As Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ opens, Montgomery County man recalls working on the H-Bomb

On a spring day, in 1950, on a Princeton campus blooming with beauty and genius, Ken Ford was asked to harness his intellect and help turn abstractions and theories into history.

“Would you like to help work on the hydrogen bomb?” Ford was in his early 20s when he was asked the question, earning a Ph.D. in physics at the Ivy League school. He didn’t pay attention to sports, he said, or politics, filling his days with equations and computations. He once attended a lecture that Albert Einstein sat in on and the urge to stay in New Jersey, hunkered down in studies, was strong.

“The other part of me thought ‘Do I really want to do this? Do I want to play a part in helping to develop the H-bomb?’ ” Ford, 97, said Tuesday morning at the Montgomery County retirement community where he lives.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of the much-lauded Christopher Nolan film Oppenheimer, was racing to build the atomic bomb to save humanity from Nazi Germany. For Ford, the dawning of Cold War threats helped him decide. He didn’t even ask his parents.

“Well, I was told if we don’t do it, the Soviet Union will. And the world will become a much more dangerous place,” Ford said. “We all knew about the talent of the Russians and, it turns out, they were working on a hydrogen bomb, just like us.”

Ford, a father of seven, spent a year working on the H-bomb at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. He later worked on the bomb under “Project Matterhorn” back at Princeton. Oppenheimer directed Los Alamos during World War II during his time on the Manhattan Project, then also went to Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton.

Ford said he was browsing through the list of characters in Oppenheimer and personally knew at least 10 of them. He only met the “father of the atom bomb” in passing — Oppenheimer served on an H-bomb advisory committee — but other characters in the film were at his first wedding.

“I thought ‘I know most of these people.’ I taught Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi how to play Parcheesi,” he said. “I put Oppenheimer in the category of knew-but-not-well.”

Ford said he’ll be in the theater tomorrow for the film’s opening with his son, to revisit memories of New Mexico, where he lived off and on during a life steeped in academia and adventure. He has also authored books about flying (he’s a retired pilot), and, of course, his time at the Los Alamos lab. He has his own Wikipedia page and drove both small motorcycles and Army surplus back and forth across the country.

“I’ve spent my whole life looking for new challenges,” he said.

Ford’s tidy apartment in the Gwynedd Township retirement community is full of birthday cards and art. There’s a “I love quantum mechanics” bumper sticker on his fridge. Physics textbooks he authored sit on a table, heavy as bricks. His wife, Joanne, died of ovarian cancer last year and few other people there know his story. There’s a few retired physicians around, he said, and some attorneys, but no other nuclear physicists he can think of.

“I gave a talk here about glider airplanes,” he said, “so that’s what they might know about me.”

Born and raised in a Kentucky suburb of Cincinnati, Ford devoured every science book in his local library — ”biology, chemistry, geology, you name it” — and was plucked out of high school there to finish his education at New Hampshire’s Phillips Exeter Academy on scholarship. He enlisted in the Navy in 1944 but spent most of his time in the service studying at various universities before heading off to Harvard, then Princeton.

“The goal there was to work toward my doctorate,” he said. “I just had a leave of absence to help with the bomb.”

Ford said Oppenheimer, initially, didn’t believe the physics of the hydrogen bomb would work. In 1951, the advisory committee was meeting at the Institute of Advanced Study, which Oppenheimer was overseeing. Ford, having worked all night on an early computer at IBM in New York City, rushed to the meeting and passed rolled papers of his work — graphs and calculations in pencil — through a window to his professor and adviser, John Wheeler.

“It looks good. It looks promising,” Ford told Wheeler.

That work, Ford said, may have helped change Oppenheimer’s mind.

“He changed his view. I can’t say for sure it was at that moment, but I think there’s a good chance that my results made him think it could work. A year after that, we had a successful test.”

The United States tested its hydrogen bomb in 1952 in the Marshall Islands. The Soviets tested their hydrogen bomb in 1955. H-bombs are believed to be 1,000 times stronger than the atom bomb and Ford is relieved he didn’t have to see that level of power unleashed in war.

“I knew that, yes, it was a horrible weapon, but I thought the world probably will be a safer place if the United States gets it done first,” Ford said. “In retrospect, I still think that’s a valid argument.”

Oppenheimer struggled with the devastation and death in Japan when the United States dropped atom bombs. President Harry Truman, according to several accounts, called him a crybaby. Ford doesn’t know whether the film will focus on the aftermath of the atom bombs or the urgency to build them. Everyone, he said, should view the movie with a “grain of salt.”

“He became an eloquent spokesman after the war, but I’m sure, well, 99% sure, that during the war, his whole focus was getting his job done and making it a success,” Ford said of Oppenheimer. “There would be time to think about its implications later.”

Ford had his own reckoning during the Vietnam War. He took part in protests and, during an antiwar meeting in a small New Mexico town in 1968, announced that he would never work on nuclear weapons again.

“I wanted to say it publicly,” he said. “It was a statement of principle.”

Today, he wears a peace button, on the breast of his vest.