Raymond Stattel and Theresa Stattel

[00:07] THERESA STADEL: I'm Theresa Stadel. I am 53 years old. Today is April 18, 2022. We are at the WAMU studio in Washington, DC. My interview partner is my father, Raymond Stadel.

[00:25] RAYMOND STADEL: Oh, there, okay, you had. My name is Raymond Stadel. I am 93 years old and I will be 94 in October. Today's date is the 18th, I believe. That's right. 418 2021-2222 the 22, rather. And the location?

[00:59] THERESA STADEL: Washington, DC.

[01:01] RAYMOND STADEL: Where?

[01:02] THERESA STADEL: Washington, DC.

[01:03] RAYMOND STADEL: Washington, DC. Okay, that's good enough. Name of the interview partner is Theresa Stadel who is my daughter. One of my younger middle childhood. Right.

[01:20] THERESA STADEL: Okay. Dad, can you describe how you ended up in the military in what year?

[01:27] RAYMOND STADEL: Okay, I know exactly. It was on my birthday, which would be 1018 1950, and I joined the air force. I went down to join the Air force because I was being drafted and I wanted to go into the Air force rather than the army. And the army. I had a deferment while I went through college, and I graduated in 1950, so that on my birthday in 1950, they sent me a draft notice, but I had joined.

[02:06] THERESA STADEL: Yeah. And where did you do boot camp? And how was that?

[02:12] RAYMOND STADEL: When did I. What?

[02:13] THERESA STADEL: Where did you do basic training? And how was that?

[02:16] RAYMOND STADEL: Lackland Air Force base in Texas. And I had gone down just for a physical, but I never returned because they sent me directly to Lachlan and I was confined to. To the barracks there for several weeks, I guess. Basic training right there.

[02:45] THERESA STADEL: How did you end up in the special weapons program?

[02:48] RAYMOND STADEL: Oh, well, the first thing they. Because of my. I had to take a lot of tests to see what fields I was eligible for. One, of course, was to go to officer candidate school because of my college degree, but I didn't want to be an officer, so I was pretty much given the choice of anything I wanted to be in. And they asked for a volunteer to go to radar school. So I volunteered and then was sent to Biloxi, Mississippi, to radar school, and I started there. But they asked for, again, volunteers to go to the special weapons project at Sandia base in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I mean, Albuquerque. Yeah, New Mexico. And wasn't Albuquerque in New Mexico?

[04:00] THERESA STADEL: Yes.

[04:01] RAYMOND STADEL: Yes, it was. That's right. Anyway, I then washed through the school because I had a college degree in electronics. So I was able to just take the tests and not attend any classes. So I figured then I would get a to Albuquerque sooner. But it turned out that the clearance, I had to get a clearance through the FBI, and it was called a Q clearance, which was special for special weapons project. And I had to wait until that was finished before I could go. So I was at Biloxi, Mississippi, for almost a year with nothing to do. I just had to stay here every morning, and then I'd go downtown or visit the VFW or something like that. And eventually, then I flew, which was the first time they flew with me to Albuquerque. When I arrived there, I found out that I had gotten my secret, top secret clearance so I could get on the base, but I still needed more time for the queue clearance to get into see the bomb, and I became a signed up to assemble and test the bombs. But in the meantime, I just. I volunteered to work for the fixed equipment down there and to go to schools and stuff like that. But eventually, then they wanted to volunteer to go to the test site in Nevada for the weapons tests, and I went. That's how I got to go there. And that was on all this was on special duty. I wasn't with the air force anymore as far as. And I was getting special pay and all that. But when I got to Nevada, I was assigned to work with the civilian scientists in checking the fallout and radiation from the various tests. And from there, I stayed through several series of tests. And then after I got from there, they asked for a volunteer to join, to go to the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Maryland. And I volunteered for that. And I became a member of the explosive effects division of the Naval Ordnance lab. And I went on tests in then. And then we talk. I went to San Diego for underwater tests. I went to various places to see these tests, and then from there, I was discharged from naval ordnance lab. I hadn't worn a uniform from the time I left Biloxi, so I had to borrow a uniform and come to the Pentagon to get signed out. I got signed out, and I then joined as a civilian, the special weapons effect at Naval Ordnance lab. From there, I went to Davies lab and various others.

[08:14] THERESA STADEL: When you were in Albuquerque, when you volunteered for the special weapons project, did you know what it was?

[08:22] RAYMOND STADEL: Yes. At that time, I knew it was to assemble the bomb and to test the electronics and all.

[08:29] THERESA STADEL: Okay. And what did you see when you first entered the compound in Albuquerque?

[08:36] RAYMOND STADEL: What did I do?

[08:37] THERESA STADEL: When you, were you surprised at anything you saw when you first entered the compound? Once your clearance was done, that was a cue clearance. Yeah. Yeah.

[08:46] RAYMOND STADEL: You had to go into the special compound, and you went into a. And somebody checked your badge, and in that one, they particularly paid attention to your picture on the badge and to make sure it was you and then let you in to see the bomb. And to work on it.

[09:06] THERESA STADEL: Yeah. What was the first blast you witnessed?

[09:12] RAYMOND STADEL: It was project upshot knothole. And it was a. That tower. The bomb was on the top of a tower. And I saw the old test sites and so forth. Now, when I got there, the tests particularly the main thing I was doing was going all the way around Nevada, all the way up to Ely, which is in the top of Nevada, and then coming back with samplers that would test the air samples from, you know, from the air in any of these cities. And then I would run tests to show how hot they were and how fast they were decaying and what types of materials. And I. That was the main job. I was just running around all over Nevada measuring stuff, including groom. Mine is where I stayed, which is right above groom lake, which later became called area 51. That was where I usually watched the bomb go off from or from the right within the right near them, just a mile or so from them.

[10:40] THERESA STADEL: And what was the equipment that was used to collect the samples?

[10:45] RAYMOND STADEL: Electrolux vacuum cleaners with filters and some special testers. They were essentially vacuum cleaners, like with filters and they. And the filter itself. And also we had plates that were. Had some sort of a glue on them so that any stuff falling on them would stick. And that was used to measure what just was falling out.

[11:20] THERESA STADEL: And so you physically picked up all these samples in your car?

[11:23] RAYMOND STADEL: Yep. Well, it was a truck.

[11:25] THERESA STADEL: A truck.

[11:26] RAYMOND STADEL: It was from the motor pool. I had my own. I had my own vehicle. It was signed out to me for the entire time. I didn't have to bring it back or anything. Every day at the end, I had to give it back, of course.

[11:42] THERESA STADEL: And you tested the samples yourself in the lab?

[11:46] RAYMOND STADEL: Yes, with other people. And there was a major from the Pentagon who was down there, who was in charge of all this. And I met with him when I was in the lab. But when the tests were over, he went back to the Pentagon and left me there. And he told me every month I should send him a report on what all of the different test sites were measuring, which I did, until the captain who was in charge of the base, camp mercury, they called it. I was just about the only one there anymore. So he wanted to know where I would go, and I said, no place. So he finally said that Nol needed a volunteer, and I volunteered.

[12:46] THERESA STADEL: How many blasts did you witness in Nevada?

[12:51] RAYMOND STADEL: I would say at least ten, including the atomic cannon. I actually was right next to the cannon when it went off. And it shot from Frenchman flat to. What is it? Well, the other part of the base, it was 40 miles. It shot the bomb. And the funny thing about that is I was in a tent right near the cannon, not very far from it, and I fell asleep, and I didn't wake up in time for the cannon to go off. So the cannon went off next to me, knocked me out of bed. But I saw the explosion 40 miles away.

[13:50] THERESA STADEL: Were there any other blasts of particular note in Nevada?

[13:54] RAYMOND STADEL: In Nevada, well, yes, they had the one where, which involved the military. There was a separate base there for the military, and that was Camp Desert Rock, I believe. And at that base, the military went in trenches, and they shot a bomb off there. And, you know, just to see survivability. And it had buildings and so forth. And I went through that, all that part of the stuff the next day, actually. And so that was pretty noteful. I saw a lot of stuff there. Let's see.

[14:46] THERESA STADEL: Oh, and then could you describe, after you were alone on the base or with just the captain on the base, what was your process for doing measurements on the range?

[14:59] RAYMOND STADEL: Oh, I had gaga counters, of course, and ion chambers, dosimeters. And of course, I had to measure my own radiation. That's the dosimeter. I keep track of how much radiation I was receiving.

[15:19] THERESA STADEL: And how hot were the sites you went to?

[15:22] RAYMOND STADEL: Oh, you could stay in there. When I first went through some like that, that one with the military, the troops themselves went in where the bomb went off, right underneath it, of course, immediately after the bomb went off, you know, maybe an hour later or something like that. And you couldn't stay in there more than five or ten minutes, so they had to just go right through. And that's what I had to do all the time.

[16:00] THERESA STADEL: And then where was the next place you went to work on tests?

[16:06] RAYMOND STADEL: The most interesting ones then were enowetalk. In the Pacific.

[16:16] THERESA STADEL: Yeah. Describe your trip to annowetalk.

[16:20] RAYMOND STADEL: Well, we had to go by military air transport, and they weren't that reliable at that time. And very often we wound up landing in mid islands, various islands, just because one of the engines went out. Some people I knew on another one, they had to throw their luggage out to make midway before they crashed. But it was a long trip by math, but it wasn't too bad. And then we arrived in Enewetak, which was the main island of that atoll, andawitak atoll with the first island, and we talked. Second was Parry. And Enuitak was run by the army, so they were all armies, and they had an air base. So we landed there and then took an M boat over to Parry, which is where all the scientists were. They were. That was a civilian compound. So from there, we set up these hydrogen bombs. There was one set up on the top of the atoll, and we talk atoll, right in the same atoll, and another one over in Bikini, which I think was 150 miles to the east. And both of them were the most spectacular things I ever saw, because.

[18:03] THERESA STADEL: Okay, so what was the first hydrogen blast like?

[18:07] RAYMOND STADEL: Well, the first one. Oh, that was. Where was that? I think that was the one in bikini. There was one in bikini, the one, I remember in Bikini. We had a float or something that we put in the water, in the air there, and we were measuring the blast and everything else from. From it that we were supposed to be in Bikini, and, you know, set that up. But when one bomb went off earlier, it washed over the islands, so you couldn't go on the islands, so we had to operate out of a ship, the Ainsworth, it was. And on that ship, there were mostly navy people, right? Regular navy. But I was in with the civilians and I didn't wear a uniform and I didn't let anybody know either, because I didn't feel right, you know, since I was outranked by most of the navy people. But anyway, the one I remember, after the bomb was all set up, we went back to Ennui Tak and we stood on the island of Eni Weetak, which, as I say, was 150 miles away. And Enewetak is very flat. That particular, the parry island, which we were on, is very flat, and it can't be more than one or 2ft above sea level, you know. So we stood on the side of that for that explosion because we expected we might have a tsunami wash across the island, and it was pitch black. There was no moon out, I can remember, and it was just before dawn. The sun was just below the horizon, so you didn't see the sun yet, none of the sun. And the sky was, as I say, pitch black. When that thing went off, the whole sky lit up and you thought it was noon, everything. It lit up the entire sky in every direction as if it was noon, as I say. And as it. The bomb then started to rise just above the. Above the horizon and you started seeing it, and then the sun came up with it and we could actually see the blast shockwave from the explosion growing and growing in the sky, and it just became daylight and it became day just like that. But when it arrived at Parry, there wasn't much. All we felt was a bang, and there was no tsunami or anything.

[21:26] THERESA STADEL: And what was the name of that test?

[21:29] RAYMOND STADEL: Oh, that I don't remember. I could look it up, but I don't remember it. Then the one on the other one was spectacular, was on in a wee talk atoll, so that wasn't very far from us. And we were right on the lagoon. Parry, that explosion was. And it was in shallow water, because the lagoon is shallow compared to the ocean. So what happened when that bomb went off? It pushed all the water out of the yattle. I mean, all of a sudden we see the fish on the bottom, and I the boats down on the bottom, everything. It was dry land. You could walk right out into the. Everything was gone. The water was all gone. And we were there with some m boats that we would get in if something happened. We could get on the m boats to get over, out of the atoll if necessary. But after just a short while, all of a sudden the water comes pouring back in and you see all these boats suddenly rise again. But it didn't go over the island or anything like that. But it was loud when it finally hit it, and it was brighten, of course, everything we did, we had to wear these glasses. That was 4.5 density glasses. They like sunglasses, but they're so dark, you couldn't even hardly see the sun, it was so dim with those glasses. But when those bombs went off, it was like. It looked like noon through those glasses.

[23:33] THERESA STADEL: And what about the blast that was. It was much more powerful than they had anticipated. One, the blast that was about a third more powerful than they anticipated. And they had to. Afterwards, they had to evacuate.

[23:54] RAYMOND STADEL: Oh, they changed. Originally, when the Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they always said they were 20 kilotons now, which is 20,000 pounds, but of explosive equivalent. That was all mathematically figured, based on the scientists. After the re evaluations of that, that was lowered quite a bit, down to about twelve, I think. And so that's nominal with the original way. They shot like the little boy. Oh, no. Little fat man and little what? The two bombs. There was one size, it wouldn't get bigger or smaller. All this making smaller bombs. And that all came later. And that had to be done by special design of the bomb. And so we found out that they were much smaller. But then when the h bombs came in, boy, they came in biggest. And the Russians always shot bigger than what we did, because it didn't make any difference. If you had a bomb that was big enough to kill everything under it, if you doubled the size of it, it isn't going to do any more damage than it. And why make it bigger?

[25:43] THERESA STADEL: So this was a castle Bravo? I was asking about Castle Bravo. Castle Bravo.

[25:53] RAYMOND STADEL: Bravo. I don't. I know that one. What one was that? Did it say where it was?

[26:12] THERESA STADEL: It was on bikini Atoll.

[26:14] RAYMOND STADEL: Oh, at Bikini? Yeah. That was. That was one. Yeah.

[26:19] THERESA STADEL: That was the largest ever test.

[26:22] RAYMOND STADEL: Oh, no, they were larger. Later.

[26:25] THERESA STADEL: Later.

[26:27] RAYMOND STADEL: Yeah. Then we started shooting them in. They started going underground into the mountains on the proving ground, and they dig a big hole way down. Miles put the bomb at the bottom. When they shot off the bomb, the hull collapsed so that there was no, nothing got into the air atmosphere, and they fired all the rest of the tests that way. They didn't have any more air shots.

[27:08] THERESA STADEL: I think you told me before on Castle Bravo blast, you were on a boat, right. And the radiation was more than they anticipated.

[27:18] RAYMOND STADEL: Well, I don't know about the radiation on that, but I do know that the water, that it washed over the islands, and therefore the islands we couldn't use to assemble the bombs to house and stuff like that, so we had to stay on the troop carrier, which was the, you know, there. It was only supposed to bring people to the islands for the shots. It wasn't supposed to house us when we were there. That's the ainsworth.

[27:56] THERESA STADEL: Yeah, yeah, but I think you said you had to quarantine. You had to stay below deck for a while. Below decks after the blast.

[28:11] RAYMOND STADEL: No, I don't remember that.

[28:13] THERESA STADEL: No. You don't remember that? What about when did you do the blast in San Diego? And what was that like?

[28:19] RAYMOND STADEL: Well, that was very interesting. San Diego was an underwater, and they were trying to find the effect of the blast on the submarines, and they picked San Diego because that's a big port, and they could have all the boats and stuff for the shot there. And they picked a place outside in the Pacific. I don't know exactly where from there. That would take a few days of sailing to get to, and they said that's where they were going to fire it. And because it was a place that of a turn, all was calm. It was calm waters. Not too many fish or anything else hurt. So this was an ideal place to be. Well, what we had was a barge and dock. The boat was a dock. It was a hull that you could lower the boat down and then bring m boats in. It was used for what he called, if you were going to capture an island or something, do you want to bring these m boats in? The m boats brought the men in onto the land later, you know, like d day and so forth. But the m boats couldn't go in the big seas, so therefore they went in the d boats or whatever. And we were in one of those. Now.

[30:10] THERESA STADEL: Go ahead.

[30:12] RAYMOND STADEL: We are.

[30:13] THERESA STADEL: Yeah, go ahead.

[30:16] RAYMOND STADEL: When we got there, we had a tow rope and all these m boats were hooked on the tow road. It was miles long. And the m boats then would lower sensors down into the water, and that's how they were going to measure the shock waves and everything else that was going on. And they had balloons to measure any shock waves that might come out of the air. Well, what happened is all of a sudden we got started getting a big waves and a lot of wind and air. Boats were going over like crazy, breaking off with a tow rope. And some of them, the balloons actually took some of the emblems and took them off of the tow rope and they went their own way. And we had trouble bringing. Getting back from the m boat in which our sensor, our sensors were back onto the boat because that's where we were sleeping is on the boat. But we couldn't get it on the boat because it was too rough to get into the back of it. You had to go in the back. It had a big gate in the back and. But eventually they shot it off. It calmed down and then we shot it off. But they didn't have all the sensors they expected, but they had plenty. And you hardly noticed. It made a big bloop on the surface. We saw that come up. Nothing really seemed to vent or anything. And I don't think it did that much damage to the submarine as much as they had thought it might, you know. But anyway, one of the things that happened is it knocked somebody trying to get onto the landing ship dock. LSD is what it hit the gate in the back, the gate that goes down and broke it off. It fell down to the bottom of the ocean. So we had to go back to San Diego. And one of the things about an LSD is you don't want to get waves come in from the rear with the gate down because it can split that into two. You know, you got two hulls, like with a bottom between them, and that can split, if you get enough water, come rushing in with a tsunami or something. So we had a struggle to get back to San Diego. We had to make sure that they kept the rear facing in the right direction all the time when waves came in. But that was a very interesting shot. I remember seeing the first boat on that thing was a barge, and they just lowered the bomb down from that and then exploded it from there. But that was an interesting, I don't think many people knew it went off because it was, you know, in the middle of the ocean, but it wasn't that eternally calm place with a lot of, not that many fish. There were plenty of fish, all kind, too, and a lot of those got killed. But that's one I remember particularly.

[34:09] THERESA STADEL: And when you going back to Nevada, can you describe where you witnessed the blast from groom mine? Oh, what was that situation?

[34:23] RAYMOND STADEL: Well, as you come in the gate to Camp mercury, you go to, you know, where the, where the barracks and all are. This is for the scientists. And then the next thing over is called Frenchman's flat. It's a dry flat, you know, from a dry lake. And they had a couple of bombs go off in there. They didn't use that much. It was a smaller one. But then there was a sort of a mountain pass, and you got to go through to the next one. And that's where most of the bombs went off. Well, on that dry pass is where they had a bunker for observers. And so we sat on, we stood on the top of that pass and watched from there. And we only be a few miles from the actual bombs on, you know, when they went off. Most of the time when I was on base. Other times I was at Groom Lake, which is area 51, is grue mine. Now, the people who owned grue mine, that was very interesting. We got to know them. They lived most of the time in Las Vegas. It was a family, but they couldn't go to their mine through Camp mercury anymore, so they had to go up to what they crystal Springs, which is the next city north of Las Vegas. And then there was a dirt road for miles and miles that went into the groom lake. And it only, that's the only place it went. And they would once a year take that trip into their, their mine, which was halfway up the mountain. And they lived there for maybe six or seven months, mining, collecting all the ore and so forth. And then they go back to Las Vegas, and that's where we stayed overnight, even when we were collecting from one of the shots, because we were particularly interested in the, in the fallout because we knew what direction it was going to come from.

[37:00] THERESA STADEL: And did you get a lot of radiation exposure.

[37:05] RAYMOND STADEL: By today's standards? I guess, but, because they changed that, but they're really quite safe. I don't think it was that much because, like they say, I think the dosage that they allowed you sort of based on accumulative dosage on some cities that are in the United States that have this as a natural level, you know, if you're there all year long, you're going to get a total accumulation that's very high, but it's at a small rate you're receiving it. And that's more or less the way I. When I'm testing the instruments, I would have to have a radiation source that I know how big it is, and then I'd measure how far I am from it. And that told me what the radiation level was to calibrate the instruments. And, like, we used to use one, one raydhe. Well, they used to call Rankin, but now they changed the name of that to a REM or something like that. But, yeah, you had to be very careful handling those type of things because it wouldn't take you very long with a one REM sauce. If you were holding it or something. Boy, you would get a. In a few hours, you start getting sick already.

[38:48] THERESA STADEL: Yeah. All right. Any last word about your experience with the testing?

[38:56] RAYMOND STADEL: With which.

[38:57] THERESA STADEL: With the testing?

[38:59] RAYMOND STADEL: No, I think that. Pretty idiot. I was a. Well, I can remember we used to take this truck when we were going around, you know, the country, and it was miles and miles from one city to another, and we would be going over 100 miles an hour with a Chevy van truck, you know, that type. And they were not very stable. So I'd be drifting back and forth from right side to the left side, trying to on the road. And then all of a sudden it started to vibrate like crazy. I said, oh, we got a flat. So we just pulled down and looked, and the tires all looked great. So we got in again. We started up, and I. Same thing started rat. Then I shut up. Go down. The wheel fell off.

[40:01] THERESA STADEL: Oh, my.

[40:04] RAYMOND STADEL: We had been going 100 miles an hour, but I was very lucky. I had a lot of close ones. And I saw a lot of people get killed, too, in those. As a matter of fact, one of our technicians on the test in the. We talk when we were working out of a barge, they had a big crane up above and with a big heavy block on it, and it was swinging back and forth, and he had his head right next to the wall, and that dang thing hit him right in the head and killed him. Another guy to jump from an m boat to the big boat, the LSD, and they're going up and down with respect to each other, and you try to jump across when it's on this. When you jump across on this way, which happened, and then it goes up and across. I remember one getting killed that way.

[41:19] THERESA STADEL: Well, thank you, dad. That's all the time we have. Very interesting.

[41:24] RAYMOND STADEL: Is that all right?