Though admitting to thread drift, I feel compelled to offer the following, as I embrace the family members of all who had the unparalleled courage to involve themselves in atomic testing. So should we all.
Having graduated in 1971 from Vanderbilt University with a baccalaureate in Psychology, I wound up being the Purchasing/Material Controls Manager for Allastics, a Division of Kusan, a Wholly-owned Subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel Corporation. That's what it said on my business card. We did injection molding: sporks for Mickey D's. separators for DeLaval, and dashboards for Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler. None of that has any importance whatsoever.
What is noteworthy was that our Plant Engineer, Ernie *********, a slight, dark-eyed gentleman who oozed genius, kindness, and sense of irreparable loss, had a story to tell. It was this: his father, a physicist, had been gathered up from a college classroom by Big Gummint and shipped off to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. There, in the company of a cadre of other gentlemen of superior intelligence, Ernie's father specialized in high-explosive lensing of nuclear explosives. He was good at it. He was there, right beside Robert Oppenheimer, when Trinity was set off on 16 July, 1945. The inventors of that awful and terrible (in the old and proper sense of those words) weapon had two immense worries. The worst was that no detonation would occur. The second was that the Earth's atmosphere would be set afire. The "Gadget" yielded approximately 20 kilotons.
Ernie said that "Oppy", after the early morning sky had become as illuminated as a blistering mid-day in the desert, did, in fact, turn to the others close by and said "Thus I am become Death, the destroyer of Worlds."
Ernie's father's name is one of the seven men's names on the U.S. patent for Device, Nuclear, Explosive. Of those seven, five, including our plant engineer's father, died of testicular cancer. (The ones who would bring two half-grapefruit-sized castings of Uranium-235 or Plutonium-239 in proximity to one another barehanded just to witness the eerie glow.) Another perished from CA of the lung.
All who grabbed the tail of "The Dragon" risked their lives. They all earned our enduring respect and gratitude. I feel particularly fortunate to have known someone whose father helped to take the concept from blackboard theory to the weapon that, in its ability to destroy life on this planet, kept a peace, however uneasy.
Ernie told me that he and his father embraced just when the Reaper came swinging the scythe for his father. Far too soon. He told me that his father's last words were "Never do this again!" The elder then became the precious, whirling, inscrutable, unamalgamated collection of atoms which he was when he started life. So do we all...
- Ed