Local Man One of Last Surviving A-bomb Scientists

A San Mato County man who worked on the atomic bomb in World War II could soon be in the news spotlight now that there are plans to make a national park of sites where the bomb was developed.

Ralph Nobles, 92, of Redwood City, is among the dwindling number of scientists that worked on the Manhattan Project, which resulted in the mushroom clouds over Japan that ended the war.

“Ralph is not the only one left, but he is close,” Heather McClenahan of the Los Alamos Historical Society told Patch.

Bipartisan legislation in Congress would create the Manhattan Project National Historical Park with sites in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Hanford, Wash. and Los Alamos, New Mexico where Nobles spent the war years.

Nobles is already well known in the Bay area for his environmental work, which included saving Bair Island from becoming a housing project. He also has been an avid yachtsman and is currently a member of a writers club at the Senior Center where he is compiling his memoirs.

Nobles, who was the youngest staff member at Los Alamos, said he was “one of, if not the first, of the technical staff to arrive at Los Alamos” when he reported to the desert site in early spring of 1943.

Nobles was present when the bomb was tested at Trinity, a remote high desert area about 100 miles south of Albuquerque. He was stationed inside a shelter where his final task was to make sure data recorders were automatically started and, “if they were not, I was to start them manually.”

Once his job was completed, the young physicist went outside, turned his back and looked toward the mountains.

Then “the most brilliant flash of light heretofore seen on earth momentarily blinded” him for a few moments.

“When my vision cleared, the distant mountains appeared much brighter than in the noonday sun,” he said.

Nobles called the effort to make the sites collectively a national park was “a good and proper thing because this was an important part of our history.”

The plan is sure to meet with opposition, particularly from those who feel dropping the bomb in 1945 was not necessary to force the Japanese to put down their arms.

Nobles shrugged when asked about this, insisting the war would have dragged on, costing more lives, especially Japanese.

“We hadn’t even started to bomb their rail lines, which would have led to massive starvation,” he said.

Nobles, a widower, would have led an adventurous and colorful life even without the chapter on the atomic bomb. He regales fellow writers at the Senior Center with his sailing exploits and tales of his “wonder dog Fritz.”

Surprisingly, he writes little about his environmental work, which mainly involved Bair Island, the 3,000 acres of former wetlands that is twice the size of the Presidio. The island, now protected from development, is nearing completion of a major restoration that will provide critical wildlife habitat.

A sign tells visitors the area was “dedicated to Carolyn and Ralph Nobles and all members of the Friends of Redwood City” for “igniting the spark that saved these baylands for future generations.”