The Manhattan Project

In partnership with the National Museum of Nuclear Science & HistoryNational Museum of Nuclear Science & History

Espionage

Esther Floth's Interview

Cindy Kelly: Okay, I am Cindy Kelly, Atomic Heritage Foundation. It’s August 9, 2016 and we are in Berkeley, California. I have with me Esther Floth. Our first question I want to ask is for her to tell us your name and to spell it.

Esther Floth: My name is Esther Marie Green Floth. It’s E-S-T-H-E-R; last name F as in “friendly,” L-O-T-H.

Kelly: Great. Esther, tell us something about your beginnings. When were you born and where were you born, and something about your childhood.

David Bohm's Interview

Martin Sherwin: At the Stanhope Hotel in New York, June 15th, 1979.

David Bohm: I met him in about 1941. I went to Caltech to do graduate work, and I wasn’t very satisfied there. It was much too limited technically.

Sherwin: Where did you do your undergraduate work?

Joseph Rotblat's Interview

Martin Sherwin: This is an interview with Professor Joseph Rotblat, R-O-T-B-L-A-T, at his office in London. Well it really was quite a production. Seven hours!

Joseph Rotblat: Yes, oh yes, quite a production.

Sherwin: I thought Sam Waterston played a marvelous part.

Rotblat: Who?

Sherwin: The person who played [J. Robert] Oppenheimer.

Japan

Japan was one of the Axis powers in World War II. Its attack on Pearl Harbor, HI, on December 7, 1941 brought the US formally into the war. Japan also attacked British, Dutch, and American possessions in the Southwest Pacific around the same time.

Hanford 25th Anniversary Celebration

[Many thanks to Claude Lyneis for donating this footage to the Atomic Heritage Foundation.]

Narrator: About seventy-five miles northwest of Walla Walla, Washington, in an isolated expanse of open desert, civilization entered into a new age, an age from which it would never emerge the same. Here, in the home of the Wanapum Indians, the terrain is mostly scrubland, laced here and there by cheatgrass, greasewood, and Russian thistle.

General Kenneth Nichols's Interview - Part 3

General Kenneth Nichols: —found we did not have the authority to satisfy DuPont.

Stephane Groueff: But why did DuPont challenge your authority?

Nichols: Because they had trouble, in World War I, being called munitions makers and investigated after World War I, so they are more conservative than most companies. And they wanted to have in their files copies of our authorities. And what we had, which I have shown you, and that is satisfactory to them.

Groueff: I see.

Peter Lax's Interview

Cindy Kelly: My name is Cindy Kelly with the Atomic Heritage Foundation. It is January 8, 2016, and I am in New York City with Peter Lax. My first question for him is to say his name and spell it.

Peter Lax: Peter Lax, spelled L-A-X.

Kelly: Great, thank you. So I would love to have you talk, just a little bit anyway, about your childhood and your parents.

Colonel Franklin Matthias's Interview (1965) - Part 2

Stephane Groueff: [Enrico] Fermi had the characteristics of a real genius.

Colonel Franklin Matthias: Almost every time you would get in contact with him, something would come up that was impressive. Physically, he was a small man, unimpressive person, but he grew real large when he started talking about things he knew.

Groueff: Was he a friendly person?

Matthias: Yes, warm; very warm, very friendly, a real nice person.

Robert Christy's Interview

Martin Sherwin: This is Martin Sherwin. I am on my way to interview Professor Robert Christy in his office at 423 Downs on the Caltech Campus in Pasadena, California, March 30th, 1983.

You were a student of his?

Robert Christy: I was a graduate student of [J. Robert] Oppenheimer’s from the fall of 1937 until the spring of 1941 when I got my degree, my PhD degree in theoretical physics in Berkeley.

Sherwin: What did you do your dissertation on?

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