Cold War Warriors

you the Cold War officially ended in 1992 after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 however a struggle to maintain nuclear military parity still continues today between the United States and Russia the history of the individuals involved in this massive endeavor to build the test and field nuclear weapons provides a glimpse of the intense effort and patriotic mindset of the Cold War workers to create a lasting peace these Cold War warriors fought a battle behind the scenes against a communist ideology that exists to this day the individuals interviewed for this documentary on nuclear weapon field test activities at Sandia National Lab were legends in the history of the court and game changers and the evolution of nuclear weapons testing I first met Ben Benjamin when he was a senior mentor with the weapon intern program at Sandia National Labs to me Ben epitomized field test the can-do attitude the esprit de corps mindset and they get the job done model up and I'm ready to do this he isn't available and then you were thinking of general groves and he's no longer available and he went on down the organization chart and he finally got to a technician who was there and that was me field testers were generally adventurous souls who inadvertently found themselves transported to isolated regions devoid of housing units eating establishments and part stores Sandia was responsible for supporting nuclear tests that were led by Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories tests were conducted in various locations from the Jornada del Muerto or journey of the Death Valley near Alamogordo New Mexico to Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean throughout Sandia corporation history nuclear weapons tests have been conducted on top of towers underneath water suspended from balloons dropped from aircraft lifted by rockets set off on the Earth's surface and detonated underground these test activities spanned nearly half a century and involved countless world war ii and Cold War nuclear weapons were collectively their stories convey a sense of urgency first in ending world war two and then stopping Russia from abbreviating the United States during the race to build the biggest baddest bugs it's an awesome display of nuclear might trees burst into flames five miles away windows rattle 300 miles away in California 20 minutes after the blasts for progress it has been said there is no cure there was no converting back from the Atomic Age but an attempt was made by the United States to stop an atomic arms race before it could begin it was an era filled with fear and uncertainty shrouded in science and secrecy protection although Sandia corporation wasn't officially formed until 1949 a contingent of its employees were present at the dawn of the Atomic Age you mentioned Trinity that was probably the most impressive and the one I'll never forget actually it was the first nuclear explosion in the history of mankind nuclear field testing began at Trinity in July of 1945 the same month Z Division of Los Alamos scientific laboratory the forerunner of Sandia Corporation was tasked with handling future weapons development engineering bomb assembly and bomb system operations including army firing and fusing plus ballistic tests of weapon shapes these activities led to the development of little boy and fat man the first and only atomic bombs used in war during that era the actual detonation of a nuclear device was needed to verify theoretical concepts that underlie its design and operation at the time Leon Smith another senior mentor from Sandhya's weapon intern program was a member of the five-o ninth composite which dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Japan after the Allied victory in world war ii planning began for a series of atmospheric weapons effects tests on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands located in the North Pacific halfway between Hawaii and Australia from 1946 to 1958 US nuclear tests were conducted intermittently in groups known as test series our operations operation crossroads consisted of an airdrop from a b-29 codenamed Abel and an underwater shot codenamed Baker to test the effects of this new atomic weapon on US Navy ships and aircraft I was given a special discharge at Lowry field in Colorado and went to work for Los Alamos as a civilian so on the April mission at bikini I was the only civilian and the crew and we got there they had just moved the ladies off of bikini I got Howard Austin out of Oak Ridge I'd known him earlier and he's a quite a amateur radio guy and had him set up a radio system between that test that that target Island and our own Island so we and the aircraft man he needed about six two-way radio stations capable of covering the distances your balls about every day or maybe twice a day the Air Force would come come across with dummy bomb that they're driving for practice and what they were doing was having a competition between screw or a stomach bomb master who was going to drop their they dropped the bomb on the fireman show as I understand it when the in spite of the contest the where was a commander decided to go ahead and drop it to himself and they missed it by a quarter of a mile that was a very interesting experience in field testing because what that was is called that portion involved not the testing but the preparation for a test in an effort to assure the public and discredit his adversaries Vice Admiral whp landing the Joint Task Force one commander of operation crossroads issued a statement it will not blow out the bottom of the sea and let all the water run down the hole it will not destroy gravity and I am NOT an atomic playboy as one of my critics labelled me exploding these bombs to satisfy my personal whim the argument for more testing was glue it became apparent there was a combination of ignorance and lack of information associated with this devastating new technology and testing was needed to acquire a knowledge base for future generations you only get one chance but so you make it good we learned how to do that one shot physics we used to call it it's very interesting you know there's a there's a toroidal lightning stroke associated with that when you have ionized gas in turbulence you generate electricity well first you see the orange hemisphere begin to grow and becomes a fireball and lifts up off the ground with a stem underneath then when you're least expecting it as the cloud starts to spread out the shock wave gets to you and the sudden blast is quite a surprise but it's a way to feel the enormous power that kilotons me Bravo I think was the name of the one that went 15 megatons or so several times as big as they expected and we were all on board ships 30 miles away from me I told when that thing last wave hit us that ship started rolling they rolled about 30 degrees an introduction to the big ones Glenn Fowler led the first field test group at the Sandia branch of Los Alamos laboratory during the same time period ballistic tests of atomic bomb cases were conducted first at the bombing range west of Los Lunas New Mexico and then at the Salton Sea test base in Southern California then on April Fool's Day 1948 the first major clash of the Cold War occurred with the Berlin Blockade it was an attempt by the Soviet Union to limit travel to and from Russian occupied East Germany the challenge was answered with the Berlin Airlift which wrote history in the German skies and kept an island of democracy alive in the heart of the Soviet zone and the threat of communist taking over the world were real President Harry Truman authorised new weapons development tests and in 1948 operation sandstone was conducted on a large coral atoll of 40 Islands the site of the atomic energy Commission's newly formed Pacific proving grounds for nuclear weapons testing it introduced a second generation of weapon designs and involved over 10,000 beeper but the cold war intensified when the Soviet Union unexpectedly detonated their first atomic bomb in August of 1949 and the United States ceased to be the only country in the world with an atomic arsenal the Soviet representative Andre Wyszynski refused to comment and stop coldly into the Assembly Building the grim vision of an atomic war which would leave complete destination in its wake is a problem that people affects nearly all deliberations of the International Forum in November of 1949 sandhya corporation became an independent lab under AT&T and Sandhya's field test operations evolved over the years to encompass a range of activities well I was not invited I was into so-called weapons effects Department no feel jess was an engineering branch boy these things they did the hard work every [ __ ] develop an organization of so-called scientists there are highly trained engineers and then the doers in our field test the ones who went out in the field and put things together and made it work became a separate organization or they became part of the existing field test organizations our slogan was the difficult we do immediately the impossible takes us a little longer you had to find out how to get by that impossible stage and there's always a wait probably went into field tests because I wanted extra money but after a while started to believe in it and what we were doing and what was happening in the world on the other side of the world to divide an unstable Korea came the first large-scale military clash of the Atomic Age depends a newsreel pictures show graphically the suffering undergone by first Cavalry soldiers taken prisoner by the North Koreans and later released by the Chinese Reds the outbreak of the Korean War led to fears that testing in the Pacific would be impossible so an alternate testing ground was established in the continental United States at Frenchman flat on the Las Vegas bombing and gunnery range formerly known as the Nevada Test Site and now called the Nevada national security site the first atomic test located in the United States since Trinity were conducted during Operation Ranger in 1951 five test shots were detonated in just eight days each subsequent atmospheric test whether conducted in the continental US or in the Pacific yielded more and more weapons effects data and during these operations and you feel customers continue to go above and beyond and there it is the familiar sinister contours of the atomic cloud a dramatic punctuation mark for these historic Defense Department films of the most lethal blasts ever unleashed by any artillery weapon in history there is nuclear blast turns darkness today I thought we'd wiped ourselves out we blacked out communications for over a day and the Pacific that couldn't communicate with didn't have cables out there Hawaii in those days even I remember one particular flight test that I went along on they didn't have any room for me to sit down so I had to lie down the entire program in me in the transport tube that went from the front of the b-29 to the back end of it over the bomb bay and that was that was an interesting fly just we took our building and got big ropes and tied it down to the palm trees you know and then we had practiced taking our data which was on what these four by six film clips putting it in our shirt and running at top speed all the way down to the water's edge and falling down on the beach covering our head and waiting to what comes next nobody knew small boy we all had our smoke glass and we're looking through and watched the tests watching this beautiful bomb and all of fire and lightning in colors and I heard something up in the sky so that impressed me there is a shockwave then atmospheric testing abruptly ceased on Halloween 1958 when the United States entered into a gentlemen's agreement with the Soviet Union for a unilateral testing moratorium during this moratorium Sandia continued to analyze data from previous test shots and develop technology to detect atmospheric bursts and underground nuclear detonations the former Soviet Union initially honored the moratorium but secretly prepared for a massive test campaign that included the largest nuclear tests that were ever conducted to date in September 1961 the Soviet Union broke the moratorium and the United States resumed year-round testing at the Nevada Test Site with operation new game mad rush to get ready fire as many shots as they possibly could and so starting September and going on until the end of October there were some 48 days in which 36 shots were fired the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 the same year United States troops began arriving in Vietnam in what would be known as the Cold War era proxy war pitting the ideology of the United States against the ideology of the sale but Americans risk and sometimes give all that they have half a world away from home because they know that once again half a world away has become our front door if freedom is to survive in any American hometown it must be preserved in such places as South Vietnam Brooke with a lot of fine fellows and and I got to see the last atmospheric above-ground tests in 1962 after the Cuban Missile Crisis was narrowly averted in 1962 above-ground testing went underground in 1963 with the signing of the limited test ban treaty underground tests were conducted primarily in vertical and horizontal tunnels at the Nevada Test Site and involve countless personnel for miners two physicists just like atmospheric testing some were amazingly successful while others were complete failures and the two types of testing overlapped in time the first fully contained underground test occurred during plumb-bob Rainier in 1957 while the first test series to be conducted completely underground was operation nougat in 1961 and 1962 my first assignment was to find out how much radioactivity was released by a cratering explosions as a function of their depth of burial and and I was very eager and naive at that time I said oh sure I'll take this job not realizing that it was it didn't really have an answer at that time the ploughshare cratering tests were developed to use nuclear explosives for peaceful purposes they were detonated underground but they were designed to breach the surface unfortunately it was an unfeasible concept because of the high levels of radioactivity that were released during the process cavity tests are interesting because they're actually in that mystery test in a tunnel dabbler hawk was my first one and there was miners iron your own landing Midas myth misty rain mighty oak middle note mission cyber disco album mineral quarry and this disease and then I supported a couple other underground shots broadax was one which was a drift south drift and of course time unfortunate we did with France one or in it the Academy some committee of the academies can recognize us for outstanding original contributions that's that's alright it isn't every day you get that from the Academy of Sciences or even a subcommittee of them work that we were you and it was a challenging thing and it was necessary work to try and promote this containment and and keep protecting experiments and keep people safe but you really care you know you cared about the experiments and you do basically that that the data you were recording was more valuable than equipment that was used to record it and that made a difference and you also knew that that the experimenters you folks only had one chance to get this data and maybe your next chance maybe five years away if you were really lucky the most prominent visual evidence of underground tests with the subside ins craters or depressions in the Earth's surface they were caused when the roof of the blast cavity collapsed into the void left by the explosion kind of drift into things you know and drifted into underground testing I did have the opportunity and I took advantage of it to go to the command post one time I'll never forget it because you could see the point of the test you could see the dust starting to radiate out for a minute on the ground and then you could slightly feel it as it went by you at the command post some are 63 we ended up out in Nevada shot out in area two called Alva very strange configuration because had two vertical shafts and a horizontal drift complex well below the surface that fit beautifully with what I thought engineering was and what I enjoy doing his freedom you feel just was something different than anywhere else in the land Donna we did a seismic test over in Hawaii and Kilauea iki and we had to do make pigs set off explosive charge and molten lava you were given an assignment and more often than not you were left alone to complete that assignment I think everybody that was out there was really dedicated the guys that weren't didn't last very long they were see I started in 1974 I came out with Howard Viney who is a great old field tester and he took me around and took me to G tunnel where we got to go underground and look at some of the early experiments that we're setting up for the fast Gate closures that sandy had developed most of the things that became of interest to me had nothing to do with radiation would most often involved explosive toxic gases typically from closure systems we've been putting down a system into a whole one time the system dropped the nuclear whole package dropped down hole and the cables that were strung along the ground started going down behind that luckily all of our people were out of the way of those because those were whipping around as they went I remember going into one of the shots and areas for they'd let us in you know after had cratered and this one didn't we drew up the pickup to get her data out of the trailer and the thing cratered boy you talk about that thing like to knock the tires off that truck a miner close to me said it's time to run we ran at about four or five seconds later about a thousand-pound slab of rock ended up where we've been standing it was dangerous business but the miners were outstanding in their knowledge of the rock behavior we had a mister it's on the Diablo event that meant somebody had to climb the tower and disarm the device where Bob Burton sort of became a hero the story was written up in Life Magazine shows pictures of these three men article about the Michelin Man climbing at 500 pound man and I I contend with two people two survivors closest ever to nuclear explosions countdown to zero and when the fireball and go from the lunar ray I hit the deck Dan did too and it wasn't for a couple of years later to close I think he's been Declassified by now I hope there's couple years later before found out what really happened was the thing wasn't safe 55-ton radiochemical nuclear yield no shots depending on what the laboratory was and who they device systems guy was they issued a participation certificate I got 40 in the bedroom gray stop collecting them or they stopped tissue I think I was involved maybe 50 shots and in the years either in the planning stage or actually worked I had been either the project leader or the alternate project leader on 57 underground nuclear tests the Vietnam War ended in April 1973 and the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989 underground testing spanned three decades included 825 tests and resulted in such significant sandy accomplishments as designing the fast-acting closure in October of 1992 the United States entered into another unilateral moratorium on nuclear weapons testing and underground testing deceased so basically I started before the cold war started before the first Soviet test I retired in 93 after the wall came down and I don't think anybody looks back on those days with any regret I think we all felt we were part of something unique of course as a boy I always had a great fascination with firecrackers so maybe that's why I like the big explosions in Nevada today Sandia uses the Tonopah test range in Nevada which was established in 1957 to validate the non-nuclear components of the current nuclear weapons stockpile Sandia no longer conducts above ground or underground nuclear explosive testing instead the labs use a number of science-based programs to maintain a safe secure and effective nuclear weapon stockpile when I came to work at Sandia in 49 I went directly into the weapons effects Department so I went to Glenn Fowler and told him what I wanted to do feel tests at that time was under Fowler and the weapons effects was under the vice president of research and in retrospect it is probably one of the smartest of things I ever dated people made it made 43 years of field tests and worthwhile it was a it was an interesting time you know of history in America I'm glad I'm part of it back then had just come out of World War two I had just seen the Korean Lord they saw threat to our country in the earlier days we had a we had a potential enemy that was getting stronger seemingly I think the Russians at one time had grandeur that they were going to take us over I am sworn to uphold and defend the freedom of the American people and I intend to do whatever must be done to fulfill that solemn obligation we were with planes in the air we have planes on the outside of Russia refuel circling ready to go in we have missiles on countdowns I mean they're on halt countdown President Kennedy and what have you talking Khrushchev and managed to work that out wasn't really an excellent piece of work because we were ready to go back in the day field test at Sandia was an era filled with extreme challenges rare opportunities and spectacular pyrotechnics it described not only the essence of who they were but the significance of what they did field testers were unique the lead of individuals who assumed dangerous roles on behind the scene heroes on the world stage during a frightening time in American history known as the Cold War

Channel: Sandia National Labs

Views: 20,330

Rating: 4.7300615 out of 5

Keywords: Sandia National Laboratories, Atomic, historical, history, Manhattan Project, Field test, Nuclear

Id: bCENYSK9qL0

Length: 32min 37sec (1957 seconds)

Published: Mon May 09 2016