Part of Lab’s Heritage classified lecture series
The early days of testing the first generation of thermonuclear weapons will be the focus of a classified colloquium featuring veterans of the Manhattan Project scheduled for Wednesday, April 20.
The panel discussion of the 1954 testing series known as Operation Castle, is scheduled for 1:10 p.m., in the Administration Building Auditorium at Technical Area 3, and is part of the Classified Heritage Series.
Led by former Laboratory associate director John Hopkins, the panel will include four veterans of the Castle test series: former Laboratory Director Harold Agnew, Manhattan Project veterans Ben Diven and Jay Wechsler and Laboratory Fellow Stirling Colgate.
All attendees must be U.S nationals who hold “Q” clearances and have sigmas 1-10 assigned by line management. Attendees must present a Department of Energy Standard “Q” badge, which will be read by a scanner at the entrance to the auditorium and checked against a list in the scanner memory to verify sigma authorities.
The first thermonuclear weapons were tested at Bikini and Eniwetok atolls between February and May of 1954 in Operation Castle. Castle followed up on the theoretical concept proven by the success of the Mike test on Nov. 1, 1952. Michael Bernardin of Thermonuclear Applications (X-2) will provide a brief history of the road from Mike to Castle prior to the panel discussion.
“The Castle tests verified design concepts which would characterize most U.S. high-yield thermonuclear weapons for the next half-century,” said Laboratory historian Alan Carr, who organized the colloquium.
Agnew served as the project engineer for the Romeo and Yankee tests, which led directly to the stockpile’s first significant thermonuclear weapon. Colgate was a diagnostic leader for neutron and gamma ray measurements on the Livermore Koon test and the Lab’s Bravo test. Diven was the project engineer for the Bravo shot. Wechsler worked closely with Wally Leland and with Marshall Holloway, the technical leader of the Castle tests.
Additional biographical information about the panelists follows:
Harold Agnew helped construct the pile under Stagg Field, and witnessed the first controlled nuclear chain reaction on Dec. 2, 1942, after which he came to Los Alamos. On Aug. 6, 1945, Agnew and Luis Alvarez flew with the 509th Composite Group to Hiroshima and measured Little Boy’s yield from the air. After earning his doctorate at the University of Chicago under Enrico Fermi, he returned to Los Alamos’ Physics (P) Division and served as the Weapons (W) Division leader from 1964 to 1970, when he succeeded Norris Bradbury as Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL) director. He retired from the Laboratory after nine years as director and joined General Atomics, serving as the company’s president until 1983. Agnew was an adviser to NATO, the President's Science Advisory Committee and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He was a White House science councilor from 1982-89 and a New Mexico state senator from 1955 to 1961.
Stirling Colgate was the first staff member to arrive in Los Alamos, as a student at the former Boys Ranch School. He worked at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory in 1952, and later joined the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as an original employee. His specialty at Livermore, neutron and gamma ray diagnostics led to his involvement in Operation Castle, where he took part in Livermore’s Koon test and LASL’s Bravo shot. Colgate went on to a career as a weapons designer and experimentalist in plasma physics for magnetic fusion. He was president of New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology from 1964-1974, then became a group leader in the Theoretical (T) Division.
Ben Diven came to Los Alamos from the University of California, Berkeley, in March 1943, one of the first staff members to arrive. He worked on implosion systems and developed measures to record the reaction history of the Trinity test device. He worked in the Physics (P) Division and in 1953-54 he served as project leader for the Bravo shot. For the next several years, he performed nuclear data measurements and helped develop methods to measure nuclear and equation of state data. Following his retirement in 1977, Diven continued as a consultant and later acted as a scientific advisor to the DOE test controller on Nevada Test Site weapons tests.
Jacob “Jay” Wechsler came to Los Alamos in early 1944 with the U.S. Army’s Special Engineering Detachment and worked in P Division under Otto Frisch. During the war, he worked in weapons development and explosive and hydrodynamic testing, in addition to aiding accelerator development efforts. Wechsler joined the Weapons Engineering (W) Division in 1951 and was involved in early thermonuclear weapon research and development, both as program manager and task unit leader for field operations attached to the Director's Office. After Castle, Wechsler was a group leader and later Weapons Engineering (WX) Division leader. He also participated in field test operations at Trinity, the Nevada Test Site and in the Pacific.
John C. Hopkins came to the Laboratory in 1959 and worked in nuclear physics research and nuclear weapons testing. He led the Field Test (J) Division and served as the associate director responsible for the nuclear weapons program. Hopkins has served for more than 40 years on government and international advisory groups, including the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel for the United States Navy and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in Washington and in Geneva. Hopkins retired in 1993 and is working on a history of nuclear testing at the Nevada Test Site.
Additional information about the Laboratory’s history, especially the Manhattan Project, is available at http://www.lanl.gov/history/index.shtml online.
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