Q: Were you actually on the mission? Were you on one of the planes?
HA: I flew on the Hiroshima mission in an airplane called the Great Artiste,
actually, piloted by Sweeney, who piloted the box car on the Nagasaki mission.
And Louis Alvarez had convinced Oppie [Robert Oppenheimer] that, well, maybe
neither of these things would work and we ought to try to devise a way of
measuring the yield, and that was a little -- that's pretty tricky because you
couldn't be on ground. So we devised a method of dropping some blast gauges on
parachutes and then telemetering the blast pressure of the impulse back to our
plane, recording it, and then analyzing the results, and that's how we
determined the yield.
So, there were three of us, Larry Johnson, Louis Alvarez, and myself. We each
had a separate frequency that we tuned in on. Larry and I got a signal. Louis
didn't. He was the boss, but that's okay. If we had missed it, he would have
really chewed us out for not getting -- it was very tricky because the
instruments had to come on. They were cold. They had to be heated, and then
you had to search for your frequency. It was -- it wasn't easy. There was a
lot of luck involved in whether you found your particular frequency and tuned
in on your particular gauge. But at the same time, I brought some movie
cameras along, and all the pictures you see were all mine.
After the bomb had been dropped, General Spaatz, who was head of the 20th Air
Force, came up to visit where we were on Tinian, and a fellow from Cornell,
Charlie Baker, had to give him a briefing on how all this took place, and what
it was all about, and Spaatz came in at the head of echelon of generals,
lieutenant generals, maybe three behind him, majors, generals, maybe six behind
him. They all came marching in. Spaatz had one of these riding whips under
his arm and stood there and Charlie Baker went through how all this worked, and
he ended up opening up the little carrying case, which you have a picture of me
holding, and showing the void inside, which is about the size of a medium size
grapefruit. And he said, and this is the material from which we got the ten,
fifteen thousand tons of high explosive equivalent, and Spaatz stood there
looking him, and you can just see the wheels going around, this kid is making
an ass out of me, and he finally said, young man you may believe that, but I
certainly don't, turned around, walked out, with the whole phalanx of generals
behind him. It just shows the level of understanding. It's pretty
mind-boggling to think, when you have been thinking about chemical reactions
where you have got a couple of electron volts in a reaction, and here you get
two hundred and ten million - seventy million times more energy per molecule in
nuclear energy.
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