William J. Wilcox, Jr.'s Interview (2005)
Bill Wilcox: My name is Bill Wilcox. William J. Wilcox, Jr.
Cindy Kelly: And how do you spell Wilcox?
Wilcox: W-I-L-C-O-X.
Kelly: Why was Oak Ridge chosen for the Manhattan Project?
Bill Wilcox: My name is Bill Wilcox. William J. Wilcox, Jr.
Cindy Kelly: And how do you spell Wilcox?
Wilcox: W-I-L-C-O-X.
Kelly: Why was Oak Ridge chosen for the Manhattan Project?
Groueff: And so you have the tank. You have all these military things. And then you finally got the atomic bomb.
Keller: Yes.
Groueff: What date did [General Leslie] Groves come to you?
Keller: That is all in the book.
Groueff: That was in ’43.
Keller: You will get that all out of the book.
Stephane Groueff: General James Marshall, New York, November 4, 1965.
Groueff: When and how and where did you first learn about the project and who assigned you and where and when? All the details of your assignment.
[We would like to thank Robert S. Norris, author of the definitive biography of General Leslie R. Groves, Racing for the Bomb: General Leslie R. Groves, the Manhattan Project's Indispensable Man, for taking the time to read over these transcripts for misspellings and other errors.]
Philip Abelson: I went to the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in the fall of 1935 as a graduate student in the Radiation Laboratory. I had had some background in chemistry. I hadn’t been there more than about six months before [Ernest] Lawrence, one day, suggested to me that I should look into the phenomena accompanying neutron irradiation of uranium.