Washington

Richard Rhodes: Would you say your name and then spell it to start with? Jane Yantis: It’s Jane Yantis, J-A-N-E, Y-A-N-T-I-S. Rhodes: Good, thank you. Where were you born and when, if you want to tell me? Yantis: I was born in Center, Texas. Rhodes: When? Yantis: In 1920. Rhodes: Good. Yantis: March the 23rd, 1920. […]

[We would like to thank Robert S. Norris, author of the definitive biography of General Leslie R. Groves, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project’s Indispensable Man, for taking the time to read over these transcripts for misspellings and other errors.] Stephane Groueff: So you were saying that they were very close […]

Stephane Groueff: We could start now with your biography and where you were born. I see that you were born in Cleveland. General Kenneth Nichols: Well, I was born in a little suburb of Cleveland called West Park, Ohio [on November 13, 1907]. Groueff: West Park, Ohio. Nichols: Later became a part of Cleveland. Groueff: […]

[We would like to thank Robert S. Norris, author of the definitive biography of General Leslie R. Groves, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project’s Indispensable Man, for taking the time to read over these transcripts for misspellings and other errors.] Stephane Groueff: Hello. We are recording 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, […]

I was in the Army drafted, classified for counter-intelligence work for reasons I will never understand.  I got into that, investigative work as an enlisted man and after about a year I was commissioned also in counter-intelligence work.  I continued there in the 6th service command in Chicago in that kind of work.  One day […]

I was in the SED, the Special Engineer Detachment and I worked in what was then called D-Building and with my college James Gergen I purified all the plutonium that went in the Nagasaki bomb.  That’s what I did. The purification that we used was purely in the liquid phase. We worked with solutions of […]

I was a member of two Special Engineer Detachments: I worked at the University of Chicago at the Metallurgical Laboratory and I also worked in Oak Ridge Plant, conceived and designed by Philip Abelson, who is probably here today. I lived in the barracks area when I was at Oak Ridge and I lived in […]

  Well I was very young at the time. I went down there in 1943, down to Oak Ridge, TN.   They were interviewing at Princeton where I was going to school. They guys said that they had a very important war project going on down there. And I said, “Oh what’s it all about?”  […]

I was in the Special Engineer Detachment and I was four-stripe sergeant when I got out of the army in 1946. I worked in a group that was doing primarily coatings for the implosion bomb. I was in the army and I was recruited to be in the Special Engineer Detachment. Of course I was […]

Robert Furman: Robert Furman. F-U-R-M-A-N. I was an assistant to General Groves in the Manhattan District, in his Twenty-First Street offices here in Northwest. And I joined him in late autumn of ‘43 and left him right after the war—right after the end of the war. Cindy Kelly: Can we—just to—no one’s going to hear […]