Bowles could not let the matter drop. He was furious that there was never any admission on Bowen’s part that Loomis’ “shower idea” was anything but original: “Apparently, again, Alfred with his typical methods had been able to brainwash [Bowen]. He evidently captured Taffy Bowen’s fancy and in effect put Bowen in a position where he couldn’t do anything else but support Loomis’ idea. In other words, it is my theory that Loomis would not have had the idea had he not been able to so involve Bowen in a step-by-step process so as to find out exactly what our British cousins had in hand.”
It soon became obvious that Bowles and Loomis could not both endure under the same roof. “Loomis took a relatively possessive position in respect to the radiation lab as if it were his baby,” Bowles complained. “I suppose with his ego and his past history, he wanted no competition.” He blamed the banker’s frosty reserve for the lab’s often difficult relations with outside agencies, particularly the navy, where Bowles had good contacts. “His ways with the military were not the ways of a first-class salesman. He worked with his cards too close to his chest, in fact hidden in his vest when he wore one.” Bowles made a clumsy attempt to undermine Loomis’ authority by criticizing him behind his back to Compton, apparently unaware of their close friendship. When he lost that argument, his bitterness increased. By the end of 1941, despite Compton’s efforts to alleviate the situation by assigning Bowles duties that kept him at a safe distance, it became, in Bowles’ own words, “an impossible situation.” Hoping for a showdown, he sent Compton a memorandum marked “Personal” enumerating Loomis’ grievous shortcomings as chairman of the microwave committee:
I have a few observations I wish to pass to you relative to the Microwave Section–Radiation Laboratory relationship which I hope will help your perspective of the problem. Please excuse the facetious tone—I am hurriedly doing this before I leave for Sperry.
First as to the Committee: We began operating as a Committee the first few meetings, then it became clear to me that Alfred did not want that kind of a Committee. The other Committees, as I understand them, have operated much as a unit. . . . Alfred’s position is that the Committee members were merely directors to be informed and to be used when we went after funds. I believe I pretty well quote the sentiment expressed.
At the start Alfred told me that the two of us would have to look after things and I took him seriously. Later when I was removed from the Executive Committee running the Laboratory, I again understood from your memorandum on the subject that in a broad sense you, Alfred and I were to look after the general progress and policy. . . .
I felt at the time, and I spoke to you about it, that it would help my position administratively were I made Vice Chairman of the Section. As I remember it you seemed to approve the idea. I then spoke to Alfred and he brushed the idea aside by pointing to the strong position that of SECRETARY implied, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of Navy, etc. . . .
I suspect a certain minority in the Laboratory who do not like to recognize the authority of others have satisfied themselves that I am a “secretary” to write letters and do the bidding of others. This has made it hard for me especially when I have had to carry most of the administrative burden of the Section.
Alfred has done the job of a genius in so many ways, but I have had to try to keep a semblance of order into things and fill in those parts which did not interest him. . . .
Bowles’ tone turned nastier as he went on to question Loomis’ habit of ignoring policy, choosing instead to exercise sovereign authority over many of the lab’s new projects and contracts: “This independence has been shown in the Laboratory’s way of turning out reports of secret material without Committee approval in many cases; a procedure that I am sure is not the NDRC’s. . . . It is the same independence that resulted in the Laboratory’s giving Westinghouse a contract for ten-centimeter magnetrons without Committee knowledge. Perhaps Alfred did know. . . .” He concluded by assuring Compton that he was glad he “taking up whole matter with Van [Bush],” adding, “I give it only with the idea that it suggests a point of view among a few, perhaps only one or two militant ones—that may grow to bring embarrassment to you and the Institute.”
Bowles no doubt realized how seriously he had underestimated Loomis when he was informed by Compton that his services at the laboratory were no longer required and that he was scheduled to take a position in the U.S. Army Air Corps communications area. “It was a polite way of banishing me,” recalled Bowles. “Loomis had seen to it I was about to be sold down the river; in other words, his desire was to have me get the hell out, to use a common idiom. Compton sided with Loomis, if there was any side to be taken.”
Bowles was saved from ignominy by Bush, who intervened at the last minute and, in an effort to avoid any more embarrassment than the imbroglio had already caused, persuaded Stimson’s office to take him on as an “expert consultant” on radar. (Loomis had been the logical choice as the secretary’s adviser on the new weapons, but concerns about nepotism forced Bush and Stimson to find another candidate.) Bowles left MIT for Washington in April 1942 and went on to become a highly effective ambassador for the new art of radar in Washington and played an important role in bringing the civilian scientists and the military high command closer together. But he never forgave Loomis, and years later he acknowledged that he found it infuriating that the former banker commanded so much loyalty and respect while he, one of MIT’s original radar pioneers, had managed to win few friends among the close-knit Rad Lab crew. “An element resolved in our problems at the time was that I didn’t belong to the fraternity of scientists who were brought in as the initial staff of the radiation lab. In other words I was not a physicist, I had no doctor’s degree, and of all low brow things, I was an engineer,” he said, adding bitterly, “I was a stranger in their midst.”
Compton would always try to minimize the power struggle at the lab that resulted in Bowles’ departure, and while praising the radar expert’s abilities, he put it down to “the limitations of temperament and personality” that had led him into conflict with so many others in the past. Bush, who had his own rocky relations with Bowles dating back to the early years of his academic career at MIT, already knew about his ability to stir up strife. In the mid-1930s, when Compton had considered promoting Bush to vice president of MIT, Bowles had voiced an unfavorable opinion of the engineer, to the effect that he “had nothing but admiration for Bush’s methods and not one damn bit of use for his methods.” Bush, who had been promptly informed of the comment by Compton, asked Bowles to drop by his office, and the two men hashed out their differences for the next two and a half hours. But their relationship never recovered, and the two were often at odds. Bush always tolerated Bowles as a bright but “strange chap,” too difficult and disloyal to be trusted. Bush always assumed Bowles’ problems at the Rad Lab were largely of his own making: “It was Bowles against the field,” Bush added, and “they pasted the hell out of him.”
Bush, meanwhile, was not blind to Loomis’ behavior and was fully aware of the adroit financier’s propensity for masterminding events. There were times when their relationship became quite tense, particularly on those occasions when Loomis, in combination with Lawrence or the accommodating DuBridge, behaved as if the Rad Lad were an establishment virtually independent of the parent. An acutely skilled politician whose stern demeanor reminded some of a school principal, Bush was not shy about setting him straight. While he admired Loomis’ energy and determination, he felt it necessary at times “to steer him to a path.” According to Bowles, whose new perch in Washington occasionally afforded him the pleasure of seeing Loomis called in on the carpet, Bush “had a way of making clear in no uncertain terms who was boss. When dealing with a subtle plan or machination he was an artist in achieving a point by the use of memoranda concealing what was really on his mind.”
But for the most part, Bush gave Loomis a great deal of latitude and made allowances for the fact that in civilian life he had not b
een accustomed to heeding the chain of command. For that matter, until he joined the OSRD, Bush was willing to bet that Loomis “had never taken an order from anybody at any time.” As he observed years later, “Alfred’s always been a close friend of mine, but a tough egg to work with. I think during the war when he occasionally changed his direction of action at my behest, it was about the only time that he ever paid attention to anybody over his head.”
Chapter 11
MINISTER WITHOUT PORTFOLIO
Shall I just call up Mr. Roosevelt and ask him to save us all from a fate worse than death?
—WR, from “The Uranium Bomb”
DURING the long, frustrating spring of 1941, weeks that had been marked by heightening political tension, Loomis’ involvement with the Rad Lab became increasingly sporadic as he found himself pressed into service on another scientific front. A number of leading physicists had become alarmed by the snail pace set by Lyman Briggs, the chairman of the uranium committee, to say nothing of the extreme difficulty in obtaining the materials and funds necessary for their experiments, and had brought their concerns to Loomis. The potential of the discoveries in nuclear fission had major implications, and scientists in both England and America were whispering about the possibility of constructing a bomb of enormous power. At this point, no one could reasonably doubt that America’s involvement in the European war would increase, yet no one on the uranium committee could be persuaded that fission was critical to the war effort.
Worried that the Germans might already be ahead of them, they turned to Loomis, who had been instrumental in jump-starting the radar lab and was widely liked and respected, and begged him to use his influence to spur the government into action. Loomis disliked being drawn into these political squabbles, which he generally viewed as beneath him, but owing to his friendship with Lawrence, and pride in the achievements of the Rad Lab, which he justly felt would always extend to him, too, he began working behind the scenes to solve the uranium problem and push the government to get on with building the bomb.
In spite of the many obstacles, a year or more of research had yielded some important findings at various laboratories across the country, and Loomis shared his colleagues’ doubts as to the Briggs committee’s ability to appreciate the full weight of their implications. At Columbia, Fermi, working with Szilard, had gained a reasonably good understanding of the chain reaction in a uranium-graphite system, and Loomis knew they were in desperate need of more graphite to proceed with the next phase of their work. At the University of Chicago, Karl Compton’s brother, Arthur, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, was investigating beryllium as a moderator that could contribute to a successful chain reaction. Harold Urey, another Nobel laureate and the discoverer of heavy hydrogen, had done some promising studies showing it might be possible to obtain a chain reaction using heavy water. At the University of Virginia, Jesse Beams was working on isotope separation to achieve uranium 235, while at Harvard, George Kistiakowsky, who had worked for Loomis at Tower House and was now head of the university’s Chemistry Department, was checking out gaseous diffusion as another possible means of separating uranium isotopes.
Meanwhile Lawrence, the great force in marshaling American physics, had become persuaded of the importance of nuclear weapons and was lending his voice to the growing discontent. Always on the lookout for ways to further expand his Berkeley operation, he was convinced that the Rad Lab should undertake uranium research, which was clearly receiving scant attention from the government. After all, his cyclotron had produced one of the major breakthroughs in the field. Back in the first flush of excitement surrounding the news of uranium fission, one of his boys—Ed McMillan—had devised an experiment to measure the energies of the fission fragments and in the process detected a mysterious new product of fission—a radioactive substance with a half-life of 2.3 days—which he speculated might be the isotope of the element 93. In subsequent experiments in the spring of 1940, he and another Rad Lab physicist, Philip Abelson, confirmed that it was the new element 93, derived by the capture of a neutron by uranium 238 and prompt subsequent decay.1
This discovery led McMillan to speculate that the element 93—which he suggested be named “neptunium” after the planet beyond Uranus, for which element 92 had been named—might decay to form an isotope of the element 94 with a mass of 239. After McMillan was drafted for radar work at MIT, and Abelson departed for Tuve’s laboratory in Washington, their research was taken up by the Berkeley chemist Glenn Seaborg, who, aided by a young instructor, Joseph Kennedy, and a graduate student named Arthur Wahl, bombarded uranium with deuterons (the nuclei of heavy hydrogen atoms) and obtained a mixture of several isotopes of 93, including evidence of the element 94. Lawrence immediately suspected that 94 might prove fissionable—that it might have nuclear properties. If this was true, it could perhaps replace uranium 235 as a nuclear fuel or explosive.
In mid-December 1940, Lawrence, who was in New York staying with Loomis, met with Fermi at the office of Columbia University physicist George Pegram to discuss the feasibility of making enough of the new substance to do further research, which they all agreed was of the utmost importance. At this point, it was still all speculation. No convincing case could be made to the government without experimental proof of 94’s fission characteristics. If the nuclear properties of the new isotope turned out to be unfavorable, the whole approach could come to nothing. During the meeting, Emilio Segrè, an Italian physicist who had worked with Fermi in Rome and was now a research assistant at Berkeley, suggested to Lawrence that they use one of his cyclotrons to manufacture enough 94 to measure its nuclear properties. “The only way of answering these momentous questions was by direct experimentation,” Segrè wrote in his memoirs. “It was imperative to try.”
After conferring with Loomis and Compton, and consulting Bush in Washington, Lawrence gave his assent. But he was already saddled with radar work and too weighed down by myriad projects and a heavy travel schedule to take on the uranium study himself. He had also been suffering from another of his debilitating bouts of flu and had spent that Christmas convalescing in Florida. As it was, Loomis was so concerned about his hard-driving friend’s stamina that he proposed Berkeley establish a special fund to facilitate Lawrence’s work for national defense. Loomis felt Lawrence was much too valuable to the country to risk his health and personally contributed $30,000 to the fund.
In the end, Lawrence decided to entrust the all-important experiments to Segrè, who would work on the slow neutron fission of elements 93 and 94 with Seaborg’s crew. By this time, the British physicists at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge were becoming interested in 94 and wrote to Lawrence urging him to undertake personally the uranium research. Events overtook the letter. Using Lawrence’s sixty-inch cyclotron, Segrè and Seaborg’s team of chemists had set to work immediately on bombarding uranium—this time with neutrons—and on the night of February 23, they succeeded in identifying and producing samples of an isotope of the element 94. It had a mass of 239, just as McMillan and Abelson had predicted. It would prove to be the fissionable isotope Pu-239—plutonium.
Realizing that the discovery of this new element and its transformation was of immense importance, Segrè informed Lawrence at once but was not sure from his initial reaction to what extent Lawrence grasped the full ramifications of their findings. “He told me to talk to his friend Alfred Loomis, a multimillionaire banker and amateur physicist of great intelligence who was visiting the Rad Lab,” Segrè recalled. “I hesitated because of security, but Lawrence reassured me that Loomis was cleared for every technical secret concerning defense, and that furthermore he was a cousin and close friend of Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s.” Segrè reluctantly sought out the civilian banker, and this time he got the reaction he had hoped for. “Loomis understood everything I told him promptly and completely. I believe he helped to open Lawrence’s eyes, although it is possible that Lawrence had fully grasped what I told him, and simply wanted Loomis to hear the
news directly from the horse’s mouth.”
Lawrence, who was shrewder than Segrè gave him credit for, recognized that his cyclotron opened up a whole new way of tapping nuclear energy and had been planning to enlist Loomis’ help in funding his plutonium research. He had sent Segrè ahead only to pique Loomis’ interest, knowing his friend would take a keen interest in the project and would be a powerful ally in pressing for a full-scale program. When Conant, Bush’s deputy at the NDRC, came to Berkeley in early March 1941, Lawrence also went to work on him, urging him to “light a fire” under the Briggs committee. “What if German scientists succeed in making a nuclear bomb before we even investigate possibilities?” he demanded, asking the question he would repeat many times in the weeks to come. Lawrence had been particularly dismayed by Briggs’ reaction to their work and felt his only real concern was with security. Briggs had actually requested Lawrence “guarantee Segrè’s reliability” and had scolded him that Fermi had “only partial clearance.”
ON a bitter cold New England morning on March 17, 1941, Lawrence and Loomis met with Compton at his office at MIT. Lawrence informed Compton that on his own initiative he had been pursuing fission experiments, and although it was not technically his NDRC assignment, he wanted to continue. He was sure that his results merited further investigation, he told them excitedly, and it had occurred to him that he could convert his thirty-seven-inch cyclotron into a huge mass spectrometer. Smaller instruments had already been used to determine the mass and identity of isotopes. It would require only minor modifications, and then it would be possible to use the mass spectrometer to separate uranium 235 from ordinary uranium, thereby isolating the fissionable isotopes. Lawrence, who could not keep from leaping ahead, already envisioned a way the magnetic separation of isotopes could be expanded to become a large-scale process for producing uranium 235.
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