MUROC AIRFIELD, Calif -- A modified B-29 Superfortress arrived from Wright Army Air Field to conduct ballistic tests on concrete-filled atomic bomb casings in order to evaluate their aerodynamic characteristics. This was part of Project A, which was responsible for making a practical weapon out of the nuclear test device then under development. Project Camel evaluated free-fall aerodynamic characteristics. Fusing and instrumentation devices were also studied over the next four weeks, as were delivery methods.
One event was Groves’s selection of Navy Captain William S. “Deak” Parsons to lead LAL’s ordnance program. Considered to be one of the military’s best ordnance engineers, Parsons not only organized and led LAL’s Ordnance Division, but in August 1944 he became Oppenheimer’s Associate Director of LAL, and in March 1945 he was appointed Officer-in-Charge of Project Alberta to prepare for combat use of the bombs from a new air base on Tinian island in the South Pacific. Upon Parsons’s death less than ten years later, his former LAL deputy eulogized, “There is no one more responsible for getting this bomb out of the laboratory and into some form useful for combat operations than Captain Parsons, by his plain genius in the ordnance business.
There is no one more responsible for getting this bomb out of the laboratory and into some form useful for combat operations than Captain Parsons.
The crew of the Silverplate first drop test B–29 aircraft, at Muroc Army Air Field, February 1944. Top row: Shields, Wilkinson, Dike, Storemen, Roark, Semple. Middle row: Bender, Coles, Merrill, unknown. Front: Rochlitz. (Photo courtesy of Keith Shields.)