109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  Everyone at the laboratory took solace in the news that Enrico Fermi had finally been persuaded to come to Los Alamos full-time. Many of the physicists regarded Fermi as the soul of wisdom—he was sometimes referred to as “the pope” because of the weight of his pronouncements—and believed that his even temperament and common sense would help provide the support and balance that was badly needed at this stage. For his part, Oppenheimer hoped that Fermi could help mediate some of the running disputes between the different division heads. Fermi was unique even among the array of talents at Los Alamos in that he excelled at both experimental and theoretical physics, and could go toe-to-toe with anyone on the site.

  Los Alamos was thick with experts and know-it-alls, with more arriving every day, so that Oppenheimer spent an inordinate amount of time settling disputes and preventing work from being disrupted. There was Teller’s ongoing dissatisfaction with the project and refusal to do what he regarded as mundane work on the implosion bomb. Fermi liked Teller, and the two got along well, and Oppenheimer could only hope the Italian Nobel laureate would be able to convince Teller to stay and undertake some useful theoretical investigations. By now, he was no longer under any illusion that Teller could be won over to his point of view, but he was shrewd enough to realize that it was better to keep the troublemaker inside the tent, where he could at least serve as a useful critic in group debate. If Oppenheimer was fed up with Teller, he usually managed to hide his antagonism, though the physicist Charles Critchfield recalled that occasionally after talking about the progress of the lab, Oppenheimer would mutter a little prayer: “May the Lord preserve us from the enemy without and the Hungarians within.”

  Oppenheimer also had his hands full dealing with escalating tension between Parsons and Kistiakowsky, who clashed over everything from who knew more about explosive technology to scheduling access to the S-Site, the new testing facility located at the site of an old sawmill near Anchor Ranch. The problem between Parsons and Kistiakowsky could be boiled down to a difference in style, between that of the classic can-do military approach to developing detonation devices and that of theoretical and experimental physicists struggling to perfect a radical assembly design for implosion. Parsons had insisted on bringing in a veteran navy ordnance officer, who had proceeded to build an explosives casting plant that Kistiakowsky regarded as “a monstrosity.” Kistiakowsky, who could be just as imperious, demanded that a completely new plant be built according to his group’s specifications.

  Parsons argued that I was wanting to do an undoable job. He believed there was something else that should be done, a kind of smoothing out of the difficulties with plutonium, minimizing them rather than really overcoming them. Perhaps I am biased but I felt the way Oppenheimer handled this difference, his grasp of the technical problems, was really most impressive.

  He called a big meeting of all the group heads, and there he sprang on Parsons the fact that I had plans for completely redesigning the explosives establishment. Parsons was furious—he felt I had by-passed him and that was outrageous. I can understand perfectly how he felt but I was a civilian, so was Oppie, and I didn’t have to go through him.

  After much debate, Oppenheimer decided the S-Site would be expanded to accommodate Kistiakowsky’s new explosives plant. Parsons never forgave Kistiakowsky, and the Russian noted that from then on they were never “on good terms.” But Oppenheimer may have seen the rivalry between the two group leaders as productive, and from a political point of view, it may have been more convenient to have Parsons believe Kistiakowsky had bypassed him, rather than think the laboratory director had subverted his authority.

  As adept as Oppenheimer was at reconciling divergent viewpoints, it was a measure of his exasperation with the more fractious members of his staff that he told the Administrative Board on August 3 that “certain” parties could be working harder. Groves had ordered a fifty-four-hour workweek for all military personnel at Los Alamos and canceled all leaves, and while Oppenheimer resisted imposing the same draconian measures, he instituted a number of organizational changes. Those “certain” few who were perceived as dragging their feet were transferred to different divisions, and several scientists were appointed to help hear complaints and expedite the work. He also announced that the Tech Area siren would sound at more frequent intervals to induce people to get to work on time and return from their lunch break in a more orderly fashion. When Fermi arrived that August to head up the F Division, which included theoretical and nuclear physics, his relaxed and unpretentious style, which was in its own way every bit as dominant as Oppie’s, did much to help defuse the summer’s simmering tensions and restore peace on the mesa.

  By the end of the summer, Oppenheimer wrote Groves that he thought he had managed to bring the project leaders in line and restore harmony. He enclosed a report from Parsons, “with the general intent and spirit of which I am in full sympathy,” but eloquently and resolutely defended the conduct of his physicists on several counts:

  I believe that Captain Parsons somewhat misjudges the temper of the responsible members of the laboratory. It is true that there are a few people here whose interests are exclusively “scientific” in the sense that they will abandon any problem that appears to be soluble. I believe that these men are now in appropriate positions in the organization. For the most part the men actually responsible for the prosecution of the work have proven records of carrying developments through the scientific and into the engineering stage. For the most part these men regard their work here not as a scientific adventure, but as a responsible mission which will have failed if it is let drop at the laboratory phase. I therefore do not expect to have to take heroic measures to insure something which I know to be the common desire of the overwhelming majority of our personnel.

  It was hardly surprising that tempers ran high in the implosion divisions. The scientists at Los Alamos were working with explosives; and pressed for time and good alternatives, they often took enormous chances. “There was no time to build barricades, so we just worked,” recalled Kistiakowsky. They made up new rules regarding safety as they went along, but manufacturing high-explosive castings was tough and dangerous work. At Los Alamos, they handled explosives by the ton, never forgetting that only one gram going off at the wrong time would “finish off the whole hand.” One of Kistiakowsky’s main concerns about the S-Site was that explosives had to be trucked all the way across the mesa, and right through the heart of the project. “With the whole theoretical division sitting in offices on one side of the road, Oppenheimer’s office (and mine) on the other, and with hundreds of wild WACs and GIs driving trucks and jeeps there,” he explained, “a truck loaded with five tons of high explosive (H.E.) going off there would have wiped out 90 percent of the brains in those temporary buildings.” During the peak period of production, they were trucking up to five tons of high explosives up the Hill monthly over some of the worst roads he had ever seen.

  Phil Morrison, one of Oppenheimer’s Berkeley grads who had been working for Fermi in Chicago as a neutron engineer, was recruited to help with the difficult implosion work and assigned to the G Division. “We were working with critical assemblies, and it was clearly very dangerous work,” said Morrison. “It was better than the front line, but not by much. I was very aware of the risks, but very motivated by the war … the urgency of the war. We believed the Germans could be ahead. We believed Heisenberg could do this, and that they had plenty of good people on their side.”

  Oppenheimer’s driving desire to make headway on the implosion bomb spurred everyone on, and differences were put aside in the name of progress. He never spared himself in work, and as a consequence inspired an equally dedicated effort from his staff. He faced tremendous pressure from above. Groves insisted that two bombs were essential for victory in the war. From a strategic point of view, Groves believed they could not risk dropping one with no backup in reserve. General George Marshall thought that figure might be closer to nine. Forced to scratch the Thin Man
, Groves presented a revised timetable for weapons delivery to Marshall on August 7, 1944, two months after the Normandy invasion. He promised the delivery of a small uranium gun bomb—nicknamed “Little Boy,” Thin Man’s lighter, smaller brother—by August 1945, with the addition of one or two more by the end of the year. If the experimental work went smoothly, small implosion bombs would be ready by the second quarter of 1945. There was no longer any escaping the fact that they were building instruments of war that would soon be used against another country. While the scientists had all been focused on Germany, Groves made it clear that if Hitler surrendered before the bombs were ready, Japan would become the target. As if underlining his own resolve, Oppenheimer wrote Groves, “The laboratory is operating under a directive to produce weapons; this directive has been and will be rigorously adhered to.”

  Looking ahead to the next twelve months, Oppenheimer must have thought Groves’ estimates wildly optimistic. Given the time scale, and the slow rate of production of U-235, there was no point in even considering a test for the gun assembly. There was no way there would be enough U-235 to make that a possibility. They would simply have to trust that the gadget would work. Plutonium’s rate of production promised to be better, and given the fact that the implosion device was so novel, Oppenheimer felt they had to consider making a field test. They could expect enough plutonium to be available by the following summer to allow for a test detonation of a single implosion bomb. But Groves was leery of wasting the little fissile material they had. If the test was a bust, and there was no nuclear explosion, he stated flatly that he could not afford to lose all that plutonium in the chemical blast. “Oppenheimer and I were pleading with Groves that there had to be a test because the whole scheme was so uncertain,” recalled Kistiakowsky:

  General Groves was very sensitive about what would happen to him after the war and whenever he didn’t like something, he’d say, “Think of me standing before a U.S. Senate committee after the war when it asks me: ‘General Groves, why did you spend this million or that million of dollars?’”

  To cover their desperation, Kistiakowsky proposed building a large prophylactic, a 200-ton ellipsoidal steel tank with twelve-inch-thick walls, dubbed “Jumbo.” By testing the bomb inside the steel vessel, they hoped that if the weapon misfired, everything would remain contained, rather than being scattered over the countryside. Then, after the tank had cooled, it would be possible to salvage the plutonium for yet another test. If by some chance the weapon worked, the tank would be vaporized, but their job would be done. Oppenheimer had first written to Groves about a “sphere for proof firing” in March 1944 and, trying to sound confident about implosion, had stated “the probability that the reaction would not shatter the container is extremely small.” It is a measure of Groves’ own uncertainty that he went for the idea and gave the order for Jumbo to be built.

  While the question of whether or not there should be field tests continued to be fiercely debated by the physicists on the Hill, Oppenheimer had to turn his attention to the problem of where such a test could be safely conducted. Beginning in early May, he organized a search team consisting of himself, Kenneth Bainbridge, who was in charge of developing the test site, Peer de Silva, and army major W. A. Stevens. They scoured maps of the area and visited several spots nearby where the land was relatively flat and isolated from any population centers, but still close enough to Los Alamos to facilitate the transportation of men and material. On their first scouting trip, they got caught in an unexpected snowstorm, and one of their trucks got stuck in the deep drifts. They had to dig it out and take a more circuitous route to San Luis and Estrella. They spent the next day exploring Star Lake, the center of an old coal region, and followed unmapped ranch trails past abandoned ranches too dry for farming and wind-beaten desert land. The front-wheel bearings of one of the vehicles finally gave out, and they had to leave it there and head back to Los Alamos. Bainbridge thought Oppenheimer was reluctant to see an end to their rugged three-day adventure, as he would not have time to participate in the subsequent site-hunting expeditions. “Oppenheimer had to return to more important duties, and could not again enjoy a trip into the open country which he loved.”

  On a following trip, they borrowed a small, seven-seater C-45 and flew low over the parched rural countryside, inspecting hundreds of miles of the western United States. By August, after all the other possibilities had been eliminated on the grounds of inaccessibility, they were left with a ninety-mile stretch of sandy desert in central New Mexico known as the Jornada del Muerto, located some three hundred miles south of Los Alamos. It was a desolate, forbidding area, battered by high winds, devoid of water, and with temperatures reaching well over a hundred degrees in July and August. Not surprisingly, the early Spanish settlers dreaded crossing the empty, unyielding region, endowing it with a name that roughly translates as “Journey of Death.” The grim pioneer history added to the romantic aura of the site, and Oppenheimer, who was spending sleepless nights reading John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, was inspired to give it the code name “Trinity” after some lines from Sonnet XIV:

  Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you

  As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

  That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

  Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

  The down-to-earth Bainbridge was less than enamored of the evocative name Oppenheimer had selected. Thinking more in terms of practicality than history, he dashed off a memo to Oppenheimer several months later requesting something more utilitarian:

  I would greatly appreciate it if the Trinity Project could be designated Project T. At present, there are too many different designations. Muncy’s [business] office calls it A; Mitchell’s [procurement] office calls it project T but ships things to S-45…. By actual usage, people are talking of Project T, our passes are stamped T and I would like to see the project, for simplicity, called Project T.

  As summer waned, the debate over to test or not to test became an increasingly hot issue at Los Alamos. Even so, work on the site was in full swing. Most of the Jornada was already in government hands and, since the First World War, had been used as a gunnery and bombing range. Groves arranged to acquire the northwest corner of the bombing range not far from Socorro, a small settlement at the northern end that no doubt took its name from the fact that it had offered the only “succor” or sustenance to the old Spanish wagon trains that ran into trouble in the desert. There were a few ranches scattered around the region, and their owners had been compensated by the government for their loss of housing and income. Not all of them had left yet, and their cattle and sheep still occasionally wandered past the NO TRESPASSING signs posted by the army. The government bribed the remaining ranchers to leave, though a few needed prodding, and the MPs fired holes into their water tanks to discourage both the two-legged and four-legged inhabitants from drifting back. There were a few small townships thirty to forty miles away, but they had become accustomed to hearing the sounds of distant explosions over the years. Other than that, the area was literally barren—empty. The army leased the McDonald brothers’ ranches and planned to renovate them for their use. Everything else would have to be trucked in and built from scratch. The roads were extremely primitive and would have to be improved to withstand the upcoming traffic, not to mention the transport of Jumbo from a stop along the El Paso-Albuquerque railroad line. The plans drawn up for the base camp called for housing for 160 military and civilian personnel. Trinity was going to be a tremendous field operation, and Groves ordered a hundred men from the Army Corps of Engineers to help with the construction.

  The demands of the implosion work and Trinity site meant that once again Los Alamos was in desperate need of more manpower. Since late 1943, the military had begun bringing in SEDs, who were assisting in the endless work in the Tech Area. Now they were arriving by the busload. Most were students with some semblance of technical training—in chemistry, physics, or eng
ineering—and served as laboratory grunts, doing everything and anything the scientists needed. In some cases, they were also promising young physics Ph.D.’s who were about to be drafted and whose professors thought they could probably serve their country better in a laboratory than in battle. In the beginning, they were crammed into barracks at the edge of town, as though the army was slightly ashamed of them and wanted to keep them as far away as possible from respectable folk.

  The arrival of hundreds of very young, very raw male draftees altered the atmosphere on the mesa, lowered the average age of an already immature population, and proved to be another test of the community’s creativity and adaptability. To Dorothy, they looked like a bunch of scrawny college boys, and she took many of them under her wing. They were thankful not to be in the line of fire on foreign soil, and their youthful high spirits showed. One of the very first to arrive was Bill Hudgins, who had been a few years ahead of Kevin in school and whom she had often seen at the home of her close friend Eleanor Gregg, a cousin of John Gaw Meem’s. Hudgins had been enrolled in the engineering program at the University of New Mexico when he heard they were looking for qualified staff on a nearby army project. He was only eighteen, and green as could be when he walked into Dorothy’s office at 109 East Palace and inquired about “a job with the government project.” Panicked that there had been a breach in security, Dorothy nearly jumped down his throat. She interrogated him for more than an hour about what he had heard about the project, where he had heard it, whom he had heard it from, and how he came to have her office address. Only after she was satisfied that there had been no real harm done by the rumors did she relax and recover her usual equilibrium.

  Afterward, feeling a little guilty about her rough treatment of the lad, she walked him through the application process and even attached a letter of recommendation. After he was accepted, she made a point of watching over him. “She mothered me whenever she could,” said Hudgins, laughing. “She definitely looked out for me. Whenever I got into any kind of trouble, I could just call her and she would straighten it out. She was definitely a good person to know.”