Project Camel encompassed the work performed by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in support of the Manhattan Project during World War II. These activities included the development of detonators and other equipment, testing of bomb shapes dropped from Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers, and the Salt Wells Pilot Plant, where explosive components of nuclear weapons were manufactured.
Background In the early 1930s, an emergency landing field was built by the Works Progress Administration in the Mojave Desert near the small town of Inyokern, California. Opened in 1935, it was acquired by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) in 1942, and became part of the Muroc Bombing and Gunnery Range. In 1943, the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) contracted with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for the testing and evaluation of rockets for the Navy. A suitable test area was required for this near Pasadena, California, so the area was transferred from the Army to the Navy in October 1943, and commissioned as the Naval Ordnance Test Station (NOTS) in December 1943. Workshops, laboratories and facilities were constructed for over 600 men. During 1944, NOTS worked on the development and testing of the 3.5-inch, 5-inch, HVAR and 11.75-inch (Tiny Tim) rockets. By late 1944, rocket development and testing work began to taper off, and production models started to reach the Navy and USAAF in quantity. The director of the OSRD, Vannevar Bush saw an opportunity to use some of the expertise at Caltech on another secret wartime project he was involved with, the Manhattan Project. Bush arranged for Charles C. Lauritsen, the head of the rocket team at Caltech, to visit the Los Alamos Laboratory, and meet with the project director, Major General Leslie R. Groves, Jr., the laboratory director, Robert Oppenheimer, and senior scientists at the Los Alamos laboratory. Oppenheimer and Lauritsen knew each other well, as Oppenheimer had worked at Caltech before the war. In addition to its scientists, Caltech also possessed an experienced procurement team, headed by Trevor Gardner. This group worked closely with its counterpart at Los Alamos, which was headed by Lieutenant Colonel Robert W. Lockridge.
Codename All the work done at NOTS on behalf of the Manhattan Project came under the codename Project "Camel". The name is said to have come from a remark by a Los Alamos scientist that once a camel (meaning Caltech) gets its nose under a tent flap it is hard to dislodge.
Manhattan Project
Drop testing The Manhattan Project conducted an extensive series of drop tests to evaluate various bomb shapes. These were initially conducted with scale models of the bomb dropped from a Grumman TBF Avenger at the US Navy test range at Dahlgren, Virginia starting in August 1943. A new airfield was constructed at NOTS, using Manhattan Project funding, with three runways, 10,000 feet (3,000 m), 7,700 feet (2,300 m) and 9,000 feet (2,700 m) long, and 200 feet (61 m) wide to accommodate the Boeing B-29 Superfortress. Fuel storage was provided with a capacity of 200,000 US gallons (760,000 L) of gasoline and 20,000 US gallons (76,000 L) of oil. It was opened on 1 June 1945, and named Armitage Field after Navy Lieutenant John Armitage, who was killed while testing a Tiny Tim rocket at NOTS in August 1944.
Three B-29s were based at Armitage for drop testing. Caltech's Gerald Kron developed instrumentation to evaluate the test drops, which were made by aircraft based at NOTS, Muroc and Wendover Army Air Field. Getting the Fat Man to fall properly was quite difficult. One officer described it as:...a crazy bomb. It was built about like a streamlined brick, and to get [it] to fly reasonably well ballistically was quite a chore. The resolution of the problem involved extensive testing with various fin configurations. Commander Chick Hayward initially thought that test bombs dropped at NOTS would be easier to recover than those dropped on the sands at Wendover, but they proved to have considerable ability to penetrate the desert floor, and required no less digging out. The commander of Project Alberta, Captain Deak Parsons, had four bomb assembly kits produced. These kits were fully contained facilities, which included a number of Quonset huts with air conditioning. Two were shipped to the Pacific island of Tinian, where the atomic bombs were assembled. One was kept as a spare at Wendover, and one was erected at Inyokern, where it was used to assemble the explosive but non-nuclear pumpkin bombs for testing.
Detonators The design of the Fat Man required that a number of explosive lenses had to be detonated simultaneously. After learning from Luis Alvarez that the Los Alamos Laboratory had encountered problems with the supply of the exploding bridgewire detonators required for this, Lauritsen found manufacturers in the Los Angeles area that could produce them. Alvarez ordered the detonators by the thousand. They were used in the bomb, but most were expended in various diagnostic tests required to verify that the detonators and the lenses worked perfectly. Responsibility for the development and testing of the critical detonators was shared between Lauritsen's group at Caltech and Robert Henderson's group at Los Alamos. By mid-1945, the object was to produce 1,000 detonators each week. Meeting this target proved challenging. Reliability was the key problem, with initial batches containing unacceptably high numbers of failures. In May 1945, a box of detonators manufactured by Raytheon fell from a truck and tumbled down a mountain side, but were found to still be in working order.
Salt Wells Pilot plant
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