Nuclear physicist Robert Bacher, a central figure behind the creation of the atomic bomb during World War II and the first provost of Caltech, died of natural causes Thursday at a retirement community in Montecito. He was 99.
Bacher was one of hundreds of young scientists recruited to Los Alamos, N.M., for the Manhattan Project to build the bomb. He was pulled away from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1943, where he had been conducting radar research, another crucial wartime effort.
Bacher headed the bomb physics division for the project as it reached fruition and put together the first bomb core with his own hands prior to its detonation in the New Mexico desert. Assembly stalled when two parts wedged together incorrectly, but after a few nerve-racking minutes, he dislodged the jam and completed the job.
"Then I got in my government car and drove to the site with [the] bomb in the back seat," Bacher told the Washington Post years later.
After atomic bombs were used to destroy two Japanese cities, Bacher shared mixed feelings with other members of the project: satisfaction in helping to end a horrific war and remorse at having unleashed so savage a force of technology.
"I knew perfectly well it would be the president, not us at Los Alamos, who would make that decision," he told the Post. But "it would have been better if [the bomb] somehow could have been used [for] persuasion," he said. "Good Lord, I certainly feel that!"
After the war, Bacher became a member of the newly formed U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, created to explore military and civilian applications of atomic energy. He also served on the President's Science Advisory Committee and other top government panels throughout much of the 1950s.
By then, Cold War tensions had created pressure to curtail academic freedom and classify much of the work going on at American universities, said Thomas Tombrello, chairman of the Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at Caltech, who met Bacher in 1961.
Bacher and a handful of other top advisors argued convincingly that openness would better serve the nation's economic, security and technological interests.
That advice was largely followed and "was as responsible as anything for the last 50 years of American scientific success," Tombrello said.
Bacher was born Aug. 31, 1905, in Loudonville, Ohio. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1926 and his PhD in physics in 1930, both from the University of Michigan.
