Creator of Destruction, my friend helped build the First Atomic Bomb…
At age twenty in the early 1970’s, during my employment at the Charles Eames Design Office in Venice California while working as a field representative, I had the opportunity to chauffer Dr. Philip Morrison 1915-2005 around the Los Angeles area. At first glance he appeared to be an odd fellow with a pronounced hunchback who walked off balance. A kind compassionate man, we would talk for hours as I drove him around the Los Angeles area. At the time I had no idea who he was or anything about his infamy. Looking at his smiling face there were no signs of the overwhelming remorse he had endured for decades.
Surviving crippling polio at an early age…
Due to his polio, Phil did not attend school until the third grade. He wore a caliper on one leg, (and spent his last years in a wheelchair). After high school he entered Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh to study electrical engineering. He married a fellow high school student, Emily Kramer in 1938 (they divorced in 1961). His advanced physics studies led him to UC Berkeley under J. Robert Oppenheimer, writing his thesis on “Three Problems in Atomic Electrodynamics.” From there he helped design nuclear reactors with Eugene Wigner.
December 1942, Oppenheimer recruited him…
On July 16, 1945 at exactly 5:29 a.m., the world entered the unprecedented atomic age with the successful testing of the most powerful weapon known to man.
A brain child of Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, the Los Alamos Manhattan Project’s debut nuclear bomb was detonated in the desert near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Oppenheimer said at the moment of the explosion, that he thought of a line from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad-Gita, “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Under the codename Trinity (inspired by a poem by John Donne) the original $6,000 program budget skyrocketed to $2 billion after Einstein raised multiple concerns that the Nazi’s were close to perfecting their own game-changing weapon.
After joining the Manhattan Project’s in 1944, Philip’s group determined how much plutonium a bomb would require, 6 kilograms, and he pioneered explosive lenses required to detonate the implosion-type nuclear weapon with George Kistiakowsky.
Phil transported the core of the ‘Trinity’ device to the test site in the back seat of a Dodge sedan. There, his team installed the core into the bomb nicknamed ‘Gadget.’ Crews built a steel 100-foot tall tower to launch Gadget. The researchers watched the explosion from three observational bunkers. Philip was present for the test on July 16, 1945.
The darkest day in human history…
Soon after the detonation of the test bomb Gadget, as leader of Project Alberta’s pit crew, Phil helped build and load the atomic bombs onto the aircraft that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At the war’s end, Phil traveled to Hiroshima, as part of the Manhattan Project, to assess the damage.
After witnessing the destruction that he himself created, Phil’s course in life dramatically changed and he championed nuclear nonproliferation. Worked on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists and founded the Federation of American Scientists and the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies. He testified before Congress on the need for civilian control for nuclear energy, and acted in the Civil Rights Congress in New York and the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace in 1949. He lectured on the subject and co-authored several books critical of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race.
New York City would have been destroyed…
One day while I drove Philip back from a lecture, he appeared distressed. I had noticed him trying to conceal tears. During the lecture (that I attended), someone asked him about his lifelong struggle to cope with the guilt from Hiroshima and Nagasaki’s unthinkable destruction. Although Philip did not disclose any new revelations during the lecture, his words were so profound that everyone in attendance felt the depth of his pain, compassion and resolve.
Driving to the office, I dug deeper into the truth. He offered me a scenario, “If the Nazi’s won the nuclear bomb race their most likely target would have been New York City… I am responsible for my part… and regret the actions of our government for dropping the bomb on heavily populated areas, knowing an offshore bombing would have been more than sufficient to scare them into surrender.” That said, he closed his eyes, sniffled, and lower his head.
In Philip’s words, “My piece in the book ‘One World or None’ (A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the Atomic Bomb—straight talk from featured contributors including Einstein, Oppenheimer and Morrison) was the description of the effect of a single atomic bomb on New York City.”
Philip and Charles Eames collaborated…
One of my duties while working at the Charles Eames Design Office was time-lapse photography. When I was not out in the field, some my duties around the office ranged from household chores to lending a hand in state-of-art technical activities. I had no formal training and claim no great accomplishments. It was a very difficult time in my life that I talk about in my memoir, “The Uris Trinity.”
Everyone at the office worked as a team to meet deadlines—mainly on museum exhibits, including Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, and a Washington D.C. exhibit on the nation’s bicentennial. Eames insisted on the very highest quality in every department.
“Powers of Ten: a book about the relative size of things in the universe and the effect of adding another zero,” written by Philip and his wife Phylis, was made into a short film narrated by Philip and produced by Charles and his wife Ray Eames. The film depicted the relative scale of the Universe, based on factors of ten, first expanding out from the Earth until the entire universe is surveyed, then reducing inward until a single atom and its quarks are observed. The fascinating film is well worth your time.
One of the founders of SETI…
Philip may have contributed to the most destructive weapon known to mankind, but his moral conviction played a key role in the forming of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence).
Philip’s most popular quote gained funding and acceptance for SETI in the eyes of the world: “The probability of success is difficult to estimate; but if we never search the chance of success is zero.”
On Philip’s 60th birthday, in 1975, Victor Weisskopf, another M.I.T. professor, said, “Nobody else has better demonstrated, or rather embodied, what it means to be the human soul….”
Charles Eames told me, “Philip’s discoveries and insight changed our world.”
No doubt, Philip Morrison has a place in my heart. The pleasure of knowing enriched my life. How could I ever forget “the man who called out to the universe” and “the man who carried the destiny of mankind in the backseat of his Dodge sedan.”
Photo credits: NASA, Manhattan Project, Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Atomic Heritage Foundation
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