LET'S START OFF WITH, TELL ME ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED WHEN SZILARD CAME TO YOU AND ASKED ABOUT GETTING A HOLD OF A CAR TO GO OUT AND SEE EINSTEIN?

Yes, well, ah, I was ah, doing some work for Szilard as a graduate student at Columbia University. I was doing some calculations which I didn't know at the time, but it turned out to be calculations relating to the first chain reaction. But in any case, ah, Szilard came to me one day and said, "Look, I understand your brother has an automobile. Can you borrow it this Saturday? I have to go down to Princeton to see Einstein and I don't have any other way of getting down there." And so I got hold of my brother and he said sure, I could have it on Saturday. And so that Saturday morning I drove Szilard down to...to Princeton. We drove to ah, Einstein's building and we went into the office, and I was sitting outside. Apparently this was...this was some of the early discussions concerning that famous letter of Einstein's to Roosevelt, which ah, introduced Szilard and Fermi and got the first support for the work for the chain reaction. Well, in any case, he came out after a while and Einstein came with him to the door, and so there I was big as life and he had no choice, he introduced me to Einstein. And ah, Einstein said, "Well, how do you do? What do you do?" I said, "Well, I'm a graduate student in physics at Columbia University." He said, "Hmmm, what...what are you working on?" And I said, "Well, it wouldn't interest you, Professor Einstein, I'm doing a...some work on a problem of molecular spectroscopy." He said, "I used to know something about molecular spectra. Come tell me." He took me by the arm and he led me in, and led me to the blackboard, and said, "Well, tell me a little about it." So I wrote down something outlined the approach I was taking. He said, "Hmmm, what would happen if we try this way," he said. And he wrote down something. And I said, "I'm sorry, Professor, but actually I've tried that... that approach and it doesn't work for the following reason," and I thought..."No, of course, you're quite right. Quite right. But you know, there's a little variation you could do on that. Have you thought of that?" And he wrote something else down. And I said, Hmm, it never occurred to me. That sounds interesting. And he said, "Well come, let's see what happens." And so he started to develop it. Just then the door opened and Szilard stuck his head in and said, "Hmmm, hmmm, Feld we really have to get back to New York." If he'd given me ten more minutes, Einstein would have done my Ph.D. thesis for me.

I'M GOING TO ASK YOU TO TELL ME THE BEGINNING OF THAT AGAIN. AND COULD YOU TRY TO LOOK AT ME A LITTLE MORE?

Okay, not at the camera.

WHY DON'T YOU START BY SAYING YOU WERE A GRADUATE STUDENT AND SZILARD CAME TO YOU AND INSTEAD OF GOING ALL THE WAY INTO WHEN EINSTEIN INTERACTED WITH YOU AT THE CAR, I THINK WE HAVE THAT ON THE FIRST SHOTS, TALK ABOUT HOW THIS...WHAT THE MEETING WAS FOR.

Right. Well at the time I was a graduate student at Columbia University.

LET ME ASK YOU TO START AGAIN AND GIVE A DATE.

This was...this was in late '39 or early '40. Something around there. I believe late '39. And I was...

LET'S START IT THAT WAY.

Well, it was in late 1939. I was a graduate student in the physics department at Columbia University. And ah, working part time for Leo Szilard, doing some calculations that he needed done. Ah, I didn't...not realize it at the time but these were the basic calculations that eventually led to the first nuclear chain reaction. But in any case, ah, one day Szilard came to me and he said, "I understand your brother has a car. Do you think you could get hold of it this Saturday? I have to go down to Princeton to see Einstein and ah, I don't drive ah, myself." And I said, "Well, I'll see what I can do." And it turned out that I could get hold of it, and so I drove Szilard down...down to Princeton, and we went into the Einstein's office, and Szilard went in and I sort of sat ah, outside waiting for him to finish. And a little while later he came out and Einstein came to the door with him, and since I was there he had no choice so he introduced me to the...to the great man and Einstein...he said...said I was a graduate student at Columbia. So he said, "Hmm, what are you doing?" And I said, "Well, I'm working on a problem. It probably wouldn't interest you Professor Einstein, it's something to do with molecular spectra." And he said, "Oh, I once knew something about molecular spectra. Come tell me." And he took me by the arm into the office up to the blackboard, ah, and asked me to explain. So I started out, I said, "Well, here's the approach I'm using." And I wrote down a few things. He said, "Ah, very interesting. What would happen if you tried this?" Then he wrote down an equation. And he said, "If we went in this direction." And I said, "Excuse me Professor Einstein, but I actually tried...have tried that approach, and it...it doesn't lead anywhere, and I gave a couple of reasons. And he said, "Oh, of course, you're quite right." He said, "But suppose we tried this other variation?" And he wrote down something else. And I said, "Hmm, it never occurred to me. I don't know, I have no idea what would happen." And he said, "Well, let's see." And so he started out and started going, and I said, "Hmm, yes," and ah, then about three minutes later the door opened and Szilard put his head in and said, "Hmmm, hmm, Feld, we really have to get back to New York." And so, if he had given me another ten minutes, Einstein would have done my Ph.D. for me.

LET'S GO BACK TO THE WIDER SHOT. I JUST WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT WE ESTABLISH IN THIS LITTLE PIECE WHAT WAS ACTUALLY GOING ON. COULD YOU START AGAIN JUST FROM THE PART WHERE YOU DROVE SZILARD OUT TO PRINCETON, HE WENT IN, AND THEN TELL US WHAT HE AND EINSTEIN WERE DOING AND THEN WE'LL STOP AT THAT POINT.

Right. Well, this...this was at the end of 1939, and ah, at that time, both Szilard and Fermi at Columbia University, this was not very long after the discovery of fission, and both Szilard and Fermi had some ideas for how one might use the fission process to make a nuclear chain reaction. Something which had been thought of for a long time, but there was no suitable reaction until the discovery of fission. Ah, and ah, however, there was very little money around to do the fundamental experiments that they needed. And so they were trying to get some money from Washington, a little money. It's, you know, it amounted to maybe $5 or $10,000 dollars ah, to...to help get these experiments going. And ah, Szilard thought it would be useful to get an introduction to the people in Washington, ah, so that ah, they would have an entree, and he got Einstein to write a little note identifying him. Szilard knew Einstein very well, they had worked together in Germany. And saying that Szilard has some ideas that he thought might be of some interest and ah, could they pay some attention ah, to this ...to this man. And it was...in the process of getting this letter from Einstein to Roosevelt that Szilard was doing the trips back and forth to Einstein's office in Princeton. And that's the purpose for which I drove him down.

BEFORE WE LEAVE THAT I JUST WANT TO MAKE SURE WE HAVE A GOOD USEABLE IN CASE WE WANT TO GIVE THE PURPOSE AFTER WE GIVE THE PART ABOUT YOU DRIVING, WE'LL STAY IN THIS SHOT HERE AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO EXPLAIN ABOUT THE CAR. JUST SAY, I DROVE SZILARD OUT TO PRINCETON, HE WENT IN AND TALKED TO EINSTEIN ABOUT, AND THEN EXPLAIN WHAT IT WAS ABOUT.

Well, that Saturday morning I drove Szilard down to Princeton and he went into Einstein's office to discuss with him the possibility of Einstein writing a letter of introduction to Roosevelt which would give Szilard an entree into the government ah, for the purpose of trying to raise a relatively small amount of money, something between $5– and $10,000 dollars that he and Fermi needed to do the basic simple experiments which might, which they thought would demonstrate whether or not a nuclear chain reaction was possible to achieve. And it was for this purpose that Szilard enlisted Einstein's help, just to get an introduction to the powers that be, so to speak, just to try to get a little money out of the government. And you know, what in these days would be regarded as peanuts, in those days $5000 or $10,000 dollars was a substantial amount.

CLOSE UP. WHAT WAS THE URGENCY THAT SZILARD AND YOU AND OTHERS PERCEIVED ABOUT GETTING THE UNITED STATES INVOLVED IN THIS?

Well, fission was discovered in Germany at the end of 1938. Ah, it was soon discovered right after fission that the process was accompanied by...by the emission of...of... that it was caused by the absorption of a neutron which is one of the elementary particles by uranium... a neutron by a uranium atom. And the process of fission, during the process of fission, two neutrons, or approximately two extra neutrons were emitted. And it became very clear that it might be possible by utilizing, let's say one of these neutrons, to cause another fission and get another two neutrons and so on, that you could build up the process so as to release a very large amount of energy starting out with just one single neutron. And it would build up in what is referred to these days as a chain reaction. And this possibility for the release of the energy that was in the nucleus looked extremely exciting, not only because of the possibility of making, if it could happen fast enough, of a nuclear explosive, which people worried about, because after all the Germans were,'39 was already the war, and the Germans had good scientists and fission had been discovered there. So ah, it was thought that there was essentially a race with the Germans to find out whether or not this could be used for a nuclear weapon and if so how. Ah, but also the idea that if it could be controlled, the use could be controlled, one would have this age-long satisfaction of this age-long dream of releasing the energy inside the atomic nucleus for useful purposes, for whatever purposes one wanted. Power or so on. Or making artificially radioactive isotopes for medical purposes and so on. So these... this combination of the notion that this might possibly lead to a weapon and in any event there were also a lot of useful practical applications, led to some feeling of urgency about pursuing it.

OK, LET'S GO TO THE WIDER SHOT. CAN YOU TELL ME A LITTLE BIT ABOUT SZILARD IN THOSE DAYS? HE WAS A VERY...

He was a very enigmatic fellow.

START AGAIN.

All right. Leo Szilard was a...was always a very enigmatic personality. He...he was extraordinarily clever. And I mean if...if it was possible to find a clever solution to any problem, Szilard would find the clever solution in contrast to the more prosaic solution. He was extremely original in his ideas. He had the idea of a nuclear chain reaction almost immediately after the discovery of the neutron in 1932. And in fact, he worked out the theory of the nuclear chain reaction and patented it. Actually patented it. He...Szilard believed in the patent process. He patented lots of things. And he got this patent on the nuclear chain reaction and assigned it to the British Admiralty at that time. He was in London, a refugee from Germany. As I say, he liked to patent many things. He has a very famous patent together with Albert Einstein of an invention the two of them made together of a...ah, of a pump for pumping around noxious fluids without any moving parts, a so-called electro-magnetic pump, which used travelling electric and magnetic waves to exert forces on a conducting fluid to pump it around. And the origins of this Leo once told me this, typical Szilard/Einstein. They...one morning they met in the lab, over by the...the institute where they were working, and they had both just read in the newspapers this account of a...a...an accident that occurred the night before when the noxious fluids from some primitive early refrigerator.

DO YOU THINK SZILARD HAD A GREATER DEGREE OF CONCERN AND FEAR ABOUT THE NAZIS SINCE HE HAD COME FROM GERMANY?

Yes. That certainly was a very strong part of it. On the other hand you know, the... the science of finding out whether a chain reaction was possible was also very exciting and attractive to him. And so it was the combination of this race with the Germans plus the fascination of what Oppenheimer would have called 'a sweet problem.' And the two of them drove him and a lot of his colleagues, ah, on in this. Ah, this... this business of fascination with carrying out a technical job is something that I've pondered about since, because if you look back at the period in...in 1945, right after the end of the war with the...in Europe, VE Day was May 8th, 1945, there was not yet any nuclear weapon on May 8th. The first test of the nuclear weapon in the desert was in July of 1945. And after the victory in Europe, after May 8th, we all went out and celebrated for a day, but the next day we were right back working away because we all wanted to know whether it could be done. And we didn't think, you know, is this trip necessary. We just went right on. And it's a disease that scientists get into. Something I try to warn my students about these days. You get carried away by an interesting technical problem and you forget to ask, ah, what are the ramifications, where is it going? What if it should work? What if it shouldn't work and so on.

THAT'S A GOOD POINT. I'M GOING TO SKIP NOW TO THE...AFTER THE WAR, AND TALK ABOUT THAT FOR A WHILE AND THEN WE'LL SEE HOW OUR TIME IS DOING. RIGHT AFTER THE VICTORY IN JAPAN, THE WEAPON HAD BEEN MADE, IT HAD BEEN USED, THAT WAS OVER. WHAT DID THE SCIENTISTS IN THE PROJECT FEEL THEY WANTED TO DO NEXT?

Well, I think most of us in the ah, in the inimitable words of General Leslie Groves in his...in his ah....

START AGAIN.

When the war was over, well ah, those of us at the laboratories to use the...the the immortal words of General Leslie Groves were very anxious to go back to our future lives, which is the way he put it when he addressed us at Los Alamos. And most of us, ah, were ready to quit and go back. I had accepted a job, for example as instructor at...of physics at MIT. And I was going to head for...right for MIT. But then something happened. Again thanks to the General, the General had a bill introduced in the Congress, a so-called May-Johnson bill, which would have perpetuated the military control over all aspects of nuclear energy. It would have perpetuated the...what we call...what was called The Manhattan District, which was the organization, the Army Organization which carried out the project, and of which the General was the head. And ah, the idea was that from how...here on out, everything relating to nuclear energy would be under the control of the...of a perpetual Manhattan District, with all the secrecy and the compartmentalization of information and all the other aspects of the project which we had been fighting for three or four years. Ah, so most of us thought that this would an unmitigated disaster from...a variety of points of view. Ah —-

CHANGE FRAMES.

THAT THE MAY-JOHNSON BILL WAS AN UNMITIGATED DISASTER FROM THE SCIENTIST'S POINT OF VIEW.

Immediately after the end of the war, the ah, it was introduced into Congress, I think mainly through the instigation of General Groves, a Bill known as the May-Johnson bill which essentially would have perpetuated the military control over all aspects of nuclear energy. Most of us who had worked on the project, thought that this would be an unmitigated disaster for a variety of reasons. We had...you know, we had spent ah, vast amounts of time circumventing the silly rules that ah, about compartmentalization not being able to speak to other people about things you were both working on, you know, about not being able to read something unless you could demonstrate a "need to know." Ah, whereas the reason that the project succeeded was because people could work closely with each other and they knew what everybody was doing. Ah, the reason Los Alamos was such a success was because Oppenheimer had made a deal with the General. That once we got behind those...those barbed wire fences in the area where...where where everybody that...nobody could come, nobody could go, then everything was open. Everybody talked to everybody else about everything. And Los Alamos was an ideal place to work primarily because of that reason. Everybody knew what was going on, and all the problems were problems that everybody was involved in. You had seminars on all the subjects, all aspects of the thing. It was a...really in that sense a communal scientific enterprise, and it worked extraordinarily well. But in the other parts of the project the General kept putting his, you know, heavy hand, and that just held things up. So we were convinced that to put the future of nuclear energy, all aspects of nuclear energy under this kind of a system would mean that ah, would guarantee that the possible useful aspects would take twice, three times as long to develop as would have been necessary.

COULD YOU SAY AGAIN, THAT WE FELT THAT PUTTING THE FUTURE OF NUCLEAR POWER, NUCLEAR ENERGY UNDER MILITARY CONTROL WOULD HAVE — SAY IT THAT WAY.

So all of us in the project felt that to put the future-- at the end of the war — that to put the future of...of nuclear energy, of the applications of nuclear energy and all the other prospects that we thought were very...so hopeful about the use of nuclear power, nuclear energy to put these under military control would be an unmitigated disaster, because it would just mean that everything was impeded, that the bureaucrats would prevent the interesting developments from talking place, that the emphasis would all be on the military aspects, whereas it was the peaceful aspects which were really the most interesting thing to us. And that therefore this should be avoided at all costs. So we opposed the May-Johnson Bill.

GOOD. WIDER SHOT. NOW YOU SAY YOU OPPOSED THE MAY-JOHNSON BILL. WHAT ACTUALLY DID YOU DO?

Well, a bunch of us just descended on Washington to lobby against it. In my own case, for example, I had accepted an instructorship here at MIT. I was supposed to arrive on around September 1st to take up my duties. Instead I...asked for and received a six month leave of absence and instead of appearing here in Cambridge, I went directly from Los Alamos to Washington to lobby against the May-Johnson bill. My colleagues in Chicago and in other parts of the project did the same. Chicago they did even more. Chicago they got the people from the Law School to work with them to draft a civilian control bill which eventually became the McMahon bill which substituted for the May-Johnson bill when it was defeated. And we were successful in this lobby, in large part I think because we were so amateur at it. We didn't have any inhibitions, and also we were national heroes in some sense. And we would go to a Congressman's door and you would knock and you would say, "I'm.." I would say, "I'm Bernard Feld, I've just come from Los Alamos," and the door would be wide open, the white...the red carpet...the red carpet, welcome carpet would be spread, and the Congressman sat and listened to everything you had to tell him, so it was really an ideal form of lobbying.

AGAIN TELL ME WHAT YOU YOURSELF DID. WHAT WAS IT LIKE TO DO THE LOBBYING?

Well...Well, what I did was as I...was instead of coming here to MIT, which I was supposed to do at the beginning of September in '45, I asked for and received a six month leave of absence and I went to Washington. And I spent the six months going from Congressman's Office to Congressman's office to Senator's office trying to convince them that the May-Johnson bill was a very poor idea and that there should be instead be a bill which would place the future control of nuclear energy under civilian control rather than military control. And we succeeded. We defeated the May-Johnson bill, or the May-Johnson bill was defeated, and a bill was introduced by Senator McMahon, which set up a civilian atomic energy commission, and ah, things that went with it.

WIDER SHOT. THAT'S GOOD. WHAT KIND OF...YOU WERE PROBABLY IN YOUR MID TO LATE 20S ABOUT THEN. WHAT KIND OF RECEPTION DID YOU GET IN WASHINGTON? WERE YOU USED TO KNOCKING ON CONGRESSMEN'S DOORS?

Well, I'd never done any knocking on Congressmen's doors. I was 25, as a matter of fact, and ah, it was a heady experience. I had no idea what it was going to be like. I just thought it was necessary to do. And ah, ah, being greeted as a national hero was something for which I was not quite... quite prepared. But ah, it was a fascinating experience.

GOOD. OK. LET'S TALK ABOUT HOW THE SCIENTISTS ORGANIZATIONS GOT STARTED, ALAMOS AND EVERYTHING ELSE, CULMINATING IN THE FAS AND YOUR SLOGAN OF "NO SECRETS, NO DEFENSE, ONE SOLUTION." MAYBE YOU COULD INCORPORATE THAT INTO THE DESCRIPTION OF THE SCIENTIFIC ORGANZATIONS. START OFF AGAIN BY SAYING, "IN THE FALL OF '45, AFTER THE WAR WAS OVER, WE..."

Well, in the fall of 1945, after the War was over and we were all prepared to quote the General ah, "to go back to our future lives," ah, we...we ah, suddenly were presented with this introduction into the Congress of a Bill, the May-Johnson bill, as it was called, which would have perpetuated the Manhattan District and perpetuated all future control over nuclear energy in the hands of the military. Now we felt that this was a very bad idea. When...as we had been discussing it, we had...we had three points which were not very well understood and which were contradictory to what was being presented to the American public by General Groves and his cohorts, which we tried to sell in var...various ways. These three points consisted of the following. First, there is no secret about ah, ah, how to make an atomic bomb. The big secret is whether or not it works, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki had dispelled that one. And any...any competent group of scientists given enough time and using only information that was already present in the open literature could themselves in time, make a nuclear weapon. So our second point is that there's no defense against nuclear weapons because they can be delivered by any kind of delivery vehicle from aircraft to ship to submarine, to lorry to suitcases, in fact. And so there being no secret and no defense, there's only one possible solution that the world can accept which would...which would prevent their being used in the future, and that is to have international control over all the materials out of which nuclear weapons can be made and the activities which leads to the production of these materials. Which means to put all future nuclear energy developments under an international agency which we thought would be embedded in the United Nations, which would ah, in fact, ah, then insure that these...this...this new technology would be used only for peaceful purposes. We had a certain amount of success selling this point of view. Ah, there was a report ah, ah, which was put out by a committee appointed by ah, President Truman. Acheson, and Lilienthal and Oppenheimer were members of this committee, and then ah, and which ah, which proposed an international agency. This was then taken by Bernard Baruch and formulated into a plan which was introduced into the United Nations, but there...there it stayed. It never got anywhere. And ah, I believe there were two reasons why it didn't get anywhere. First, the way Baruch formulated the plan, it essentially left the possibility of having nuclear weapons in the future in the hands of the United States. It sort of presented the United States as the custodian over nuclear weaponry in the future, which obviously was not going to be acceptable to the Soviet Union. And of course in retrospect, I don't think any international plan at that point would have been acceptable to Stalin who wanted to have his own nuclear weapon and was working or driving very hard in the Soviet Union to...to produce one. So it was doomed from the beginning.

OK, LET'S GO BACK. WAS THE NO SECRET, NO DEFENSE NOTION SOMETHING THAT GREW OUT OF THE FAS, OR WAS IT INDEPENDENT?

Well, ah, excuse me. The...the...the idea that there's no secret, no defense and therefore international control, sort of arose in almost a spontaneous way among the different groups. There were a number of... of...of laboratories where this work had gone on. Los Alamos was just one. Chicago was another one. Oak Ridge was the third laboratory. And after the war at each one of these laboratories there were groups of scientists that go together, to organize in essence the lobbying, ah, against the May-Johnson bill. And ah, I don't remember where this first came up, but it very soon became an adopted motto for all these groups. These groups together set up a Washington office to...to coordinate the lobbying where people would go when they got to Washington, to find out, you know, who needed, where they needed to go, who needed lobbying and who didn't. And ah, a...a…small international group...I'm sorry, national group was set up which was called the Federation of Atomic Scientists.

LET'S STOP AND YOU CAN PICK IT UP...WHEN WAS THE FEDERATION OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS STARTED... WHY DON'T YOU START OUT WITH THAT NOTION TELLING US THAT EARLY IN '46, SOME OF THE GROUPS FROM THE VARIOUS LABORATORIES GOT TOGETHER IN WASHINGTON IN THIS ORGANIZATION CALLED THE FEDERATION OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS TO TRY AND EDUCATE THE PUBLIC TO THE NOTION THAT THERE WERE NO SECRETS, NO DEFENSE AND THEREFORE INTERNATIONAL CONTROL.

Well, ah, as a result of the lobbying that many of us did as individuals it became clear that it would be useful to coordinate these efforts. So in the early part of 1946, representatives of the different groups got together in Washington and set up an organization called the Federation of Atomic Scientists, which has since grown a great deal and is now known as the Federation of American Scientists. But at that time it was just...consisted of representatives from the different Manhattan District ah, laboratories ah, to coordinate their efforts in Congress, to start an educational campaign which would not only influence the legislature, but also the American public and get into the media with the basic ideas that we were trying to get across, "No secret, no defense, therefore international control." Ah, at the same time, ah, the group in Chicago set up a little newsletter to just keep the various groups informed as to what each, everybody was doing, which they called the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. And that has grown from a little ah, small newsletter and...and I think the first issue was in December 1945, it has grown now into what we think is an interesting journal with some 25 to 30,000 ah, subscribers and a fairly large international circulation.

TIGHT SHOT. I'M JUST GOING TO ASK ONCE AGAIN WITHOUT THE PREAMBLE AS TO HOW THE ORGANIZATIONS WERE FORMED, COULD YOU JUST TELL US AGAIN THAT THE MESSAGE THAT YOU WERE TRYING TO GET ACROSS WAS, AND THEN EXPLAIN BRIEFLY, "NO SECRETS, NO DEFENSE, AND INTERNATIONAL CONTROL."

Ah, we had a very simple message that we thought we had to sell to the public and we packaged it into a form which had essentially three statements in it. The first, there's no secret, that is to say nuclear fission had been discovered. It was in the literature. The fact that nuclear weapons could be made was well known. Hiroshima was a demonstration of that, and ah, any nation with a reasonable technical capacity ah, and a group of scientists would be able to follow our lead and do the same thing. It was just a question of time. Therefore, there's no hope of keeping this hidden by you know, closing down the literature. Any secrets that there might be, were out. The second, there's no defense against nuclear weapons. That is, a nuclear weapon is small relative to the...to the kinds of weapons that were used to...in...in World War II, the big blockbusters that required huge bombers to carry them. It could be carried by almost any kind of a vehicle, an airplane, or a ship or a lorry or even a suitcase, and ah, could be placed...could be delivered to almost any target ah, that one wanted to deliver it. So there's no defense against nuclear weapons. That is if a nuclear war started, both sides would be thoroughly devastated by nuclear weapons. Nobody could prevent that. And therefore, we felt there was only one possible long-term solution to this issue and that was international control over all nuclear activities, military and peaceful, because peaceful nuclear activities lead to the production of nuclear weapons materials. And so we had to... we had advocated this simple three point platform, "no secret, no defense, therefore international control." And this was what we were trying to sell.

GOOD. LET'S JUST TRY ONE MORE QUESTION ON THIS TAPE. YOU MENTIONED THAT OPPENHEIMER AND SOME OTHERS WERE BRAINWASHED TO GO ALONG WITH THE MAY-JOHNSON BILL AT FIRST. COULD YOU EXPLAIN THAT?

Well, as I said earlier, right after the war the military introduced the May-Johnson bill into Congress. Ah, the General and ah, his...his...his supporters did a very good job of trying to convince and of actually convincing some of the leaders of the project, people like Oppenheimer and one or two others, that this was the best deal that we could possibly expect. That in fact it had in it enough guarantees so that there would be a reasonable civilian influence over the future and that to try to get anything better would...would be futile and would ah, prob... probably they...they were told lead to something worse. And ah, I'm afraid they bought this. Ah, ah, I call it brainwashing. Ah, in a sense it was. I mean they just didn't realize that in fact the public was ready for something much more radical, and that finally when they saw this they all came over to...to the other side.

[QUESTION INAUDIBLE]

Well, I was going to say it, but now I'm not...not 100 percent sure, so I didn't.

[BACKGROUND COMMENT]

Well ah, the...the leaders of the project, people like Oppenheimer and others who were...who were sort of the leaders of the scientific community, that is the people in Washington who spoke for science, so to speak, went along with the May-Johnson, the idea of the May Johnson Bill, and as far as I can gather the reason that they did was because they were convinced that that was the best deal they could get so to speak. That if they didn't take the May-Johnson bill that there would be prob...probably be something which would have even more stringent military control with more stringent compartmentalization, things of this kind. And that this being the best they could get they had better go along with it. I have...I have a suspicion in this regard they were brainwashed in the sense that they were given no idea of the fact that there was a considerable pressure both from the outside and in the Congress for a more reasonable approach to this, and ah, that that pressure had a very good chance of prevailing as it eventually did. Because eventually Oppenheimer and the others when they saw this pressure building up also came around to support of the McMahon bill.

DO YOU THINK THERE WAS A FEELING OF JUST TRYING TO RUSH SOMETHING THROUGH SO THEY COULD GET ON WITH INTERNATIONAL CONTROL?

Well, ah, I'm not so sure that the...the international control aspect had a great deal to do with it. I mean...

YOU WERE RESPONDING TO THE NOTION THAT THEY WERE TRYING TO RUSH.

Yes. Well, I think ah, to some...to some extent I think it's true that they wanted to have that aspect of the question settled, so they could get on to other things. International control was one aspect of the thing they wanted to get on to. But there were other aspects too. They were just tired of spending so much time in Washington, running back and forth ah, between Congress and the Executive and so on. Ah, it was a combination of a lot of things, and I think it's also true that many people on the project would have been very happy to put the whole thing aside and forget about it. But on the other hand, ah, with some feeling of responsibility for what we had created that was very difficult to do.

DO YOU THINK SCIENTISTS AND POLITICIANS ARE STRANGE BEDFELLOWS?

Well, they are rather strange bedfellows, on the other hand, because somebody's a politician does not necessarily mean that he or she is unreasonable. I've since gotten to know politicians a lot better than I did then. Ah, and many of them are really very clever and honest people.

I WANT TO JUMP BACK IN TIME HERE BEFORE IT GETS AWAY FROM US. YOU WERE AT THE METLAB BEFORE GOING OUT TO LOS ALAMOS AND YOU WERE WITH FERMI?

That's right. December...December 2nd, 19. . .

TELL ME THE STORY OF BEING THERE.

Well ah, by the time that the first nuclear chain reaction was ready we all knew that it was going to work, because Fermi had made some very careful and painstaking experiments and analyses building it up bit by bit. And then what we were waiting for was just being able to assemble enough material so that in fact we could get it big enough to sustain a chain reaction. Ah, well that...

[BACKGROUND INTERRUPTION].

That took a while, mainly because it...first of all one had to learn how to produce very pure graphite in very large quantities. In the first nuclear chain reaction was a mixture of graphite and uranium, with the uranium being placed in lumps in a lattice within the graphite and the whole thing being built up as a sort of a lattice of uranium lumps embedded in the graphite matrix....very pure graphite of a purity that had never been made before and it took the carbon manufacturing people a number of years to learn how to make it pure enough and in sufficient quantity, because it required many tons, and then it required also pure uranium, and ah, uranium was a... was a...an element that had not been used, it had not had many purposes. It was used in minute quantities as impurities in certain things to give them various kinds of colors, but that was about the net extent of the use of uranium per se. So one had to learn how to produce uranium in large quantities again of the requisite purity, all of which took a considerable amount of time. And so it wasn't until the end of 1942 where Fermi was able to accumulate enough material to put it all together. And he built it up slowly as the material came out, all the time making careful measurements to see how the reactivity was building up, so to speak. Ah, this was all being done underneath the ah, in ah, what used to be the football stadium underneath the stands, the west stands of the Chicago football field. No longer used because Chicago--University of Chicago gave up football in the late '30s. Ah, and so this was being built up there slowly, bit by bit, all the measurements being made until finally Fermi knew he had enough material. And so everybody assembled together while the last pieces were being put together. And when Fermi felt that that was it, there, there were insurgence of materials, ah, rods of cadmium —cadmium is especially strong neutron absorber—to make sure that the thing, you know, wouldn't start before we wanted it. But when everything was ready, Fermi had the—the rods withdrawn one by one and he's sitting there looking at the counter as the counter started to go up and up and finally, when all the rods were withdrawn, one could hear the counting go. And off scale and Fermi said, well I guess that's enough, put the rods back and let's go to lunch. And that was the first chain reaction. It was a culmination of a lot of hard work. It was also typical Fermi.

WHAT WAS TYPICAL?

The nonchalance with which he did all these things, and the way he always had everything under control. I remember tha--the other experience with typical Fermi was at the first test in the desert in New Mexico, when the first explosion was being made. And we were ah—terribly excited to find out if it was going to work. It was exploded, it was detonated just before dawn. And everything was sort of quite dark. There was a little bit of light in the eastern horizon, but not much. And then the countdown, ah, ten, nine, etc...zero at... Suddenly the desert lit up as though it were noon. Everything was lit up with light. We're all lying I, looking the other way and then as soon as the first flash had occurred, we all turned around with their pieces of smoked glass that we had provided ourselves with and started looking at the thing as the as the sort of the, the fireball grew and expanded and colors changed and then finally, off and started to drift away. And then I noticed Fermi. I was right beside him and I hadn't noticed, and there was Fermi standing and just dropping little pieces of papers. He had a newspaper in his hand and he was shredding off little pieces and dropping them and the pieces were just falling to his feet. And then a minute or so after the explosion, the shock waves that came through the air...felt like that, literally. And then went by and some of the pieces of paper that were fluttering ah, were picked up by the shock wave and then dropped further out. And after that had happened, Fermi got out a tape measure and bent down and measured the distance between the pile at his feet and these few pieces that floated up. He got out his little six inch slide rule, which he always carried in his pocket, and cut it out and started to manipulate it for two or three minutes. Then he turned and then he said, well, I would estimate anywhere between, somewhere between five and twenty-five thousand tons of TNT. It turned out it was twelve. That was typical Fermi.

IT'S A GREAT STORY IF YOU DON'T MIND TELLING IT WITHOUT THE...

Well, Fermi was just extremely clever physicist and he knew how—understood everything and I remember the test in the desert in which the first nuclear detonation—test detonation was, exploded on a tower. Ah, this was done just at dawn, it was still quite dark with a little glow of light in the eastern horizon. And—and we were all there and then the countdown came, ten, nine, eight. And everybody turned with his back turned with his back to the tower and laid down flat with his back to the tower and then zero. And then there was this tremendous flash of light. The whole desert lit up like it was high noon. Everything bright. But it lasted just for an instant and then it went away. And then we all turned around with these little pieces of smoked glass that we prepared in advance looking at it. And there you could see this developing red fireball starting to rise and then slowly drifting off. Ah, and I was standing right next to Fermi, and I noticed what Fermi was doing while everybody was looking at all these things. Fermi had a piece of newspaper and he was shredding it and dropping the pieces and they were just falling down at his foot. Ah, and then when the shock waves arrived, you know, the thing sets up a wave in the atmosphere, which is like a shock wave, literally comes travelling through and when it arrives, you feel it...like a slap right against you. And this shock wave arrived and a few of these pieces of paper then were caught up in the shock wave and they fluttered out and landed maybe a foot or so away from the pile of his feet. And then Fermi after that had passed, Fermi got out a tape measure and he bent down and he measured the distance between the pile and these few pieces of paper. Then he got out his little six inch slide rule which he always carried around in his, his pocket. Pulled it out and he stood there for about three or four minutes manipulating it and then he turned to us and we knew he would something to say and he says, well, he said I would estimate somewhere between five and twenty five thousand tons of TNT. Turned out when we got all the measurements later that it had been twelve. He's right in the middle of his estimate. And that was typical Fermi.

THANK YOU. YOU TOLD ME SOMETHING IN THE OTHER ROOM EARLIER ABOUT WHEN THE MILITARY TOOK OVER THE PROJECT ABOUT THE COPIES

Yes. Well, ah, one of the reasons that we had... One of the reasons we had no confidence in military control is that we'd had experience with the way the military bureaucracy operated. Ah, and it, the experience was somewhat shattering. In one incident, a trivial incident that I remember is ah, after we had been in Chicago a little while when the military finally took over complete control of the project and it was put in the hands of the so-called Manhattan District. Then ah, one day we received a notice from the ah, authorities as to a change in the purchasing procedure for purchasing materials. Until then it had been very simple if we needed something, if we needed to buy something that was needed for your work. You would walk down to the purchasing office, tell them what you needed and if you say it's urgent, they would get on a telephone and -- and try to find it as quickly as possible. If it wasn't terribly urgent, they would set into motion the proceedings and get it to you reasonably soon. Well we see this notice saying the -- the enclosed forms are to be filled out in triplicate for every new purchase. Ah, to be filled out in triplicate. Not triplicate, in quintuplicate. Five copies...

LET'S JUST START THAT PART AGAIN...

Well, when the military took over one of the first things that happened was they sent us a form that had to be used whenever you wanted to purchase something. The form had five copies and the instructions that came with it said the following, 'fill out the form in five copies. The first copy is to be sent to the purchasing office. The first copies sent to the purchasing office. Third copy to be sent to your group leader. The fourth copy to be sent to the ah, director's office. And the fifth copy to be destroyed. This was typical Manhattan District bureaucracy. So we knew what to expect.

I WANT TO ASK YOU AGAIN ABOUT THE FIRST CHAIN REACTION... WASN'T THERE ALSO SOMETHING ABOUT BUYING A BOTTLE OF WINE OR SOMETHING?

Oh, well, actually the, everybody was there, everybody in the project who could get in was there watching it from, from a balcony.

START IT BY SAYING "ON DECEMBER SECOND..."

On December 2nd, 1945, Fermi...'42... excuse me. On December 2nd, 1942...

START...YOU NEED TO LOOK AT ME AND YOU STARTED IN THE MIDDLE OF A LAUGH...

OK. Ah, on December 2nd, 1942, Fermi had assembled all the necessary materials and was ready to try to see if they could all be put together to make a chain reaction. It was all there and Fermi was pretty sure it was going to work. Ah, so he invited people who had worked on the project to come witness his bringing it into being, so to speak, the birth of the first chain reaction. And we all assembled, we were all on a platform, and, ah, as the thing had been put together, there had been inserted into the reactor cadmium rods. Cadmium is a very strong neutron absorber. So that if anything should go wrong, the thing wouldn't go off by itself. And when Fermi was ready, he had the rods sort of slowly one by one removed from the reactor. And next to him at his, at his table, there was a Geiger counter, which was counting the rate of neutron accumulation, the reactivity, so to speak. And as the rods were removed, the rate of clicking increased, first slowly and then more and more until finally, it just, you know saturated and went off scale. And then Fermi said, well, it's done. It's finished. It reacts. Put the rods back and let's go to lunch. So everybody was there and applauded and Wigner, who was the head of the theoretical division who was there brought out a bottle of Chianti and said this is a great occasion, we have to drink to this. And so we got out the paper cups and everybody was poured a little Chianti and Wigner offered a toast to Fermi and the first nuclear chain reaction. We all drank it and then everybody got around and signed his name on the Chianti bottle. The Chianti bottle still is in existence. I'm not quite where it is, but it exists. If need be, it can be dug up again, I'm sure.

SO DO YOU THINK THAT THE CONTROLS, THE SECRECY AND THE COMPARTMENTALIZATION MADE THE WHOLE PROJECT TAKE LONGER?

Well ah, I'm sure of that. I mean ah, my recollection in Chicago was that we...we spent an inordinate amount of time just circumventing the...the foolish rules that the General tried to impose onus. The idea of compartmentalization, that you couldn't talk to anybody, ah, except your immediate neighbor or what have you, or the person in the same room. And that the idea of the need to know, you couldn't get information unless you could demonstrate that you had to have just that precise information. You can't do science that way. You can't run a...open a project in the...in the field where, you know, you don't really know where you're going until you start to go there. There was no such thing as nuclear engineering, we were inventing it as we went along. And the other thing about the General is that he was mean and vindictive. I mean for example, because Leo Szilard used to talk back to him literally, and occasionally called the General a... a fool in his... to his face, more or less, the General became very, very furious with Szilard. And he started a proceedings which would have ah, sent Szilard back to Europe as an enemy alien. Szilard was Hungarian who had been in Germany and escaped from the Nazis in '32. And it was only the intervention of... Arthur Compton, the head of the laboratories that prevented this from... from going ahead. Ah, he just ah, was a man, I've often thought ah, ah, that if I were a German, I would advocate putting up a memorial to General Groves, because if it weren't for the General, the bomb could easily have been ready in time to use in the war against Germany and might very well have been used.

WHEW!

Strong statement. It happens to be true.

DID GENERAL GROVES THINK THE SCIENTISTS WERE CRAZY PEOPLE OR HOW --WHAT WAS HIS VIEW OF...

He just thought that they were untrustworthy and...

START AGAIN.

Generally speaking, I think that General Groves felt that the scientists were untrustworthy, that somehow or other they were too idiosyncratic, that they talked too much, that they didn't like to obey the rules. And ah, he didn't understand them, he just simply didn't understand them, it was in a sense a miracle that Oppenheimer was able to get on with the General. Somehow or other he found the formula for rubbing the General the right way, and he was able to get from the General agreement from the General, the General's agreement to permit him to run Los Alamos the way he wanted to without any of these stupid rules. I don't know whether it's lucky or not. It depends on whether you're Japanese or not. But from the point of view of getting the bomb done, ah, it could not have been done, ah, if the Los Alamos laboratory had not been such a dedicated smoothly working and effective ah, laboratory.

HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE THE RELATIONSHIP TO GO BACK TO THAT POINT BETWEEN OPPENHEIMER AND GROVES?

Well, I...it's hard to describe. The... Oppenheimer was the only scientist to whom Groves, I ever saw Groves defer. So...who could talk to him so to speak. And I think somehow or other the General had convinced himself that to get this job done he needed Oppenheimer, and ah, therefore he had better curb his other... otherwise foolish tendencies. And it worked.

CHANGE THE SUBJECT. GET INTO ONE MORE THING. WHEN YOU HEARD ABOUT, WHEN YOU WERE AT LOS ALAMOS AND YOU HEARD ABOUT HIROSHIMA, WHAT WAS YOUR PERSONAL REACTION AND COULD YOU CATEGORIZE THE REACTIONS OF THE OTHER SCIENTISTS?

Yeah. Well, looking back at it...it's a little hard to understand, but ah, the general reaction in Los Alamos, mine included, on hearing Hiroshima was one of almost elation. My God, it's worked. The job's done. It worked. We've ended to war. To the...to me, the shock of cold water literally came with Nagasaki when three days later we were told that a second bomb had been dropped and it had wiped out the city of Nagasaki, and then suddenly I said, "Well, now wait a second. What was that for?" We knew that the Japanese were suing for surrender. Was that trip necessary so to speak? And then suddenly I asked myself, yeah, whoa...But in a sense you know, looking back at it, we were inured to that kind of thing. After all, the strategic bombing in World War II was a terribly deadly business. In two or three nights of bombing we wiped out the City of Dresden, killing at least as many people in the fire storms and so on as were killed in Hiroshima. The Tokyo firebombing did more or less the same. The difference of course was that it took ah, you know, waves and waves of bombers, a certain fraction of which were shot down and ah, to do this, whereas here, a single bomb from a single airplane did it all at once. So it added a new dimension to... the possibilities of bombing. And then ah, suddenly when we realized this, I think most of us ah, it gave most of us a certain amount of pause.

SO THE REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE ATOMIC WEAPON AND INCENDIARY BOMBS IS THE MAGNITUDE.

The magnitude. Of course we didn't really know until somewhat later about the radioactive effects. I mean the radioactive cloud which can then travel downwind and settle over large areas and render large areas uninhabitable or at least damage people with radiation over much larger areas than just the area which is affected by the bomb. That became clear later, and that's an additional effect, which makes the atomic bomb so much more deadly. But just the pure ah, incendiary qualities, the blast and the heat, it was something that ah, we were already accustomed to so to speak.

THE OTHER TIME WE WERE HERE ALSO, I REMEMBER TO GAVE US A NICE CONCISE DESCRIPTION OF HOW A GUN TYPE BOMB WORKED, WHICH MIGHT BE USEFUL TO...MAYBE WE COULD TRY TO DO THAT.

The bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima was a gun-type bomb, which is a very simple idea and can be made very simply. It was made of enriched uranium. It's hard to get uranium highly enriched, let's say 90 percent enriched in the lighter isotopes, the uranium 235, which in normal uranium is only present in one part, in 140. So you've got to enrich it and that's a difficult process. But once you've got it, it's extraordinarily easy to make a bomb. What you do is take two pieces, let's say each of them three quarters of what we would call a critical mass. It requires a certain size, a certain mass of material to become, to maintain a chain reaction, otherwise too many neutrons leak out, and then you can't maintain it. And that's called the critical mass. Now if you take two pieces, each let's say three quarters of a critical mass, and you put one of them down at the end of a gun barrel, and you put the other one at the open end of the gun barrel, place an explosive charge behind it, and you set off the explosive charge, that drives the other piece down the gun barrel, and when the two get together, you've got one and a half critical masses and that's a lot and bang they go off. You also put in there a source of neutrons which will...which will be initiated when the two strike each other, which is easy to make also. And that's known as the gun-type, and that's very simple to make. That works very inefficiently with plutonium for rather complicated reasons, but the main reason is that when you produce plutonium, you produce it in a way which gives it the rather unfortunate property that there are a lot of neutrons around all the time. And if there are a lot of neutrons around if you try to drive the two together the... explosion will start when the two are still not quite together, ah, and then it will be premature and blow the... blow apart at a very low efficiency. I mean that's why with uranium you have no neutrons around and you release the neutrons when the two strike each other. So with plutonium you've got to have a system which can work much more quickly. And the way you do that is you take a shell of plutonium and you surround it with high explosives and then you detonate the high explosives in a number of places around the outside in such a way that you start an inward wave coming from all directions, and that strikes the shell and compresses it. And since the critical mass becomes much letter...smaller as the compression increases as the density increases it soon gets compressed into more than the critical mass and goes bang, goes off. And that's a very quick process, and those extra neutrons around don't have a chance to do anything. So it's the implosion technique that's used with plutonium, much more complicated ah, a little more difficult to do, although not...you know, not impossible.

JUST ONE LAST THING. WHAT HAS BEEN THE MOST SURPRISING DEVELOPMENT TO YOU IN THIS WHOLE NUCLEAR ERA OF OURS?

Well, ah, in a sense you might say that the fact that nuclear weapons have not been used in any conflict situation in spite of the fact that there have been a whole lot of conflicts, and that nuclear weapons have not spread to many more nations in spite of the fact that there are many nations — more than the six nations that have them, which is already quite a number -- in a period of 40 years since... the end of the war, is a development which I would have not have foreseen. I mean I would have guessed at the end of the war that unless we came to some kind of effective international control nuclear weapons spread would have been much more rapid, and that the chances of a nuclear weapon being used in a conflict situation would have been much greater. In that sense it's a very positive development you know, we've escaped... nuclear war for forty years. On the other hand that shouldn't lead to complacency because that happy state of affairs is not going to continue indefinitely, and ah, it seems to me that if we get through this century or for the next 30 or 40 years and still have escaped nuclear weapons we will have some kind of a miracle and it will take I think a little more than a miracle to be sure that nuclear weapons are never again used. They... just realization and hard work and lots of smart politics...