00:00:00 You were born in Rolinda, California in 1922.

00:00:16 What was your family like at that time, and how did you develop an interest in science?

00:00:22 Well, I should say that I was born on a ranch or farm outside of Rolinda, which is a small

00:00:29 rural town 20-30 miles from the nearest city, Fresno, so I was actually born on a ranch.

00:00:36 My father was working the ranch as a farmer, and when I was about one year old, we had

00:00:46 to move because of the post-World War I depression to Los Angeles, and so I was really raised

00:00:52 in Los Angeles, but we always maintained this tie with the Pimentel family farm every summer.

00:01:02 I was fortunate in that my parents were both intelligent people and had this very strong

00:01:10 emphasis on the importance of my brother and me getting as much education as possible.

00:01:17 Each of them, my mother and my father, sensed how much they had lost by not having any education,

00:01:24 and so even though there was not an academic environment by any means, and neither my father

00:01:31 nor my mother had any significant education, the emphasis was always on getting education,

00:01:40 as my father used to say, so you don't have to work with your hands the way I do.

00:01:45 But my specific interest in science developed in high school mainly because I found the

00:01:52 math and physics and chemistry most challenging of the courses I took.

00:01:56 There wasn't any particular teacher in high school who had big influence on me.

00:02:02 It was more the challenge of the subject matter.

00:02:07 Was that more of an interest to you than Latin or English or history?

00:02:13 I have to admit that I was torn because I enjoyed very much debating, for instance,

00:02:21 and in general the humanist subjects were just as interesting to me, and I thought,

00:02:27 gee, wouldn't it be interesting to go into law, perhaps, but finally I had to make a choice.

00:02:36 Now this was just at the tail end of the Depression, and we had a job counselor come

00:02:43 to the high school, and in the science area he said that there were no jobs at all in

00:02:47 math and physics.

00:02:48 What year?

00:02:49 Well, this would have been 1939.

00:02:52 But there were jobs in chemistry, and that's what cast the die for me.

00:02:57 Just this end of the Depression period when one felt, well, one has to do the best one

00:03:04 can with an education to make sure that you can make your way.

00:03:09 When this counselor said chemistry, were you at this point prepared to pursue that as your

00:03:16 field?

00:03:17 Yes.

00:03:18 And it was as a result of that interview and thinking about it, that discussion, that when

00:03:24 I started school at UCLA, I started as a chem engineer.

00:03:30 Chemistry because of this discussion that I mentioned, and engineer because it had to

00:03:34 do with the construction business, which my dad was in, and sort of a fulfillment of his

00:03:41 dreams.

00:03:42 Why did you pick UCLA?

00:03:44 Well, at the time that was the only way I could go to college.

00:03:47 It was this business of the Depression years, and there was no chance.

00:03:54 We lived only six miles from Cal Tech, but there was a tuition there.

00:04:01 So what I did was live at home, so I got free room and board, all the way on the other side

00:04:08 of Los Angeles from UCLA, and I commuted every day.

00:04:12 How did you commute?

00:04:14 Well, I bought a car with my earnings my first summer, and I bought a four-door so that I

00:04:22 could carry as many passengers as possible, and fellow students who were commuting each

00:04:28 gave me some amount, twenty-five cents each or something.

00:04:31 That paid for gas, and so then it was just a matter of incidental monies.

00:04:38 Was this first summer job related to chemistry?

00:04:42 No.

00:04:43 As a matter of fact, the first two years, I just took whatever job I could get, picked

00:04:50 apricots, and I worked in a restaurant up in the Griffith Park area for a while, running

00:05:00 a zoo stand where I served hamburgers and hot dogs and the like.

00:05:07 I had one summer when I worked for an uncle who was a construction engineer as a gopher

00:05:14 type thing, and that was the most technical thing I did.

00:05:18 But then after I got to the junior level, UCLA was a marvelous place for an undergraduate

00:05:26 at the time, because they had few graduate students, and they brought what they considered

00:05:32 to be promising young undergraduates into the teaching activities.

00:05:37 So from then on, I was engaged in some kind of teaching activity during the summers.

00:05:43 Were there any particular professors at UCLA that influenced you?

00:05:47 Yes, there certainly were.

00:05:49 The first academic job I had was with the sophomore quantitative analysis prof, a man

00:05:55 named Kroll.

00:05:58 He brought me in as an instructor, and I'd walk around the lab helping the students.

00:06:04 And then worked me into undergraduate research already at my junior level.

00:06:10 One day, as an aside, he took me in his office and showed me a notebook of a former student

00:06:19 that he'd had, that had just exactly the same trajectory as I had, and as he'd started

00:06:25 with Kroll at the same time, did the same sorts of things and so on.

00:06:29 And he showed me this with great pride, this notebook, and I looked at it, and I was very

00:06:34 fond of Kroll, and so I acted as though this made a great impression on me, but I had no

00:06:39 idea who it was.

00:06:40 It was Glenn Seaborg, had done the same thing.

00:06:43 And how old was Glenn Seaborg at the time?

00:06:45 Well, see, he would have been, you know, he was a few years ahead of me, and he would

00:06:49 have been the same age.

00:06:50 I was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, something like that.

00:06:54 But I'd never heard of Glenn Seaborg at the time, so it made only an impression on me.

00:07:01 Anyway, there was a second prof who taught physical chemistry, and his name was J.B.

00:07:08 Ramsey, and everybody called him Justify Briefly Ramsey, because he always added on

00:07:15 his test questions, Justify Briefly.

00:07:18 And he was a thought-provoking prof.

00:07:21 He used to—I used to go into his office, and we'd have big, long discussions about

00:07:25 what it all meant, you know, and he had as much time as I wanted.

00:07:30 And I ended up acting as a teaching assistant for him in a physical chemistry course, and

00:07:37 also in a physics course on thermodynamics.

00:07:41 Were you a straight-A student?

00:07:43 Well, I can't say yes to that, because I struggled with German, and I was very insistent

00:07:51 that my curriculum include some courses in the humanities.

00:07:56 And in general, I didn't struggle for A's in those courses, but I took maybe twenty,

00:08:04 thirty units above what I needed for graduation in order to be able to take courses in philosophy

00:08:08 and economics and English and so on.

00:08:10 Why did you think that that was important, since you were obviously headed towards being

00:08:16 a chemist, and that's what you were best at, and here you were taking courses that

00:08:22 required more work and where you might not be quite as good at?

00:08:26 Well, I think it had to do with what I mentioned earlier when I was in high school.

00:08:31 I had some doubts as to whether I really wanted to be, so to speak, just a scientist.

00:08:36 I felt the humanist end of things was just as interesting to me, and I felt just somehow

00:08:44 at that relatively naive adolescent age that I'd be losing an opportunity if I didn't

00:08:52 get some of these courses in.

00:08:53 Can you recall a particular humanist course that had an influence on your life or on your

00:08:59 thinking?

00:09:01 I guess the only one I can really mention is a course in philosophy department on comparative

00:09:08 religion, and, you know, appropriate to that age, I was in a very questioning, pondering

00:09:15 mood about religion, and I found that a very delightful course.

00:09:22 Not particularly because of the prof, but because of the subject matter.

00:09:27 Okay, so you graduated from UCLA.

00:09:29 In 1939.

00:09:30 1939.

00:09:31 So you started, really, in 1930.

00:09:34 Pardon me.

00:09:35 I'm sorry.

00:09:36 I started UCLA in 1939, graduated in February of 1943.

00:09:41 Okay, and from there you went to the Manhattan Project.

00:09:44 Right.

00:09:45 How did that come about?

00:09:46 Well, one of the profs that I had an enormous respect for was named Saul Winstein at UCLA.

00:09:55 And he had been a co-student with Glenn Seaborg, and Glenn was trying to get promising young

00:10:05 people to come up and work on the Manhattan Project, and so Winstein more or less recruited

00:10:11 me to the Manhattan Project, but he couldn't tell me anything about it.

00:10:15 The only thing he could say was, it's important work, but I can't say any more than that.

00:10:19 And that was when I heard the name Glenn Seaborg again, see, because now I was to work for

00:10:25 Glenn Seaborg, but I still had no idea what he did or who he was.

00:10:29 And so I finally decided that the chance to work at Berkeley on what seemed to be an important

00:10:36 project was worth the lowest salary I got offered in any job offer.

00:10:41 So you had other jobs?

00:10:43 Oh, yes, yeah.

00:10:44 There was no problem getting a job.

00:10:46 What kind of money was involved?

00:10:49 Well, I think, if I recall correctly, that the top salary I was offered was $235 a month,

00:10:55 and the Manhattan Project job carried $170 a month.

00:11:01 Was it an appeal to you about it, since you didn't know what was involved and it was secretive?

00:11:07 Well, it just had to do with my confidence in Winstein that he said it was important.

00:11:11 Oh, I have to say that my brother was in the Air Force at the time, and I felt guilty about

00:11:17 not actually doing anything active toward the war, because he was in it.

00:11:22 Why weren't you in the war?

00:11:25 Well, I had as my original plan to join the Air Force immediately after graduation,

00:11:33 and the girl I was going with at the time indicated she would go along with that

00:11:40 if we got married before I graduated, so I got married in my senior year.

00:11:45 By the time graduation came around, she had talked me out of joining the Air Force.

00:11:51 I must say, too, that this goes back to my father.

00:11:56 I had a discussion with him one time about this plan to join the Air Force.

00:12:04 He made a very philosophical remark that I always considered to be a measure of his depth,

00:12:12 even though he had no more than about a fourth grade education.

00:12:17 He said, you know, you picture this aviation business as a romantic, exciting thing,

00:12:24 and you don't think about the fact that if you go up and shoot down another plane,

00:12:29 you kill the human being.

00:12:32 And that made me think so.

00:12:34 But, I mean, how did you—wasn't there a draft?

00:12:39 Well, because I had the science education, and scientists were in such need,

00:12:44 I was able to get, first of all, enough time to finish my college studies.

00:12:51 And then, as it turned out, the draft problem was not a serious one,

00:12:57 as long as I took a job in an industry that was considered to be important to the war.

00:13:03 So you moved to Berkeley.

00:13:05 Right.

00:13:07 What was Berkeley like at that time, and what did you do your first year here?

00:13:12 The first three months, I learned later, were associated with an FBI check,

00:13:19 before they could tell me anything about what the project was all about.

00:13:26 So I worked for three months learning new lab techniques

00:13:29 that were appropriate to what I was going to do,

00:13:31 but with no idea whatsoever what I was doing.

00:13:34 And I found that very frustrating,

00:13:36 and so I got myself a weekend job on a graveyard shift

00:13:43 in the Moore Dry Dock Company down here in Oakland,

00:13:48 as a boilermakers' helper.

00:13:50 So at least I'd feel I was helping build ships or something, you know.

00:13:53 And then after three months, Wendell Lattimer, who was the head of the project,

00:13:58 called me in and told me and two other youngsters, young fellows,

00:14:03 who started at the same time,

00:14:05 who were working on plutonium and neptunium,

00:14:08 and what it was for and so on,

00:14:10 and that it was extremely important that we get there before the Germans did.

00:14:15 And so I quit my boilermakers' helper's job that next weekend.

00:14:20 Did you have any concept beyond this of what the Manhattan Project was about?

00:14:26 Well, in the course of the next nine months,

00:14:28 yeah, I worked on it for one year,

00:14:31 but in the course of the next nine months,

00:14:33 it became more and more clear that we were trying to invent

00:14:38 a new and better way of killing people.

00:14:41 And I don't know the extent to which my father's remark influenced me,

00:14:47 but in any event, during that time,

00:14:50 I grappled with this problem of whether I was interested in doing creative work

00:14:59 to develop an atomic bomb.

00:15:01 And after just 12 months, three months plus the nine months,

00:15:06 after I knew what I was doing,

00:15:08 I went into Lattimer's office and told him that I didn't want to work on the bomb.

00:15:11 I was going to quit and join the military services

00:15:16 in the most active job I could find,

00:15:19 where I stood the best chance of making a tiny help

00:15:23 toward ending the war before the bomb got there.

00:15:26 And Lattimer was very thoughtful about it and sympathetic

00:15:30 and said, this is a personal decision.

00:15:32 If you really mean it and think it over,

00:15:36 I'll make it possible for you to do that.

00:15:39 Were there others who influenced you in your thinking?

00:15:42 Not really.

00:15:43 Was this discussed much?

00:15:45 Oh yeah, a lot of people were discussing the bomb,

00:15:50 but it was always in the context at that time.

00:15:54 It should have been late 1943,

00:15:56 but the desperate problem is that Germany might get it first.

00:16:01 And I was one person who decided,

00:16:06 even though there was that threat on us,

00:16:09 I didn't want to try to bring this into existence.

00:16:13 So I decided to get into the most active thing I could find in the military,

00:16:18 which turned out to be submarines,

00:16:21 and see if I couldn't help end the war that way.

00:16:24 Were there any female co-workers at the Manhattan Project?

00:16:30 Not that I remember.

00:16:33 I guess the person I worked with when I first got there

00:16:36 was a prof named Bob Connick.

00:16:41 And I was very, very fortunate in working with him

00:16:45 because he had a big influence on me from a scientific point of view.

00:16:50 His wife was a scientist on the project,

00:16:54 but her name was then Frances Spaeth.

00:16:57 But I didn't really work with her much.

00:17:08 What was it like working for the Navy,

00:17:11 in the Office of Naval Research?

00:17:14 I hesitate to say this because it sounds militaristic,

00:17:18 and if there was anything I was, it was not militaristic.

00:17:21 But I had just a marvelous experience for a person my age.

00:17:26 The first thing they did was put me into radar,

00:17:30 at the officer level.

00:17:33 And the implication was that I had to learn some electronics.

00:17:36 So they sent me the first five months to Princeton,

00:17:40 where we were taught by the regular Princeton staff faculty.

00:17:45 And then from there, five months at MIT,

00:17:48 where we got into more equipment type things.

00:17:52 And so there was ten months of really good education,

00:17:56 in which I learned a tremendous amount of electronics.

00:18:00 And then, from there, I got into submarine school,

00:18:05 spent three months in an old submarine in Target,

00:18:09 acting as a target for anti-submarine warfare,

00:18:14 down in Key West, so I had some opportunity to go to sea.

00:18:18 And then finished up sub-school, just as the war ended.

00:18:24 So I never got an active war patrol.

00:18:27 But anyway, let me continue that,

00:18:30 because it was just as the war ended,

00:18:33 and I happened to end up number one in the class in sub-school.

00:18:37 So I got my choice of duty,

00:18:41 and I picked a submarine that was on war patrol in Japanese water at the time.

00:18:46 So as soon as I got finished with sub-school,

00:18:50 they put me on a plane and flew me out to Pearl Harbor.

00:18:53 From there, I was supposed to join the sub.

00:18:56 The war ended, and the sub was on its way back,

00:18:59 and they told me there's no point in going to join it.

00:19:02 And so I spent a couple months at Pearl Harbor doing nothing.

00:19:07 And I decided this is a waste of my time, and the Navy's time, and everybody's time.

00:19:11 So I wrote a letter, feeling it was infinitely futile,

00:19:15 to the Navy Department, saying I had this year on the Manhattan Project,

00:19:19 and they ought to find some place where that could be used to the Navy's advantage.

00:19:23 And astonishingly, in this moment where they're bringing thousands and thousands of people home,

00:19:29 this letter didn't get lost,

00:19:31 and within a couple weeks, I was on my way back to Washington, D.C.,

00:19:36 to a new office called Office of Research and Inventions.

00:19:40 And it was just being formed.

00:19:44 When I got there, they didn't really know exactly who was going to be there,

00:19:48 what they were going to do.

00:19:50 Shortly after, it was changed to the Office of Naval Research.

00:19:53 So I was there when Office of Naval Research was founded.

00:19:57 And they told me when I arrived that I was a nuclear physicist.

00:20:01 So I started studying nuclear physics as fast as I could.

00:20:05 But you weren't a nuclear physicist.

00:20:07 No, I was—if you want, I could be said to be a nuclear chemist, as Seaborg is.

00:20:13 But anyway, I was very interested in the field,

00:20:17 and had this background on the Manhattan Project.

00:20:20 But nobody would tell me what to do.

00:20:23 So I decided that I'd start going to the McMahon Committee hearings in the Senate.

00:20:29 They were trying to decide at the time

00:20:31 whether it would be civilian or military control of atomic energy.

00:20:35 And I was—