by Sam Kean
But when his country needed him, Mad Jack proved himself worthy. The Broompark finally reached open ocean on the night of June 19. By that point most of the passengers—many of whom had to sleep on piles of coal belowdeck—were covered in black soot. They looked like chimneysweeps, albeit ones wearing suits and dresses. Even worse, several ships near the Broompark were bombed by German planes on the trip north. Yet despite the terror and discomfort, many passengers had the time of their lives. By sheer force of personality, Mad Jack made the whole voyage seem, as one passenger had it, like a “schoolboy adventure,” limping up and down the deck, cracking jokes, handing out mugs of champagne, which he insisted was the best cure for seasickness. Joliot’s assistant later remembered their situation in almost comic terms: “You know, the story of two scientists fleeing for their lives from an implacable enemy and carrying the world’s supply of rare material which will enable them to master a new force of nature? It was preposterous, it was dime-novel stuff.” And as in any novel worth its dime, the heroes survived their harrowing journey, landing unharmed in England on June 21.
The canisters of heavy water soon ended up in another jail, one with the Dickensian name of Wormwood Scrubs prison. After a few weeks in solitary there, they got a magnificent upgrade when the mad earl personally delivered them to Windsor Castle for safekeeping. Over the next few years these well-traveled cans of water would play a key role in experiments for the Allied atomic bomb project.
Sadly, Mad Jack blew himself up later in the war while engaged in a hobby of his—defusing unexploded German bombs that landed in England, an activity he liked to do while smoking. And despite his heroics on the Broompark, he did fail in one important aspect of his mission. In addition to the heavy water, he was supposed to seize another vital scientific asset in France. But Frédéric Joliot had eluded his grasp.
Joliot had arrived in Bordeaux a few days after his assistants. No matter how much the mad earl begged, though—at one point he seized Joliot’s arm and tried to drag him up the gangplank—Joliot refused to board the Broompark and sail for England. He had several reasons for this. He didn’t speak much English, and he knew he’d probably have to work under James Chadwick there, the man who’d beaten the Joliot-Curies to the discovery of the neutron. Even more important, Joliot was worried about his wife.
Irène had always been sickly, suffering from whooping cough and other ailments as a girl; her parents also had a bad habit of leaving lab coats covered in radioactive dust lying about, which further weakened her immune system. She’d grown even sicker after the birth of her daughter, developing both tuberculosis and anemia. (In an echo of her wedding day, Irène had worked all morning on her due date, taking only the afternoon off to give birth.) Ultimately the stress of the war broke her, and rather than accompany Joliot to Bordeaux, she’d checked herself into a sanatorium in western France to recover.
Even if he’d adored England, Joliot couldn’t leave his sick wife behind—especially not after he’d already abandoned her once to open his cyclotron lab. Moreover, he found her contempt for the Nazis inspiring. “She was convinced,” said her biographer, “that they would not dare lay a finger on a Curie,” no matter how bad things got. Joliot needed such strength, and was determined to stick by her.
Moreover, Joliot still felt a sense of duty to France. Echoing Werner Heisenberg, he told Mad Jack that France needed him and that he wanted to salvage what he could of French science during the German occupation. In fact, he planned to return to Paris as soon as he could. Little did he suspect that the head of the Uranium Club would be waiting there for him.
CHAPTER 13
Compromise
After hiding out for several weeks to let the chaos in Paris subside, Joliot returned to his lab there to find two unwelcome visitors. One was Kurt Diebner, the striving, bespectacled founder of the Uranium Club. Diebner coveted the cyclotron in the basement of Joliot’s institute and had come to assume control of it. These particle accelerators were necessary to study nuclear reactions, and the Nazis didn’t have access to one—until now.
Joliot certainly didn’t like Diebner, but he considered the other guest, Diebner’s boss, outright loathsome. Erich Schumann was the grandson of composer Robert Schumann, and he’d never quite escaped the penumbra of his ancestor. Schumann did research on sound waves and the acoustics of musical instruments; he also penned military ditties for the Wehrmacht, which earned him healthy royalties. As an ardent Nazi, he’d been appointed the administrative head of the Uranium Club, even though Werner Heisenberg and others thought him a buffoon and mocked his work as “piano-string physics.” (They despised him personally, too. “He might serve schnapps to visitors,” one colleague recalled, “but it was always the cheapest.”) Schumann considered nuclear bombs ridiculous—he called the idea “atomic poppycock.” But he was cynical enough to pretend there was something to them, just to cover his ass, and he’d occupied Joliot’s lab in Paris shortly after the city fell.
When Joliot turned up in early August, Schumann and Diebner called a meeting of his staff. Speaking through a translator, they worked hard to make a good first impression, praising them for their contributions to atomic physics and wishing for a fruitful Franco-German collaboration. Schumann then asked Joliot to join him, Diebner, and the translator in a nearby office for a tête-à-tête.
The moment the door closed, Schumann wheeled, glaring. He ripped into Joliot for not reporting to Paris sooner, then upbraided him for the theft (as he saw it) of the heavy water. We saw the bills of lading in Norway and know you stole it, he told Joliot. Now, where is it? Thinking fast, Joliot told Schumann that the canisters had been destroyed at Bordeaux, sinking aboard one of the ships that the Germans had bombed. All the heavy water had gurgled out into the harbor, he said, lost forever. Schumann didn’t believe this, but had no proof otherwise. He also asked Joliot about several tons of uranium ore that had gone missing from Paris; in an obvious whopper, Joliot told them it was probably in North Africa. More invective followed.
As uncomfortable as things were for Joliot, the man who felt the most awkward here was the translator relaying all the insults, Wolfgang Gentner. Gentner was actually Joliot’s old cigarette buddy—the young German assistant who’d spent a night in his and Irène’s lab checking the detector after the discovery of artificial radioactivity. A few years later Gentner had been drafted into the German army and now worked for Schumann, whose conduct that day left him mortified. So as soon as the interrogation ended, Gentner tried to make things right. He lingered just long enough to catch Joliot’s eye, then whispered that his old boss should meet him at the café on Boulevard Saint-Michel at 6 p.m.
That night they rendezvoused in a back room of the café. Gentner no doubt apologized to Joliot first thing—he deplored the circumstances of their reunion. Then he got to the point. The Germans had originally planned to dismantle Joliot’s cyclotron and take it to Berlin as war booty. But Gentner had persuaded Schumann to keep the delicate machine in Paris and send the German scientists there instead. Gentner asked Joliot if he would accept this compromise—an intact lab, but one under Nazi control. He added that he could probably get himself named head of the lab, to shield Joliot from Schumann.
Perhaps Joliot lit a cigarette as he considered the offer. He certainly couldn’t let the Reich steal the only cyclotron in France. But the thought of Nazi vermin infesting his lab disgusted him. And collaborating with the Germans, even decent ones like Gentner, could get him branded a traitor in France. Then again, he could probably fight the Germans most effectively through his research, and in that case he’d need his lab intact. Joliot finally agreed to the occupation on two conditions: Gentner had to run the lab, and the Germans could do no military research there, only pure science. Gentner said he could arrange that. And without lingering a moment longer—they’d already run a huge risk in meeting—the two men parted. It was Joliot’s first undercover act of the war. It would not be his last.
As Joliot feared,
when word of his compromise leaked out, people declared him a quisling. And not just in France—scientists in Great Britain and the United States wrung their hands over the news as well. Germany had already occupied Vemork, giving it access to heavy water. In conquering Belgium, it had stumbled into thousands of tons of uranium ore, which Belgium had imported from its colonies in Africa. Now, with the capitulation of Joliot, the Nazis gained a cyclotron, too. Germany had always had the intellectual firepower for a crash nuclear bomb program. It now had the equipment and the raw ingredients as well. And every nuclear physicist in the Allied world knew it.
CHAPTER 14
Harvard Highs and Lows
Samuel Goudsmit wished he could enjoy Harvard more. He’d joined the faculty in January 1941, and on paper the appointment certainly looked prestigious. What scientist wouldn’t enjoy saying he worked at Harvard? Still, he couldn’t quite feel content there, because he knew his hiring was a fluke: Harvard had brought him on to fill in for a professor doing war work; Goudsmit was basically a substitute teacher—“pinch-hitting,” as he put it. Besides, everyone knew that the most prestigious posts then weren’t at Ivy League universities, they were in defense labs. The United States hadn’t yet entered World War II, but its best and brightest were already laboring away on rockets and radar and other vital technologies. Meanwhile, here he was, teaching Newton’s laws to the bored sons of business magnates. On the whole he still enjoyed Harvard, but his old fear of being a has-been had stalked him from Michigan to Massachusetts.
Characteristically—he was a magnificent griper—Goudsmit unburdened himself in letters to friends. He complained about the damp climate of Cambridge. He complained about the stuffiness of the dress code at Harvard, all suits and ties. He complained about serving on too many committees, about having too many blue books to correct, about being stuck teaching Saturday morning classes. Even the best moments at Harvard were tinged with melancholy. One evening in May 1941 he chaperoned a formal dance for a fraternity and couldn’t help but note the differences between the Harvard affair and similar events at Michigan. A senator’s daughter showed up that night, for one thing. Harvard boys drank better liquor, too. Not that Goudsmit was complaining about the latter—he indulged freely. But he couldn’t quite let go and enjoy himself, no matter how much he wished to. “I could not get it out of my mind that it was just a year ago that the Huns invaded Holland,” he recalled. “No amount of liquor and dancing was able to cheer me up.” In describing one partygoer there—“a sad-looking, brooding type of man who got sadder after each drink”—he might as well have been describing himself.
Beyond the damage to Holland, the anniversary of the invasion haunted Goudsmit on a personal level, too. In late 1939, a full year after returning from his sabbatical in Europe, he’d finally started looking into visas for his parents to immigrate to the United States. Isaac was almost seventy years old, and Marianne was going blind; he needed to get them out soon. But he’d gotten distracted with other things—research, his growing daughter, planning the next physics summer camp—and had put off finishing the applications for a few weeks here, a few weeks there. As a result, his parents didn’t receive their visas until May 6, 1940. Four days later the Germaniacs invaded Holland, trapping his parents behind enemy lines.
Suddenly frantic, Goudsmit began writing letters to The Hague, then to immigration officials in the United States. Was there any news of them? Would the Reich still honor the visas? He even offered to pay for their departure, since “their money is probably valueless now.” But no one knew anything for sure. Phones and telegraph wires were dead, mail service was suspended. Hitler had drawn a cloak around the entire country, making everyone inside vanish. Goudsmit was in agony. How had he ever, ever believed that Holland would be an oasis?
A few letters eventually reached Isaac and Marianne, and he learned that they were safe for the time being. But no Dutch citizen could leave the Reich now; the visas were useless scraps of paper. Worse than useless—every time he thought of them, they tormented him. What if I hadn’t waited a year to start applying? What if I hadn’t put off dropping by the immigration office that week? What if I’d just gone over and gotten them myself, visas be damned? What if, what if, what if…
CHAPTER 15
Maud Ray Kent
While Samuel Goudsmit agonized over his parents in Holland, the rest of the scientific world was agonizing over the fate of another disappeared soul, Denmark’s Niels Bohr. After the Wehrmacht overran Copenhagen in April 1940, all contact with Bohr had ceased, and many of his friends and colleagues feared the beloved physicist dead.
Bohr was okay, it turned out—shaken but unharmed. To reassure everyone, he arranged through various underground channels to have Lise Meitner—still in exile in Sweden—send a telegram to England. It read, “Met Niels and Margrethe [Bohr’s wife] recently. Both well but unhappy about events. Please inform Cockcroft and Maud Ray Kent.”
The telegram caused three successive reactions. First, relief: Bohr was alive. But relief soon gave way to confusion. The “Cockcroft” mentioned was John Cockcroft, a physicist at Cambridge and future Nobel Prize winner. It made sense for Bohr to reach out to him. But who the Dickens was Maud Ray Kent? Someone finally asked Cockcroft if he knew—at which point confusion gave way to panic. Cockcroft loved doing British-style cryptic crosswords and other word puzzles, and after staring at the name for a moment, he realized that the letters were an anagram: Maud Ray Kent stood for “radyum taken.” That was to say, the Nazis had seized the radium in Bohr’s institute, no doubt in service of their atomic bomb project.
The news dealt a serious blow to British scientific morale. Intelligence agencies were already awash in rumors about the German interest in nuclear weapons, and Bohr’s anagram ratcheted up the tension even higher. The British government responded by throwing together an advisory board on nuclear weapons that became known as the MAUD committee. (The name was inspired by Bohr’s message, though someone later made a backronym of it—military application of uranium detonation.) The committee made its most important contribution to the war in July 1941, when it released a secret report showing just how scarily plausible nuclear bombs were. A mere 25 pounds of enriched uranium, it estimated, could explode with a deadly force equal to 3.6 million pounds of TNT. (If anything, this underestimated the true power of atomics: if 25 pounds of uranium-235 fissioned completely, it would unleash the equivalent of 385 million pounds of TNT.) What’s more, the report implied that such a weapon might reasonably be available in two years—which, if the Germans opened up the throttle, would hand Hitler the Bomb in mid-1943.
The report shook the scientific world. Before this, many prominent physicists, while acknowledging the grave potential of nuclear bombs, had always expressed doubt that they were really possible. In a classic case of hope steering logic, they argued that some subtle factor that everyone had overlooked so far, or some new law of nature, would surely render such weapons unfeasible. The MAUD report murdered that hope. Committee member James Chadwick, the physicist who’d discovered the neutron in 1932, said that when he finally grasped the true threat of atomic weapons, he had to start gobbling pills in order to sleep at night, and never again in his life fell asleep without them.
The MAUD committee recommended that Great Britain start a crash program to build a nuclear bomb. At the same time, given the massive industrial effort required, the committee acknowledged that the strapped British economy couldn’t support the project alone. Great Britain should therefore partner with the United States, which had more natural resources and was safely distant from the threat of German bombers. To this end, MAUD dispatched copies of the report to Lyman Briggs, a top nuclear scientist in the United States who’d been working with them semiofficially. He was told to distribute it to American officials and report back.
A full week passed without any word from Briggs. Then a second week. Soon a month and a half had slipped away. Finally, one MAUD member who was visiting the States in l
ate August decided to look into the delay. To his disgust and amazement, he remembered, “I called on Briggs in Washington, only to find out that this inarticulate and unimpressive man had put the reports in his safe and had not shown them to members of his committee.” A terrified Briggs, in other words, had read the report and, like a five-year-old covering his ears during a thunderstorm, decided to lock the scary document away and pretend it didn’t exist. Even years before it was built, the Bomb was reducing otherwise brilliant people to lunacy.
Despite Briggs, British and American scientists eventually convened and agreed to collaborate on an A-bomb. And not a moment too soon: by then Germany had been working on nuclear weapons for two years.
PART III
1942
CHAPTER 16
Resistance
Walther Bothe couldn’t catch a break. The lovelorn physicist had already made a hash of his graphite research earlier in the war. Now he was bungling his way through a series of cyclotron experiments in Paris. Cyclotrons were intricate but temperamental machines, and no matter how many times Bothe and his assistants checked the valves and cooling lines and wires before each run, something always overheated or shorted out at the worst possible moment—flushing weeks of work straight down the bidet. This wasn’t all Bothe’s fault, but as head scientist he had to take responsibility. The failure tasted especially galling because he’d already tried to build a cyclotron back in Germany and had failed. It seemed he had some sort of cyclotron curse on him.
He didn’t, of course. In turning his lab over to the Nazis, Frédéric Joliot had insisted they do no military research there. Bothe had nevertheless barged in and started running fission experiments, all but biting his thumb at the gentlemen’s agreement. Equally galling, the Germans had stamped the machine with wax seals featuring Nazi eagles and swastikas, an insult Joliot’s crew would not stand for. So whenever Bothe started an experiment, a French technician would sneak away and, say, turn off the water for the cooling lines, allowing the machine to overheat. Or he might discharge its huge electromagnetic coils all at once, producing a pulse of current strong enough to melt the copper wires. In abusing the cyclotron this way, the French scientists derailed their own research, too, but the choice between a busted cyclotron and an atomic Hitler was no choice at all.