The Manhattan Project

by Cynthia C. Kelly

  Unlike many of the people from this period, Oppenheimer did not leave a diary, nor did he write an autobiography. No one is quite sure why. This is sort of odd for a man who was so eloquent in his letter-writing, particularly the letters to his brother Frank.

  He left thousands and thousands of pages of correspondence, scientific papers, and documents. It is almost as though he was daring those of us who came afterwards: “Just try to tell this story and see what happens!” So we’ve all been trying. Over the last couple decades, Oppenheimer has not emerged as a single icon, the way that Einstein has as the “Genius.” While McCarthy represents “McCarthyism,” Oppenheimer doesn’t represent “Oppenheimer-ism.”

  Instead, popular culture has created a whole cascade of different Oppenheimers. There is the post-Hiroshima Oppenheimer on the cover of Time magazine as “America’s number one thinker on atomic energy.” Then there is the post-hearings martyr Oppenheimer, when we start to see more complex ambiguities. Recently, there has been a wonderful flood of books including Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird’s recent book American Prometheus, Priscilla McMillan’s The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer, Jeremy Bernstein’s Portrait of an Enigma, Jennet Conant’s 109 East Palace, and John Adams’s opera, “Doctor Atomic.”

  In an odd sort of way, Oppenheimer no longer belongs to himself (any more than the historical Prince Hamlet belongs to himself) as both nonfiction and fiction about him have taken on a life of their own. I think that’s fine. I hope that long after we’re gone, there will be Oppenheimers upon Oppenheimers that keep getting concocted by historians and by artists. That’s how culture works.

  Section Four

  Secret Cities

  Secret Cities

  The three principal Manhattan Project sites were “secret cities” where 125,000 people worked and lived and were not on any maps during World War II. These sites were established in remote areas across the country, nestled in the wooded hills along the Clinch River in eastern Tennessee, on the high desert beside the Columbia River in eastern Washington State, and on an isolated mesa above the Rio Grande in northern New Mexico.

  Secrecy was paramount and the sites were referred to only by their code names, “X,” “Y,” and “Z.” Employees were issued badges and driver’s licenses had numbers without any names. The five thousand residents at Los Alamos shared the same address: P.O. Box 1663 in Santa Fe, making Sears and Roebuck sales clerks extremely curious when they received orders for more than a dozen baby bassinets to be delivered to the same address. Beyond the large-scale work at Oak Ridge, Hanford, and Los Alamos, there were secret activities occurring in many cities in the United States and abroad, including Washington, D.C.; Wilmington, Delaware; Chicago; Boston; Rochester, New York; Berkeley, California; Pittsburgh; Cleveland; St. Louis; Detroit; Dayton, Ohio; Montreal; and London.

  The odds of producing an atomic bomb in time for use in World War II were long because of the enormous number of scientific and technical issues that had to be resolved. Fearing that Germany had a two-year lead, the Manhattan Project leaders hedged their bets by undertaking several different approaches simultaneously. Two different ingredients, plutonium and highly enriched uranium, were pursued as the fuel for an atomic bomb. Three techniques were utilized to produce highly enriched uranium at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, while gigantic facilities at Hanford, Washington, were built to produce plutonium. At Los Alamos, New Mexico, physicists, chemists, and engineers worked on the theoretical and practical aspects of making atomic bombs from both types of material.

  Virtually built from scratch, these communities most closely resembled frontier towns. Aside from the security restrictions and military police, the common denominator of Los Alamos, Hanford, and Oak Ridge in the early years was ever-present mud and dust, as barracks, dormitories, and houses were quickly built along unpaved roads for the steady influx of people. Early plans far underestimated the number of people needed to construct and operate the plants and laboratories, and there was a chronic shortage of housing, schools, health-care facilities, and other resources. At Oak Ridge, a community known euphemistically as “Happy Valley” housed nearly 15,000 people in barracks, trailers, and temporary shelters, with long lines in the morning to use the communal bathing facilities.

  Workers were only told as much as they needed to know to do their jobs and were forbidden to talk about what they did with others, including their wives and close colleagues. Many only learned the purpose of their efforts on August 6, 1945, when radio broadcasts and newspaper headlines announced that an atomic bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. In this section, accounts from physicists, members of the Special Engineer Detachment, Women’s Army Corps, family members, and others convey the broad spectrum of perspectives on the Manhattan Project experience. Written works, oral histories, photographs, and other materials offer a glimpse of what life and work were like in these wartime “secret cities.”

  “A new and uncertain adventure in the wilderness”

  Author Stephane Groueff discusses the initial recruitment of scientists and the need to abandon plans to put the military in charge at Los Alamos.

  From Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of the Making of the Atomic Bomb

  BY STEPHANE GROUEFF

  Most of the recruitment of the first Los Alamos team was done by Oppenheimer personally. He traveled from university to university—Princeton, Berkeley, Chicago, MIT, Cornell—and contacted promising scientists, primarily those who were already engaged in some form of nuclear research. Nearly all accepted the invitation to embark on a new and uncertain adventure and live in the wilderness of New Mexico’s mountains. The crash programs to develop radar and the proximity fuse—two top-priority war projects that had previously drained the nation’s supply of first-rate scientists—were completed by 1943, and Oppenheimer was able to recruit some stellar scientific talent—men like Edwin McMillan, Luis W. Alvarez, Kenneth T. Bainbridge, Robert F. Bacher and others.

  Because of the purpose and secrecy of the Los Alamos laboratory, the original idea was to make it a military installation and put all the scientists in uniform. Conant approved of the idea; having served with the Army’s chemical warfare unit during World War I, he was in favor of a military laboratory. Oppenheimer himself was not against the idea, and plans were discussed of making him a lieutenant colonel and giving the heads of the laboratory’s various divisions the rank of major.

  But strong opposition came from many scientists, especially from Bacher and Isidor I. Rabi, who were winding up work then on radar at MIT before heading west for Los Alamos. Oppenheimer wanted these top two physicists, but they refused categorically to work in uniform. They insisted that a scientific group organized along military lines would be too rigid and inefficient for laboratory work; rank would be an annoyance and a serious impediment. Facing the danger of losing other talented scientists loyal to Bacher and Rabi, the Project’s leaders abandoned the idea; Los Alamos would be organized as a civilian laboratory. Most people who did not know Groves well expected him to raise the roof; as it turned out, however, he did nothing to impose the militarization. He only chuckled, privately, when imagining how some professors would look in uniform—and trying to salute at that!

  The first men to arrive in Los Alamos were Robert Wilson from Princeton, Robert Serber, McMillan and Joseph Kennedy from Berkeley, John H. Williams from Minnesota, and John H. Manley, a nuclear physicist who had worked at Columbia before joining Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory. Manley had been used earlier to help organize the new laboratory. He had been sent, by Oppenheimer, to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Purdue and other universities to persuade scientists to come to Los Alamos. Manley’s big handicap in recruiting was that he was not allowed to reveal the exact purpose or location of the laboratory. Nevertheless practically all of the scientists accepted. Manley also went to Boston to discuss the design of the Los Alamos buildings, which were to be constructed by Stone and Webster.

  Oppenheimer arrived in Santa Fe on March 15, 1943, and the of
fices were moved to Los Alamos in the middle of April. Working and living conditions at that time were extremely inadequate, even primitive by big-city standards. Housing construction was slow, the road was bad, and telephone conversations with Santa Fe were possible only over a Forest Service line.

  While waiting for the construction of Los Alamos, the scientists who had already left their homes grew impatient and decided to go up to the Hill even before their living quarters were ready. They drove their cars up the dirt road to the mesa and started helping construction workers by counting the cement loads, checking trucks in and out, even redesigning the piping and electrical lines for more efficient functioning, often only to add to the confusion. Oppenheimer had had no experience in organizing a large laboratory, and had not shown any particular predisposition for teamwork before. His appointment had therefore been met with some surprise and criticism by many colleagues. But very soon he amazed everybody by his rapid transformation from academic professor to competent administrator. The initial plan, drafted by Oppenheimer, McMillan and Manley, provided for a scientific staff of about one hundred. Four divisions were formed, each one including different groups with specific assignments.

  Hans Bethe, a brilliant, forty-year-old German refugee and former Cornell professor, became the head of the Theoretical Division, in which physicists of the caliber of Teller, Serber and Victor F. Weisskopf were among the group leaders. Bacher, who had also taught at Cornell earlier, became leader of the Experimental Physics Division with Emilio Segrè, Manley, Wilson, Williams and Darol K. Froman heading the various groups. Both Bethe and Bacher had been working on radar at MIT when Oppenheimer came to recruit them. Joe Kennedy, only twenty-six but already one of Glenn Seaborg’s outstanding students, was put in charge of the Chemical Division. Captain William S. Parsons, a studious, efficient Regular Navy officer who had been for a certain period Vannevar Bush’s assistant on the combat use of the proximity fuse, became the leader of the Ordnance Division.

  Most of the specialized equipment was brought or sent out to Los Alamos by the scientists who were going to use it. The University of Wisconsin group, for example, arrived with two Van de Graaff machines for accelerating atomic particles; Manley’s team from the University of Illinois bought a Cockcroft-Walton accelerator; the Berkeley scientists provided highly specialized physics apparatus.

  The largest item, a cyclotron, was “borrowed” from Harvard by Robert Wilson’s Princeton group—but not without some difficulty. When Wilson first asked for it, he did not mention what kind of project it would be used for. “We need it for some medical research,” he merely said. But when the Harvard scientists refused to part with so precious a research tool, Wilson had to admit, “OK, it’s not for medical research. I’m not allowed to tell you exactly what, but it’s going to be used for very important things. You can trust us!” Then Conant dropped a few words to one of his assistants at Harvard and no further questions were asked; the cyclotron was taken apart and put on rail flatcars for the long journey west to Santa Fe.

  “A crazy place to do any war thing”

  Stirling Colgate was a student at the Los Alamos Ranch School when Oppenheimer and Ernest O. Lawrence visited under assumed names while they were deciding whether it should be the location of the new laboratory. Despite this pretense of secrecy, young Colgate quickly recognized Oppenheimer because of his famous porkpie hat. After the war, a national magazine had a photograph of the hat on its cover, aware that people would recognize it without further explanation.

  From AHF Oral Histories

  INTERVIEW WITH STIRLING COLGATE

  Before any of the important visitors arrived, we knew that the decision had been made that this would be a laboratory. About a month or two earlier, a “mega-bulldozer” came through the place and set about redoing things—roads and everything else. The construction work was being done at a tremendous rate.

  There were four of us who were seniors at the Los Alamos Boys Ranch School. To fill in for one of the faculty, I was teaching the math class. We knew the school was going to be closed because of the war. I mean you just felt it. But we were all wondering why the government would put anything up here on the mesa. It was so hard to get water and there was no good transportation or railroads nearby and so on. It was just a crazy place to do any war thing. Secrecy? You would do so much better, if secrecy is what you want, to locate it in the middle of a military compound. Just anything else.

  So we used to kid from the very beginning about what kind of science-fiction laboratory they might have here with white-coated scientists. Then these two guys show up, one wearing a porkpie hat and the other wearing a fedora, a hat that we thought was uniquely E. O. Lawrence. Of course the porkpie, there was just no question that this was Oppenheimer.

  We knew enough from physics class and publications of the current physics issues that fission could be used to make a chain reaction. So when those two showed up after this place had already been run over by the mega-bulldozer, there was absolutely no question in the mind of a couple of us smart ass kids that this meant that they would be making a nuclear bomb.

  Excitement, Devotion, and Patriotism Prevailed

  Part of Oppenheimer’s recruiting strategy was to whisper to young physicists that the project might not only end this war but it might bring an end to all future wars. In this excerpt, J. Robert Oppenheimer recalls his efforts to convince top scientists to join the project at Los Alamos.

  From In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer

  BY THE UNITED STATES ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION

  The prospect of coming to Los Alamos aroused great misgivings. It was to be a military post; men were asked to sign up more or less for the duration; restrictions on travel and on the freedom of families to move about would be severe.… The notion of disappearing into the New Mexico desert for an indeterminate period and under quasimilitary auspices disturbed a good many scientists, and the families of many more. But there was another side to it. Almost everyone realized that this was a great undertaking. Almost everyone knew that if it were completed successfully and rapidly enough, it might determine the outcome of the war. Almost everyone knew that it was an unparalleled opportunity to bring to bear the basic knowledge and art of science for the benefit of his country. Almost everyone knew that this job, if it were achieved, would be part of history. This sense of excitement, of devotion and of patriotism in the end prevailed. Most of those with whom I talked came to Los Alamos.

  U.S. Department of Energy

  The road to the laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, was treacherous, winding its way along steep canyon cliffs up to the isolated mesa.

  The Case of the Vanishing Physicists

  Mathematician Stanislaw Ulam was asked to join a secret wartime project in New Mexico while working at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Here he recalls the way in which he discovered that he was not the only recruit from the Wisconsin campus for this hush-hush effort.

  From Adventures of a Mathematician

  BY STANISLAW ULAM

  Soon after, other people I knew well began to vanish one after the other, without saying where—cafeteria acquaintances, young physics professors and graduate students like David Frisch, and his wife Rose, who was a graduate student in my calculus class, Joseph McKibben, Dick Taschek, and others.

  Finally I learned that we were going to New Mexico, to a place not far from Santa Fe. Never having heard about New Mexico, I went to the library and borrowed the Federal Writers’ Project Guide to New Mexico. At the back of the book, on the slip of paper on which borrowers signed their names, I read the names of Joan Hinton, David Frisch, Joseph McKibben, and all the other people who had been mysteriously disappearing to hush-hush war jobs without saying where. I had uncovered their destination in a simple and unexpected fashion. It is next to impossible to maintain absolute secrecy and security in war time.

  Learning on the Job

  In late 1942, Rebecca Diven decided that she wanted to leave her home in Pas
adena, California, to take spring semester classes at the University of New Mexico. She took an odd job at California Institute of Technology in order to earn enough money to make the trip. However, her work there led her down a very different path from the one she had anticipated.

  From AHF Oral Histories

  INTERVIEW WITH REBECCA DIVEN

  The job I got was unexpected. It was at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the sub-basement. We were not exactly honest with each other. I didn’t say I planned to leave in February and they didn’t tell me I was working on a National Defense Project. So December 7th came along. I went to work, a great big sign on the door: National Defense Project, No Entrance without Permission. I was locked in.…

  You couldn’t leave work without written permission, to prevent postulating during the war. It wasn’t the time to go to New Mexico anyway, so I stayed. This job involved quartz fiber work, micro fibers. It was in the sub-basement of the chemistry building working on Linus Pauling’s invention of an oxygen meter for submarines.

  I was trained on the job. I had never worked with micro fibers. By close to October of 1943, the oxygen meter had gone into manufacturing to make it on scale for the submarines and I was bored silly. That wasn’t what I wanted, so I told my bosses at Caltech that I was going to quit and was told, “You can’t quit. You are locked in.”