The Age of Radiance

by Craig Nelson

  They were all so young, and all so full of vim—not representing the grand old men of science, the average age of those at Los Alamos was twenty-seven. Many of the accompanying wives were upset to see all the bedding stamped USED, until it was explained that the organization running the compound was the United States Engineer Detachment. The water that came out of the tap could be accompanied by rust, algae, dirt, or worms, and sometimes was so chlorinated that it dissolved the wives’ stockings. Regardless, in eighteen months the water supply was so thinning that cars could not be washed, lawns could not be watered, showers were supposed to last only a few minutes, and all were warned to “REPORT LEAKY FAUCETS IMMEDIATELY!” Men gave up shaving, and women made do with less laundry and shampooing by switching to overalls, and pulling their hair back into bandannas. Everyone joked that they all started looking like the pictures of the first down-on-their-luck Santa Fe prospectors, and if the base were open to the public, they would think it was all an operation run by and for cowboys. Bethe: “The water supply had been built for the Los Alamos school, which had maybe fifty people, and there were several thousand of us. There just wasn’t any water. We got water delivered in trucks that had previously been used to transport gasoline, so the water generally tasted of gasoline.”

  Tewa-speaking Indian women in deerskin boots, Hopi shawls, and glossy hair piled up or pigtailed were bused in to the mesa to work as maids, cooks, and nannies. One had a mother-in-law with a reputation as a good potter, and the secret spread; her talent and her connections made her a fortune in blackware.

  Emilio Segrè sent a letter to his wife back in California and included a strand of his hair. She opened the letter, the hair was missing, and that was how the physicists discovered their mail was being read. A number of the émigrés were additionally unhappy to be surrounded by a razor-wire fence, which reminded them of Nazi prison camps. Junior physicist Richard Feynman discovered, however, that workers had put a hole in the Los Alamos fence as a shortcut, and he enjoyed exiting the property through that hole and then coming in through the security entrance, so the guards would always see him arriving, but never departing. The kids, too, discovered every hole the fence had to offer, as well as a treasure pile of toys to play with—lab equipment left out in the trash.

  In November 1943, James Chadwick invited Otto Robert Frisch to join the thirty British scientists who would be going to America. Otto replied, “I would like that very much,” and when it was explained that he would need to first become a British citizen, he said, “I would like that even more.” Chadwick then invited Lise Meitner from Sweden, and the discoverer of fission said, “I will have nothing to do with a bomb.” Accompanied by Rudolf Peierls and Klaus Fuchs on December 3, 1943, the group of thirty found no available taxis in London and had to pay a hearse driver to take them to the wharves. When they then crossed the United States by rail and stopped in Richmond, Virginia, for a meal, Frisch became ecstatic at the sight of fruit stands blooming with immense pyramids of oranges. He hadn’t seen an orange in three years. Arriving in New Mexico, they received the standard hello from Oppenheimer: ‘Welcome to Los Alamos. Who the devil are you?’ ”

  Oppenheimer did everything he could to get his friend Isidor Rabi to join, but Rabi, like Meitner, refused, telling Oppenheimer that he did not want to make “the culmination of three centuries of physics” a horrible weapon. He did not believe in bombs, feeling that they killed both the innocent and the guilty, and continued his work on radar at Columbia. He did, however, travel to the Los Alamos sporadically to offer advice as a visiting consultant, as did Einstein.

  North-central New Mexico is today as green as any artificially irrigated desert in the world, but during World War II it was home to columbines, gentians, ponderosa, aspens, indifferent porcupines, tender marmot, determined badger, and fearless skunk. Ruth Marshak: “Behind us lay the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, at sunset bathed in changing waves of colors—scarlets and lavenders. Below was the desert with its flatness broken by majestic palisades that seemed like the ruined cathedrals and palaces of some old, great, vanished race. Ahead was Los Alamos, and beyond the flat plateau on which it sat was its backdrop, the Jemez Mountain Range. Whenever things went wrong at Los Alamos, and there was never a day when they didn’t, we had this one consolation—we had a view.” Emilio Segrè: “The Mesa was indented by deep canyons, which in time came to be occupied by special laboratories. The region was extraordinarily beautiful. This beauty was to have profound influence on many scientists who by inclination and long habit were sensitive to nature and could appreciate the noble countryside surrounding Los Alamos. The view of the mountains; the ever-bearing clouds in the sky; the colorful flowers blooming profusely from early spring to late autumn; the possibility of walking on interesting trails leading to fishing streams, skiing slopes, mineral beds, or Indian ruins. . . . Often at the end of a strenuous period of work one was completely exhausted, but the out-of-doors was always a source of renewed strength. Any number of spirited discussions were conducted during hikes in the beautiful and savage countryside.”

  Back in May 1940, what would become the Manhattan Project had been handed a phenomenal twitch of luck. The Congo uranium mine that Szilard and Einstein had warned Roosevelt about had been discovered and managed by a Belgian corporation, the Union Minière du Haut Katanga. When Hitler came to power, Union Minière chief Edgar Sengier assumed the Nazis would have to take Belgium on their way to France, and he didn’t want his cobalt—a key ingredient in airplane engines—to fall into Fascist hands. Just before his nation fell in May 1940, Sengier moved himself and his wife to a suite in New York’s Ambassador Hotel and renamed Union Minière the African Metals Corporation. Under the nose of the German occupation, he then shipped 1,250 tons of uranium—the whole of the mine’s on-hand inventory—out of the Congo and into a vegetable-oil plant storage facility operated by Archer Daniels Midland on Staten Island, New York, as suggested by the Joliot-Curies in Paris and Henry Tizard in Britain. For two years, Sengier worked to sell the whole of it to the American government for the war effort, but no one was interested . . . until September 18, 1942, when Leslie Groves signed an eighteen-year, four-hundred-tons-a-month contract with AMC, which ore would supply two-thirds of the enriched uranium for Hiroshima’s Little Boy and a substantial amount of the plutonium for Fat Man at Nagasaki. When the Belgians declared Congo independent in the 1960s, Union filled the mine with cement, but as of this writing illegal miners are digging away and exporting their ore through Zambia. The mine is known as Shinkolobwe, named after a fruit that has to be boiled before it can be eaten. If you try to eat some without letting it cool, you will get burned, and shinkolobwe is also the term for a man who is, like uranium, cool on the outside but boiling from anger within.

  During the war, over a million people would know that the Manhattan Project existed; it was the job of the Counter-Intelligence Corps (known by their colleagues as the Creeps) to keep those people from knowing anything else. The cops created posters—DON’T BE A BLABOTEUR—and invented a code:

  topic boat

  atomic bomb

  urchin fashion

  nuclear fission

  igloo of urchin

  isotope of uranium

  tenure

  U-235 (2+3+5 = 10)

  Henry Farmer

  Enrico Fermi

  Eugene Samson

  Emilio Segrè

  Oscar Wilde (who wrote The Importance of Being Earnest)

  Ernest Lawrence

  The Los Alamos physicists came to believe that their Creep bodyguards had remarkable powers. “They had this notion that we could know whatever they were doing even if they didn’t tell us,” one agent was surprised to understand. Many of the scientists behaved erratically, even life-threateningly—notably Fermi, with his perilous driving skills—and the agents became alarmed, since besides spying on their scientists, a key part of their assignment was to keep their charges alive until the Bomb was born.

  Like al
l the rest of the Creeps, Fermi’s bodyguard and chauffeur, the Italian-speaking American, halfback-size lawyer John Baudino, filed weekly reports on his subject with army intelligence. To keep Fermi from talking about his work to others, Baudino got him to talk about it to him. So Fermi started saying that, “Soon Johnny will know so much about the project he will need a bodyguard, too.”

  When agent Charles Campbell, who hated physics but pretended to like it as part of his job, mentioned to John von Neumann that he was too busy to study, von Neumann got upset: “It is my fault! You will come with me and together we will study theoretical physics in New Mexico!” FBI surveillance teams used walkie-talkies disguised as hearing aids, and any assembled together looked conspicuously like an outing of deaf people.

  The same month that Los Alamos opened, the FBI suspended its surveillance of Oppenheimer at the insistence of the army. No more help was needed from the Feebs as the Creeps had placed agent Andrew Walker as Robert’s driver and bodyguard, had wiretapped his home and office, and read every piece of his mail before he did. By the summer of 1943, JRO was so sick of this relentless snooping that he thought he should quit.

  The military police stationed outside the Oppenheimer house on Bathtub Row insisted on seeing everyone’s pass before letting him or her enter, including, repeatedly, Kitty Oppenheimer, who often forgot to take her pass with her when she left the house and made a huge fuss when the men interfered with her coming back. She got the detail canceled, however, when the sergeant in charge learned she was using the MPs to babysit the Oppenheimers’ son, Peter.

  Phil Morrison’s wife, Emily: “Kitty was a very strange woman. . . . She could be a very bewitching person, but she was someone to be wary of. . . . She would pick a pet, one of the wives, and be extraordinarily friendly with her, and then drop her for no reason. She had temporary favorites. That’s the way she was. She did it to one person after another.” Oppenheimer did nothing in the face of his wife’s caprices, even when she “threw a hate on Charlotte” Serber, whose husband was one of his closest friends.

  When Elinor Pulitzer, newspaper heiress, married Los Alamos medical director Louis Hempelmann, she decided to throw a big dinner party on the mesa, but didn’t know that the high altitude meant longer roasting times. While all her guests waited for their food for hours, they drank and drank until Elinor developed a reputation as a spectacular hostess.

  Single men and women lived in dormitories, where parties were marked by lab-created 200-proof rotgut ladled from reagent jars, Mexican vodka brought in from Santa Fe, and, if they were lucky, visiting consultant Isidor Rabi playing the comb. The marrieds dressed up and went square dancing; the singles gathered at the two PXs for hamburgers and the jukebox; there were group drives, horseback riding, fishing, mountain climbing, poker, amateur theatricals and concerts, golf, baseball, softball, basketball, and a women’s dorm that for a time became a brothel. So many young people trapped behind barbed wire led to a baby boom. When Groves realized that one-fifth of the married women on the base were pregnant, he insisted that Oppenheimer do something about it. But, as Kitty herself was expecting, there was little he could do, other than inspire mesa-wide sing-alongs:

  The General’s in a stew

  He trusted you and you

  He thought you’d be scientific

  Instead you’re just prolific

  And what is he to do?

  When a study was published linking a decrease in male fertility with long, hot baths, copies were immediately forwarded to Groves in the hopes of getting more tubs. But all the new children led in turn to an outpouring of social effects: a newspaper, library, barbershop, radio broadcast, church services, golf course, baseball field, and, on a military site, a democratically elected town council. Family life brought civilization to the desert, and a real sense of community to Los Alamos.

  Naval officer Deke Parsons: “You know, usually on a military post the commander is the social arbiter and top dog. It’s really sort of hard for the military here because everybody looks down on them.” Good news from the fronts would cheer the civilians and dispirit the junior military, who felt gypped at being stationed in the desert and missing out on the action. Later in the war, when men arrived with ribbons from Anzio, though, they were clearly grateful to be stationed at the peaceable mesa.

  In March 1943, Hans Bethe was at MIT’s Rad Lab working on radar, after escaping from Germany through London: “Though I had an excellent time with my colleagues and my friends in England, it was clear there that I was a foreigner and would remain a foreigner. In America, people made me feel at once that I was going to be an American—that maybe I was one already. I felt that Germany was much stranger than America—that it was a weird country. It was clear that according to the laws, I could not hold a university position, because two of my grandparents were Jewish. The first I heard about this directly was when one of my two Ph.D. students in Tübingen wrote me a letter saying, ‘I read in the papers that you have been dismissed. Tell me, what shall I do?’ What should he do? I had not heard of my dismissal, but it had been published in the papers.”

  To help with the war effort, in 1941 Bethe had produced a theory of armor penetration, which was published by Philadelphia’s Frankford Arsenal as confidential, meaning Bethe himself wasn’t allowed to read it. Two years later, he got the call from Oppenheimer and agreed to come to Los Alamos. On the way, Bethe passed through Chicago, picked up Ed Teller, and visited Enrico Fermi. By April, Teller’s wife, Mici, and two-month-old son, Paul, arrived, with a Steinway concert grand acquired from a hotel sale and a Bendix automatic washer. The Hungarian physicist played his remarkable instrument at all hours of the day and night, which alternately enthralled and irritated his neighbors. Teller described himself as “choleric”—tending to anger—and when he played Mozart, it was always fortissimo.

  Ed Teller: “The Army routinely leveled every bush and tree within two hundred feet of a building site before beginning construction, thereby destroying whatever attractiveness the immediate surroundings had. Yet, throughout the war, our apartment building had a pretty stand of pines growing between us and the Canyon. On the morning the bulldozers appeared to level the area near our apartment as part of the next construction project, my wife had spread a blanket under the trees and settled herself, Paul, his diapers and bottles, and a picnic lunch on it. The young soldier responsible for the bulldozer asked her politely to move; she, just as politely, refused. He leveled the rest of the surroundings and returned to ask again—to no avail. Finally the soldier went to Gen. Groves for advice. ‘Leave the trees,’ Groves grumbled on hearing about the situation.”

  With a face like an abdominal muscle foreshadowed by a prow of beetle brows, Hungarian Quartet member Edward Teller would, over the decades, become the Dr. Strangelove of this history and the Saruman of this real-life Lord of the Rings, with a fairly distinct personality: “Fermi once told me with hardly a trace of a smile that I was the only monomaniac he knew with several manias. My grandson, my son, and my editor-collaborator all claim that the film character ET and I have more in common than our initials.” In 1928, Teller fell on the street, and a trolley ran over his foot, leaving him with a lifelong limp and a lifelong friend and nemesis, Hans Bethe, who visited him in the hospital. In the 1930s, Ed got a grant to study in Rome after Fermi “wrote an official letter to the Hungarian government. He called me a great physicist (which I certainly was not), asked for the privilege of collaborating with me (which could hardly have been a privilege for him considering my ignorance of his area of study), and expressed the hope that some means could be found by the Hungarian government to make my stay possible. . . . I do not believe that as a total stranger I have ever been more warmly welcomed.”

  Edward Teller had helped Oppie organize Los Alamos and recruit, but then became notably upset when the sparkling Bethe was named head of the Theoretical Division, as Bethe himself admitted: “Teller had worked on the bomb project almost from the day of its inception and co
nsidered himself, quite rightly, as having seniority over everyone then at Los Alamos, including Oppenheimer.” Teller didn’t like working under Bethe, didn’t like military secrecy, didn’t like collaborating, and didn’t like the lack of support for his thermonuclear fusion design, the Super. Still, at that time, he was a true Oppenheimer acolyte. Ed Teller: “Throughout the ten years, Oppie knew in detail what was going on in every part of the Laboratory. . . . He knew how to organize, cajole, humor, soothe feelings—how to lead powerfully without seeming to do so. He was an exemplar of dedication, a hero who never lost his humanness. Disappointing him somehow carried with it a sense of wrongdoing. Los Alamos’ amazing success grew out of the brilliance, enthusiasm and charisma with which Oppenheimer led it.” Yet, after one outrageous incident with the prima donna Teller and his obsession with fusion over fission, Robert said to Charles Critchfield, “God protect us from the enemy without and the Hungarians within.”

  In August of 1944, the Fermis were told that they, too, would be joining the exodus to Site Y in New Mexico’s Pecos Valley, with J. Robert Oppenheimer himself visiting them in Chicago to explain what it was like, and what they could expect. Enrico would be heading up the F division, the F standing for “Fermi,” which would be a team of freelance troubleshooters, including Herb Anderson and Ed Teller—getting Teller out from under Bethe—working on any advanced problems as required. Laura remembered Oppenheimer’s saying that all his friends called him Oppie and they should, too. “He made it all sound just wonderful.” Oppenheimer: “Fermi was simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active.” In turn, Enrico said that Robert had a remarkable talent for appearing far more knowledgeable about a given topic than he actually was.