Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
Interview with Thomas A. Tombrello - Caltech Oral Histories
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<strong>Tombrello</strong>–115<br />
protons, you didn’t get much neutron-rich stuff. They designed this bomb, which had its own<br />
problems, but it was, again, gun-assembled. It was longer. You needed higher velocity because<br />
of the plutonium-240, but they figured they could get around it. There were some other<br />
problems <strong>with</strong> the aerodynamic stability of this thing, which was called Thin Man. It tended to<br />
rotate in a plane rather than falling like an arrow. But they figured they could work that out. But<br />
when they got the first plutonium samples from the Hanford reactor, it had more 240 than the<br />
previous sample from Berkeley, and they knew they couldn’t assemble a gun to make critical<br />
mass. So almost immediately, they jumped into an implosion design, where you take something<br />
that’s roughly spherical and you compress it <strong>with</strong> high explosives so it becomes a smaller sphere,<br />
reaching critical mass that way.<br />
ASPATURIAN: Seth Neddermeyer.<br />
TOMBRELLO: I’m going to tell that story. I knew Seth.<br />
ASPATURIAN: You knew him?<br />
TOMBRELLO: Yes. I spent the summer once at the University of Washington, where he was at<br />
the time. But my Los Alamos question was, When did Oppenheimer start the implosion project?<br />
Because almost overnight, after they got those plutonium samples, they were doing implosion.<br />
And the answer was, Probably about day one. Seth Neddermeyer had this idea of implosion and<br />
had been given a tiny little room <strong>with</strong>, I think, five people to study implosion and do<br />
experiments—not very successful experiments, but doing them. That’s when I realized<br />
Oppenheimer was such a brilliant project manager. He anticipated a possible obstacle and he<br />
started working on it early in the project—not when he hit the obstacle but long before. Now,<br />
the interesting part of the story, from Neddermeyer’s point of view, and which Neddermeyer<br />
never quite liked, was that once Oppenheimer saw that implosion might be a solution to the<br />
critical-mass problem, that project went from five people to five hundred in a couple of days.<br />
Neddermeyer became an advisor to George Kistiakowsky, who was appointed to run it. Here<br />
Oppenheimer again showed the strength of a project manager, realizing that the person you had<br />
for the wild card was not necessarily the person you needed to implement his idea. That was<br />
truly brilliant.<br />
http://resolver.caltech.edu/<strong>Caltech</strong>OH:OH_<strong>Tombrello</strong>_T