April 30, 2021 Newsletter
The 23rd National Award of Nuclear Science & History was presented at the virtual Einstein Gala on March 20, 2021. I was honored to the be this year’s recipient. If you missed the Gala, here is a link to the show. Jim Walther, director of the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History, was the emcee. Richard Rhodes, a long-time friend and charter member of the AHF board, introduced me.
In accepting the award, I emphasized that my success was possible because of the collaboration of our Manhattan Project community. Among the most dedicated and effective proponents for preserving the Manhattan Project were the Los Alamos Historical Society, B Reactor Museum Association, and Oak Ridge Heritage & Preservation Association.
The leadership and support of the Manhattan Project communities and Congressional delegations were also essential. Manhattan Project veterans across the country offered oral histories, documents and memorabilia. Finally, the National Parks and Conservation Association and National Trust for Historic Preservation were invaluable partners working with Congress.
My involvement began when I joined the Department of Energy in 1993. I was surprised to learn that some fifty remaining Manhattan Project buildings at Los Alamos were slated to be demolished. Preserving some Manhattan Project properties became my crusade within DOE.
In 2000, the newly created Save America’s Treasures program awarded $1.3 million to restore Manhattan Project properties and I left my 25-year Federal career to raise the matching funds.
Raising funds for preserving the Manhattan Project was not easy. Corporations who played major roles in the Manhattan Project were loath to be associated with the atomic bomb.
Wearing the same dress that I wore for the Einstein Gala (see photo above), in 2002 I went to a black-tie event to commemorate DuPont’s 200th anniversary. There I made a beeline for the President and told him he was hiding DuPont’s light under a bushel. A month later, DuPont contributed $25,000 and AHF forged a valuable relationship with a DuPont family foundation.
Another breakthrough came after catching a Senate appropriations clerk working late on the DOE’s budget. After giving him a brief pitch, he asked, “How much do you need?”
Surprised, I tried to sound authoritative, “$2.5 million.”
“Where shall we take it?”
Having spent six years at DOE, I suggested “Field Management.” With his pencil, he marked up the spreadsheet.
When a line item for $250,000 appeared in the Congressional budget six months later, DOE called the Congressional staff for an explanation. “Oh, those funds are for Cindy Kelly.”
With these funds, the newly created Atomic Heritage Foundation (AHF) was tasked with preparing a report to Congress on whether and how to preserve the Manhattan Project properties owned by DOE. AHF held meetings with DOE and National Park Service officials, local governments and the public in Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, and Hanford. The meetings were the first time many considered preserving the Manhattan Project.
The report submitted to Congress in August 2003 recommended that the National Park Service (NPS) study the feasibility of creating a national historical park. In 2004, Congress passed legislation for such a study which took NPS eight years to complete. Following NPS’s recommendations, in 2014 Congress passed legislation to establish a Manhattan Project National Historical Park at three sites.
As I emphasized in my remarks, it was a great collaborative effort. I am deeply grateful to the Manhattan Project communities, veterans, historians and all those who contributed. The past 25 years working on the Manhattan Project has been a most rewarding journey.
A Tribute to “Atomic John”
This tribute is in honor of John Coster-Mullen (1946-2012) who died on April 24 after struggling for over a year with ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Beloved by many, John became nationally famous as “Atomic John” after the New Yorker profiled him in 2008 as “a truck driver who uncovered secrets about the first nuclear bombs.” The illustration by John Ritter (above) is from the New Yorker article.
Richard Rhodes who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb, commented that John Coster-Mullen “came out of left field and really did something that I think is pretty dazzling. He worked out a way to see through the ballistic casing of the weapons to see what’s inside.”
In AHF’s oral history (2017), John remembers that in seventh grade he was amazed to see photographs of Little Boy and Fat Man in an encyclopedia. “I was just dumbstruck. It was the biggest secret but there they were.” For 30 years, John worked as an industrial photographer documenting machinery and technology. This experience gave him insight into how to reverse engineer how atomic weapons worked.
When John decided to become a truck driver, his passion for figuring out Little Boy and Fat Man became consuming. John thought he could make little models of the bombs for the fiftieth anniversary of the bomb in 1993. He and his son spent days at the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson studying, measuring and photographing the Little Boy and Fat Man bombs on display.
Attending reunions of the 509th Composite Group and Manhattan Project veterans, John made valuable contacts. Driving only at night, he had time to ponder the inner configurations of the bombs for hours. At truck stops and Walmart parking lots, he met with veterans who gave him feedback on his drawings and ideas.
For 25 years, John meticulously researched how the first two atomic bombs were constructed. Former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Harold Agnew was stunned to see his diagrams when they met on Tinian in 2005. “Where did you get this drawing? How did you know where all this stuff was?”
As John said in his interview, “Nobody’s ever leaked anything to me. I found out that this stuff was literally all hiding in plain sight.”
As Alex Wellerstein wrote in a recent Restricted Data” blog, John’s discovery of the internal workings of Little Boy and Fat Man “changed our understanding of these weapons dramatically…Only in America could you have the phenomenon of a truck driver whose hobby was to discover nuclear secrets.”
Dieter Gruen Nominated for the Presidential Medal of Freedom
Manhattan Project veteran Dr. Dieter Martin Gruen (above, photo courtesy of the Argonne National Laboratory) has been nominated for the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The nomination is for “his dedication to science, contributions to shaping the United States of America as a leader and world power in technology, innovation, and national defense, and for his continued work at the age of 98 developing alternative energy technology.”
Representative Sean Casten of Illinois and five other Congressional colleagues nominated Dr. Gruen on April 12, 2021.
As he described in AHF’s oral histories, Gruen fled Nazi Germany in 1936 as a teenager. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1944, he worked on the purification of the enriched uranium at Oak Ridge, TN. After the war, he earned his PhD at the University of Chicago and had a distinguished career at the Argonne National Laboratory. A man of prodigious energy, he has over 60 U.S. patents for his inventions in alternative energy and other fields.
At 98, Dr. Gruen is working in collaboration with the University of Illinois in Chicago to make solar energy more cost-effective and efficient. His innovation is graphene-based Dirac solar cell technology.
As his nominees observed, “Dr. Gruen has and remains the embodiment of a dedicated American and pure scientist.”
Doe’s Chief Historian to Stay in Washington DC
The Department of Energy reversed a Trump administration decision and will allow the agency’s chief historian Eric Boyle to stay in Washington, DC instead of being transferred to Morgantown, West Virginia. Boyle has a PhD in the history of science, technology and medicine from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and has served as DOE’s chief historian for the past five years. His office will remain in the James Forrestal Building in Washington, DC (above photo by Francis Chung/E&E News, April 23,2021).
Several organizations including the Atomic Heritage Foundation appealed to Secretary Jennifer Granholm to reverse his transfer to West Virginia. (Energywire, April 21). As DOE’s former historians argued, moving the chief historian to West Virginia would “make it more difficult, if not impossible, for the DOE historian to serve as the historian for the entire department.”
The decision was a victory for preserving the DOE historian’s important role as institutional memory and guardian of DOE’s important records, artifacts and properties. The historian is also responsible for making the history available to the public, researchers, and policymakers. Boyle remains “committed to doing whatever I can to support and ensure the survival of the history program at DOE.”
New and Noteworthy Reading
Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States by Alex Wellerstein
A decade in the making, Alex Wellerstein’s first book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States (University of Chicago Press, 2021), is now available. The book synthesizes the origins and trends of nuclear secrecy from the 1930s through World War II and the Cold War to the present.
As Eric Schlosser, author of Command and Control, wrote: “Wellerstein is one of the great nuclear historians of our time. This book is fascinating, essential reading not only for what it tells us about the origins and workings of America’s national security state but also for what it reveals about the nuclear dilemma we still face today: freedom or the illusion of safety.”
Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshimato the Cuban Missile Crisis by Martin J. Sherwin
Martin J. Sherwin, the Pulitzer-Prize winning co-author with Kai Bird of American Prometheus, has a new book on the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sherwin’s riveting, sometimes hour-by-hour account, emphasizes the role of luck and adequate time to avoid a nuclear war. In addition, the book explores the origins, scope, and consequences of the nuclear weapons in the post-World War II world.
For a preview, listen to Sherwin discussing his book or read the New York Times review.
The Weaponeer: The Life & Career of Frederick L. Ashworth by Frederick L. Ashworth, Jr.
Frederick L. Ashworth (see photo below) played a major role in making the Nagasaki bombing mission a success despite numerous things that went wrong. The book explains why they could only make one attempt to visually sight their target at Nagasaki and still have enough fuel to reach an airfield in Okinawa.
Based on 22 hours of oral histories and the Admiral’s own memoirs, it traces the illustrious career of Ashworth who rose from Naval Academy Midshipman at 17 to Commander of the US Sixth Fleet.