102-year-old Harold Behl is key figure in New Mexico’s science industry

He’s been here for the last 50 years and will be a part of New Mexico’s history forever.

Harold Behl, 102, has put his "sticky little fingers" in some of the quintessential New Mexico and American technologies and institutions, including nuclear weapons, satellites, lasers and museums. He was awarded the Sustained Community Leadership Award from the Jewish Community Center this year.

Behl used to work at the K-25 Facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, taking uranium mined in New Mexico and turning it into an atomic bomb, called Little Boy. Behl worked on the jet propulsion system of the airplane that would take Little Boy, an atomic bomb to the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

He graduated from college in the height of World War II with a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering. He went to work for the Special Engineering Detachment at Oak Ridge.

The chief scientist at Oak Ridge army base was a physicist who pulled Behl aside to say, “You’re just a dumb engineer. I’m going to make you a physicist out of you,” Behl recalled.

Years later, Behl walked into the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque to donate some of the maps and booklets he had lying around from working on Little Boy.

“I brought them all in and said, 'Can you use these?'" Behl said."Big mistake."

When he walked out, he was a charter member of the foundation and on the board of directors for the museum.

Behl is from New York and never had any plans to settle down in New Mexico.

But, he found himself working for Western Union Telegraph Company at White Sands Missile Range in the late 1970s.

It was his job to make a set of new satellites so the telegraph company could expand. Western Union Telegraph Company, not wanting to foot the entirety of the bill, reached out to NASA.

NASA had its own communications problems: It needed to stay in contact with the Apollo missions 24/7. Western Union Telegraph Company proposed renting their satellites to NASA.

“That way, you don’t have to go to Congress and ask for a billion dollars for a new satellite system, which you probably won’t get,” Behl said.

At the Western Union Telegraph Company, Behl's cowboy tendencies he developed in New Mexico presented some problems. He caused a stir early on when he didn't wear the standard button-up white shirts and donned cowboy boots in the corporate office. He left the company after developing two satellites.

"I was feeling cute. They needed me more than I needed them," he said.

Behl went to work on the Strategic Defense Initiative that President Ronald Reagan launched in 1983. The goal of the initiative was to protect the United States from nuclear attack using lasers. The project was nicknamed Star Wars.

There were two teams working on Star Wars: One that figured out all the interference that would dilute the laser and a team who would make the laser work, Behl said. He was on the team that had to make the laser work.

“It was all very secret, but it turns out that now it's not secret at all,” Behl said.

The same technology Behl helped create is now used in major telescopes like Soccoro’s Very Large Array to allow them to get crisp images of far away planets and space debris. And today, Albuquerque and New Mexico are hubs for developing directed energy technology. The Air Force Research Laboratory's Directed Energy Directorate is based at Kirtland Air Force Base.

Behl is long since retired, but he remains an active member of New Mexico's museums, including the Nuclear Museum, Maxwell Museum and the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History.

"These are things that I've worked on, put my sticky little fingers in," Behl said, as he pointed out pictures and memorabilia from around his office.

Editor's note: This article has been updated to accurately reflect Behl's work history.