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When he spied the beautiful Martha Cluverius on a tennis court, he did not hesitate to challenge her to a set. By this point the social shyness of his earlier days at the Naval Academy had given way to a comfortable modesty. In May 1927 Parsons’s analytical skills took him to the Naval Postgraduate School, which was then at Annapolis, for advanced studies in ordnance. His analysis was so convincing that it led the ship’s captain to recommend new procedures for the fleet at large. On his first tour of duty, as a gunnery officer aboard the USS Idaho, Ensign Parsons set the tone for his naval career by questioning long-standing assumptions about the dispersal pattern of the fourteen-inch batteries. Hyman Rickover, who would lead the postwar development of nuclear submarines, was a classmate. In a rather labored pun on his last name, classmates at Annapolis turned “Parsons” into “Deacon,” which was soon shortened to “Deak.” Parsons proved to be an outstanding student in mathematics and physics and graduated from the academy in 1922.
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The story of the naval officer who transformed the theory of atomic fission into a weapon that ended a war begins with a shy boy of exceptional brilliance. Young Parsons outperformed his classmates and skipped grades to graduate from high school and pass the Naval Academy examination by age sixteen. Fort Sumner was deep in Billy the Kid country and about 150 miles southeast of Los Alamos, then the isolated mountain site of a boys’ school. William Parsons was seven years old in 1909 when his father, a lawyer, moved the family from Chicago to rustic Fort Sumner, New Mexico. Leslie Groves, executive head of the Manhattan Project, expressed the same sentiment more tersely: “Don’t let Parsons get killed! We need him.” Vannevar Bush, the wartime leader of American science, summarized Parsons’s importance: “The fact that came to fruition and into actual use, the fact that the first uses were fully successful … all this was due in no small measure to devotion to his task and his high skill in carrying it out.” In wartime instructions Brig. They agreed that the scientists would be entrusted to produce the nuclear guts of the “gadget” (as the bomb was referred to), while Parsons, as head of ordnance, would take charge of transforming their scientific results into a reliable service weapon.ĭuring the next twenty-seven months Parsons would accomplish this and more. What Parsons learned on his return from the South Pacific was that Los Alamos was working on a new type of bomb with power virtually beyond comprehension-and that he would be intimately involved in building it.Īs the train rattled its way west, Oppenheimer and Parsons discussed the officer’s future role among the scientists who were being brought together at Los Alamos.
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Even those privy to the laboratory’s secrets referred to it obliquely as Project Y of the Manhattan Engineer District. Still less known was the Los Alamos laboratory, where Oppenheimer had recently been appointed director. The name Oppenheimer meant little then outside a limited circle of scientists. His traveling companion was a nuclear physicist, J. Instead he found himself on a train heading toward a most unlikely posting for a Navy officer: Los Alamos, New Mexico. He expected his next assignment to be the command of a ship. (“Deak”) Parsons returned from a secret mission to the South Pacific, where he had successfully introduced a new weapon in the war against Japan.