Staff Biographies

Raemer Schreiber

Raemer Edgar Schreiber, or "Schreib," as his friends called him, found his wartime experience working alongside the cream of the world's scientists at Los Alamos to be a heady experience and decided to stay and work for Laboratory Director Norris Bradbury after World War II. Although he did not expect to work at the Laboratory permanently, he remained until his retirement in 1974, after serving as the Lab's deputy director for two years.

Schreiber came to Los Alamos in November 1943 from Purdue University, where he had been a research associate at the Purdue Research Foundation. Born in 1910 in McMinnville, Oregon, he received his master's degree from the University of Oregon and completed his PhD in 1941 at Purdue.

When he arrived at Los Alamos, Schreiber and some others from Purdue went to work on the Water Boiler Reactor, which went critical in May of 1944; it was the first reactor to go critical using enriched uranium. He continued to work on improved reactor models until April 1945, when he became a member of the pit assembly team for the Trinity test.

Close Encounters with Dramatic Nuclear Events
During his Los Alamos years, this Oregon native had several close encounters with dramatic nuclear events. In assembling the first bomb to be tested, he and his assembly team watched as the core of that first atomic bomb was readied for detonation on July 16, 1945. He was at Base Camp at the time of the actual explosion.

Just ten days later, Schreiber sat in a military sedan headed to Kirtland Field in Albuquerque where a box (actually the plutonium core of the Nagasaki bomb Fat Man) was positioned in the sedan trunk for transfer to a C-54 cargo plane headed with Schreiber to Tinian Island in the Pacific. In an Albuquerque Journal series, "Trinity: 50 Years Later," commemorating the 50th anniversary of the atomic bomb, author Larry Calloway interviewed Schreiber about his dramatic wartime experiences. Schreiber recalled:

"We all flew out of Kirtland Field in two C-54 cargo planes, carrying nothing but a box of documents and some guards and my little box and me. Nobody talked about the box. Those were the rules.... One of the guards came up and tapped me on the shoulder, and says, "Sir, your box is bouncing around back there, and we're scared to touch it." So I went back and corralled it and got a piece of rope and tied it to one of the legs of the cots."

After arriving on Tinian Island on July 28, Schreiber delivered his box and helped assemble the rest of the bomb parts brought by other members of the group of Los Alamos scientists. A few days later, on August 9, 1945, Fat Man was exploded over Nagasaki, an action that many felt actually saved lives that would have been lost through continued U.S. firebombing. Schreiber compared the number of firebombing casualties that could be as high as the 100,000 killed in one night of conventional bombing to the casualties from the atomic bombs:

"Just the fact you could do the same thing with one airplane and one bomb proved the efficiency, but it didn't change the effect very much. But the firebombing, the saturation bombing of the B-29s was not bringing Japan to its knees, and the shock effect of one airplane being able to wipe out a city, I think, is what finally convinced the Japanese military they had to give up."

Comments on the U.S. Atomic Bombing
One of Schreiber's most vivid memories of his Tinian duty was watching the American Pacific fleet prepare for the invasion of the Japanese home islands. Schreiber always said that his work on Fat Man saved many lives by making that invasion unnecessary. In Children Of Los Alamos: An Oral History of the Town Where the Atomic Age Began, Schreiber's daughter Paula recalled her father's description of the American naval buildup. He said:

"All the way to the horizon were ships that had pulled into the lee of those islands to get out of the storm. Destroyers, aircraft carriers, landing craft, every kind of ship you could think of.... If I ever have doubts about our use of the bomb, all I have to do is remember just the unbelievable number of ships and the men that were waiting to find out whether they had to invade Japan.... You balance lives."

Another Close Encounter
After the war, Schreiber became a group leader in the Weapons (W) Division at Los Alamos and began work on Operations Crossroads, which he describes as a "postwar Navy show in which two Fat Man bombs destroyed a fleet of warships at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific." Here once again, Schreiber had a close encounter with a dramatic but tragic nuclear event. As part of the preparation for that project, he and a few other Crossroad scientists were watching physicist Louis Slotin conduct a critical assembly experiment with plutonium cores at Los Alamos.

Though Slotin had done this experiment several times before, this time the screwdriver he was using slipped, the cores moved together, and a supercritical event occurred, exposing Schreiber, Slotin, and five other witnesses to ionizing radiation. Slotin pulled the spheres apart, a heroic act that caused him to die a few days later from radiation poisoning but saved the lives of the other six men in that room.

As a result of the accident, further critical assembly test were conducted by remote control, and Schreiber became a leader in developing remote-handling technology at Los Alamos. He went on to lead the pit assembly team at Operation Crossroads in June and July of 1946.

Green Light for the Hydrogen Bomb
"Super" In 1947 Schreiber became associate leader of W Division and then division leader in 1951. During those years, W Division played a key role in designing the first thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb, known as the "Super." President Truman in January 1950 announced the decision to proceed with the development of the hydrogen bomb. Two years later, the U.S successfully tested the first fusion bomb, "Mike", at Eniwetok Atoll.

In 1955 Schreiber became the leader of the Nuclear Rocket Propulsion (N) Division. The primary responsibility of N Division was the Rover program that developed rockets based on reactors that would power long, interplanetary missions not able to be carried out by conventional rocket-propulsion technology. In this capacity, he met John F. Kennedy during the President's 1962 visit to Los Alamos. That same year he became technical associate director of the Laboratory and deputy director in 1972.

Publications and Awards
After his retirement, Schreiber remained active in both Laboratory and community affairs. He served as an unpaid consultant to the Laboratory from 1975 to 1995. In the late 1980s he was a member of the Laboratory's History Advisory Council, which assisted in the publication of Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos during the Oppenheimer Years, 1943-1945. In 1994-1995, he assisted the Human Studies Project Team in reviewing the history of medical studies at the Laboratory.

After his death in 1998, the Laboratory's Advanced Nuclear Technology Group (NIS-6) named its conference room the Raemer E. Schreiber Room in honor of Schreiber's contributions to nuclear criticality research.