Michigan Tech alumnus and faculty emeritus Walter Anderson brings World War II into the high school classroom, telling his personal stories about the development of the atomic bomb code-named "Little Boy."

The Manhattan Project was cloaked in secrecy, hidden even from most of the scientists involved. But Walter Anderson and other curious engineers at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, calculated that the mysterious substance they were producing was the rare isotope uranium 235. A few years later, U-235 from Oak Ridge would fuel the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Their equations, scribbled on paper, are seen on the cover.

For the gregarious Walter Anderson '43, the hardest part about working on the Manhattan Project - America's gargantuan, covert effort to build the atomic bomb - was keeping quiet about it.

"The most we could say was, 'Yeah, I was at Los Alamos, yeah, I was at Oak Ridge,'" says the retired Michigan Tech emeritus professor.

While they didn't talk about it much, over the years it became clear that as many as thirty University alumni and faculty had worked on the bomb.

"Michigan Tech was represented on the Manhattan Project entirely out of proportion to its size," says Anderson. "Back then, we only had about nine hundred students."

Robert Sherman '43 worked at Los Alamos, where the bombs were built. Alumnus Manley Fortune '43 kept track of America's uranium stockpiles. Michigan Tech student Phillip Barnes was a sergeant on the plane that carried Fat Man, the plutonium bomb, to Nagasaki.

"During the flight, they discovered there was a problem with the bomb, and he fixed it," says Anderson. Other Manhattan Project veterans were Meriott Bredekamp, a Michigan Tech chemistry professor, and electrical engineering alumnus Leroy Hartmann '43.

Eventually, federal secrecy rules relaxed, and Anderson began telling his story at local high schools, including Ted Holmstrom's American history class at Chassell High. "They are always interested," Holmstrom says afterward. "He's a primary source. Just think: when these students are forty or fifty years old, they'll be able to say they met someone who worked on the Manhattan Project."

"Twenty years ago, I wouldn't have dared to give this talk," Anderson observes. But now, he and Sherman can discuss their work on this desperate, high-stakes scientific endeavor, a fulcrum in history that assured American victory over Japan and changed world politics forever.

In 1943, Walter Anderson was a young engineer working for General Electric and waiting for greetings from his draft board. Then he got a summons of another kind.

At the age of 21, Anderson went to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as part of America's desperate effort to develop an atomic bomb. He supervised a crew of young women from throughout the South, who ran equipment used to make weapons-grade uranium.

"I got a call that somebody wanted to interview me, and they said it was a secret project," says Anderson. Back then he was fresh out of Michigan Tech, with a BS in Electrical Engineering.

After a cryptic interview, he resigned from General Electric, where he was making a respectable ninety cents an hour, and found himself riding a train from Schenectady, New York, to Knoxville, Tennessee. There, he boarded a bus to Oak Ridge, a two-year-old, 60,000-acre community that was so secret even the governor didn't know it was there. For two weeks, he hung out in a big room with a crowd of other young men, "telling jokes and reading newspapers."

None of them knew they'd been handpicked to work on the super-secret Manhattan Project. The secrecy applied even to those who made it through the security screening and were put to work. "They never told us what we were making," Anderson remembers.

What they would make at Oak Ridge was fuel for Little Boy, the uranium bomb that would level Hiroshima and hasten the end of World War II. Oak Ridge was one of three primary research and production sites of the Manhattan Project; the others were the plutonium-production facility at the Hanford Site, in Washington state; and the weapons R&D laboratory at Los Alamos in New Mexico.

"One night, we were sitting around wondering what we were doing," says Anderson. "We knew everything about the process except the strength of the magnetic field." So they asked around and got the missing piece of the puzzle. "Then we figured it out. We were making uranium-235."

When the army found out about their discovery, they confiscated the engineers' security badges. "We asked the sergeant if we were fired," Anderson remembers. "But then they gave us new badges." The curious scientists' security clearance was bumped up to reflect their new knowledge.

U-235, now known as weapons-grade uranium, was made using electromagnetic separation to winnow out the rare isotope from the garden-variety U-238. The process was carried out on a massive scale that only yielded U-235 by the gram. "The locals saw all this construction, with so much going into Oak Ridge and nothing coming out," says Anderson. Indeed, almost nothing did go out. The U-235 left Oak Ridge periodically in a briefcase by an army courier.

Much of the hands-on work at Oak Ridge was done by thousands of young women hired from throughout the South. "There were dormitories that housed five thousand," Anderson says. He supervised a crew of operators in the electromagnetic plant, who also had no idea what they were making, or why.

However, the purpose of their work was made abundantly clear on August 6, 1945, when the first atomic bomb, fueled by U-235, exploded over Hiroshima.

The workers at Oak Ridge realized instantly that they had played a crucial role. "That night, my group had midnight shift, and the girls caught on quickly," says Anderson. "There was one who sat on her operator's stool and cried for eight hours. Her brother and husband were in the Philippines, as was my brother. A lot of those guys claim we saved their lives, and I think we did. But she was so laden with guilt."

After the war, Anderson earned his master's degree and returned to Oak Ridge to work in the gaseous diffusion program, a new process to create U-235, albeit briefly. "In 1954, I turned in my resignation and went to Tech," he says, where he served first on the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering (now Electrical and Computer Engineering) and later as dean of the School of Technology, until his retirement in 1988.

Looking back on his years at Oak Ridge, Anderson does not second-guess the morality of his work. "War is hell," he states. "It's expensive in equipment, it's expensive in lives. It's a horrible thing." And for all its devastation, Little Boy helped put an end to it.