Manhattan Project’s Success Brought Personal Anguish : Horror of Bomb Haunted Officer Throughout His Life

On Aug. 9, 1945, the day an atom bomb obliterated Nagasaki and three days after one had destroyed Hiroshima, the young legal officer of the Manhattan Project sat down with a yellow legal pad in his office at Oak Ridge, Tenn., and wrote of his own anguish at having participated in developing the awesome new weapon.

“Nagasaki has this morning disappeared from the map,” 1st Lt. Philip C. Close wrote to his parents in Kansas City. “Buildings and people in the immediate vicinity are not blown to bits but disintegrate and vaporize, if you can imagine such a thing. On the outer extremities, all living tissue and material, organic and inorganic, is seared to destruction beyond recognition.”

Close wrote that, while he had taken part in “history’s greatest event,” he was “tired and unhappy and uncomfortable” at Oak Ridge and had “no pride in having participated in this thing to the very small extent that a legal but unscientific mind could.”

Haunted by Bomb

He returned to Kansas City after the war to practice law but was haunted for the rest of his life by the horrors of the bomb, according to his widow, Mildred Close of Kansas City, and daughter, Janet Ewert of Roanoke, Va., who released a copy of the handwritten letter to The Times.

“He was disturbed by the bomb and its consequences,” Mildred Close said. “It preyed on his mind for years. He would have nightmares about fires, and I would shake him and wake him up, and he would say: ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ ”

Ewert, who has kept the letter in a box of old photographs and documents, said: “Daddy never was the same after the war and turned to drinking. What happened to him has weighed heavily on all our lives.”

In the letter, Close disclosed that when he drew his assignment as legal adviser to the Manhattan Project, he and a colleague were secretly “whisked” into the Washington office of Maj. Gen. Leslie R. Groves “as though we were being dispatched to another world from which we would never return.” Groves was commanding general of the Manhattan Engineer District, code name for the Army’s secret bomb project.

“His name was not on the new War Department directory, nor on the door,” Close wrote. “His office was reached by a blind passageway concealed by a partition or false wall. Such goings-on I have never been through before.”

During the war, Mildred Close knew her husband was working on a super-secret project “but never had an inkling of what it was.” Almost every day, she received a letter from him postmarked Oak Ridge.

Only after the war did she learn that he had written many of the letters in advance, pre-dated them and had someone else mail them from Oak Ridge. Meanwhile, he was doing much more than legal work for the Manhattan Project. “He was off overseas on night missions, flying in these small planes to rendezvous with scientists who were working on the bomb,” she said.

In his letter, Close wrote that he had prepared the legislative recommendations that would serve as a start toward congressional action to preserve and control the use of atomic energy.

“I say without exaggeration that man has reached or is shortly within reach of the point where all earthly civilization can be obliterated,” he said. “This is considerable cause for sober thought.

“Sadly enough, there are only a comparative handful of people in the world who realize this or are stunned with it. History is enough teaching and basis for the realization that if we can do it, others can. I draw hope from the fact that it may make war too horrible to contemplate and too ridiculous to be engaged in.”

Close concluded by saying he wanted to return home and stay there and “enjoy simple things in a normal, simple fashion.”

But life was never the same. Close began drinking heavily soon after resuming his law practice in Kansas City.

“One day he went down to light the furnace and it exploded and he was badly injured,” said Ewert, his daughter. He was badly burned and in terrible shape, but he wouldn’t go to a hospital at first. They finally took him to a VA (Veterans Administration) hospital, but he never pulled out of it.”

Close died at the VA hospital on Nov. 4, 1963. He was 52. Three days later, his widow received a letter signed by President John F. Kennedy declaring: “A grateful nation acknowledges the death of Philip J. Close.”