Oral Histories

Nancy Bartlit is the former president of the Los Alamos Historical Society and the author of “Silent Voices of World War II: When Sons of the Land of Enchantment Met Sons of the Land of the Rising Sun.” In this interview, she describes the Historical Society’s efforts to preserve properties at Los Alamos. She also explains her support for the Manhattan Project National Historical Park and her vision for the park.

Clay Kemper Perkins is a physicist, philanthropist, and collector of Manhattan Project artifacts and replicas. In this interview, he discusses his vast collection of weapons and how he became interested in nuclear weapons and Manhattan Project history. He describes some of the stand-out pieces in his collection, including the safety plug used in the Little Boy atomic bomb on the Hiroshima mission and a full-scale replica of Little Boy. He also explains the role of high-speed cameras in the Trinity Test and the “pin domes” that Manhattan Project scientists experimented with for the implosion bomb. Perkins also discusses his philanthropic contributions to the Los Alamos Historical Society, including his purchase and gift of the Hans Bethe House.

David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is author of the award winning book “Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics,” and more recently published “How Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival.” His discussion with Atomic Heritage Foundation President, Cindy Kelly, focuses on the birth of nuclear physics and the nuclear bomb, but ranges across scientific developments in the early-to-mid 20th Century. Kelly and Kaiser also deliberate on the facets of innovation, and connect the scientific legacy of the Manhattan Project to current scientific research.