The Manhattan Project

by Cynthia C. Kelly

  As for army life, we did indeed partake of this during the time when we weren’t actually working. We had to undergo hated calisthenics in the early morning, and traditional Saturday morning inspection, for example—but no KP [kitchen duties]! Comparing notes we discovered that most of us had something in common—our educational or training backgrounds in science, particularly in physics and chemistry. Also scattered among us were machinists, including my neighbor in the next bunk, David Greenglass [later revealed to be an atomic spy].

  My first supervisor turned out to be a British physicist by the name of Philip B. Moon. He arrived at Los Alamos just weeks after I did, as one member of the group of British scientists who had by agreement joined forces with American scientists to work on the Manhattan Project, rather than working independently in Great Britain. He was the first practicing physicist I had ever met (apart from my City College professors), and what an introduction it was! Phil, as he insisted on being called, was an amazingly sloppy dresser. The first thing I noticed about him was that he wore a tie for a belt. And he perpetually had a cigarette dangling from his lips, with one eye closed to keep the smoke out, and with ashes forever falling randomly about him.

  Much later I learned that he was one of the scientists who had performed very early work on the neutron, after its discovery by Chadwick. We became good friends—I was greatly taken by his wry sense of humor, and we corresponded with each other for a while after the war. He had a wife, Winifred, who was the quintessential English matron, very tall and broad, with an accent I could never understand, but warm and friendly. Much later, when I had helped organize the so-called “Mushroom Society,” a club consisting of myself, Norman Greenspan, and occasionally Ted Hall [who later admitted to spying for the Soviet Union], Winifred and Phil would on occasion come as invited guests to listen to our classical record collection in a small office where we had installed a homemade hi-fidelity system.

  In a month or two I was called to a small meeting of SEDs who, like myself, were working on various aspects of explosives. At the meeting we were greeted by the head of the Explosives Division, George B. Kistiakowsky. “Kisty” was a professor of chemistry at Harvard, one of the most distinguished chemists in the world, as I was to find out later. He had a strong Russian accent, and was very approachable and good-natured. The purpose of the meeting was to let the GIs know what was going on at Los Alamos. He laid it all out, from beginning to end.…

  Everything fell into place with Kistiakowsky’s revelations, from the mysterious distillation plants in Oak Ridge to the overwhelming secrecy of the entire project. The only thing I had cause to be miffed about was my faded hope that the Manhattan Project would get me back to New York. Still, the thought that somehow I had landed in the middle of what was certainly a historic enterprise was exhilarating and inspiring.

  U.S. Department of Energy

  Mud was a major source of irritation at Los Alamos and the other sites, generated by hasty construction and few sidewalks.

  “A bad time to get a new boss”

  Joseph Kanon’s novel Los Alamos is a murder mystery set in New Mexico during the Manhattan Project. While most of the characters and plot are fictional, Kanon captures both the youthful exuberance and unrelenting intensity of the top secret laboratory as it races to create an atomic bomb. In this excerpt, Oppenheimer makes a cameo appearance on a dark day in the history of the Los Alamos project.

  From Los Alamos

  BY JOSEPH KANON

  Suddenly the street began to fill with people coming out of the buildings, then standing around aimlessly, unsure what to do, as if an explosion had gone off inside. Some of the women hugged each other. Others began to move in haphazard groups toward the open area in front of the Admin Building, anxious and listless at the same time.

  Mills went up to the guard. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s the President—Roosevelt’s dead,” he said, not looking at them.

  Nobody said a word. Connolly felt winded, caught by an unexpected punch. He was surprised by how much he minded. Only the war was supposed to end, not the foundation of things. Now what? He imagined himself back in Washington—bells tolling, people stupefied in their maze of offices, the humming of gossip about a new order that was beginning before its time. Most of the people he knew there had come to Washington for Roosevelt, measuring their lives by his successes. They never expected to know anything else. Now the others would begin scurrying to make the town over—it wasn’t too soon, even now. For the first time since he’d come to Los Alamos, Connolly missed it, that nervous feeling of being at the center of things, where telephones rang and everything mattered. He felt suddenly marooned on a cool, bright plateau, looking at an inconsequential crime while the rest of the world skipped a beat.

  They joined the others drifting toward the Admin Building, drawn home like children after dark. It was only when he saw Oppenheimer appear on the steps that he realized why they had come. There was a different White House here, and the plain army-green building was as central and reassuring as the one across from Lafayette Square. There were no loudspeakers and Oppenheimer barely raised his voice, so that Connolly missed most of what he said. There would be a service on Sunday. He knew everyone must be shocked. He knew they would carry on the President’s ideals. The words faded even as he spoke them. But no one looked anywhere else. His face visibly troubled, Oppenheimer held them all with the force of his caring. In Washington there had been the rakish glint of Roosevelt’s eyes, his generous celebration of worldliness, but here the center was held by Oppie’s almost luminous intelligence. It was his town. When something went wrong—the water supply, a death in the larger family—they didn’t have to hear what he said. It was enough to have him here.

  Connolly looked at the crowd of his new town. Scientists in jeans. Nurses and WACs and young typists with vivid red nails. Fresh-faced graduate students in sweater vests and ties—you could almost see them raising their hands in class, eager to impress. Some were openly weeping, but most people simply stood there, sober after a party. And then Oppenheimer was finished, coming down the few steps to join the crowd, and people began drifting back, not wanting to burden him further.

  Connolly couldn’t stop watching him, and Oppenheimer, glancing up, caught his stare and looked puzzled for a moment, until he placed him. He was walking toward them, and Connolly felt oddly pleased to be singled out, then embarrassed when he saw that Oppie had been headed for Professor Weber all along.

  “Well, Hans,” he said, placing a hand on his shoulder, “a sad day.”

  Weber, always in motion, now seemed to bubble over. “Terrible, terrible. A gift to the Nazis. A gift.”

  Oppenheimer looked at his watch. “It’s already tomorrow there. Friday the thirteenth. Dr. Goebbels won’t even have to consult his astrologer. For once, a clear sign, eh?”

  “But Robert, the music. What should we do? Should we cancel this evening? It seems not respectful.”

  “No, by all means let’s have the music,” Oppenheimer said softly. “Let the Nazis look at their entrails—we’ll take our signs from the music.”

  Weber nodded. Oppenheimer, in a gesture of remembering his manners, turned to include Connolly. “You know Mr. Connolly?”

  “Yes, forgive me. I didn’t see you. We met at the dancing.”

  “How are you getting on?” Oppenheimer said.

  “All right, I guess.”

  “Good. You must invite him to your evening, Hans.” Then, to Connolly, “All work and no play—it can be a disease here. They’re really quite good.”

  “But I have invited him. Yes? You remember? So come.”

  “I’m planning on it. If there’s room.”

  “Oh, there’s always room,” Oppenheimer said. “And the cakes are even better than the music.”

  “Vays mir,” Weber said, putting his hand to his head. “Johanna. You’ll excuse me, please?” But he went off before anyone could answer.

  Oppenheimer lit a cig
arette and sucked the smoke deeply, like opium. “He likes to help. Schnecken. Seed cake. I think the music is an excuse. How are you getting on?”

  “Slowly. Thanks for running interference on the files.”

  “I hope they’re worth it. They say bad things run in threes—maybe you’ll find something yet.”

  “Would that make three? Has something else happened?”

  “No, I’m anticipating. It’s been just the opposite. Today Otto Frisch finished the critical assembly experiments with metallic U-235.” He paused, looking at Connolly. “You haven’t the faintest idea what I’m talking about, have you? Well, so much the better. I probably shouldn’t be talking about it in any case. Suffice to say, it’s a significant step—best news in a week. And now this. No doubt there’s some philosophical message in it all, but I’m damned if I see it.”

  “Did you know him well?”

  “The President? No, not very well. I’ve met him, of course, but I can’t say that I knew him. He was charming. But that’s beside the point.”

  “Which is?”

  “It was his project. He okayed it. Now it’s anybody’s guess—”

  “Truman opposed it?”

  “He doesn’t know about it.”

  “What?”

  Oppenheimer smiled. “You know, I’m constantly surprised at security’s being surprised when something secret is kept secret. No, he doesn’t know. Nobody there knew except Roosevelt and the committee. And I expect he’ll be furious when Stimson tells him what he didn’t know.”

  “Touchy, anyway,” Connolly agreed. “But he’s not going to pull the plug at this point.”

  “How well do you really know Washington? This project has cost nearly two billion dollars.” He watched Connolly’s eyes widen. “None of the men you sent to Washington to spend your money knows a thing about it.”

  “That’s a lot of money to hide,” Connolly said, thinking about his own paltry search.

  “Only Roosevelt could have ordered it,” Oppenheimer said. “It had to come from the top. Still does.”

  “So you’re off to Washington, hat in hand?”

  “No,” Oppenheimer said, “nothing that drastic. General Groves will take care of it—he knows his way around those land mines better than anybody. But it’s—” He hesitated, grinding out his cigarette. “A complication. We were always racing against time, and now it’s worse. It’s a bad time to get a new boss.”

  “It always is.”

  “This is a particularly bad time.”

  “Can I ask you a question? What if it doesn’t work?”

  “I never ask myself that. It will.”

  “Because it has to?”

  “Because the science is there. It will work. The question now is what happens after that. The generals will want to own it. We’ll need a whole new kind of civilian control. Otherwise, all our work here—” He looked away, rehearsing some talk with himself. “Otherwise, it will be a tragedy. Roosevelt saw that. Now we have—who? Some politician nobody ever heard of. How can he be expected to make such a decision? For all I know, he’ll think it’s just a giant hand grenade.” He stopped, catching himself. “Well, let’s hope for the best,” he said, looking back at Connolly. “A little music for the soul. Seven o’clock. Weber’s on Bathtub Row—just ask anyone. By the way, I hope you’re not looking too closely at my bank account. It feels like someone’s going through my laundry.”

  Tumbleweed and Jackrabbits in the Evergreen State

  In this excerpt, Steve Buckingham discusses how many of the workers at Hanford came from the South, recruited by the DuPont Company. Expecting the mountains of western Washington, new arrivals were often surprised to be greeted by the dusty plains of the high desert of the Columbia Basin.

  From AHF Oral Histories

  INTERVIEW WITH STEVE BUCKINGHAM

  DuPont had to hire over 50,000 people but the War Manpower Board dictated where you could recruit. During the war, you just couldn’t go over to the West Coast and recruit people from the shipyards or from Boeing over there. So a lot of recruitment was done down South.

  In the 1940s, the South wasn’t highly industrialized and was prime territory for recruiting labor. That’s why so many Southerners live here. They were offered a paying job and given a railroad ticket.

  I have to always kind of laugh because the trains came through Pasco, where the railroad station was located, about 2:00 in the morning. I’m sure if it’d come by during daylight hours they wouldn’t have bothered to get off the train. The recruiting posters lured people to come to “the evergreen state of Washington, sparkling rivers, snow capped peaks, wonderful fishing and hunting.” But what do you find? A desert with tumbleweed and jackrabbits. The new recruits arrived in the dark of the night and were given a place to sleep. In the morning they went through employment, were put on a bus and driven the fifty-odd miles from Pasco. What a shock when they ride past miles of empty desert and arrive at this huge construction camp at the old Hanford town site.

  Making Toilet Paper

  What Hanford was producing was a secret but that did not stop the people from speculating, as Roger Rohrbacher, a Manhattan Project veteran, relates. However, breaching security rules was no joke.

  From AHF Oral Histories

  INTERVIEW WITH ROGER ROHRBACHER

  There were a lot of rumors about what was going on at Hanford. Everything was coming in, nothing was going out. And some people said, “Oh, that’s a sandpaper factory. They hold up a glued sheet of paper and the dust coats it.” Others said that the gigantic facilities rising from the desert were going to be FDR’s winter palace. At a show-and-tell session at school, a kid says “I know what they’re making. They’re making toilet paper. My dad brings home two rolls in his lunch bucket every day.”

  I remember an incident when one of the workers was leaving the plant with a bunch of copper wire wrapped around his waist. A patrolman noticed him, gave him a pat search and said, “Step over here, please.” The rest of us went on. We never saw the guy again.

  “Termination winds”

  While the isolated locations of the Manhattan Project sites helped to keep the effort top secret, the remoteness took an emotional toll on the workers. These problems were particularly acute at Hanford, as historian Michele Gerber points out.

  From On the Home Front

  BY MICHELE GERBER

  The extreme secrecy, the rigid rules and unfamiliar procedures, and the remoteness of the Columbia Basin itself combined to produce a chronic shortage of labor at wartime Hanford. Construction employee turnover varied between 8 and 21 percent at any given point over the life of the project. Workers stated their reasons for leaving as isolation, lack of recreation, and the fierce dust storms of the arid tract. The work was hard, rushed, and remote. Yet, due to secrecy, the commendations received by soldiers and workers at other war production plants could not be issued. “Highlights of Hanford,” a small recruiting booklet used during World War II, termed the region “a little on the rugged side.” Still, most workers were not prepared for the full effect of the Columbia Basin. A Denver ordnance employee who arrived at Hanford on a hot, windy day recalled his heartsick feeling: “It was so darned bleak. If I’d had the price of a ticket I wouldn’t have stayed.”

  Project managers sought to overcome the feelings of loneliness and privation by building a huge recreation hall in June 1944. Then they brought in popular swing bands, such as the famed Kay Kyser, as well as smaller bands and circuses, to entertain the construction workers. Hanford also received official designation as an “isolated area,” allowing generous food rations and extra “hardship gasoline.” In early 1944, in another effort to boost morale, Matthias led a campaign to encourage Hanford workers to contribute a day’s wages and buy a bomber for the air force. Employees responded enthusiastically. A B-17 named Day’s Pay, which later served with the Eighth Air Force in England, was purchased.

  The stinging windstorms of the Columbia Basin, however, presented p
roblems that administrators could not solve. As the huge construction project tore up the sagebrush and anchoring grasses, the sandy soil rose up in retribution. The dust storms became ferocious. According to a local newspaper: “The land laid bare by the mass excavation swirled to the skies in dust storms to end all dust storms. Busses put on lights and stopped by the side of the road.” Some war workers recalled running from one telephone pole to another, seeking “cover from the dirt-laden winds.” Another recounted: “Your face would get black in the storms, and you felt grit in the food, on your hands and clothes, and everywhere. Everything felt like real fine sandpaper.” The endemic storms became known as “termination winds,” and the dust itself as “termination powder,” because so many employees quit every time a big blow occurred. Even on quiet days, many have recalled, there was still a fine dust in the air.

  To some employees, however, the secrecy and obvious urgency of the wartime work at Hanford provided a challenge sufficient to overcome the isolation, the wind, the dust, and the drudgery. Some, like other newcomers before them, even came to love the arid Columbia Basin. The fact that the manufacturing plant had the highest priority for all resources limited community services. The supply never caught up with demand during the war period. The challenge of living without many services or conveniences inspired some workers and kept them in remote, windy Richland. When it was time to leave in late 1945, the wife of a prominent production manager voiced regrets: “We hate to leave our front room view of Rattlesnake Mountain, the Columbia River at our back door, the wonderful fruit and vegetables.”