National Museum of Nuclear Science & HistoryI was in the Special Engineer Detachment and I was four-stripe sergeant when I got out of the army in 1946. I worked in a group that was doing primarily coatings for the implosion bomb. I was in the army and I was recruited to be in the Special Engineer Detachment. Of course I was told it was Manhattan Project and since I lived in New York, I thought that was wonderful.
[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:
Ben Diven: All right. I’m Ben Diven. That’s spelled D-I-V-E-N. I was born and raised in northern California, and I went to school in my hometown of Chico, and fortunately there was a state college there so I could start college in my hometown. I took the two and a half years of physics and mathematics that they taught there. And then, after a break of a couple years to save enough money to be able to go to Berkeley, I then transferred to University of California at Berkeley.
