We first learned about Mr. Doom thanks to a tweet from nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, who found a document signed by "L.G. Doom," and concluded that Doctor Doom helped the US become a nuclear power.

I don't want to alarm anybody, but at Los Alamos in 1944 there was actually a scientist named Doctor Doom. pic.twitter.com/dmMh8D2VUO — Alex Wellerstein (@wellerstein) January 11, 2015

Like Verge reporter Arielle Duhaime-Ross, who became obsessed with a mystery woman at Los Alamos last year, I wanted to know more about L.G. Doom. Was Doom his real name? Was this a clever pseudonym from an ambivalent scientist who wanted to foreshadow the nuclear age?

Fortunately, it didn't take long to find the real Mr. Doom (sorry, no Ph.D.), who shares a patent with his son, Lewis G. Doom, Jr., for a "method and system for processing soap and soap-like materials." (This piqued my interest even more, as fans of Fight Club will remember that scheming masterminds have a fondness for soap.) From there I was able to find Mr. Doom's phone number and gave him a call.

Mr. Doom, now 92 years old and living on the East Coast, was happy to share some of his memories of working on the first atomic bomb. A fresh graduate of Princeton in 1944, he put his name on two atomic studies that have since been unclassified and released to the public: "Thermal analysis of plutonium," and "Development of gamma-phase hot-pressing of uranium."

The following interview is lightly edited for clarity.

T.C. Sottek: How did you get involved with the atomic program at Los Alamos?

Lewis G. Doom: I had just graduated from Princeton in January of ‘44 and went down to Los Alamos. A friend of ours who worked at Union Carbide was a consultant down at Los Alamos, and he talked with me and said that there was a project which he could not say anything about, but that could have a big influence on the war. And I said, "Well, if it has that potential, I’d be very interested in it."

Did you have any idea what you were about to be working on?

"He said there was a project which he could not say anything about, but that could have a very big influence on the war."

Absolutely zero. (Laughs.) He said, "Nope, I can’t tell you a thing about it except that it could be a very important factor in the war, period. That’s all I can tell you."

So what did you do at Los Alamos?

What I did was in the metallurgical lab doing analysis. Not too long after I got there they had just started making plutonium. And I had in my hand at that time about a 2 or 3 gram sample of plutonium, which was half the plutonium in the world at that point. And I manned the tests on it to find out where the transition points were, which was very interesting. And I did other work of that type, transition points on the uranium and technical analysis of all kinds of materials. I worked primarily on the Fat Man, but I had very good friends that were working on the Little Boy.

I was there about eight or nine months, and then the man who was coordinator for all of the different functions of the project, including the squadron that did the actual bombing, asked if I would be interested in going up to Wendover [Air Force Base] and being basically the contact between Los Alamos and Wendover, and do the scheduling of the flights. Not when they were going to leave, but what tests were going to be run on the different flights to maximize the amount of information that could be obtained from each drop. And then we would lower the bombs, Fat Man and Little Boy, onto the planes and go down to Inyokern [Airport] and drop them and then fly back again. And I went on many of those flights — as many as I could. I loved flying, we had wonderful pilots there.

So you were actually on flights that dropped prototype bombs?

Yep. On the B-29s. In fact, I flew on the Enola Gay, once or twice.