The Berlin Project

by Gregory Benford

  Well done, Karl thought ruefully, since the right path started in Manhattan. . . . And now the work at Columbia outflanked the methods the British thought would work better.

  Groves discarded his brusquely jovial face and put on a scowl, hands on hips. “I have already participated in the selection of sites for research and production here at Oak Ridge, plus others to come in Washington State and New Mexico. I shall direct the enormous construction efforts there. I made the critical decisions on the various methods of isotope separation as well—hence this centrifuge plant, with more to come. The Tennessee Valley Authority is the best site, with under-used electrical power capacity. All this we will call the Clinton Engineer Works, period—nothing to give away what we’re doing.”

  Groves paused, eyeing the officers. He held them just long enough to let some tension build; then his face went stern.

  “This is not a standard army project. We’re building something, but we don’t have a blueprint. We have to work with the scientists—not a disciplined bunch, I can tell you.” This brought a wave of laughter. Karl smiled. Groves ignored the laughs, though he smiled. “Get this straight. I shall direct the acquiring of raw materials, especially uranium. As well, I will supervise the collection of military intelligence on the German bomb program, which seems well ahead of ours. We’ve got to keep this tightly secret! We will also take countermeasures against their intelligence gathering. All these are my charge, gentlemen, directly from the president. Questions?”

  “What’s going on at the other places?” a voice down front called.

  “You will learn that only on a need-to-know basis,” Groves shot back. “Let me be clear about the size of this project. During the first week that I was on duty here, I could not walk out of my office and down the corridor without being assailed by officers, or worse, by civilian engineers with liaison responsibility for various jobs. It is no exaggeration that during this period decisions involving up to five hundred thousand dollars apiece were made at the rate of about one every hundred feet of corridor walked.”

  This got a loud laugh. Karl joined in as he realized that the day-to-day decisions Groves faced would go beyond the abilities of any scientist he knew, easily. Groves went on, “This job will get still bigger—and fast. Through it all, I will ruthlessly protect the project from other government agency interference.”

  “What’s this we hear about New Mexico?” Same questioner.

  “That’s a possibility for a different aspect of S-1.” Groves gestured to a man in the front row, who stood. He was thin with a crew cut and was smoking a pipe. “Dr. Oppenheimer and I are taking a train right away, to scope it out.”

  “He’s a theory guy, right?” someone called.

  “Yes, I think it’s smart to have at least one guy who understands this stuff.”

  This fetched general laughter. Oppenheimer bobbed his head modestly and sat as Groves boomed out, “We’re pursuing a couple different ways to do this. The stuff about ‘atomic piles’ is maybe right, and we can produce the—well, let’s call it the ‘bang stuff,’ because there are different things that can make a bomb. Different things you slam together, I mean. Oppenheimer will look at those, see how to get it done.”

  Karl stood, and Groves looked toward him. “Sir, can’t we focus on the project running here—the centrifuges? We can concentrate our work, not let it get spread out.”

  A military man expected the “sir,” Karl knew. Groves blinked, thinking this through. “With two approaches, we can maybe find the least expensive way to do it, see.”

  “What does the war cost every day?”

  Groves was not used to this kind of question, Karl saw. He said slowly, “I hadn’t thought of it like that. We finish fast, we save money.”

  “Lives, too,” someone said.

  Karl knew that every day now the war was burning what this whole project might cost, in total. He had made the estimates from standard economic data and federal budgets. Nailing a fact like that to Groves’s chest was not smart, though. Let him think it through.

  Plot Plan K-25

  • • •

  Detailed talks came next. Karl sat through the lamp-lit visuals of the even bigger centrifuge plants to come. The largest was to be called K-25, in keeping with the project-imposed subterfuge of meaningless numbers and letters. Each little square was a coordinated suite of centrifuges, with myriad pipes and wires.

  The complexity of it all numbed the mind. To Karl these were like neurons in a monomaniac brain, perpetually thinking whirring thoughts and spitting out steady streams of U-235, “tube alloy” in security-speak, measured in grams per day. Drudge work.

  K-25 would be the world’s most gargantuan building when fully built out, covering fifty acres and strumming with the high-pitched shrieks of tortured metal all day, every day, through the year or more that a single warhead would take. Artillery shells demanded mountains of copper, so K-25’s wires were of silver, over ten thousand tons (kilotons, as Karl had learned to say) of it, straight from Fort Knox. This fact, too, was an ever deeper secret, to prevent pilfering of the wiring.

  The tour of the world’s very first centrifuge plant drew few from the meeting. They had mostly seen it and all had heavy workloads, and so scurried back to their offices. Karl was here, sent by Urey, to observe and advise, so he walked a few paces behind General Groves and kept silent.

  The trim steel walls and thick power lines stood out among the green Tennessee hills that soon enough would be covered in housing for the thousands about to pour in here. All around these sleepy valleys, US marshals were tacking notices to vacate on farmhouse doors, and construction contractors were rumbling in.

  Inside the long plant, centrifuges were running in gangs of twenty, their shrill whine unnerving. Everybody wore earplugs. The whirring centrifuges were nearly man-size cylinders, with tubes running out top and bottom, sandbags stacked on top to dampen vibration, water running down the sides to cool them. Karl knew the layout by heart, had worked on blueprints and fluid lines for months, but seeing it in its noisy majesty was still a thrill.

  “You’re the centrifuge guy, right?”

  The question came out of nowhere for Karl, who was tracing the complex weave of piping around the centrifuge racks. He turned to see the question came from Groves, with other officers standing behind the big man, whose belly bulged over his belt.

  “Uh, yes. I’m with Urey at Columbia.” He started to put out his hand, thought better of it, and said, “Karl Cohen, sir.”

  “Sharp question you just asked in there. I saw you do that at Columbia, too.” A quick smile. “Helped me make up my mind. Gave me ammo to use in meeting with the higher-ups, the experts.”

  “Why didn’t you identify yourself then?”

  “I had the job, General Marshall gave it to me. I wanted a combat command; he said no, since I’d just built the biggest building on this continent. But—I wanted to wait until my promotion to brigadier general came through. I figured you scientists would have more respect for a brigadier than some recently promoted colonel.”

  Karl didn’t know the import of this and doubted that people like Fermi and Teller did either, but he suddenly understood that Groves lived in a hierarchy that respected order and clarity. Rank mattered. Direct talk did too. This opening moment might be his best chance to make an impression and give advice that mattered. Groves liked plain speaking. So Karl ignored the tightening in his belly and said, “Ah, so you liked my money versus time argument back there?”

  “Sure. Because, see, I’ve got a budget. It’s about half what I asked for.”

  “The spinners here”—Karl swept his arm out—“are working pretty well. We’ll know after the uranium has gone through a few thousand processing steps.”

  “You mean, know if we can get weapons-grade stuff out of it?”

  Karl had never heard the term, but he nodded. “Once we know what that number is, precisely.”

  Groves snorted, eyes sharp beneath his scowl
. “That’s what I want to know. How to build the damn thing too, once we’ve got the U-235.”

  Karl spread his hands and gave a wry smile. “Sir, cost is one way to look at this, sure—but getting a big killer bomb to use against the Germans is more than that. They’re slaughtering countless people every day.”

  Groves raised an eyebrow, as if already judging Karl’s response to his next sentence. “People are madder at the Japs.”

  “They’re small fry. The Germans are the deep enemy. They were well ahead of us in nuclear physics before the war started. Probably are now, too. This is a race.”

  Groves turned to his officers and gave them a quick, short nod. “So it is. But we’ve got to try any method that looks good.”

  “Why are you bringing in Oppenheimer? To do bomb design?”

  Karl could see this direct questioning was not what a general was used to. Groves blinked and beckoned to him with a crooked finger, waving his officers aside, and the two of them walked together to a quieter part of the plant. Here, pressure gauges told of the innumerable pumps driving the system, watched by teams of mostly women wearing sensible pants and blouses, whose eyes never left the dials. Other attendants were working all along the production lines, and they stepped aside for the general. Some glanced at his rank and stiffened.

  “Look, I don’t want staff to hear all this,” Groves said gruffly. “Don’t like gossip in a command. I know you’ve been in on this from the beginning—I got dossiers on all you scientists, tryin’ to figure you guys out.” A chuckle, shaking of head. “I want Oppenheimer to see if this plutonium idea will work out. And how to build a bomb, sure. He’s arguing for a place in New Mexico, some boys’ school, wants me to go see it with him.”

  “A desert is a good place to test a big bomb.”

  “So I figured.”

  “The money you spend on plutonium—hell, we don’t have enough of it to even see with the human eye now!”

  Groves let his mouth relax into a wry curve, as if amused at this scientist who kept poking at him. “I know. Oppie says plutonium might be easier to make in Fermi’s reactors.”

  “So you’re building those, too?”

  “You get right smack to the heart of things, don’t you?” Groves gave Karl a skeptical look. “Yeah, the reactors we’re putting out along the Columbia River. Big, expensive things. Modeled on the small one Fermi built in New Jersey.”

  “You’re spreading the work all over the country?” He felt his stomach muscles tense. Groves seemed the sort who could turn against you if you questioned his assumptions. But it seemed the only way to tease out the man’s thinking.

  A shrug with raised eyebrows. “Plenty of electricity from the dams along the Columbia, like here. Plus room to build, like here. And senators sure like to hear about big new projects going into their state.”

  “I urge you to pour your funds into these spinners, sir. They’re simple, we understand them. Plutonium—that’s a multiple-miracle problem.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Fermi’s reactors have to work well and make plutonium, by banging neutrons into the U-238. Make a lot of it. Then plutonium has to work in a bomb. Three miracles, with the clock running.”

  Groves leaned against the plant’s outer support wall, and Karl saw the man was tired. “I heard from a little bird that you and Urey put the kibosh on that guy Dunning’s idea. What was it again?”

  “Letting uranium diffuse through a wall, so the lighter U-235 gets through a bit faster.”

  “Huh. Sounds not so clean as your spinners out there.”

  “It’s not. Nothing we know can stand up against the hex, either. That stuff eats up everything we’ve tried.”

  “Ummm . . .” Groves sighed, and for just a moment Karl felt for this man, besieged by bureaucratic pressures. With two stars on his shoulders, he probably didn’t get much advice he could take as untainted by influence.

  Groves straightened, threw back his shoulders. “Y’know, I wanted to command a division. Hit ’em in Africa, Europe. I wanted to be there. Once you go into the Army Service Forces—hell, no getting out.”

  Karl saw now the cracks in Groves’s facade. The general snorted ruefully and peered at Karl. “The head of Service Forces Somervell, his appointment letter to me said, ‘If you do the job right, it will win the war.’ You think so?”

  Karl nodded. “Einstein told me he thought it could be decisive. He understands the war better than most. Einstein told me he even saw Hitler once. Some Nazi party parade through Berlin. Einstein was coming home from his university office. The Nazis always stage their big public events in the dark, when every advertiser knows people are more easily persuaded. So Einstein looked at Hitler and vice versa, they both recognized each other. Hitler gave him a look of pure rage. Einstein was the most famous Jew in the world, and he lived in the same city as Der Führer. That’s when Einstein knew he had to get out.”

  Groves frowned at this. “Wow. Really.”

  “So later, Einstein wrote the letter to FDR that started this. I know—I was there when he and Szilard went over the wording.”

  “Einstein’s in on this?”

  “Not really. Turned out he knew nearly nothing about nuclear physics. But he got the point.”

  “Really?” Groves goggled. “Einstein?”

  “Scientists specialize.” Karl knew he was winging this, letting his emotions out, but he could not stop. Not now. “We have to. FDR got the letter just a day after the USSR invaded Poland. The other part of the Nazi-Soviet deal. They united with the German army, about halfway across the country. That made it clear that the huge, heavily armed dictators were chewing up Europe. Roosevelt made the connection. If anyone develops this weapon, it should be the democracies. Us.”

  Groves stepped back, surprised. “I never heard about all this. I was busy building the Pentagon.”

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if we knew Hitler was at home in Berlin, and we dropped a bomb so big it couldn’t miss him?”

  Groves brightened. “You bet. But . . . who’d be left to surrender?”

  The general gazed off into space and then shook himself. He swiveled sharply and led them back into the spinner noise. Groves gestured to his officers, who were slouching around, looking at the complicated spinner arrays in puzzlement. “Attention!” The officers jumped, stood up straight, hands flying up in salutes. “This is Cohen, Karl Cohen. He and the Columbia gang worked out the plans for this plant. You got questions, ask him.”

  Groves turned back to Karl. “Still, Cohen, you’ve gotta remember in all this, an old army rule: brass outranks brains.”

  His men laughed, but Karl didn’t. He thanked Harold Urey, who had taught him how to speak up when he really felt something. Another lesson he could carry forward.

  • • •

  Groves poured a water glass half-full of amber fluid and handed it to Karl. “You look like a bourbon man. Try this.”

  Karl sipped it, judging the mellow, heavy taste. “Um . . . smooth,” he said diplomatically. He was a wine man, really, and once again knew why.

  “Made locally, not legally.” Groves grinned, gestured to an ordinary stiff-backed chair. The small cabin smelled of tart pine sap and odd oily fumes. Groves sat just a foot away in the bare living room of the one-bedroom shack.

  “Couldn’t they give you—”

  “Better quarters? Sure, but people think I’m enough of a blowhard already.” Groves winked, slugged back half his glass. “I thought I’d have a sit-down with you, show you this—”

  He pitched a transparent plastic envelope from a side table into Karl’s lap. Inside was a flat lump of yellow clay.

  “That’s from a mine in the Congo called ‘Shinkolobwe.’ It means ‘the fruit that scalds’ in whatever language they use there.”

  Karl felt heat on his thighs and tossed the envelope to Groves. “Yellowcake—so rich you can feel it!”

  Groves laughed. Karl guessed this was not the first time he had played this tric
k. Still, he managed a grin. “So that’s the source of our starter uranium?”

  “Got it! Sixty-five percent uranium—best ever found.” Groves snapped his fingers and a broad grin spread across his face. “Those Congo guys painted their bodies with it, did ceremonial dances—never knew they were getting a dose.”

  Karl sat back. “How did we get—?”

  “Turns out, it was Einstein. He wrote to the queen mother of Belgium, for Chrissake!”

  Groves got up, added bourbon to his glass, and gestured to Karl, who shook his head. Best to just listen here. He wants to talk. He recalled Einstein saying something about the queen mother, and Urey had mentioned that the Congo was the world’s best source of starter uranium. The world was moving all around him, forces aligning, from the genius to the poor men who worked a mine that poisoned them, all in a looping chain of ever-greater complexity, a spaghetti of timelines. . . .

  “So Einstein sets it up with one goddamn letter! Gotta admire that guy. So that’s how we locked up the Congo supply, bingo. We’re flying it in on Pan American Clippers, the only air service there.”

  Karl thought as he waved away Groves’s next offer of the bourbon bottle. The Pan Am Clippers hearkened back to the nineteenth-century clipper ships and were the only American passenger aircraft in intercontinental travel. To compete with ocean liners, the airline offered first-class seats and flight crews of formal attire. No leather-jacketed, silk-scarved airmail pilots, the crews of the Clippers wore naval-style uniforms and adopted a set procession when boarding the aircraft. “Sending uranium freight on a passenger plane?”

  Groves nodded, frowned. “Security. The Krauts have plenty of agents in Africa, and they have the Belgian company, Union Minière, with a gun to its head. But that’s in Europe. They’ve got nobody to enforce their rules in the Congo, so they’re getting their pitchblende yellowcake uranium from Czechoslovakia.”

  “But—on a passenger plane?”