Man of the Hour

by Jennet Conant

  Conant received Oppenheimer’s report on the results of the Berkeley study group at an S-1 meeting at the end of August. The essentials of fast-neutron fission had been worked out, and under the heading of “Status of the Bomb,” he noted that the group estimated the fission bomb would explode with “150 times energy of previous calculation.” Unfortunately, such a bomb would require more U-235 than previously estimated—about 30 kilograms, or 66 pounds—and more precise values would require further experimentation. This news paled in importance compared with the startling revelation that a much more powerful reaction than nuclear fission might be produced by the thermonuclear fusion of deuterium, the heavy-hydrogen isotope. A 66-pound uranium bomb was equivalent to 100,000 tons of TNT. But Oppie’s report suggested that if the same bomb was used to ignite a fusion explosion of two to three tons of liquid deuterium, it would explode with the force of 100 million tons of TNT. “Estimate devastation area of 1,000 sq. km [or] 360 sq. miles,” Conant scribbled. He immediately sent off the new status report to Bush, with the S-1 Committee’s conclusion: “We have become convinced that success in this program before the enemy can succeed is necessary for victory. We also believe that success of this program will win the war if it has not been previously terminated.”

  Groves met Oppenheimer for the first time when he visited Berkeley on October 8, 1942, to discuss the recommendations of the summer study group. The whip-lean, wild-haired Oppenheimer, with his love of literature, poetry, and erudite pursuits—he was studying Sanskrit in order to read the Bhagavad Gita in the original—did not seem like someone the hard-nosed general would take to, but Groves appreciated his quick mind and “tremendous intellectual capacity.” That and the fact that Oppenheimer, as he put it, “knew everything that was then known” about how to make a bomb. Groves grilled him for hours on his conclusions, as well as the methods by which he had reached them, later telling Compton that he was “strongly impressed by Oppenheimer’s intelligence and grasp of the problem.”

  Groves had come to Berkeley expecting to request that Lawrence take charge of Project Y, the name he had given to the classified weapon’s laboratory well in advance of its existence, but the general was forced to accept that he could not be spared from his work on electromagnetic separation. Instead, Lawrence recommended his protégé Edward MacMillan, but he was an extremely modest man and did not have the forceful personality Groves had in mind. A number of eminent physicists’ names were floated—Teller favored Bethe, and Eugene P. Wigner, the Hungarian theoretical physicist who had been with the project since its embryonic beginnings—but they were not long out of Europe. Groves was not about to name a foreigner as head of a top-secret American military project. By comparison, Oppenheimer was a relatively junior member of the project and a theorist, not a hands-on experimentalist, and if ever there was a job for an experimental physicist, this was it. Groves was tired of theory and speculation. He wanted someone who could talk about the “down-to-earth” problems—such as “how to detonate the bomb, or design it so that it could be detonated”—and how to tackle them in practical terms.

  At the same time, there was something about the charismatic thirty-eight-year-old Oppenheimer that caught the general’s eye. Groves had just come from a strained meeting with the Chicago scientists, who were openly hostile to the idea of a military laboratory, especially the querulous Leo Szilard, whom he loathed almost on sight. Groves had little sympathy for the armchair critics, considered them long on talk and short on action. “None of them were go-getters,” he groused. “They preferred to move at a pipe-smoking academic pace.” Oppenheimer, on the other hand, agreed that the heart of the problem lay not in theory but in the lack of good experimental data. He believed the time had come to make a major change in the organization of the project, and proposed consolidating all their scattered research operations in one laboratory where they could come to grips with the chemical, metallurgical, engineering, and ordnance problems that had so far received scant consideration. He expressed the same sense of frustration at the snail’s pace of the project, and emphasized the need to eliminate the waste, errors, and duplication caused by all the security constraints and compartmentalization if they were to get the fast results they needed desperately. If the most efficient way to accomplish this was in a military establishment, it was fine by him. He was willing to be adaptable.

  Groves was so relieved to have finally found someone capable of the kind of pragmatic thinking the job required that he asked Oppenheimer to meet with him again in a week. He would be back in Chicago, and asked the Berkeley physicist to accompany him, along with Colonel James Marshall and Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Nichols, on the train back to New York. The overnight run would allow Oppenheimer ample opportunity to expand on his ideas. By the time the 20th Century Limited pulled into Grand Central Terminal the next morning, the four of them—sitting knee-to-knee in the tiny compartment—had come up with a plan for a single centralized laboratory, located in an isolated region, and small enough to be under strict military watch, where the scientists could go about their business and converse freely, completely protected from outsiders and enemy spies.

  Within a month of the train trip, Oppenheimer had talked Conant and Groves out of using the Oak Ridge site and into “a lovely spot” in a part of the country that held special significance for him: the Jemez Mountains of northern New Mexico. As soon as Groves saw the barren, windswept mesa, empty except for a small cluster of buildings and crude log cabins that belonged to the Los Alamos Ranch School, he reportedly said, “This is the place.” The mesa, a strip of land that was two miles wide and eight miles long, was as isolated and inaccessible as imaginable. Steep canyons formed the north and south boundaries, and the open sections could easily be fenced and patrolled. The nearest railhead was in Santa Fe, twenty miles to the southeast, but the bad road connecting the city with the mesa, with its hairpin turns and precipitous drops, discouraged all but the most determined travelers. Conant, who remembered Los Alamos from a brief visit to see if the rigorous boys’ academy would benefit his sickly son, agreed that they would be hard put to find a better location. Groves acted quickly to acquire the site and surrounding property. On December 4 the secretary of war notified the owners it was being taken over. The sale was arranged in complete secrecy and the documents sealed. It could not have worked out better for Oppie, who knew the area like the back of his hand and just happened to own a ranch in the nearby Pecos Valley, on the other side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

  While Oppenheimer threw himself into the preparations for the new laboratory, acting as the de facto director of Los Alamos, Groves could find no one who “showed any great enthusiasm” for his choice. There was nothing in the Berkeley physicist’s background or résumé that indicated that he was prepared for such awesome responsibility. He had a mystic streak that raised eyebrows, and sometimes told stories or acted in ways that struck his colleagues as foolish. “To most physicists, it came as a surprise,” observed Isidor I. Rabi, putting it mildly. In truth, the formidable Columbia University physicist who was the associate director of the MIT Rad Lab, considered it “a most improbable appointment.” The consensus, Groves learned, was that Oppenheimer lacked the necessary “prestige among his fellow scientists”—he had never won a scientific award of any kind—and that many did not believe he could carry the development through to a successful conclusion.

  As the selection process dragged on, Groves asked each member of the Military Policy Committee to give him the name of someone who could possibly be a project leader, but “it became apparent we were not going to find a better man.” In the end, with Lawrence’s assurance that he would take over if the project faltered, Groves went with his gut instincts and asked Oppenheimer to undertake the task. His plan almost immediately hit a “snag,” as he delicately put it, when military intelligence refused to clear Oppenheimer. “His background included much that was not to our liking, by any means,” Groves acknowledged later, but he and Conant�
�who had reviewed the contents of his FBI file—had concluded that Oppenheimer’s potential value outweighed any security risk. They did not think his brief flirtation with Communism should bar him from doing vital war work. The army’s reservations did not go away, however. The letter formalizing his appointment, signed by Groves and Conant, would not be sent until February 1943, and problems over his clearance would continue for months to come.

  In the meantime, Oppenheimer set to work trying to put together the nucleus of the new organization, writing to Conant for advice and assistance. He began by catching him up on the results of recent scientific work and then addressed the real purpose of his letter: namely, the difficulty of recruiting men of the first rank to come to a remote military outpost for what was vaguely described as the “duration of the war.” Oppenheimer knew rounding up the talent he needed was not going to be easy. Rumors abounded that the bomb project was a giant boondoggle: a sideshow to the bloody struggle in progress. Lawrence and Loomis had already raided the physics departments of the top Eastern universities for the radar lab, and everyone else in the field was already fully engaged in war work. He was going to have to poach talent from existing projects, incurring the wrath of the other program chiefs, but confided to Conant that he was “inclined not to take too seriously the absolute nos with which we shall be greeted.”

  Oppenheimer could not afford to stand on ceremony. “The job we have to do will not be possible,” he stressed, “without personnel substantially greater than that which we have now available, and I shall only be misleading you and all others concerned with the S-1 project if I were to promise to get the work done without this help.”

  Always a quick study, Oppenheimer recognized that the fifty-year-old Harvard president was regarded as an elder statesman of the scientific community, and modeled himself after the veteran wartime leader and Washington insider. Conant’s administrative ability, intuition, quiet sense of humor, and cool determination to keep the project moving and the men in good spirits were qualities he sought to emulate. But it was the cool Yankee’s political savvy he envied most. “Oppenheimer saw this faculty of Conant and wanted to learn from it,” recalled John Manley, an experimental physicist at the Met Lab who became Oppie’s assistant. Over time Conant became Oppenheimer’s “mentor in national policy matters,” and evolved into a kind of worldly father figure on whom he relied heavily for sympathy and wise counsel in his battles with government and military bureaucracies.

  Aware that the success of the bomb project—and the outcome of the war—might very well rest on Oppenheimer’s inexperienced shoulders, Conant took it upon himself to help the Los Alamos director get established as quickly as possible, cleaning up his messes, straightening out misunderstandings, and fielding complaints during his shaky first few months on the job. There was a low moment in late December 1942 when Oppenheimer’s overzealous recruiting tactics sparked so many complaints within the NDRC and OSRD that Conant wrote Groves that both he and Bush were “wondering whether we have found the right man.” To keep peace in the family, Conant decided it would be better if he rather than Oppenheimer made the initial approach, telling Groves that he would personally speak “to the top man in each organization who was likely to kick” and smooth the way for the new laboratory leader, who would then talk to the scientist in question and “try to sell him on the idea.”

  Conant also had to run interference on the loaded issue of whether the Los Alamos laboratory should be militarized. Oppenheimer had been so eager for the top job that he had readily embraced Groves’s plan to induct the scientists into the army. He had agreed to assume the rank of lieutenant colonel—and had even ordered his uniforms. A number of the senior physicists he wanted to recruit thought he had been naïve to agree, however, and both Rabi and his Rad Lab colleague Robert F. Bacher were adamantly against it. They had spent the last two years in the successful radar lab and saw no need to impose a rigid military hierarchy at Los Alamos, which they believed would only stifle creativity and productivity, divide personnel, and damage morale. They told Oppenheimer in no uncertain terms that if he went ahead with the plan, “None of us would come.”

  After a heated meeting in Washington on January 30, 1943, and afraid he was facing an insurrection, Oppenheimer again asked Conant to intercede on his behalf. After listing all the Rad Lab scientists’ conditions, “the discussion of which you were a witness in the early stages,” Oppenheimer admitted that he was unsure how Groves would respond to the ultimatum that the project be demilitarized. He also asked Conant to use his persuasive powers on Rabi, but worried they risked losing more than just his cooperation. “I believe that the solidarity of the physicists is such that if these conditions are not met, we shall fail not only to have the men from MIT with us, but many men who have already planned to join the new laboratory will reconsider their commitments.” If they were forced to come with real misgivings, he doubted they could “carry on the work with anything like the speed required.”

  Although he had donned a uniform during his chemical warfare service in World War I, and considered it a mere formality, Conant now sought to defuse the growing dissension. The compromise he negotiated with Groves took the form of an open letter, bearing both their signatures, which Oppenheimer could share with the men he was trying to recruit. The letter, dated February 25, stated that the laboratory was to be run “on a strictly civilian basis” during the early, experimental stages, with the military assuming control later, when the dangerous ordnance work began. At that point in time—but not before January 1, 1944—the scientists would become commissioned officers and take their orders from the army.III To assuage any fears they had about the isolated laboratory losing its “scientific autonomy,” the authors assured the scientists that they would be exempt from the usual wartime restrictions that prevented them from learning what was going on in the other research facilities. They also asserted rather arrogantly, “Through Dr. Conant, complete access to the scientific world is guaranteed.”

  The letter went a long way to easing tensions and overcoming the misgivings of potential recruits, and Groves gratefully acknowledged Conant’s “great experience in, and understanding of, the academic world, particularly its scientific elements.” But Conant’s word was not enough to erase everyone’s doubts about the army and Oppenheimer’s selection. Rabi declined the offer to become associate director of the Los Alamos laboratory—he was unwilling to abandon his crucial radar work for a project whose overall odds were fifty-fifty at best. In response to Oppenheimer’s cajoling letters, however, he agreed to send some of his ablest men. Still, they had cleared a difficult hurdle, and physicists at MIT, Chicago, and elsewhere were hanging up their lab coats and heading west to join the new venture. Hans and Rose Bethe’s decision to throw in their lot with the Los Alamos group meant that many others would want to come and would make the job of recruiting personnel much easier. It was a victory, and an important vote of confidence.

  Conant praised Oppenheimer for his “patience, courage, and determination” during the trying formative months of the project, and forgave him his trespasses. “Don’t worry about all the trouble which your activities may have caused me,” he wrote with evident warmth and goodwill. “I am only sorry that I can’t press a button and produce the men that I know you need and want.” Conant had once led a group of men in a risky, highly speculative experimental endeavor, and probably knew better than anyone the pressure Oppenheimer was under. The kinship he felt with the intensely cerebral young physicist quickly developed into a genuine friendship, with the reserved Conant reciprocating to an unusual degree, so that in their frequent correspondence, Oppie soon felt comfortable addressing the NDRC chairman as “Uncle Jim.”

  Oppenheimer had been given his marching orders. In the February 25 letter, which served as a sort of charter for Los Alamos, Conant and Groves explicitly laid out the task ahead. “We are addressing this letter to you,” they began, “as the scientific director of the special laboratory in New
Mexico in order to confirm our many conversations on the matters of organization and responsibility.” Oppenheimer would report to Groves, who had overall responsibility for the project and its security. Conant, as the general’s chief advisor, would supervise the scientific and technical aspects of the work. Oppenheimer would be in charge of a small, highly secret community of scientists living and working under constant stress in a compound surrounded by a high fence and secured by troops, and would have to manage the politics and personalities as well as technological problems. They detailed it all in the letter, spelling out his duties in black-and-white, putting it all on the record so there would be no room for misunderstanding. But there could be no confusion about the ultimate objective: Los Alamos, they asserted, “will be concerned with the development and final manufacture of an instrument of war.”