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An Incident From World War II (Reprinted from a 2002 newsletter)
By Rod Sime
During the last week in September, 2001, my wife Ruth and I were relaxing at dinner in the restaurant of the Hotel Galles in Rome, Italy. We shared a table with Dr. Harold Agnew and his wife Elizabeth. Earlier that day, Harold and Ruth had given papers at a week long conference celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Enrico Fermi, Italy's most famous twentieth-century physicist and Nobel laureate.
Fermi left Fascist Italy for the USA about 1940, Harold, now in his eighties, had been one of Fermi's graduate students and worked on the first atomic pile, built secretly in the squash courts of the University of Chicago in the early forties. When Fermi went to Los Alamos to work on the first atomic bombs, Harold went with him, and also worked as a physicist building the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. For a while he also lived in Fermi's Los Alamos home, doing odd jobs including babysitting.
As a scientist myself, I already knew many aspects of Fermi's Life. But I'd never heard of Harold Agnew until that week in September. I remembered the name of the B-29 bomber that dropped the first bomb on August 6, 1945. The Enola Gay was piloted by Air Force Col. Paul Tibbets. What I didn't know was that there were two civilians on the Enola Gay. One of them was graduate student Harold Agnew and the other was physicist Luis Alvarez.
For that historic flight, Agnew and Alvarez were dressed up in Air Force first lieutenant's uniforms so that if the plane crashed in Japan, they would be held as prisoners of war, instead of being summarily shot as civilian spies. I asked Harold if he felt anything in the airplane at the moment of the explosion He replied that he did not feel anything, but that he heard the explosion. I asked what the sound was like. He said that if you were in a fifty-five gallon drum with the lid on, and someone hit it with a sledge hammer, that s what it sounded like.
So what happened to graduate students Harold Agnew and Luis Alvarez? A!varez became a professor of Physics at UC Berkeley. He designed the Bevatron, used to discover many new elements. In 1968 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics Agnew's career was more political and administratlve. He was a science advisor to President's Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jerry Ford, Jimmy Carter and George Bush. Jimmy Carter appointed Agnew Science Advisor to NATO Supreme Allied Commander. He served as a state senator in New Mexico. From 1970 to 1979 he was the Director of the Los Alamos Laboratory. What will I always remember of that week in Rome? Bernini's Ecstasy of Sf. Teresa in the Coronaro Chapel of the Church of Santa Maria delia Vittoria ... and Harold Agnew.