Sikeston man had role in A-bomb project

SIKESTON, Mo. -- Sixty years ago, the world became a different place with the test detonation of the atomic bomb on July 16 and its first use as a weapon on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6.

The path that led to Lennie Whitworth of Sikeston being part of the team that developed the atomic bomb started when he joined the U.S. Army in 1943 after serving in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

The Army sent him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for additional study. In 1944, Gen. Leslie Groves, who was in charge of the atomic bomb project, came looking for engineers.

"He told me, 'We are looking for engineers and scientists to work on a secret project for the government,'" Whitworth said.

With the country at war, there were a lot of "secret projects," according to Whitworth.

He was soon in Los Alamos, N.M., to work on something codenamed the Manhattan Project. He didn't have to wait long to find out what that meant.

"The day I arrived, they put me in a room with this physicist who described what they were trying to do about making a bomb and the method," Whitworth said.

He ended up spending almost all of the next two and half years there.

Whitworth was assigned to work under Dr. Jim Tuck, an English physicist.

Much of Whitworth's efforts were dedicated to setting up and timing explosives down to the millisecond in an effort to find a way of using explosives to compress a ball of plutonium and start a nuclear chain reaction.

That method was used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, and tested at Alamogordo, N.M.

Whitworth prefers to avoid debating the development and use of nuclear weapons.

"We were in the Army, we had a job to do," he said. "I personally had nothing to do with that decision."