Now that America had risen to become a leading country, he continued, it could not avoid taking a stand against world anarchy. “The price of greatness,” he declared, “is responsibility.” He then made a moving plea for their two English-speaking countries, bound by “ties of blood and history,” to continue their military partnership to preserve the peace once the war was won: “I am here to tell you whatever form your system of world security may take, nothing will work soundly or for long without the united effort of the British and American people. If we are together, nothing is impossible. If we are divided, all will fail.”
After the ceremony, Conant led Churchill to the steps of the Memorial Church, where he greeted a cheering throng of nearly ten thousand, including more than six thousand army and navy cadets and officers in parade formation, and almost as many students, faculty, staff members, and guests. The afternoon was stiflingly hot, and the PM wisely ditched his academic gown. He was now a familiar figure in his short black jacket, gray trousers, gray waistcoat, and polka-dot bow tie, a cane in one hand and the other flashing the famous victory sign. The day was long and exhausting, and Conant was grateful to be done with what he called his “national public relations job.” A photographer had caught him and the prime minister side by side, and as Churchill made the V sign, Conant was pushing back the sleeve of his jacket to steal a surreptitious glance at his watch. Time magazine observed that the pose was “typical” of both men.
Churchill was visibly touched by his reception. At the end of the ceremony, he stumped eagerly into the living room, where Clementine and Patty were waiting, and, turning straight to his wife, asked, “How did I do, Mother?” She told him that the speech was “one of his best,” and he beamed at them all with pleasure. He charmed the college trustees, who were once again favorably inclined to Conant, who got the credit for the surprise visit. It would long be remembered in Harvard history and reaffirmed his own reputation as the country’s leading educational statesman, who, like the English historian, had risen to the challenge of the war and helped martial the country’s defenses in the cause of freedom.
It was no coincidence that Churchill chose Harvard’s stage to proclaim that “the empires of the future are the empires of the mind.” To Conant, his meaning was clear: “The twentieth-century struggles over ideology, technology, and markets” had replaced the nineteenth-century wars over territory. In the fierce struggles of the future, whether for profit or aggrandizement, weapons would be of prime importance. Self-preservation demanded they confront the nuclear age standing “shoulder to shoulder.”
Bush told Conant he was also feeling encouraged. Based on what he had heard in London, he was convinced the technological battle in the Atlantic had reached a turning point. Thanks to OSRD advances in radar and sonar, and new tactics and techniques, they were making inroads against the deadly German submarine. (The code breakers at Bletchley Park, a secret decryption facility outside London, had also reworked the British convoy code so that the Germans could no longer pinpoint their locations.) The Allied high command had white-knuckled it through the worst winter of the war, afraid the U-boat campaign might sever virtually all communication between America and Europe. But advances in subsurface weaponry now had the Germans on the run. In the last ten days of March, U-boat sinkings of cargo ships had dropped dramatically by two thirds. With each passing month, as the Rad Lab got more devices into the field, the numbers were continuing to decline.
This was especially heartening to Conant, as his son Jim, who had earned his bachelor’s degree and naval ROTC reserve commission from the University of Michigan at nineteen, was on active duty with the submarine service. The last he had heard, Jim had been assigned to the USS Halibut and was in a “safe portion” of the Pacific. But the Halibut was a sub hunter, and it would not be long before he went back out on patrol. Conant did not tell his wife that it had one of the highest casualty rates in the armed forces: one in five submariners that went to sea did not return. She was already beside herself with worry, and that spring had thrown herself into volunteer work with the injured at the Chelsea Naval Hospital outside Boston, where Joe Kennedy’s son, Jack, Harvard class of 1940, was recovering from back surgery for an injury he had sustained when his boat, PT-109, was attacked by a Japanese destroyer in August 1943. Many Harvard wives were helping out by providing coffee and doughnuts and a welcome diversion from the dreary hospital routine. But the twice-weekly stint as a sketch artist in the psychiatric wing soon proved too much for Patty. Seeing so many trembling, emotionally fractured boys left her upset and depressed for days afterward, and Conant finally put an end to it.
In an attempt to keep her spirits up, Conant reported from Washington that Bush was “most optimistic” the war would soon be over:
“[His] feeling is that Germany will be licked in six months . . . All agree that it will take 6 to 18 mos. longer for Japan. I stick to Xmas ’45 for the entire show. Only two things can possibly save the Germans, anyhow, one is a miracle, the other Joe Stalin. And personally I’m not betting that either savior will appear!”
* * *
That “miracle” was much on his mind when he boarded the Chief in Chicago in late November for the sixteen-hour trip to Lamy, a lonely whistle-stop in New Mexico, where an army car would be waiting to take him up the long, torturous route to Los Alamos. Groves would not allow any of the key members of S-1 to travel by plane because of the risk of a crash. Conant, who loved trains, did not mind the inconvenience nearly as much as Bush and Lawrence did. To the astonishment of his colleagues, he had mastered the art of sleeping sitting bolt upright in a coach and would arrive well rested even when it was impossible to get a Pullman berth.
Now that the atomic partnership with the British had been patched up, he was taking a delegation from Tube Alloys on a cross-country tour of the large-scale laboratories. They had already been to Oak Ridge, where Lawrence’s electromagnetic separation process was proving to be painfully slow, producing only tiny amounts of enriched uranium, and raising concerns about whether he would ever be able to deliver enough material in time. The other uranium separation process, gaseous diffusion, was becoming more important by the minute, and they needed all the help they could get from the British in designing and building the new plant at Oak Ridge, as well as a giant complex at Hanford, Washington.
The first group of scientists the British had sent over was small in number—about twenty—but large in talent. Perusing the list, Conant noticed that only a handful were actually English born and bred, and knew that would aggravate Groves. Nevertheless, they would be of tremendous assistance. Rudolf Peierls, whose pioneering work had contributed to the MAUD Report, was sent straight to New York to consult with the isotope-plant designers at Columbia before moving to Los Alamos. His group also included Otto Frisch, as well as a shy, courteous young German theoretician named Klaus Fuchs. Mark Oliphant and a half dozen who worked under him were assigned to the electromagnetic operation. Conant worked with Sir James Chadwick and Groves to arrange their transfer to different parts of the Manhattan Project, putting them to work wherever they would be most useful.
It was also under British auspices that Niels Bohr and his physicist son, Aage, would soon be making a trip to the bomb laboratory under a cloak of secrecy. The elder Bohr had barely escaped from Nazi-occupied Denmark, a now-legendary feat that began with him hiding on a fishing boat bound for Sweden and then being smuggled into England in the bomb bay of a Mosquito fighter, briefly losing consciousness when he failed to hear the pilot’s instructions to use the oxygen mask as the plane gained altitude. The fifty-eight-year-old physicist arrived in London on October 5, 1943, none the worse for wear, began a series of debriefings about the German bomb program, and was promptly appointed a consultant to Tube Alloys. Within weeks, he was on his way to America. Oppenheimer hoped that the eminent Nobel laureate, revered as the wise old man of nuclear physics, would be an inspiring presence for the young project scientists. Groves, however, worried that
the great Dane, already publicly identified as the inventor of “atomic explosions,” and an important figure in the Allied war effort, would attract exactly the kind of attention they had to avoid if they were to keep the laboratory’s existence secret from the Germans.
The approach to Los Alamos always took Conant’s breath away. As the twisting road slowly wound its way up the mesa, the terrain changed from the vast, sparse red and brown southwestern desert to pleasant aspen forests, and in the distance was a splendid view of the majestic snowcapped Sangre de Cristo Mountains across thirty miles of the Middle Rio Grande Valley. Where the road leveled, there was a tall wooden sentry tower with a small guardhouse built into the base, which constituted the first checkpoint for the army post. More checkpoints followed. Conant’s reception on arrival was not notable because the security guards were alerted in advance to expect him. Each time, he produced his identification and gate pass, and once cleared was waved through. The high fence and barbed wire brought back memories of the year he had spent in the primitive military compound outside Cleveland, as did the rows of barracks and ugly, raw look of the place.
Oppenheimer and the first group of scientists had gone out to Los Alamos in mid-March to begin setting up the laboratory and establish a rudimentary community on the desolate plateau. When they went up to “the Hill” to inspect the construction site, it was a mess. The army crews were behind schedule, and the bulk of the housing, along with the main administration building (Tech Main) and five laboratories were unfinished. The most basic equipment they needed to get to work was either not ready or had not arrived. Even food was in short supply. On top of that, one unreliable and noisy Forest Service line provided the only means of communication with the project office in Santa Fe. Any conversation more complicated than a few shouted instructions required a face-to-face meeting, involving an eighty-mile round-trip commute on the execrable road. But they had no choice except to make the best of it, bedding down in nearby ranches at night and camping out on the mesa by day, sustained by boxed lunches and Bunsen burner coffee.
Vividly recalling his miserable first few months in the Mousetrap, when hot meals and showers had been hard to come by, Conant assured the unhappy scientists that conditions would improve soon. In truth, their comfort did not overly concern him, except to the extent that it affected their performance. He worried that Oppenheimer underestimated the difficulty of organizing and running what amounted to a small town, complete with all the usual problems of providing housing, sewage, electricity, and fresh water, only compounded by the fact that it was completely cut off from the outside world, and no one could know they were there. He worried that the somewhat ethereal Berkeley physicist would be overwhelmed by all the mundane difficulties and housekeeping duties, that the scientific work would suffer, and he would fall behind the schedule they had set for him. Mostly, Conant worried that the project would end in failure.
It did not help matters that the laboratory’s associate director, Edward Condon, whom Groves had urged on Oppenheimer to help ease the administrative burden, and keep the peace between the scientists and soldiers, up and quit after only six weeks. While his letter of resignation never gave the real reasons for his departure, it seemed he was primarily motivated by the belief that the project would not be successful. Neither Conant nor Groves had any tolerance for naysayers. They were both acutely aware of what would happen to them after the war if the $500 million investment went belly-up, and often joked grimly among themselves that they should consider purchasing homes near Capitol Hill, because if the bomb did not work, they would both be condemned to spend the rest of their lives testifying before angry congressional committees.
But remarkably, by the April conference at Los Alamos, which marked the official opening of the laboratory, Oppie had assembled some thirty scientists, and they made rapid progress in laying out the theoretical and experimental problems and deciding what needed to be done. Robert Serber, Oppie’s former student and frequent collaborator, gave a series of introductory lectures on the state of knowledge about the nuclear bomb, which he called “the gadget.” It was not that much. He covered it in five concise hour-long lectures, summarizing the theoretical calculations and experimental data, and giving an overview of the main areas for study: energy release, chain reaction, critical size, fission cross sections, possible ways of assembling fissionable materials, and damage. He also briefly discussed the hydrogen bomb, dubbed “the Super,” and the far more powerful explosion that might result from a thermonuclear reaction in deuterium, a possibility that had emerged during the Berkeley study group. Serber’s tutorials were so good, they were immediately compiled and mimeographed, and a copy, known as The Los Alamos Primer, was required reading for all new recruits.
Oppenheimer, on Rabi’s advice, organized the laboratory into separate divisions, a system that had worked extremely well at the MIT Rad Lab. Rabi refused to join the bomb project but agreed to act as a senior consultant, and he came out with Robert Bacher to help them block out the program of research. The conference members created four divisions to tackle the technical work: Bethe took charge of theoretical physics; Bacher took experimental physics; Joseph W. Kennedy, a twenty-six-year-old disciple of Seaborg’s, took chemistry and metallurgy. Because of Kennedy’s extreme youth, Groves and Conant provided backup in the form of Charles A. Thomas, an industrial engineer with years of experience at the Monsanto Chemical Company, who would coordinate the work in the division with the other related Manhattan Project efforts. British-born Cyril Smith, another veteran industrial scientist, was responsible for the metallurgical work. Since none of the Berkeley physicists had any experience with explosives, they brought in Commander William S. “Deak” Parsons, an outstanding naval officer who had spent much of his career on battleship gunnery duties and devoted the last few years to developing and field-testing the proximity fuse, to take charge of the ordnance work.
The original idea was to make an atom bomb based on the “gun method”: an arrangement by which one mass of fissionable uranium was fired, using a miniature gun, at another mass of fissionable uranium, which served as a target. As long as these two hemispheres were apart, the bomb was inert. When the projectile and target came together, they would exceed critical mass, and the bomb would explode. The assumption was that the design of the bomb would be essentially the same whether the fissionable material was uranium-235 or plutonium made in a pile. Even though much less was known about the new element—for example, it had not yet been established that fissioning Pu-239 emitted enough neutrons for an explosive chain reaction—it held out great promise. A plutonium bomb required less fissionable material, and it seemed possible they would be able to produce Pu-239 more rapidly than U-235. While Fermi’s successful chain reaction in Chicago had demonstrated that the basic nuclear process in fission could create an explosion, many experiments had to be carried out to confirm their deductions about the nature and speed of the reaction, size of the critical mass, and destructive effect. Any one of these factors could affect the success of the weapon.
A second way of making a bomb had been proposed by Seth H. Neddermeyer, a thirty-six-year-old Caltech physicist who offered theoretical analysis that demonstrated the feasibility of the “implosion method.” In his strategy, high explosives were grouped in a spherical shell around a solid core of fissionable material. When compressed symmetrically with great force, the active material was squeezed together until it reached a critical mass and detonated. He was unable to convince his fellow physicists of its merits, which was not surprising, since it involved a far more difficult design and had never been done before. Oppenheimer polled his men and found most opposed to allotting laboratory resources to implosion, which meant veering off into an unknown area where they might encounter all kinds of obstacles and insoluble problems. Parsons doubted implosion would ever be reliable enough for field use. The gun assembly was the sounder method and involved tried-and-true technology. Oppenheimer agreed but at the same time felt the
y could not neglect such a novel approach. Neddermeyer, who was something of a loner, was left to pursue his intriguing idea on his own.
Despite all the gaps in their understanding, the physicists were very confident when it came to the theory. The gun model seemed fairly straightforward, and they anticipated that the work ahead would essentially be, as Bethe put it, “engineering.”
At the start, Oppenheimer had envisioned a small, dedicated bomb laboratory staffed by fifty scientists, with perhaps up to fifty assistants, supported by an equal number of technical, shop, and administrative employees. But even before the spring planning sessions were over, it was apparent he had considerably underestimated the size of the job. The scientists found it hard to explain the need for all the costly changes to Groves, who was obviously insecure around so many brilliant minds, and was more obnoxious and oppressive than ever. Even though he had them under lock and key, he vehemently objected to Oppenheimer’s weekly colloquia, where classified topics were discussed openly among members of the laboratory. The dispute quickly blew up into a full-fledged crisis. It took two letters from the White House, one drafted by Conant, to convince the incarcerated scientists that Groves was not a petty tyrant and that they had to tolerate the extraordinary restrictions. Oppenheimer, who fought hard for free discussion, succeeded in preserving the democratic organization of the laboratory. In deference to the security-conscious Groves, however, he agreed to limit those eligible for the colloquia to qualified members of the laboratory.
Although they could see that Groves was dedicated and efficient, he annoyed his minions with his displays of egotism and insistence on throwing his not inconsiderable weight around. Early on at Los Alamos, he got up on a podium and announced, “The reason why I am here today is to introduce you to your boss’s boss’s boss,” meaning himself. The young graduate-student theoreticians—the average age at Los Alamos was all of twenty-five—such as Richard Feynman and Philip Morrison, rolled their eyes at his posturing. Conant, hoping to lessen the friction, created another bureaucratic buffer between the general and his sensitive charges. He suggested to Groves that it might improve his working relationship with the laboratory staff if he appointed a committee to review their progress. That way any suggestion would come from their peers and would be readily accepted, whereas if it came from him “it might be regarded as interference.” Groves, who had no objection to committees as long as he appointed them, went along with the idea.
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