The Sentinel article detailed the manifest of the Liberty Ship E.A. Bryan, diaries of port officials, full government inquiry records, computational evaluation for the energy released at Port Chicago, confidential and top secret memos from the U.S. Navy. But now, two years later, some very specific documents have been declassified. One declassified document was originally hand-delivered only to Major General L.R. Groves, who headed the Los Alamos project, and Dr. J.R. Oppenheimer, the father of the nuclear bomb. The memo was dated 25 September 1944 and written by Captain W. S. Parsons. This document may prove, once and for all, that the Port Chicago blast was nuclear.
Parsons is the key.
He has been almost alone to appreciate the actual military and engineering problems which we should encounter. He has been almost alone in insisting on facing these problems at a date early enough so that we might arrive at the solution. Vogel tenacity has established Parsons as the man who was the father of the first atomic bomb, in contrast to what history has told us. But what does Parsons and Port Chicago have in common. Recently released records show that Parsons, sole assigned to building the first atomic bomb, was at Port Chicago around the time of the blast.