Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  Allegedly derived from “highly reliable” sources, the report was riddled with errors. To security investigators, Szilard and Fermi were simply foreigners with strong accents, suspicious backgrounds, and a string of fanciful ideas. Briggs informed Szilard and Fermi that the Uranium Committee had decided to limit further financial support of their research. The committee was afraid that if it funded an expensive research endeavor that flopped, Szilard’s and Fermi’s foreign backgrounds would prove a liability in case of a congressional inquiry. 31 The explanation Briggs gave them was that the possibility of a costly failure loomed too large. It seemed the American government would never seriously embrace the possibility of building an atomic bomb.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Manhattan Project

  IF WASHINGTON FAILED to perceive the importance of an atomic bomb early in the war, London did not. British scientists were furiously studying the feasibility of a bomb, their motivation simple and urgent: to beat Hitler to the punch. This was crucial, for by mid-June 1940 France had fallen to the Nazis. Britain now stood alone, and many people feared that Germany would soon cross the English Channel. The notion that Hitler was ahead in the atomic race had become so deep-rooted that it was treated as a certainty. “We were told day in and day out that it was our duty to catch up with the Germans,” recalled a British physicist. 1 In 1940 it was still difficult for Americans to think about the war, while it was the only concern for the British.

  The principles of fission and a chain reaction were clear enough to British scientists by 1940. Far less clear to them was the feasibility and expense of separating U-235 and constructing a weapon in time to be useful. Three questions overshadowed all others: How could a sufficient amount of fissionable material be collected? How much material would constitute the critical mass necessary to sustain a chain reaction? And how could the material be assembled rapidly enough so that it exploded, rather than simply fizzled like a pile of gunpowder?

  The advanced state of British efforts and the desperate need to work quickly combined to effectively override whatever bureaucratic obstacles might normally have interfered with fission research. The imperative of survival concentrated British scientific minds dramatically.

  Two of them, refugees Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch—the latter for the second time playing a decisive role—got together in early March 1940 to discuss the implications of fission. Peierls remembered: “I had a conversation with Frisch in the course of which he asked, ‘Well, Bohr and Wheeler have made it quite clear that the fission is due to 235. What would happen if one had a pure uranium 235 in a sufficient quantity? How much would you need? And if you got it, what would happen?’” 2

  Frisch and Peierls came up with startling answers to these questions. Early estimates of the “critical mass,” the amount of U-235 needed to start a chain reaction, had run to several tons—far too much for a deliverable weapon. But Frisch and Peierls produced an estimate that only one kilogram (just over two pounds) of U-235 could create a critical mass that would explode with a force equivalent to that of several thousand tons of dynamite. Eighty generations of neutrons would multiply in millionths of a second, yielding temperatures as hot as the interior of the sun and as deadly in radiation, before the swelling explosion separated the atoms of U-235 enough to stop the chain reaction.

  “Our first reaction was to realize that this was no longer an academic exercise, but a highly practical problem, in spite of the almost science-fiction nature of large-scale isotope separation,” Peierls recalled later. “Then it struck us that, as the idea had come to us so easily, it was likely to have occurred to the Germans, and the thought of such a weapon in Nazi hands was frightening.” 3 Something had to be done immediately. They decided to draw the attention of the authorities to this possibility and its implications. In a three-page memorandum, they described their calculations and a practical mechanism for a bomb: making a U-235 sphere in two parts “which are brought together when the explosion is wanted.” As soon as the hemispheres touched, the whole assembly “would explode within a second or less.” The yield would be immense. Lethal radiation would be emitted on a large scale, against which “effective protection is hardly possible.” 4

  “I have often been asked,” Frisch wrote years afterward, “why I didn’t abandon the project there and then, saying nothing to anybody. Why start on a project that, if it was successful, would end with the production of a weapon of unparalleled violence, a weapon of mass destruction such as the world had never seen? The answer was very simple. We were at war, and the idea was reasonably obvious; very probably some German scientists had had the same idea and were working on it.” 5

  The Frisch-Peierls memorandum consisted of not more than a thousand words, but it was all there. They not only asked the right questions, they also answered them. They made isotope separation sound simpler than it proved to be, and their estimate of the quantity of U-235 needed was too low, but these errors only increased official attention to and acceptance of their analysis. An atomic bomb had seemed like science fiction to government officials. Now it seemed feasible. 6

  Otto Frisch was an Austrian, and Rudolf Peierls was a German. They should have been making their pioneering calculations at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. But instead they made them at the University of Birmingham, in England. The reason for their relocation was simple: they were Jews.

  British authorities referred their paper to a scientific committee code-named MAUD. Over the next fifteen months—through the successive shocks of the invasion of Norway, the fall of France, the Battle of Britain, the London Blitz, the fall of Yugoslavia and Greece, and the attack on the Soviet Union—the MAUD Committee carefully reviewed the two refugee physicists’ conclusions. By the middle of 1941 their conclusions had persuaded London to undertake an atomic bomb program. The MAUD Committee recommended “that this work be continued on the highest priority and on the increasing scale necessary to obtain the weapon in the shortest possible time.” 7

  The British government preferred to keep the whole project (and thus its control) in the United Kingdom, but it would require an immense industrial effort. It was one thing to talk of separating U-235 isotopes on this scale, but a formidable job to do it. The country was at war and was struggling to survive, which meant that its scientific talent and resources had to be devoted to projects with immediate practical military value—like radar. Britain’s ally, America, on the other hand, was still not in the war and possessed vast industrial resources. The British government decided to go ahead as fast as possible with research, and then—if the work was promising—to persuade the United States to build a production plant for the bomb. London understood what this would mean down the road: Washington, by contributing the majority of technical and industrial effort, would effectively control the bomb. But London had little choice; such an effort in Britain was impossible because of the strain on British resources and the danger to British project sites from German bombing. Hence, it was decided to lobby the Americans.

  As part of its lobbying effort, the British government dispatched an Australian physicist working at the University of Birmingham with Frisch and Peierls named Mark Oliphant across the Atlantic in the late summer of 1941 to proselytize for an atomic bomb. His mission was to stir American physicists to action. “If Congress knew the true history of the atomic energy project,” Leo Szilard said modestly after the war, “I have no doubt but that it would create a special medal to be given to meddling foreigners for distinguished services, and Dr. Oliphant would be the first to receive one.” 8 Oliphant was a blunt, forceful, and persuasive man who was chosen by the British government to seek out one American physicist in particular, a striver of immense self-confidence and practical genius named Ernest Lawrence.

  A tall, broad-shouldered man with slicked-back strawberry blond hair atop a boyish face colored by pale blue eyes set behind rimless glasses, Lawrence was a talented gadgeteer and charming yet shrewd promoter from the prairie heartland of Americ
a. There was something enormously vital in his movements, in the energetic way he walked and talked. He moved so quickly that he always seemed to be on the run. He was not a brilliant physicist, but he loved to build great big powerful machines, and his enormous drive got them built.

  Born in South Dakota in 1901, Lawrence inherited his drive from his father, Carl, a small-town Babbitt who built a big house, became a leading citizen, and constantly kept his eye out for the main chance. His son showed a similar knack from the time he was in college at the University of South Dakota. He was so enthusiastic and persuasive in his request to the dean of students for funds to buy radio equipment that the dean gave him the money on the spot and urged him to take up the study of physics. He told Lawrence about another country boy named Ernest from New Zealand (Rutherford), who had won the Nobel Prize for his insights into atomic structure. What adventure could equal that of searching for nature’s secrets? he said, firing the young man’s imagination. Who knew what might be discovered next?

  After college Lawrence attended graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he came into contact with Arthur Compton, and later moved to Yale. He developed beautiful technique as an experimenter, with not only remarkable physical intuition but also the confidence to believe in his instincts. While at Yale, he invented the “cyclotron,” an atom smasher that provided an entirely new way of studying the nucleus. His first cyclotron was a bellows-shaped glass instrument just four inches wide and covered with red sealing wax against vacuum leaks. It worked by accelerating electrically charged particles in a magnetic field and then aiming them at a target. The subatomic pieces that broke off on impact provided clues to the internal structure of the atom. The cyclotron quickly earned Lawrence what he wanted most: publicly acknowledged success. He became the boy wonder of American science.

  The University of California, Berkeley, which sought to build up its physics department, wooed Lawrence from Yale by offering him tenure, graduate students, and opportunity for rapid advancement—uncommon perquisites for a fresh-faced academic at an Ivy League university. Lawrence moved to Berkeley in 1928, settling into an office on the second floor of LeConte Hall, the physics building. He set up shop in an old wooden building next to LeConte Hall that he saved from demolition, renamed the Radiation Laboratory, and made his personal fiefdom.

  The instruments in the “Rad Lab” were first-class, but almost nothing else was. The centerpiece was a twenty-seven-inch cyclotron—twenty-seven inches for the size of the poles of its eighty-ton electromagnet. The electromagnet was massive, twelve feet high and twelve feet long in its semicircular arch. Inside the arch, set on its side, was a metal spool shaped like an enormous barbell. From the narrow neck of the spool spread out a web of wires and cables. Here the particles were accelerated and the targets set. The building was so full of static electricity that one could light up an electric bulb by touching it to any metal surface. 9

  Before Lawrence, there had been a proud tradition that a physicist conducted research only with personal tools. The cyclotron required a big team. This was all part of Lawrence’s plan. His approach was to assemble teams devoted not only to solving specific problems but to applying discoveries across disciplines. By teaming up physicists, chemists, biologists, physicians, and engineers, he increased his odds of producing the practical applications that would bring him the fame and funding he wanted. 10

  The Rad Lab was an exciting place for an experimental physicist. Lawrence had a tremendous enthusiasm for the work, an enthusiasm that was very infectious. Everyone wore a wraparound apron with a sash tied in front—it was a kind of badge that showed you were “in.” Everyone knew it was one of the most outstanding physics laboratories in the world. They felt a sense of adventure and participation in an important activity with important people—especially Ernest Lawrence, whom they affectionately called “the Maestro.” Occasionally Lawrence would don an apron himself and work alongside everyone else. When he did, things went a little faster, his focus on the acquisition of physical data, not on what the data meant.

  Operating independently of the physics department, Lawrence was a scientific entrepreneur who had shrewd business sense and was skilled at raising money for his laboratory. Measured against the standards of later years, the money he raised was small, but it was an astronomical sum for science during the Depression, especially for what was then considered an esoteric field. Introducing the big-machine approach to science, he became a sovereign in his own realm.

  He also put Berkeley on the map. Lawrence knew he had arrived when he was invited to the prestigious Solvay Conference on Physics, held in Brussels in October 1933, the only American so honored. Other invitees included such giants of physics as Einstein, Bohr, and Fermi. By the mid-1930s Lawrence was the youngest full professor at Berkeley, with an army of graduate students. Berkeley’s chancellor, Robert Sproul, exaggerated only a little when he quipped, “I don’t know whether I’m running a university with a cyclotron attached to it or a cyclotron with a university attached to it.”

  The boyish, clean-cut Lawrence was an exceptional salesman and handler of people. He instinctively knew how to make a good impression—particularly on those he sought to flatter—and was scrupulously polite, even to those he did not particularly like. As he worked a room like a master politician, foundation officers and industrialists found him hard to resist. His presence and salesmanship grew out of an inexhaustible energy and optimism that impressed everyone who met him.

  Underneath the charming smiles and friendly backslaps, however, lurked an intense, driven man who clenched his jaw and had little time for “nonsense.” When he lost his cool, a vein in his left temple bulged out—it became a warning sign to everyone. 11 Assertive and at times overbearing, he identified personally and passionately with the Rad Lab. It was his laboratory—he had created it from scratch—and he ran it with an iron fist. “This was Lawrence’s domain,” said Philip Abelson, one of his graduate students. “He was number one. He was running the show.” 12 Lawrence was omnipresent, demanding, and dominating. He hung a huge microphone from the lab’s ceiling so that he could talk to the staff from his office—and listen to them. Some staffers found him overbearing and pompous—“a man with an inflated ego.” 13 During midmorning coffee breaks, Lawrence used a fine china cup and silver spoon, while everyone else made do with thick porcelain mugs. At the end of the break, the cup and spoon went into a locked drawer conspicuously marked RESERVED FOR THE DIRECTOR. 14 His cyclotrons cost loads of money to construct and operate, yet the staff who ran them had to make do with small salaries and no benefits such as medical insurance.

  Lawrence was quintessentially American—he believed anyone could do anything if he just put his mind to it. “Keep your nose to the grindstone, there’s nothing more interesting than physics,” he often said. 15 He chose his staff carefully, preferring uncomplicated people willing to work long hours. Laziness was not tolerated. “He wouldn’t hesitate to bawl you out or tell you [that you] were doing things wrong,” recalled Edwin McMillan, whose years in the Rad Lab eventually won him a Nobel Prize. “The greatest sin was not working hard enough. That was a worse sin than doing something badly.” 16 He dropped in to the Rad Lab at odd hours of the night—often dressed in black tie after a dinner party at Sproul’s house—just to see how things were going. He also kept a radio by his bedside at home tuned to the cyclotron frequency to know that it was running. If it was not, he would get on the phone and bark, “What the hell’s the matter? Having coffee, or were you out for a beer?” 17

  As the administrative and fund-raising burden increased, Lawrence grew distant from the day-to-day work of the Rad Lab. He was often away in New York, where his main financial supporters were located. These trips occupied more time than necessary, since he insisted on going by train—he would have nothing to do with airplanes. In spare moments he hosted friends at favorite restaurants like DiBiasi’s in Albany and played tennis to win. His family and friends worried that he wouldn�
�t be able to keep up the frenzied pace and that one day his health would suffer. But Lawrence was not the worrying type.

  By the late 1930s Lawrence had made himself and his Rad Lab world-famous. MIT’s president wrote him: “I believe [the Rad Lab] to be the most interesting and important scientific work now going on anywhere in the world.” 18 In Russia, cyclotrons were called “Lawrences.” When a model cyclotron was set up at the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay in 1939, Lawrence spoke about it on a national radio hookup with a showmanship worthy of P. T. Barnum. That same year he won the coveted Nobel Prize in physics.

  Lawrence was sarcastic and impatient with Berkeley colleagues who explored schemes for alleviating the lot of humanity. Political issues did not excite or engage him. His view of international affairs was even more naive and simplistic. Like the vast majority of Americans during the isolationist 1930s, he thought Europe’s “shenanigans” should be ignored because they were not America’s business. In October 1938 he wrote to Wilfred Mann, a British physicist who had done research at the Rad Lab, commenting on—among other things—the recent Munich Conference, where Britain and France had sacrificed Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany on the altar of appeasement:

  Dear Wilfred:

  You have been having a very anxious time recently, but let us hope the war clouds have passed and that we have ahead of us at least a decade of peace. I don’t think it absurd to believe it is possible that we have seen a turning point in history, that henceforth international disputes of great powers will be settled by peaceful negotiations and not by war.