Cold War Nuclear Tests

[At top is the edited version of the interview published by S. L. Sanger in Working on the Bomb: An Oral History of WWII Hanford, Portland State University, 1995. For the full transcript that matches the audio of the interview, please scroll down.] Book Version: While I was in Oak Ridge, they chose the so-called bismuth […]

Richard Shepard: I’m Richard Shepard, S-H-E-P-A-R-D. Cindy Kelly: Okay. And now why don’t you tell us a little bit about how you came to the Manhattan—come into the Manhattan Project, and how that happened. Shepard: I graduated from high school about three or four weeks after I was seventeen in 1943. I had been an […]

Jay Wechsler: Well, my mother was visiting her folks in New York when she decided that it was time, and I was the first child, and I guess she was a little surprised. So I was born in New York even though we didn’t live there. And as soon as we were able we were […]

George Cowan: It’s weighted so heavily in favor—not in favor of—but the emphasis on number one Los Alamos, and then Oak Ridge, and then Hanford, as the three secret cities or something. But the fact is the Met Lab at Chicago was enormously important. The Stagg Field reactor was historic in ’42, and its sort of […]