Norris Bradbury stands next to the "Gadget" before the Trinity test in 1945. Bradbury went on to head Los Alalmos National Laboratory for the next 25 years, keeping the lab running during the interim between World War II and the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947, building the community of Los Alamos into a place scientists would want to live and establishing the site as a multidisciplinary institution for science beyond nuclear weapons. New Mexican archive photo

J. Robert Oppenheimer’s reflection on the Bhagavad Gita following the detonation of the world’s first nuclear bomb at the Trinity Site in New Mexico has gone down in history.

Norris Bradbury’s reaction was more prosaic.

“He said, ‘I was just damn pleased that it worked,’ ” said Los Alamos National Laboratory senior historian Alan Carr.

The disparate reactions highlight the differences between the dashing Oppenheimer, a famous figure during his lifetime and decades after his death, and the more staid Bradbury, who became Los Alamos National Laboratory’s second director in late 1945.

A blockbuster movie about Oppenheimer generated more than $900 million last year, while Bradbury’s main public legacy is being the namesake of the lab’s Bradbury Science Museum in downtown Los Alamos.

But while Bradbury is less well-known than his predecessor, he was instrumental is keeping Los Alamos running after World War II and shaping it into the multibillion-dollar research and weapons facility it is today. In doing so, he became a regular presence in the newspaper for a quarter-century.

“Oppenheimer was the founder of this laboratory,” The New Mexican quoted friend and co-worker Louis Rosen as saying in Bradbury’s Aug. 22, 1997, obituary. “Bradbury was its savior.”

A trained physicist from Berkeley teaching at Stanford, Bradbury joined the Navy reserves and was called up for service during World War II. He became a group leader in the Manhattan Project and was responsible for assembling the non-nuclear components of the bomb detonated at the Trinity Test.

After the war, he was planning to return to academia but agreed to helm the lab for six months in an interim capacity while a permanent leader was found.

Six months stretched into 25 years.

“If you understood him, that made sense,” said lab historian Nicholas Lewis, who has researched Bradbury extensively. “He didn’t walk away from a high-stakes problem.”

Bradbury believed strongly the lab should continue to operate in peacetime, Lewis said, and as relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union deteriorated, secured the support of the newly created Atomic Energy Commission for his mission.

He kept the lab running between the end of World War II and the formal creation of the commission in 1947 — securing leftover Manhattan Project-era funding to renovate lab facilities into permanent structures and to build the community of Los Alamos into a place scientists and their families would want to continue to live after the war.

“It was a pretty tough assignment, and he was quite graceful about it,” said Bradbury’s daughter-in-law Ellen Bradbury Reid.

She described Bradbury as unassuming, intelligent and unflappable, and a more private figure than Oppenheimer.

“He kept his head down and kept on doing what he was doing,” Bradbury Reid said.

She said Bradbury was deeply affected by the 1954 Atomic Energy Commission hearing against Oppenheimer, at which he was required to testify as lab director. The hearings, which Carr described as a “kangaroo court,” stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance until it was reinstated posthumously in 2022.

“They just tore him up into shreds, and Norris did not want to go through that,” she said.

While Bradbury disagreed with Oppenheimer’s opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb, he and many other scientists considered the allegations against him “baseless slander,” Lewis said.

While Los Alamos is primarily a weapons laboratory, Carr said Bradbury is responsible for turning it into “a truly multidisciplinary institution, where you see people doing science in just about every major area that you can think of.”

Bradbury’s philosophy paved the way for facilities like the Los Alamos Neutron Science Center and other research areas not focused on the nuclear arsenal, he said. The satellites used to detect illegal atmospheric nuclear testing were first developed during Bradbury’s tenure, which led to the discovery of cosmic gamma ray bursts. Frederick Reines’ Nobel prize-winning discovery of the neutrino began with work he did on the nuclear weapons program.

“The ability to do work like that, in addition to your day job, if you will, was really at the heart of Norris Bradbury’s hope to have a thriving scientific program that would attract the brightest minds,” Carr said.

Carr described Bradbury as a “nice guy with an edge,” someone who was pleasant to work with but could make tough decisions when needed. His time in the Navy served him throughout his career.

“He had that dual perspective as both a scientist but also a military person,” Carr said.

Lewis said lab employees were struck by how down-to-earth he was and the personal interest he took in everyone from high-level scientists to new arrivals.

“It would be hard to find a more beloved director,” Lewis said. “Oppenheimer was better known, but I think those who were here ... had an enormous fondness and affection for Bradbury.”

While deeply respected in Los Alamos and by many in Washington, he also was harshly criticized for his role in above-ground nuclear testing in Nevada, which exposed downwind residents to harmful and sometimes fatal doses of radiation.

Bradbury Reid said the tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site and in the Pacific were “horrible” but that Bradbury saw them as necessary.

“He felt strongly if you’re going to build something as dangerous as these weapons were, you better damn well know how they work,” she said.

She and lab historians were unanimous in saying Bradbury personally disliked nuclear weapons but believed strongly in nuclear deterrence.

“I think he looked forward to a world that would develop a different technology or idea that would supplant” nuclear weapons, Carr said. “That’s not happened yet, but we’ve not seen a global war in the meantime.”

Bradbury’s retirement from the lab was front-page news in the Aug. 30, 1970, edition of The New Mexican. The paper quoted at length from a speech he gave, where he said nuclear weapons “must never be used in anger.”

The world “cannot live forever in the shadow of nuclear war,” he said.

Along with working at the lab, Bradbury served as a vestry member at Trinity on the Hill Episcopal Church in Los Alamos and was an “enthusiastic amateur archaeologist” who was twice elected to lead the Archaeological Society of New Mexico, according to The New Mexican. Bradbury-Reid said he was an amateur gardener and had a woodshop where he made furniture.

“He was quite handy, and so when things would break [at the lab] he would often fix them personally,” Lewis said.

His wife, Lois Bradbury, whom The New Mexican described as the “first lady of Los Alamos” for her role as hostess, died five months after her husband in 1998.

“She truly loved Los Alamos and the people living there,” son Jim Bradbury told The New Mexican in her obituary. “That’s why they stayed. They did not even consider leaving.”

Bradbury was bad at delegating; at one point 22 division leaders reported directly to him. That’s likely what contributed to him staying on for a quarter of a century, which Lewis said he doesn’t think anyone else could have accomplished.

“He was the right man for the right time,” Bradbury Reid said.