Donald Hornig, 1920–2013

last updated 8 January 2015

Donald Hornig was a year out of graduate school when he received a mysterious job offer. No one would tell him what or even where the job was, so he declined—until the president of Harvard University called and convinced him to take it. Soon after, Hornig bought an old car and headed for Los Alamos, N.M. He would become one of the youngest leaders of the team that developed the first atom bomb, and the last surviving witness of its detonation, on July 16, 1945.

Born in Milwaukee, Hornig “was the first in his family to go to college,” said the Associated Press. He studied physical chemistry at Harvard, earning his doctorate in 1943. In Los Alamos, the head of the Manhattan Project, J. Robert Oppenheimer, gave him the job of developing the firing unit that triggered the detonation.

On the eve of the planned blast, Hornig was accorded another task, said The Washington Post. “Oppenheimer decided someone should be in the tower to babysit the bomb,” he later remembered. As lightning and thunder raged outside, Hornig sat by the bomb reading a book of humorous essays. In the morning, “he took his place beside Oppenheimer in a control room more than five miles away.” When the bomb exploded, at 5:29:45 a.m., Hornig recalled, “My first reaction, having not slept for 48 hours, was, ‘Boy, am I tired.’ My second was, ‘We sure opened a can of worms.’” He later described the massive orange fireball as “one of the most aesthetically beautiful things I have ever seen.”

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Hornig went on to teach at Brown and Princeton universities, said The New York Times, before becoming science adviser to President Lyndon Johnson. “Working for Johnson was reportedly not easy”; the president disdained scientists because many of them opposed the Vietnam War. Hornig was named president of Brown in 1970, where his budget cuts restored the institution’s finances but triggered fierce student protests. Upon his resignation, in 1976, he described his tenure as “bittersweet.” He returned to Harvard, and to teaching, to end his career.