When offered the position of director of the Laboratory in 1945, Norris Bradbury reluctantly agreed to take the job for six months or until it was filled permanently, whichever came first. He remained for 25 years, overseeing the transition of the Laboratory from the site of a wartime crash project to one of the nation's premier research facilities.
Bradbury arrived in Los Alamos in July 1944 to work on the Manhattan Project, the crash program to build the world's first atomic weapons. He was in charge of assembling the nonnuclear components for the world's first nuclear explosion, which occurred at Trinity Site in southern New Mexico on July 16, 1945.
Less than a month later, following the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, World War II ended. Many Los Alamos scientists, including Director J. Robert Oppenheimer and Bradbury, planned to return to their pre-war jobs or take advantage of other employment offers.
"About 4 p.m. one afternoon, Oppie (Oppenheimer) called me in and asked me if I'd be willing to take on the directorship," Bradbury recalled for an article in the September 1970 issue of the Atom, a former Laboratory publication. "I was anxious to get back to Stanford (to teach physics), but I said I'd think about the offer." After talking it over with his family and colleagues, "I told Oppie I'd take it for a short period."
Bradbury took over a research institution that had just completed an immensely successful project, but did not have a compelling mission at that time.
As Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, said on the occasion of the Laboratory's 25th anniversary in 1968: "Some of my colleagues maintained that it would never be possible to make Los Alamos attractive for competent scientists. It was remote from civilization. The wartime buildings were already falling to pieces ... Furthermore, most of the 'big name' scientists had left Los Alamos with Oppenheimer."
Bradbury, who later said he stayed because he could not lead an institution with an uncertain future unless he was willing to link it with his own future, overcame the difficulties. He convinced the nation of the need to maintain nuclear expertise, persuaded a core of scientists and engineers to remain and tackled projects such as Operation Crossroads, a test of the effects of nuclear weapons against Navy ships.
"Oppenheimer was the founder of this Laboratory," senior fellow Louis Rosen said during a discussion of the Bradbury Era that was reported in the Winter/Spring 1983 issue of Los Alamos Science. "Bradbury was its savior."
Another wartime colleague, Richard Baker, said, "If Norris hadn't stayed, or someone like him, I think the Lab would have collapsed."
During Bradbury's leadership, the Laboratory developed the first thermonuclear weapons and continued groundbreaking research in a number of nuclear and nonnuclear weapons areas. It also maintained a solid record in basic research.
Bradbury, born May 30, 1909, in Santa Barbara, Calif., earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., and a doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, for work on the mobility of ions in gases. He spent two years as a research fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then joined the faculty at Stanford University to teach physics. During the 1930s, he established a reputation as an expert on the conduction of electricity in gases, properties of ions, and atmospheric electricity.
He had joined the naval reserve while at UC and was called to active duty in 1941. He worked in projectile ballistics at the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Va., until he was offered the job at Los Alamos.
The Atomic Energy Commission presented Bradbury with its highest honor, the Enrico Fermi Award, in 1970.
Bradbury was cited by the AEC for "his inspiring leadership and superb direction of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory throughout one-quarter of a century, and for his great contributions to the national security and to the peacetime applications of atomic energy."
He also received the Legion of Merit from the Navy, the 1964 annual achievement award from the New Mexico Academy of Science, and the Distinguished Public Service Medal from the Department of Defense in 1966.
Bradbury was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society. He received honorary doctor of science degrees from Pomona College and Case Institute of Technology and an honorary doctor of laws degree from the University of New Mexico.
He is survived by his wife Lois and three sons, James, John and David.
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