National Museum of Nuclear Science & HistoryRichard Rhodes: So what I thought we might do since you just came back from – was this work related to the Russian collaboration?
Siegfried Hecker: Yes.
Rhodes: Then maybe we should debrief you about that first before we go back and do the earlier part of the story. Does that make sense to you?
Hecker: Well, I do not know how you do these things. I am completely in your hands. Whatever you think makes sense.
Mary Rockwell: My name is Mary Rockwell. Spell it? M-a-r-y R-o-c-k-w-e-l-l.
Cindy Kelly: Very good. What was your maiden name?
Rockwell: Compton.
Kelly: And how is that spelled?
Rockwell: C-o-m-p-t-o-n.
Kelly: Okay. Is there a funny story attached with that?
Harold Hoover: My name is Harold E. Hoover, that’s H-O-O-V-E-R, commonly known as Hal, H-A-L.
Cindy Kelly: Why don’t you start by telling me how you got into the SED [Special Engineer Detachment]? How you happened to get into the SED, and then what you found when you got to Oak Ridge?
Kai Bird: Let us begin at the beginning and I think the viewers of this will want to know first about your own background. What year were you born?
Bob Carter: I was born in 1920 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Bird: On what day?
Carter: February 3, 1920.
Bird: 1920.
Carter: Yes.
Bird: Okay, 1920, what was sort of before modern physics, quantum physics was invented as such.
Jacob Beser: The story which we could tell. And one point that Dr. Wittman, though, which I wish you would please keep in mind—and this is true not only in this situation, but any historical event should be evaluated in the context in which it took place, the context and the times in which it took place. Hopefully we proceed from there and progress. Forty years later, we all had 20/20 hindsight and we also have had access to archives and information that we did not have forty years ago.
Interviewer: At two forty-five in the morning of August 6, 1945, the B-29 Enola Gay took off from North field on Tinian. Aboard the plane were thirteen men a thing called “the Gimmick.” Some fourteen hundred miles and six hours later, the Enola Gay reached her appointment with history. The time was fifteen minutes and seventeen seconds past 8:00 AM, just seventeen seconds behind schedule. The place: Hiroshima. The Gimmick, also known as Little Boy, was a uranium atomic bomb with the explosive power of twenty thousand tons of TNT.
Announcer: You are listening to Extension 720. Here once again is your host, Milt Rosenberg.
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 was the co-pilot of Bockscar. That was the plane that actually delivered the bomb to Nagasaki.
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 war begins this morning.
Interviewer 1: Why did your family come to Oak Ridge? When did that happen?
Rowan: Well, we actually came to Oak Ridge in 1945. We left Nashville in early 1945. Because there was no housing available onsite in Oak Ridge, we had to stay in South Harriman, which is about twenty miles away. In the summertime of 1945, we moved into—
Iacovino: No, no, that was ’44. It was ’44. Because we went through the winter, because then the war was over.
Rowan: We should have gotten our story together. [Laughter.]
