by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Miss Warner, the daughter of a Philadelphia clergyman, had first come to the Pajarito Plateau in 1922, after suffering a nervous breakdown at the age of thirty. Together with her companion, an elderly Native American, Atilano Montoya—known about the pueblo as Tilano—she ran what she called a tea room for tourists out of her home. Her life was simple in the extreme.
One evening soon after Oppie moved to the mesa, he took General Groves to the house at Otowi Bridge for tea. With the closing of the Ranch School and the imposition of wartime gas rationing, which discouraged tourist traffic, Edith gently confessed that she was wondering how she would make ends meet. As they sipped their tea, Groves offered to put her in charge of all the food services on The Hill. It was a big job with good pay. Edith said she would consider the idea. When they left, Robert escorted Groves to their car, but then returned and knocked on Edith’s door. Standing with hat in hand and the moonlight full on his face, he told her, “Don’t do it.” Then he abruptly turned and walked back to his car.
A few days later, Oppenheimer reappeared on Miss Warner’s doorstep and proposed that she host three small dinners each week for parties of no more than ten. By providing the scientists a brief diversion from life on The Hill, Oppie explained, she would be making a real contribution to the war effort. General Groves had given his consent to the idea—and Edith herself regarded it as a godsend.
“Along about April,” wrote Miss Warner at the end of that year, “the X’s began coming down from Los Alamos for dinner once a week, and they were followed by others.” After cooking all day, Miss Warner presided, wearing a simple shirtwaist dress and Indian moccasins. Everyone sat at one long, hand-carved wooden table set in the center of a dining room with whitewashed adobe walls and low-slung, hand-hewn beams. Miss Warner, aged fifty-one, served her “hungry scientists” generous portions of home-cooked food. They ate ragoût of lamb by candlelight off traditional Indian black ceramic plates and bowls, hand-coiled by the local potter, Maria Martinez. Afterwards, her guests huddled briefly together by the fireplace for warmth before making the long drive back up to the mesa. In return for this evening of candle-lit adobe ambience, Miss Warner charged her guests the token sum of $2 per head. She knew only that these mysterious people were working “for some very secret project. . . . Santa Fe calls it a submarine base—as good a guess as any!”
Dinner at Miss Warner’s became such a sought-after pleasure that teams of five couples had permanent reservations for the same night each week. Oppenheimer made sure that he and Kitty had first choice on Edith’s calendar, but soon the Parsonses, Wilsons, Bethes, Tellers, Serbers and others became regulars, while many other Los Alamos couples vied for the prestige of an invitation. Oddly enough, the calm, quiet Miss Warner had a special rapport with Oppenheimer’s vivacious, sharp-tongued wife. “Kitty and I understood each other,” Warner later said. “She was very close to me, and I to her.”
One day in early 1944, Oppie brought along the Danish Nobelist Niels Bohr, and introduced him to Miss Warner as “Mr. Nicholas Baker”—an alias Bohr was assigned at Oppenheimer’s initiative. Everyone called the gentle, unassuming Dane “Uncle Nick.” The softspoken, mumbling Bohr conversed in stumbling half-sentences—but then, Miss Warner wasn’t much of a talker either. Years later, Bohr attested to this most unlikely friendship by writing Miss Warner’s sister a note “in gratitude for the friendship of your sister.” Miss Warner had a near-mystical regard for both Bohr and Oppenheimer: “He [Bohr] has a great stillness in him, a calm inexhaustible source. . . . Robert has the same thing in him.”
Bohr was not, of course, the only memorable personality to dine at Miss Warner’s table. James Conant (chairman of S-1 or Section One of the Office of Scientific Research and Development), Arthur Compton (a Nobelist and director of the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago) and the Nobelist Enrico Fermi visited the house at Otowi Bridge. But it was only Oppie’s framed photograph that Miss Warner kept on her Philadelphia dresser. Phil Morrison could easily have been speaking for Oppenheimer when, late in 1945, he wrote Miss Warner a long letter of thanks for his many evenings in her company: “Not the smallest part of the life we came to lead, Miss Warner, was you. Evenings in your place by the river, by the table so neatly set, before the fireplaces so carefully contrived, gave us a little of your assurance, allowed us to belong, took us from the green temporary houses and the bulldozed roads. We shall not forget. . . . I am glad that at the foot of our canyons there is a house where the spirit of Bohr is so well understood.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Bohr Was God, and Oppie Was His Prophet”
They didn’t need my help in making the atom bomb.
NIELS BOHR
THE “RACE” FOR THE ATOMIC BOMB had begun more or less as a straggle. A few scientists, almost all European émigrés, were panicked in 1939 over the possibility that their former colleagues in Germany might take the lead in putting the discovery of fission to military use. They alerted the U.S. government to this danger, and the government supported conferences and small nuclear research projects. Committees of scientists did studies and wrote reports. But it was not until the spring of 1941, more than two years after the discovery of nuclear fission in Germany, that Otto Frisch and Rudolph Peierls, German émigré physicists working in Britain, figured out how a usable atomic bomb could be produced quickly in time for use during the war. From that time forward, everyone involved with the combined American-British-Canadian atomic bomb project was totally focused on winning this deadly race. Thoughts about the postwar implications of a nuclear-armed world remained dormant until December 1943, when Niels Bohr arrived at Los Alamos.
Oppenheimer was enormously gratified to have Bohr at his side. The fifty-seven-year-old Danish physicist had been smuggled out of Copenhagen aboard a motor launch on the night of September 29, 1943. Arriving safely on the Swedish coast, he was taken to Stockholm—where German agents plotted his assassination. On October 5, British airmen sent to his rescue helped Bohr into the bomb bay of an unmarked British Mosquito bomber. When the plywood aircraft approached an altitude of 20,000 feet, the pilot instructed Bohr to don the oxygen mask built into his leather helmet. But Bohr failed to hear the instructions—he later said the helmet was too small for his large head—and soon he fainted from lack of oxygen. He nevertheless survived the air journey and upon landing in Scotland, he remarked that he had had a pleasant nap.
Greeting him on the tarmac was his friend and colleague James Chadwick, who took him to London and began briefing him on the British-American bomb project. Bohr had understood since 1939 that the discovery of nuclear fission made an atomic bomb feasible, but he believed that the engineering necessary for separating out U-235 would require an immense, and therefore impractical, industrial effort. Now he was told that the Americans were turning their great industrial resources to exactly this purpose. “To Bohr,” wrote Oppenheimer later, “[it] seemed completely fantastic.”
A week after his arrival in London, Bohr was joined by his twenty-one-year-old son Aage (pronounced “Awa”), a promising young physicist who later would earn his own Nobel Prize. Over the next seven weeks, father and son were thoroughly briefed about “Tube Alloys”—the British code name for the bomb project. Bohr agreed to become a consultant to the British, who then agreed to send him to America. In early December, he and his son boarded a ship for New York. General Groves was not happy about the idea of Bohr’s participation, but, given the Dane’s prestige in the world of physics, he reluctantly granted him permission to visit the mysterious “Site Y” in the New Mexico desert.
Groves’ displeasure had been sparked by intelligence reports suggesting that Bohr was a loose cannon. On October 9, 1943, the New York Times reported that the Danish physicist had arrived in London bearing “plans for a new invention involving atomic explosions.” Groves was incensed, but there was nothing he could do beyond trying to contain Bohr. This proved to be a hopeless task: Bohr was irrepressible. In Denmark, he had
simply walked up to the palace door and knocked if he wished to see the king. And he did pretty much the same thing in Washington, D.C., where he visited Lord Halifax, the British ambassador, and Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, an intimate of President Roosevelt’s. His message to these men was clear: The making of the atomic bomb was a foregone conclusion, but it was not too soon to consider what would happen after its development. His deepest fear was that its invention would inspire a deadly nuclear arms race between the West and the Soviet Union. To prevent this, he insisted, it was imperative that the Russians be told about the existence of the bomb project, and be assured that it was no threat to them.
Such views, of course, horrified Groves, who was desperate to get Bohr out to Los Alamos, where the loquacious physicist could be isolated. To ensure that Bohr got there without breaking security, Groves personally joined him and his son on the train from Chicago. Caltech’s Richard Tolman, Groves’ science adviser, also came along. Groves and Tolman had agreed to take turns watching over the Danish visitor, to make sure he didn’t wander out of the compartment. After an hour with Bohr, however, Tolman came out exhausted and told Groves, “General, I can’t stand it any more. I am reneging, you are in the Army, you have to do it.”
So as Groves listened to Bohr’s characteristic “whispering mumble,” every so often he would try to interrupt and explain to him the importance of compartmentalization. It was an effort foredoomed to failure. Bohr had a broad overview of the Manhattan Project and an insatiable concern for the social and international implications of science. Not only that, more than two years earlier, in September 1941, Bohr had met with his former student Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist who led the German atomic bomb program. Groves had debriefed Bohr about what he knew about the German project—but he certainly didn’t want him to talk to others about it. “I think I talked to him about twelve hours straight on what he was not to say.”
They arrived in Los Alamos late on the evening of December 30, 1943, and immediately went to a small reception in Bohr’s honor hosted by Oppenheimer. Groves complained later that “within five minutes after his [Bohr’s] arrival he was saying everything he promised not to say.” Bohr’s first question to Oppenheimer was, “Is it really big enough?” In other words, would the new weapon be so powerful as to make future wars inconceivable? Oppenheimer immediately understood the import of the question. For more than a year, he had concentrated his energies entirely on the administrative details related to setting up and running the new lab; but over the next few days and weeks, Bohr sharply focused Oppie’s mind on the bomb’s postwar consequences. “That is why I went to America,” Bohr later said. “They didn’t need my help in making the atom bomb.”
That evening, Bohr told Oppenheimer that Heisenberg was working quite vigorously on a uranium reactor that could produce a runaway chain reaction, and thereby create an immense explosion. Oppenheimer convened a meeting the next day, the last day of 1943, to discuss Bohr’s concerns. Attending were Bohr, Aage and some of the best minds at Los Alamos, including Edward Teller, Richard Tolman, Robert Serber, Robert Bacher, Victor Weisskopf and Hans Bethe. Bohr then tried to convey to these men the quite extraordinary nature of his encounter with Heisenberg in September 1941.
Bohr recounted how his brilliant German protégé had received special permission from the Nazi regime to attend a conference in German-occupied Copenhagen. Though not himself a Nazi, Heisenberg was certainly a German patriot who had chosen to remain in Nazi Germany. He was undoubtedly Germany’s most eminent physicist; if the Germans had an atomic bomb project, Heisenberg was the obvious candidate to direct it. When he arrived in Copenhagen, he sought out Bohr, and what the two old friends said to each other has become an enduring enigma. Heisenberg later maintained that he had guardedly mentioned the uranium problem and tried to suggest to his old friend that while a fission weapon was quite possible in principle, it would “require a terrific technical effort, which, one can only hope, cannot be realized in this war.” He claimed that he was implying— but, worried about German surveillance, and fearful for his own life, could not explicitly say—that he and other German physicists wanted to persuade the Nazi regime that it would not be feasible to build such a weapon in time for use in this war.
But if this was Heisenberg’s message, Bohr was not listening. All the Danish physicist heard was Germany’s leading physicist telling him that a fission weapon was indeed possible and that, if developed, it would be decisive in this war. Alarmed and angry, Bohr cut short their conversation.
Later, Bohr himself reported that he was not quite sure what Heisenberg had meant to say. Years later, he would compose numerous drafts—as was his habit—of a letter to Heisenberg that in the end he never sent. In all versions of the letter, it is quite clear that Heisenberg had shocked Bohr by merely mentioning atomic weapons. In one draft, for instance, Bohr wrote:
On the other hand, I remember quite clearly the impression it made on me when, at the beginning of the conversation, you told me without preparation that you were certain that the war, if it lasted long enough, would be decided with atomic weapons. I did not respond to this at all, but as you perhaps regarded this as an expression of doubt, you related how in the preceding years you had devoted yourself almost exclusively to the question and were quite certain that it could be done, but you gave no hint about efforts on the part of German scientists to prevent such a development.
What was said or not said between Bohr and Heisenberg remains a source of considerable controversy. Oppenheimer himself later wrote, cryptically: “Bohr had the impression that they [Heisenberg and his colleague Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker] came less to tell what they knew than to see if Bohr knew anything that they did not. I believe that it was a standoff.”
One thing is clear, however: Bohr came away from the encounter with a great fear that the Germans might end the war with an atomic weapon. In New Mexico, he conveyed this fear to Oppenheimer and his team of scientists. Not only did he tell them that Heisenberg had confirmed the existence of a German bomb project, Bohr also displayed a drawing of what he said was a bomb, allegedly sketched by Heisenberg himself. One glance, however, persuaded everyone that the sketch depicted, not a bomb, but a uranium reactor. “My God,” Bethe said when he saw the drawing, “the Germans are trying to throw a reactor at London.” If it was disquieting to learn that the Germans were indeed working on a bomb project, it was reassuring that they seemed to be pursuing a highly impractical design. After discussion of the issue, even Bohr was persuaded that such a “bomb” would fizzle. The next day, Oppenheimer wrote Groves to explain that an exploding uranium pile would actually “be a quite useless military weapon.”
OPPENHEIMER ONCE observed that “it is easy, as history has shown, for even wise men not to know what Bohr was talking about.” Like Bohr, Oppenheimer was never simple or straightforward. At Los Alamos, the two men sometimes seemed to be mimicking each other. “Bohr at Los Alamos was marvelous,” Oppenheimer later wrote. “He took a very lively technical interest. But his real function, I think, for almost all of us, was not the technical one.” Instead, Bohr came “most secretly of all,” as Oppenheimer explained, to advance a political cause—the case for openness in science as well as international relations, the only hope to forestall a postwar nuclear arms race. This was a message Oppenheimer was ready to hear. For nearly two years, he had been preoccupied with complex administrative responsibilities. As the months rolled by, he was becoming less and less a theoretical physicist and more and more a science administrator. This transformation had to be intellectually stifling for him. So when Bohr showed up on the mesa speaking in deeply philosophical terms about the project’s implications for humanity, Oppenheimer felt rejuvenated. He assured Groves that Bohr’s presence had greatly helped morale. Up until then, Oppenheimer later wrote, the work “often looked so macabre.” Bohr soon “made the enterprise seem hopeful, when many were not free of misgiving.” He spoke contemptuously of Hitler and under
scored the role scientists could play in his defeat. “His own high hope that the outcome would be good, that the objectivity, the cooperation of the sciences would play a helpful part, we all wanted to believe.”
Victor Weisskopf recalled Bohr telling him that “this bomb may be a terrible thing, but it might also be the ‘Great Hope.’ ” Early that spring, Bohr attempted to put his concerns on paper, drafting and redrafting a memorandum and then sharing it with Oppenheimer. By April 2, 1944, he had a draft that contained several basic insights. No matter how things ultimately worked out, Bohr argued, “it is already evident that we are presented with one of the greatest triumphs of science and technique, destined deeply to influence the future of mankind.” In the very near term, “a weapon of an unparalleled power is being created which will completely change all future conditions of warfare.” That was the good news. The bad news was equally clear, and prophetic: “Unless, indeed, some agreement about the control of the use of the new active materials can be obtained in due time, any temporary advantage, however great, may be outweighed by a perpetual menace to human security.”
In Bohr’s mind, the atomic bomb was already a fact—and control over this menace to humanity required “a new approach to the problem of international relationship. . . .” In the coming atomic era, humanity would not be safe unless secrecy was banished. The “open world” Bohr imagined was not a utopian dream. This new world already existed in the multinational communities of science. In a very pragmatic sense, Bohr believed the laboratories in Copenhagen, Cavendish and elsewhere were practical models for this new world. International control of atomic energy was only possible in an “open world” based on the values of science. For Bohr, it was the communitarian culture of scientific inquiry that produced progress, rationality and even peace. “Knowledge is itself the basis of civilization,” he wrote, “[but] any widening of the borders of our knowledge imposes an increased responsibility on individuals and nations through the possibilities it gives for shaping the conditions of human life.” It followed that in the postwar world each nation had to feel confident that no potential enemy was stock-piling atomic weapons. That would only be possible in an “open world” where international inspectors had full access to any military and industrial complexes and full information about new scientific discoveries.