Manhattan Project Obituary: Col. Arthur "Pete" Peterson
Arthur V. "Pete" Peterson, a retired Army colonel who oversaw the production of fissionable material for the Manhattan Project, died March 24. He was 95.
Peterson was born in Morristown, NJ. He earned a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from NYU in 1934 and a master’s in the same subject from Cornell in 1937. A reserve officer in the Army, he was conducting research at Cornell when he was called to active duty in 1941.
In 1942, Peterson was reassigned from his combat engineer battalion to the Manhattan Project. He first worked with Enrico Fermi and Arthur Compton at the University of Chicago on the project that ended with the first ever self-sustaining, controlled, nuclear reaction. As the project expanded, Peterson was tasked with coordinating the efforts of sites across the country in order to assure that the materials for the bomb would be available at the earliest possible time.
After the war, Peterson worked for the newly formed Atomic Energy Commission before joining the private sector in 1953. In 1958, he founded his own consulting firm, AVP Associates, where he helped clients meet the challenges of nuclear power planning and development until he was well into his seventies.
The Atomic Heritage Foundation
910 17th Street, NW
Suite 408
Washington, DC 20006
202-293-0045 info@atomicheritage.org
Atomic Story of the Week
It was very exciting times. And of course when the bomb was dropped in August ‘45, the town went wild. It was absolutely crazy. As was generally reported in the papers, very few of the people here knew that we were working on a bomb, and just about no one knew what the status was, as relatively young engineers... it was not possible for us to know how much material was needed for a weapon or anything else. We weren’t sophisticated physicists like Oppenheimer and the rest of them out in Los Alamos.
BOB KUPP, OAK RIDGE
Did You Know?
"We (the military leaders at Los Alamos) came up through kindergarten with them (the scientists). While they could put elaborate equations on the board, which we might not be able to follow in their entirety, when it came to what was so and what was probably so, we knew just about as much as they did. So when I say that we were responsible for the scientific decisions, I am not saying that we were extremely able nuclear physicists, because actually we were not. We were what might be termed "thoroughly" practical nuclear physicists." (General Leslie R. Groves, Commanding Officer, Manhattan Engineer District, 1955)
