A-bomb memorabilia on display here before California auction

Friday, June 7, 2002 | 11:04 a.m.

Morris "Dick" Jeppson spent an hour and a half scrambling over a five-ton bomb, the only one aboard the B-29 that day.

His job was to put the final link in place between a complex fuse system and a weapon called "Little Boy."

The entire mission was experimental and top secret from the beginning. Jeppson, now 79, and the entire 509th crew that flew the Enola Gay were kept in a separate Quonset hut as they worked at the Army Air Corps base on Tinian Island in the South Pacific.

The historic plane dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. Memorabilia from the plane, some of it belonging to Jeppson, will be auctioned on Tuesday in San Francisco.

The memorabilia is expected to sell for a total of about $1 million at the auction.

Those pieces were on display during a private showing Thursday at the Antique Arms Show at the Riviera convention center, which continues through Saturday.

Although only 23 years old, Jeppson, who grew up in Carson City and now lives in Las Vegas, said he wasn't afraid when the time came. "We were trained to do this job."

Instead, he felt a sense of dread.

The fuse system had failed less than 24 hours previously during a practice run.

"All I could think was, 'Oh, my God, it's not going to work,' " Jeppson said.

A pair of red and green plugs belonging to Jeppson rested under glass on a table at the Riviera's convention center. Once a green plug was removed and replaced by the red, the bomb was armed.

One of the last available sets from that flight, Jeppson's pair of bomb plugs sat in a drawer of his home for years. A second set is in a military museum in Washington, D.C. The third set is framed and hung in the home of Ed Doll, his superior at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The two scraps of paper, tags certifying that the two safety plugs came from the Hiroshima mission, lie in the case holding Jeppson's set on black felt. They are signed by Jeppson and Doll.

Once Jeppson installed the green plug that day, he began counting, knowing the shock wave from the atomic explosion would rock the plane 43 seconds after the bomb, falling at the speed of sound from the plane's belly, reached 1,500 feet above the ground.

Jeppson reached the number 43, and nothing seemed to happen.

"But it worked," Jeppson said. He figures now that, in his dread, he counted too fast.

The bomb killed more than 100,000 people, injured thousands more on the ground and vaporized the city.

Historians credit the Hiroshima bomb and another dropped on Nagasaki three days later with helping to end the war in the Pacific with fewer casualties than a ground invasion might have exacted.

It took all of the uranium 235, the size of a softball, that had been refined at Oak Ridge, Tenn., Jeppson said.

The Nagasaki weapon used plutonium.

On the log sheet for that flight -- also up for auction -- is a penciled note about a ship in the harbor.

Other items to be auctioned off include the Enola Gay's master clock, a sextant used by navigator Maj. Theodore Van Kirk, Van Kirk's valise, the Enola Gay's headset and a Colt 1911 pistol carried on the flight.

Jeppson peered at the notation about the ship. "I don't have any idea what happened to that ship," he said. There were no windows where he huddled in the plane. "We weren't supposed to look anyway."

Instead, after the drop, Jeppson said he felt the plane lurch after the initial blast, then a second time as the explosion bounced off the Earth's surface.

He never flew another combat mission. Jeppson said he had had enough of war, and he set his sights on becoming a nuclear physicist.

The military had provided him and other crew members before their flight with some of the best available training. He attended electronics school for five months at Harvard then spent another three months at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to learn about the radar that would guide the weapons.

He went back to school, ultimately studying for a doctorate in physics at the University of California, Berkeley. While there, he worked at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, where Edward Teller, the father of America's hydrogen bomb, worked.

He never finished the degree, but went on to the Nevada Test Site, where he monitored nuclear weapons experiments and later started his own company to build electron beam accelerators.

Today such accelerators are used in research and medicine.

As the holder of 30 patents, Jeppson made a range of 21st-century devices, from microwave electron beam linear accelerators used in cancer therapy to large microwave heating systems for industry and food processing.

The fallout, both literally and figuratively, from the use of nuclear weapons still bothers Jeppson. "The fallout was not very good, that was one reason the tests went underground (in 1963)," he said. "They didn't know that at the time."