Measures for Progress: A History of the National Bureau of Standards

THE BUREAU AND THE ATOMIC BOMB 377
By February• 1943, Dr. Briggs reported, the entire staff and facilities
of the Bureau were wholly engaged in war work. All conference and lecture
rooms had been converted to laboratories, and double and triple shifts were
in effect in some sections to make maximum use of space and equipment.
The prewar 39-hour week had long since been extended to 44 hours and no
overtime pay was permitted.
The rising cost of food, clothing, and rent worked some hardship,
but almost everyone at the Bureau subscribed 10 percent of his salary for
war bonds. All worried about the 5 percent Victory tax and new income
taxes to come, considering their prewar civil service salaries. And because
of the pay, the Bureau had had to recruit boys too young for the armed
forces as shop assistants and for training as mechanics and instrumentmakers.
With few exceptions, they were lost within a year or two to the defense
industries.37
Within a year after the war began, Dr. Briggs was to recall, "just
about everything at the Bureau was classified." The tight security thrown
around the work in the laboratories became constricting at times, and on
occasion Dr. Briggs felt he had to exercise some discretion. But that discre-
tion did not extend to anything connected with the research on the atomic
bomb.38
THE BUREAU AND THE ATOMIC BOMB
Under the direction of Dr. Briggs during the first 2 critical years of
its inception, the work that led to the atomic bomb grew thereafter beyond
the powers of the Uranium Committee to control. It became a technological
feat, stretching the capabilities of the greatest concentration of the Nation's
scientists and engineers ever assembled. The massive requirements for final
production had to be lodged eventually in the vast anonymity of the military
establishment.
The Bureau staff was engaged in scores of other fundamental investigations
in physics, applied mathematics, chemistry, and engineering for the
immediate prosecution of the war and few more than 60 members gave full
time to the bomb program. Apart from special assignments at Oak Ridge
and at Los Alamos, most of the Bureau participants carried out their work
in the Washington laboratories. The Bureau was nevertheless to serve to
the end of the war as "a central control laboratory for determining the
purity of uranium * and other products used," that work, it was said,
Letter, LJB to Department of Commerce, Aug. 11, 1942 (NBS Box 464, AP); letter,
LJB to chairman, Senate Commission on Appropriations, Oct. 15, 1942 (ibid., AG);
Hearings * * * 1944 (Feb. 26, 1943), p. 77.
Interview with Dr. Briggs, Nov. 1, 1961.