My retrospective

My Retrospective

On my eighteenth birthdayI (January 24, 1943) I was an undergraduate engineering student who went to my draft board to volunteer for the Army. I was concerned that they might draft me for the Navy and I didn't think I could swim well enough when in trouble but could dig a fox hole as well as anyone.   I was mysteriously deferred (as a convenience to the government) and told to stay in engineering school until called.

Eventually I wound up at Los Alamos, helping cast lenses for the Fat Man  In recent years at the end of a presentation on my experience, I am frequently asked if the use of atom bombs were the right thing or the wrong thing to do.  I then describe this as a question with moral connotation and killing is always wrong.  However, I prefer also to answer this mathematically, if it were the correct or incorrect thing to have done  This usually ends the discussion --  something can  be morally wrong but surely mathematical correct.

Where I grew up in Nashville, neighboring mothers on all sides had Gold Stars in the windows.  My older brother was in the Air Corps but remained in the US on another science project.  Harry Denham from the home immediately on the left was a Marine who survived Guadalcanal but was killed at Tarawa.  Bill Hager, across the street, survived D-Day with serious injury. Johnny Ozier immediately to the right was on a B-17 that did not return to base.  Conrad Jamieson, immediately behind us was killed on D-Day.  Across the street and down three houses lived John Manchester, a Navy Aviator like George Bush Senior, except he didn't make it back to his Carrier.

I could not have been more exhuberant  when Japan surrendered and we immediately stopped making the lenses for the Fat Man.   Who could possibly imagine (at that time!) that we would ever need a single bomb that could destroy a whole city!

2025 Canyons Resort Drive

Park City, Utah 84098

January 6, 2006

Mr. Daniel Bankston

Fidelity Investments

Mail Zone WB3Y

One Destiny Way

Westlake, Texas 76262

Dear Daniel,

Thanks so much for your helping me earlier today. Your directing the resetting of

preferences apparently did the trick and I am once again able to work with my Fidelity account.

If I am overloading you with my story, you can always pitch it! But it is historical (some

young folks may think it pre-historical!). The long letter to Ms. Cindy Kelly resulted from a

program I caught on TV in the Spring of May, 2000. She had started the Atomic Heritage

Foundation to set aside certain locations from the Manhattan Project of WW 11 as historical

sites. The very first one was S-Site where I worked as a GI in 1945 and 1946. Her first

publication is a short VHS tape called “A Handfull of Soldiers” which shows exactly what I was

doing in casting high explosive lenses which caused the implosion of the Plutonium bomb

(dropped on Nagasaki). The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was one of a kind, made with

Uranium 235. This isotope of Uranium worked (obviously) but was not available in any

quantity.

I tell you all this because I want young people to realize how naive I was at 20. I want

them to realize how easy it is to be naive when it comes to the possibility of thinking that the

world is so much better now that such idiocy as Hitler or Stalin could not arise in our

enlightened time in the 21st century. If we, in that earlier generation, had not been so naive we

might have denied Chamberlain the “peace in our time” folly and stopped Hitler before the

holocaust got out of hand.

I wrote many letters home during my two years in the military--saved by my mother. I

am enclosing one I wrote when I happened to be in New York when the war in Europe ended,

shortly after Roosevelt died. I will never forget passing by the Stature of Liberty the first night

it had been lighted in several years. The hair still stands up on the back of my neck when I think

about it. The second letter home was written the morning after the Uranium bomb was dropped on

Hiroshima and I was free to let my mother know what we had been doing in such secrecy at Los

Alamos. (I was known as Buddy) This letter was written in two parts--after the Hiroshima

bomb but before the Nagasaki bomb. Japan had not surrended yet and Russia had not yet

declared war on Japan.

I am also enclosing for fun a poem I had written when were still in total

secrecy before the first bomb was dropped.

Be not afraid but be not naive!!

Sincerely yours, Ralph Gates