* * *
The British, at least, knew where they were going. Tizard was skeptical of the MAUD Report and doubted that a bomb could be produced before the end of the war. Lindemann—he was Lord Cherwell now, a baron, courtesy of his friend the P.M.—did not. Cherwell had followed the MAUD work carefully. He respected Thomson; Simon was an old friend; Peierls had read his grunts correctly after all. He trusted their judgment and set to work to reduce the lengthy report to a memorandum for Churchill. Churchill liked his documents held to half a page. So important was this one that Cherwell allowed it to run on for two and a half pages. He thought research should continue for six months and then face further review. He thought an isotope-separation plant should be erected not in the United States but in England—despite manpower shortages and the risk of German bombing—or “at worst” in Canada. In that conclusion he differed from the MAUD Committee.1452 “The reasons in favor [of an English location],” he wrote, “are the better chance of maintaining secrecy . . . but above all the fact that whoever possesses such a plant should be able to dictate terms to the rest of the world. However much I may trust my neighbor and depend on him, I am very much averse to putting myself completely at his mercy. I would, therefore, not press the Americans to undertake this work.” His summation narrowed the odds but decisively raised the stakes:
People who are working on these problems consider the odds are ten to one on success within two years. I would not bet more than two to one against or even money. But I am quite clear that we must go forward. It would be unforgivable if we let the Germans defeat us in war or reverse the verdict after they had been defeated.
Churchill received Cherwell’s recommendation on August 27. Three days later he minuted his military advisers, alluding ironically to the effects of the Blitz: “Although personally I am quite content with the existing explosives, I feel we must not stand in the path of improvement, and I therefore think that action should be taken in the sense proposed by Lord Cherwell.”1453
The British chiefs of staff concurred on September 3.
* * *
Mark Oliphant helped goad the American program over the top. “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.”1454 Conant in his 1943 secret history thought the “most important” reason the program changed direction in the autumn of 1941 was that “the all-out advocates of a head-on attack on the uranium problem had become more vocal and determined” and mentioned Oliphant’s influence first of all.1455
Oliphant flew to the United States in late August—he considered the Pan-American Clipper through Lisbon too slow and usually traveled by unheated bomber—to work with his NDRC counterparts on radar. But he was also charged with inquiring why the United States was ignoring the MAUD Committee’s findings. “The minutes and reports . . . had been sent to Lyman Briggs . . . and we were puzzled to receive virtually no comment. . . . I called on Briggs in Washington, only to find that this inarticulate and unimpressive man had put the reports in his safe and had not shown them to members of his Committee.” Oliphant was “amazed and distressed.”1456
He met then with the Uranium Committee. Samuel K. Allison was a new committee member, a talented experimentalist, a protégé of Arthur Compton at the University of Chicago. Oliphant “came to a meeting,” Allison recalls, “ . . . and said ’bomb’ in no uncertain terms. He told us we must concentrate every effort on the bomb and said we had no right to work on power plants or anything but the bomb. The bomb would cost twenty-five million dollars, he said, and Britain didn’t have the money or the manpower, so it was up to us.” Allison was surprised. Briggs had kept the committee in the dark. “I thought we were making a power source for submarines.”1457
In desperation Oliphant reached out to the most effective champion he knew in the United States. He wired Ernest Lawrence: “I’ll even fly from Washington to meet at a convenient time in Berkeley.”1458 At the beginning of September he did.
Lawrence drove Oliphant up the hill behind the Berkeley campus to the site of the 184-inch cyclotron where they could talk without being overheard. Oliphant rehearsed the MAUD Report, which Lawrence had not yet seen. Lawrence in turn proclaimed the possibility of electromagnetic separation of U235 in converted cyclotrons and the virtues of plutonium. “How much I still admire the way in which things are done in your laboratory,” Oliphant would write him after their meeting. “I feel quite sure that in your hands the uranium question will receive proper and complete consideration.”1459, 1460 Back in his office Lawrence called Bush and Conant and arranged for Oliphant to see them. From Oliphant he collected a written summary of the secret British report.
In Washington Conant took Oliphant to dinner and listened with interest. Bush met him in New York and gave him a barely courteous twenty minutes. Neither administrator admitted to knowledge of the MAUD Report. “Gossip among nuclear physicists on forbidden subjects,” Conant characterizes Oliphant’s peregrinations in his secret history.1461
Oliphant also stopped by to talk to Fermi. He found the Italian laureate more cautious than ever, “non-committal about the fast-neutron bomb and not altogether happy about the Bohr-Wheeler theory of fission.”1462
Before or after his meetings in Washington and New York Oliphant visited William D. Coolidge, the temporary chairman who produced the second NAS report, at General Electric in Schenectady. That visit at least stirred something like indignation. Coolidge immediately wrote Jewett of Oliphant’s news, emphasizing for pure U235 “that the chain reaction in this case would take place thru the direct action of fast neutrons. . . . This information, so far as I know, was not available in this country until after the National Academy Committee had sent in its second report. I think that Oliphant’s story should be given serious consideration.”1463 Information had indeed been available in the United States—at least the MAUD minutes, including Peierls’ April 9 statement—but Briggs had locked it away for safekeeping. Oliphant returned to Birmingham wondering if he had made any impression at all.
Lawrence was already moving. He called Arthur Compton in Chicago after Oliphant left Berkeley. “Certain developments made him believe it would be possible to make an atomic bomb,” Compton paraphrases the conversation. “Such a bomb, if developed in time, might determine the outcome of the war. The activity of the Germans in this field made it seem to him a matter of great urgency for us to press its development.”1464 It was no more than Szilard had argued two years earlier. Lawrence was scheduled to speak in Chicago on September 25. Conant would be in town to receive an honorary degree. Compton proposed to invite both men together to his home. Lawrence could then press the NDRC chairman directly.
* * *
Following his decision for political commitment at the Pan American Scientific Conference, Edward Teller had continued teaching at George Washington University but sought work in fission research. In March 1941, with Merle Tuve as one of their sponsors, the Tellers swore allegiance to the United States and became American citizens. Hans Bethe, who was teaching at Columbia for the spring term on temporary leave from Cornell, took the oath the same month. At the end of the term Bethe recommended that Columbia invite Teller to replace him. To work more closely with Fermi and Szilard—and to adjudicate their disputes, which he did with sensitivity—Teller accepted and moved to Manhattan, to an apartment on Morningside Drive.
In the midst of experiment Fermi found time to theorize. He and Teller had lunch at the University Club one pleasant day in September. Afterward, walking back to Pupin—“out of the blue,” Teller says—Fermi wondered aloud if an atomic bomb might serve to heat a mass of deuterium sufficiently to begin thermonuclear fusion.1465 Such a mechanism, a bomb fusing hydrogen to helium, should be three orders of magnitude as energetic as a fission bomb and far cheaper in terms of equivalent explosive
force. For Fermi the idea was a throwaway. Teller found it a surpassing challenge and took it to heart.
Teller liked to break new ground. When he understood something theoretically he usually moved on without waiting for experimental confirmation. He understood the atomic bomb. He moved on to consider the possibility of a hydrogen bomb. He made extensive calculations. They were disappointing. “I decided that deuterium could not be ignited by atomic bombs,” he recalls.1466 “Next Sunday, we went on a walk. The Fermis and the Tellers.1467 And I explained to Enrico why a hydrogen bomb could never be made. And he believed me.” For a while, Teller even believed himself.
Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller were not, however, the first to conceive of using a nuclear chain reaction to initiate a thermonuclear reaction in hydrogen. That distinction apparently belongs to Japanese physicist Tokutaro Hagiwara of the faculty of science of the University of Kyoto. Hagiwara had followed world fission research and had conducted studies of his own. In May 1941 he lectured on “Super-explosive U235,” reviewing existing knowledge.1468, 1469 He was aware that an explosive chain reaction depended on U235 and understood the necessity of isotope separation: “Because of the potential application of this explosive chain reaction a practical method of achieving this must be found. Immediately, it is very important that a means of manufacturing U-235 on a large scale from natural uranium be found.” He then discussed the linkage he saw between nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion: “If by any chance U-235 could be manufactured in a large quantity and of proper concentration, U-235 has a great possibility of becoming useful as the initiating matter for a quantity of hydrogen. We have great expectations for this.”
But before the Japanese or the Americans could build a hydrogen bomb they would have to build an atomic bomb. And in neither country was major support yet secure.
* * *
“It was a cool September evening,” Arthur Compton remembers. “My wife greeted Conant and Lawrence as they came into our home and gave each of us a cup of coffee as we gathered around the fireplace. Then she busied herself upstairs so the three of us might talk freely.”1470
Lawrence spoke with passion. He was “very vigorous in his expression of dissatisfaction with the U.S. program,” writes Conant. “Dr. Oliphant had seen him during the summer and by recounting the British hopes had further fired Lawrence’s zeal for more action in this whole field.”1471 Conant knew all about the British hopes, knew talk was cheap and chose to play the devil’s advocate, easily gulling Compton, who thought his arguments turned the tide:
Conant was reluctant. As a result of the reports so far received he had concluded that the time had come to drop the support of nuclear research as a subject for wartime study. . . . We could not afford to spend either our scientific or our industrial effort on an atomic program of highly questionable military value when every ounce of our strength was needed for the nation’s defense.
I rallied to Lawrence’s support. . . .
Conant began to be convinced.1472
“I could not resist the temptation,” says the Harvard president, “to cut behind [Lawrence’s] rhetoric by asking if he was prepared to shelve his own research programs.”1473 Compton cranks Conant’s challenge to high melodrama:
“If this task is as important as you men say,” [Conant] remarked, “we must get going. I have argued with Vannevar Bush that the uranium project be put in wraps for the war period. Now you put before me plans for making a definite, highly effective weapon. If such a weapon is going to be made, we must do it first.1474 We can’t afford not to. But I’m here to tell you, nothing significant will happen on such a job as this unless we get into it with everything we’ve got.”
He turned to Lawrence. “Ernest, you say you are convinced of the importance of these fission bombs. Are you ready to devote the next several years of your life to getting them made?”
. . . The question brought Lawrence up with a start. I can still recall the expression in his eyes as he sat there with his mouth half open. Here was a serious personal decision. . . . He hesitated only a moment: “If you tell me this is my job, I’ll do it.”
Back in Washington Conant briefed Bush on what he calls “the results of the involuntary conference in Chicago to which [I] had been exposed.”1475 The two administrators decided to order up a third National Academy report, enlarging Compton’s committee this time to include W. K. Lewis, a chemical engineer with an outstanding reputation for estimating the potential success at industrial scale of laboratory processes, and Conant’s Harvard colleague George B. Kistiakowsky, the resident NDRC explosives expert.
Tall, big-boned, boisterous, with a flat Slavic face and abiding selfconfidence, Kistiakowsky had volunteered at eighteen for the White Russian Army and fought in the Russian Revolution. “I grew up in a family in which the question of civil rights, human freedom, was an important one,” he told an interviewer late in life. “My father was a professor of sociology and wrote articles and books on the subject and got into trouble with the Czar’s regime, very substantial trouble. Mother was also politically oriented. I think both of them went through a short period of being Marxists and then rejected it. That’s why I really joined the anti-Bolshevik armies in ‘18. It was certainly not because I loved Czarism. Of course, I got completely disgusted with the White Army long before it was all over.” Kistiakowsky escaped to Germany and took his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1925. He might have stayed, but his professor advised him to look elsewhere. “He told me that if I wanted to go into an academic career I should emigrate; I would never get a job in Germany—’Here you will always be a Russian.’ ”1476 Princeton accepted the Ukrainian chemist on a fellowship and soon hired him for its faculty. Then Harvard discovered and courted him. In 1930 he moved, becoming professor of chemistry in 1938.
Conant had been among those who lured Kistiakowsky from Princeton to Harvard. He valued highly his friend and fellow chemist’s opinion. “When I retailed to him the idea that a bomb could be made by the rapid assembly of two masses of fissionable material, his first remark was that of a doubting Thomas. ‘It would seem to be a difficult undertaking on a battlefield,’ he remarked.” But it was Kistiakowsky’s judgment that finally convinced Conant, as British hopes and physicists’ entreaties had not:
A few weeks later when we met, his doubts were gone. “It can be made to work,” he said. “I am one hundred percent sold.”
My doubts about Briggs’ project evaporated as soon as I heard George Kistiakowsky’s considered verdict. I had known George for many years. . . . I had asked him to be head of the NDRC division on explosives. . . . I had complete faith in his judgment. If he was sold on Arthur Compton’s program, who was I to have reservations?1477
Oliphant convinced Lawrence, Lawrence convinced Compton, Kistiakowsky convinced Conant. Conant says Compton’s and Lawrence’s attitudes “counted heavily with Bush.” But “more significant” was the MAUD Report, which G. P. Thomson, now British scientific liaison officer in Ottawa, officially transmitted to Conant on October 3.1478 On October 9, without waiting for the third National Academy of Sciences review, Bush carried the report directly to the President.
Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Wallace and the director of the OSRD met that Thursday at the White House. In a memorandum Bush wrote to Conant the same day he makes it clear that the MAUD Report was the basis for the discussion: “I told the conference of the British conclusions.”1479 He told the President and the Vice President that the explosive core of an atomic bomb might weigh twenty-five pounds, that it might explode with a force equivalent to some eighteen hundred tons of TNT, that a vast industrial plant costing many times as much as a major oil refinery would be necessary to separate the U235, that the raw material might come from Canada and the Belgian Congo, that the British estimated the first bombs might be ready by the end of 1943. Bush tried to explain that an atomic bomb plant would produce no more than two or three bombs a month but doubted if the President took in that “relatively low yie
ld.” He emphasized that he was basing his statements “primarily on calculation with some laboratory investigation, but not on a proved case” and therefore could not guarantee success.
Bush was presenting, essentially, British calculations and British conclusions. Such a presentation made it appear that Britain was further advanced in the field than America. The discussion therefore shifted to the question of how the United States was attached or might attach itself to the British program. “I told of complete interchange with Britain on technical matters, and this was endorsed.” Bush explained that the “technical people” in Britain had also formulated policy—had proposed that the government develop the atomic bomb as a weapon of war—and had passed their formulations along directly to the War Cabinet. In the United States, Bush said, an NDRC section and an advisory committee considered technical matters and only he and Conant considered policy.
Policy was the President’s prerogative. As soon as Bush exposed it to view Roosevelt seized it. Bush took that decision to be the most important outcome of the meeting and put it emphatically first in his memorandum to Conant. Roosevelt wanted policy consideration restricted to a small group (it came to be called the Top Policy Group). He named its members: Vice President Wallace, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, Bush and Conant. Every man owed his authority to the President. Roosevelt had instinctively reserved nuclear weapons policy to himself.
Thus at the outset of the U.S. atomic energy program scientists were summarily denied a voice in deciding the political and military uses of the weapons they were proposing to build. Bush accepted the usurpation happily. To him it was simply a matter of who would run the show. It left him on top and inside and he put it to use immediately to shoulder the physics community into line. Within hours, as he wrote Frank Jewett in November, he had “emphasized to Arthur Compton and his people the fact that they are asked to report upon the techniques, and that consideration of general policy has not been turned over to them as a subject.”1480, 1481
Making of the Atomic Bomb Page 52