by War
Few people even at the highest levels knew the extent of the threatening failure. Colonel Peters knew. The scientific mastermind of the bomb project, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer, knew. And the resolute, thick-bided Army man bossing the show, Brigadier General-Leslie Groves, knew. But nobody knew what to do about it. Dr. Oppenheimer had an idea, and Colonel Peters was going to Oak -Ridge to meet with Oppenheimer and a small senior committee.
As against this crisis, Captain Henry's request for the Dresser couplings was small potatoes. Rather than risk trouble with the White House, Peters was taking him along, since Pug's security clearance was flawless. Oppenheimer's idea involved bringing in the Navy, and the Army-Navy relations were touchy. A cooperative gesture made some sense at this point.
Peters knew nothing about the Navy's thermal diffusion system.
"Compartmentalization" was General Groves's first rule: noncommunication walls between sections of the bomb effort, so that people in one track would not know what was happening elsewhere.
Groves had investigated thermal diffusion in 1942 and concluded that the Navy was wasting its time.
Now Oppenheimer had written to Groves suggesting a second very urgent look at the Navy's results.
Pug Henry had been passing through military checkpoints all his life, but the Oak Ridge roadblock was something new.
The gate guards were processing a crowd of new workmen in a considerable uproar, letting them through one by one like counted gold coins, to buses waiting beyond the gate. The substitute coupling Pug had brought along was scrutinized by hardfaced MPs and passed before a fluoroscope. He himself went through a body search and some stiff questioning, then got back into Peters's Army car, wearing various badges and a radiation gauge.
"Let's go," Peters said to.the sergeant driver. "Stop at the overlook."
They went bowling along a narrow tarred road through dense green woods, flowering here and there with redbud and dogwood.
"Bob McDermott will be at the castle. I phoned," said Peters.
"I'll Turn you over to him."
"Who's he? What's the castle?"
"He'll have to pass on your request. He's the boss engineer. The castle is the administration building."
The ride through wild woods went on for miles. The colonel worked on papers as he had on the train, and during the drive from Knoxville.
The two men had scarcely spoken since leaving Washington. Pug had his own paper sheaf, and silence always suited him- It was a warm morning, and the forest scent through the open windows was delightful.
The car climbed a twisting stretch of road through solid dogwood.
Rounding a bend, the driver pulled off the road and stopped.
"God Almighty," Pug gasped.
"K-25," said Peters.
A long wide valley stretched below, a chaotic muddy panorama of construction centered around an unfinished building that looked like all the airplane hangars in America put together in a U-shape; the most gigantic edifice Pug had ever seen. Around it sprawled miles of flat-roofed huts, acres of trailers, rows of military barracks, and scores of buildings, dear out of sight. The general look, from this distance, was a strange melange of Army base, science-fiction vision, and gold mining town, all in a sea of red mud. A sense of an awesome future' rose from this view like the shock wave of a bomb.
"The water lines are for that big plant," said Peters.
"Something, hey? The technicians get around in there on bicycles.
It's operating, but we keep adding units. Over the ridge there's another valley, and another installation. Not quite as big, different principle."
They drove, down through the booming valley past rough huts interlined with wooden boardwalks built over the mud, past long queues of workingmen and women at bus stops and stores, past a hundred noisy construction jobs, past the gigantic K-25 structure, to the "castle."
Pug was not expecting to encounter a familiar face, but there in the corridor was Sime Anderson in uniform, talking to shirt-sleeved civilians.
Sime returned a salute to Pug's startled informal wave.
"Know that young fellow?" asked Peters.
"Beau of my daughter's. Lieutenant Commander Anderson."
"Oh, yes. Rhoda's mentioned him."
It was the first reference to Rhoda on the trip.
The walls of the chief engineer's small office were covered with maps, his desk with blueprints. McDermott was a heavyset mustached man with a grimly amused look in bulging brown eyes, as though he were hanging on to his sanity by regarding Oak Ridge as a great mad joke.
His neatly pressed suit trousers were tucked into rubber knee boots crusted with fresh red muck. "Hope you don't mind walking in mud," he said to Pug as he shook hands.
"If it'll get me those couplings, not at all."
McDermott looked over the substitute coupling Pug showed him.
"Why don't you use this on your landing craft?"
"We can't accept the delay needed for modification."
"Can we?" McDermott asked Colonel Peters.
"That's the second question," Peters replied. "The first question is whether you can use that thing."
McDermott turned to Pug, and pointed a thumb at a pile of muddy boots. "Help yourself and let's go."
"How long will you be?" Peters asked.
"I'll bring him back by four."
"Good enough. Did the new barriers come in from Detroit?"
McDermott nodded. Grim amusement came on his face like a mask.
"Unsatisfactory."
"Jesus God," said Peters. "The general will go up in smoke."
"Well, they're still testing them."
"Ready," Pug said. The boots were too large. He hoped they would not come off in the mud.
"On our way," said McDermott.
In the corridor, a short bespectacled colonel, almost bald, with a genial very sharp expression, had joined Anderson and the civilians.
Peters introduced Pug to the Army boss of Oak Ridge, Colonel Nichols.
"Is the Navy going to get those landing craft made in time?"
Nichols asked Pug, his bluntness modified by a pleasant manner.
"Not if you keep preempting our components."
Nichols asked McDermott, "What's the problem?"
"The Dresser couplings for the underground water lines."
"Oh, yes. Well, do what you can."
"Gonna try."
"Hi, there," Pug said to Anderson. The junior officer diffidently grinned. Pug went off with McDermott.
A frail-looking, young-looking man smoking a pipe entered the building as Pug left. The prospect of addressing a meeting that included Dr. Oppenheimer had Sime Anderson shaking at the knees.
Oppenheimer was, in Anderson's view, probably the brightest human being alive; his mind probed nature as though-God were his private tutor, and he was cruel to fools. Sime's boss, Abelson, had casually sent Sime off to Oak Ridge to describe the thermal diffusion plant for a few key Oak Ridge personnel and corporation executives. Only on arriving had Sime learned that Oppenheimer would be there.
There was no help for it now. Feeling appallingly illprepared, he followed Dr. Oppenheimer into the small conference room, where a blackboard gave the place a classroom look. -Some twenty men, mostly in shirt-sleeves, made it crowded, smoky, and hot. Anderson was sweating in his heavy blue uniform when Nichols introduced him and he got to his feet. But chalk in hand, talking about his work he soon felt all right. He avoided looking at Oppenheimer, Who slouched smoking in the second row. By the time Anderson paused for questions, forty minutes had sped by, and the blackboard was covered with diagrams and equations. His small audience appeared alert, interested, and puzzled.
Nichols broke the short silence. "That separation factor of two -that's the theoretical performance you're hoping for?"
"That's what our system is putting out, sir."
"You're getting that concentration of U-235? Now?"
"Yes, sir. One point four. One part in seventy.
"
Nichols looked straight at Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer stood, walked forward, and shook hands with Sime, smiling in remote recognition. "Well done, Anderson." Sime sat down, his heart swelling with relief.
Oppenheimer looked around with large sombre eyes. "The figure of one point four is the reason for this meeting. We have made a very fundamental, very serious, very embarrassing mistake," he said in a slow weary voice, "all of us have, who share responsibility for this effort. It seems we were bemused by the greater elegance and originality of gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic separation. We were obsessed, too, with going to ninety percent enrichment along a single path. It didn't occur to us that combined processes might be a speedier way. Now here we are. From the last word on barriers, K-25 will not work in time for this war. Hanford too is a question.
Out in New Mexico we're testing bomb configurations for an explosive that doesn't yet exist. Not in usable quantities."
Picking up chalk, Oppenheimer went on, "Now thermal diffusion itself won't provide the enrichment we need, but a combination of thermal diffusion and the Y-12 process will give us a bomb by July 1945. that is clear." He rapidly scrawled on the board figures that showed a fourfold increase in the electromagnetic separation of the Y-12 plant, given feed enriched to one part in seventy. "The question is, can a thermal plant on a very large scale be erected within a few months to feed Y-12? I've recommended this urgently to General Groves.
We're here to discuss ways and means."
Stooped, skinny, melancholy, Oppenheimer returned to his seat.
Now that the meeting had a direction, ideas and questions sparked around in quick insiders' shorthand. Sime Anderson was called on to answer many questions. The meeting pressed him hard on the core of the Navy system, the forty-eight-foot vertical steam pipes of concentric iron, copper, and nickel cylinders.
"But the Navy's using only a hundred of them, handfashioned at that," exclaimed a big red-faced civilian in the front row. "That's lab equipment. We're talking here about several thousand of the damn things, aren't we? A whole forest of them, factory-made! It's a plumber's nightmare, Colonel Nichols. You won't get a corporation in this country to take on such a contract. Three thousand pipes of that length, with those tolerances, in a few months? Forget it."
The meeting split into two groups for lunch: one to talk about design with Oppenheimer and Anderson, one to confer with Nichols and Peters on construction and manufacturin "The general wants this thing done," Colonel Nichols summed up in adjourning. "So it will be. We'll all meet back here at two o'clock, and start making some decisions."
With a wave of his pipe, Oppenheimer stopped Sime from leaving the room. When they were alone he said, walking to the blackboard, "A-minus, Anderson." He picked up chalk, corrected an equation with a nervous rub of a fist and a scrawl of symbols; then asked a series of quick questions, dazzling the naval officer with his total grasp of thermal diffusion in every aspect. "Well, let's get on to the cafeteria," he said, dropping the chalk, "and join the others."
"Yes, sir."
Leaning against the desk, arms folded, Oppenheimer made no move to go. "What next for you?"
"I'm returning to Washington tonight, sir."
"I know that. Now that the Army will get into thermal diffusion, what about a new challenge? Come and join us out in New Mexico."
"You're sure the Army will do it?"
"They have to. There's no alternative. The weapon itself still poses some nice problems in ideas. Not lion hunting, so to say, but a lively rabbit shoot. Are you married, Anderson?"
"Ah-no, I'm not."
"Better so. The mesa is a strange place, quite isolated.
Some of the wives take to it, but others-well, that won't concern you. You'll soon be hearing from Captain Parsons."
"Captain Parsons? Is he in New Mexico now?"
"He's a division head. You'll come, won't you? There's a lot of excellence out there."
"I go where I'm ordered, Dr. Oppenheimer."
"Orders won't be a problem."
All the trudging in ropy mud wore Victor Henry down.
McDermott drove a jeep, but the narrow rutted roads ended abruptly in brush or muck, sometimes far from where they wanted to go. Pug didn't mind the slogging here and there, because they were getting the answers he wanted. One after another, the technicians concurred that with a modified sleeve and a thicker gasket, the substitute coupling would answer. It was the old story-administrative rigidity in Washington, good-humored horse sense among the men with hard hats, dirty hands, and muddy shoes. Pug had broken many a supply impasse this way.
"I'm convinced," McDermott shouted over the grinding and bumping of the jeep, as they headed back under lowering storm clouds. They had been at this for hours, pausing only for sandwiches and coffee at a field canteen. "Now convince the Army, Captain."
Sharing A DRAWING room on the train back to Washington, Pug and Peters hung up wet clothes as the train started, and Pug declined the whiskey the Army man offered him. He did not feel much like drinking with his wife's current love. Sime Anderson came in, summoned by the colonel. "Stay here," Peters said to Pug, when their discussion began and he offered to leave. "I want you in on this."
Pug quickly gathered that the Army was taking a sudden urgent interest in a Navy system for processing uranium. He kept his mouth shut while the colonel, whose trame bulked large in the tiny room, puffed at a cigar, sipped whiskey, and asked Anderson questions. The train picked up speed, the wheels clattered, rain beat on the black windows, and Pug began to feel hungry.
"Sir, I'm on special detached duty, assigned directly to the lab," Anderson replied to a query about the Navy chain of command on , she project. "You'll have to talk to Dr. Abelson."
"I will. I see only one way through this mess," Peters said, putting his notebook into a breast pocket. "We'll have to build twenty Chinese copies of your plant. Just duplicate it and string 'em in series. Designing a new two-thousandcolumn plant can take many months."
"You could design for greater efficiency, sir."
"Yes, for the next war. The idea is to make a weapon for this one. All right, Commander. Many thanks."
When Anderson left, Peters asked Pug, "Do you know Admiral Pumell?
I'm wondering how I go about getting the Navy's blueprints for thermal diffusion real fast."
"Your man is Ernest King."
"But King may not even be clued in on uranium. Pumell's the Navy man on the Military Policy Committee."
"I know, but that doesn't matter. Go to King."
"Will you do that?"
"What? Approach Admiral King for the Army? Me?"
At the incredulous tone, Colonel Peters's fleshy mouth widened in the grin which no doubt charmed the women; the naive, cheery grin of a mature man who had not known much grief, a gray-haired boyish man.
"Look, Henry, I can't proceed through channels in the uranium business, and I can't write letters. Ordinarily I'd go with this thing to the next meeting of the NElitary Policy Committee, but I want to get moving. The trouble is-and it hasn't been my doingwe've cold-shouldered the Navy for years. We've shut Abelson out. We even got snotty about giving him a supply of uranium hexafluoride, when it was Abelson, for Christ's sake, who first produced the stuff for us. I just found that out today.
Stupid policy, and now we need the Navy. You know King, don't you?"
"Quite well."
"I have a feeling you could broker this thing."
"Look, Colonel, just getting in to see Ernest King can take days.
Tell you what, though. You release those couplings - I mean telephone that firm in Pennsylvania from Union Station tomorrow -and I'll get right in a cab and try to break in on the C.N.O."
"Pug, only the general can waive this priority." Peters's wide grin was wary and uncertain. "I could get my head cut off."
"So you said. Well, I can get my head cut off for barging in on Ernest King without an appointment. Especially with an Army requ
est."
Staring at Pug, Colonel Peters rubbed his mouth hard, then burst out laughing. "Hell, those Oak Ridge fellows approved your coupling, didn't they? You're on. Let's have a drink on "I'd rather have dinner. I'm hungry as a bear. Coming?"
"Go ahead." Peters clearly did not like this second refusal.
"I'll be along."
Sime Anderson stood in the queue outside the dining car, pondering a common quandary of wartime-whether to propose marriage before going off to serve in a distant place.