“Shall I fire?” asked Poulsson.
“Not yet,” said Haukelid.
The soldier swung his light across the snowy ground around the plant. Haukelid and Poulsson stood with their backs flat against a shed, just out of view.
The soldier turned back toward the barracks.
Ronneberg and the demolition team came racing toward Haukelid. Together, they ran out the open gate, and gathered about 300 yards from the fence.
“The Germans still don’t seem to know what’s happened,” Haukelid said.
*
ALL TEN MEN scrambled down the gorge. They slid from one wet icy rock to another, resting briefly on thin ledges, then continuing the slippery descent.
At the bottom of the gorge, the ice on the river had continued melting. Big chunks were now spinning in the rushing black water. The men were leaping from chunk to chunk when the scream of Vemork’s sirens ripped through the air.
“It was as if we were being pursued across the river by the shrieking sound itself,” Ronneberg reported. “We slipped and fell, grabbing on to rocks and blocks of ice.”
They made it across and immediately started up the far side of the gorge. They reached the top and ducked back down just as a car raced past on the road in front of them. Then they crossed the road, found their skis and poles, jumped into their white camouflage suits, and sped across the snow away from the road.
“German cars and trucks kept zipping past us,” remembered Jens Poulsson. “That was all to the good. Those Nazis were in too much of a hurry to get to Vemork to look right or left as they raced along.”
*
THE GUNNERSIDE TEAM SPLIT UP, most heading on skis to the Swedish border, 250 miles to the northeast. Knut Haukelid and Arne Kjelstrup stayed behind in Norway to help organize the anti-German resistance. They skied to a mountain hut, found radio equipment that had been stashed by other resistance fighters, and wrote out a short, coded message for London: “High concentration installation at Vemork completely destroyed on night of 27–28—Gunnerside has gone to Sweden.”
Then they headed deeper into the wilderness. “You can bet the Germans are in a fury,” Haukelid told Kjelstrup. “And you can be sure that they’ll search every corner of the mountains.”
Only later did Haukelid learn how right he was. Enraged German commanders were already sending out a ten-thousand-man German force to track down the saboteurs.
Not a single one of the Norwegians was ever caught.
The Main Gate of the Los Alamos campus in the early 1940s.
THE GATEKEEPER
ONE AFTERNOON IN LATE MARCH 1943, Dorothy McKibben, a forty-five-year-old single mother, was crossing the street in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Halfway across she ran into Joe Stevenson, a local businessman she knew casually. There were no cars coming, so they talked in the street.
“How would you like a job as a secretary?” asked Stevenson, who’d heard McKibben was looking for work.
“Secretary to what?” she wanted to know.
He smiled. “Secretary,” he said.
She knew he was doing something for the government, something to do with the war.
“Well, what would I do?” she asked.
“You would be a secretary,” he said. “Don’t you know what a secretary does?”
“Not always.”
“Well, think it over. I’ll give you twenty-four hours.”
Intrigued, McKibben agreed to meet her potential employer the next day in the lobby of La Fonda, the nicest hotel in town. She was standing there, waiting, when she saw a man enter. He wore a trench coat. He had wiry black hair and bright blue eyes. He strode directly to her and introduced himself as “Mr. Bradley.”
Then he fired quick questions about her background, her skills, her knowledge of Santa Fe. As she answered he leaned forward and stared intensely at her.
“I never met a person with a magnetism that hit you so fast and so completely,” she said later. She had no idea who this man was, or what he was doing in town. She didn’t care. “I knew anything he was connected with would be alive,” she said. “I thought to be associated with that person, whoever he was, would be simply great!”
She took the job. When she reported for work the next day, the man was waiting for her. Only when they got inside and closed the door did he tell her that his real name was Robert Oppenheimer.
*
A WEEK LATER, CONFUSED scientists began showing up in Santa Fe, wandering the streets holding a letter that read: “Go to 109 East Palace Avenue, Santa Fe, New Mexico. There you will find out how to complete your trip.”
Friendly locals directed the strangers to an ancient wrought-iron gate that opened onto a courtyard built by Spanish settlers in the 1600s. In one of the buildings surrounding the courtyard was a door marked with the number 109. When newcomers knocked they were greeted by Dorothy McKibben—“the Gatekeeper,” as she quickly became known.
“They arrived, breathless and sleepless and haggard, tired from riding on trains that were slow,” she remembered. “The new members were tense with expectancy and curiosity.”
Those were the ones who found the address. McKibben often got calls from nearby drugstores that began, “There is a party here who is lost.”
She’d say, “Send him over right away.”
In a small office crammed with desks and boxes, McKibben wrote out security passes for the scientists. She told them that from now on their mailing address was Post Office Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico. To avoid drawing attention to the arrival of so many scientists, she cautioned them never to refer to each other as “doctor” or “professor” while in town. Then she gave them directions to Los Alamos.
Scientists continued arriving throughout April. “The office was a madhouse,” said McKibben. Famous physicists were given code names—Enrico Fermi, for example, was supposed to tell people his name was Henry Farmer. But Fermi had a hard time remembering his new name and felt absurd pronouncing it with his thick Italian accent. Like Fermi, much of Oppenheimer’s scientific dream team was European, many of them Jews who had escaped from Hitler. This gave America a huge advantage in its race with Germany, but it also presented a security problem. The people of Santa Fe, a city of just twenty thousand, began to wonder why so many men with European accents were suddenly walking the streets.
And there were other clues that something was going on. Long lines of army trucks were seen driving up the narrow road to Los Alamos. They always went up the hill loaded. They always came back empty.
“Some amazing rumors began to circulate through Santa Fe,” remembered Leslie Groves. Some guessed that Los Alamos housed a secret military project. They were making submarines according to one rumor, death rays according to another. Others claimed Los Alamos was home for pregnant military personnel—or possibly a nudist colony.
The crazier the rumors got, the more they worried Groves and Oppenheimer.
*
UP ON “THE HILL,” as Los Alamos became known to its residents, Oppenheimer asked Charlotte Serber to step into his office. He needed her help, he told her.
Charlotte was married to Robert Serber, the physicist and former student who’d become Oppenheimer’s right-hand man the year before. Oppenheimer knew Robert and Charlotte well. He trusted them completely.
The rumors in Santa Fe were getting wilder and wilder, Oppenheimer told Serber. The danger was that sooner or later someone might stumble onto the truth, and the story could spread. And if the Germans learned how seriously the Americans were working on an atomic bomb, they’d surely double their own efforts.
Oppenheimer’s solution was to plant a false, but believable, story about what was happening at Los Alamos. “Therefore,” he told Serber, “for Santa Fe purposes, we are making an electric rocket.”
Charlotte Serber was unsure what this had to do with her.
“Go to Santa Fe,” Oppenheimer continued. “Talk. Talk too much. Talk as if you had too many drinks. Get people to eavesdrop. Say a number
of things about us that you are not supposed to. Finally, I don’t care how you manage it, say we are building an electric rocket.”
Charlotte explained the mission to her husband, and they drove from Los Alamos to Santa Fe. They walked into the bar at La Fonda at about 9:00 p.m., sat at a table, and ordered drinks.
“Our conversation was singularly dull as we each wondered how to bring electric rockets into it,” Charlotte recalled. “We told little stories about Los Alamos, mentioning the forbidden name boldly and loudly. But no ears cocked in our direction.”
Unable to attract attention, they walked down the street to Joe King’s Blue Ribbon Bar, which, Robert described as “jumping, jammed, and crowded.”
A young man immediately approached Charlotte, bowed, and asked her to dance. She agreed.
While they danced, she got the conversation started by asking if he lived in Santa Fe.
“Yes,” he said.
“What do you do?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“How come you’re not in the service?”
“Four F,” he said—a military classification for those physically unfit for service. “Want to get a job on a ranch.”
“We’re up at Los Alamos,” she said, steering toward the target.
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s quite a place, don’t you think?” she asked. “So mysterious and secret.”
“Yeah,” he shrugged. “You know, I sure want to run a ranch someday.”
“But what do you suppose they’re doing at Los Alamos?”
“I dunno,” he said. “Come to town often? You sure dance fine.”
“We come to town as often as we can, but they don’t like to let us out much. What’s your guess about what cooks up there?”
“Beats me. Don’t care. May I have another dance later?”
Robert Serber watched it all from a booth near the dance floor. Seeing that things were going badly for his wife, he walked up to the tightly packed bar, turned toward the man next to him, grabbed the lapels of his jacket, and shouted: “Do you know what we’re doing at Los Alamos? We’re building an electric rocket!”
The man grunted and sipped his drink.
*
DRIVING BACK to Los Alamos that night, the Serbers knew their mission had failed.
“The FBI and Army Intelligence never reported picking up any rumors about electric rockets,” Robert said. “The spy business isn’t as easy as it appears in the movies.”
And so the rumors in Santa Fe kept flying. Something big was obviously going on, and locals wondered if jobs might be available. Almost every day someone knocked on the door at 109 East Palace and asked Dorothy McKibben for work on the new government project in town.
“I can’t understand wherever you got that idea,” said the smiling Gatekeeper. “There’s nothing of that sort in Santa Fe that we know of.”
THE GADGET
ON THE EVENING OF APRIL 15, 1943, about forty physicists gathered in what used to be the library reading room of the Los Alamos Ranch School. A small blackboard on wheels stood at one end of the room. In front of the blackboard were several rows of folding chairs. Everyone took seats, except for Robert Oppenheimer and his assistant, Robert Serber.
“Buildings were still under construction,” remembered Serber. “There was a hammering off in the background, carpenters and electricians working out of sight but all over the place.”
Oppenheimer introduced Serber and sat down. Serber looked down at his notes and began reading quietly, with a slight stutter. But he opened with a bang: “The object of the project is to produce a practical military weapon in the form of a bomb in which the energy is released by a fast-neutron chain reaction.”
There was a second of stunned silence. Until that moment, many men in the room had not known exactly why they’d been dragged to this remote mountaintop.
Scribbling graphs and formulas on the blackboard as he spoke, Serber began to explain the physics of an atomic bomb. “He wasn’t much of a speaker,” the physicist Isidor Rabi recalled, “but for ammunition he had everything Oppenheimer’s theoretical group had uncovered during the last year. He knew it all cold and that was all he cared about.”
Serber had the room’s attention—until a sharp crack interrupted the talk. Startled, everyone looked up. They saw a jagged hole in the thin ceiling above, and, dangling through the hole, the wiggling leg of an electrician. The scientists heard the man call for help. They heard men running on the floor above, then saw the leg slowly slide up through the hole and disappear.
Serber returned to his lecture. Almost every sentence included the word bomb, which began to worry Oppenheimer. He leaned to the physicist beside him, John Manley, and whispered something. Manley walked up to Serber and told him to stop saying “bomb”—there were too many workers around.
When Serber resumed his talk, he referred instead to the “gadget.” The name stuck. “Around Los Alamos after that,” explained Serber, “we called the bomb we were building ‘the gadget.’”
*
IN FOUR MORE LECTURES over the next two weeks, Serber described the physics of how the gadget might work. Enrico Fermi’s Chicago experiment had proved that it was possible to spark a chain reaction in uranium. Fermi’s uranium and graphite pile had released energy, but only a tiny amount, and slowly. The problem facing Oppenheimer’s team was to figure out how to create a much faster chain reaction that would release so much energy it would cause a massive explosion—and the whole thing had to be light enough to travel by airplane.
In theory, Serber explained, the design of the bomb could be very simple. They could load two pieces of very pure uranium into a specially adapted artillery gun. Inside the gun barrel, they would fire one piece of uranium at the other. When the two pieces met, they would form a critical mass, the amount of material needed to get a chain reaction going. The reaction would begin—speeding neutrons would hit uranium atoms, which would split, releasing energy and more neutrons. Each fission would release just enough energy to move a grain of sand. But within less than one millionth of a second, so many atoms would fission that the lump of uranium would blow itself apart with the force of millions of pounds of regular explosive.
Serber drew a rough sketch of what became known as the “gun assembly” method. Surrounding the uranium would be a tamper—a shield of very dense metal. The tamper would prevent flying neutrons from escaping, bouncing them instead back into the uranium. This would cause more fission, and a bigger explosion.
Major questions remained, Serber told the team. Exactly how much uranium was needed to form a critical mass? What material would perform best as a tamper? How fast would the lumps of uranium need to be brought together inside the gun? How big an explosion would this type of bomb cause? And, of course, would this design even work?
“We started working immediately,” said Richard Feynman.
*
OUTSIDE THE WORKROOMS, Los Alamos was a disaster.
“The site itself was a mess,” said Robert Serber. “It was a shambles,” agreed Hans Bethe. “It was a construction site. You stumbled over kegs of nails, over posts, over ladders.”
Melting snow sank into the dirt roads, turning them to sticky black mud. And while views of the surrounding mountains and deserts were spectacular, the army built high fences around the entire lab—making the scientists feel like prisoners.
“The first thing I noticed,” remembered Edward Teller, “was that we were all going to be locked up together for better or for worse.”
“I was shocked by the isolation,” Bethe said. “Clearly we were very far from anything, very far from anybody.”
Oppenheimer and his wife moved into one of the five log cabins that had originally been built for school directors, a little group of houses known as “Bathtub Row”—they had the only tubs on the Hill. Younger scientists crowded into bunk beds in an old school building while new dorms were being built. “Bob Christy and his wife had to go to the bathroom thro
ugh our bedroom,” recalled Feynman. “So that was very uncomfortable.”
As construction continued, Oppenheimer was often seen strolling the streets of his growing town in jeans and a Western shirt, his thumbs tucked into his belt. New scientists were arriving all the time, and when the director saw someone he didn’t know, he’d stride up to the newcomer.
“Welcome to Los Alamos,” he’d say, smiling. “And who the devil are you?”
*
TO GET TO WORK, scientists struggled through the mud to the half-finished Tech Area, which housed labs and offices and was surrounded by another fence, nine feet high, with barbed wire strung along the top. Military police guarded the only gate twenty-four hours a day. To gain entrance, scientists had to show their white badges—only the scientists were issued these special photo IDs.
Oppenheimer arrived at the gate of the Tech Area each morning at 7:30, flashed his white badge, and walked to his office. This was a big change from his Berkeley days. A lover of late-night parties, he’d never scheduled classes before 11:00 a.m. But Oppenheimer knew that it wasn’t just his reputation and career on the line at Los Alamos—it was the outcome of the biggest war in human history.
And in case the pressure wasn’t intense enough, President Roosevelt spelled it out in a personal note. “Whatever the enemy may be planning, American science will be equal to the challenge,” Roosevelt wrote to Oppenheimer. “With this thought in mind, I send this note of confidence and appreciation.”
Oppenheimer thanked Roosevelt for the kind words, adding, “There will be many times in the months ahead when we shall remember them.”
Then came a memo from General Leslie Groves. Given Oppenheimer’s vital importance to the country, wrote Groves, “it is requested that:
(a) you refrain from flying in airplanes of any description; the time saved is not worth the risk.
(b) you refrain from driving in an automobile for any appreciable distance (above a few miles) and from being without suitable protection on any lonely road.
(c) in driving about town, a guard of some kind should be used, particularly during hours of darkness.”
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