[citation needed] After the US entry into World War II he worked from 1940 as a soldier for the Manhattan Project in Princeton where he made the acquaintance of Albert Einstein.
As early as 1944 he was, even during his time at Manhattan Project in Tennessee, a pacifist, publishing an anonymous pamphlet by Henry Miller.
During this time, Porter traveled in the South Pacific and meeting artists and writers and observing the rebirth of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.
In the 1960s, Porter was part of the Saturn V program at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, until 1967).
Porter spent the next thirty years creating poetry, mail art, correspondence, travelling and hosting visitors at his Institute of Advanced Thinking in Belfast, Maine.
Bern Porter's underground reputation as an artist-writer-philosopher-scientist is well established among visual artists and writers, and his philosophy of dissent is respected.
[citation needed] Dick Higgins, the avant-garde writer and publisher/editor of the Something Else Press, was inspired to call Porter the Charles Ives of American letters'.
Porter's eye never tires of seeking accidental, unconventional literature in odd pages of textbooks, far corners of advertisements, the verbiage of greeting cards and repair manuals, ad infinitum."
Since then he authored dozens of books and poetry broadsides as well as created paintings, sculpture, prints, and experimented with photography (included photograms in the early 1940s).
“Lost and Found: The Work of Bern Porter from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art Library” was on display through July 11, 2010 at MoMA in New York.
Porter designed Kenneth Patchen's Panels for the Walls of Heaven (Berkeley 1946); published the first books of the young Philip Lamantia (Erotic Poems; 1946), by Leonard Wolf : Hamadryad Hunted (1948); James Schevill (Tensions; 1947) and Robert Duncan : Heavenly City Earthly City (1947).
For this purpose: Parker Tyler's The Granite Butterfly: A Poem in Nine Cantos (Berkeley 1945); Yvan Goll English Poems Fruit from Saturn, a response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945; also in Hemispheres Editions, New York 1946); Hubert Creekmore: Formula (Berkeley 1947); Albert Cossery: Men God Forgot (1948).
In the 1950s also appearing: poetry collections of Beat filmmaker Christopher Maclaine: The Crazy Bird (1951) and Word (1954); Gerd Stern: First Poems and Others (1952).
He worked in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on the part of the project devoted to the separation of the highly enriched uranium needed to construct atomic bombs.