Norris Bradbury, the man who made Los Alamos

On his rare breaks from work, Norris Bradbury—who, in 1945, succeeded J. Robert Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (now Los Alamos National Laboratory)—liked to take road trips to remote corners of Latin America.

As Bradbury’s daughter-in-law, Ellen Bradbury-Reid, who took part in a number of these odysseys, sees it, Bradbury was seeking a reprieve from the burdens that came with serving as director of the nation’s preeminent nuclear science laboratory. “I think he wanted to get away and be around people who didn’t treat him like a celebrity,” Bradbury-Reid says.

But any respite Bradbury might have attained on these trips was precarious. Bradbury-Reid recalls one trip to rural Mexico, when the family was in search of a bottle of Bacanora, the famed bootleg agave liquor.

“We were in this tiny town, and a police car comes up behind us,” Bradbury-Reid says. “And Norris says, ‘Either we’re going the wrong way on a one-way street, or something’s gone wrong at Los Alamos.’” On more than one occasion, Bradbury-Reid says, her father-in-law had to leave his vacations early—sometimes by helicopter—to deal with pressing Laboratory business.

Bradbury’s commitment to his work might be even more remarkable for the fact that he was reluctant to become director in the first place. At the end of World War II, Bradbury wasn’t at all certain that he wanted to stay at Los Alamos, where, during the Manhattan Project, he helped to build the world’s first nuclear weapons. Persuaded to accept a 6-month term as director, Bradbury wound up remaining in the role for 25 years—a tenure that makes him, by a comfortable margin, the Laboratory’s longest-serving director to date. (The second longest-serving, Siegfried Hecker, led the Laboratory for 11 years.)

Bradbury’s directorship wasn’t remarkable just for its duration, however. As Los Alamos’ leader, Bradbury helped transform the Laboratory from a hasty wartime project into an enduring institution tasked with safeguarding the nation’s security. Leading the Laboratory during the first decades of the Cold War, Bradbury shepherded Los Alamos through challenges that included the development of the world’s first thermonuclear weapons, an arms race with the Soviet Union, international agreements that established new limits on nuclear testing, and the Laboratory’s diversification into many areas beyond nuclear weapon design.

In a 1983 retrospective on Bradbury’s career in Los Alamos Science, physicist Louis Rosen summarized Bradbury’s legacy succinctly: “Oppenheimer was the founder of this Laboratory. Bradbury was its savior.”

A scientist and a soldier

Born in Santa Barbara, California, in 1909, to a mother who was a schoolteacher and a father who was a jack-of-all-trades (a landscape architect, rancher, and machinist), Bradbury excelled as a student, graduating from Chaffey High School in Ontario, California, at age 16. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Pomona College in Claremont, California, and then a doctorate in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1932. Three years later, he accepted a position as assistant professor of physics at Stanford University. At the time, Bradbury was just 26 years old.

In 1933, Bradbury married Lois Platt, who he’d met as an undergraduate student. In a 1970 profile (in Los Alamos’ The Atom magazine), Bradbury summarized their courtship with his typical lack of sentimentality: “Lois was the sister of my roommate in college. She was engaged to someone else. The engagement fell apart, and I moved in.” The couple remained together for 64 years, until Bradbury’s death in 1997.

While a graduate student, Bradbury followed one of his academic mentors’ examples in joining the U.S. Naval Reserve. In 1941, before the United States entered the Second World War, Bradbury received a commission and was told to report to the Naval Proving Ground in Dahlgren, Virginia. There, Bradbury worked in ballistics—specifically, on engineering the outer casing of bullets and other projectiles.

In 1943, Bradbury’s supervisor, William “Deak” Parsons, disappeared from Dahlgren. It wasn’t until 1944 that Bradbury learned where his supervisor had gone.

“I was suddenly directed to report to Albuquerque,” Bradbury recalled to an interviewer in 1985. “I did so, and there was my old pal, Captain Commodore Parsons.” Parsons took Bradbury to Los Alamos, and—“probably in defiance of all the security regulations”—explained the work underway in Los Alamos (which was known as Project Y of the Manhattan Project). Parsons, who was responsible for Los Alamos’ Ordnance Division, asked, but didn’t order, Bradbury to join the project.

Bradbury recalled experiencing mixed emotions about accepting Parsons’ request. “I was happy at Dahlgren,” he said. “I had sort of a dismal premonition that once I got [to Los Alamos], I would never get away, and that turned out to be right.”

In the end, Bradbury’s sense of duty got the better of him. “I got to thinking about the blue uniform I was wearing, and who was I to argue about where I was assigned?” Bradbury remembered. “I called Parsons and told him I’d take the job.”

The Bradburys—Norris, Lois (who was pregnant with their son David), and sons Jim and John—set out by car for New Mexico. “We started out with six well-worn tires and discarded them as they wore out on the trip,” Bradbury recalled. The family arrived at Los Alamos in the summer of 1944. 

Bradbury wasn’t the only soldier-scientist at the Laboratory. At its height, around 40 percent of Los Alamos’ workforce was members of the Army. Many of these employees worked alongside civilians, helping to design the first nuclear weapons. But Alan Carr, the Laboratory’s senior historian, says that Bradbury’s status as both a physicist and a naval officer likely gave him a distinct sense of the Manhattan Project’s urgency. 

“He was duty-oriented,” Carr says. “As a soldier, I think he recognized the weight that went with the work they were doing.”

Bradbury ended up playing a key role in the Manhattan Project. At Project Y, researchers worked on two nuclear weapon designs. The first was a uranium gun-type weapon, in which two pieces of uranium were fired together to initiate a nuclear chain reaction. The second design was more complicated: a plutonium implosion device, in which a plutonium core, or pit, was compressed to create nuclear energy, or yield.

Scientists worried that this latter design might not work, necessitating a full-scale test of a plutonium implosion device—what came to be known as the Trinity test. Bradbury was responsible for assembling all the nonnuclear parts of the device, which was called the Gadget.

The test was conducted at the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range, southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. As the first-ever nuclear explosion, Trinity ushered the world into the atomic age. In contrast to Oppenheimer, who famously claimed to have reacted to the successful test by recalling lines from the Bhagavad Gita, Bradbury’s reaction was straightforward. 

“For me to say I had any deep emotional thoughts about Trinity… I didn’t,” he said. “I was just damned pleased that it went off.”

Taking the helm

After two U.S. nuclear weapons were detonated over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Japan surrendered, bringing the Second World War to a close. Suddenly, Los Alamos was known the world over as the place where researchers had designed those weapons.

In the war’s aftermath, rumors swirled in the community of Los Alamos, which by that point numbered a few thousand people, that the Laboratory might close. Many of the Laboratory’s scientists—including Oppenheimer—were eager to leave New Mexico and return to the universities from which they’d come. 

According to Laboratory historian Nicholas Lewis, however, General Leslie Groves—who led the Manhattan Project—never considered shuttering Los Alamos.

“Groves didn’t believe that the scientists should all go back to their universities,” Lewis says. “He wanted the Laboratory to continue stockpiling weapons, and he wanted the weapons developed during the war to be improved upon.”

Even before the war’s end, Groves had begun considering who might assume the Laboratory’s helm after Oppenheimer departed. Groves conferred with Oppenheimer, and the two agreed on a replacement. One afternoon in mid-September 1945, 36-year-old Bradbury was summoned to Oppenheimer’s office and given a job offer.

Bradbury’s eldest son, Jim, was 10 years old when his father was offered Los Alamos’ top job. Jim remembers his father carefully weighing the question of whether to assume the directorship. “He and my mother talked about it a whole lot,” Jim says. For one thing, Bradbury was still a professor at Stanford University, where, before the war began, the family had built a house.

But among other reasons the Bradbury family decided to stay was their affinity for the place in which they’d come to live. “They loved New Mexico,” Jim says.

In the end, Bradbury agreed to take the job of director, but only for six months or until Congress could pass legislation that determined the Laboratory’s future. A tempest followed when the University of California, which operated the Laboratory, discovered that Groves and Oppenheimer had appointed Bradbury without the University’s input.

“They were madder than hell,” Bradbury recalled. Ultimately, though, the University decided, in Bradbury’s words, “'We’ll give the poor bastard a little while to see what he does.’ So they politely left me alone.” In years to come, Bradbury would earn the University’s approval, befriending Robert Underhill, who for many years served as secretary-treasurer of the University’s board of regents.

In his inaugural months as director, Bradbury faced significant challenges. The first had to do with staffing. 

During the Manhattan Project, Project Y had swelled to some 3,000 employees (far more than the 100 that Oppenheimer initially thought necessary). With the war over, some of the Laboratory’s leaders and scientists left immediately, eager to return to their academic laboratories, as Bradbury had been tempted to do. Others were members of the military who would soon be discharged. And some employees, according to Bradbury, were simply waiting for better opportunities and “not doing a stroke of work.”

To deal with these staffing woes, Bradbury made two decisions. The first was to commit himself fully to the Laboratory. “I decided I couldn’t run a laboratory that would have a future unless I was willing to put my own future on it,” Bradbury said. “It needed a man who believed in it himself before others could believe in it.”

Bradbury’s second decision was to “shake the tree,” as he put it. Although the government had promised to pay the moving expenses of anyone who wanted to leave Los Alamos, Bradbury decided to give this offer an expiration date—September 1946—to encourage indecisive employees to make up their minds.

Altogether, some 1,400 employees stayed at the Laboratory. “They stayed,” Bradbury said, “because, to some extent, they shared my opinions of what the Laboratory was supposed to do.”

What did Bradbury think that the Laboratory was supposed to do? In the aftermath of the war, Bradbury charted a course that sought a balance between short-, intermediate-, and long-term goals. In a 1948 speech at Pomona College (his undergraduate alma mater), Bradbury explained the importance of focusing on a breadth of endeavors. “If war is imminent, production is important; if in the middle future, development must be emphasized; but the long-range strength lies in research,” he said.

Bradbury’s vision for the Laboratory—as a facility that would balance production, development, and research—was guided by his sense of the postwar world’s uncertainty. In the first year after the war’s end, the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence expanded in Eastern Europe. Indeed, while the United States and many of its allies were demobilizing, the Soviet Union seemed focused on consolidating its wartime gains.

Nuclear weapons, Bradbury felt, would play a key role in hedging against Soviet expansionism. As the only facility in the country capable of developing and producing nuclear weapons, Los Alamos had an obligation to continue supplying the nation with the tools to achieve its postwar aims.

“Bradbury saw that the United States was going to be negotiating new power structures,” Lewis says. “He thought that the U.S. should negotiate from as strong a position as possible.”

Early struggles

In the first months after the war, Bradbury had his hands full with other challenges, too. In February 1946, the pipes that carried water to Los Alamos froze for several weeks. Tanker trucks carried water from the Rio Grande into Los Alamos for distribution throughout the town. These and other privations (including the town’s muddy streets, hastily built housing, and isolation from the outside world) proved too much for some residents. Among those who chose to leave that winter was physicist (and future Nobel Prize winner) Hans Bethe, who had led the Laboratory’s Theoretical Division during the war.

Groves, recognizing that better living conditions would be necessary for the Laboratory to attract the personnel it needed, greenlighted major investments in housing and infrastructure in the Los Alamos townsite. (The town of Los Alamos remained property of the Atomic Energy Commission [AEC] and closed to the public until 1957, when the fence that separated it from the outside world was removed.)

At the same time that Bradbury worked to manage staff and deal with frozen water pipes, the Laboratory was also tasked with planning the first nuclear tests to take place after Trinity. These tests, called Operation Crossroads, were to be conducted at the Marshall Islands’ Bikini Atoll in the summer of 1946.

John Hopkins, who began working at the Laboratory as a student in 1955—and who, over the course of some four decades at the Lab, would come to direct its testing and weapons programs—says that Bradbury’s feelings about Crossroads were decidedly mixed. Crossroads was conducted to test the effects of nuclear weapons like the ones detonated at the end of World War II. “Bradbury felt that was a waste of time,” Hopkins says. “His thinking was that if you dropped a nuclear weapon on a ship, it was going to sink.”

Whatever Bradbury’s personal feelings about Crossroads, he recognized that the test series had the potential to galvanize the Laboratory’s remaining staff by giving its post-Manhattan Project workforce a common goal. “It gave me something to put people on, and I needed all the good people I could get,” Bradbury said. The Crossroads tests took place in July 1946 and provided the U.S. Navy with valuable information on the effects of a nuclear blast on or near their ships (some of which did, in fact, sink).

In the first years of the Cold War, Los Alamos worked to improve the weapons designed during the Manhattan Project. When these weapons were used in Japan, they were so complex that scientists from the Laboratory had to help assemble the bombs just before they were dropped. Accordingly, one of the Laboratory’s priorities was to refine its weapon designs, turning its devices into bombs that could be easily handled and deployed by the military.

Some of this work would take place elsewhere. By the time World War II ended, much of the work to prepare the weapons for combat use had moved south from Los Alamos to an airbase in Albuquerque, New Mexico, forming the basis of what is today Sandia National Laboratories. Outsourcing certain weapons production processes helped ensure that the nation retained its ability to make nuclear weapons should there be an accident at the Laboratory. However, a shortage of space in mountainous Los Alamos played the biggest role in the decision to move certain functions elsewhere.

“It was simply impossible to keep on increasing the activities at Los Alamos,” Groves recalled of the decision. “Relief was essential.”

Other Laboratory functions soon moved offsite, too. In 1951, the Pantex Plant opened in Amarillo, Texas, becoming the facility tasked with assembling and dismantling the nation’s nuclear weapons. Two years later, in 1953, the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, Colorado, became the nation’s primary producer of the plutonium pits that are the cores of nuclear weapons.

These facilities, and others across the country, helped ensure that by the early 1950s, Los Alamos’ focus had settled squarely on researching and designing, rather than producing, the United States’ nuclear weapons.

Bradbury as a leader

As director, Bradbury was known for his humility. “He had little patience for the perks of top management,” wrote physicists Harold Agnew (who succeeded Bradbury as director) and Raemer Schreiber (who eventually served as the Laboratory’s associate director) in a 1998 biographical memoir of Bradbury.

“His office was strictly functional; no carpeting, no lounge chairs, simply GI office furniture,” Agnew and Schreiber wrote. “His usual attire was casual; in fact, if he appeared for work in a business suit, it meant he was expecting VIPs or that he was about to leave on official business. His office door was open all day, except when he was in conference. He answered his phone himself unless he was already on the line.”

Although Bradbury had a soldier’s self-discipline, he wasn’t interested in enforcing the kind of rank-based hierarchy that he’d experienced in the Navy. 

“He treated everybody exactly the same,” Hopkins says, noting that Bradbury’s democratic spirit made him popular with the Laboratory’s workforce. “The feeling at the Lab was, ‘He really cares about us.’”

Bradbury’s unpretentious attitude extended to his life outside the Laboratory. For years, he drove a battered Ford Model A to and from work. With his sons, he enjoyed disassembling and reassembling the car on weekends, and when the vehicle finally grew too decrepit to use, he donated it to the auto shop at Los Alamos High School.

Stories abound about Bradbury’s down-to-earth demeanor. One anecdote involves the wife of a new Los Alamos employee who called the Zia Company (which at that time carried out maintenance in Los Alamos’ government-owned housing) to help fix a broken thermostat.

By chance, Bradbury had been dispatched by his wife, Lois, to this new employee’s house to deliver a message. Bradbury arrived at the house before the Zia Company repairman and, when prompted by the new employee’s wife, fixed the thermostat. Having mistaken Bradbury for the repairman, the wife was chagrined when the real repairman arrived shortly thereafter.

Because the town of Los Alamos existed to support the Laboratory, the town’s social life was inevitably shaped by the Laboratory, too. This meant that the Bradbury household naturally played an important role in the greater Los Alamos community. 

Having inhabited a hastily built apartment during the war, the Bradburys later moved into a house in Los Alamos’ Bathtub Row neighborhood (so named because the homes were the only ones in wartime Los Alamos that had bathtubs). In the late 1940s, the Bradburys moved into a spacious new home that commanded an impressive view of the woods and mountains around Los Alamos. Norris and Lois lived in the house for the rest of their lives.

Jim Bradbury recalls that his mother was regularly tasked with organizing social functions. He says that every other month or so, the Bradburys would host a party to welcome new hires to the Laboratory—parties that were enduringly popular with Los Alamos’ workforce.

“When I’d talk to people years later, that party was one of the things they’d always mention,” Jim says.

The hydrogen bomb controversy

The first four years of Bradbury’s directorship were largely taken up with establishing the Laboratory on a firm footing, ensuring that the town of Los Alamos was an appealing place to live, and improving on the designs of the nuclear weapons deployed at the end of World War II. In support of the latter goal, in 1948, Los Alamos led Operation Sandstone, a series of three nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. But the Laboratory’s priorities shifted suddenly after the Cold War began in earnest.

On September 24, 1954, Bradbury gave a press conference in which his tone was unusually defensive.

The occasion was the publication of a book, entitled The Hydrogen Bomb: The Men, The Menace, The Mechanism, by Time magazine journalists James Shepley and Clay Blair Jr. According to the book, Los Alamos had dragged its heels in developing the world’s first thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bomb. (Unlike the fission weapons developed during the Manhattan Project, thermonuclear weapons use fission followed by fusion to produce far greater explosive power.)

The hydrogen bomb debate began in the aftermath of the first Soviet nuclear test, Joe-1, in August 1949. After the test, the General Advisory Committee (GAC) to the AEC, which was led by Oppenheimer, debated whether the United States should develop thermonuclear weapons.

In October 1949, the GAC released a report recommending that the United States not develop thermonuclear weapons. In January 1950, however, President Truman overrode this recommendation and expressed his support for the hydrogen bomb’s development. Thermonuclear research, which had always been part of Los Alamos’ work, soon assumed pride of place at the Laboratory.

Physicist and Project Y veteran Edward Teller had returned to the Laboratory in 1949. Teller had been fascinated by the possibility of developing a thermonuclear weapon since before the Manhattan Project began. However, he soon clashed with Bradbury, whom he felt had given him insufficient authority over the thermonuclear program. 

Frustrated with Bradbury and the Laboratory, Teller left Los Alamos again in 1951. He set about helping to found a new national laboratory, which today is known as Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Teller also became a key source for Shepley and Blair’s critical book.

On November 1, 1952, Los Alamos conducted the world’s first test of a thermonuclear device, code-named Ivy Mike, in the Marshall Islands. The device used a design that Teller had developed in collaboration with mathematician Stanislaw Ulam at Los Alamos. 

Shepley and Blair’s book, however, suggested that the hydrogen bomb could have been developed much sooner.

“Shepley and Blair’s book came very close to accusing the Laboratory of sabotaging the hydrogen bomb effort,” Lewis says. “The book imputed that Teller alone was responsible for the bomb and implied that Livermore had invented it.”

Bradbury resented Shepley and Blair’s suggestion that a thermonuclear weapon might have been developed any faster. At the 1954 press conference, Bradbury explained that thermonuclear weapons had been researched both during the Manhattan Project and after the war. He further noted that after the Soviet Union’s first nuclear detonation, the Laboratory voluntarily adopted a six-day work week in order to develop a thermonuclear weapon sooner.

“THERMONUCLEAR WORK NEVER STOPPED,” reads Bradbury’s prepared remarks for the press conference (the capitalization is his). He added that if the Laboratory had ceased developing fission weapons to focus only on developing thermonuclear weapons, “The fission weapons stockpile would have been but a fraction of its present size. The essential fission techniques required for practical thermonuclear weapons would not have been developed. Discouragement would have nagged at those who worked in the field without the means for practical accomplishment, and the [thermonuclear] program—and the Laboratory—might have died.”

Lewis says that Bradbury’s frustration owed to the fact that even before the book’s publication, Bradbury had dealt with pressure from leaders in Washington for years, many of whom believed Teller’s claims that Los Alamos had failed to pursue the hydrogen bomb with due haste.  

That pressure was visible in April 1954, when Bradbury testified at the hearing that famously led to the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance. At the hearing, the AEC’s lawyers criticized Oppenheimer’s reluctance to support full-scale development of thermonuclear weapons. But Bradbury sided with Oppenheimer, stating that while Oppenheimer had been at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer had always supported thermonuclear research (even though the Laboratory didn’t yet have the means to develop a thermonuclear weapon).

Bradbury was relieved when, after he delivered this testimony, the AEC’s chairman, Lewis Strauss, issued a statement affirming that Los Alamos had done its duty in developing the hydrogen bomb. Bradbury took this statement to have refuted, once and for all, any claim that Los Alamos had failed to adequately pursue thermonuclear weapons development. So, he was piqued when later that year Shepley and Blair insinuated that the Laboratory had failed to develop the bomb as quickly as possible.

“By the time the Shepley and Blair book came out, Bradbury was done with the controversy,” Lewis says. “He was frustrated that everyone had come to believe that Teller was the hero and he was the villain.”

Carr agrees that Teller’s version of events distorts the Laboratory’s history. “Going back to World War II, Teller claimed a hydrogen bomb test might be as little as a year away,” Carr says. “These were overly simplistic timelines that were completely unrealistic. But Shepley and Blair uncritically accepted the baseless narrative  that Bradbury had been dragging his heels.”

Carr adds that while Teller’s contributions to the hydrogen bomb’s development were real, they were inflated in accounts like Shepley and Blair’s.

“Teller was a remarkably creative theoretician, but a large team of talented people is needed to manufacture a hydrogen bomb,” Carr says. “Teller later acknowledged this, penning an article titled 'The Work of Many People.' Unfortunately, however, the wholly inaccurate appraisal of Norris Bradbury and his Laboratory lingered for decades.”

The Laboratory diversifies

Over the course of Bradbury’s 25-year directorship, the nation’s nuclear stockpile expanded precipitously. During World War II, the United States produced only two types of nuclear weapons: a uranium gun-type weapon (Little Boy, detonated over Hiroshima) and a plutonium implosion device (Fat Man, detonated over Nagasaki). At its numerical peak in 1967, the nation’s nuclear stockpile swelled to 31,255 weapons. By the time Bradbury retired in 1970, Los Alamos had designed more than 60 types of nuclear weapons.

While Los Alamos continued to develop and test nuclear weapons, its mission also broadened. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Bradbury began securing congressional support to expand Los Alamos’ mission into other areas.

“In its first decade, Los Alamos was almost purely a weapons laboratory. Everything the Laboratory did was connected to nuclear weapons design or testing,” Carr says. “But in the second decade, Bradbury started lobbying to make the Laboratory more technologically diverse. Los Alamos shifted from being a nuclear weapons laboratory to a nuclear science laboratory.”

Among other initiatives inaugurated during Bradbury’s tenure, the Laboratory carried out pioneering work in nuclear technologies. Project Rover explored the possibility of developing nuclear-powered rockets, and Project Vela saw the development of satellites that could detect nuclear explosions around the world and in outer space. Bradbury supported the creation of the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility, known today as the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center (LANSCE), which made possible new research into basic nuclear and non-nuclear physics. And beginning in the 1960s, Los Alamos began developing safeguard technologies to help ensure that the development of nuclear power wouldn’t lead to the spread of weapons-grade nuclear materials.

“I don’t think there is any overall trend in the Laboratory toward either applied or basic research,” Bradbury reflected in 1970. “What’s obvious is a trend toward diversification. We have many more projects than we did 20 years ago. Many of them are quite small, and many more of them are unclassified. In that sense, we’re becoming more like a national laboratory.”

Why did Bradbury support diversifying the Laboratory’s work? Carr says that Bradbury’s attitude toward nuclear weapons—his lifelong hope that the world might someday find a way to ban or eliminate them—may have played a part.

“Bradbury looked forward to the day when weapons might not be necessary,” Carr says, noting that Bradbury once said, “Nobody likes nuclear weapons; I hate them. But it has to be done.”

Hopkins clearly recalls Bradbury’s attitude toward nuclear weapons. “I think Bradbury really would have been happier if nuclear weapons had turned out not to be possible,” Hopkins says. “But he also felt that ‘These weapons are possible. You can thank nature for that. And since they’re possible, we have an obligation to make them as effective and as safe as possible.’”

Bradbury’s hope for a world without nuclear weapons received a boost in 1958, when the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union agreed to a moratorium on nuclear testing. For nearly three years, no nation conducted a nuclear test, and a comprehensive test-ban treaty seemed possible.

Lewis says that Bradbury’s support for diversifying the Laboratory was in part a response to these developments. Bradbury felt that a greater diversity of work would make it easier to sustain the Laboratory and to retain the scientists who would be needed if testing should resume. 

“Bradbury believed that by diversifying, the Laboratory could hold people in reserve,” Lewis says. “That way, if testing ended, a moratorium happened, or something interrupted the weapons program, once testing resumed, you could put all those people back onto weapons.”

Prospects for a comprehensive test-ban treaty soon dimmed, partly because the first years of the 1960s proved a fraught time for relations between the United States and the Soviet Union. However, in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, tensions eased, which led the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States to negotiate the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963. This treaty forbade nuclear testing in the atmosphere, in space, or underwater (underground testing was still permitted).

In July 1963, the U.S. Senate’s Foreign Relations, Armed Services, and Joint Atomic Energy committees held 11 days of hearings to debate ratifying the Limited Test Ban Treaty. Prominent figures, including Teller and Senator Barry Goldwater, opposed the treaty. But Bradbury testified in favor of ratification.

“I think, in this instance, I may speak for most of my colleagues at Los Alamos,” Bradbury said during the hearing. “We have never believed that nuclear weapons were an end in themselves; they are merely tools to an end ... the abandonment of war and most of all, a nuclear war.”

Bradbury went on to describe the treaty as a “small but positive step” in the direction of world peace, and to praise the treaty as “the first faint sign of hope that international nuclear understanding is possible.

“I, myself, with considerable knowledge of nuclear things, with some knowledge of their military use, but with only a plain citizen’s feelings about people and nations and hopes and fears, would prefer to try to follow the path of hope,” Bradbury said. In September, the Senate ratified the Limited Test Ban Treaty by a vote of 80:19.

Later years

In a 1952 magazine article about Bradbury, the director’s secretary described his diligence in answering correspondence. “You never saw a man go through a basketful of papers so fast,” she said, “and you’d swear he wasn’t reading even a fraction of the stuff. Yet, six months later, he’ll remember every detail.”

In the late 1960s, Bradbury’s relentless work ethic began to run up against a shifting political and bureaucratic landscape. By that point, Lawrence Livermore had begun to distinguish itself by developing nuclear weapons that were small but powerful, and to vie with Los Alamos for status as the nation’s preeminent nuclear weapons laboratory.

Los Alamos’ dominance was also challenged by Livermore’s close relationship with the military. Whereas Livermore was willing to work in tandem with the armed forces to design weapons that met military specifications, Bradbury felt that the military should accommodate itself to Los Alamos’ work.

“Bradbury’s attitude was that we should build the best weapons we could, and then the military could use them,” Hopkins says. “Whereas Agnew”—Harold Agnew, the Laboratory’s third director, who assumed the role after Bradbury retired—“was willing to work a lot more closely with the military, to find out what it was that the military needed.”

Lewis agrees with this assessment, noting that Livermore’s close relationship with military leaders gave it an advantage when, in the late 1950s, the laboratories began developing warheads for intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).

“Los Alamos started falling behind,” Lewis says. “The Laboratory was still in the pre-ICBM world, and Bradbury wasn’t ready to adapt to that.”

Bradbury faced other challenges in the later years of his directorship. Conflicts with Congress led to time-consuming battles over funding and the Laboratory’s direction. At the same time, even as Los Alamos expanded—the Laboratory’s workforce had swelled to nearly 4,000 people by 1970—Bradbury retained much of the Manhattan Project’s structure, with some 20 division leaders reporting to him directly.

“It really reflects Bradbury’s abilities, and his self-sacrifice, that the Lab maintained that structure as long as it did,” Lewis says.

Both Hopkins and Jim Bradbury remember that despite—or because of—Bradbury’s many responsibilities, Bradbury remained passionate about the Laboratory’s mission and engaged with its work. In Jim’s recollection, his father’s decision to retire owed more to a general conviction that it was time to turn over the reins than to burnout or fatigue.

“I think he said that once he got to 25 years, that would be enough,” Jim says.

Like Oppenheimer—who had ended his time at Los Alamos with a speech acknowledging receipt of the Army-Navy “E” Production Award on behalf of the Laboratory—Bradbury’s time as director ended with an award. 

The Enrico Fermi Award—which brought with it a gold medal, a commendation, and a $25,000 prize—was conferred on Bradbury by the AEC. The award’s commendation read, “For his inspiring leadership and superb direction of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory throughout one quarter of a century, and for his great contributions to the national security and to the peacetime applications of atomic energy.”

Bradbury received another recognition in 1970, when the Laboratory’s unclassified science museum was renamed the Norris E. Bradbury Science Museum. This museum had begun exhibiting documents and artifacts to the public in 1963, hosting some 14,000 visitors in its first year. The museum’s name was later shortened to the Bradbury Science Museum and is now located in downtown Los Alamos.

“It’s been fun,” Bradbury reflected on the occasion of his retirement. “If it hadn’t been fun, I wouldn’t have stayed as long as I have.”

Life after the Laboratory

By his own account, Bradbury wasn’t ready to slow down after leaving the Laboratory in 1970. “When a man says he’s going to retire, you immediately start thinking about a rocking chair. I’m not ready for one,” he said.

Bradbury declined Agnew’s offer to serve as a senior consultant at the Laboratory, preferring to devote himself to other pursuits in his adopted home state and beyond. He was fascinated by the art and culture of the Southwest’s Native American communities (one of his favorite accessories was a bolo tie bearing a sacred symbol of the O’odham peoples of southern Arizona). As an amateur archaeologist, Bradbury enjoyed traveling on weekends to archaeological sites throughout New Mexico, and in retirement, he served for a time as president of the New Mexico Archaeological Society.

In 1969, Bradbury was appointed to the University of New Mexico Board of Regents. He remained on the board until 1971, and in the years that followed (Bradbury would live for 27 years after he left the Laboratory), he was involved in a variety of other organizations. Among other things, he served on the boards of the Los Alamos YMCA, the Los Alamos Medical Center, the First National Bank of Santa Fe, and the Santa Fe Neurological Society. He was also a consultant to the National Academy of Sciences—a role that necessitated frequent trips to Washington, D.C. With Lois and other family members, he traveled to Scandinavia, India, and Australia—and on trips to Latin America that could no longer be interrupted by Laboratory business.

Bradbury served in various capacities at Trinity on the Hill Episcopal Church in Los Alamos, including as junior warden. In that role, his duties included landscaping—he pulled weeds and took care of flowers in the spring and summer, and he shoveled snow in the winter—along with other unglamorous tasks, like fixing leaky pipes. At home, Bradbury was a passionate woodworker who delighted in making beds, chairs, and furniture for his children and grandchildren. 

In the early 1990s, Bradbury injured his leg while chopping wood. The injury turned gangrenous, necessitating a leg amputation that confined him to a wheelchair. Bradbury accepted this setback without complaint. He continued to contribute to the Los Alamos community, too, if on a smaller scale. The Bradburys enlisted a nurse to assist them, and, while on daily walks through the neighborhood, Bradbury would sometimes ask the nurse to stop his wheelchair so that he could pull a weed or two from the sidewalk.

Bradbury died in Los Alamos on August 20, 1997, at the age of 88. His funeral, three days later, drew a sizable crowd. In an obituary, Siegfried Hecker, who was then the Laboratory’s director, lauded Bradbury for his contributions to the United States’ national security and scientific endeavors.

“Norris had the vision and the foresight to recognize that the national security job of the Laboratory wasn’t over, but only beginning,” Hecker said. “He had the wisdom to recognize the value of laboratories like Los Alamos to the nation in areas broader than national security—helping to strengthen the nation’s world position in basic science, plus contributing to civilian challenges such as nuclear energy, magnetic fusion, and the Rover nuclear rocket program. The nation’s laboratory system of today owes in no small measure its foundation to Norris Bradbury.” ★