by Craig Nelson
In 1939, when Niels Bohr publicly revealed Meitner and Frisch’s discovery of fission, California’s Rad Lab boys knew they’d blown another chance. Luis Alvarez: “I remember exactly how I heard about it. I was sitting in the barber chair in Stevens Union having my hair cut, reading the Chronicle, and in the second section, buried away someplace, was an announcement that some German chemists had found that the uranium atom split into pieces when it was bombarded with neutrons—that’s all there was to it. So I remember telling the barber to stop cutting my hair and I got right out of the barber chair and ran as fast as I could up to the Radiation Laboratory. And my student Phil Abelson had been working very hard to try and find out what transuranium elements were produced when neutrons hit uranium. And he was so close to discovering fission that it was almost pitiful. I mean, he would have been there, guaranteed, in another few weeks—when I arrived panting from the Student Union with my news about fission, and I played it kind of dramatically. I saw Phil there and I said, ‘Phil, I’ve got something to tell you but I want you to lie down first.’ So, he lay on the table (right alongside the control room of the cyclotron). ‘Phil, what you are looking for are not transuranium elements, but they are elements in the middle of the periodic table.’ I showed him what was in the Chronicle, and, of course, he was terribly depressed.”
Philip Abelson: “When Alvarez told me the news, I almost went numb as I realized that I had come close but had missed a great discovery. During that day, other members of the laboratory, including Alvarez, prepared experiments to check on the validity of the fission process, of resample, by measuring the energy liberated in a linear amplifier when uranium was exposed to neutrons. For nearly twenty-four hours I remained numb, not functioning very well.” Chemist Glenn Seaborg spent all night wandering in a daze through the streets, shocked that they had missed what was so, in retrospect, obvious.
When Alvarez told Oppie about Meitner’s fission, Oppie immediately said, “That’s impossible,” and ran to the blackboard to prove it. But the next day, Alvarez “invited Robert over to see the very small natural alpha-particle pulses on our oscilloscope and the tall, spiking fission pulses, twenty-five times larger. In less than fifteen minutes he not only agreed that the reaction was authentic but also speculated that in the process extra neutrons would boil off that could be used to split more uranium atoms and thereby generate power or make bombs. It was amazing to see how rapidly his mind worked.” Ernest Lawrence’s response? He needed an even bigger cyclotron than ever as now “prospects for useful nuclear energy become very real!”
On September 3, 1939, news arrived that a Nazi submarine had torpedoed the ocean liner Athenia, which was sinking off the shores of Scotland. John Lawrence, Ernest’s brother, had been in Britain lecturing on the Rad Lab’s medical achievements. He was on that ship and it took two days to learn that he was safe. Previously, Ernest was a die-hard midwestern noninterventionist firmly in the camp of Charles Lindbergh, who believed Europe’s troubles were none of America’s business. Nearly losing his brother made Ernest fervently change course. Then, on November 9, he won his Nobel for inventing the cyclotron.
In December 1940, Segrè and Lawrence met with Fermi and Columbia’s Pegram to mull over the cyclotron’s recent breakthrough of forcing U-238 to capture a neutron and produce a new element—#93, neptunium. Besides this new human-made element, neptunium appeared to be regularly half-living up to another new element, #94, as yet undiscovered, but the results were inconclusive. Segrè recommended trying to produce enough #94 to determine its nuclear properties, Lawrence agreed, and on February 23, 1941, Segrè and the Seaborg chemistry group bombarded a series of three hundred pounds of irradiated uranyl nitrate hexahydrate, yellowish crystals similar to rock salt, which had been shipped to California from St. Louis. Along the way, the compound’s plywood boxes cracked open in their trucks, spilling out a trail of hot rocks.
With their three hundred pounds, Segrè and Seaborg produced enough #94 to determine a mass of 239. They wondered what it should be called, toying with the names ultimium, extremium, and pandemonium. Paid for by the military, the discovery could not be published in the scientific journals, as it was classified. Simultaneously, Egon Bretscher and Norman Feather at Cavendish Labs in Cambridge also discovered element 94 and also kept it secret, under Britain’s Tube Alloys classified fission-research program. Remarkably and in secret for a decade, both teams gave the new element the exact same name (as it follows uranium and neptunium): plutonium. After the war, America beat the British in declassifying the discovery, meaning Seaborg got the 1951 Nobel.
The great majority of the world’s uranium has an atomic weight of 238. Much rarer is the variant, or isotope, that can be used to make bombs: 235. It is so rare that Bohr for five years would categorically insist there was no potential in nuclear arms—until he came to America and saw it all with his own eyes. Ernest Lawrence thought his Republic could use magnetic fields to split a beam of ionized uranium in half in his cyclotron track, directing the mildly lighter isotope, U-235, onto a metal collector where its vapor would condense into a green slurry of U-235 and carbon tetrachloride. The slurry was reduced into a soft, silvery U-235 metal, which would then be re-ionized and recollected, “enriching” the uranium, atom by atom. After four months, the Rad Lab had produced two hundred micrograms of 35 percent U-235, and on March 9, 1942, Vannevar Bush reported to FDR that the country should build a $20 million centrifuge, so that by the end of 1943 they could be making a bomb a month that was the equivalent of two thousand tons of TNT. Roosevelt’s only reply: “Time is very much of the essence.”
Two months later, Oppenheimer was anointed the Coordinator of Rapid Rupture under Compton’s Chicago Met Lab and assembled a team to research nuclear explosives, including Hans Bethe, Ed Teller, and Bob Serber. Teller sidetracked the committee’s work by constantly promoting the idea Fermi had given him the year before, that a fission trigger of deuterium could initiate fusion, promising a thermonuclear weapon of 1 million tons TNT, a result both much cheaper and much bigger than the fission bomb everyone else wanted to pursue. As part of his argument, Teller then warned that fission weapons might ignite the nitrogen in the earth’s atmosphere or the hydrogen in its ocean waters, causing a global holocaust. Hans Bethe was left to do the calculations proving this scenario unlikely.
Ed Teller, meanwhile, now began keeping a chart of thermonuclear-bomb ideas in his office. At the bottom of the list was his most ambitious weapon—the Backyard. The Backyard was so massive that it would probably kill every single living thing on earth, so there was no reason to take it anywhere and drop it on anyone. You could just set it off in your backyard. This was the beginning of the thinking and behavior that would inspire Isidor Rabi to muse, “The world would be better without an Edward Teller.”
On September 13, 1942, at 20601 Bohemian Avenue, Monte Rio, California, under a portal that claimed WEAVING SPIDERS COME NOT HERE, a committee of Ernest Lawrence, Lyman Briggs, James Conant, Arthur Compton, and Harold Urey met to discuss the MAUD Committee report—which Briggs had finally passed on to others in the Bush empire—as well as who should lead the American effort to create the atomic bomb. They settled on the 250-pound, eternally enraged bulldog with a distinctively dead-fish handshake, Colonel Leslie Groves. Groves was exhausted by having just built the Pentagon and had accepted orders for overseas combat when Army Services of Supply chief General Brehon Somervell asked him to take on this new and overwhelming assignment.
Somervell: “The Secretary of War has selected you for a very important assignment, and the President has approved the selection. . . . If you do the job right, it will win the war.”
Groves, upset over being reassigned away from combat, replied, “Oh. That thing.”
Newly promoted to brigadier general, Leslie Groves arrived at the Rad Lab expecting to hire Ernest Lawrence to be his head of scientific research and development. But Lawrence didn’t want the job, and someone else did. Robert Oppenheimer unders
tood that, at thirty-eight, his best years as a physicist were behind him, and that as a scientist he was first-rate but not first rank among the giants of his era. If he could not be a genius, then at least he could be a handmaid to genius.
Even with the Met Lab’s consolidation under Arthur Compton, the Coordinator of Rapid Rupture told Groves that having scientists all across the United States working separately on fission, with none of them communicating due to security, was uncoordinated, inefficient, diffused, and certain to slow progress. Oppenheimer insisted that R&D needed to be consolidated, in a compound isolated from the world. He then sang to the general what was, to Groves, the most beautiful of music: in such a location, security would be drastically improved.
Secretary of War Henry Stimson called Groves the most security-conscious man he’d ever met, and Groves’s use of compartmentalization, secret budgets, and lack of financial or other control by Congress would be implemented by his many employees who went on to careers in the CIA at the dawn of the Cold War. Emilio Segrè: “When Groves saw that the usual security rules would preclude recruiting those he wanted, he invented new rules. Each of us was to guarantee some colleague he knew well. ‘Guarantee’ sounded good, but how? Somebody proposed an oath on the Bible, but Groves objected: ‘Most of them are unbelievers.’ An Intelligence officer then proposed an oath of personal honor, but Groves replied, ‘They do not have any sense of honor. Rather,’ he concluded, ‘let them swear on their scientific reputation. It seems to me that is the only thing they care for.’ ”
Oppenheimer did everything he could to get the job and make the partnership work—significantly, when Groves asked stupid questions, Oppie never made him feel like an idiot, as he would have with anyone else. Famous at Berkeley for an office floor covered in enormous piles of paper, Robert knew Leslie thought a tidy desk meant a tidy mind and maintained a spick-and-span charade for his boss. They could even josh. When Groves complained that Robert’s porkpie hat was becoming so well known it was a security risk, for their next meeting Oppenheimer wore an eagle-feathered Indian headdress and asked, “Is this better, sir?” (Oppie’s hat became so famous that, after the war, it was featured on a magazine cover, by itself.) Groves said of Oppenheimer, “He’s a genius. A real genius. While Lawrence is very bright, he’s not a genius, just a hard worker. Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you can bring up. Well, not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn’t know about. He doesn’t know anything about sports.” But perhaps the greatest reason for their success was that Groves could not pull rank on titans such as Lawrence, Fermi, Bohr, von Neumann, or any of the other scientists whose work was crucial to Groves’s success. But knowing the details of Oppenheimer’s Communist past—Kitty Oppenheimer was a “card-carrying” Communist during the 1930s; Frank and Jackie Oppenheimer were members from 1937 to 1941; Robert contributed without signing on, calling himself a “fellow traveler,” until 1942—Groves could do exactly that with his director.
The Army Corps of Engineers had an office for building airfields and shipping ports on 270 Broadway at Chambers Street in New York City, and when Vannevar Bush put the atom bomb under the Corps for financial reasons, the headquarters were set up in the same building on the eighteenth floor. Originally named the Department for the Development of Substitute Materials, Groves feared such a provocative title might draw the attention of foreign agents and instead followed Corps procedure by generically calling it the Manhattan Engineer District, eventually known as the Manhattan Project. The building of the Pentagon had required 1,300 men; Manhattan would employ 130,000. As the war progressed, Oppenheimer chain-smoked and grew more wizened; Groves ate chocolate pecan turtles and enlarged.
After all their difficulties in Chicago, Enrico Fermi never worked with Leo Szilard again on a joint experiment, though both of their names would be on the 1955 patent for the nuclear reactor. To prove how prophets are without honor in modern times, quickly in his new assignment Groves became absurdly convinced Szilard was a Nazi spy and kept him under twenty-four-hour surveillance. When agents complained that following Leo around was pointless, Groves insisted, “The investigation of Szilard should continue despite the barrenness of the results.” After hundreds of man-hours, the FBI uncovered such damning facts as that Szilard ate breakfast in drugstores and other meals in restaurants, got shaved in a barbershop, walked often when taxis weren’t available, and read Newsweek.
But this was not the end of Szilard’s troubles with authority. When a raging conflict over the engineering of piles among nuclear physicists, the DuPont, Stone + Webster contractors, and army engineers escalated—with Szilard as reagent—Compton was forced on October 26, 1943, to ask Leo to work for Met Lab as a consultant from Columbia, leaving Chicago in forty-eight hours. In reply, Szilard asked for patents and royalties on all his inventions being used by the government. Two days later, fearing that Szilard’s exit would create a scientific brain drain of his colleagues, Compton accepted a truce with his gadfly and his engineers—Leo becoming chief physicist at Met Lab with a monthly salary of $950 and a year’s back pay, the army getting his patents in exchange for his costs of $15,416—and cabled Groves that all had been resolved. Groves, meanwhile, on October 28, drafted a letter for Secretary of War Stimson to sign, having Szilard interned for the rest of the war as an enemy alien. Stimson refused, which only further infuriated the always-infuriated Groves.
The Coordinator of Rapid Rupture found for his secluded compound a boys school out West the Army Corps of Engineers could buy, which would coincidentally realize Oppenheimer’s lifelong dream of uniting physics with New Mexico. But what did Groves think? It was in the middle of nowhere, connected to the world with one dirt road and one decrepit phone line, and in terms of security was absolutely perfect. When the town opened for business on March 15, 1943, it was home to a hundred employees. Six months later, a thousand; one year later, thirty-five hundred; and by the summer of 1945, six thousand. Physicists and their families arrived to find an entire burg painted army green, and homes furnished with refrigerators, woodstoves, water heaters, and fireplaces, but no telephones. It would be known as the Project, the Mesa, the Hill, Site Y, and Shangri-La—Los Alamos.
Robert Oppenheimer: “The prospect of coming to Los Alamos aroused great misgivings. It was to be a military post; men were asked to sign up more or less for the duration; restrictions on travel and on the freedom of families to move about would be severe. . . . But there was another side. Almost everyone knew that if it was completed successfully and rapidly enough, it might determine the outcome of the war. Almost everyone knew that it was an unparalleled opportunity to bring to bear the basic knowledge and art of science for the benefit of his country. Almost everyone knew that this job, if it were achieved, would be part of history. This sense of excitement, of devotion and of patriotism, in the end prevailed.”
Mathematician Stanislaw Ulam: “People I knew well began to vanish one after the other, without saying where. . . . Finally I learned that we were going to New Mexico, [so] I went to the library and borrowed the Federal Writers’ Project Guide to New Mexico. At the back of the book, in the slip of paper on which borrowers signed their names, I read the names of Joan Hinton, David Frisch, Joseph McKibben, and all the other people who had been mysteriously disappearing to hush-hush war jobs without saying where.” Hans Bethe: “I went by train to a place called Lamy, New Mexico, which was the railroad station for Santa Fe. Later on, there was a story about some people who went to the railroad station in Princeton to buy tickets to Lamy, and the ticket seller told them, ‘Don’t go there. Twenty people have already gone there, and not one of them has ever come back.’ ”
In Lamy, the Super Chief streamliner stopped at a one-room adobe station sitting hard by an empty road of tumbleweeds and an eternal hot, dry wind. Two scientists arrived, couldn’t find the deliberately inconspicuous Army Corps of Engineers offices at 109 East Palace Avenue they’d been told to report to, and had
to call back to Met Lab: “Where the hell are we?” Civil engineer Joe Lehman: “I drove right through the square and kept on going looking for the main part of town and I found myself out in the desert again. So I turned around and came back and finally pulled into a service station right off the square and asked where downtown Santa Fe was. The guy said, ‘This is it. You’re in it.’ ”
The scientists and engineers arrived to find a situation so primitive that the telephone network was a single line to the outside world shared by twelve parties, gnawed at by chipmunks, so static-filled a caller needed to shout to be heard, and unusable when it rained for fear of being electrocuted. The quality was so poor that at one point, the secretaries were once flummoxed by a call requesting eight extra-large trucks. It was actually for eight extra lunches.
It was, however, all that Oppie had said it would be. “Here at Los Alamos,” one tough British physicist said, “I found a spirit of Athens, of Plato, of an ideal Republic.” Ed Teller: “In spite of the difficulties, I (and many others) consider the wartime years at Los Alamos the most wonderful time in our lives.” Hans Bethe: “It was an unforgettable experience for all the members of the laboratory. There were other wartime laboratories of high achievement. . . . But I have never observed in any one of these other groups quite the spirit of belonging together, quite the urge to reminisce about the days of the laboratory, quite the feeling that this was really the great time of their lives. That this was true of Los Alamos was mainly due to Oppenheimer.” Dick Feynman: “Oppenheimer was very patient. He paid attention to everybody’s problems. He worried about my wife, who had TB, and whether there would be a hospital out there, and everything. . . . He was a wonderful man.” Well, not everyone thought this was the great time, as Leslie Groves told his officers: “At great expense, we have gathered on this mesa the largest collection of crackpots ever seen.”