D  e  s  e  r  t     E  x  p  o  s  u  r  e     July 2005

Quest for Fire

As a Los Alamos archivist, WNMU's Theresa Strottman filmed more than 70 interviews with participants in the Manhattan Project, which gave birth to the atomic age 60 years ago this month.

By David A. Fryxell

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

—Bhagavad-Gita, quoted by
Robert Oppenheimer after the
first atomic blast at the Trinity test site
near Alamogordo, NM

Sixty years ago, the sliver of rock encased in glass atop a circle of wood, paperweight-style, on Theresa Strottman's office table was just a pile of sand. Then, at 5:29 on the morning of July 16, 1945, it was forever changed—as was the world, though the world didn't know it yet.

The testing of the first atomic bomb, on the flat scrub landscape aptly named Jornada del Muerto—the Journey of Death—some 60 miles from Alamogordo, at the northern end of what's now White Sands Missile Range, unleashed a blast equivalent to almost 20,000 tons of TNT. The explosion turned a 2,400-foot-diameter circle of desert sand into a glistening olive-green substance never before seen by human eyes. When the molten silica, with traces of olivine, feldspar and other minerals, solidified in the air, it fell to earth as trinitite—named for the Trinity site where the "Gadget," as the first bomb was modestly dubbed, was tested.

This particular sample of trinitite was donated to Western New Mexico University by Richard Van Vleet, a retired machinist now living in Tyrone who'd worked for the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb. Strottman, an assistant professor and technical services library manager at WNMU, likes to borrow the trinitite when she shows her documentary film, Remembering Los Alamos: World War II. The last time she screened her 1993 documentary on campus, in March, she recalls that she didn't get much interest from the student journalist who was covering the event—until the student learned that her little paperweight prop was radioactive.

Theresa Strottman, now with WNMU, was an archivist at Los Alamos when the Manhattan Project last marked a major anniversary.

In the documentary, Joe Lehman, who was with the Army Corps of Engineers detachment at Los Alamos, recalls the blast that created trinitite and launched the atomic age, 60 years ago this month: "There was nothing one could do but sit there in amazement at what had happened. Then we realized, hey, we're still here, we're still breathing—and we've just witnessed a new era."

The last time Los Alamos prepared to mark a major round of anniversaries—starting with the 50th anniversary of the 1943 founding of the lab—Theresa Strottman was the archivist for the Los Alamos Historical Society. Staff of the nonprofit society and its county-supported museum got together in a retreat to figure out how best to commemorate the occasion.

"Somebody suggested a traveling exhibition," Strottman says, intense eyes narrowing behind the ovals of her glasses. With her close-cropped brown hair and stylish matching blue earrings and necklace, Strottman looks more like an executive than a stereotypical librarian—as polished and precise as her office looks disheveled. The piles of papers, tapes and books suggest that some minor, non-nuclear explosion has recently occurred in her brightly windowed sanctum on the bottom floor of WNMU's Miller Library.

Her years working at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe had convinced her that traveling exhibits were "a pain in the neck." Strottman says, "Being an archivist, I liked developing archives, so I proposed doing oral-history interviews and then creating a video from the interviews."

Though she'd done audio interviews, Strottman had never made a video before, despite a zig-zagging career that had taken her from a childhood in New York City to the mesas of New Mexico. In-between, she earned a bachelor's degree in economics and a graduate degree in social anthropology, then worked on a master's and PhD candidacy in Latin American history. A rare earthquake—the first in 300 years—wiped out the area of Columbia she'd chosen for her thesis, so when her physicist husband got a job at Los Alamos, fate seemed to be putting Strottman on a new path. She worked at the Palace of the Governors, taught at the College of Santa Fe and served as librarian for the city of Espanola before becoming the Los Alamos museum archivist, a post she held for 10 years before coming to WNMU in 2000. ("I arrived with a suitcase and a briefcase because the Cerro Grande Fire eliminated my Los Alamos home three weeks earlier," she says.)

Her video brainstorm would eventually lead to more than 70 hours of archival interview footage and a 60-minute documentary that's still sold by the historical society. As the Manhattan Project turned 50 years old, sliding into the shadows between recent events and History, Strottman and her documentary crew filmed the scientists, soldiers and even the maids who could recall Los Alamos' earliest days. Although others—notably the Smithsonian—have recorded Los Alamos oral histories, Strottman's documentary came at a pivotal time. Even in the months between the wrapup of filming and the premiere, four of her interview subjects died. "I imagine the attrition has been much more since then," she says.

The documentary premiered in May 1993, at the start of Los Alamos' 50th-anniversary commemoration. Strottman seizes on that word, "commemoration." She says, "It wasn't a 'celebration.' That's an important distinction."

She recalls the segment in her film where Cyril Stanley Smith, one of the Manhattan Project's civilian scientists, describes a spontaneous party after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki led to the end of World War II. "That's when the bottles came out," Smith says. But the party "fizzled away" as the implications of the human toll sank in.

As the documentary project got underway, Strottman says, "I was gratified by the amount of interest that video generates"—much more than when she'd toted around a tape recorder. A committee of Manhattan Project veterans helped develop questions and lists of potential interviewees; others would eventually act as hosts for taping sessions, freeing Strottman to concentrate on asking questions. (She would wind up doing most of the interviewing, with an assist from Yvonne Delamater.) The New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities gave the project a grant. Strottman teamed up with Dohn Chapman, a gifted videographer, and started tracking down subjects to talk to.

That proved surprisingly easy, given the once top-secret nature of the Manhattan Project. A handful of people did turn her down, saying, "That's classified and why are you doing this, woman?" Strottman says, "The security provisions had been so strict, and people took that responsibility very seriously. Nearly 50 years later, they still considered themselves guardians of the project."

But the camaraderie of the Manhattan Project had persisted, too, enabling the filmmakers to tap a lively network of former Los Alamos residents. "They'd forged personal connections and friendships that were very intense," Strottman says. "They were always having reunions, not just the 50th." Whenever scientists returned to Los Alamos, for a visit or a conference, the "grapevine" clued her in and she and Chapman could catch them with his Hi-8 camera.

Pretty soon, she had so many potential subjects she had to start cutting off the list. "Unless they had something very special, we limited it to people who'd been there from near the beginning. If they'd arrived after 1943, we really had to look into it before doing an interview."

For important subjects who weren't passing through town, she and Chapman traveled to both coasts. In the Boston area they caught up with Anthony P. French, who'd been part of the Manhattan Project's British contingent. French recalled how famed physicist Richard Feynman had given him a large Indian drum that Feynman, in darker moments, used to pound while wandering the woods at night. And he told how physicist Claus Fuchs—later revealed as a Soviet agent—had given French his car, provided that the British scientist first dropped Fuchs off at the airport.

That East Coast trip also took them to see Cyril Stanley Smith, who was hospitalized with cancer. "We felt very awkward," Strottman says. "He was obviously happy to talk about something other than his problems. But we thought, given how he looked, that he probably did not want to be remembered in this way. So we left the lens cap on the camera, and recorded only the audio track."

At home in New Mexico, they interviewed not only scientists and engineers but also long-time locals and women like Lydia Martinez, who'd been a maid for the households of the Manhattan Project. Martinez remembered coming and going to work in Army trucks, and having hamburgers at the PX.

"We went out into the villages and pueblos to find people who'd worked as community laborers in various capacities," Strottman says. Not everything made it into the finished documentary—like her favorite story about a man who'd lived on the edge of the Santa Clara Indian reservation: "People would always knock on his window on their way to work at Los Alamos, because they knew the family had a clock. Eventually he turned the clock to face the window, so he wouldn't get pestered by people making sure they were getting to work on time."

The clock was ticking from the very inception of the Manhattan Project, in the darkest hours of World War II. "It seemed likely that Germany would be working on [the bomb] and would be ahead of us," Cyril Smith says near the opening of Remembering Los Alamos. "And it really was a race." A pacifist before the war, Smith signed on with the bomb effort nonetheless: "In 1943, the defeat of Hitler would justify almost anything."

The race to beat Hitler to the atomic bomb came to New Mexico when General Leslie R. Groves, who'd been assigned the project, sent Major John H. Dudley to find a suitably remote location. Los Alamos was not Dudley's first choice, but got the nod in part because J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific chief of the Manhattan Project, liked it and remembered the region from earlier visits. "My two great loves are physics and desert country. It's a pity they can't be combined," Oppenheimer once wrote to a friend. At Los Alamos, they were.

The site was already occupied, however, by the Los Alamos Ranch School—an elite, outdoorsy prep school for boys founded in 1917—and 23 mostly Hispanic homesteads. Strottman's documentary recalls the pain of families forced to leave: Annie Lujan remembers her parents raising pinto beans where later the labs would be built. Pete Gomez tells of being stopped by a newly arrived MP: "He didn't really know why he was there, but it was his job to be a sentry."

Meanwhile, scientists were being recruited. In the film, John Wiener tells of being offered the chance to help build an atomic bomb: "I was quite surprised, and in my perhaps youthful enthusiasm said to him, 'Why, I remember reading about that when I was 11 or 12 years old.' I was quite a devotee of science fiction at that time and was reading Amazing Stories."

When new hires arrived, the film relates, they were told only to report to 109 E. Palace Ave. in Santa Fe, where the pleasant but tight-lipped Dorothy McKibbin would dispatch them to Los Alamos. Joe Lehman told Strottman of his arrival by car in New Mexico's capital city, which he expected to be much larger than the Santa Fe of 1943: He drove through Santa Fe looking for the main part of town, only to find himself out in the desert again, on the other side of Santa Fe. Finding his way back to a gas station, he called McKibbin. "Oh yes," she said, "I see you"—from right across the plaza.

For most, it was their first visit to the Land of Enchantment. One scientist's wife, Marge Schreiber, recalls "the lovely, wonderful smell of pinon all over everything. . . a faint smoke, blue, hung all over Santa Fe."

The fledgling site at Los Alamos, though, was a bit of a shock. Labs and living quarters sprang up overnight. Bob Diven, one of the first on the scene, was sent because "trainloads of equipment would arrive and there would be nobody there to receive them." His job was "to see what had been forgotten, because it was all being done so quickly." Roy Merryman, part of the Special Engineering Detachment that would balloon from a few hundred to more than 1,800 military engineers, describes the labs as "just a madhouse of construction and destruction."

As Los Alamos grew, families came as well as soldiers (which included a detachment of the Women's Army Corps) and scientists. Lacking streetlights, residents navigated at night by flashlight. The khaki-colored houses were all so identical that one interviewee recalls her mother putting a geranium out front so the family would know which was theirs. After rhapsodizing about the landscape, one letter writer quoted in the documentary continues, "It would simply be intolerable without a liberal application of good old sense of humor. Think of the tenements of New York set down in the above background and you get the idea."

Strottman and her crew even tracked down a former Los Alamos school teacher, Jean Nereson, who talks of books "clear up to the ceiling. . . . Anything we really needed we could order for the kids. It might not get there right away, but we got it."

The documentary also captures memories of downtime—dances every Saturday night, followed by church services in the same recreation hall the next morning, requiring some quick changing of furniture. Plays were staged, classical music filled the mesa, and colloquia sent ideas wafting into the blue New Mexico sky. For many, mingling with the scientists gave the first glimpse of an unfamiliar, urbane lifestyle exemplified by "copies of Fortune magazine. . . and opera singers."

But Schreiber told the filmmakers "there wasn't the caste system there might be in other places, because we didn't know what the men did and the wives couldn't talk about what their husbands did."

What exactly were all those scientists creating at Los Alamos, anyway? The film collects some of the rumors that spread through the facility: A submarine with windshield wipers? A submarine tunnel to the Pacific Coast? "Most of us were so young we didn't really care," one WAC confesses.

Whatever it was, it was top-secret. Babs Weineke, another wife, remembers the FBI visiting periodically to quiz her about the neighbors. Miriam White Campbell, a WAC who was assigned to draw "Little Boy," the first bomb, told Strottman, "I learned very early not to know anything. Security-wise, your life was you did what you had to do. I knew far too much and I knew I knew too much, but I tried not to know anything."

And yet, Jack Aeby, a civilian scientist, remembers tweaking the security officials: "We just delighted in playing games with the military officials, exchanging badges or putting a dog's picture on your badge or this kind of thing."

Mary Lehman, a WAC, actually guessed the big secret. She'd caught a science program on the radio about someday splitting the atom (which Enrico Fermi had first done in Chicago in December 1942). Driving with some of the top scientists, including Fermi and Edward Teller, "I turned around and asked, 'Have they split the atom yet?' There was complete silence in that car. . . and I had an idea that I'd hit the button. . . . They weren't very good actors."

Francis Dunne, a civilian technician, told Strottman about learning the importance of what was going on at Los Alamos. A senior scientist explained, "You see, what we're doing, it's never been done before. When we drop that bomb, the war is over." To which Dunne replied, "Well, let me out of here and let me get back to work, because I wanted to work for the war."

But building the bomb that would end the war proved to be among the greatest scientific and engineering challenges of the century. The original scheme called for what Harold M. Agnew, another scientist Strottman interviewed, describes as a gun-like device: "You put two pieces of fissile material in a gun barrel and shove them together. It seemed very straightforward."

That was in fact the basic design of "Little Boy," the "uranium gun" bomb that would devastate Hiroshima. But to use plutonium in such a device demanded a muzzle velocity of 3,000 feet per second, which began to seem unattainable. So attention turned instead to an implosion design that would employ "lenses" to focus explosive energy inward until the plutonium underwent a sustained nuclear reaction. The precision required for such a plan led to a human explosion of Los Alamos' workforce, with the British scientists and more than a thousand additional special engineers arriving to assist.

"There was a feeling of energy in Los Alamos," Anthony P. French, the British scientist, remembers in the documentary. "There were certainly more prestigious physicists collected there than I would ever have seen if I'd stayed at Cambridge. On an intellectual plane, nothing could compare. . . . Physically, it was simple by American standards, but for someone coming from Britain and years of limited resources, almost everything seemed exciting and satisfying."

Fissile material, however, was so scarce, says Strottman, that when one experiment failed it would swiftly be cannibalized to supply another. The technical challenges of crafting perfect lenses eventually led one scientist to call upon his youth as a soda jerk, applying a technique similar to a stick blender used for making malteds.

"We were able to capture a lot of that kind of detail," she says. Like the camera operator who told her about taking photos of explosions: "He had the camera and its cover. He would take a picture in a mirror, with the photographer's back to the explosion, and put the cover over his head and shoulders to protect himself."

When the time came to test the prototype of the plutonium bomb and its finely crafted lenses, the Manhattan Project looked several hundred miles southeast of Los Alamos, to what was then the Alamogordo Bombing Range. Even 60 years later, the Trinity site there remains shrouded in secrecy: Normally, only two public tours are held annually, in April and October. This year, for the test anniversary, a special tour will be held on July 16, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. (See box for details.)

Strottman and her crew had to get special permission to take their filming, and some of their interview subjects, to the Trinity site. "They arranged for us to go to places that are usually not available to the public," she says. "It was a very special day."

On camera, former MP Marvin Davis talks about being sent to set up the Trinity site, two months before the first scientists came: "We posted the signs and closed the roads." Part of the McDonald ranch, where cattle had been branded and inoculated, became a base camp. Harry Snowden, with the Special Engineers, remembers Trinity as "warm beer, scorpions, sand. It was very uncomfortable."

Strottman uses a poster-board map of the area when she gives talks at screenings. "The distances are huge," she emphasizes, pointing at the poster. "Base camp in the Oscura Mountains was 10 miles from Ground Zero. Compania Hill was 20 miles north."

It's not only the distances around the Trinity site that people don't understand—it's also the distance of Ground Zero from Los Alamos. When Strottman worked in Los Alamos, she says, people would come into the museum shop and see the pond outside the window, where the Ranch School boys had once ice skated. Even after going through all the museum exhibits, visitors would point at the pond and ask, "Is that where the blast was?"

When the scientists began trekking from their Los Alamos labs to the Stallion Gate that guarded the Trinity site, they had to figure out how to measure something that had never happened on earth before. To calibrate the instruments at Ground Zero, on May 7, 1945, they stacked 108 tons of TNT on a wooden platform 800 yards away, along with a tiny amount of radioactive material, and detonated the whole thing. It was the largest explosion ever measured by instruments—a record that lasted just over two months.

Besides the ordinary apprehension attending any scientific experiment—will it work?—the crew who assembled at Trinity 60 years ago had some extraordinary concerns. As Arno P. Roensch of the Special Engineers tells Strottman in the documentary, they feared that the nuclear chain reaction, once started, might be impossible to stop. Fermi wondered out loud to Gen. Groves whether the resulting fireball might ignite the earth's atmosphere.

Against the advice of the Army meteorologist, Groves scheduled the test for July 16. Thunderstorms during the night threatened the operation. In Remembering Los Alamos, civilian scientist Dick Watts remembers the puddles at the site that morning: "I vividly recall Oppenheimer and Gen. Groves marching back and forth, dodging those puddles, trying to decide whether they ought to shoot that thing off or not."

When the decision was made to go ahead and detonate the Gadget, Joe Lehman recalls, "Everyone was reminded when H-hour arrived we should lie on the ground with our feet toward the blast site, with our arms covering our eyes, and no one was to look until a few seconds after the blast, because they expected the flash to be so bright that many people would be blinded, at least temporarily. Everyone followed instructions to a T.

"In these minutes it was interesting to me to listen to some of the conversations that were going on, and these conversations weren't necessarily with each other. . . . There were a lot of people praying really seriously, because no one really knew whether this chain reaction could be stopped or whether it would be stopped, and we could all be facing our last minute on this earth."

Berlyn Brixner, a civilian photographer at the Trinity site, was one of the few people allowed to watch, through heavy welding glasses. "When the explosion went off that welding glass just seemed to glow white, intense white like the sun," he relates. "The Oscuro Mountains were off to the left and they were just lit up like daylight. My camera was just sitting there. Soon the ball of fire was starting to rise and I thought I'd better get busy."

"We began to see the sun reflecting off the dust particles," Lehman remembers, "and the colors were fantastic."

Everyone that Strottman talked to recalled the sight of the Trinity blast first of all, not the sound. One scientist she later asked about the sound of the blast insisted, "There was no sound." Then he paused and added, "If there was, I don't remember it."

Since sound travels much more slowly than light, the observers would have heard the blast 30, 60, even 90 seconds after seeing it, depending on their location. On the movie film of the blast, however, there was no sound track to record the actual explosion. But Strottman, who's also written a scholarly paper about this silent "icon of the Cold War," asks, "Have you ever seen footage of the Trinity site without sound?" A fake sound track—initially a ridiculously tiny popping sound—was added, she says, as soon as the footage was released in 19456.

Not everyone was awed by the dawn of the atomic age. In the documentary, Felix A. DePaula of the Army Corps of Engineers confesses, "This still didn't make a big impression on me, because the only thing I'd seen in the way of explosions was firecrackers. . . . But this older man, we used to call him Pop Borden. . . had worked with dynamite in the days before he got into the service. Three, maybe four days after the detonation, he still couldn't get over the detonation. He couldn't get over it. He'd go around and say, 'That's the most terrible thing I've seen in my life.'"

So terrible was the power the Los Alamos team had unleashed that some immediately began to wonder whether it should be used, even if it could end the war. Aeby recalls a petition that was circulated at Los Alamos against the bomb. He hoped for some sort of demonstration blast, to let Japan know what it was up against, without actually bombing any target.

But the bomb was dropped. The film quotes a letter from Ed Doty written to his parents on Aug. 7, 1945, the day after the Enola Gay dropped "Little Boy" on Hiroshima: "Well, now you know why I was sent to this oasis in the desert."

When "Fat Man" followed at Nagasaki, Donald Baker of the Special Engineers recalls thinking it seemed like "overkill. They should have waited a little while longer. I had feelings of remorse in a way. Now that I'm this old and I've seen what's happened in the last 50-60 years, I realize that they made atomic wars unwinnable."

Some at Los Alamos criticized Strottman, when the documentary premiered, for including doubts about the use of the results of the Manhattan Project. "I was part of a small Amnesty International group, and these people were firm hawks," she says.

For most of the scientists at Los Alamos, however, the lasting memories were not of the atomic bomb, but of a great scientific challenge. "Most people don't appreciate the thrill of doing science," Strottman says. "A lot of people were there because it was the best science in the world for what they do. The thrill of discovery, the successful execution of an experiment, calculating and verifying—they were in it for that. It permeates them so completely. If that's your dream, this was where you could live it."

Over and over, the Manhattan Project scientists told her, "It was the best work experience I ever had in my life. We all knew what we were trying to do and everyone was dedicated to it. I've never experienced anything like it since."

As the Manhattan Project's culmination approaches its 60th anniversary, will that experience begin to fade into the past—except for archival records such as Strottman's hours of interviews? "Los Alamos is so inextricably linked to the legacy of World War II," she says, "as image and symbol it can't be erased. And I don't know if it would be a good thing if it were.

"I don't think anyone should forget. We shouldn't be trying to deny it. We should recognize the context of the war and the war effort, and continue seeking for the truth rather than an edited version of history."

---

Theresa A. Strottman's documentary, Remembering Los Alamos: World War II, can be ordered for $21.95 plus $8 shipping from

Los Alamos Historical Society
PO Box 43
Los Alamos, NM 87544

662-2660, publications@losalamos.com,
losalamos.com/historicalsociety/publications.asp

David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.

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