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Edwin McMillan Physicist, Atom Bomb: “I am a veteran of the Manhattan Project”
Edwin McMillan Physicist, Atom Bomb: “I am a veteran of the Manhattan Project”
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Groves Leslie

Edwin McMillan Physicist, Atom Bomb: “I am a veteran of the Manhattan Project”

 

EDWIN M. MCMILLAN, Typed Letter Signed, to Leslie R. Groves Jr., September 9, 1963, Berkeley, CA. 1 p., 8.5" x 11".  Very good.

 

Excerpts

“I want to thank you sincerely for your letter of congratulation, which awaited me on my return from an extended trip. You note that I am a veteran of the Manhattan Project; you may not know that the idea for which the award is to be given is also a veteran of the Project, since it occurred to me while I was at Los Alamos, although it was not published until my return to Berkeley.”

 

Historical Background

In December 1953, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a speech entitled “Atoms for Peace” to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. At the July 1955 Geneva Summit with leaders of Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, Eisenhower encouraged businessmen and professionals throughout the world to “provide an incentive in finding new ways that…atomic science can be used for the benefit of mankind and not destruction.” One month later, the Ford Motor Company gave a grant of $1 million to a nonprofit corporation to administer the Atoms for Peace Award.

 

The first recipient was Niels Bohr in 1957, and over the next dozen years, there were twenty-two additional recipients of the Atoms for Peace Award, including former President Eisenhower himself in the final award in 1969.

 

On July 30, 1963, the corporation announced that Edwin M. McMillan and Soviet physicist Vladimir Veksler (1907-1966) would share the Atoms for Peace Award in 1963 for their independent inventions of the synchrotron particle accelerators. Each was to receive a gold medal and would share the $75,000 honorarium.  Dr. James R. Killian Jr., chairman of the trustees of the award, said, “Working independently in widely separated laboratories, Drs. Veksler and McMillan proposed within months of each other a basis for designing more effective devices to explore the nucleus. From these insights have come the new machines, the synchrotrons, which have introduced us to the finer structure of the nucleus and which will lead to our more effective use of the energy there for the benefit of mankind.”

 

They received their awards in Washington, D.C., on October 24, 1963, at the centennial meeting of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

 

Edwin M. McMillan (1907-1991) was born in California and graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1928 and with a master’s degree in 1929. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1933. McMillan joined Ernest Lawrence’s Berkeley Radiation Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, where he helped to develop and improve the cyclotron. McMillan began experimenting with uranium and discovered the first transuranium element, neptunium, in 1940. For this discovery, McMillan shared the 1951 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Glenn Seaborg, discoverer of plutonium. Late in 1940, McMillan began working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Radiation Laboratory on radar projects. J. Robert Oppenheimer recruited McMillan to work on the Manhattan Project in September 1942, and McMillan became a key scientist there. After the war, he returned to the Radiation Lab at Berkeley and developed the synchrotron for accelerating particles, independently of parallel work by Soviet physicist Vladimir Veksler, with whom he later became friends. He served on the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission from 1954 to 1958. When founder Ernest Lawrence died in 1958, McMillan became director of the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory and served in that position until his retirement in 1973.

 

Leslie R. Groves Jr. (1896-1970) was a United States Army General with the Corps of Engineers who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and directed the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb during World War II. Born in New York to a Protestant pastor who became an army chaplain, Groves graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1918 in a course shortened because of World War I. He entered the Corps of Engineers and gained promotions to major by 1940. In 1941, he was charged with overseeing the construction of the Pentagon, the largest office building in the world, with more than five million square feet. Disappointed that he had not received a combat assignment, Groves instead took charge of the Manhattan Project, designed to develop an atomic bomb. He continued nominally to supervise the Pentagon project to avoid suspicion, gained promotion to brigadier general, and began his work in September 1942. The project headquarters was initially in the War Department building in Washington, but in August 1943, moved to Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He and physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer selected the site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, for a laboratory, and Groves pushed successfully for Oppenheimer to be placed in charge. Groves was in charge of obtaining critical uranium ores internationally and collecting military intelligence on Axis atomic research. Promoted to major general in March 1944, Groves received the Distinguished Service Medal for his work on the Manhattan Project after the war. In 1947, Groves became chief of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project. He received a promotion to lieutenant general in January 1948, just days before meeting with Army Chief of Staff Dwight D. Eisenhower, who reviewed a long list of complaints against Groves. Assured that he would not become Chief of Engineers, Groves retired in February 1948. From 1948 to 1961, he was a vice president of Sperry Rand, an equipment and electronics firm. After retirement, he served as president of the West Point alumni association and wrote a book on the Manhattan Project, published in 1962.

 

 

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