When the Army assigned him to work on the top-secret atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M., Ben Hayward didn't know what to expect. But he was thrilled.
"It was exciting," said the 86-year-old Yakima resident. "Here I was on the frontier of science and working with world-class people."
Hayward joined the Army Reserves in 1943 while attending Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. After basic infantry in Texas, he was transferred to Los Alamos to work in a special engineer detachment to the Manhattan Project.
The sole purpose of this project was to produce the first atomic bomb, and to do it before the Russians or Germans. More than 130,000 scientists, engineers, chemists and others worked in secret to develop the technology, costing the United States nearly $2 billion.
Hayward was a metallurgist, charged with developing the process to make metals for the first nuclear weapons. He processed chemical compounds like U-235 fluoride made at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and the plutonium nitrate from Hanford.
Because he was working with toxic substances, he had to wear a face mask, booties, rubber gloves and other protective clothing. Despite all the precautions, he ingested a dangerous level of plutonium. He submitted to urine tests for the next two decades, and boasts of no ill effects.
"I can't be buried in Oregon," he quipped. "I exceed the hazardous waste limit."
When he was working on the atomic bomb, Hayward said, he knew it would be used on Japan. But he didn't worry about the long-term consequences or how the bomb would affect the environment, at least not then.
"We were all anti-Japanese, heavily," he said about Americans' mind-set at the time. "So we wanted to get it done as fast as we could. We didn't like the Japanese after their bombing of Pearl Harbor."
Another benefit of using the bomb was that it would save American lives, he said.
"We knew it would take a half a million to a million Americans to invade Japan," he said. "... They wouldn't give up. We had to get over and make them realize it was give up or be bombed to death, and that's what we won by."
After the war, Hayward continued to work for seven years at Los Alamos. He spent the remainder of his career developing nuclear reactor fuels.
Today, the married father of three grown children believes nuclear technology can be credited to advances in power production and medical improvements. But he still worries about the technology getting into the wrong hands.
"I'm scared stiff that it will go off before I die," he said. "It could be done in a suitcase."
* Erin Snelgrove can be reached at 577-7684 or esnelgrove@yakimaherald.com.
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