Frenetic partying became an established feature. As Emilio Segre recalled, "The isolation of Los Alamos pushed families to an active social life: there were many dinner parties; many people for the first time took up poker and square dancing." Amateur dramatics flourished—Edward Teller played a corpse in a production of Arsenic and Old Lace. Oppenheimer also negotiated with a local woman, Edith Warner, who agreed to provide dinner three nights a week for small groups of scientists and their wives at her little house on the banks of the Rio Grande. As Oppenheimer had hoped, it gave them a brief respite from the stressful claustrophobia of the site.
The extraordinary surroundings, the ever-changing colors of mountains, sky, and desert, the clear, crisp air, the vivid flowers that bloomed from early spring to late autumn also helped invigorate people. The scientist Philip Morrison, summoned to Los Alamos, was seduced by "the utterly enchanting landscape." To Robert Christy it was "a wonderful environment for anyone who liked the outdoors. The only ones who didn't like it were the complete New Yorkers." There were trails to ride and hike, streams to fish, Indian ruins to visit, and in the winter snowy slopes to ski. Leo Szilard, still in Chicago, had warned departing Met Lab colleagues that "nobody could think straight in a place like that. Everybody who goes there will go crazy," but he would, for once, be proved wrong. Despite the pressures, many would remember their time at Los Alamos as the most stimulating and enjoyable of their lives.
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Meanwhile rapid progress was being made at the two giant industrial sites of Oak Ridge and Hanford. At Oak Ridge, where construction was shared between several contractors, work began in early 1943 on Lawrence's electromagnetic uranium-separation plant, code-named "Y-12." It was based on cyclotrons modified into mass spectrographs that were known as "calutrons" after the University of California. They were put together in great "racetracks," each containing ninety-six calutrons. Eventually, fifteen such racetracks would be built. From the outside the complex of concrete-and-brick buildings connected by a maze of streets with gantries of pipework and electrical wiring passing overhead resembled a conventional chemical plant.
In June the first ground was broken at Oak Ridge for the gaseous diffusion plant, code-named "K-2 c" and so immense that it would consume more electricity than a small city. At half a mile long, it was probably the largest chemical engineering plant ever built. In the interests of safety, Y-12 and K-25 were located in valleys seventeen miles apart. With no time to build pilot plants, the respective designs were based on Lawrence's research at Berkeley and Harold Urey's at Columbia. As Groves later wrote, "Research, development, construction and operation all had to be started and carried on simultaneously and without appreciable prior knowledge."
At Hanford the uncertainties were the same. According to Teller, the plutonium-producing reactors were built in under eighteen months "on the basis of a theory proposed by physicists that no engineer had thoroughly checked." In April 1943 Du Pont began work on three industrial-scale reactor piles based on a design developed by Eugene Wigner using graphite as a moderator. For safety's sake, they were constructed six miles apart. Each reactor was a giant block, forty-six feet wide, forty-six feet high, and forty feet deep. Inside was a thirty-six-foot-high stack of one hundred thousand graphite blocks, encased in six thousand tons of cast iron and steel. The uranium fuel, sealed in eight-inch-long aluminum cylinders and then assembled into batches, was pushed through tubes running from the front to the back of the pile, irradiated, and then discharged ready for reprocessing to retrieve the plutonium produced by the controlled fission it had undergone. This reprocessing, using chemicals to dissolve the uranium and extract, concentrate, and purify the plutonium, was the most hazardous part of the operation and wras carried out in windowless separation plants built in isolation more than ten miles away.
Hanford itself, with some twentv thousand construction workers, had swiftly developed the feel of a Wild West frontier town. "There was nothing to do after work except fight," exaggerated one physicist, if only slightly, "with the result that occasionally bodies were found in garbage cans the next morning. . . . It was a tough town." There was also racial segregation. The site administrators bowed to local sentiment and provided separate accommodations and amenities for black workers. At Oak Ridge, local Tennessee law decreed that the twenty-five thousand construction workers had to be segregated.
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From the very start Oppenheimer justified Groves's selection of him as director of Los Alamos. He showed himself to be a disciplined, inspirational leader with breadth of vision and a facility to appreciate, assimilate, and analyze issues and then to make the right decision. Hans Bethe praised him in the following terms: "A physicist like Fermi would delight in solution of a single problem; I admired him to idolatry, but there is another type of mind which is equally needed. Oppenheimer . . . worked at physics mainly because he found physics the best way to do philosophy. This undoubtedly had something to do with the magnificent way he led Los Alamos." Above all, Oppenheimer inspired trust in his team.
Groves was also impressed with Oppenheimer's unemotional objectivity. In 1943 James Conant was asked to lead a study into the prospects for developing radiological weapons. Learning of the project, Oppenheimer told Groves that he and Fermi had been discussing a scheme of their own to pollute German food supplies with a lethally radioactive fission by-product: beta-strontium. Groves's response was apparently enthusiastic, but Oppenheimer wrote coolly to Fermi that the idea was probably not worth pursuing "unless we can poison food sufficient to kill a half a million men."
However, there was one area where he and Groves did not agree. To protect security, Groves wanted a system of "compartmentalization." The aim, as he later wrote, was that "each man should know everything he needed to know to do his job and nothing else." The system worked in the industrial environment of Hanford and Oak Ridge. It was, however, anathema to scientists used to a free exchange of ideas. Groves particularly disapproved of the colloquia that Oppenheimer asked Teller to organize and at which scientists discussed their respective progress and problems. From a scientific perspective they were creative and valuable exercises, producing cross-specialization synergy. From a security perspective they were, Groves believed, highly dangerous. However, as Teller later recalled, Oppenheimer "fought hard for an open exchange so that everyone could contribute, and he won."
Most of the Manhattan Project scientists considered Groves's attitude toward security obsessive, even childish. The Fermis were amused by the personal protection rules he established for Enrico at the Met Lab in Chicago. Laura Fermi considered that they would have done credit to the nervous mother of a teenage girl: "Enrico was not to walk by himself in the evening, nor was he to drive without escort." The pile that had gone critical in December 1942 to cheers and sips of Chianti had been moved to the newly built Argonne Laboratory some twenty miles away. By mid-1943 Fermi was driving there almost daily but, at Groves's insistence, he was always acompanied by his powerfully built bodyguard, who looked "as if he had sufficient strength to wring the neck of any evil-minded spy or saboteur."
Groves's fears about spies and espionage would, however, be vindicated after the war, when the extent of spying at Los Alamos was revealed. Groves would rightly claim that the Soviet spy David Greenglass, recruited to Los Alamos as a machinist, passed information to the Russians to which he should never have had access. Greenglass was, in fact, the brother of Ethel Rosenberg, whom he would later denounce, with her husband, Julius, as responsible for his acts. They were executed for spying in 1953.
Groves would also bitterly recall the spying activities of Klaus Fuchs at Los Alamos, but for those he would blame the British.
*Harmon was replaced after four months because of a weakness for alcohol and difficulties in his relations with nonmilitary personnel. His successor was Lieutenant Colonel Whitney Ashbridge.
SEVENTEEN
"MR. BAKER"
THE ARRIVAL OF ATEAM of British scientists in the United S
tates in the autumn of 1943 to work on the bomb project was the result of the three-page Quebec Agreement, signed on 19 August 1943. After snubbing the American offer of partnership in 1941, the British had found themselves increasingly marginalized, in part because the United States believed it no longer needed Britain. By the end of October 1942 Henry Stimson had felt confident enough to advise the president that the United States should proceed "for the present without sharing anything more than we could help." However, it was also a security issue. In May 1942 Britain and the Soviet Union had signed a twenty-year mutual assistance treaty—the Cripps-Molotov Agreement—and several weeks later a specific scientific exchange agreement. Groves was convinced that information about the bomb project would inevitably reach the Soviet Union and had been doing what he could to restrict the flow of information to the British.
Churchill pressed Roosevelt, first at the Casablanca conference in January 1943 and then in Quebec, for a greater role for Britain. To Groves's dismay, the president yielded. The treaty provided for the two countries to pool their nuclear research but crucially stipulated that neither country would pass information to a third party without the other's consent. It also provided that neither country would deploy the atomic bomb without the other's agreement.
The British were now so eager to collaborate that, even before the treaty was formally signed, James Chadwick, Rudolf Peierls, Franz Simon, and Mark Oliphant were on their way to the United States aboard the Pan American flying-boat service from Ireland. It was a far more luxurious trip than the usual form of wartime transatlantic transport experienced by British scientists—flying in a bomber. *
The British team spent a few days in New York, amazed by the abundant food in the shops. Chadwick, with his legacy from the First World War of an impaired digestion, unwisely visited Grand Central Station's oyster bar and suffered agonizing consequences. A fewr days later, according to Oliphant, he still looked "like death." However, news that the Quebec Agreement had indeed been signed revived him. On Monday, 13 September 1943, a t a meeting at the Pentagon, Chadwick and the British team learned for the first time of the existence of Los Alamos. General Groves suggested that Chadwick and Oliphant should go there at once because of the lack of experienced experimental physicists.
Chadwick's initial impression of Groves, who forcefully outlined his views on secrecy and compartmentalization at the meeting, was that he was "the dominant personality" of the American project—in fact "a dictator." Chadwick and Groves would later come to a mutual respect, even admiration, but for the moment, Chadwick found his discussions with Robert Oppenheimer more productive. The British team also toured several U.S. laboratories, where, according to Peierls, the American scientists revealed Groves's instructions that the British "could be told everything, but must not be shown anything." However, as nobody could understand this perplexing order, "it caused no problem." By the time Chadwick returned to Liverpool in late September, arrangements for the revived Anglo-American collaboration were largely in place.
Chadwick began assembling a team to go to the United States. The Quebec Agreement required all its members to be British citizens. For many this was no problem. Among Chadwick's own group at Liverpool, Otto Frisch happily agreed to take British nationality. His aunt Lise Meitner could have accompanied him. She was invited to leave Stockholm and join the British team, but her response was that "I will have nothing to do with a bomb." Her views on the moral duty of scientists had altered from the early days of the First World War when she reassured Hahn about his chemical warfare work with the words "Any means which might help shorten this horrible war are justified." She later explained, "I hoped that the newly-discovered source of energy would be used only for peaceful purposes. During the war, I used to say . . . 'I hope they will not succeed in making an atomic bomb, but I fear they will.'" It also seemed that Chadwick's favorite protege, Joseph Rotblat, would not be coming to the United States. Deeply attached to his Polish nationality, he refused to renounce it. However, Chadwick was so eager to bring Rotblat with him that he obtained a special dispensation from Groves, assuring him of Rotblat's complete loyalty.
The next sticking point was over security. Groves demanded U.S. security checks on every scientist the British proposed sending. The British were affronted and offered, instead, to guarantee that every member of their team had been thoroughly vetted by British intelligence. Groves attributed their reaction to "the attitude then prevalent in all British officialdom that for an Englishman treason was impossible, and that when a foreigner was granted citizenship he automatically became endowed with the qualities of a native-born Englishman." He was forced to accept the British position but tried to ensure that, insofar as possible, British scientists did not gain access to the most sensitive areas of the project. Even Chadwick was not allowed to visit Hanford.
The British scientists were allocated to various teams and locations. Chadwick, as leader of the British team, would base himself at Los Alamos. Mark Oliphant was to work with Ernest Lawrence at Berkeley on electromagnetic isotope separation. Rudolf Peierls was to work on gaseous diffusion theory in New York. Among those also cleared to go to the United States by British intelligence, which failed to spot his communist allegiances, was Klaus Fuchs, a British citizen since 1942.
Brought up in a left-wing German family with deeply rooted socialist and Christian beliefs—his father was a pastor—Fuchs had joined the Communist Party in 1932, believing that only a united working class could stop the rise of the Nazis. He later wrote, "I was ready to accept the philosopy that the [Communist] Party is right and that in the coming struggle you could not permit yourself any doubts." After Hitler came to power and the Nazis began arresting known communists, Fuchs had fled Germany, reaching England in the autumn of 1933. His orders from the Communist Party were to complete his education to prepare himself for the struggles ahead.
Fuchs had duly found a position as a research assistant in Bristol University's physics department and after completing his doctorate had worked with Max Born at Edinburgh University. In 1940 the British had briefly interned him as an enemy alien but soon released him. Realizing that Fuchs had the kind of ability he was looking for, Rudolf Peierls had offered him a post at Birmingham University as assistant in theoretical physics, writing, "I cannot now describe the nature or purpose of the work, but it is theoretical work involving mathematical problems of considerable difficulty, and I have enjoyed doing it, quite apart from its extreme importance." He obtained official clearance for Fuchs* to join the nuclear project and put him to work on gaseous diffusion techniques for isotopic separation. His contributions were so significant that, when Peierls was invited to go to America, his gifted young colleague naturally went too. Before leaving for the United States, Fuchs contacted his Soviet handler, a woman code-named "Sonia," who promised that a new agent would contact him there—a man he would know only as "Raymond." They would make contact in February 1944.
Under the Quebec Agreement, the United States also promised to underwrite the Anglo-Canadian nuclear project. In late 1942 the British had established an Anglo-Canadian laboratory in Montreal, which later moved to Chalk River, and dispatched a team to Canada, including Hans von Halban, Lew Kowarski, and Bertrand Goldschmidt. Its primary purpose was to study the effectiveness of heavy water at slowing down neutrons. Hans von Halban was director until April 1944, when John Cockcroft took over. Groves allowed some low-level exchanges with the Montreal team but, deeply distrustful in particular of the French contingent, forbade direct contact with the U.S. scientists. His reservations would ultimately be proved correct. The team sent to Montreal by the British included two men—one a Briton, Alan Nunn May, and the other a refugee, Bruno Pontecorvo—who would later be unmasked as ideologically motivated Soviet agents.
The Chadwicks arrived at Los Alamos in early 1944 and moved into a two-bedroom log cabin on Bathtub Row. When Rotblat arrived a few weeks later, he moved in with them. Also in early 1944, Mr. Nicholas Baker and his son arr
ived to join the British contingent. Laura Fermi, when she arrived at Los Alamos later that year, would be struck how, "in the Los Alamos array of faces wearing an expression of deep thought at all hours and under all circumstances, whether the men they belonged to were eating dinner or playing charades, Mr. Baker's face stood out as the most thoughtful, the one expressing the gravest meditations. He appeared to be dedicated to a life of the intellect alone, which allowed no time for earthly concerns. . . . Mr. Baker's eyes were restless and vague. When he talked, only a whisper came out of his mouth, as if vocal contacts with his fellow-men were of little consequence. He was a few years older than the other scientists—close to sixty in 1944—and all looked at him with reverence."
"Mr. Baker" was, of course, Niels Bohr. He had been given a pseudonym, just as Oppenheimer was "Mr. Smith," Lawrence was "Mr. Jones," and Fermi was "Mr. Farmer." Bohr was fortunate to be alive. In early 1943 British intelligence had received a warning from Denmark that Bohr was likely to be deported to Germany. A message from James Chadwick inviting Bohr to England was smuggled into Denmark on microdots concealed in two ordinary-looking doorkeys. Chadwick promised "a very warm welcome and an opportunity of service in the common cause." Bohr, however, was reluctant to leave Denmark, knowing his flight would expose family and colleagues to Nazi reprisals. His reluctant refusal—reduced to a two-by-three-millimeter microdot—was smuggled out of Denmark in the hollow tooth of a resistance worker.
The rapidly worsening position in Denmark altered Bohr's view. News of the Russians' victory at Stalingrad at the end of January 1943 had encouraged the Danish resistance to launch a series of sabotage attacks. The Germans responded by shooting hostages, prompting a series of strikes that the Germans again savagely suppressed. On 28 August 1943 the Danish government resigned, and the following day the Germans declared martial law. The British sent a further, urgent message to Bohr, passed to him by word of mouth: "We still are waiting for you."
Before the Fallout Page 28