The Manhattan Project

by Cynthia C. Kelly

  I said, “But I can quit. I have saved my money. I can live at home for the three months I have to be without employment and then I am going to join the Navy, the Army, or Red Cross, or whoever will take me.”

  They said, “Well, let us think about that.” And in a little while I was called in and [they] said, “We have a job. We can’t tell you what it is, where it is, but they want you to come and do quartz fiber work.” Well, that sounded kind of strange. They said, “After you agree to take the job, we’ll tell you where it is and what you will be doing.”

  I said, “Can you tell me whether it is for the war effort?”

  “Yes. But we can’t tell you what it is.”

  “Well, why?”

  “It’s secret. I will only tell you that I don’t approve of it.”

  “Why?”

  “For moral reasons.”

  “But it is for the war effort?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought about that for awhile and said, “Okay, I’ll take it.” What they told me was only that it would be an Army base, it would be in the mountains, there would be pine trees, and that once I agreed I had to stay there for the duration of the war. I really don’t remember what the salary was, but for a non-technical person I thought it was very handsome so I agreed to take it.…

  To this day I don’t know how they knew I did micro fiber work at Caltech. Then I was told, “First, you will go to Berkeley and you will report to the top floor of the chemistry building.” I got up there and was told, “Oh, you’re going to make a microbalance with quartz fibers and you’re going to design the jigs and things to make it.”

  I looked at them absolutely appalled. I never designed anything in my life and I had not made a balance. They said, “We’re sure you’ll figure it out. We’ll give you all of the help you need and we’ll expedite things through the machine shop.” I just stared. If the war effort depended on people like me, we simply had to do it. I had to learn some math, I had to learn some drafting, and they did help me.

  But after I’d been there two months, I wrote the project and said, “I quit. I’ve been here two months, I’ve never been paid, I’m hungry, I don’t have a place to stay anymore, and I’m going home.”

  A few days later, just before I planned to leave, a man with money in his hand arrived. “Your pay check was in Los Alamos [and we were] wondering why you weren’t picking it up.” So I now had money, but really no place to stay because everything was full. There was a housing shortage, so I spent the next month sleeping in beds of project workers who were away on business. For some time, I lived out of a suitcase.

  Then everything was through, the machine shipped, and I went home to Pasadena for maybe a week. But then I couldn’t get transportation [to Los Alamos] and I told them that I’m ready but I can’t get there. The train master in Pasadena called, “You have a reservation on the train on a given date and just come.” It apparently [had] been paid for. I later discovered that I had bumped a major account captain from this little roomette and that I was traveling in luxury to Los Alamos.

  I was to be met and so I dressed with care, a little pillbox with a veil, my precious nylons, high heels, and I was ready to go to Los Alamos. Well, I stood on the platform and waited and waited and finally a WAC came up and said, “Are you Becky Diven?”

  SINGING HUNGARIAN

  The first year I was here, I was eating at Fuller Lodge, having lunch, and at the next table were about five or six men eating. All of a sudden they started singing the Hungarian National Anthem, so I joined in and sang with them, since I grew up singing it with my folks. Afterwards, I went over to one of the men and asked who he was, what he was doing here, and, well, he was Edward Teller! So that was how I got to meet some of the fellows early—not on the job, but after the job, when they were off socializing.

  —FRED AUSBACH

  I later discovered they said, “She’s never going to last here.” I got to Los Alamos and discovered I was making a microbalance to weigh plutonium. They only had micro amounts in January of 1944. And in due time I made a microbalance. However, nobody had calculated static electricity. Every time we were ready to weigh something it smacked up against the wall and broke, so the balance was delayed and delayed. In due time, we made a weighing of the total supply of plutonium on a microbalance.

  Life at P.O. Box 1663

  Ruth Marshak contrasts the life of a physicist’s wife in peacetime and in wartime as she remembers following her husband, Robert Marshak, to an “unknown, secret place… a destination without a name.”

  From “Secret City”

  BY RUTH MARSHAK

  A physicist’s wife in peacetime and a physicist’s wife in wartime are, I have discovered, two very different things. In the years before our country was at war, this wife’s interests were identical with those of any other academic lady. She went to faculty teas, fretted over her budget, and schemed for her husband’s advancement. Although a physicist was inclined to work rather longer hours than his colleagues in other departments of the university, his wife’s life was no different from that of the wife of a history professor. It was a good life, too.

  Even before the Pearl Harbor attack, however, the physicist’s routine had changed. Defense projects were started in college laboratories; armed guards began to pace the thresholds of physics buildings. One’s husband grew more secretive about his work, and one knew that his job must be important, for he was immune from the draft. The physicist’s wife realized that her husband, in wartime, was more than just a college professor—his was a key profession in the defense of his country.

  Some physicists remained at home to teach the few students who were left in the universities. Others worked on subcontracts for the Army or the Navy in their own laboratories. But many were forced to leave home in order to do their part in developing and perfecting the weapons of war. They went to a giant installation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work on radar. They went to Washington as Naval Ordnance men. They went to Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Then, sometimes, the wives who accompanied them found that they were moving to a destination without a name.

  I was one of the women thus bound for an unknown and secret place. “I can tell you nothing about it,” my husband said. “We’re going away, that’s all.” This made me feel a little like the heroine of a melodrama. It is never easy to say goodbye to beloved and familiar patterns of living. It is particularly difficult when you do not know what substitute for them will be offered you. Where was I going and why was I going there? I plied my husband with questions which he steadfastly refused to answer.

  “Be careful what you say,” he warned me over and over again. As if I, confused and distraught, knew anything which might be of aid and comfort to the enemy! German agents could probably tell me a thing or two, I reflected bitterly. I went about my packing in a daze. Many questions quivered on my lips, but I would have to wait two years to find out most of their answers. “What’s it all about?” I cried to my husband. “At least tell me why we are going away?”—That was in 1943, and only when an atomic bomb ripped Hiroshima in the fall of 1945 did I really understand.

  When I left home, I had never even heard the name, “Los Alamos.” I gradually became aware, however, that we were going to the Southwest. My husband had received a letter of instructions which said, in part, “Go to 109 East Palace Street, Santa Fe, New Mexico. There you will find out how to complete your trip.” What should I expect? Rattlesnakes? Outdoor privies? My concerns as a housewife over the mechanics of living seemed rather petty in the face of the secrecy surrounding our destination. I felt akin to the pioneer women accompanying their husbands across uncharted plains westward, alert to danger, resigned to the fact that they journeyed, for weal or for woe, into the Unknown. The analogy is incomplete, for I rode, not in a covered wagon, but in a red coupe, comfortably, over silver highways. The hazards of the road were not Indians but the broken glass that menaced our thin, irreplaceable tires.

  Ju
st before reaching New Mexico, we stopped at a gasoline station in Colorado. The attendant looked over the loaded car, examined our license plates, and asked us where we were heading. We replied that we were bound for New Mexico. The man studied my husband and said, “Oh, you folks must be going to that secret project!” He needed no encouragement to launch into a detailed and accurate description of our new home. Thus for my husband’s caution! We proceeded on our way, feeling considerably less important.

  We arrived in Santa Fe, dusty, tired, and hungry. The Plaza, the antiquity of the architecture, the Indians hawking their wares—all were just as we had imagined they might be. Too much cannot be said for the poetic gesture which placed that fantastic settlement, Los Alamos, in that fantastic state, New Mexico. Santa Fe is the second oldest town in the United States, and its various racial and cultural strata have never quite jelled. There are Indian pueblos nearby with civilizations that were old in Coronado’s time and have changed but little since. The predominant racial stock in Santa Fe and the country around it is Spanish-American. These people are descendants of the conquistadores, have some Indian blood certainly, but still are completely different from the Indians in both appearance and customs. They till the soil much as their ancestors did centuries ago. I was to find both kinds of “natives” working at Los Alamos, and they gave a remarkable flair to the place. There they were, the oldest peoples of America, conservative, unchanged, barely touched by our industrial civilization, working on a project with an object so radical that it would be hailed as initiating a new age. The Indians and Spanish Americans of New Mexico were the most unlikely of all peoples to be ushers to the atomic epoch.

  The day after we arrived in Santa Fe, we went to 109 East Palace for our passes. We received our instructions from Mrs. McKibbin, who was in charge of the office. I learned nothing new, really. I had already realized that when my husband joined the Manhattan Project it would be as if we shut a great door behind us. The world I had known of friends and family would no longer be real to me. Why, my parents were not even allowed to come to Santa Fe on a pleasure trip! The only bridge between us would be the shadowy one of censored letters. By a rapid transmutation, my husband and I had become different people. He could not even admit that he was a physicist; his profession was “engineer.” Now we were part of the top secret of the war, that great secret which lay behind our innocent rural address: P.O. Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  P.O. Box 1663 went by many names. Those who lived there were inclined to call it Los Alamos or the mesa. People in Santa Fe referred to it as the Hill. In Manhattan District jargon it was known as Site Y, and although another designation, Zia Project, never really caught on, everyone said, familiarly, “Here on the Project.” A mournful GI once wailed, “Lost—almost,” and the populace laughed, but few called it that. People coming to the Project often spoke of it as Shangri-La.

  The first thing I learned about my new home was that it was not, as I had supposed, in the desert, but rather was on top of a mesa thirty-five miles from Santa Fe. The most direct road to it was a treacherous washboard running through the Indian pueblo of San Ildefonso, over the muddy Rio Grande, and then up a series of narrow switchbacks. As we neared the top of the mesa, the view was breathtaking. Behind us lay the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, at sunset bathed in changing waves of color—scarlets and lavenders. Below was the desert with its flatness broken by majestic palisades that seemed like the ruined cathedrals and palaces of some old, great, vanished race. Ahead was Los Alamos, and beyond the flat plateau on which it sat was its backdrop, the Jemez Mountain Range. Whenever things went wrong at Los Alamos, and there was never a day when they didn’t, we had this one consolation—we had a view.

  A mile or two before reaching the settlement itself, we had to show our temporary passes to the MP on duty. He jotted our pass and car license numbers on the record for the day. Passes were to be a solemn business in our lives. A lost pass meant hours of delay in the guard’s hutment, an elemental little structure, its stark walls decorated with starkly naked pinup girls. The expiration date of a pass was apt to creep up, finding one unaware on just the day one had planned an outing. Many a tearful woman or belligerent gent found themselves stopped at the guardhouse, while the rest of the party sailed gaily by. The fence penning Los Alamos was erected and guarded to keep out the treasonable, the malicious, and the curious. This fence had a real effect on the psychology of the people behind it. It was a tangible barrier, a symbol of our isolated lives. Within it lay the most secret part of the atomic bomb project. Los Alamos was a world unto itself, an island in the sky.

  U.S. Department of Energy

  Only scientists and personnel with proper clearance were allowed to enter the fenced-off Technical Area at Los Alamos.

  THE GENERAL’S IN A STEW

  General Leslie R. Groves was reputed to have complained to Dr. Oppenheimer about the number of children being born on the Hill. Couldn’t something be done about it, the General wanted to know. A jingle celebrating this remark went in part:

  The General’s in a stew

  He trusted you and you

  He thought you’d be scientific

  Instead you’re just prolific

  And what is he to do?

  FIZZLERS AND STINKERS

  No one could mention the professions “physicist” and “chemist” even within the gates of Los Alamos. We called them, I’m sorry to admit, “fizzlers” and “stinkers.” A friend in the Tech Area, seeking the Chemistry Office, once asked a janitor, “Where is the Stinker’s Office located?” He led her up the stairs and down a long hallway, then ceremoniously opened a door and ushered her in. She was embarrassed to find herself in the Ladies Room.

  —JANE WILSON, STANDING BY AND MAKING DO

  A Boy’s Adventures at Los Alamos

  Dana Mitchell was the son of Dr. Dana P. Mitchell, whom J. Robert Oppenheimer had recruited from Columbia University to become an assistant director for the Los Alamos Laboratory in charge of procurement and other matters. Dana shares some of his adventures at Los Alamos as a ten- to twelve-year-old boy.

  BY DANA MITCHELL

  My father had been recruited by Oppenheimer to become an assistant director of the Los Alamos project. I have a letter that my father wrote to my mother, dated March 16th, 1943:

  Dearest,

  Arrived on time to hotel, then went to see Oppie. He left me his office, a Packard convertible coupe, an appointment at $7200 per year with the University of California, a check for $1000 made out to “cash,” and carte blanche to do as I pleased with absolutely nothing to work with, or on, except a great vacuum to be filled with what the staff will soon need, and no cue as to what that is except for my past experience.

  Practically no catalogues, one typist, no files, almost no stationery supplies, a lot of heterogeneous lists of things to come, some that others have had, and some that they sort of want. Much too little of the latter. I feel like I was in the desert now, and I think I’ll soon go there, since there seems to be little more to work with here. I’m not down—it’s so appalling, it’s almost exhilarating!

  A few months later, when I was ten years old, he got permission to get us out there. He told Oppie, “I’ve been separated from my family for too damn long and I really want to have them here.” So we got on a train. Apparently they had a compartment reserved on every Santa Fe train back and forth between Chicago and Los Alamos, so we had that compartment, which was very nice. We met Oppie at Lamy, and I got all excited because he was in an Army sedan, a khaki-colored sedan. So we went up that dirt trail to Los Alamos, which was really a dangerous road. He put us in the Ranch School guest house. At this point, they hadn’t yet built the quad apartments where we lived later on. There wasn’t much housing at all.

  One of the things I remember about the guest house is that my mother turned back the sheets that evening and it said, in big black print, “U-S-E-D.” I was about ten years old and I said “Used?! That’s pretty strange. Used sheets? C
an’t they afford new sheets?”

  My mother said “No, no—that stands for United States Engineering Detachment.”

  I didn’t care, as long as they were new sheets!

  This was seven months before they built a school. The kids there were all children of physicists and engineers and chemists and so on, and these kids were dangerously bright, so they had to do something with us for those seven months, or else we would have prematurely blown up the site ourselves! They figured out some things to do, and we figured out some things to do. They used the cavalry horses to teach us how to ride horseback. The graduation present for that was terrific. We saddled up—I still remember to get that cinch strapped tight, or you’re going to end up under your horse. We went over to the post theater, which was just a frame building with potbelly stoves on the sides to heat it and wood benches, and we watched a Western. And then we got back on our horses at the hitching rail and rode back to the stables. For a city kid, born in New York City, this was it! This was great!

  We went hiking and mountain climbing. Several of the women there were really good skiers and they taught us how to ski, and that was great. So that spring they were just getting to building the school and we’d walk over there and look at this construction activity and think “Oh, no! Should we tip over the nail kegs, or rip some of the framing apart? No, wouldn’t do any good, they’d just put it back together again.”

  We were always raiding the junk pile there. In the Project, they decided that it was a lot better to throw stuff out than to repair it. By the time they could have repaired something, they would have invented a better version anyway. So this junk pile filled up with discarded electronics and lab equipment. And as the children of physicists, chemical, and electrical engineers, we grabbed whatever we wanted and filled our bedrooms.