[Later Agnew was recruited to work with Robert Oppenheimer’s team at Los Alamos.] It was just a madhouse. Construction everywhere. Mud roads, no pavement. A frontier town, except the cowboys were very smart. In late ‘44, [physicist] Luis Alvarez convinced Oppy we ought to try to measure the yield of the bomb, and I heard there was a chance of going overseas as part of that team. So I saw Alvarez and signed up. In June ‘45, I think it was, five of us went out to Tinian [a Pacific atoll, the main base for bomber raids on Japan].
We had no idea when the operation would come. But the uranium for the bomb finally arrived around the end of July, and that’s what we were waiting for. On the afternoon of Aug. 5, we were just told to show up at a particular Quonset hut, and there a major said: “Little Boy [the code name for the atomic bomb] is going to be delivered.” That was that.
[He flew in one of two B-29s accompanying a similar bomber, the Enola Gay, which actually dropped the bomb.] The first thing was this tremendous flash which lit up the inside of the plane. The blast took some time to come up to us, but 30 or 40 seconds later, we got a helluva jolt. Maybe three seconds later, we got another jolt. That had us baffled. Then we realized the initial explosion had been an airburst, and the second jolt was the blast reflected off the ground. In my notebook I wrote: “Boy, it really went off. It really did.” That’s all I wrote. I got a perfect record of the impulse and the blast from my instruments. So did Larry Johnson from his, but Luis Alvarez couldn’t pick up the signal from his at all. You had to be lucky.
