We are sad to report that two prominent Manhattan Project veterans passed away in February, Val Fitch and Ralph Nobles.
Val Fitch was drafted into the Special Engineer Detachment in 1943. He was sent to Los Alamos, where he worked with Ernest Titterton on signals for the detonation of the "Gadget" in the Trinity test. He was also sent to Wendover to observe the dummy bomb tests. Fitch won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980 "for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons." He was a professor at Princeton for many years.
In a 2008 interview with AHF President Cindy Kelly, Fitch remembered witnessing the Trinity test: "It's hard to overstate the impact on the senses of something like that. First the flash of light, that enormous fireball, the mushroom cloud rising thousands of feet in the sky, and then, a long time afterwards, the sound. The rumble, thunder in the mountains. Word's haven't been invented to describe it in any accurate way."
Ralph Nobles was one of three brothers to work on the Manhattan Project; he and his brother William worked at Los Alamos, while brother Robert was at the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory. During the Trinity test, Ralph helped operate data recorders. Ralph married Carolyn Fisher, who worked as a secretary at Los Alamos. He went on to earn a PhD in physics and worked for many years at Lockheed Missiles and Space. He was also heavily involved in efforts to preserve San Francisco Bay.