Alvin C. Graves

Who was Alvin C. Graves?

Alvin C. Graves was an atomic physicist and director of U.S. nuclear weapons testing for the US Atomic Energy Commission, predecessor of today's Department of Energy.

Graves was born in 1909 in Washington, DC, the youngest of six children. He graduated at the top of his class from the University of Virginia in 1931 with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and later earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

In 1942 Graves was an assistant professor of physics at the University of Texas when he was invited back to the University of Chicago to help build the first nuclear reactor, the. He was a member of Fermi's "suicide squad", assigned to drop buckets of liquid cadmium salts onto the reactor if something went wrong. He and his wife, Dr. Elizabeth "Diz" Graves, moved to work at Site Y in Los Alamos, New Mexico, when it opened in 1943 and two years later he headed the Test Division there.

Graves was badly injured in a 1946 laboratory criticality accident in Los Alamos that killed Dr. Louis Slotin. Slotin, who was training Graves to replace him in his position as chief bomb assembler for Los Alamos, was demonstrating the dangerous "tickling the dragon's tail" test to several other scientists when the accident occurred. Graves, who was looking over Slotin's shoulder, suffered an estimated 400 roentgen dose. This caused severe radiation poisoning, loss of hair and a zero semen count, two weeks of hospitalization and a several week convalescence. He seemed to have recovered fully in a few months, work and skiing vigorously, with only a bald spot on the head to show for the experience. Two years later he fathered a healthy child, their second.