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When Agnew arrived at Los Alamos in March 1943, there were no invalids, no idle rich, no paved roads and not much room.
"Beverly and I shared a bunkhouse with one other couple and a fella from the University of Nebraska, a guy named Jorgensen, who would eat only Chinese food. He elected himself cook. We ate Chinese food three times a day, Chinese oatmeal for breakfast. He cooked on a hot plate and slept in the hall, while the two couples had one small bedroom each. But it worked great. I loved the place. Easterners had a time getting used to all this primitive discomfort, but I was in hog heaven. It was also a completely democratic society. Oppie saw to that--big shots and flunkies like me all living together. Every week we had a colloquium in one of our two movie theaters, where we would be told what everyone was doing. Once in a while some military guy would come by and give us a pep talk.
"Soon as we got there our job was to put together an accelerator, which was brought from the University of Illinois in Champaign. A team of us--Bernie Waldman from Notre Dame and John Manley, who'd come from Illinois and Columbia, and people from Nebraska and Wisconsin--we all pitched in. We worked six days a week to get the Bomb first. There's been a lot of stories that maybe we had the Bomb and were sitting on it, that we could have used it in Germany but because we're Anglo-Saxons or whatever, that we only went against the Asians. That's not true. As soon as we got the Bomb we were ready to drop it.
"First we had to figure out how the thing would be designed. Everyone was working just as fast as possible--either on the gun-assembly method, which was used for the uranium bomb in Hiroshima, or on the implosion method, which we used for the plutonium bomb at Trinity and later in Nagasaki. [George] Kistiakowsky pooh-poohed the implosion idea at first; he was a real tough cookie. But then he got behind it. Both bombs were going ahead full steam."
As it turned out, the Hiroshima bomb would be the only one of its type America ever built or used, uranium being that much more difficult to obtain than plutonium. One of the spurs to the American atom bomb effort had been a report in 1943 that Hitler had ordered uranium shipped out of mines in Belgium. It was also taken for granted that the gun-assembly method--one piece of purified uranium (uranium-235) fired into another at terrific speed--would work, so the Hiroshima bomb was never tested till the morning it was dropped.
While the people in Los Alamos were working to produce their bomb, physicists in Japan were attempting to produce theirs. Professor Hidetake Kakihana of Sophia University in Tokyo was Agnew's age when he too was enlisted by his country in 1941 to assist with nuclear fission experiments at a secret cyclotron in Tokyo under the directorship of Yoshio Nishina, Japan's Oppenheimer. Unlike Agnew, Kakihana and many of his colleagues were reluctant to produce an atom bomb for their government because they had great distaste for the military regime. The physicists worked, Kakihana says today, with deliberate slowness.