Security & Secrecy

Kai Bird: This is Kai Bird off camera, interviewing Charles Oppenheimer and Dorothy Vanderford. Just for the record, I will ask you to state your names and your date of birth and where you were born. Dorothy Vanderford: My name is Dorothy Vanderford. I was born as Dorothy Oppenheimer August 18th, 1973. I was born […]

Joseph Katz: Now it was recognized that plutonium would have a chemistry that would be quite similar to that of uranium. And developing procedures for the separation of plutonium from irradiated uranium. The assumption that was most commonly made was that the chemistry of plutonium would be similar, if not identical to that of uranium […]

Stephane Groueff:  You personally you were in what department or building? You were directly working with Doctor [Arthur H.] Compton? Norman Hilberry: He called Dick Doan back in first. Dick had been one of his students. Well Mrs. H and Dick Doan had been, and Tom Johnson who is now with Raytheon, had been students […]

Raymond Gallagher: My name is Ray Gallagher. I am from Chicago, Illinois. The purpose in making this tape is because of an event that took a part of my life, and also of the lives of a group of men of which I was associated in 1945, during World War II. I was assigned to a […]

Stephane Groueff: One thing I don’t understand, and it’s a very ignorant question, but what was actually the difference between [Enrico] Fermi’s experiment in ’34 and [Otto] Hahn’s? Because, why do we say that Hahn was the first one, while Fermi also bombarded uranium? Lew Kowarski: I don’t it’s true to say that Hahn was […]

Alfred Nier: By the summer of 1943, the question came up, what I should do next? And I had a chance to – [J. Robert] Oppenheimer had gotten a hold of me and suggested I might come out to Los Alamos. Stephane Groueff: And you knew him? Nier: I knew him, yes. I had met […]

Announcer: You are listening to Extension 720. Here once again is your host, Milt Rosenberg. Milton Rosenberg: As we are tonight talking about the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions, whose 43rd anniversary comes this weekend, we are talking with Robert Messer, Professor of History at the University of Illinois Chicago and with two participants in those […]

Announcer: Here is your host and moderator, Milton Rosenberg. Milton Rosenberg: Our guests tonight all know a great deal about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but from different vantage points, two of them from the vantage point of being up in the air and helping to drop the bombs. They are Fred Olivi, who […]

Ross Simpson: All right, here’s the promo for Part One of the Nuclear War Series. I’m Ross Simpson on a bus, heading into Cheyenne Mountain, outside of Colorado Springs, Colorado. This is the home of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command. This is also where my five part series on the nightmare of nuclear […]

Paul Tibbets, Jr. (1915 – 2007) was a brigadier general in the United States Air Force who piloted the Enola Gay, the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb in the history of warfare.