The Manhattan and Elsie Projects 107 



Who were the other people involved significantly in the project"? 



There was the Head of the Terminal Ballistics Laboratory, who was here 

 most of the time during the Elsie Project and was a naval officer. Commander 

 [Ben] Sarver, who later was Admiral Sarver before he retired. The first civilian 

 division head in the beginning of the Special Projects Group was Don [L.] 

 Winchell. He left here in, I think, 1953 and went out to Los Alamos. Then I 

 took over. I was Plate Battery Division Head before he left, and then I was 

 shifted from Plate Battery Division Head to Special Projects Division Head. As 

 Plate Battery Division Head, I was in charge of all the tests on the atomic 

 weaponry going on out in the battery areas. 



We spent quite a lot of time in the Butler hut on the special projects. We 

 finished up the work on the MARK 9 1 in 1956 when the testing and evaluation 

 were finished and the design was finalized. After 1956, the atomic weapons 

 work at Dahlgren came to an end, and as far as I know, the Navy has not worked 

 on the design and development of atomic weapons since that time. That was 

 sort of an unusual case. I'm sure the Navy has done bits and pieces, and, as Dr. 

 Kemper said, a lot of the calculations for people working at Oak Ridge, 

 Redstone, and Los Alamos were done here in our computing facility because we 

 have one of the best capabilities in the nation to do this type of work. This 

 continued, I'm sure, after 1956 until other facilities got their own big cal- 

 culators and didn't have to come here. 



That was really the time when the first major reorganization of Dahlgren 

 took place and Dahlgren evolved from a naval proving ground concept into the 

 naval laboratory concept. After 1956, after the work in the Special Projects 

 Division tapered off, I was then assigned as Development Division Head in the 

 Terminal Ballistics Laboratory. 



How many hours a week did you work on the atomic projects'? 



There were long hours involved — about 60 hours a week. Among other 

 things, we were trying, and were requested at the time, to consider new designs 

 for these types of weapons — designs for devices that would not exactly pene- 

 trate deeply but would be capable of impacting a hard surface like an aircraft 

 runway and not ricocheting off. They were to come to a skidding halt on the 

 runway and lie there until they detonated. Of course when you drop an atomic 

 weapon from an airplane, you've got to give the guy who dropped it an 

 opportunity to get out of the area because of the large area involved and the 

 things that result. These devices have delayed fuzes. 



Admiral Parsons dropped the first one. 



That one was retarded by a parachute. It dropped very slowly, and they had 



