Part Two/Two-Part Series

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Fifty years later, a rock bearing a metal plaque with words worn by time and the elements is all that remains, a relatively obscure reminder of Iowa State’s contribution to the most lethal killing device the world has ever known.

Uranium production was the goal here, a goal — a race, really, — that will forever put Iowa State knee deep in the nuclear effort that was the Manhattan Project of the 1940s. Project participants here, provoked by the urgency of war, worked in a seldom-used building near today’s Hamilton Hall to develop an efficient process to produce uranium metal that was to be used for the atomic bomb.

In all, the Ames facility turned out about 2 million pounds of uranium for nuclear use.

Other Manhattan Project sites using the ISU uranium were working to assemble the atomic bomb that eventually killed 66,000 people and wounded another 69,000 when dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the government’s decision to shut down uranium production operations in Ames.

Then a senior at Iowa State, David Peterson was hired in 1942 to produce the metal. Although he was not officially informed about the Manhattan Project’s connection with the atomic bomb, Peterson was aware of his work’s contribution.

Why, then, did he decide to participate in the efforts of the Manhattan Project? Peterson said it was a matter of timing.

His job as a scientist was to proceed with the research, not to ask questions about the social ramifications of his work. He did, however, go through a rigorous decision-making process.

“I think that the time of decision was in 1942. Anything that became known after that was not particularly pertinent. Our intelligence gathering in Germany during World War II was really not very good. We had no way of knowing whether they were working to produce an atomic bomb.

“It would be almost criminally naive to assume from what we knew, ‘Well, they probably aren’t going in that direction.’ I think that’s probably the overwhelming factor in going ahead with the project,” Peterson said.

After he decided to work with the Ames Project (which became part of the Manhattan Project in 1943), Peterson found himself in the middle of the race to produce uranium metal quickly.

“The first successful reductions of uranium metal were done in August, and I didn’t start until September. By Dec. 1 [1942], everything had progressed rapidly enough so that they were in effect operating seven days a week and 24 hours a day,” Peterson said. “There was an extremely urgent need for pure uranium metal in connection with the Manhattan Project. There were several other groups that were working.”

Other competitors vying to create an efficient process of pure uranium metal development included the University of California, Columbia University and the University of Chicago.

The work environment in the laboratory, Peterson said, was engulfed by a sense of urgency because it was rumored “that the Third Reich might be working on atomic explosives, which was really quite frightening.”

He said researchers at Iowa State knew about Germany’s atomic advancements because some German physicists had immigrated to the United States.

Competition and the pressures of war upped the stakes. Workers were divided into three crews, which rotated during around-the-clock shifts. The crews were made up of seven to eight people, including three foremen, three assistant foremen and other workers. Peterson worked as an assistant foreman.

On occasion, Peterson said, workers would — behind the scenes, of course — try out their innovative ideas for more efficient uranium production methods. Some ideas would be given a trial run during the midnight to 8 a.m. shift because “there was hardly ever an occasion where the big bosses would come in and watch what you were doing in the midnight shift.”

Peterson saw the results of one “trial run” that could not be easily hidden. The incident occurred sometime during the late shift. Peterson and his crew arrived the next morning for the 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. shift.

“One of these steel containers blew up and about a foot to 18 inches of the wall was blown out. When our crew came in before 8, we all got together … to put the wall back in place. We got it within about 2 to 3 inches,” he said.

Peterson said he was friends with the foreman in charge that night, but his friend wouldn’t tell him anything about the explosion and neither would anyone else. “He would never admit to anything. No one squealed. Nobody ever knew what it was that caused that mysterious explosion,” Peterson said with a slight smile.

This was not the only explosion of the Manhattan Project. According to an Ames Laboratory newsletter report, “Magnesium and uranium react vigorously with air and fires frequently erupted in Little Ankeny.”

Little Ankeny was the name of the building where the uranium processing took place.

Today, ISU remembers the Manhattan Project through a statement written on a stone southeast of Hamilton Hall. Little Ankeny no longer stands.

“A striking achievement among the many associated with the wartime atomic energy project in the United States was the production of many tons of pure uranium by a group consisting of faculty and students working in a disused building on the campus of the Iowa State College of Ames,” the plaque reads.