Command and Control

Louis Slotin was tickling the dragon: For Slotin’s accident and its aftermath, see Stewart Alsop and Ralph E. Lapp, “The Strange Death of Louis Slotin,” in Charles Neider, ed., Man Against Nature (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), pp. 8–18; Clifford T. Honicker, “America’s Radiation Victims: The Hidden Files,” New York Times, November 19, 1989; Richard E. Malenfant, “Lessons Learned from Early Criticality Accidents,” Los Alamos National Laboratory, submitted for Nuclear Criticality Technology Safety Project Workshop, Gaithersburg, MD, May 14–15, 1996; and Eileen Welsome, The Plutonium Files: America’s Secret Medical Experiments in the Cold War (New York: Dial Press, 1999), pp. 184–88.

“Slotin was that safety device”: “Report on May 21 Accident at Pajarito Laboratory,” May 28, 1946, in Los Alamos, “Lessons Learned from Early Criticality Accidents.”

David Lilienthal visited Los Alamos for the first time: For the disarray at Los Alamos and the absence of atomic bombs, see Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan, Atomic Shield: A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, Volume 2, 1947–1952 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969), pp. 30, 47–48; May et al., “History of Strategic Arms Competition,” Pt. 1, p. 2; Gregg Herken, The Winning Weapon: The Atomic Bomb in the Cold War 1945–1950 (New York: Vintage, 1982), pp. 196–99; Necah Stewart Furman, Sandia National Laboratories: The Postwar Decade (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1990), pp. 233–36; and James L. Abrahamson and Paul H. Carew, Vanguard of American Atomic Deterrence: The Sandia Pioneers, 1946–1949 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), p. 120.

“one of the saddest days of my life”: Quoted in Herken, Winning Weapon, p. 196.

“The substantial stockpile of atom bombs”: Quoted in Furman, Sandia National Laboratories, p. 235.

at most, one: “Actually, we had one [bomb] that was probably operable when I first went off to Los Alamos: one that had a good chance of being operable,” Lilienthal later told the historian Gregg Herken. Although Los Alamos had perhaps a dozen nuclear cores in storage, a shortage of parts made it impossible to put together that many bombs. Colonel Gilbert M. Dorland, who headed the bomb-assembly battalion at Sandia, had an even bleaker view of the situation than Lilienthal. “President Truman and the State Department were plain bluffing,” Dorland later wrote. “We couldn’t have put a bomb together and used it.” For Lilienthal, see Herken, Winning Weapon, p. 197. For Dorland, see Abrahamson and Carew, Vanguard of Atomic Deterrence, p. 120.

“probably operable”: Quoted in Herken, Winning Weapon, p. 197.

“We not only didn’t have a pile”: Quoted in ibid, p. 235.

“haywire contraption”: Quoted in Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, Voulme 1, p. 133.

Nobody had bothered to save all the technical drawings: According to the official history of the Atomic Energy Commission, when the original Manhattan Project scientists left Los Alamos, they “left behind them no production lines or printed manuals, but only a few assistants, some experienced technicians, some laboratory equipment, and a fragmented technology recorded in thousands of detailed reports.” See Hewlett and Duncan, Atomic Shield, p. 134. For the lack of guidance on how to build another Little Boy, see Abrahamson and Carew, Vanguard of Atomic Deterrence, pp. 41–42.

He’d wrapped the metal around a Coke bottle: See Abrahamson and Carew, Vanguard of Atomic Deterence, p. 42.

the final assembly of Mark 3 bombs: Ibid., pp. 60–61.

“a very serious potential hazard to a large area”: Quoted in Hansen, Swords of Armageddon, Volume 1, p. 137.

secretly constructed at two Royal Air Force bases: During the summer of 1946, the head of the Royal Air Force and the head of the United States Army Air Forces had decided that British bases should have atomic bomb assembly equipment, “just in case.” See Abrahamson and Carew, Vanguard of Atomic Deterrence, pp. 115–17; Ken Young, “No Blank Cheque: Anglo-American (Mis)understandings and the Use of the English Airbases,” Journal of Military History, vol. 71, no. 4 (October 2007), 1136–40; and Ken Young, “US ‘Atomic Capability’ and the British Forward Bases in the Early Cold War,” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 42, no. 1 (January 2007), pp. 119–22.

“if one blew, the others would survive”: Quoted in Abrahamson and Carew, Vanguard of Atomic Deterrence, p. 119.

parts and cores to assemble fifty-six atomic bombs: See Wainstein et al.,“Evolution of U.S. Command and Control,” p. 34.

deploy only one bomb assembly team overseas: The AFSWP had two fully trained teams by the end of 1948—but lacked the support personnel to send both into the field at the same time. See ibid., p. 17; and Abrahamson and Carew, Vanguard of Atomic Deterrence, pp. 68–69, 150.

Robert Peurifoy was a senior at Texas A&M: Peurifoy interview.