Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  The report Bush sent to the president on December 16, 1942, was a blueprint for action. Conant and his S-1 Committee cut the number of methods to three. They proposed going ahead with a full-scale uranium gaseous diffusion plant and a plutonium plant, costing $150 million and $100 million respectively, and, in a compromise won by Conant, a medium-size experimental electromagnetic plant for producing uranium costing $10 million, to be expanded as necessary. Another $20 million was allotted to produce heavy water for use as a moderator in a chain-reacting pile. At the same time, the design for the bomb had grown more complicated, and a new estimate doubling the amount of fissionable material they needed for a weapon was going to increase both the production costs and timescale. Groves was ready to put the $400 million enterprise in motion, having already negotiated contracts with four of the nation’s largest corporations to design, construct, and operate the giant industrial complex. If all went according to plan, the Military Policy Committee predicted there was a small chance that bomb production could begin as early as June 1, 1944, though a better possibility was January 1, 1945, with “an uncertainty either way of several months.”

  Conant, always on guard against false optimism, thought it unlikely they would have a bomb ready to use much before the summer of ’45. Unable to single out one horse as superior, he had asked the president to commit to backing three rivals, despite the staggering sums. It would be a race to the finish. And time was against them. “To my mind, it is this fear that the Germans may be near the goal which is the prime reason for an all-out effort now on this gamble,” he wrote Groves. “This being so, it is clear that nothing short of a full-speed, all-out attempt would be worthwhile.” The boldness of his proposal later led Groves to remark, “Conant has the gambling spirit of New England pioneers—a calculated gambling spirit.”

  Conant’s determination to expedite the bomb project was reinforced days later when, during a meeting with Bush in Stimson’s office, he was confronted with an alarming intelligence report from General Marshall that Germany was planning to use poison gas against the Allies. Even though Hitler, who had been gassed in World War I and blinded temporarily, had promised to never use the weapon, none of them could be sanguine that the Nazis would not resort to chemical combat. There were rumors that German scientists had solved some of the problems that had made mustard gas so difficult to deploy in World War I and found a way to make it more tactically effective on the battlefield. Tanks of the lethal liquid were reportedly being shipped to secret depots in Algeria and the Mediterranean region, as well as a more forward cache near the Italian theater.

  Although chemical warfare had been universally condemned by the civilized world after the last war, and progress had been made toward outlawing the use of asphyxiating gases per the Geneva Protocol of 1925, Conant feared German research programs could have developed far more powerful biological weapons and more sophisticated delivery systems. Fears of gas warfare—of the horrific casualties and psychological effects should Germany strike first—prompted a major expansion the US Chemical Warfare Service—the budget rose from $2 million in 1940 to $1 billion in 1942—and both offensive and defensive weapons were developed. Stockpiles of aerial bombs filled with mustard and phosgene gas were readied should the need arise to retaliate against any use of gas by an Axis power. While Conant felt it necessary to take these precautions, he and the Allied generals had no inkling that Germany had made major advances in chemical weaponry—developing new, rapid action, extremely toxic nerve agents called tabun and sarin—for which the biological weapons expert Jonathan B. Tucker has shown they were “totally unprepared.” Or that the Nazis had begun to employ another gas, Zyklon-B, a formulation of hydrogen cyanide (also known as prussic acid) to facilitate the mass murder of millions of Jews and defenseless civilians in extermination camps.

  Conant was opposed to the use of gas for anything but reprisals, less for moral reasons than for concerns about resistance from the public, which was still haunted by the memory of the uncontrollable choking clouds. He would never forget the bitter censure heaped on those who helped create this new type of industrial death, and had confided to his assistant Calvert Smith that he counted himself fortunate that “lewisite was first discovered in [Winford Lee] Lewis’s lot and not mine!” He would not have wanted that stain on his name.

  The threatened escalation in the scientific war was very much on Conant’s mind when he gave an emotional address in the New Year to a midwinter graduating class being pressed into service. He had watched the college’s classrooms empty as the country’s armies grew in strength. A generation of young men was marching off to war, but the question was for how long. “How many years before the end?” Explaining why they needed to prosecute the war with ever-increasing vigor, he told them, “This is for the country an hour of need:

  “Every day the war continues prolongs the agony of civilization; every month adds to the chaos with which the postwar must deal; every year increases the hazards liberty must encounter when the war is won. Therefore, to ensure victory in the shortest span of time, no sacrifice can be too great.”

  * * *

  With their course set, the focus of the Manhattan District shifted from the laboratory to the production plant, and Conant’s role altered again. In recent months, he had found himself functioning more and more as Groves’s scientific advisor, and in January 1943 the appointment was made official. While he had initially been wary of the blustery, abrasive forty-six-year-old general, they worked well together. But Conant knew Groves’s bullying style had done nothing to lessen his colleagues’ fears about military control, and many regarded the general with “jaundiced eyes.”

  Anything but diplomatic, Groves had managed to alienate the physicists at the start by expressing his dismay at the paucity of proven theory. A career officer, he had been hoping for a prestigious post overseas and made no secret of the fact that he did not relish leading an endeavor that, as he put it, was “founded on possibilities rather than probabilities.” Moreover, he was unused to “long-haired scientists,” with their oddball personalities and idiosyncratic ways of working. He was forever trying to instill discipline, irritably barking at the division chiefs that if they wanted to command respect, they should make their men address them by the title “Doctor,” or at the very least “Professor,” and avoid using first names. This did not go over well. Conant, who kept an ear to the ground for rumblings of trouble, quietly advised Groves to consider appointing himself and Richard Tolman, a respected physicist and vice chairman of the NDRC, as dual advisors as a way of alleviating some of the resentment. Recognizing the “soundness of his reasoning,” Groves acted on Conant’s suggestion.

  In the transition from OSRD to army control, the issue of security had also become a growing source of friction, and Conant was forced to pay new attention to the Manhattan Project’s procedures. The president had repeatedly stressed the need for extra security restrictions despite the inconvenience. This continued to be unpopular with the scientists, many of whom were averse to any kind of supervision and believed they were capable of policing themselves. But in a war in which new technology might prove decisive, Conant agreed with Roosevelt that this project had to be “more drastically guarded than other highly secret developments.”

  Conant’s concerns about security, reflected in his correspondence with Bush and Groves, were fueled by a number of alarming—if unsubstantiated—reports warning of an imminent German threat. On July 15, 1942, an agitated Compton, prompted by Szilard and the increasingly frantic refugee physicists in Chicago, had passed on allegedly “reliable information” from Switzerland that the Germans had achieved a self-sustaining chain reaction and were on the verge of producing an atomic weapon. “We have become convinced,” Compton wrote, “that there is a real danger of bombardment by the Germans within the next few months using bombs designed to spread radioactive material in lethal quantities.” Conant wrote the American embassy in London, which sent a paraphrased version of his
letter to the Directorate of Tube Alloys (code name for the British atomic bomb program). The British responded that they had it on good information that the German uranium bomb program was being directed by Werner Heisenberg, a brilliant physicist and fervent nationalist, but their own informants did not believe he had accumulated enough heavy water to sustain a chain reaction. Could Conant please tell them more about Szilard’s source and try to “verify” his tip? What is unmistakable in the flurry of jittery cables that followed is the very real fear that the Germans might get there first.

  From the outset, Conant was as apprehensive about internal leaks as he was of foreign espionage, and went to great lengths to restrict the knowledge of his role in the bomb project. His experience with Bill Richards had taught him to trust no one—not even his wife or closest Harvard associates—with even the vaguest suggestion of his top-secret assignment. Though his son Ted suspected it was a military project of some importance when the army came and ran a special telephone line up the long dirt road that led to their isolated summer cottage to ensure constant communication with the White House, Conant kept his family in complete ignorance. Rather than worry constantly about relaxing his guard and letting something slip, he found it easier to lie. “The amount of bare-faced lying that was done in Washington in those days is beyond estimate,” he recalled. “Military secrets of all sorts were closely guarded. One just didn’t ask an old friend whom he met at the Cosmos Club what he was doing. A statement that a person was working for the government was sufficient sign to change the conversation.”

  One of the biggest problems facing the Manhattan District leaders was deciding who would take charge of the next critical phase of the project: developing a method for making the actual bomb. While it had been demonstrated theoretically, the bomb’s design and size had yet to be worked out, as well as such practical problems as how it would be detonated. They could still not do much more than make an educated guess at how much force an atomic bomb would exert. Both Bush and Conant felt it was imperative they begin drawing up detailed plans. Per their request, Compton had organized a study group at Berkeley in June 1942 to begin work on the problem. To help with the calculations, he recruited J. Robert Oppenheimer, an outstanding theoretical physicist and a specialist in the problems of nuclear physics. It became clear from their preliminary studies that working out the mechanics by which a mass of fissionable material would suddenly become critical and explode would require extensive exploration, and would by necessity have to be carried out in a secluded location.

  Groves, who inherited all his other laboratory directors when he arrived on the scene, realized it would take a unique individual to lead the bomb laboratory, and he was determined to find the very best man for the job. He asked Bush and Conant for nominations, and talked to them at length about the technical expertise and administrative skills the enterprise would require. Oppenheimer was not at the top of anyone’s list. Given the importance of the project and the extreme difficulty of the task, it went without saying that it would go to a Nobel Prize winner—someone of the caliber of Compton, Fermi, Franck, and Lawrence.

  Oppie, as he was known, was a comparative latecomer to the bomb project. He had come to Berkeley in 1929, where he earned a reputation as an inspiring lecturer with a devoted following, and rose swiftly to become head of the Theoretical Physics Department. He was a great friend and frequent sounding board of Lawrence’s, and had accidentally overheard him in conversation with Mark Oliphant about the possibility of Anglo-American cooperation on building an atomic bomb. Once the cat was out of the bag, Oppenheimer knew too much to be excluded from the project, and Lawrence—after being reprimanded by Conant for spilling official secrets—convinced everyone it would be better to have him inside the tent than out.

  Lawrence was eager to involve his brilliant friend in the weapon’s research but was not helped by Oppenheimer’s apparent determination to carry on with his left-wing political activity, including an array of Communist causes. While Oppie appeared earnest in his desire not to let anything interfere with his ability to “be of direct use” to the government, he attended various labor union meetings, as well as a fund-raising event for veterans of the Spanish Civil War, despite Lawrence’s advice to do nothing that would give anyone in Washington a reason to find fault with him. But it was a cause that was close to the heart of his wife, Katherine “Kitty,” whose late husband, Joseph Dallet, an active member of the US Communist Party, had been killed in the struggle in 1937. It was also guaranteed to attract the “parlor pinks” with whom the couple socialized regularly, as well as a good number of the high-level Communist organizers that the FBI suspected of aiding the Russians in their intelligence-gathering efforts. At the event, Oppenheimer was introduced to Gregory Kheifetz, reportedly an agent for the NKVD, the forerunner of the KGB, and agreed to meet him for lunch the following day—during which the physicist discussed Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt, as well as a secret wartime project that involved the country’s leading scientists. Why Oppenheimer persisted in such risky behavior, which he knew full well would invite further suspicion, is open to debate. It was just one in a series of mystifyingly inconsistent, self-indulgent, and reckless acts that would make the extraordinarily gifted and enigmatic physicist such a controversial figure.

  The FBI and military counterintelligence agents first opened a file on Oppenheimer in the wake of the Oliphant episode, but by early 1942, his cavalier attitude goaded them into compiling a thick dossier. Newly alert to the threat of German and Soviet espionage, they were particularly disturbed by some of the circles Oppenheimer traveled in and some of the prominent Communist intellectuals he called friends, including a left-leaning Berkeley professor of French literature named Haakon Chevalier. Far from denying it, when asked to fill out a government security questionnaire, Oppenheimer reportedly told them, “I am not a Communist, but I have probably belonged to every Communist-front organization on the West Coast.” Not surprisingly, his initial clearance application was rejected. Though Oppenheimer was not yet officially part of the bomb project, and technically was not supposed to even know about it, according to his biographer Ray Monk, he was working on it more or less full-time, having been allowed in “through the back door” by Lawrence.

  At the same time, Conant, still troubled by the security breach that led to Oppenheimer’s hearing about the bomb project, worried that security precautions at Berkeley might be a bit lax. On January 30, 1942, he wrote Lawrence and the other program chiefs that he would be instituting new security restrictions, calling them “a necessary nuisance to all this work.” As an additional safeguard, he and Bush had decided that everyone working on the bomb project, no matter how small a detail of the problem, must have their names submitted for clearance to the intelligence services. Apologizing in advance for the additional paperwork, he promised that this would “in no way slow down or hamper” their work but would provide them with a record of “all the people who are in any way concerned with even a small fragment of the investigation.”

  As a college president, Conant was well acquainted with the propensity of the young to buck authority, and he wanted to know if other Berkeley researchers were gossiping freely about forbidden subjects. In February he recruited First Lieutenant John Lansdale Jr., a recent Harvard Law graduate working for the US Army Military Intelligence Service, to go undercover as a student and investigate whether the physicists were talking out of school. At their first meeting in his NDRC office, Conant gave Lansdale a capsule summary of the race against Germany for the bomb, telling him matter-of-factly, “Whoever gets this first will win the war.” In less than a month, Lansdale managed to fill a notebook with atomic scuttlebutt and even filched a blueprint of a spectrograph from the cyclotron lab. One law school dean had been so obliging as to point out the great E. O. Lawrence to him as the man who was trying to “split the atom” for use as an explosive. Conant listened to his report in grim silence, punctuating the most flagrant lapses in security with a m
urmur of pained incredulity: “Oh! . . . Oh! . . . Oh my goodness!”

  He ordered Lansdale to return directly to campus in uniform and read the Berkeley crowd the riot act. Loose talk would not be tolerated. Under the new security restrictions, there was a “complete ban” on discussing nuclear fission with anybody not officially involved in S-1, and corrective action would be taken. Their conduct was undermining the cause of secrecy. The Bush-Groves policy of strict “compartmentalization”—which limited the information given to individuals and small units to no more than that which was required for the performance of the work—was to be enforced, with Lansdale, soon to be promoted to captain and put in charge of project security, as chief enforcer.

  It was probably with mixed emotions that Conant received a glowing letter from Lawrence on March 26, 1942, urging him to consider “the desirability of asking Oppenheimer” to serve as a member of S-1: “I think he would be a tremendous asset in every way. He combines a penetrating insight into the theoretical aspects of the whole program with solid common sense, which sometimes in certain directions seems to be lacking, and I am sure you and Dr. Bush would find him a useful advisor.”

  Any hesitancy Conant might have felt about including a potential security risk in the secret project was overridden by the unstoppable Lawrence, who prevailed on Compton to make Oppenheimer a member of the Chicago group. After so many months waiting on the sidelines, Oppenheimer reveled in his new title, coordinator of rapid rupture, and surprised Compton with the “wisdom and firmness” he demonstrated on both policy and personnel issues. By the end of the summer, after receiving rave reviews for his dynamic leadership of the Berkeley study group, where he guided nine of the country’s most distinguished physicists in complex theoretical discussions about the fission bomb—as well as the more speculative fusion weapon, a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb—Oppenheimer had more than proven himself. Even Edward Teller, a strong-willed Hungarian-born physicist who often clashed with his colleagues and had long regarded Oppenheimer as a dreamy eccentric, had to admit that he had “showed a refined, sure, informal touch.” Hans Bethe, the highly regarded thirty-six-year-old Cornell physicist, was even more enthusiastic about the spirit of cooperation and spontaneity that set those sessions apart as an “unforgettable” experience. Bethe, whose tome on nuclear physics was referred to as the “Bible,” was half-Jewish and was a much beloved figure. He left Nazi Germany in 1933 after the first wave of anti-Semitic legislation. His opinion carried weight. He could now attest to Oppenheimer’s “intellectual power” and how by the close of the meetings he had transformed himself into “the unquestioned leader of our group.”