because they were to "ride herd" on the implosion effort and coordinate all the efforts of the laboratory. It included Bacher, along with Samuel Allison, George Kistiakowsky, Deak Parsons, Charles Lauritsen and Hartley Rowe. Three days before the day the bomb was to be test detonated in the New Mexico desert, Bacher was part of the pit assembly team, which assembled the nuclear capsule (a cylindrical section of the uranium tamper, containing the plutonium core and initiator) in an old farmhouse near the Alamogordo testing site. When the capsule was driven to the shot tower and inserted into the spherical tamper, inside the explosive assembly, it stuck. Bacher recognized that expansion of the capsule due to the heat given off by the plutonium core was causing the jam, and that leaving the two parts in contact would equalize temperatures and allow the capsule to be inserted fully. After watching the test, his reaction was merely "Well, it works." Bacher was packaging the third core for shipment to Tinian on August 12 at the Ice House at Los Alamos when he received word that the Japanese had initiated surrender negotiations. He had already set G Division the task of designing and building new types of cores and assemblies, and he co-authored a report with Robert Wilson urging the development of Edward Teller's Super bomb. He served on a committee chaired by Richard Tolman that looked into declassifying documents produced by the Manhattan Project, and one chaired by Manson Benedict that investigated the technical feasibility of international control of nuclear energy. For his services to the Manhattan Project Bacher was awarded the Medal for Merit on January 12, 1946. Post-World War II Atomic Energy Commission After the war, Bacher returned to Ithaca to head Cornell's Laboratory for Nuclear Studies. He agreed with Bethe that what Cornell needed to become a major player in high energy nuclear physics was a new synchrotron, but first he needed to find somewhere to put it. However, in 1946 Bacher was appointed to the Scientific and Technical Subcommittee of the new United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, along with fellow United States representatives Tolman and Oppenheimer. Bacher therefore had to divide his time between Ithaca and New York City. In October 1946 David Lilienthal asked Bacher to become one of the inaugural commissioners of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, the civilian agency that was being formed to