Tales my father told of Los Alamos

I wrote a blog about my visit to Los Alamos yesterday:

https://annebarschall.blogspot.com/2026/04/visit-to-los-alamos-260420.html

These are some afterthoughts

People have told me that I should write down tales that my dad told me about Los Alamos. I’m pretty sure he wrote some of them down in his Réminiscences, which were published in a journal,and also that some of them appeared in his biomem for the National  Academy of Sciences. Still, I can write them down the way I remember them. They might come out differently from the way he wrote them. 

I myself have told some of them before, e.g.:

https://annebarschall.blogspot.com/2025/02/telling-one-of-my-fathers-stories.html

The first hint that there was something odd came while he was studying physics at Princeton. My father came to the United States from Germany on a student visa to study there. In fact, he was essentially a refugee from Hitler. 

His ancestry was Jewish. He was not raised Jewish. His parents did not profess Judaism as adults. However, his ancestry was Jewish. AncestryDNA has told me I’m something like 43 to 46% Ashkenazi – which means that he must’ve been about twice that. My mother had no Jewish ancestry.

He was delivering a paper at Princeton, and FBI agents came up and asked him not to deliver it. I suppose this must’ve been around 1942 or 1943, about the time when he got his PhD.

My father pointed out that the abstract of the paper had already been published. Therefore, it made no sense for him to say nothing or withdraw the paper, so he did give the paper anyway. 

His research was in the area of neutrons. I was told later that he was often called “Mr. Neutron.“

After he got his PhD, there was a mysterious shortage of physics professors in the United States. He got a job at the university of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. This was wonderful for him because he was an enemy alien.

Because he was an enemy alien, he was essentially a serf of the president of the University of Kansas. He was not allowed to leave Lawrence without the permission of the president of the university.

Someone he knew from the world of physics told him that he was wanted to work on a secret project. He said that he didn’t think that there was any chance that he would be allowed to leave the University of Kansas. He was sure the university president would never let him go.

His interlocutor said that they would get a letter from the Secretary of War. My father expressed great skepticism that the Secretary of War could possibly interest himself in my father.

Nevertheless, the letter appeared — and my father ended up traveling — I believe to Santa Fe — with two suitcases, as I recall. 

He didn’t have a lot of assets. He told me he was not able to get a personal copy of his own dissertation. He had to have the dissertation typed with carbon copies. They didn’t have photocopy machines back then. It cost more to have more carbon copies. I think he was required to have three for the Princeton, but he never got one for himself.

Once he arrived in New Mexico, he encountered that woman who has since been well documented, I believe, who directed him to the correct bus. When I recently visited the national park relating to the Manhattan Project, I noticed that she was mentioned.

My father found that interaction quite amusing. There was this woman who knew how to look for physicists and direct them to a bus, without knowing anything about the project they were going to work on. 

I’ve found this myself – I can sort of tell physicist. They often have a certain look about them. They’re thin and nerdy, typically with glasses, though not always. There’s often something about them — just a little bit messy or disheveled or perhaps distracted or perhaps absent minded. Maybe that wasn’t the case with my father. He was pretty rigorously neat, with a piercing stare. Still I think you can sort of tell a physicist when you see them. When I was in Los Angeles most recently, I saw a car drive by with a thin bearded man in glasses driving and I thought “that is a physicist.“

I don’t know all that my father did on the Manhattan project. When the Ranger at the national Park looked him up in the computer, he only found reference to my father working on measuring the strength of the blast. My father did tell me something about that – some of the tales were about that, but I also know that he was called Mr. Neutron. He must’ve had some other role there besides just measuring the strength of the blast – but I don’t really know.

In any case, he said, it was a tricky thing, this measurement. The measurement had to be taken very quickly before the device was destroyed by the explosion. The results had to be transmitted at quite some distance,  faster than the rate the explosion expanded. 

Later, when I was working as a patent attorney trying to get patents in the area of software, I read that the Supreme Court felt that software shouldn’t be patentable because the signals were too transitory. Look at what my father did with transitory signals to measure the strength of the blast. How would that not be patentable? The Supreme Court makes me angry on this topic. 

I don’t know if they didn’t have cables or whether there was a shortage of cables, but somehow this process ended up involving burying 50 miles of garden hose filled with wires, in the desert.

My father said that he ordered 50 miles of garden hose and he got it – and suddenly there was a mysterious shortage of garden hose is all over the country. That level of power always intrigued me. There’s no way I’ve ever been in a position where I could order every single instance of something from all over the country and get it.

My father said that the soldiers were a bit grumpy about the idea of burying 50 miles of a garden hose in the desert. That sounds like exactly the sort of thing you do at Boot Camp. You dig a ditch and you don’t know why. Burying garden hose in the desert seems weird. Yet, it’s just exactly the sort of thing soldiers are supposed to do without asking questions. Of course, they couldn’t be told why they were doing this.

My father said, afterwards, after the explosion, the soldiers were suddenly tremendously interested in the project and asked if there was anything they could do to help – but it was already done.

My father also told a tale of traveling to Mexico on vacation after the war. On his return, his documents were questioned. He had an emergency naturalization in 1943. The customs and border patrol couldn’t believe that an enemy alien would’ve been emergency naturalized in 1943.

My father confidently asked them to call the FBI and ask the FBI about it. The FBI confirmed that he was in fact emergency naturalized in 1943. 

That idea that you could call the FBI and they would actually pay attention to you also seems rather remarkable to me. I’m of counsel to a law firm. A few years ago there was a would be a scammer who tried to scam us out of $500,000. I tried to get the FBI interested in catching the scammer. I couldn’t even get them to return my phone call. I couldn’t even talk to a human being.

Yet, my father had access to the FBI. I remember when we were living in Livermore and he was working at the Livermore national labs there were FBI people who he talked to, who even came to our house. They were helping him because he had an enemy — somebody  who was out to get him —who had a professional grudge.

If someone had a professional grudge against me and were out to get me, I doubt that I could get the FBI‘s attention. Only a very small circle of my family and friends would even care. I guess that’s an advantage of not having any professional accomplishments to speak of — I don’t have an interstate enemy out to get me – at least not yet, at least not at the level of criminality. 

At the National Park, they told me that Hans Bethe was the head of theoretical physics for the Manhattan Project. I hadn’t known that. I did know that he visited my house. He was clearly a friend of my father’s.

My father told me that they once created a paper where they found physicists named Alpha, Bethe, and Gamow to be the authors. I’m not sure I have all those names spelled correctly. They did it because they thought it was funny.

My father also once told me that there was a paper he worked on that had many authors, and they couldn’t decide who to list first, so they listed Bucky Badger, the school mascot of the University of Wisconsin first. That has nothing to do with Los Alamos, but it just popped into my mind.

I read a book about the Manhattan Project that said my father was actually briefly the mayor of Los Alamos. I had no idea. Apparently, he advocated for clean water for the physicists. Apparently the water in their quarters smelled of gasoline. Ugh. They were not living in the lap of luxury.

People have often asked me whether my father felt guilty about working on the Manhattan project. It seemed, looking at the movie “Oppenheimer,“ that Oppenheimer felt guilty. I never had any inkling that my father did.

I thought it was very interesting, in the movie, when Oppenheimer was talking to Truman, that Truman pointed out to him that Oppenheimer himself was not responsible for dropping the bomb in Japan. It was Truman, who gave the order to drop the bomb. Oppenheimer was not responsible.

Perhaps my father felt that way too. He was eager to participate in this project because he was eager to defeat Hitler. He was eager to defeat Hitler, because of the Holocaust, which he had been a victim of.

It was also the most exciting physics project that has ever existed. He lived at a time when being a physicist was truly exciting. They started out, not knowing even for sure that what they were doing was possible. Yet they succeeded, possibly beyond their wildest dreams.

He didn’t decide to drop a bomb on Japan. I don’t think he had regrets — though I don’t know. My father was not the sort of person to discuss that sort of thing much. He liked to discuss things that involved provable facts — not things that involved emotions, religion, or philosophy.

When I went to that national park, which is really a very small exhibit, I noticed there were a couple of Japanese looking tourists there. I could be wrong, but I thought they looked Japanese, not Chinese. I wonder how many Japanese tourists are going there — as a kind of closure.

In fact, my father didn’t talk much about his experience in Los Alamos. He never talked much about his research at the University of Wisconsin either. I think the habit of secrecy that he learned at Los Alamos followed him through his life. He selected a fuse, harmless tales that he could tell. The heart of the matter – he never got to that.

Interestingly, in his biomem for the National Academy of Sciences, they mentioned that he often was known for giving students credit for research, and not being listed on the research himself. There was a sort of a desire for obscurity there — or perhaps it was humility.