Oral Histories

Nick Salazar is a longtime Los Alamos National Laboratory employee and New Mexico State Representative. He has remained close to Los Alamos his entire career, from spending his high school summers as a mess hall attendant during the Manhattan Project to becoming a member of the laboratory’s Board of Governors. In this interview, he discusses his numerous experiences with the laboratory, including his 42-year career as a research scientist and his goal of improving relations between the laboratory and northern New Mexico’s communities. He also recalls traveling to the Savannah River Site as part of Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines’s famous experiment that discovered the neutrino.

Irénée du Pont, Jr. is a member of the storied du Pont family and the son of the President (1919 to 1925) of the E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. The DuPont Company played a crucial role in the Manhattan Project. In this interview, Irénée discusses the history of the DuPont Company, from its early work making gunpowder to the invention of nylon. He describes how the company became one of the key civilian contractors for the Manhattan Project and how DuPont evolved after the war’s end.

Dewitt “Bill” Bailey, originally from New Albany, Mississippi, was working at an Alabama shipyard when he heard of the job opportunities in Hanford. At Hanford he worked as a special material handler for DuPont, and experienced the regime of intense compartmentalization and secrecy. In this interview, Bailey discusses his life and work at Hanford, as well as the role played by the DuPont Company.

Watson C. Warriner, Sr., a trained chemical engineer, worked for DuPont on the Manhattan Project. During the war he worked on building ordnance plants and acid plants, and helped design and build the chemical separation plants at Hanford (also known as the 221 T-plant or “Queen Marys”). He discusses the trains and cask car system used at Hanford and life in the dormitories on the secret site. He recalls going to New York City with his wife to celebrate V-J Day with thousands of other people crowded into the streets.