The Manhattan Project

by Cynthia C. Kelly

  By contrast, General Groves’ visits were always interruptions—and sometimes comically disruptive. One day, Oppie was showing Groves around a lab when the General put his considerable weight on one of three rubber tubes funneling hot water into a casing. As McAllister Hull recalled for the historian Charles Thorpe, “It [the rubber tube] pops off the wall and a stream of water just below the boiling point shoots across the room. And if you’ve ever seen a picture of Groves, you know what it hit.” Oppenheimer looked over his soaking-wet general and quipped, “Well, just goes to show the incompressibility of water.”

  Oppie’s interventions sometimes proved to be absolutely essential to the success of the project. He understood that the single major impediment to building a usable weapon quickly was the meager supply of fissionable material. And so he was constantly looking for ways to accelerate the production of these materials. Early in 1943, Groves and his S-1 Executive Committee had settled on gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic technologies to separate out enriched fissionable uranium for the Los Alamos bomb lab. At the time, another possible technology, based on liquid thermal diffusion, had been rejected as unfeasible. But in the spring of 1944, Oppenheimer read some year-old reports about liquid thermal diffusion and decided that this had been a mistake. He thought this technology represented a relatively cheap path to providing partially enriched uranium for the electromagnetic process. So in April 1944, he wrote to Groves that a liquid thermal diffusion plant might serve as a stopgap measure; its production of even slightly enriched uranium could then be fed to the electromagnetic diffusion plant and thereby accelerate production of fissionable material. It was his hope he wrote, “that the production of the Y-12 [electromagnetic] plant could be increased some 30 to 40 percent, and its enhancement somewhat improved, many months earlier than the scheduled date for K-25 [gaseous diffusion] production.”

  After sitting on Oppie’s recommendation for a month, Groves agreed to explore it. A plant was rushed into production, and by the spring of 1945 it was producing just enough extra partially enriched uranium to guarantee a sufficient amount of fissionable material for one bomb by the end of July 1945.

  Oppenheimer had always possessed a high degree of confidence in the uranium gun-design program—whereby a “slug” of fissionable material would be fired into a target of additional fissionable matter, creating “criticality” and a nuclear explosion. But in the spring of 1944, he suddenly faced a crisis that threatened to derail the entire effort to design a plutonium bomb. While Oppenheimer had authorized Seth Neddermeyer to conduct explosive experiments aimed at creating an implosion design bomb—a loosely packed sphere of fissionable material that could be instantly compressed to reach criticality—he had always hoped that a straightforward gun assembly would prove viable for the plutonium bomb. In July 1944, however, it became clear from tests performed on the first small supplies of plutonium that an efficient plutonium bomb could not be triggered within the “gun-barrel” design. Indeed, any such attempt would undoubtedly lead to a catastrophic pre-detonation inside the plutonium “gun.”

  One solution might have been to separate further the plutonium material in an attempt to make a more stable element. “One could have separated out those bad plutonium isotopes from the good ones,” John Manley explained, “but that would have meant duplicating everything that had been done for uranium isotope separation—all those big plants—and there was just no time to do that. The choice was to junk the whole discovery of the chain reaction that produced plutonium, and all of the investment in time and effort of the Hanford [Washington] plant, unless somebody could come up with a way of assembling plutonium material into a weapon that would explode.”

  On July 17, 1944, Oppenheimer convened a meeting in Chicago with Groves, Conant, Fermi and others, to resolve the crisis. Conant urged that they aim merely to build a low-efficiency implosion bomb based on a mixture of uranium and plutonium. Such a weapon would have had an explosive equivalent of only several hundred tons of TNT. Only after successfully testing such a low-efficiency bomb, Conant said, would the lab have the confidence to proceed with a larger weapon.

  Oppenheimer rejected this notion on the grounds that it would lead to unacceptable delays. Despite having been skeptical about the implosion idea when it was first broached by Serber, Oppenheimer now marshaled all his persuasive powers to argue that they gamble everything on an implosion-design plutonium bomb. It was an audacious and brilliant gamble. Since the spring of 1943, when Seth Neddermeyer had volunteered to experiment with the concept, little progress had been made. But in the autumn of 1943, Oppenheimer brought the Princeton mathematician John von Neumann to Los Alamos, and von Neumann calculated that implosion was possible, at least theoretically. Oppenheimer was willing to bet on it.

  “Then Robert Oppenheimer walked onto the page”

  Joseph Kanon, who wrote the novel Los Alamos, shares some of the challenges of capturing the Manhattan Project in a fictional work.

  From presentation at AHF symposium, October 2006

  BY JOSEPH KANON

  The sheer scale of the Manhattan Project is a challenge for anyone who writes about it: Tens of thousands of workers, a house built every thirty minutes in Oak Ridge, the astonishing technical achievement of just two years up here on the mesa, critical assemblies, gaseous diffusion, the complicated metallurgy—how do you put that on paper?

  Well, you don’t. You need a way in, a key. I found mine right here, in the place—Los Alamos itself. I came in the summer of ’95 as a tourist, almost as a pilgrimage. I’ve been interested in the Project and World War II in general for years so it was an absolute must-stop for me. After spending some time in the Historical Museum, fascinated, I was walking around Ashley Pond, trying to imagine the Technical Area that used to surround it. Everything now looked so anywhere-in-America. Yet fifty years earlier, this had been the most secret place on earth.

  What was it like to have been here then? I had just seen driver’s licenses made out to numbers, pictures of laundries and mess halls, hints of a daily life that was going on while the extraordinary scientific advances were being made in labs and meeting rooms. Implosion lens design during the day, a hoedown party at night, all of it taking place in a city so secret that it did not officially exist, appeared on no map. No outsiders allowed, no telephones, no police.

  At that moment, the proverbial light bulb went on over my head: What if there had been a crime? How could it be solved? How would people here have thought about it, busy as they were unraveling the more important mysteries of the atom? The idea got hold of me and kept growing. I don’t claim that it had the significance of the apple falling on Newton’s head, which anyway we are now told never happened, but unexpectedly it changed my life.

  The Manhattan Project has had a profound effect on all of us, but it had an additional personal effect on me. It made me a writer. I had never written anything before I came here and conceived the idea for this first book. But I wanted to know more, and the more I learned, the more I knew I wanted to write about it.

  There was something else going on that summer of 1995. It was the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima. The media was full of coverage, most of it understandably focused on Hiroshima’s victimization, but it seemed to me they weren’t getting the Project right. It had somehow become a group of Dr. Strangeloves gathered in the desert to bring about the end of the world. Not only was that misleading, but the reality was so much more complicated and interesting.

  The op-ed pieces had forgotten who was actually here. The average age of the scientists was 27; Oppenheimer was just turning 40. It was a young man’s project, fueled with patriotism, scientific inquiry, and, especially among the émigré scientists, a desperate determination to make the bomb before the Nazis could do so.

  What interested me about the Project, what would interest any novelist, was not the science, but these people. I grew up under the mushroom cloud—who had put it there? What had the experience been like? So I started. The Lo
s Alamos Historical Society had a wealth of just the sort of details I wanted. Floor plans of a Sundt unit—I put a character in one. Utility bills—I put a rumbling coal truck in the street. Pictures of the theater—I put a square dance there. The town—my imaginary Los Alamos—was beginning to take shape. Veterans here may not recognize it, but I hope at least that it is close, because it became the real one to me. Still, a town is only a setting.

  And then Robert Oppenheimer walked onto the page, and I had the book. The tools of fiction—plot, a sense of place, atmosphere, et cetera—do not matter without character. Only character brings pages to life. And what a character Oppenheimer was.

  I have mixed feelings about using real people in fiction. It is inevitably on some level inaccurate, even exploitative, and that was the last thing I wanted to be to someone I admired and respected. Moreover, Oppenheimer’s story, what happened then and, tragically, later, was a high-profile part of our national story, too well known to allow the usual fictional liberties.

  But no one else could conceivably have been Project Director. It would be like saying someone other than Roosevelt was President. So I decided to use him in one scene, try not to do any serious damage, and move on. Faint hope. I hadn’t reckoned on Oppenheimer, a character so brilliant, so mercurial, and so full of contradictions that he not only took over the book, but made me realize why I was writing it in the first place.

  Los Alamos is an entertainment, a thriller. To readers, it may simply be a crime story, or a love story, and that’s okay. But to me, underneath, it is, or it wants to be, a book about Oppenheimer and the other scientists here in the spring and summer of 1945 when they were only half-consciously about to change human life forever.

  July 1945 at Alamogordo is the hinge of the century. Nothing after would ever be the same. The eyewitness accounts of that morning are consistent about the scientists’ reactions: a mixture of awe, exhilaration, and then, dismay. The bomb was suddenly no longer numbers on paper, not a problem to solve, a race to win. It was real, in front of them, not just a weapon, a better bow and arrow, but something absolutely new: the possibility of complete annihilation.

  Los Alamos to me is a story of what happens when good people, for what seem to be good reasons, do something extraordinary, and yet produce consequences so complicated and troubling that over 60 years later we are still grappling with them. This is a powerful theme, and among the many creative legacies of the Manhattan Project, I count it as the most important one. It may be in the end the Project’s great gift to fiction: a cautionary tale like no other.

  But what fiction can do in turn is to personalize it, make it specific. What happened here was not an abstraction. The Manhattan Project is in danger I think of becoming a metaphor. These same op-ed pieces now ask for a Manhattan Project for global warming, for energy self-sufficiency, for any large problem that requires a marshalling of enormous resources and collective will. Well, fine, let’s marshal them. But let’s also remember the Manhattan Project as a unique event, at a unique time.

  It’s the task of the novel, even a modest one, to put the reader in someone else’s head, even briefly, to see the world as he might see it. What if you had been here in 1945? What would you have thought? Not now, carrying 60 years of anxiety and hindsight, but then, at the beginning. If a novel can make these people individuals, not Dr. Strangeloves, but people just like us, who react with the same human mix of pride and anguish, then it has accomplished something useful.

  The Manhattan Project has left us with a horrifying legacy, but we should never take the easy way out and blame the messengers. We are the messengers, too, all of us. The question that early morning in Alamogordo still asks us is: how do you want to live? Now that it’s no longer numbers on paper, no more trial runs, no takeover tests, no second chances. This is it. Now how do we live with it? Has there ever been a more important question? I don’t think any mere book can have an answer, but I hope we keep writing them—better ones than mine—and keep asking. Because I do know that if we stop asking, we stop being the people we want ourselves to be.

  Doctor Atomic: The Myth and the Man

  The opera “Doctor Atomic” focuses on J. Robert Oppenheimer as the project approaches the Trinity test on July 16, 1945. Here composer John Adams addresses why this story lends itself to interpretation through opera and how Oppenheimer, as a scientist and sensitive intellectual, was easily transformed into an operatic character.

  From presentation at AHF symposium, October 2006

  BY JOHN ADAMS

  The Manhattan Project as Opera

  The atomic bomb is the ultimate American myth. First of all, it is visually captivating. Who has not stood enraptured looking at images of atomic explosions? They are beautiful in an awesome way. They capture our attention and express something that is both conscious and unconscious. If you have something that has that ability to touch you on both these levels, it has already attained mythic status and is an ideal subject for an opera.

  Part of opera’s power is that it is such an absurd art form. You come into a hall, the lights go down, and very bizarre things happen. People enter the stage and start singing in a strangely arch and highly exaggerated way. Frequently the text is unintelligible and the stage changes in a way that is very unlike film.

  Because opera is fundamentally a musical experience, it is also a profoundly emotional one. That is why people who go to a bad performance of an opera are angrier than anyone in the world. On the other hand, when it works, opera can be an overwhelming experience.

  Doctor Atomic was an opportunity to create a work that challenges the audience on several levels. Intellectually, what were these people really thinking? Psychologically, what was the pressure being felt by those scientists during the last 24 hours before the Trinity explosion? On a moral level, audiences must confront the issues involved in introducing an atomic bomb into the world. Finally, the music is a very sensual experience. I was able to make music that gave a sense of a storm blowing across the desert, of the scientists arguing, of the final countdown and detonation of this weapon.

  Oppenheimer as Operatic Character

  So much has been said about Oppenheimer—his uniqueness, his highly cultivated background, his astonishing transformation from being an arrogant, difficult, brilliant young professor into the sort of father figure and extremely adept political person that he became, upon being appointed here.

  I reveled in making an operatic character of Oppenheimer because I realized that he was a person of enormous artistic sensibility as well as being a great scientific mind. One of the most important things to bear in mind was how much Oppenheimer loved poetry. You all know the story, which I imagine is true, that he carried a volume of French poetry, of Charles Baudelaire, with him and he even had it with him at the test site. And he said later that he named the site Trinity after the sonnet by John Donne, “Batter my heart, three -person’d god.”

  So instead of making Oppenheimer say the usual blather that you get in an operatic libretto, what we did was have Oppenheimer from time to time sing the great poetry he loved. So at many moments, when he’s not arguing with an uppity young graduate student or having to calm General Groves down, but off by himself, and he contemplates how the world is going to change, he apostrophizes in the words of these great poets.

  At the very end of Act One, Oppenheimer is finally alone after an unexpected electrical storm blew over the test site. The huge plutonium sphere, hanging like the sword of Damocles over the test site, is illuminated in the background, and Oppenheimer sings this poem, “Batter my heart, three-person’d god.” Here’s the first part of it:

  Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you

  As yet but knock; breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

  That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

  Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

  It’s written in that very elusive symbolic language of the Elizabethan metaphysical poets. But it is a d
eep poem of tremendous torment of the soul. The speaker asks that God come and literally batter him, assault him, knock him to the ground, almost kill him, to make him new, because he feels that his soul has been usurped by a dark power. Donne’s image is that of a city that has been taken over by some evil invader and he pleads with God to do this violent thing to him, so that he may become whole again.

  I think the fact that Oppenheimer could operate both spiritually as well as intellectually on both levels, both as a great scientist, as somebody who’s delivering the goods for the war effort, but at the same time, able to look beyond that and express it by an awareness of a sonnet like this, is really an extraordinary testament to the man’s universality.

  Molly B. Lawrence, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives

  In the 1930s, Ernest O. Lawrence, right, and Oppenheimer built a renowned physics program at University of California, Berkeley. Oppie introduced Lawrence to his beloved New Mexico.

  A Cascade of Different Oppenheimers

  Jon Else produced the Oscar-nominated documentary The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb. As part of a symposium on the Manhattan Project and creativity, Else discusses the challenges of portraying J. Robert Oppenheimer as a character in both historical and artistic works.

  From presentation at AHF symposium, October 2006

  BY JON ELSE

  Oppenheimer is irresistible to a writer or film producer, because he is such a ball of contradictions. We have here a mild-mannered geek who won the Second World War; a frail aesthete, Romantic poet, who was one tough cowboy, who rode horses in the nighttime with the thunder rolling around him through these mountains, probably reciting Baudelaire. We have a misfit with militarism who was utterly at home in the halls of power in Washington. Most of all, we have one of the smartest men, as Freeman Dyson said, “the smartest man he ever knew,” sitting at the very hinge of the 20th century, the use of the bomb in World War II. And that is just too good to pass up if you are an artist or if you are an historian.