History: Bradbury/Eisenbud/Watters

[Mike Grissom <mikeg@SLAC.Stanford.EDU>]

The following radiation sciences related professionals passed 
away this year:

----------SanJoseMercuryNews/8-22-97/NewYorkTimes byline

Norris Edwin Bradbury, chief of weapons lab

Norris Edwin Bradbury, a physicist who reluctantly followed
J. Robert Oppenheimer as the director of the nation's first
nuclear weapons research center and then served longer in the
job than anyone else, died on Wednesday at his home in Los
Alamos, N.M. He was 88.

Mr. Bradbury took over in 1945 as the director of what was
soon billed as "the best-equipped physics laboratory in the
world."  He had been invited by Oppenheimer to do so and,
after confering with his family, agreed to stay on for six
months or until a permanent successor was found, whichever
came first.

What came was 25 years on the job, enough time for a wartime
crash project to grow into Los Alamos National Laboratory
[LANL].  Mr. Bradbury oversaw the transition and retired in
1970 when the Atomic Energy Commission presented him with its
highest honor, the Enrico Fermi Award.

During his tenure, the laboratory developed the first
thermonuclear weapons and continued to break ground with
research in both nuclear and non-nuclear weaponry, in addition
to building a solid foundation for basic research.

----------SanJoseMercuryNews/8-23-97

EISENBUD, Merril, 82,

an environmental scientist who was the first health and safety
chief of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and the first head
of New York City's Environmental Protection Agency; Friday of
leukemia at the Carolina Meadows retirement community in Chapel
Hill, N.C.  In a career lasting six decades, he also taught and
worked for 25 years at New York University's Institute of
Environmental Medicine upstate, retiring in 1984.  Mr. Eisenbud,
the author of books, book chapters and about 200 scientific
articles, had continued to write and teach.

---

George Watters, atomic bomb engineer (byline Don Brignolo/MNSW)

George Michael Watters was the Manhattan Project's supervising
chemical engineer, and he literally held the key to the reactor
that produced plutonium for the first atomic device tested at
Trinity site in Alamogordo, N.M.

His work for the project was part of a 41-year career with DuPont
Co. that ended with Mr. Watters' retirement in 1978.  ...he died
Thursday of cancer.  He was 82.

Mr. Watters grew up in Washburn, Wis., in the north woods near
Lake Superior.  He joined DuPont shortly after obtaining his
bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering from the
University of Wisconsin--the first member of his family of
loggers to attend college.  He performed many duties and worked
in eight states for DuPont, but it was his war experience that
set him apart.

Early in the war, he and other DuPont engineers began working
on the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government's top-secret program
to develop the world's first atomic bomb.  In Richland, Wash.,
he was a nuclear chemical engineer working on the first atomic
reactor at Hanford, Wash., under the direction of physicist
Enrico Fermi.

"It was so top secret they told my mother for her multiday train
ride to Washington that she was to talk to no one and if asked,
she was to say she was going to visit her husband who was a
shoe salesman in Seattle," recalled his son, Don Watters of
Los Altos [California].

When Mr. Watters and his crew tried to start the reactor to
produce the first controlled chain reaction of plutonium, it
didn't work, his son said, "But Fermi (the Manhattan Project's
leading physicist) simply recalculated the formula by hand on
the back of an envelope and instructed my father to change one
of the settings on the control panel.

"And, it worked--but they didn't know if they'd blow up the
planet or not [sic!].  Nobody had ever done this before, so
this was very serious and risky."

Mr. Watters signed the papers releasing the plutonium that
was used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in
1945.

"He said he had no regrets because he and his colleagues
believed that Nazi Germany was developing a similar weapon,"
his son said.  "Also, they believed that if the U.S. were
to invade Japan, over a million American lives would have
been lost."  ...