Herbert York Interview (1988): Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Professor York, welcome to Berkeley.
Thanks, Harry.
You got your Ph.D. here, right?
Yes, I did.
What was it like to be part of the community of nuclear scientists during World War II and after?
In a word, it was great! It was really a very stimulating place. Ernest Lawrence was alive and he had gathered around him a number of very exciting persons, all of whom were variously smart, ambitious, good scientists, and hard workers. It was an extremely exciting place, made more so not just by the people and so on that I described, but also by the fact that a lot of ideas had been stimulated by the war, or even independently, but during the war, and were waiting to be tried out, so that there was a lot of pent-up energy and ideas just waiting to be tried. Those first half-dozen years after the war provided an opportunity for all of that.
Tell us a little about Lawrence. Remind us what he had achieved in his field and why he was such a magnet.
He was a physicist-inventor, and during the early thirties he made a very important invention called the cyclotron, a means for accelerating particles to very high energies, through the use of combined electrical and magnetic fields. And that particular kind of technology -- that is, the technology of accelerating particles -- has persisted to this day. The big accelerators we see around the world today are all derived from the very first idea that he promoted here in Berkeley in the thirties. I didn't come here until he was already ten years into that work. So I wasn't in it at the very beginning. But he won a Nobel Prize for that, and rightly so. He became a very important figure on the Berkeley campus and in the world of science as a whole.
Then, when the war came along, he was one of the people who pushed hardest, perhaps, the person who pushed hardest on the notion of getting the Manhattan Project going, and building and developing the first nuclear weapon. The idea that that was possible suddenly burst on the world in 1939. But the question of how you could do that, if you could do it in a short time and, especially, during the war, remained undecided for quite some time. And Lawrence was an optimist, a technical optimist -- an optimist in other ways, too. So it was he who first became convinced, one of the earliest to become convinced, that it was all possible and it was all important.
The Manhattan Project was not just based in Los Alamos. Parts of the project were scattered all over the country.
It was all over the United States. It's named for the fact that one of the early headquarters offices was in Manhattan. But Los Alamos was the place where the bomb was actually designed. Then, finally, the parts and so forth, were made. But the key to the program was not merely how to put a bomb together, but how to produce the very unusual, special materials necessary for doing so, either plutonium, which had not existed on the earth before World War II, or U-235, which did exist but which was mixed with other forms of uranium in a way that couldn't be used. The problem was to create those materials in useful forms. That work was done at Berkeley, at Columbia, at Chicago -- at the universities in those places, mainly -- and at other universities too, Iowa State, and then by a number of industrial organizations in Oak Ridge, in Washington, and so on.
As a minor participant in these projects, did you have a sense of what the whole was about?
Yes, but not a fully accurate sense. I didn't know all the details. From the very beginning and even before I arrived, the notion was in the air, so that I was pretty well convinced before I got to Berkeley that that's what the laboratory was doing, although nobody specifically told me. After I got here, they confirmed what I already knew. But there still were a lot of details that I didn't know until the war was over and the Smyth Report was published and I got to read it all.
I'll bet that you are asked a lot about whether you have any second thoughts of having participated in some aspect of building ...
Yes, it's a natural question.
What is your response? You talk a little about that in the book.
Given what I could have possibly known at the time, it was the only reasonable thing to do -- not only what I did, but what the country did. And, you know, there's at least partial supporting evidence for that notion -- it is the fact that virtually everybody who was invited to participate was eager to do so. Second thoughts are all after the fact. But that's only the beginning of the question. The fact is that World War II was history's greatest military disaster -- there were, perhaps, 50 million killed in World War II. And contributing to getting the war over at the earliest possible date seemed like a very important and noble cause.
Now, when it all happened, that is, when Hiroshima was destroyed and then Nagasaki, and then the emperor surrendered, we were glad it happened, because it did end that terrible war. But at the same time, a lot of people were aware of the fact that that we'd opened up a Pandora's box -- I think it's a good analogy in this case -- and the question was not so much what had happened, but what was going to happen. The young group that I was associated with was not really privy to the discussions going on at high national and political levels, but I soon came to learn about them later.
I came back to Berkeley from Oak Ridge, which is where I was most of the war, to join the Physics Department here. Robert Oppenheimer was teaching here occasionally. Ernest Lawrence was developing the laboratory, changing the direction of the laboratory to its current postwar purposes. And so I came slowly to have some feeling for these issues. But I know much more about them because I read about them, in retrospect, than because I remember them from the time.
The Lawrence Laboratory here -- there wasn't much in the way of political discussion, or was there during this period?
There wasn't as much as there was at some other places, because Lawrence, himself, discouraged it. Especially among the young physicists, like myself -- the graduate students. He, quite honestly, felt that the thing a young graduate student ought to be doing is "sticking his nose to the grindstone in order to become a good scientist." Lawrence would use homilies like that. And that science was a noble and positive profession as well as an exciting one, and that the best way to behave at that age and place in a person's career was to focus on that. It's possible that he pushed that idea, in part, because he knew he wouldn't like the results of political discussions. But beyond that, or more important than that is that's the real Lawrence. That's what he believed.
The setting was one in which, besides being a talented physicist, you also had to a be jack of all trades, I gather.
Yes. The laboratory was focused on the experimental approach, and that included making devices and painting objects and sweeping the floor and a lot of other things like that -- during the war, especially.
How important was this work in nuclear physics for pushing Berkeley to the top academically?
I don't know how to weigh it against other things. But during the period, middle thirties to middle forties, Lawrence and the laboratory were the outstanding feature of the academic landscape at Berkeley.
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