On Friday, October 17, eleven Manhattan Project veterans stepped up to the stage in the CUNY Graduate Center auditorium and faced an audience of over two hundred. As they prepared to see the Saturday matinee performance of Doctor Atomic at the Met, the vets took the opportunity to reflect on their own experiences of building the bomb. Some had not seen each other for years. There were handshakes and back pats aplenty.

Dressed in slacks and sensible shoes, the vets wore a profusion of bow ties and had a proclivity for talk. “We’re going to have to keep this short, as we have such a wealth of knowledge up here,” moderator Brian Schwartz warned. It was a warning that went largely unheeded. Most veterans had to have the microphones wrenched from their hands. They each had a story to tell.

Veteran Herald Agnew, who assisted Enrico Fermi with his graphite pile experiment at Columbia University and later became the Director of Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1970 to 1979, stood before a projected photograph of his younger self seen holding a scratched out bomb core.

“We took turns getting our picture taken with it,” Agnew recalled. “Soon the US government said, well, you can keep the photo if you scratch out the bomb. It was thought that a photo of the core could give away some secrets,” Agnew chuckled. The audience gazed up at the grainy photo of a young man positioned next to a scratched out blur that looked more like a block of ice or a row of silver fish.

“We dropped leaflets all over Japan,” Agnew continued, showing a slide of one of the Japanese language fliers air force crews had sprinkled days before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts. “We wanted to tell them that we had something you shouldn’t have to put up with.”

Agnew flashed to his next slide, a shot of a dollar bill covered with scrawls and loops. “This dollar bill was signed by the whole team,” Agnew explained. “I can’t remember why we did this exactly, maybe for good luck. I guess I should put it on eBay.”

Audience members laughed and the comment elicited a few smiles from the vets on stage. Both the weight and the necessity of what they had created hung heavily in the auditorium air. Soon the microphone was passed down the line, allowing each a turn to speak. Some got carried away in the nuance of the physics principles that had been their world. Others commented on character, noting that Kitty Oppenheimer was “always very nice” or that J Robert Oppenheimer “smoked an awful lot.” Veteran Benjamin Bederson brought the conversation back to the Met’s staging of Doctor Atomic, stating, “This is a truly marvelous opera. You have to let it all sink in.”

Robert Brown recalled the fun he had at Los Alamos as a few shots of square dancing physicists filled the screen behind him. “These social occasions were very special to all of us,” Brown said.

Jim and Elsie Tuck dancing at a Los Alamos square dance, courtesy of Robert Brown.

Veteran Hans Courant was among the last to speak. He held aloft his old Special Engineering Detachment uniform, a coat studded with patches and decals.

“This one was given to us after the successful detonation of the bomb,” Courant explained. The decal featured a tipsy combination of thunder bolts, question marks and yellow nuclear insignia. A patch below that indicated Courant was a member of the T-3 or technical rank.

“I can still button it up,” Courant said with a wink. “When it’s hanging in the closet.”

The afternoon symposia drew to a close and the veterans stepped off the stage to linger and mingle with audience members. Outside the auditorium, Allison Steinberg, 26, sat manning a table full of fliers.

“It’s fascinating to hear the first person accounts of the people who created this,” Steinberg said. “These guys are in their 90s. For some of them, this could be the last chance people get to hear them speak in person.” Steinberg handed a copy of the flier A Guide to Manhattan Project Sites in Manhattan to a departing guest.

“We’re at a weird intersection now with our country at war. In the presidential debates, they’re talking about nuclear energy as well as nuclear weapons,” Steinberg shook her head and arranged some more fliers.

“The main point is, it’s not so much historic as it is current.”

This entry was posted by Caroline Cooper on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 10:33 am and is filed under Doctor Atomic Blog, 2008-09 Season. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.