LET'S START OUT BY TALKING ABOUT BERKELEY IN '38, '39, MAYBE YOU COULD START OUT BY SAYING HOW YOU WERE A PHYSICS STUDENT WITH OPPENHEIMER AT THAT TIME AND THE NEWS OF FISSION CAME FROM HAHN AND STRASSMANN EXPERIMENTS IN GERMANY AND WHAT THE FEELING WAS AMONG THE PHYSICISTS AND HOW THE IDEA OF A BOMB, DISCUSSION OF THE IDEA OF A BOMB DEVELOPED FAIRLY QUICKLY, IF THAT'S ACCURATE. SOMETHING-

OK. You're asking for memories that are more than 40 years old, but some of them are indelible, so I think I can give a pretty good account of some of that. For me, the tone of the year 1938 is fixed by staying up till four o'clock in the morning to hear that gravel voice of Hitler on the radio, direct from Nuremberg, where he was promising and threatening at the same time. Very exciting and frightening, because the sense of working hard all day as a graduate student and doing problems for Oppenheimer's course, very demanding, till midnight and then couldn't sleep very well because you had to listen to Hitler since the fate of the world seemed to hang on what he was going to say, this was the Munich crisis. So that's what colored that year. At the end of that year, then, it was no surprise in the beginning of 1939, when the moment that people heard of the long-belated discovery of fission, which we didn't think of, nobody thought of in the physics world, but was so understandable once it was demonstrated by these papers that came from Germany, and then was immediately confirmed, Berkeley, New York, all over the world. And by the end of January, 1939, a world that was heading for war seemed to have within it the threat or the promise of a new weapon of absolutely unprecedented power. Nuclear energy release in an explosive way. How and just when we didn't know, or just how, but the potential of this particular discovery seemed so clear that by the end of January everybody was talking about it. By the end of February I think I -- or maybe it was March, as late as that, I was talking to my friends, other graduate students, and on the blackboard we would draw pictures of heavy water and uranium and put big explosion marks and so on, we didn't know very much what we were talking about. But we had a vague idea of the principles that would later become developed. That was in early 1939. And I'm sure it was not just us, we were not specially adroit in that matter. It was going on in Japan and in Russia and in Germany and France and England and New York and everywhere else.

I'M GOING TO ASK YOU TO TALK ABOUT THAT AGAIN, AND MAYBE YOU COULD START OUT BY SAYING, WHEN YOU HEARD THE NEWS OF FISSION, HOW IT WAS A SURPRISE AND HOW PEOPLE STARTED MAKING DIAGRAMS ON THE BLACKBOARD AND TALKING ABOUT THE POTENTIAL OF A WEAPON COMING FROM...

OK. When we heard the news of the discovery of fission, which was a belated discovery in the sense that it only had to be pointed out to you for you to realize at once what its implications were. This was the long-awaited path towards the large-scale release of nuclear energy, something we just had not anticipated. But there it was. It was quite clear that it was very likely to be contained in this new phenomenon. So by the end of January, or maybe by February, 1939, every graduate student was in the mood to draw on the board some strange cartoon of a bomb with heavy water and uranium and all the ingredients. We didn't understand it very well, but we had-- we could see the potential. It was plainly there.

FOR A LAYPERSON IN OUR AUDIENCE, CAN YOU EXPLAIN SIMPLY HOW YOU KNEW THE POTENTIAL WAS THERE FOR AN INCREDIBLE NEW EXPLOSIVE? AND HOW DID THE SPLITTING OF THE ATOM LEAD TO A WEAPON?

Well, the trouble with that is, it requires a couple of intermediate steps. I don't know if you're going to stand still for all that. I don't know how to formulate that in a moment.

YEAH, MAYBE IT'S TOO MUCH.

It's too much, I think that It was because the act of fission so disturbed the atom, the nucleus, that it would clearly release neutrons, and neutrons were the one carrier that was efficient, to carry the reaction from one place to another. And so we could see that would happen. And very likely if there were enough neutrons, the thing would just be able to spread with extraordinary speed through any solid block of the fuel. ... But unless you know what a neutron is, what a nucleus is, you can't really understand that, but that's what we knew, we knew that very well. But it would never have occurred to us that would happen, that this would be released. It had occurred to Leo Szilard, but he didn't know where to look. He was about the only person in the world who had anticipated this for years before.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE DISCOVERY OF FISSION HAPPENING AT THAT TIME, AT THE TIME OF HITLER RISING TO POWER-

Oh, Hitler had seized power and was running Europe. This was 1939.

DID YOU FEEL AT THE TIME THAT SOMETHING AWESOME WAS IN THE MAKING, I MEAN, WITH THE DISCOVERY OF FISSION COINCIDENT WITH HITLER'S POWER IN GERMANY, WAS THERE A SENSE THAT THE IDEA OF A BOMB WAS CONVERGING WITH BURGEONING FEELING OF WAR?

There was no doubt in our minds that the German government, which meant war, whose leader's gravely voice had made our whole autumn anxious over the radio, was in possession of the means of the most powerful weapon that the world had ever seen. We didn't know just when he would succeed, but my teachers studied in Germany, the books I used were German, Germany was the leader of modern physics. And here this new regime had made the discovery that, for us, unlocked the possibility, the potential of a new weapon. So we felt it was not only that they had the tanks and the dive bombers and the rest, but they were very likely to have the nuclear weapon to fire at any opposition as soon as they could reasonably make it, which we think would take, you know, we didn't know how long, but quite soon.

SO WHAT WAS THE REACTION THEN AMONG PHYSICISTS?

Well, the reaction was great anxiety and fear. And quite a few physicists tried to block the publication of any more information on it. There's a long story about that. Again, centered around Leo Szilard, who was a wonderful organizer of that kind of far-seeing strange activity. But it didn't work too well. But of course, we were far away. I was a graduate student in Berkeley, and I had nothing much to do with bombs. I just had this conversation, I was worried. We could see war was coming closer and closer to the United States, and we were fearful.

SO THERE WAS ALREADY A SENSE WITH SZILARD AND OTHERS THAT PHYSICISTS IN THE FREE WORLD SHOULD NOT PUBLISH THEIR FINDINGS?

That's correct. But that failed. Simply because there's no organization to make it succeed.

COULD YOU SAY THAT IN A COMPLETE STATEMENT, WITHOUT GETTING INTO GREAT DETAIL?

I see. There was some effort on the part of people around New-- around Szilard in New York to communicate with their friends in France, Britain, and so on, to prevent publication of new material on fission which might help. But it was impossible to know who was going to do what, and it failed essentially because of that reason. There was lack of understanding, difficult communication. Maybe over the year-- it just couldn't be organized. So by the end of 1939, beginning of 1940, it was pretty clear to everybody that there was a very good chance that this would lead to large-scale release of nuclear energy.

LET'S SKIP TO DECEMBER OF '41 AND PEARL HARBOR. WHERE WERE YOU AT THE TIME OF PEARL HARBOR, AND WHAT WERE THE FEELINGS THAT WERE ENGENDERED IN YOU AND YOUR ASSOCIATES WHEN THE UNITED STATES ENTERED THE WAR?

When Pearl Harbor came, I was a young instructor at the University of Illinois. I was replacing a very close friend of mine who had that same job the year before but who'd gone off to some secret project in Chicago. Of course, I had a strong surmise what he was doing, but I didn't literally know. And then it was clear this work would only increase and augment when the United States got thrown into the war. Then, as perhaps people today hardly realize, that enormous acceleration of concern and preparation hit the United States. Let us call it mobilization. And of everybody who was mobilized, the campuses were the most mobilized. And of the campuses, the most mobilized were the engineering and physics people, because their-- and chemistry, because their work seemed directly connected to, first, training technical officers for radar and airplanes and everything else, and second, actually working on research projects which would be related to the war. At Illinois we were then working with one of our colleagues, Professor Kerst had invented a wonderful device, the so-called Betatron, then perhaps six months or a year old, which made the most powerful X-rays the world had ever seen. I was quite interested in the physics of X-rays, these powerful X-rays. And we immediately got together with-- no one told us what to do, we said, well, the war is here, the United States is engaged in a war, can this be of any use in war? And if so, we should try to make it that way, it'd be our contribution. And we saw, to ourselves, we saw at once that of course, war, we didn't know much about the things, but we knew that in wartime they make big pieces of steel, shells and armor and tanks and what not. And X-rays for looking through big thicknesses of steel are likely to be quite valuable and important. This is the best source the world has ever seen for such things, let us work on the problem of using the Betatron for taking photographs through thick amounts of heavy metal. And so we proceeded to do that, and Don Kerst went to Washington to get a little support, he found that easy to do, and pretty soon we were working in an accelerated way on this research, teaching classes. The university stayed open summers as well as winters. The students were drafted and went marching about the campus in uniform. And we were on a war footing. That all happened I think before six months were out, after Pearl Harbor.

THIS SORT OF VISION OF MOBILIZING THE CAMPUSES AND MOBILIZING THE COUNTRY FOR WHAT SEEMED TO BE A JUST AND IMPORTANT WAR IS KIND OF HARD FOR YOUNGER PEOPLE TODAY TO UNDERSTAND. THE FEELING THEN WAS WHAT? I MEAN THERE WAS...?

The feeling was clear that the most-- the readiest country for war, the most powerful country in the world was led, had been led for ten years, eight years, by a man whose direction was clear, whose direction of world domination in a racist way, it was a terrible threat to Europe and to America. And America was not the most powerful nation in the world in those days. From our point of view, from what we knew, we were a weak, unready un-military affair. We had a very small army, and we didn't trust them to know what was going on. We felt they were looking backwards towards cavalry. And here were the Rus-- the Germans, who had, by the time we're now talking, had mashed into the Russians and made great strides. And ... there was victory for the Germans at every hand. And then, behind it all, there was a new weapon of unprecedented power which probably they were making better than we had any idea of. That's the way things stood by the-- six months after Pearl Harbor.

SO ON CAMPUS, YOU HAD-- YOU WERE INVOLVED IN, WHAT, CIVIL DEFENSE OF SOME KIND?

Yes. In addition to teaching and working on high-power X-rays, most people who felt some civic consciousness and were in a good position took some role. For example, then there was air raid training. I went and studied with the Red Cross to treat for shock, and to throw sand on magnesium bombs and so on. I admit, looking back now, it was a little hysterical. We imagined for ourselves at Urbana, Illinois, a small town in central Illinois, was in some potential danger from enemy air attack because, we argued, well perhaps the Germans will send an aircraft carrier to Hudson's Bay, they will come to bomb Chicago, an important center, Chicago will be blacked out. They won't see anything until they come to Urbana, which is right on the line, and they'll see this little place, and they'll drop a few bombs here. Therefore, we'd better turn out our lights and be prepared to defend the university against air raids. And I took that quite seriously. I didn't think it was likely to happen tomorrow, but I felt this was something we should be prepared for, we should not slip. And we felt we were doing our part. After all, the students we were training were going off, and they were soon going to be fighting. And we felt some responsibility to do what we could. We were safer than that.

LET'S TALK A LITTLE BIT MORE ABOUT ... TELL ME ABOUT WHEN YOU FIRST JOINED THE MANHATTAN PROJECT AND WHAT YOUR INVOLVEMENT WAS?

I was working at the University of Illinois quite happily on a number of things-

ALL RIGHT. YOU WERE GOING TO TELL US ABOUT YOUR INITIAL INVOLVEMENT IN MANHATTAN.

I was working both on war work and on teaching and on physics at the University of Illinois. There was a meeting of the Physical Society in Chicago, the University of Chicago, that fall. That's a year after Pear Harbor, now. And I went there. And there I encountered some old fellow graduate students and close friends of mine whom I knew to be working on a secret project in Chicago. In fact, I had a very good idea what it was, though I had no idea of the size, progress, potentials and so on. I just knew they were probably working on power from uranium in some way because that was in the cards. They were the kind of people who would do that. So that's where they were. So was I, and therefore, one of my friends said, "You must come see me tomorrow, I must talk to you. Don't fail." And I said, "OK, I'll do that." I knew what he wanted, more or less, but not precisely. So I came to his office behind a guarded door, and he said, "You know what we're doing here?" And I said, "Well of course I have a general idea." He said, "Well you probably don't realize we're after bombs." That was the word he said, bombs. I said, "That's further than I thought." "Yes," he said, "it is much closer than you think. This is the most important thing that a physicist can do. You really ought to come join us. We need you." And I said, "Give me a few days to think about it." And I went home and I thought about it, and a few weeks later I was in Chicago.

I'M GOING TO ASK YOU TO TELL ME THAT AGAIN.

Sure.

...START WITH

I believe it was the Thanksgiving weekend when the Physical Society had a meeting in Chicago, in which all the Midwestern physicists who had something to say and something to learn would come. I went there. There I encountered more than one of my old friends and colleagues from California, whom I knew to be working at the University of Chicago on some secret project. And I could surmise, it was the uranium project, from the nature of their work. So indeed I saw a very close friend of mine, and he said, "Please come see me tomorrow, you must do so, it's urgent." I agreed. I went to see him behind a guarded door, which was unusual for me. And I sat in front of him, and he said, "Well, you know what we're after of course." I said, well, I knew in a general way it was the uranium project. "Yes," he said, "that's true, but more than that. We're after bombs." I was quite surprised. I said, "You're so far that you know that can be done?" "Yes," he said, "we feel that can be done. This is the most important and decisive activity a physicist can do. We need you. You must come work with us." So I asked for a few days to think about it, and in a couple of weeks time, I was in Chicago.

NOW AT THAT --IN '43, IT WAS ASSUMED THAT THE GERMANS WERE WELL AHEAD ON AN ATOMIC BOMB PROJECT. CAN YOU TALK ABOUT THAT A LITTLE MORE, AND WHY, I KNOW WE TOUCHED ON IT EARLIER, BUT IF WE COULD GO OVER IT AGAIN, WHY WAS IT FELT THAT THE GERMANS WERE PROBABLY AHEAD OF THE UNITED STATES ON AN ATOMIC BOMB PROJECT?

By early 1943, when I was in the project and saw the scope and difficulties that lay ahead, I also realized that a few years' advance preparation would have made a big difference. We knew the Germans-- or we imagined the Germans had that preparation. They had the readiness all the time for war, they had a government very concerned about it. They had a very powerful group of physics and engineering people. And we imagined that it was only safe to assume they were well ahead of us. And we were pretty close. So if they were well ahead of us, we could expect success at any time from them. It looked to us like a race in which we were pretty well losing. So at that time I became very concerned about that. I wrote a letter to our General, with some details about how he might find means to penetrate still more accurately into what they really were doing. It happened by chance that another young scientist I never met before, just by accident had written a very similar letter to him, and they appeared on his desk in very similar time. This coincidence led him to act. And so he set up a quite ambitious and powerful project to look into what the Germans were doing on the spot by all the means that one could imagine. And we-no holds were barred.

MAYBE WE COULD PICK IT UP AGAIN WHEN YOU STARTED TELLING ABOUT THE LETTER YOU WROTE TO GENERAL GROVES? WE CAN USE HIS NAME. BY THIS TIME THE AUDIENCE WILL KNOW WHO GENERAL GROVES IS.

I see. OK. Sometime in '43, I became concerned about-

WHY DON'T WE START AGAIN. I'M SORRY.

After I was on the project a for a few months, I somehow became concerned about the lack of our knowledge of what the Germans were in fact doing. And I realized that there were many ways to find out or which at least gave some promise of finding out. Technical means as well as obvious aerial photography and searching literature and listening to prisoners of war and so on. But all those things were involved. And I spent some time writing a long letter to General Groves-of course, I never-- I don't think I'd ever met him. But he was my boss, at a high level - suggesting that we should spend some effort on trying to find that out, and outlining how it might be done. And at the same time, by coincidence, a young scientist in another part of the project, whom I had never met and never heard of before, coincidentally did just the same thing. The fact that two-- these two letters came at the same time, more or less, made a powerful impression on him. And he was a man of action. He said, "Let's get this going," and he set in motion a powerful program for finding this out.

CAN YOU JUST BACK UP AND PICK THAT UP AGAIN AND SAY SOMEONE ELSE HAD WRITTEN HIM A SIMILAR LETTER AND THAT PROVOKED HIM INTO ACTION. AND THEN MAYBE WE COULD TALK ABOUT WHAT SOME OF THOSE THINGS WERE.

Another chemist, another scientist, a young chemist, had written him a very similar letter at about the same time. These were quite independent activities; we didn't know of each other. And this coincidence led him to act. So he set up a scheme, we were involved in it to a small way to advise him how to go about it, and he proceeded to get the powerful apparatus that was needed to do all the things you might imagine to find out what the Germans were doing. For example, we discussed sampling the rivers, all the cold rivers in Europe the best we could -some by people, agents, on the scene; some by actually dropping wicks from aircraft, low-flying aircraft to pick up samples, that sort of thing. Because we knew, or we surmised, that if they were doing this they would need to do what we were doing, namely, find a cold river to cool off a nuclear power reactor which was making the plutonium that would be po-- would be a possible fuel for a bomb. And that always made radioactivity. And you can detect, of course, the tiniest trace of radioactivity. If you looked in the Columbia River, where we were working, it was quite easy. So it was clear that if we looked in the rivers of Europe, we had a chance of finding something out that way. That was tried. Very hard to do, but it was tried. We studied the German uranium mines. We had aerial coverage made of them all the time. It was hard to do, because they were far behind the German lines, in Czechoslovakia. The pilots who flew that were under very severe risk from the German fires. But they tried over and over again. When we got pictures of the mines, we tried to learn how many trucks were coming in and out, what railroad cars were being loaded, how busy were the mines, what can we estimate about their capacity and size. We then picked up all the German aircraft instrument panels that we could. We analyzed them for radioactivity content. Of course, they used radioactivity to make the dials glow. We still do, perhaps, certainly did in those days. And if we could sample all the models of aircraft and calculate all the dials and how many they were producing so we could begin to see were they making a lot of this material or only a little? Was there something missing in our count? That was the sort of things we tried to do. At the same time, we tried to read all the literature which we got through Switzerland or through Italy, the German publications. Who was not publishing who might be publishing? Who was publishing, who should be publishing, and so on, and try to piece it together in that way. And a few dozens of people were working on this kind of thing. And, of course, at the same time, we began to pick up prisoners of war, especially from North Africa. Many engineers, many technicians, many people in the German forces who might be related to the Universities, to Eisenberg, to uranium, to various chemical plants and so on. And we tried to inject into the system the kinds of questions that would elicit answers that would be clues for us.

I'M GOING TO ASK YOU TO GO OVER SOME OF THAT AGAIN SO WE CAN GET IT IN A DIFFERENT FRAME SIZE. I THINK WE'VE ESTABLISHED THE IDEA THAT YOU WROTE THE LETTER AND THE OTHER CHEMIST WROTE A LETTER. MAYBE WE COULD JUST PICK IT UP FROM TALKING ABOUT SOME OF THE THINGS THAT WERE DONE TO TRY TO GATHER THIS INFORMATION.

OK. Many things were done -- of course, it's quite obvious that we would read all the papers that were published and try to identify the various people, we tried to identify the various firms that might be engaged in the enterprise. We thought of sampling, for radioactivity, all the cold rivers in Europe in German occupation. Because we knew that our river, the Columbia, or the Clinch in Tennessee, were pretty radioactive by now from the cooling water that came from the chain reactors that were making plutonium. And these were not dangerously radioactive, but radioactive to the-to the detectors, which are very sensitive. And we thought we would try to get samples of those rivers and see if we could locate some plant up in some cold river that would be doing the same thing for the Germans that we were doing. We tested German aircraft dials, which were full of radioactive content to make the glow in the dark for the benefit of the pilots at night, just as ours were. But from this, we could make an inventory of what kind and how much radioactive mining they were doing, compare that with the actual activity at the mines, and try to strike a balance. Of course, all this was quite wishful thinking. We couldn't really do all those things very accurately, but we tried.

AND WHAT DID YOU FIND?

Well, we found out uncertainty. We find out they were in a position to do it, but we couldn't be sure that they were doing it. But we couldn't exclude that they were doing it, either. That was the trouble. So we made what all intelligence people do, it's a very bad guide to policy, we said, well, let's assume the worst, because if we assume something better than the worst we may be terribly surprised. If we assume the worst and work on that, then we have a chance to stay ahead. So we took the view they were working hard and even were ahead of us.

OK. GOOD. TELL ME ABOUT LOS ALAMOS. WHEN YOU FIRST CAME TO LOS ALAMOS, WHAT WERE YOUR IMPRESSIONS OF THE PLACE, OF THE WAY IT WAS RUN, OF THE SCALE OF THE OPERATION AND THE FEELING OF COMMUNITY. DID YOU START RUNNING INTO PEOPLE THAT YOU'D HEARD OF OR THAT YOU HAD KNOWN FROM BERKELEY?

I came to Los Alamos at the end of the peak of work in Chicago, when many people came to Los Alamos. It was expanding; it was going to new fields; it was beginning a mushroom growth, because the problem had suddenly become very much more difficult for making bombs than it had appeared before, at least for using plutonium. So I was brought in on that wave of increase, increment. And of course I was enormously impressed by the people that had gathered there, many of whom I knew, many of my old friends were there, many people whom I hadn't-- only knowledge was studying their works. It's clear that the center of technical concern and the problem for making a weapon had moved to Los Alamos. The work of Chicago, not done, was primarily done. It remained only to put it into practice, which wasn't the task of the Universities but of the great industrial complexes at Harvard or at Oxbridge. And so now I was thrown into the midst of a new research activity among very congenial, similarly minded, activated, excited people, working after all for my old boss, Robert Oppenheimer, who was the director, apparently tireless and all-knowing director of the project.

MAYBE YOU COULD TALK A LITTLE BIT ABOUT OPPENHEIMER AS THE WAY YOU KNEW HIM AND AS DIRECTOR OF THE PROJECT. EVERYBODY DESCRIBES HIM LIKE HE WAS ALMOST A MIRACLE, THE WAY HE RAN THE PROJECT.

Yes, well of course, I was a graduate student of Robert Oppenheimer's, and we were fairly-- I would say we were good friends. And I'd already learned acquired enormous respect for his ability and his concern and his profound understanding of human beings and of physics, which he had demonstrated ever since I w-- got to Berkeley in 1936, and became fell to some degree under his spell. And this same charm, energy, understanding readiness, quickness of mind and wit and spirit were absolutely characteristic of Los Alamos. Everybody recognized it. He was present at all the meetings. He was ready for advice at any point. He knew what you were doing. He would make helpful hints about it. At the same time, he was not tyrannical or dictatorial in any way. He tried to bring out the best in you, And I think his leadership at the Los Alamos project was extraordinary. I believe everyone agrees to that.

DO YOU THINK HIS PERSONALITY OR HIS WAY OF LEADING THE PROJECT WAS REALLY INSTRUMENTAL IN THE SUCCESS?

There's little doubt that his gifts were ind-invaluable at Los Alamos. I think probably the people there were very able and very well motivated and had every conceivable resource, and I think maybe somebody else might have done it. But his style was certainly characteristic of that time, and everything went with great smoothness, with great intensity. Of course, we worked around the clock, six days a week and Sundays too. And nobody complained very much except about the trivialities of daily life.

WHY WAS IT SO INTENSE?

Because we felt we were the bottleneck in the manufacture of a weapon which if we didn't make first would lead to the loss of the war. And every day we read of the battles in which our friends and colleagues and students and allies were being killed in droves. And here we were in very pleasant circumstances, living in the mountains, working on physics in a wonderful community. And our job was to try to make a bomb. And if we didn't try our hardest, we were certainly remiss. And we did try, very hard.

DID YOU FEEL THAT THIS PROJECT, BY BEING UNDER-- BEING RUN BY THE MILITARY, WHEN YOU WERE IN CHICAGO OR AT LOS ALAMOS, WAS THERE A PROBLEM FOR SCIENTISTS WORKING UNDER MILITARY CONTROL? DID YOU FEEL THAT THE REQUIREMENTS OF SECRECY AND SECURITY WERE GETTING IN THE WAY OF PROGRESS?

Yes, we did. We complained a good deal about that at Chicago-

CAN WE START OVER AGAIN, SO WE CAN SAY WHAT THE SUBJECT IS THAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT?

OK. Of course we recognized there was some need for secrecy in the project. We felt that the breaking up of the ideas by compartmentalization was inhibiting the work, and sometimes it did. And at Chicago this was-- it seemed rather onerous to us. At Los Alamos it was much better, because though it was a ... highly secret affair, though our letters out were censored and so on, we accepted that. And within the project there was a good deal more free communication. Everybody with the right status, so-called white-badge personnel, technical people, could go to nearly every meeting. And we did have a lot of communication across the lines of interest, which made for very rapid work and very high concentration. This was a direct bargain, which General Groves approved of; the price for it was that we could not communicate with the outside world, and that seemed to us a very reasonable arrangement. So on the whole, I was fairly contented, quite contented with the general leadership of Los Alamos, especially because Robert Oppenheimer played such an important role and smoothed and modified everything that could go wrong.

SO LOS ALAMOS WAS DIFFERENT FROM THE OTHER LABORATORIES IN THAT THERE WAS FREE EXCHANGE OF IDEAS AMONG THE SCIENTISTS-

It was different--Los Alamos was different than other places in two ways. It was an isolated military post. Therefore, you were not free to leave and to go around and do your business and go to the movies, as we were in Chicago, where nobody paid attention to us. When we left the locked gates, we were free. In Los Alamos there was no way of doing that. We agreed to that. But in exchange for that, within the post where nothing cou-- from which nothing could leak out, we thought, it was quite free to talk about, among the technical personnel, all the problems in which you might be interested. And we felt this made work go faster and smoother and with a great deal more sense of direction.

LET'S TALK ABOUT NIELS BOHR NOW, COMING TO LOS ALAMOS AND WHAT YOU KNEW-- WHAT YOU SAW OF HIM THERE, AND WHAT YOU THOUGHT HE WAS DOING THERE AND YOUR IMPRESSIONS OF WHAT WAS BEING DISCUSSED BETWEEN HIM AND OPPENHEIMER AND OTHER PEOPLE...

Niels Bohr, of course, was the-- in some ways the most luminous figure. He wasn't the most significant physicist on the project. But he was a little more reflective and, we felt, wiser than the rest of us. And Robert Oppenheimer in particular had this feeling, which communicated itself very easily to his friends young graduate-- ex-graduate students, such as myself. And so we had a great confidence in Bohr... And we knew that Bohr was concerned, as we all were concerned, but he was-- he had a higher view. His view was to try to place the coming bomb into the construction of a peace which would be workable, into a new world where nuclear weapons could somehow be recognized if they came to exist and made part of the construction of a peace. We didn't know how he was going to do that very well, but we talked about it a good deal. We knew that he was a man who had access to the highest persons in the government. We didn't know in detail when or what he would talk to, but we knew that he was concerned about these matters, grave when his overtures were not well received, more cheerful when he was writing reports that looked as though they would work. And we felt that between Bohr and Oppenheimer, in their circles, they would find some way to make our leadership behave properly. What we did in those days, of course, when I first arrived there, was we worked on the bomb. We were-the whole thing made no sense if we didn't have this power, and if we didn't have it first. And therefore we spent most of our efforts on practical, positive work. But in the evenings, we would be concerned about the future. In those days, I must say, the war did not look won. It wasn't clear to us. I felt particularly that the V-I and the V-2, which we had known about for some time, which were now being used in the summer of '44, that they made very little sense for the Germans unless they had nuclear weapons to go into them one day. I listened to the BBC regularly every day on shortwave, I was a shortwave enthusiast -- not so much to hear the program, but just to hear that they still existed. Because I really feared that some day London would be attacked by half a dozen nuclear weapons and wiped out and their signal would go off the air. That's the day I was fearing. Of course, it never came.

WE'LL GET BACK TO BOHR AGAIN IN A MINUTE. LET'S, SINCE WE HAD THIS LITTLE RUMBLING PROBLEM, MAYBE YOU COULD TALK ABOUT YOUR SENSE OF FEAR OF THE V-1 AND THE V-2 ROCKETS AND YOUR LISTENING TO THE BROADCAST TO SEE IF THEY STILL EXIST.

In the summer of '44, of course, our eyes were wholly on the invasion. And with it, there came the V-1 and V-2 cruise missile and ballistic missile of the Germans-

LET'S START AGAIN. MAYBE YOU COULD START AGAIN AND SPECIFY THAT IT WAS THE INVASION OF EUROPE WE'RE ABOUT TO TALK ABOUT. IT MIGHT BE A LITTLE CONFUSING.

OK. This is the summer of '44, and all our ears and eyes were on the coast of France, where the US and British troops were finally confronting the German army in full scale. And with it, there came against London, especially, the V-1 and-- cruise missile, and the V-2 ballistic missile we knew the Germans had been developing for some time. And it always seemed to me that those devices made very little sense unless they had nuclear warheads. So we felt that their use was preliminary to the first few nuclear warheads bursting in London. In those days, I was so concerned that I listened every day to the BBC on the shortwave, not because I so much wanted to hear the news, but because I was anxious to see that London was still existing. I felt some day we'd turn on, the London frequency would not be there because half a dozen or ten bombs had burst in London. That was not to happen.

-- EXCUSE ME, PHIL, WERE THEY KNOWN AS V-1, V-2 ROCKETS AT THE TIME OR CRUISE AND BALLISTIC MISSILES?

They were not-- well, only one was a rocket. One was a cruise missile and one was a rocket.

OK. AND THAT'S THE WAY THEY WERE KNOWN?

No, they were known as V-1 and V-2.

ABOUT BOHR AND LOS ALAMOS. WAS IT SURPRISING WHEN HE CAME THERE?

I believe that Bohr was there before I got there. I'm not-- I can't remember with precision. But I know-- I think he was away when I arrived, and when I'd been there for a very short time, he re-he returned. I knew he was expected. But he returned. He had been off on some high mission to Britain or to Roosevelt or something, we didn't know exactly what, he wouldn't talk about that. But we knew he was gravely concerned with the future policy of the use of the bomb and the nature of the alliance, as we all were. But he was somebody who could-- who could deal with that. We were not. So we had to watch and hope that he was making progress. I remember going with him on one Sunday to a dance at the, at the Hamus Pueblo, a very exciting time for me because of the remarkable circumstances of the dance -- the ancient dance, and the-- around the dancers, the onlookers, the whole galaxy of famous physicists from Europe who were making this extraordinary investigation into a new kind of weapon. The whole incongruity and strangeness of the scene had gripped everybody. I think nobody could fail to be caught up in that peculiar and wonderful event.

I REMEMBER READING, I FORGET WHO IT WAS, THAT SAID THAT THEY FELT AFTER HIROSHIMA THAT THEY SHOULD GIVE LOS ALAMOS BACK TO THE INDIANS.

Yes. That was very commonly said.

LET'S TALK ABOUT NIELS BOHR AGAIN JUST A LITTLE BIT. WHAT-- GO OVER SOME OF THE SAME POINTS. WHAT WERE THE IDEAS THAT HE WAS TRYING TO GET ACROSS WHEN HE WAS TALKING TO PEOPLE AT LOS ALAMOS? THAT YOU KNEW OF AT THE TIME?

At the time. When Bohr spoke about policy at Los Alamos, he spoke in a guarded way. We didn't know what he was doing. But we knew he was concerned with the problem of nuclear weapons and the establishment of the peace. We could all see that was a problem. And we relied upon his enormous prestige and reflective turn of mind to be able to place those ideas in the high political leadership of our country. We didn't know the details. He never spoke about it. We had to surmise, and we could surmise from what he said and told us how grave the situation was and how the world could hardly deal with nuclear weapons if they were to work, which we didn't know at the time, and how we should try to set up a post-war situation in which they could not emerge again.

AMONGST THE PHYSICISTS, BEFORE THE BOMB WORKED, BEFORE IT WAS SHOWN-- BEFORE IT WAS USED, I KNOW YOU WERE ALL VERY BUSY, AND YOU DIDN'T HAVE A LOT OF TIME TO REFLECT ON WHAT MIGHT HAPPEN AFTER THE WAR. BUT WAS THERE MUCH DISCUSSION? WAS THERE A FEELING-- WAS THERE CONCERN ABOUT THE SOVIET UNION AT THAT TIME, WHO WAS THEN OF COURSE OUR ALLY?

In the months between the time when we were convinced that the Germans would not make the bomb and the actual use of the bomb in Japan, about half a year or something like that, a little more, of course we knew that the role the bomb would play in ending the war and in bringing the attention of the world to this new kind of warfare was very important, and that the re-- relationship between the United States and Britain on the one hand and Russia, then our ally but obviously in a, in a difficult position, was very important. We hoped that peace could be established, with the United Nations, with all those efforts which were a signal to us as a sign for making a stable peace, where another war, based on nuclear weapons, could not occur. That was our concern. And of course, our view was that unless we found out if there was such a thing as nuclear weapons and found it out in wartime, that I think was the principal concern of Bohr. It would probably remain forever secret, and the world would never know what this danger was.

LET'S GET BACK TO THAT IDEA. BUT... BY THE END OF 1944, WHEN, THROUGH THE EFFORTS OF THE ALSOS MISSION AND THERE WAS NO LONGER FEAR THAT THE GERMANS WERE GOING TO HAVE A BOMB DURING THE WAR, WHAT HAPPENED? WAS THERE A CHANGE IN LOS ALAMOS? I MEAN, NOW THE ORIGINAL MOTIVATION WAS GONE, THE ORIGINAL THREAT WAS GONE. WHERE DID THAT LEAVE THE PROJECT?

Once it became clear the Germans were beaten, they would not produce nuclear weapons during the war, the original sense of fear and anxiety disappeared from the project. But our leadership said, indeed, we were still at war, the country had invested a great deal in this, would expect to be able to use this in the war. Higher considerations were still that if the world never knew about atomic energy -- we didn't know if it would work or not. If it did work, we felt there was something we could do alone that the world had a necessity to know. You could hardly build a peace -- this was one of Bohr's main ideas -on the framework which, in which nuclear weapons were not recognized. I remember some disappointment when the first meetings of the United Nations did not breathe a word about this. And I worried about that. But Oppenheimer and the others reassured me that leaders were concerned about it, that it was simply premature, in the absence of knowledge, to make it public.

LET'S JUST FOCUS ON THE WORK OF THE PROJECT AGAIN, AFTER THE GERMAN THREAT HAD DISAPPEARED, WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT-- WITHOUT BRINGING IN IDEAS ABOUT THE POST WAR AND THE UNITED NATIONS-

But you can't do that. That was the reason for the project. At that point. It was to end the war, and end the war in such a way that the future war will not be ... based on a secret possession of nuclear weapons, which the people won't know about.

WASN'T THE MAIN OBJECTIVE JUST TO END THE WAR WITH JAPAN AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE-

Well, that was not Bohr's main objective, and that wasn't Oppenheimer's main objective, and it wasn't my main objective. But it was certainly the main objective of the, of the leadership of the United States. But we were very concerned about the whole pros-- prospect. And as I say, I remember hoping that at the United Nations something would be said about the prospects of this new weapon which would make warfare such n-- such a novel and terrible affair. And the fact that it passed without the slightest reference to it was disturbing. But again, we were reassured that the time was not yet ripe, that the leaders were well aware of these issues and they were dealing with them the best way they could. And we trusted our leadership, from Oppenheimer and Bohr up to the President. And that was it. I still feel that the sudden death of Roosevelt, which made an enormous emotional impact at Los Alamos, was a turning point in the whole situation.

COULD YOU ELABORATE ON THAT?

The death of Roosevelt meant that there was no one who commanded immediate trust and respect who could carry through any novelty. Because who knew of Mr. Truman? Of course, he was the President, we would obey him, but he was not the man to carry through a change in policy or a new, bold policy that was not continuous to what had been laid down in the four years of fighting the war.

AFTER THE GERMANS WERE DEFEATED, WAS THERE ANY FEELING AMONG PROJECT SCIENTISTS THAT THEY SHOULD STOP?

After the Germans were defeated, there was certainly concern whether somehow the project was no longer necessary, no longer urgent. One or two persons, especially Joe Rotblat, himself a European who felt he had no part of the Japanese war, went back home, he was very concerned with finding his parents, who were probably concentration camp victims and so on. And we recognized that was a possibility. He was in the British mission. But mostly both the English and the American scientists said, "We're in for the duration. The war is going on, it's a terrible war. We must play what part we can."

SO THE SHIFTING IN THE MINDS OF PEOPLE OF THE TARGET, FROM THE GERMANS TO JAPAN, WAS A NATURAL TRANSITION?

The shifting of the target from Germany to Japan was a natural transition, just as it was for the armed forces. The war did not stop when the Germans made peace. The war in America became even more intense. There was more fighting, more loss, more casualties, the great battles around Okinawa and between the fleets were still to come. And the sense of the war being bloody and terrible was not lost to us. And the bombers were still going every few days to attack another Japanese city. I think we did not understand, in spite of what we said, the true novelty of our weapon, how great it would come to be, how numerous they would come to be. We thought of it as more continuous still with the old way, because after all, the bombers were destroying a city a day, so to speak, in Japan. They made about a hundred raids. And for us it was just one or two or three more. Yes, they were much cheaper, they were even more terrible, but not by a big factor. That was another thing. That we were inured to this attack upon the cities by the B-29 campaign against Japan.

SO COULD YOU DESCRIBE THE EXPERIENCE OF THE TRINITY TEST?

I was one of the people who had a responsible post in the Trinity test, a small, technical job, which I had to carry out. My colleague and I were a head of a group whose responsibility was the pit, so-called, the central portion of the implosion bomb, which contains the nuclear material and some other items that go around it. We had to be responsible for its operation, its proper installation, its readiness. We had to monitor it, make sure it was on the tower, working. We had to assemble it in advance and so on. And so it was a lot of things to do, and a heavy responsibility, which we tried to carry out. And then, of course, our work was done a day or so before the test. Most other people still had work, because their work was to measure the test. Our work was to prepare the bomb. So we were idle, apprehensive, concerned. And of course, when the test actually came, before dawn on Monday, the 16, July, I was at ten miles away, base camp, and I'll never forget the experience of course of seeing that tremendous flash, which we were prepared for, through-- looking through darkened glasses. What we were not quite emotionally prepared for was the sense of heat on the face as though the noon-day sun had appeared across the cold desert morning. That was a thing I shall never forget, the visceral sensation of the heat of the bomb on one's face at ten miles' distance. To me that was much more important than the flash or even the rumbling thunderous sound that came and echoed among the mountains a minute later. The real point was that sense of direct, intimate contact through the warming of the skin. And that's one memory I have most of all. But of course, we were all awed and silenced by the extraordinary power of this thing which we had understood in the numbers, but not in true experience.

WAS THERE SOME SENSE OF REALIZATION AT THAT TIME THAT THIS THING WAS VERY NEW, VERY DIFFERENT? AS A WEAPON.

I think that the realization that this was something novel was there, but a bit latent, because we were so concerned about our success and about the use of that in warfare. Which we were-- which we were constrained to do, which we were-- had signed up to do, so to speak. And we were loyal to our fellow countrymen who had fought there. We were going to try to bring this war to an end. And the issue that we saw was whether this could be brought into combat if that was-if those were the orders, we were prepared to do that. What we saw was that one of these bombs would literally destroy a city. I remember, between-in the week between the test itself and the time I left for islands where the airbase was which launched the bomb, I heard a famous lecture, a colloquium available to all the technical personnel at Los Alamos, made by an English expert, now Lord Penny, who described what this bomb would do to a city in terms of his long technical statistics experience with bomb damage in Britain. And he predicted quite correctly that this would knock out of the war at a stroke a city of about 300,000 population. And indeed, Hiroshima was a city of about 300,000 population, a little overcrowded because of the war. But that's about what he was right about. He made it very graphic, and his numbers left no room for doubt.

WHAT ABOUT THE REPORT WHEN IT CAME OUT OF CHICAGO? WHAT WAS THE REACTION? YOU HEARD ABOUT IT AT LOS ALAMOS?

I don't think we heard about it. I don't remember hearing about it until after the war was over.

I WASN'T SURE OF THAT. OK. WAS THERE-

It was there, I think, but it was not-- I didn't see it.

SO THERE WAS REALLY NO FEELING OF HESITANCY AMONGST THE SCIENTISTS TO GO AHEAD AND SEE THE BOMB USED MILITARILY IN THE WAR?

No, there was a great deal of feeling of hesitancy, but there was a great deal of feeling that it was not our responsibility to decide. Maybe that was wrong, but I think that's what it rested on. For me, I was involved, I was a technical advisor to the target committee at one point. There were several target committees, and I was on one of them. I was not a member of it, I had no vote, but I could talk to them. And I remember saying that of course the important thing was to make a warning and explain how new this was and how the whole war would be changed by the look of this terrible thing. And my Air Force colleague said, "You're not flying this mission, we are. We can't afford to do that. Because if we say that a new weapon is coming in one airplane, they will attack that airplane, and they will kill us. And you're just recommending something because you're safe, but we're not safe. That's not the way to talk." That was the kind of silencing we got if we tried to raise any objections. So I'm afraid that we more or less naive and ignorant and quite far from the point of decision, said, well, OK, we can do what we can and that's all.

AT THAT TIME THE JAPANESE WERE VERY FEARSOME AND A TERRIBLE ENEMY TOO?

Yes, we thought they were, at least. I don't think we were well informed about the Japanese. I doubt that the leadership was very well informed about them. When I reached Japan at the end of the war, I could see the Japanese were beaten and that they knew it. And that probably without an invasion, without the Russians, without an atomic bomb, the Japanese would have had to make peace sometime by the end of the year. It would have been a delay, and maybe that was important. I just don't know. But the Japanese economy was done for. The people, the cities were destroyed, and the people were starving.

WHAT WAS THE REACTION AMONGST THE PEOPLE ON TINIAN WHEN YOU WERE THERE AFTER THE NEWS CAME BACK OF THE BOMB BEING DROPPED ON HIROSHIMA?

It went in two stages of course. The bomb left in the airplane. Great excitement and great concern. And then during the day we heard the code message of the success of the strike, but no details. When the Air Corps people tried to take photographs, they couldn't do so, because the city was covered by an impenetrable blanket of smoke from the fires. The firestorm that we now know took over Hiroshima within a couple of hours after the attack. And so we didn't know what happened. But we knew that the city had been destroyed. And undoubtedly with extreme loss of life, probably the worst raid of any. And we knew there'd been some bad ones. So, that evening, since we were so directly responsible for this event, the few physicists from Los Alamos and chemists and technical people who were there were a bit sobered by this event, and we didn't feel like the big noisy party which the military, the Air Force people engaged in that evening to celebrate their victory. I remember when the airplane landed on the field, all that morning generals had been assembled from all over the islands, a little, private, you know, semi-- what shall I say, little planes, carrying generals with one or two or three stars in their, in their windows appeared. And when the airplane rolled to a stop, a whole of such people was in front of the airplane, and as soon as the pilot leaped onto the ground from the B-29, a big medal was pinned on his chest, and that was the time of the triumph. So naturally, they celebrated. They were afraid, they had risked their lives, they were afraid of the whole thing from the beginning to the end. I don't think they really expected it would work until they heard the news of the test in the desert. And here they were, this was the fruition of their warfare, and they had destroyed a city. But we didn't feel too much part of that, and so we stayed home and thought or wrote or read something quiet during that first night.

TELL ME AGAIN ABOUT WHEN THE B-29 CAME BACK FROM THE RAID AND HOW THEY WERE GREETED AND HOW YOU FELT?

When the aircraft came back from the raid in Hiroshima, we knew it had been successful, in a broad way. First, from their code message, and second for the all-day-long, half-day-long efforts of the Air Force to make photographs, which were impossible, because the city was covered by the smoke of the terrible fire storm that was set there. So we were pretty sure the city was destroyed, and by afternoon we knew it. When the airplane landed, we were impressed by the degree of military recognition this project which had been carried out in secrecy and without any recognition at all was suddenly blazoned across the whole Pacific. The high officers had been flying in all day long in their small planes. And when the aircraft landed, and the-- pilot jumped out, he was met by the Commander in Chief of the Air Corps in the Pacific, who pinned a big medal on his chest as he walked 20 feet away from the airplane, with the clicking of photographers innumerable. So we knew that a new world had been entered in that sense. Of course, these people then, naturally, went on to a celebration of the event, a large party which lasted for a long time. But most of the Los Alamos people, who had no particular share -they didn't risk their lives nor had any particular concern with the military promotions and awards, felt rather the profound responsibility of having destroyed a city. We thought it was an evening to be quiet and reflective, and we stayed home, and I remember not going to the party and going to bed early, trying to get some sleep. Another bomb, after all, was to come in a few days' time.

AND YOU LOADED THAT BOMB?

My group loaded the center of that bomb, we didn't-- we put it into the high explosives, and then the high-explosives people came and took it away and put it into the airplane. And we watched carefully while that happened. In fact, then I had to go off to the other end of the island with a few instruments and a couple of people because we were the reserve in case the second bomb had a crash in --in taking off, which was by no means impossible. Many aircraft had crashed in taking off, in that very same field. And we had no way of preventing an explosion. So we feared there might be an explosion which would destroy a great amount of material and many people. So we were the only ones on the island who had the wherewithal and the know-how to check on radiation and so on, and they felt it was wiser for us to go five or seven miles away to the other end of the island and then wait out the takeoff in safety, which I remember doing in the hospital.

I READ SOMEWHERE THAT YOU HAD SAID THAT AFTER THE BOMB WAS USED THAT SCIENTISTS FELT THE TIME HAD COME TO END ALL WARS. IN RETROSPECT, THESE 40 YEARS LATER, HAVING SEEN THE EMERGENCE OF MORE POWERFUL BOMBS AND BALLISTIC MISSILES AND WHATEVER, IT SORT OF BECOMES CLEAR THE POTENCY OF THIS NEW WEAPON. BUT AT THE TIME, I FIND THAT VERY CURIOUS AND KIND OF HARD TO BELIEVE, NOT BEING A SCIENTIST, THAT THERE WAS REALLY THIS FEELING AT THE TIME THAT SOMETHING SO DIFFERENT HAD BEEN UNLEASHED AT THE TIME THAT WARS COULD NO LONGER BE FOUGHT.

I believe the meaning of the atomic bomb is really that no wars can be fought. That's not a new idea. Nobel himself -- the Nobel prize man, who -- the inventor of dynamite, of modern explosive -- felt the same thing. It was very naive. Probably ours was very naive too. All you can say is that there haven't been any big wars fought, certainly no nuclear wars, since 1945. And I think that there is some truth in the fact that nuclear wars are not tolerable and can't be fought. What is the problems of the day is that we prepare for it, fearfully and fearsomely even though they can't be fought. And I'm afraid that inconsistency is going to destroy us by so-to-speak, not by anyone's design, but by the events which arise when we are loaded with all this possibility. And that's the fundamental problem of the day.

LET'S GO BACK TO THE TIME PERIOD THAT WE WERE DISCUSSING. WAS THAT FEELING REALLY PREVALENT THEN, IN 1945,THAT THERE HAD TO BE AN END TO WAR.

Well I'm not so sure there has to be an end to war. There has to be an end to nuclear war. We've seen quite a few wars without nuclear bombs. I think there's a difference, and I think that difference is important. I don't think we know how to end war in the, in the present situation with nation states everywhere. After all, every day's headline tells you about some war. I think it's pretty unlikely that will happen soon. But the use of nuclear weapons has not happened again, and it should be made impossible. Otherwise, war will be intolerable. And we don't know how to stop war, we won't be able to survive it. I think this was very quickly realized. I know that by December of '45, when the scientists formed their somewhat amateur organizations for politicking and lobbying and public relations, we had developed a series of slogans. I think these are admirable slogans, and they still work today just about as well as they did then, namely, there is no secret to this weapon. Sooner or later it'll spread to all powers who wish to have it. Second, there is no defense against this weapon. We didn't know about X-ray lasers, but we knew the power of this thing was so great that even a small leakage in any defense will make the offense intolerable. And third, the only solution then is some kind of international agreement for control. And that's what we started working on in 1945. We were inept. We have not succeeded, and we have not succeeded yet. But yet that success must come I think, or there's no doubt that the-- what started at Los Alamos will destroy most of the cities of the world.

WHAT WAS THE MOTIVATION BEHIND THE SCIENTISTS ORGANIZING AFTER THE WAR WAS OVER? REPHRASING THIS A LITTLE BIT. THE WAR WAS OVER, THE BOMB HAD WORKED, IT HAD DONE ITS JOB, THE WAR WAS OVER, AND YET THERE WAS NOT A FEELING AMONG THE PHYSICISTS ASSEMBLED THERE THAT, WELL, OUR JOB IS DONE, WE SHALL DISPERSE AND GET ON WITH OUR LIVES. OR WAS THERE SOME FEAR THAT THIS NEW WEAPON WOULD BE NOT HANDLED PROPERLY?

When the war was over, the project demobilized, just as the whole American system demobilized. Nobody wanted more war. Quite a few people, I think an important minority, were active enough in politics, concerned enough to feel -- and we were given much reason to do so by the, by the public and the media, who for the first time recognized the existence of atomic physics and its concerns; we were minor celebrities, we had access to the luncheon clubs and the radio networks if we wanted to talk about the future of international arrangements about the peace that we were trying to build. After all, the war was a terrible war, and we felt the scars of it intensely. And most people, as the United Nations demonstrates, felt there was going to be some way to make a new arrangement among nations to block the coming of war. And we felt that nuclear weapons were not properly considered yet, and that our special knowledge and special access would be of use to our fellow citizens in the United States and around the world to try to solve the problem that we saw of adjusting national rivalries to this new kind of essentially intolerable warfare. And so, many people, not everybody, but an important minority thought it was worthwhile spending some of our time working on that. And the first six or eight months, it was fast and furious. And after that it died away to be a more or-ordinary sort of thing, where organizations of people that we chose would go to Washington and do full-time work and then rotate back to the campuses, and so on. A very exciting time, a very demanding time for most people involved in it. We were amateurs. We didn't know what we were doing very well. We just improvised as we went along.

IN THE FALL OF '45, WHAT WERE SOME OF THE THINGS THAT THE SCIENTISTS STARTED TO DO? LET'S BACK UP. WHY DID YOU FEEL IT WAS IMPORTANT THAT THE PUBLIC BE EDUCATED ABOUT WHAT HAD HAPPENED AT LOS ALAMOS AND WHAT THE ATOMIC BOMB WAS LIKE?

Well, we couldn't help feeling the public should be educated, because the newspapers carried nothing but shouting headlines about atomic weapons a-- everywhere, every day, all the time, mostly mixed up with a lot of misunderstanding, nonsense lack of apprehension and so on. And it was clear that physicists who were in a position to do something about it and had any taste at all for public education -- I certainly admit I had, and quite a few people, but not the majority -- had a responsibility to try to explain and clarify and forecast and do the best we could to make our experience, forebodings, knowledge, hopes, available to the general public. I don't think it was an unusual thing. I think you would not imagine anything else would happen.

WHAT WAS YOUR CONCERN...?

Our concern was that the world had changed, and we knew how it would change and what would change still more and that it was a-- it was essential to democracy to explain that to the people. I don't see any way around that. And I think that was true all over the world. ...You realize that there were 14 million people in uniform. And within-

I THINK I STEPPED ON-

Oh, it doesn't matter whether it's in the camera or not. Yeah. There were 14 million Americans in uniform or something of that sort. They all began to come home. The world was changing. There was a new spirit around. We were going to have peace. That peace had to be founded on the realities of the situation. One of the most important of those realities had been blazoned at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But nobody really understood it well, nobody could see what the future meant. And we didn't see clearly, but we had some ideas and some knowledge and we thought it was responsible for us to share that. And we were much sought for that very reason.

YOU WERE MUCH SOUGHT IN WHAT WAY?

Every day ten people would call me and say, "Will you come and give a talk on nuclear weapons," or something equivalent.

SO THE PEOPLE WHO HAD BEEN AT LOS ALAMOS WERE TREATED LIKE HEROES?

Yes, somewhat. Heroes or at least people with a very special knowledge in place. Robert Oppenheimer was certainly regarded as a hero. The others, I think, we were just work--work-a-day people, but we certainly had something to say, and any luncheon club that could get us felt they had done something which their members would like. And we were anxious to try to make a public impact, and so we tended to accept, and of course we organized for that purpose. And there were spokesmen and committees and resolutions and conventions and the whole machinery of public relations. Especially around the Congress of the United States, which was trying to make law to govern the peaceful and military uses of atomic energy in the post-war world. Up till then they had no contact with it. The Congress--all the Congress got to do was vote money for unknown purposes. So it was really quite a unusual situation.

SO THERE WAS STARTING TO BE SOME MOVEMENT IN THE CONGRESS FOR DOMESTIC CONTROL OF ATOMIC ENERGY, AND THE FIRST BILL THAT CAME OUT WAS THE MAY-JOHNSON BILL, WHICH MOST OF THE SCIENTISTS STARTED TO LOBBY AGAINST. COULD YOU TALK ABOUT THAT?

Yes. The first bill for organizing the post-war American effort in nuclear energy was very much written by and stimulated by the Department of- wasn't the Department of Defense, by the Department of the Army, the War Department in those days, and it had a strong military flavor which most of the scientists objected to. We felt that this was more-- a larger matter than the military could handle, it had to be, as we said, under civilian control. That was our view. And there was a popular view, and we succeeded in mobilizing around it and winning the legislative fight on that particular question. Rather ironically, I don't think it made any difference, because we got civilian control, but it was very militarized and militaristic in its attitude, because what matters is the policy of the country, and not the particular organizational structure that carries it out, I think now. But in those days we were ingenuous, and we believed that political reform, structural reform of that sort would make a big difference. I don't think it did make a difference.

WERE THE YOUNG SCIENTISTS AND POLITICIANS ODD BEDFELLOWS AT THE TIME? DID YOU FEEL-- WAS IT A NEW THING FOR A LOT OF THE PHYSICISTS TO START BECOMING POLITICALLY ACTIVE?

It was a complete novelty for most of us. And we had to learn how to do it. We brought a certain ingenuousness and I think sincerity which was apparently not very common in Washington, but we didn't really know the ins and outs, and we didn't know that we were being manipulated now and again, and we didn't know how to appeal best to the, to the Congress. And we had a lot of things we didn't know. But we did know some things, which we believed in, and we said them, and that was of some value, though it was not of permanent-- it was not to prove a permanent success.

BUT YOU WERE SUCCESSFUL IN THAT THE MAY-JOHNSON BILL WAS NOT-

The first battle we fought we won brilliantly. And that was the last thing we ever won.

CAN I ASK YOU TO SAY THAT AGAIN IN A LITTLE MORE DETAIL, INCLUDING THE WORD MA-

The first battle we ever fought was against the military bill for controlling atomic energy in the post-war world, the so-called May-Johnson Bill. We won that battle I think very handily, and it gave us a great feeling of confidence. It was, however, to be our last real victory. We never won anything important again.

OK, WHAT WAS HAPPENING IN INTERNATIONAL CONTROL IN THAT TIME? THE ACHESON-LILIENTHAL REPORT THE GROUP WERE DEVELOPING. WHAT WAS YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON THAT? DID YOU FEEL THAT INTERNATIONAL CONTROL WAS GOING TO BE IMMINENT THROUGH THE UNITED NATIONS?

In '47, '48, I think I was rather optimistic about the chances for international control, that this novelty would really penetrate to the statesmen, would really make a difference. But I think pretty soon we began to see that the pressures for the cold war were still strong and that there was no relationship between the Russians and the Americans that would allow a real agreement, that the plan the Americans proposed to the United Nations was simply not going to succeed, because the two powers were on such different footing with respect to nuclear weapons, and that really there was not much hope for the thing to be settled in a-- by agreement in that simple-minded way while the disparity existed that we knew how to make weapons and had made and used them and the Russians had never done so. That was an impossible gap to cross. The only way to cross it would have been if they had been given weapons and their understanding, which the American people and government were not about to do. Or if they would come to their own, which of course they did, and we said they would do, in four years or so after the end of the war.

LET'S GO OVER THAT AGAIN. IN THE BEGINNING YOU SAID '47, '48, WAS THAT WHAT YOU MEANT TO SAY?

I think so, yes.

LET'S TALK ABOUT '45, '46—

-- '45, '46 was a time of great hope and optimism and nothing very definite was being proposed. As far as I can recall.

WELL, THAT WAS THE TIME OF THE BARUCH PLAN-

No, I don't think it was.

WELL, IT WAS THE END OF 1946-

Yeah, the very end of 1946, but then it was fought in 1947. It was prepared in 1946.

I THINK IT WAS ACTUALLY DEFEATED IN DECEMBER OF '46.

OK. OK. Well, it took one month maybe. For me 1946 was the year of preparing that thing, and 1947 was the year of seeing that it didn't work.

WELL, WITHOUT MENTIONING THE ACTUAL DATES, WHAT... AGAIN, MAYBE WE CAN COME AT IT FROM THE OTHER SIDE. THERE WAS SUCH DISPARITY BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND THE SOVIET UNION IN TERMS OF ATOMIC CAPABILITY THAT YOU FEEL THAT AT THAT TIME THERE WAS NO WAY OF REACHING AN AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE TWO COUNTRIES?

At first I hoped that this novelty would allow an agreement between the Americans and the Russians, which were the two powers that counted, perhaps through the mechanism of the United Nations. And, indeed, that was tried. But I'm afraid, looking back on it, and rather soon I came to see that while the powers were not very friendly, and while the United States had a big edge on the Russians in this particular area, which was so important for future warfare, it seemed unlikely that any agreement could be made. And when, sort of by the beginning of 1947, the Baruch Plan had been produced and clearly was not going to gain universal acceptance, one began to be more pessimistic about the future of international control.

I'M GOING TO ASK ESSENTIALLY THE SAME QUESTION AGAIN. WHY, IN YOUR ESTIMATION, WHY DID THE BARUCH PLAN NOT SUCCEED. WHY COULDN'T THERE BE AN EARLY AGREEMENT FOR SOME KIND OF INTERNATIONAL CONTROL OF ATOMIC ENERGY?

I think it is-- looking back on it is now very clear that there cannot be a great agreement between two contesting powers who are very different in respect to their abilities to use, make and use nuclear weapons. The power that can't do that is going to insist on being able to do it. And there's a good reason for that, because no matter what agreement they make, if they don't know how to, do it and the other guy does, you can never be sure the other guy will not break the agreements and use it. And that's the same situation we're in today. And I think therefore it was necessary to see some kind of symmetry develop before agreement could happen. That could happen in two ways. It could happen by agreed transfer so they come in on the same footing and nobody has any but both know how to do it. Or it can come, as it did come, by one guy building up and the other guy then having to do it on his own and a contesting structure arise, which is the race we have all been in since 1949 or so.

YOU DON'T THINK, SHORTLY AFTER THE WAR, THAT THERE'S ANY WAY THAT AN ARMS RACE COULD HAVE BEEN AVOIDED? WAS THERE A TIME WHEN A MOMENT WAS LOST THAT COULD HAVE HALTED-

I mean I don't-- I'm not able to write history that well. My feeling is, yes, there was a time when if the United States and the Allies had been able to say to the Russians, we take you in, you're going to be equal partners in everything, let's get rid of these things, but you'll know just what's going on, and you'll be at Los Alamos and all the rest, and we'll be over there might have been a moment when that could be done. But I think in view of all the barriers that existed, it was probably i-- over idealistic to imagine that. And I think that's the only way it could have been done. And that was not in the cards. ...When Bohr said to that-- that to the leaders, we now know, during the war, already in 1944, they very nearly had him put in jail.

[Morrison reading from book.] "We flew down to the inland sea, past Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya and a score of smaller cities. All of them looked the same from the air. The green and grey of the untouched Japanese city, with its gardens and its universal gray tiled roofs was in every town now, just a narrow fringe to a great rust-red circle, where the wreckage had incinerated under the fire bombs. Our B-29s by the hundreds had ruined the cities of Japan. We circled finally low over Hiroshima and stared in disbelief. There below was the flat, level ground of what had been a city, scorched red in the same telltale scar. But no hundreds of planes had visited this town during a long night. One bomber, and one bomb had, in the time it takes a rifle bullet to cross the city, turned a city of 300,000 into a burning pyre. That was the new thing."

I THINK I'M GOING TO ASK YOU TO DO IT AGAIN. I'M SORRY, BUT THERE WAS A LOT OF NOISE.

"We flew down to the inland sea, past Osaka, Kobe, Nagoya and a score of smaller cities. All of them looked the same from the air. The green and gray of the untouched Japanese city, with its gardens and its universal gray tiled roofs, was in every town now just a narrow fringe to a great rust-red circle, where the wreckage had incinerated under fire bombs. Our B-29s by the hundreds had ruined the cities of Japan. We circled finally low over Hiroshima and stared in disbelief. There below was the flat, level ground of what had been a city, scorched red in the same telltale scar. But no hundreds of planes had visited this town during a long night. One bomber and one bomb had, in the time it takes a rifle bullet to cross the city turned a city of 300,000 into a burning pyre. That was the new thing."

YOU TALKED A LITTLE BIT EARLIER ABOUT BOHR TALKING WITH FDR AND CHURCHILL. FROM A LATER PERSPECTIVE, NOT THINKING ABOUT IT AT THE TIME, CAN YOU TELL US A LITTLE MORE ABOUT WHAT HE DID, WHAT HE TALKED TO CHURCHILL ABOUT, WHAT THE REACTION WAS, AND HOW THAT BODED FOR...

If I understand Bohr's proposal, it was this. He said, there are two things that can be used. One is the community of scientists, which can communicate across all national boundaries, there is a sort of mutual trust, a kind of tradition of understanding; they can evaluate documents and meaning and so on. You can use this, he said, if you will, to extend the alliance in the post-war world between Britain, US, who are already tightly allied in exactly this way, by bringing in the Russians in the same fashion. That probably means you will have to let them have access to the activities of Los Alamos and the project and see what's going on. With an agreement that you'll use nuclear weapons only jointly and build them only jointly in the future, therefore not easily against each other. You don't lose much by this, he said, because if you don't do it, they will do it anyhow, on their own. And this is a chance, just a chance, to start the post-war world in a new way. And while I think he had made some progress in talking to lesser leaders within the administration, for example, Mr. Justice Frankforter, when he brought this to Churchill, he was utterly rebuffed. And indeed, Churchill wrote, perhaps somewhat jokingly, that this man ought to be perhaps put under arrest, because his ideas of publication and sharing were so out of line. Of course, this was a year before the bomb itself was actually tested, nearly a year.

SO THERE REALLY WAS SOME TALK IN THE HIGHEST CIRCLES ABOUT INFORMING THE RUSSIANS BEFORE THE BOMB BECAME A REALITY, TO AVOID-

Oh, clearly there was, and many more papers beside, which we now know, from Mr. Stimson, from the technical committees, from the policy committees everywhere, this-- the same idea was involved. But it wasn't to be in the course of wartime rivalry.

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF TODAY, WHAT-LET'S GO TIGHTER ON THIS ONE -WHAT, TO YOU PERSONALLY, WHAT IS THE LEGACY OF THE WAR AND THE BOMB?

What the war and the bomb left behind of course is a world now enormously more armed, enormously more professionally ready for warfare of an unprecedented scale and magnitude, which we never anticipated would happen in those days. In some sense that might be reassuring, because I never thought we could go 40 years and build up to the present situation and not have a real war and destroy ourselves. So we've done that much at least. We've been inhibited from using them. But that hasn't inhibited the statesmen from buying and building and preparing for it. And I think they must learn to do that too. I think they must learn more or less to end nuclear weapons, or nuclear weapons will end us. They all say that, but they never do it. The time is long past when we have to do something about it. I think a cut of a factor of ten is only the beginning of what we have to do. I believe if we don't do that, sooner or later destruction will come to the cities of the earth.

WHAT IS THE MOST SURPRISING THING TO YOU SINCE THE NUCLEAR AGE BEGAN? IS-

The enormous buildup of nuclear weapons is the thing that surprises me most. They're beyond all reason, beyond any conceivable military advantage. Everyone knows this, but this is the thing that surprises me most. People have done that knowing what they do know about the consequences of their use.

YOU'RE ALSO SURPRISED THAT NUCLEAR WEAPONS HAVE NOT BEEN USED IN WAR SINCE 1945?

Yes, I find that less surprising than the fact that they've built so many of them, but it is the two together make the surprise. It shows there is something in their inhibitory power, but not enough to draw back from the brink of danger.

I'M GOING TO ASK YOU TO JUST RESTATE, MENTIONING THOSE TWO THINGS AGAIN, THE SURPRISE THEY HAVEN'T BEEN USED AND THE SURPRISE THAT THEY'VE BEEN BUILT UP SO MUCH.

The greatest surprise is the degree to which they've been built up and improved and made in all kinds of varieties and numbers and speed and strength and so on. And the second surprise, not as great as that perhaps, is in spite of this build-up, the great powers have never used them, which is very hopeful. But these two things together represent something I would not have predicted 40 years ago. And I think it won't last another 40 years. We must find a solution by reduction or we will use them without intending to quite in one of the crises that international affairs always bring.