Alvin C. Graves

Alvin Cushman Graves (November 4, 1909 – July 28, 1965) was an American nuclear physicist who served at the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory and the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II. After the war, he became the head of the J (Test) Division at Los Alamos and was director or assistant director of numerous nuclear weapons tests during the 1940s and 1950s. Graves was severely injured in the 1946 laboratory criticality accident in Los Alamos that killed Louis Slotin, but recovered.

Early life Alvin Cushman Graves was born on November 4, 1909, in Washington, D.C., the youngest of six children. He was the son of Herbert C. Graves, an engineer with the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey and member of the American Commission to Negotiate Peace after World War I. Graves attended Eastern High School and graduated at the top of his class from the University of Virginia in 1931 with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. He attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a year but found that jobs were hard to come by during the Great Depression. He received a graduate fellowship to the University of Chicago, where he earned his Ph.D., writing his thesis on "Packing Fraction Differences Among Heavy Elements".

At Chicago, Graves met and married Elizabeth Riddle, a physics major there, Graves remained at the University of Chicago as a research fellow and an assistant professor until 1939, when he moved to the University of Texas. Graves, Harold V. Lichtenberger and Warren Nyer formed Enrico Fermi's "suicide squad" or "liquid-control squad", assigned to smash glass bottles containing a solution of cadmium sulfate over the reactor with hammers if something went wrong. Cadmium is a strong neutron absorber and Fermi hoped that this would halt a runaway nuclear chain reaction, if the reactor control rods proved to be incapable of halting it in the first place.

Graves and Elizabeth moved to work at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico when it opened in 1943. He made it a condition of his going to Los Alamos that a job be found there for her. This was probably unnecessary, as someone with her skills—she was one of the few physicists who had experience with a Cockcroft–Walton generator—would have been quickly snapped up at Los Alamos. and was given a 50 percent chance of survival. This caused severe radiation poisoning, loss of hair, and a sperm count of zero. He recovered fully after two weeks of hospitalization and several weeks of convalescence. In a few months, he was back at work and skiing vigorously, with only a bald spot on the head to show for the experience. Two years later he and his wife had a healthy child, their second, a son they named Alvin Palmer (who became a chemistry lecturer at Florida International University).

Later life Graves became dismissive of the radiation risks from nuclear testing while serving as test director for the Nevada Test Site shots during the 1950s. He announced that the risks from fallout were "concocted in the minds of weak malingerers." As a spokesman for the Nevada Test Site, he spoke in local areas around Nevada, assuring the population of no danger from the activities there. As the head of the Los Alamos Laboratory's J (Test) Division, He played in the Los Alamos Symphony, accompanying local performances of Gilbert and Sullivan and Handel's Messiah. He had suffered from hypertension even before the 1946 accident, and had a minor heart attack in December 1955.