Project Camel encompassed the work performed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in support of the Manhattan Project during World War II. These activities included the development of detonators and other equipment, testing of bomb shapes dropped from Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers, and the Salt Wells Pilot Plant, where explosive components of nuclear weapons were manufactured.
In the early 1930s, an emergency landing field was built by the Works Progress Administration in the Mojave Desert near the small town of Inyokern, California. Opened in 1935, it was acquired by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) in 1942, and became part of the Muroc Bombing and Gunnery Range. In 1943, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) contracted with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for the testing and evaluation of rockets for the Navy. A suitable test area was required for this near Pasadena, California, so the area was transferred from the Army to the Navy in October 1943, and commissioned as the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) in December 1943. Workshops, laboratories and facilities were constructed for over 600 men. During 1944, NOTS worked on the development and testing of the 3.5-inch, 5-inch, HVAR and 11.75-inch (Tiny Tim) rockets. [1]
By late 1944, rocket development and testing work began to taper off, and production models started to reach the Navy and USAAF in quantity. The director of the OSRD, Vannevar Bush saw an opportunity to use some of the expertise at Caltech on another secret wartime project he was involved with, the Manhattan Project. Bush arranged for Charles C. Lauritsen, the head of the rocket team at Caltech, to visit the Los Alamos Laboratory, and meet with the project director, Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., the laboratory director, Robert Oppenheimer, and senior scientists at the Los Alamos laboratory. [2] Oppenheimer and Lauritsen knew each other well, as Oppenheimer had worked at Caltech before the war. [3] In addition to its scientists, Caltech also possessed an experienced procurement team, headed by Trevor Gardner. This group worked closely with its counterpart at Los Alamos, which was headed by Lieutenant Colonel Robert W. Lockridge. [2]
All the work done at NOTS on behalf of the Manhattan Project came under the codename Project "Camel". The name is said to have come from a remark by a Los Alamos scientist that once a camel (meaning Caltech) gets its nose under a tent flap it is hard to dislodge. [3]
The Manhattan Project conducted an extensive series of drop tests to evaluate various bomb shapes. These were initially conducted with scale models of the bomb dropped from a Grumman TBF Avenger at the US Navy test range at Dahlgren, Virginia starting in August 1943. [4] A new airfield was constructed at NOTS, using Manhattan Project funding, with three runways, 10,000 feet (3,000 m), 7,700 feet (2,300 m) and 9,000 feet (2,700 m) long, and 200 feet (61 m) wide to accommodate the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. Fuel storage was provided with a capacity of 200,000 US gallons (760,000 L) of gasoline and 20,000 US gallons (76,000 L) of oil. It was opened on 1 June 1945, and named Armitage Field after Navy Lieutenant John Armitage, who was killed while testing a Tiny Tim rocket at NOTS in August 1944. [1] [5] [6]
Three B-29s were based at Armitage for drop testing. [1] Caltech's Gerald Kron developed instrumentation to evaluate the test drops, which were made by aircraft based at NOTS, Muroc and Wendover Army Air Field. [7] Getting the Fat Man to fall properly was quite difficult. One officer described it as:
...a crazy bomb. It was built about like a streamlined brick, and to get [it] to fly reasonably well ballistically was quite a chore. [7]
The resolution of the problem involved extensive testing with various fin configurations. Commander Chick Hayward initially thought that test bombs dropped at NOTS would be easier to recover than those dropped on the sands at Wendover, but they proved to have considerable ability to penetrate the desert floor, and required no less digging out. [8]
The commander of Project Alberta, Captain Deak Parsons, had four bomb assembly kits produced. These kits were fully contained facilities, which included a number of Quonset huts with air conditioning. Two were shipped to the Pacific island of Tinian, where the atomic bombs were assembled. One was kept as a spare at Wendover, and one was erected at Inyokern, where it was used to assemble the explosive but non-nuclear pumpkin bombs for testing. [9]
The design of the Fat Man required that a number of explosive lenses had to be detonated simultaneously. After learning from Luis Alvarez that the Los Alamos Laboratory had encountered problems with the supply of the exploding bridgewire detonators required for this, Lauritsen found manufacturers in the Los Angeles area that could produce them. Alvarez ordered the detonators by the thousand. They were used in the bomb, but most were expended in various diagnostic tests required to verify that the detonators and the lenses worked perfectly. [10]
Responsibility for the development and testing of the critical detonators was shared between Lauritsen's group at Caltech and Robert Henderson's group at Los Alamos. By mid-1945, the object was to produce 1,000 detonators each week. Meeting this target proved challenging. Reliability was the key problem, with initial batches containing unacceptably high numbers of failures. In May 1945, a box of detonators manufactured by Raytheon fell from a truck and tumbled down a mountain side, but were found to still be in working order. [11]
The explosive lenses required by the Fat Man had to be fabricated. A small explosive plant was established at Los Alamos known as Site S, as it was a former sawmill. Groves was appalled at the work practices and safety at Site S, and considered it only a matter of time before it blew up. On Parsons' recommendation, Groves decided to establish a pilot plant at NOTS, because Caltech had experience in building and operating pilot ordnance plants. He had some misgivings about this, because he thought that the Navy might err too far on the side of workplace safety. [12]
Groves and Parsons met with Lauritsen and Bruce Sage, who had built the China Lake Pilot Plant where the rockets were made, and it was agreed that Caltech would build and operate the plant. A site was chosen in the Salt Wells Valley and work commenced on 80 buildings, 52 of them permanent, at a cost of $13 million. Groves wanted the plant working within 100 days. While Site S had sufficient capacity to make explosive components for one or two bombs, it was unlikely that it could meet the expected demand in the months to come. Complicating the construction program was the fact that Los Alamos had not finalized what processes would be used. [13]
Equipping the Salt Wells Pilot Plant involved its own challenges. Some facilities had to be fabricated for the purpose. Some items were hard to locate, while others were in short supply in the wartime economy. The Manhattan Project's overriding priority overcame this problem. In some cases, the Army had representatives at the factories where items were made who designated them for use by Project Camel. Groves felt that his fears about excessive safety were realized: reinforced concrete, blast proof doors and electrical shielding drove up costs. In the end, after 115 days, the first explosives were melted, mixed and poured on 25 July 1945. [14]
After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Under Secretary of War, Robert P. Patterson, sent a telegram to "all the men and women employed on the Camel Project":
Today the whole world knows the secret which you have helped us keep for many months. I am pleased to be able to add that the warlords of Japan now know its effects better even than we ourselves. The atomic bomb which you have helped to develop with high devotion to patriotic duty is the most devastating military weapon that any country has ever been able to turn against its enemy. No one of you has worked on the entire project or known the whole story. Each of you has done his own job and kept his own secret, and so today I speak for a grateful nation when I say congratulations and thank you all. I hope you will continue to keep the secrets you have kept so well. The need for security and for continued effort is fully as great now as it ever was. We are proud of every one of you. [15]
Production at Site S ceased in late 1945 due to the cold weather. [16] All work was then done at Salt Wells. [17] The plant was completed in January 1946, and all equipment was installed and working by May 1946. Work was initially dogged by an unacceptably large number of defects in the form of cracks or imperfections in the explosive blocks. The core of the problem was that the techniques used at Los Alamos did not scale to a production site, so different methods were required. Special instrumentation was devised by Caltech's Ira Bowen to assess the quality of the explosive blocks. [18]
The temporary nature of the accommodation was no longer acceptable after the war, [18] [19] and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which took over from the Manhattan Project on 1 January 1947, [20] spent $3.252 million on 380 sets of family quarters, streets, electricity, sewers, mains water, and a small school, which was named after Groves, and opened in 1948. Improved techniques and facilities allowed the plant to triple its output in 1947. By 1949, the pilot plant employed over 700 people. The pilot plant helped design, equip and train workers for the new Burlington AEC Plant, which took over responsibility for manufacturing the explosive lenses. [18] [19] The Salt Wells Pilot Plant was closed in 1954. [21]
"Fat Man" is the codename for the type of nuclear bomb the United States detonated over the Japanese city of Nagasaki on 9 August 1945. It was the second of the only two nuclear weapons ever used in warfare, the first being Little Boy, and its detonation marked the third nuclear explosion in history. It was built by scientists and engineers at Los Alamos Laboratory using plutonium from the Hanford Site, and it was dropped from the Boeing B-29 Superfortress Bockscar piloted by Major Charles Sweeney.
The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer was the director of the Los Alamos Laboratory that designed the actual bombs. The Army component of the project was designated the Manhattan District as its first headquarters were in Manhattan; the placename gradually superseded the official codename, Development of Substitute Materials, for the entire project. Along the way, the project absorbed its earlier British counterpart, Tube Alloys. The Manhattan Project began modestly in 1939, but grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion. Over 90 percent of the cost was for building factories and to produce fissile material, with less than 10 percent for development and production of the weapons. Research and production took place at more than thirty sites across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon. It was conducted by the United States Army at 5:29 a.m. on July 16, 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project. The test was conducted in the Jornada del Muerto desert about 35 miles (56 km) southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on what was then the USAAF Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, now part of White Sands Missile Range. The only structures originally in the vicinity were the McDonald Ranch House and its ancillary buildings, which scientists used as a laboratory for testing bomb components. A base camp was constructed, and there were 425 people present on the weekend of the test.
Rear Admiral William Sterling "Deak" Parsons was an American naval officer who worked as an ordnance expert on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He is best known for being the weaponeer on the Enola Gay, the aircraft which dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. To avoid the possibility of a nuclear explosion if the aircraft crashed and burned on takeoff, he decided to arm the bomb in flight. While the aircraft was en route to Hiroshima, Parsons climbed into the cramped and dark bomb bay, and inserted the powder charge and detonator. He was awarded the Silver Star for his part in the mission.
Norris Edwin Bradbury, was an American physicist who served as director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory for 25 years from 1945 to 1970. He succeeded Robert Oppenheimer, who personally chose Bradbury for the position of director after working closely with him on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Bradbury was in charge of the final assembly of "the Gadget", detonated in July 1945 for the Trinity test.
Robert Frederick Christy was a Canadian-American theoretical physicist and later astrophysicist who was one of the last surviving people to have worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. He briefly served as acting president of California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Naval Air Weapons Station (NAWS) China Lake is a large military installation in California that supports the research, testing and evaluation programs of the United States Navy. It is part of Navy Region Southwest under Commander, Navy Installations Command, and was originally known as Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS).
Seth Henry Neddermeyer was an American physicist who co-discovered the muon, and later championed the Implosion-type nuclear weapon while working on the Manhattan Project at the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.
Robert Fox Bacher was an American nuclear physicist and one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project. Born in Loudonville, Ohio, Bacher obtained his undergraduate degree and doctorate from the University of Michigan, writing his 1930 doctoral thesis under the supervision of Samuel Goudsmit on the Zeeman effect of the hyperfine structure of atomic levels. After graduate work at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he accepted a job at Columbia University. In 1935 he accepted an offer from Hans Bethe to work with him at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. It was there that Bacher collaborated with Bethe on his book Nuclear Physics. A: Stationary States of Nuclei (1936), the first of three books that would become known as the "Bethe Bible".
The Manhattan Project was a research and development project that produced the first atomic bombs during World War II. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project was under the direction of Major General Leslie Groves of the US Army Corps of Engineers. The Army component of the project was designated the Manhattan District; "Manhattan" gradually became the codename for the entire project. Along the way, the project absorbed its earlier British counterpart, Tube Alloys. The Manhattan Project began modestly in 1939, but grew to employ more than 130,000 people and cost nearly US$2 billion. Over 90% of the cost was for building factories and producing the fissionable materials, with less than 10% for development and production of the weapons.
Charles Christian Lauritsen was a Danish/American physicist.
Project Alberta, also known as Project A, was a section of the Manhattan Project which assisted in delivering the first nuclear weapons in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
Pumpkin bombs were conventional aerial bombs developed by the Manhattan Project and used by the United States Army Air Forces against Japan during World War II. It was a close replication of the Fat Man plutonium bomb with the same ballistic and handling characteristics, but it used non-nuclear conventional high explosives. It was mainly used for testing and training purposes, which included combat missions flown with pumpkin bombs by the 509th Composite Group. The name "pumpkin bomb" was the term used in official documents from the large, fat ellipsoidal shape of the munition casing instead of the more usual cylindrical shape of other bombs, intended to enclose the Fat Man's spherical "physics package".
Hugh Bradner was an American physicist at the University of California who is credited with inventing the neoprene wetsuit, which helped to revolutionize scuba diving and surfing.
The Armed Forces Special Weapons Project (AFSWP) was a United States military agency responsible for those aspects of nuclear weapons remaining under military control after the Manhattan Project was succeeded by the Atomic Energy Commission on 1 January 1947. These responsibilities included the maintenance, storage, surveillance, security and handling of nuclear weapons, as well as supporting nuclear testing. The AFSWP was a joint organization, staffed by the United States Army, United States Navy and United States Air Force; its chief was supported by deputies from the other two services. Major General Leslie R. Groves, the former head of the Manhattan Project, was its first chief.
Rear Admiral Sherman E. Burroughs, Jr. was a senior officer in the United States Navy, and the first commander of the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake originally known as the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS).
Gerald Kron was an American astronomer who was one of the pioneers of high-precision photometry with photoelectric instrumentation. He discovered the first starspot and made the first photometric observation of a stellar flare.
Britain contributed to the Manhattan Project by helping initiate the effort to build the first atomic bombs in the United States during World War II, and helped carry it through to completion in August 1945 by supplying crucial expertise. Following the discovery of nuclear fission in uranium, scientists Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch at the University of Birmingham calculated, in March 1940, that the critical mass of a metallic sphere of pure uranium-235 was as little as 1 to 10 kilograms, and would explode with the power of thousands of tons of dynamite. The Frisch–Peierls memorandum prompted Britain to create an atomic bomb project, known as Tube Alloys. Mark Oliphant, an Australian physicist working in Britain, was instrumental in making the results of the British MAUD Report known in the United States in 1941 by a visit in person. Initially the British project was larger and more advanced, but after the United States entered the war, the American project soon outstripped and dwarfed its British counterpart. The British government then decided to shelve its own nuclear ambitions, and participate in the American project.
The Los Alamos Laboratory, also known as Project Y, was a secret laboratory established by the Manhattan Project and operated by the University of California during World War II. Its mission was to design and build the first atomic bombs. Robert Oppenheimer was its first director, serving from 1943 to December 1945, when he was succeeded by Norris Bradbury. In order to enable scientists to freely discuss their work while preserving security, the laboratory was located in a remote part of New Mexico. The wartime laboratory occupied buildings that had once been part of the Los Alamos Ranch School.
The Salt Wells Pilot Plant was a facility established by the Manhattan Project at the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) at Inyokern, California, where non-nuclear explosive components of nuclear weapons were manufactured. The first explosives were melted, mixed and poured on 25 July 1945. Between 1945 and 1954, it manufactured explosive components of the Fat Man, Mark 4, Mark 5 and Mark 12 nuclear bombs. The Salt Wells Pilot Plant also helped design, equip, and train workers for the Burlington AEC Plant in Iowa and the Pantex Plant in Texas. The Salt Wells Pilot Plant closed on 30 June 1954.
