Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  It was, of course, soon after this conference that Condon left the project, which made some reorganisation necessary. Back in November 1942, Conant had convened a committee to review progress in the various research projects then under way relating to the production of an atomic bomb. Chaired by Warren K. Lewis, a professor of chemical engineering at MIT, this review committee produced a report on 4 December, recommending the continuation of a concerted programme of plutonium production via the pile process then being pursued by Fermi at Chicago. In May 1943, a second Lewis committee was given the task of reviewing the Los Alamos programme. Up until then, the running of the laboratory had been the responsibility of a planning board, the membership of which had grown steadily. At its first meeting of 6 March 1943, the planning board had consisted of Oppenheimer, Condon, Wilson, McMillan, Manley and Serber. A few weeks later, this board had grown in two directions: Oppenheimer and Condon heading a subgroup concerned with the administration of the laboratory, while Wilson, Serber and others took responsibility for planning the scientific programme. At two subsequent meetings in early April, several more scientists were added to the board, including Feynman, Teller, Bethe and Neddermeyer. Now, in addition to planning the first three months of the experimental programme, due to start in June, the board also discussed the problems that arose from the rapid expansion of the laboratory. Already it had 150 members of staff, and the available housing was almost filled. The board decided to delay any further hiring and recommended that the laboratory should ‘be more far-sighted about expansion’ in the future.

  Members of the Lewis committee attended these planning board meetings, after which they produced a report that judged progress to be satisfactory, but recommended that the laboratory should be considerably expanded so as to include within its remit not only the design and manufacture of the bomb, but also, for example, the investigation of the metallurgy and purification of plutonium (previously chiefly the responsibility of the Met Lab in Chicago) and all issues relating to the ordnance of the bomb – that is, the design and manufacture of the specific mechanisms for firing and using the bomb. As the official history puts it, this report destroyed altogether ‘the original concept of Los Alamos as a small physical laboratory’.

  Prior to the Lewis committee’s report, ordnance had been the responsibility of Richard Tolman and was treated as a scientific set of problems. The report, however, reflected Groves’s view that ordnance needed to be dealt with by someone with a practical rather than a purely scientific frame of mind, ‘so that,’ as Groves put it, ‘we will have service equipment instead of some dream child’. The kind of person Groves wanted ‘would have to set up ballistic tests of experimental bombs, plan for the combat use of the weapon and quite possibly be the one to use the bomb in actual battle’. In other words, it had to be a military man.

  After trying and failing to find someone he thought could do the job, among the list of army ordnance officers, Groves turned to Bush in Washington, who recommended a naval officer: Commander William ‘Deak’ Parsons, a man with several years’ experience of ordnance and gunnery research. On 5 May 1943, Parsons was ordered to report without delay to Admiral Ernest King, and, he later recalled, ‘I was plunged into the Manhattan District with a set of verbal orders and a discussion with Admiral King lasting less than ten minutes.’ Groves, in his autobiography, says that, on meeting Parsons, he was immediately impressed with his ‘understanding of the interplay between military forces and advanced scientific theory’ and claims that ‘within a few minutes I was sure that he was the man for the job’.

  The following day, Parsons was introduced to Oppenheimer and the two of them took the train together to Los Alamos. During the journey, Parsons has recalled, they agreed that, while the scientists would ‘produce the nuclear guts of the gadget’, Parsons’s division would be responsible for engineering those guts into ‘a totally reliable service weapon’. Parsons had no background in nuclear physics, but what he, with his background in ordnance, could see that the scientists had not, even now, appreciated was the scale of the task facing them. When Parsons first arrived at Los Alamos in May 1943, Oppenheimer’s plan of the laboratory had swollen from his original conception of about a dozen scientists and staff to a workforce of about 300 people. A few days later, as a result of Parsons’s reappraisal of the situation, the anticipated workforce had more than doubled, most of the increase going into the ordnance-engineering division. After sizing up the situation at Los Alamos, Parsons returned to Washington for a few weeks. When he reported for work at Los Alamos in June, he had been promoted to captain, and made it clear to everyone that he regarded himself as firmly in charge of his part of the operation. Working under him, as group heads, were Ed McMillan, Charles Critchfield and Seth Neddermeyer, the last of whom had by this time become head of the Implosion Experimentation Group. Within two months, Parsons had added five more groups to his division and, in the words of his biographer, ‘pulled together a top-notch ordnance-development team, [begun] the design of the nuclear gun, brought new support to the implosion method of nuclear assembly, readied the test range at Anchor Ranch, [begun] the planning for the tactical delivery of the bomb, and started testing scale models’. Considering there was at this time almost no uranium, and absolutely no plutonium available for experiments, this was pretty remarkable progress.

  Notwithstanding Oppenheimer’s somewhat optimistic estimates of the daily production of uranium and plutonium to be expected in the coming years, the scientists and engineers at Los Alamos knew that it would be two years or so until enough fissionable material would be available to actually build a bomb. Their job, the urgency of which was felt by everyone concerned, was to have the theory, design and manufacture problems solved in time for the arrival of sufficient quantities of the fissionable materials. As one history of the Manhattan Project puts it, once the material was ready to use, ‘every month’s delay had to be counted as a loss to the war’. The fact that fissionable material was in such short supply at the start of the new laboratory’s work meant that, to a much larger extent than would otherwise have been the case, the enterprise was reliant upon theory. Thus the theoretical physicists that Oppenheimer had recruited – which included, of course, a good proportion of the best in the country – were absolutely central to the project, even though it was, in essence, an engineering project. As Feynman once put it: ‘All science stopped during the war except the little bit that was done at Los Alamos. And that was not much science; it was mostly engineering.’

  Unlike the experimentalists, who required the equipment to be up and running before they could begin their work, the theoreticians could start right away. So, during the months of May and June, while the builders continued to construct houses and laboratories, and the leaders of the project continued to construct ever more elaborate organisational charts and to revise upwards their estimates of how many people the project would need, the theoreticians – needing only their slide-rules, their minds and, occasionally, a blackboard – could get on with their calculations. As Teller had emphasised the previous summer in Berkeley, the basic science of the atomic bomb had already been done. There was no doubt, from a theoretical perspective, that the fission of uranium or plutonium could potentially produce an explosive of enormous power. There was no fundamental theoretical science left to do regarding the fission process. On the other hand, in the spring of 1943, the idea of a bomb based upon the science of fission was only theoretical. The Met Lab in Chicago had succeeded in producing a chain reaction, but nobody had even come close to building an atomic bomb. In order to make that a reality, the theoreticians needed to work with the experimentalists and the engineers, not only in the formulation of fundamentally new physics, but also in the performing of certain mathematical calculations that only they could do because only they understood.

  ‘Every day,’ Feynman remembers, ‘I would study and read, study and read. It was a very hectic time.’ Though still young and as yet relatively undistinguished, Fey
nman quickly established a lively rapport with Bethe. As Feynman remembers it, Bethe would come into their office, explaining his ideas, and Feynman would say: ‘No, no, you’re crazy. It’ll go like this.’

  And he says, ‘Just a moment’ and explains how he’s not crazy, I’m crazy. And we keep on going like this. You see, when I hear about physics, I just think about physics, and I don’t know who I’m talking to, so I say dopey thinks like ‘no, no, you’re wrong,’ or ‘you’re crazy.’ But it turned out that’s exactly what he needed.

  Despite the fact that it fundamentally contradicted the idea of compartmentalisation, Oppenheimer insisted on having a weekly colloquium, in which scientists could exchange information and criticise each other’s ideas. Having failed to recruit Rabi and to keep Condon, he became more and more accommodating to the anti-military sensibilities of many top scientists. For example, after the April conference, he decided that the perfect man to lead the Experimental Physics Division was Robert Bacher. Bacher accepted the position, but only after he made it clear to Oppenheimer that his letter of acceptance should be regarded also as a letter of resignation if the laboratory ever became, as was officially still the intention, fully militarised. Partly because of the trenchant opposition to militarisation shown by Bacher and his fellow scientists, the intention to bring the laboratory under full military control was never realised. As Bacher rather diplomatically recalled:

  It had been planned that Los Alamos would turn to be a military laboratory, but I think Groves, who was a very sagacious man about such things, even though he first thought that compartmentalization was the most important thing that you could have in a laboratory, began to realize that that would defeat him, he’d defeat himself in this, and that the very openness that a civilian laboratory had was a big advantage, and it provided very much greater flexibility.

  It seems possible that in insisting on making his views on militarisation clear from the start, Bacher was responding to what had happened to Condon, who had left Los Alamos bewildered by Oppenheimer’s willingness to conform to the dictates of military authority, even when they conflicted with the requirements of science. As Condon suspected, Oppenheimer shared his views on compartmentalisation – as, surely, did all the scientists at Los Alamos – but what Condon did not know was that Oppenheimer was not in a position to openly support Condon’s objections to the security arrangements at Los Alamos. As he himself did not yet have security clearance, Oppenheimer could ill afford to alienate those responsible for providing security. Indeed, as a result of Joe Weinberg’s late-night conversation with Steve Nelson, things were far worse than Oppenheimer himself could possibly have known.

  In the spring of 1943, at the time that Condon left the project and the organisation of the laboratory was being put into place, the chances of Oppenheimer being granted security clearance did not look good. Though Weinberg had not yet been identified as ‘Joe’, the authorities knew perfectly well who ‘the professor’ was, and Pash and de Silva were not alone in their view that a man who numbered among his friends and students at least three people who were either actively engaged in Soviet espionage or closely associated with those who were (Nelson, Lomanitz and the as-yet-unidentified ‘Joe’) was not the man to appoint as the head of the US’s most important and most secret military research project. And that was before they knew anything about Haakon Chevalier’s attempt to persuade Oppenheimer to aid Eltenton’s espionage efforts – the disclosure of which, Oppenheimer knew, would almost certainly bring an end to his directorship of the Los Alamos laboratory before it had really begun.

  And so Oppenheimer kept that particular secret to himself for several months, during which he was followed everywhere by Pash’s agents, who continued to hunt for irrefutable confirmation that he was not to be trusted. Meanwhile, the FBI stepped up its investigation of those civilians not employed by the Manhattan Project who yet seemed to be taking an unhealthy interest in it, particularly those people who had a history of involvement with the Communist Party. This, of course, included some of the radical young scientists connected with Berkeley’s Radiation Laboratory, the best known of whom, to both the FBI and to army intelligence, was Lomanitz, whose every movement was now closely watched by both agencies.

  In June 1943, the constant surveillance of Lomanitz resulted in the identification of Weinberg as ‘Joe’. A G-2 agent following Lomanitz saw him pose with three friends for a picture taken by a commercial photographer at one of the entrances to the Berkeley campus. As soon as the four men were out of sight, the agent approached the photographer and bought the negative of the picture he had taken. The other three men in the photograph were identified as David Bohm, Max Friedman and Joseph Weinberg, and in a short while the agency was able to identify Weinberg as ‘Joe’. All four of the people in the photograph were physicists at Berkeley, all of them politically radical and all of them associated with Oppenheimer (Bohm, Lomanitz and Weinberg had been students of his, and Friedman was regarded socially as a member of the same group).

  For the rest of the war each of these four friends was watched closely by the security services, who saw to it that none of them had any access whatsoever to sensitive information. When Oppenheimer asked for Bohm to be transferred to Los Alamos, his request was refused on the grounds that Bohm could not possibly be granted security clearance. Lomanitz, meanwhile, was offered a job liaising between the Rad Lab and Oak Ridge, but before he could take up the position he was drafted into the army. Friedman was hired first by the Rad Lab and then by the Met Lab in Chicago, but was quickly fired from both. Weinberg, like Lomanitz, was drafted into the army. As a direct result of the monitoring of Weinberg’s conversation with Nelson in March 1943, then, the Soviets would have received no further information about the US bomb project from Weinberg, Lomanitz, Bohm, Friedman or Nelson. That particular ‘spy ring’ was effectively shut down.

  The idea that those four, together with Nelson, constituted a spy ring is not altogether fanciful; Weinberg, for one, had shown himself perfectly prepared to pass secret information to the Soviets via Nelson. And, given their connections with Oppenheimer, and the fact that Oppenheimer had recruited (or at least tried to recruit) at least three of them to positions that would give them access to secret information, it was perfectly natural to suspect Oppenheimer of being in some sense a member of that ‘spy ring’.

  In June 1943, at about the same time that Weinberg was being identified as ‘Joe’, Oppenheimer himself provided further reason for suspicion when, followed, as ever, by army intelligence agents, he left Los Alamos for Berkeley. His ostensible reason for the trip was to recruit a personal assistant, his chosen candidate for the job being his friend, the Berkeley philosopher David Hawkins – a man with many connections to radical, left-wing politics, suspected by the FBI of being a communist. Such a choice added a little more credibility to Pash’s suspicions of him, but much more serious grounds for questioning his judgement, if not his loyalty, were provided by Oppenheimer’s decision to use this trip to California to pay a visit to his ex-lover Jean Tatlock, who was at this time living in San Francisco.

  By the summer of 1943 Jean was far more interested in psychology than politics – she was working as a child psychiatrist at Mount Zion Hospital, and was herself receiving psychoanalysis from the Freudian doctor Siegfried Bernfeld – but, nevertheless, she was well known to the security services as a woman with a history of communist sympathies, activities and connections. Before Oppenheimer left for Los Alamos in March, Jean had asked him to visit her, but he had refused. When he was asked later why, on this occasion, he did see her, he replied:

  She had indicated a great desire to see me before we left. At that time I couldn’t go. For one thing, I wasn’t supposed to say where we were going or anything. I felt that she had to see me. She was undergoing psychiatric treatment. She was extremely unhappy.

  Asked why she ‘had to’ see him, Oppenheimer replied: ‘Because she was still in love with me.’

  What transpire
d when the two met is recorded in some detail by the report that Pash’s agents sent to the FBI. On 14 June 1943, those agents reported, Oppenheimer went from Berkeley to San Francisco, where he was met by Jean Tatlock, ‘who kissed him’. The two then drove in her car to a local bar, where they ate and had a few drinks, after which Jean drove them back to her apartment on Montgomery Street, San Francisco. The agents, sitting in a car outside the apartment, noted that at half past eleven the lights went off, and the following morning Oppenheimer and Jean left the building together. That evening the two met again in downtown San Francisco, where they ‘greeted each other affectionately’ and then went to have dinner together at a place called Kit Carson’s Grill. After dinner Jean drove him to the airport, where he caught a plane back to New Mexico.

  At this time, of course, Oppenheimer did not know that Joe Weinberg had incriminated both himself and, potentially, everybody close to him. But he did know that he himself was regarded with some suspicion by those whose job it was to provide the Manhattan Project with security from espionage, and he presumably also knew, or might well have surmised, that the success or failure of his application for security clearance was therefore still in the balance. Given this, and given that he was in daily contact with members of US army intelligence, it is surprising that he did not assume, or at the very least suspect, that his every movement was being watched. Or, even more surprising, that he chose to spend a night with Jean even though he was most likely being kept under surveillance. At his security hearing in 1954, he squirmed uncomfortably when asked about the occasion: