Groves knew he was taking a considerable risk. As Hans Bethe recalled, "Oppenheimer had never directed anything—he was a pure theoretical physicist interested in the most advanced ideas—nobody trusted him except Groves." However, Groves brushed aside the reservations and alternative suggestions of Arthur Compton and Ernest Lawrence, who argued that Oppenheimer lacked the experimental and administrative experience to run a laboratory, was not a Nobel Prize winner, and would find it hard to impose his authority. Oppenheimer's sheer intellectual ability would, Groves believed, drive the project on. However, he promised Lawrence and Compton that, should Oppenheimer prove inadequate, they could take over.
Far more surprisingly, Groves ignored evidence of Oppenheimer's left-wing sympathies and communist connections. His wife, Kitty, whom he had married in November 1940, was a former communist who had been married twice before. Her first husband was an American Communist Party member, killed fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. She had then married an English doctor, who had moved to the United States with his new wife. Less than a year later, she and Oppenheimer had fallen in love, and within another year she had obtained a Nevada divorce. Oppenheimer himself had earlier been engaged to a Berkeley professor's daughter, Jean Tatlock, a committed member of the Communist Party with whom he was still in touch.
Groves was an archconservative with an inherent distaste for liberal thinkers and an obsessive attitude toward security. He infiltrated counterintelligence officers among the workforce of the Manhattan Project. He even had himself tailed to see whether he was under enemy surveillance and carried a small automatic pistol in his trousers pocket when traveling. He ordered any failure of plant or machinery to be rigorously examined in case it was the product of sabotage. Yet he dismissed the assertions of U.S. military intelligence that Oppenheimer was "playing a key part in the attempts of the Soviet Union to secure, by espionage, highly secret information which is vital to the security of the United States." After personally reviewing the evidence against Oppenheimer, he concluded that "his potential value outweighed any security risk." He demanded that Oppenheimer be given security clearance, insisting, "He is absolutely essential to the project." Nevertheless, as Groves well knew, Oppenheimer would remain under surveillance by military intelligence throughout. They tapped his phones and tailed his movements.
Groves also believed it essential to find a prime contracting agent for Los Alamos to function formally as employer of the staff and procurer of whatever was needed, and he appointed the University of California. Obtaining the right experimental equipment was one of the first challenges, but the project progressively begged, borrowed, and leased from universities across the United States, acquiring a cyclotron and several linear accelerators from Harvard and the Universities of Illinois and Wisconsin.
Oppenheimer meanwhile was identifying the team he wished to bring to Los Alamos. A potential difficulty was that Groves wanted to draft the laboratory's scientists into the army, believing it would contribute to discipline and security. Oppenheimer initially supported him. According to Hans Bethe, "Oppenheimer was eager to do this—he would have been a lieutenant colonel." However, others were much less certain, and they found a champion in the highly respected American physicist Isidor Rabi. Although Rabi did not plan to work at Los Alamos himself, believing that his present work on radar had more short-term importance for the war effort, Bethe recalled that he "came to us and said 'don't do that. If you make this a military laboratory nothing will ever, ever happen. You will need hundreds of permissions just to buy a screw of one diameter rather than another, and you'll be commanded by Groves, who'll boss you around. You won't be able to refuse; you'll have to do it because he is the general even if you know the experiments are pointless.'"
Oppenheimer and Groves agreed on a compromise. During the experimental stage of the project, the laboratory would remain under civil administration, but when large-scale testing began—and, whatever happened, not before i January 1944—scientists and engineers would become commissioned officers. In fact this never occurred. Groves wisely did not raise the militarization question again. He did, however, establish two lines of command at Los Alamos. Oppenheimer would be scientific director, but there would also be a military commander: Lieutenant Colonel John M. Harmon.* The site itself would be a military reservation, fenced and guarded. The technical facilities and laboratories would be housed within an inner protected zone—the "Technical Area."
By April 1943 the new laboratory was beginning to function, although it was still, essentially, a building site. Some three thousand construction workers, billeted there since the previous December in cramped trailers, had made remarkable progress on a main building, five laboratories, a machine shop, a warehouse, and the first accommodation blocks. However, most of the buildings were not ready. The roads oozed with mud when it rained. When it was fine, building dust blew everywhere. To one new arrival the site looked "as raw as a new scar." A few scientists moved into the old school buildings, but the rest lodged in dude ranches and were bused daily to Los Alamos along bumpy dirt roads, where surprised chickens ran for cover.
Oppenheimer organized a series of lectures to review the latest state of knowledge in atomic physics and to thrash out a detailed experimental program. As well as those already on the site, he invited others like Enrico Fermi and Hans Bethe whom he hoped to attract to Los Alamos or whose work elsewhere would contribute to the design and building of the bomb. Those in academic posts were paid the equivalent of their university salaries. Others were remunerated according to their qualifications. Oppenheimer's own pay was $10,000 a year—a sum he considered excessive. His sustained attempts to have it lowered failed. The scientists discussed everything from how best to determine the detailed characteristics of chain reactions—including how rapidly new neutrons would be released in each fission—to how much fissionable material it would take to make a bomb. A fundamental question was whether to use U-235. or plutonium—or indeed both—as bomb fuel. As Groves and Oppenheimer knew, it would be some time before sizable amounts of either material became available from Oak Ridge and Hanford. In the meantime all investigations of the chemical properties of U-235. and plutonium would have to be carried out on microscopic samples, and it would be necessary to pursue both types of bomb in tandem.
Another key question was how to ensure that a nuclear reaction culminated in the desired huge explosion. Groves later wrote that "two opposing considerations came into play. The violence of the explosion was dependent upon the number of neutrons released by the chain reaction. This number increased geometrically with each generation of the chain. Yet to allow the reaction to progress through a number of generations took a certain amount of time during which the energy already released by previous generations could blow the bomb apart and terminate the chain reaction before any major detonation was achieved." The crux of the problem was how to bring the critical mass together quickly enough. At this early stage most believed the fastest method was the gun-assembly technique, whereby one subcritical mass of fissionable material—U-235 or plutonium—was fired into another to produce one critical mass.
The task ahead of the scientists was clearly so huge and complex that Oppenheimer decided to establish specialized divisions for theoretical physics, experimental physics, chemistry and metallurgy, and ordnance. He asked Robert Bacher, working on radar at MIT, to head up experimental physics. Bacher agreed but stipulated that the minute the army took over the work he would resign. Oppenheimer wanted to lead the theoretical physics work himself but accepted that he could never combine this with his responsibilities as director. Instead he appointed Hans Bethe.
Hans Bethe
Bethe had a powerfully logical mind. After fleeing Nazi Germany, first for England and then for Cornell University, he had made his mark in 1936 and 1937 with the publication of three encyclopedic reviews of nuclear physics, which together had come to be known as "the Bethe Bible." However, Oppenheimer's first approach caus
ed Bethe some soul-searching. Bethe's wife, Rose, guessing that the project was connected with some new form of weapon, asked him during a long walk in Yosemite National Park whether he really wanted to become involved. Bethe reflected carefully but concluded that "the fission bomb had to be done, because the Germans were presumably doing it."
Much of the project's success would be due to Bethe. There were no blueprints on how to build an atom bomb. The selection of materials, design, size, and properties of the bomb would all have to be based on theoretical judgments derived from whatever experimental results were available. Bethe divided his team, which included Edward Teller, Victor Weisskopf, Robert Serber, and a precocious young scientist named Richard Feymnan—whom Bethe recalled as "more eager than almost anybody and extremely ingenious"—into groups. Anticipating the amount of calculation to be done, Bethe also set up a unit composed primarily of scientists' wives, who punched the numbers into handheld computing machines. These manual machines were later replaced by faster IBM machines, the sight of which would, as Bethe recalled, inspire John von Neumann with the ambition "to change these machines and make them much faster and electronic."
Edward Teller had wanted to head theoretical physics himself and did not relish Bethe for a boss. Teller wrote in his memoirs, "I was a little hurt. I had worked on the atom bomb project longer than Bethe." He also thought Bethe plodding and overly focused on "little bricks"—"work that is methodical, meticulous, thorough and detailed." His own approach was, he believed, more visionary. Teller was by then a commanding physical presence with, as Laura Fermi described, eyebrows that were so thick and bushy that they "jutted out so much above his green eyes, that they looked like gables over the stained windows of some old church. When he was absorbed in thought, he thrust them up, and his face acquired a strange intensity." Although Teller agreed to work for Bethe, he later wrote that disagreements over his tasks "marked the beginning of the end of our friendship."
Some of the friction centered on the low priority given to Teller's special interest—the development of an explosive weapon based on fusing light hydrogen atoms rather than fissioning heavy elements. Enrico Fermi had made the original suggestion for such a weapon—nicknamed the "Super"—somewhat in passing, but it had caught Teller's imagination. He had hoped and assumed that he would be able to work almost exclusively on the Super—an early version of the hydrogen bomb. However, Bethe, backed up by Oppenheimer, made it clear that, for now, a bomb based on fission was the priority.
Forty-one-year-old Captain William S. "Deak" Parsons of the U.S. Navy was appointed head of ordnance—a vital role. As the project moved to fruition, he would be responsible for ballistic testing and the planning for, and perhaps the actual use of, the bomb. Groves selected him, on Vannevar Bush's recommendation, after the briefest of interviews, recognizing his grasp of both theoretical and practical ordnance, including high explosives, guns, and fusing. As the work progressed, he would also show skill in melding together a mixed team of scientists, engineers, and explosives experts. Parsons arrived at Los Alamos soon after his appointment—the first naval officer to be assigned there. His naval summer uniform caused consternation, then suspicion at the entry gate. An army guard telephoned his sergeant to report, "Sergeant, we've really caught a spy! A guy is down here trying to get in, and his uniform is as phoney as a three dollar bill. He's wearing the eagles of a colonel, and claims that he's a captain."
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Despite their respective talents, at the outset neither Groves nor Oppenheimer predicted the scale of operations and the population that would be required to sustain it. Los Alamos grew at phenomenal speed from just a few hundred people in the spring of 1943 to well over three thousand by January 1944. Before long, extraordinary stories began circirculating in Santa Fe about what was really going on at "the hill," as Los Alamos became known. Townspeople could see smoke curling up from the site in daytime and lights at night. Some believed that the army was operating a home for pregnant WACs. When naval officers were spotted, a rumor spread that a new type of submarine was being perfected there. Local people took a particular interest in the enclosure fences, wondering whether they were designed to keep people in or out. The advice given to Los Alamos staff was not to confirm or deny anything. The wilder the rumors, the easier it would be to obscure the truth.
Gatehouse at Los Alamos
The trip up to Los Alamos from Santa Fe enthralled newcomers. Ruth Marshak, accompanying her physicist husband, wrote: "As we neared the top of the mesa, the view was breathtaking. Behind us lay the Sangre de Cristo mountains, at sunset bathed in changing waves of color—scarlets and lavenders. Below was the desert with its flatness broken by majestic palisades that seemed like ruined cathedrals and palaces of some old, great, vanished race. Ahead was Los Alamos."
However, the majesty ended abruptly. Seven-foot-high fences topped with barbed wire surrounded the site itself. Signs read:
U.S. Government Property
DANGER! PELIGRO!
Keep Out
Military policemen in battle helmets—a "formidable-looking bunch of young men," as another woman later recalled—inspected passes. To some of the refugee scientists at Los Alamos, the stark fences, strict security, dog patrols, and heavily guarded Technical Area held disturbing echoes.
Life was certainly strange for the new arrivals as they adjusted to existence behind the wire. They could tell no one where they were; the only address they were allowed to quote was "Box 1663, Santa Fe." The site itself was confusing. Barracklike buildings stood at odd angles on streets without names, all alike and all painted green, camouflaged among the green pines. They were so uniform that it was easy to get lost. People used the cylindrical wooden water tower on the site's highest point to orient themselves.
Rose Bethe was appointed head of the housing office and was hence responsible for allocating accommodations—a task, as another Los Alamos wife described, requiring every ounce of her "self-reliance, efficiency and stubbornness." There were a few ground rules to help her. Childless couples were only entitled to a one-bedroom apartment; couples with one child were allocated two bedrooms; and couples with two children were given three-bedroom dwellings. There were, nevertheless, perpetual problems to solve and people to soothe. Edward Teller and his beloved, monumental piano were placed right below a quiet, contemplative bookworm who relished silence rather than Teller's nocturnal sonatas. An enthusiastic chemist with a passion for conducting explosive experiments in his apartment lived adjacent to a large brood of children.
A childless couple asked Rose for a two-bedroom apartment. When she inquired whether they were expecting a baby, the blushing pair replied, "No, but we let nature take its course." Babies were, in fact, a prominent feature of life at Los Alamos, which was, above all, a young site—the average age was twenty-seven. Many couples decided to start their families there. Medical care in the one-story hospital was free, and it was especially strong in pediatrics and gynecology. Groves later wrote wryly, "Apparently we provided adequate service, for one of the doctors told me later that the number and spacing of babies born to the scientific personnel surpassed all existing medical records." Some of the scientists blamed Groves for a perennial shortage of diapers, which they believed he had arranged on purpose. They also believed he had ordered Oppenheimer to discourage people from reproducing, but Oppenheimer's own daughter, Toni, was born at Los Alamos. Like the others, her place of birth was simply listed as Box 1663, Sandoval County Rural.
There were tensions between parents and dog owners. Many had brought their pets with them, and the animals roamed the mesa at will. One dog started biting people and was found to have rabies. Rules were hastily introduced to keep dogs under control, but, as a Los Alamos mother later recalled, "when the dog owners got tired of keeing their pets inside or on a leash, they suggested putting the children on leashes and letting the dogs go free."
Living quarters at Los Alamos
The most desirable residences were in "
Bathtub Row." These attractive, sturdy stone-and-log cottages had belonged to the school. Their great attraction—hence the nickname—-was that they possessed baths, whereas the new army-built accommodations had only showers. At first, only the most senior people like Oppenheimer and his wife, who settled into the erstwhile headmaster's house, lived there. But later, as others moved in, "it became uncertain in envious minds whether Bathtub Row derived its lustre from its residents or whether the residents acquired distinction from living in it," according to one wife. Apartments in nearby "Snob Hollow" were also highly prized.
Snobbery was a genuine issue, as the American physicist Luis Alvarez discovered shortly after arriving at Los Alamos. As news spread that a family called Alvarez was moving in, other wives in the apartment building hurried to the housing office to complain about living next to Spanish-Americans. They were reassured to learn that the tall, blond Alvarez was only partly Spanish. The shortage of domestic help was another potential source of discord. Indian girls from the nearby villages were assigned by need rather than by the ability to pay. Kitty Oppenheimer, who had a full-time maid, took a role in the allocation. As an incentive to wives to work, those who did volunteer were given priority with household assistance.
Wives were not the only women working at Los Alamos. Promising young female scientists were recruited—like Joan Hinton, a graduate physics student from the University of Wisconsin, who worked on the design and construction of research facilities. By October 1944 there would be twenty women scientists and about fifty women technicians working on the site, in addition to nurses, teachers, secretaries, and clerks.
Before the Fallout Page 27