Nation: U.S. TEST DIRECTOR

"You Do What Your Country Wants Done."

TO William Elwood Ogle, 44, scientific director of the U.S. atomic tests to be held in the Pacific, a nuclear bomb is a marvelous device. "There's hardly anything more technically fascinating to contemplate than a bomb," he says. "It's a little universe unto itself, one in which we don't know the detailed physical laws which govern it." When he waited on a dark New Mexico mountainside to watch the world's first atomic bomb explode 17 years ago, Ogle was elated. "It was the biggest dawn we'd ever seen," he recalls. "A fantastic moment. When it was over, I felt a sense of great relief and intense pleasure that it had worked." Even when atomic bombs killed thousands at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Ogle felt no revulsion. "I wasn't horrified," he says. "After all, our purpose was to do just that."

Shotgun on Main Street. Bill Ogle sees no paradox in the fact that he can be coldly analytical about the bomb, yet apprehensive about the world that the bomb is creating. "You may not be sure that what your country is doing is right in the long run," he explains. "But nevertheless you do what your country wants done." As a scientist with the Atomic Energy Commission's Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory since getting his doctorate in physics from the University of Illinois in 1944, Ogle has participated in every atomic test series since 1945, has witnessed more than 100 explosions in the Pacific and Nevada. He assisted in hydrodynamic experiments for the wartime Manhattan Project, which produced the first Abomb, celebrated the war's end by firing a shotgun into the air on Los Alamos' main street. After the war, he helped measure bomb yields at the Crossroads tests at Bikini in 1946, and at the Sandstone tests at Eniwetok atoll in 1948, directed technical operations during the Ranger series on Nevada's Frenchman Flat in 1951. He was in technical command of the world's first thermonuclear explosions, set off over a small island near Eniwetok in 1952. "It was the most terribly impressive thing I've ever seen," he says. "We couldn't even find the damn island."

Ogle is a chunky (5 ft. 8 in., 175 Ibs.), flamboyant man, who hates neckties, wears baggy Western-cut pants and a battered Stetson, chews the ends of his pipes to bits. Part Spanish, English, Cherokee and Yaqui Indian, he was born in Los Angeles, grew up in Las Vegas, the son of a logger who later became a railroad engineer. Ogle took calculus in high school, used a W.C.T.U. scholarship (he is no longer an abstainer) to help finance his studies at the University of Nevada, where he majored in physics and math. In his last year, he married a girl he had met in church: Johanna Wilhelmina Schouten, whose parents emigrated from Holland. In recent years, she and their five children have bravely endured both his long absences from home and his addiction to secondhand automobiles (he owns four: a '36 Dodge coupé, a '41 Dodge pickup, a '50 Ford convertible, a '51 Chevrolet sedan).