Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  Once the cyclotron was running, Lawrence always tried to coax the maximum voltage out of the machine. A penciled mark next to a slide-switch in the control room indicated the pinnacle reached on the last attempt. Success was measured by the intensity and focus of the ionized particle beam, which emerged into the target chamber as a thin line of bright blue light. These sessions, usually brief, ended when an oscillator tube burned out or the cyclotron’s vacuum chamber sprung a leak—whereupon Ernest cheerfully promised to return when the boys had the problem fixed.

  Hazards abounded. The popular method of locating vacuum leaks—by playing a jet of natural gas over the sealing wax—was likened by the boys to a race between explosion and asphyxiation. The cyclotron bathed its operators in so much radio frequency energy that it inspired a favorite trick: standing next to the machine, a cyclotroneer could get a lightbulb to flicker in one hand by holding onto a grounded piece of metal with the other.

  Frequent electrical faults caused heavy hooks to fall from overhead cages, shorting out the cyclotron with a resounding bang and an overpowering smell of ozone. Water spraying from the cooling system that Cooksey installed—common garden hose, for the most part—sparked fires as often as two or three times a day. The boys then ran around the machine with handheld extinguishers, desperately trying to put out the flames before they spread to the wooden floor, which was soaked with highly flammable transformer oil. (One cyclotroneer, puzzled that strangers at campus parties were always able to guess where he worked, finally realized that the sickly sweet smell of the oil on his clothes was the giveaway.)

  Seemingly oblivious to the smoke, water, and stench of burned insulation, Lawrence remained resolutely hunched over the controls, pressing on to higher voltages and more tightly focused beams for as long as the current flowed.16

  Ernest’s obsession was legendary at Berkeley. Late at night or even in the early morning hours, Lawrence—sometimes still in formal wear, having just arrived from a dinner party at Sproul’s house—would appear without notice in the control room and demand a report on the current experiment from the cyclotron’s stunned operator. These impromptu nocturnal visits came to be known, not always affectionately, as the “bed check.”17 Canny graduate students learned to leave the lights burning, their coats on a hook behind the door, while they stole away for dinner. Cyclotroneers grew used to the sight of Molly sprawled asleep in the red leather chair, following what Ernest had promised would be only a brief detour to the lab before dinner or a movie. Two-year-old Eric, the couple’s first child, learned to salute his father’s colleagues with a cheery, “How’s the vacuum?”18

  On those occasions when illness kept him at home, Lawrence remained in touch by means of a bedside radio tuned off station to the cyclotron’s operating frequency. When the telltale hum ceased, Ernest was instantly on the telephone to inquire whether the machine was down or the boys simply malingering.19

  * * *

  By the time he and Livingston broke the million-volt barrier, Lawrence was already an internationally recognized figure among physicists. Notoriety, of course, came with a price. In the company of such august figures as Lord Rutherford and James Chadwick, members of Britain’s famed Cavendish Laboratory, and even among young contemporaries like German physicist Werner Heisenberg, Lawrence had the reputation of a headstrong American upstart in a field long dominated by Europeans.20

  Among the remarkable discoveries of 1932—the annus mirabilis of particle physics—was a revelation from the Rad Lab.21 Experimenting that spring with deuterons (an isotope of hydrogen consisting of a proton and a neutron), Lawrence noticed that atoms struck by the heavy particles not only disintegrated readily but in the process seemed to release more energy than it took to break them apart. For Ernest, this unexpected outcome opened up a sudden vista of cheap, reliable, and virtually limitless energy from cyclotrons.

  That June, Lawrence promoted just such a vision in a radio broadcast from the Chicago World’s Fair, at the Century of Progress Exposition, where the boys had put a scale-model cyclotron on display.22 In October, he was the only American invited to the annual Solvay Congress, a prestigious international meeting of physicists in Brussels.

  Lawrence’s so-called disintegration hypothesis was greeted with skepticism just short of ridicule by the doyens of physics gathered in Belgium. Just weeks earlier, Lord Rutherford had indignantly dismissed as infeasible for many generations the kind of practical application of atomic energy that Lawrence already claimed for his cyclotron. In a much-publicized speech before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Rutherford had asserted that “anyone who looked for a source of power in the transformation of the atoms was talking moonshine.”23

  Reluctant to contradict the “lion of the Cavendish,” Ernest conceded the difficulty of penetrating the atomic nucleus—a feat he had once compared to hitting a fly in a cathedral—but nonetheless defended his new-age cannon, claiming that it all came down to a “matter of marksmanship.”24

  At Solvay, Rutherford maintained a studied silence while younger representatives of Britain’s scientific establishment quietly savaged the brash American. John Cockcroft noted, ominously, that other laboratories had been unable to reproduce Berkeley’s results. “Inconclusive,” sniffed Chadwick. Heisenberg, author of the uncertainty principle, intimated that Lawrence either had not witnessed what he claimed or had misinterpreted the results. Lawrence made matters worse by innocently suggesting that the Europeans were simply handicapped by antiquated and obsolete equipment.25

  Returning to Berkeley, Ernest set the boys to settling the question of whether he or his critics were right. Within weeks it became evident that his startling “discovery” was actually the result of contamination of the target in the 27-inch cyclotron. The vista of limitless energy evaporated, like a mirage, as quickly as it had appeared. In its wake, Lawrence and his laboratory seemed guilty of slapdash science and a premature rush to the publicist.

  For someone less self-assured, the error and subsequent rebuff by his peers might have been devastating. Instead, Ernest’s humiliation at Solvay became a valuable object lesson. Notoriously impatient with long-winded mathematics, Lawrence had achieved success to date largely owing to a combination of remarkable intuition and dogged empiricism.26 “Brawn prevailed over brain,” summed up an Italian physicist visiting the Rad Lab.27 For so long as Lawrence and the boys lacked a theoretical foundation in physics, their experiments would continue to be ill conceived and the results likely to be misinterpreted.

  After Solvay, Lawrence the experimentalist resolved to work more closely with his opposite number in the world of physics: the theorists.

  * * *

  One was readily at hand. Robert Oppenheimer had been hired by Birge almost a month before Lawrence but delayed his arrival on campus so that he could finish postdoctoral studies in Europe. Thin and gangly rather than tall, “Oppie” walked with the peculiarly rolling gait of the chronically flat-footed.*28 Three years younger than Lawrence, he had similarly striking blue eyes. (His face was that of an “overgrown choirboy … both subtly wise and terribly innocent,” remembered a friend, who compared Oppenheimer’s visage to that of the apostles in Renaissance paintings.)29

  Oppie was another physics phenom much in demand; he had already been successfully courted by Caltech. Oppenheimer ultimately signed contracts with both schools, teaching quantum mechanics at the University of California in the fall and winter, then driving south to teach the same class at Pasadena when Berkeley’s term ended in early spring.

  It was shortly after he arrived at Berkeley, in August 1929, that Oppenheimer met Lawrence, who was still living at the Faculty Club.

  Their personalities were more complementary than similar. On the surface, the two seemed to have little in common. In contrast to Lawrence’s solidly midwestern and Lutheran upbringing, Oppenheimer was a Jew and a graduate of Manhattan’s elite Ethical Culture School. Oppie had gone on to study at Harvard, Cambridge, and Göttingen
, where he received his Ph.D. in physics at the age of twenty-three.

  Possessed of famously bohemian tastes, Oppenheimer favored exotic cuisines: a spicy Indonesian dish often served to guests, Nasi Goreng, was rendered as “nasty gory” by Lawrence, who knew to avoid it. Oppie was also an accomplished linguist. (While a postdoc in Leiden, he had given his seminars in Dutch.) But Oppenheimer’s fondness for classical allusions and obscure, convoluted metaphors was sometimes irritatingly evident, even in casual conversations with friends.30 His nervous mannerisms—including the constant flicking of his fingers, stained with nicotine from chain-smoking, when he performed calculations at the chalkboard—stood in contrast to Lawrence’s usually detached Olympian calm.

  Like Lawrence the son of first-generation immigrants, Oppenheimer was far better off financially. Carl Lawrence had earned $3,000 a year as head of the Northern Normal and Industrial School in Aberdeen, South Dakota, and died without a pension. Julius Oppenheimer owned a successful textile-importing firm in New York City. The Oppenheimer family lived in a spacious Riverside Drive apartment overlooking the Hudson River and spent vacations at a rambling white summer home on Long Island Sound. Ernest had sold aluminum cookware door-to-door to help pay for college. At the same age, Oppie had his own twenty-eight-foot sloop, which he christened with an appropriately esoteric name: Trimethy, the abbreviation of a particular chemical compound.31

  Despite having between them what Oppenheimer called “the distance of different temperaments,” the two men quickly became close friends. While still bachelors living at the Faculty Club, Lawrence and Oppenheimer double-dated together, spending Thanksgivings at Yosemite and going horseback riding on weekends around the Berkeley hills. Oppie originally thought Ernest’s jodhpurs and English saddle a curious affectation—until he realized that, growing up in South Dakota, Lawrence looked upon horses as draft animals. For Ernest, it was a way of distancing himself from his roots.32

  Oppenheimer introduced Lawrence to impressionism; Oppie’s mother, Ella, was a Paris-trained painter who maintained a studio in Manhattan. The art on the walls at the Riverside Drive apartment included a Renoir, drawings by Picasso and Vuillard, a Rembrandt etching, and van Gogh’s Enclosed Field with Rising Sun.33 Oppie likewise broadened Ernest’s horizons in classical music. Tellingly, Lawrence favored Beethoven’s popular symphonies—the Fifth and the Pastoral—while Oppie preferred the composer’s more complex and moodier later work. The String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp Minor was a particular favorite.

  Oppenheimer—who, as an adolescent, had seen a succession of psychiatrists for “dementia praecox” and had at least once contemplated suicide—found Ernest’s “unbelievable vitality and love of life” his friend’s most endearing trait: “His interest was so primarily active, instrumental and mine just the opposite.”34

  Lawrence’s practical nature, simple tastes, and driving ambition served as an antidote to Oppie’s whimsical otherworldliness.35 (“The kind of person I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance,” Oppenheimer once confided to college friends.)36 Oppie later claimed to have learned of the 1929 stock market crash some six months after it happened, while on a walk with Lawrence.37

  The differences between them were evident in their attitudes toward material possessions. Lawrence drove a 1927 Reo Flying Cloud, a flashy red coupe with rumble seats which he bought while at Yale in eager anticipation of the move to California. Ernest treated the car lovingly and kept it regularly tuned, washed, and waxed.38 Oppenheimer arrived in Berkeley driving a battered tan Chrysler roadster that he and his younger brother, Frank, had nearly flipped and later run up the steps of a courthouse on the route west. By the time they reached California, Oppie’s right arm was in a sling, and his clothes showed holes from the battery acid that had spilled when the car almost turned over. (It is unclear who was the worse driver. “That he was worried was evident by the fact that when I drove up to the edge of the Grand Canyon he yelled ‘STOP!’” Frank later wrote of his brother and the trip.)39

  Despite their disparate natures, a bond based on mutual affection and respect gradually formed between Oppenheimer and Lawrence. For Ernest, an inveterate tinkerer, Oppie seemed the perfect counterpart. “His type of mind is analytical, rather than physical, and he is not at home in the manipulations of the laboratory,” Oppenheimer’s adviser at Harvard had warned Cambridge.40 But to friends at other universities, Oppie quietly boasted that Berkeley, which Lawrence had described as a “Mecca” of physics, was actually a “desert” where a young theorist like himself could make a mark.41

  When Oppenheimer had to return to New York in 1931 to care for his ailing mother, he asked Lawrence to look after his “fatherless theoretical children.” Ernest sent roses to the dying woman’s bedside.42 Later, when Oppie was visiting Harvard, Lawrence sent him frequent updates on the progress being made with the cyclotrons. “I know you are having a good time, but hurry back,” Ernest implored.43

  Settling into Berkeley, Oppenheimer rented the bottom floor of a rambling Craftsman-style house set amid redwoods in the hills above campus. His rooms afforded “a view of the cities and of the most beautiful harbor in the world,” he wrote Frank, who was then studying at the Cavendish.44 Oppie’s simple flat on Shasta Road soon became the scene of riotous parties, fueled by the host’s trademark 4:1 frozen martinis, served in glasses whose rims were dipped in lime juice and honey. Latecomers were amused to find those who would become the top physicists of their generation, drunk and crouched on all fours, playing a version of tiddlywinks on the geometric patterns of Oppenheimer’s Navajo rug.45 On special occasions, like a dissertation defense, Oppie would take a handpicked group of students to Jack’s, a favorite restaurant across the Bay; he ordered the food and always picked up the bill.

  During winter vacations, Oppenheimer and Lawrence went on highspeed trips to Death Valley in “Garuda”—the new Chrysler roadster which Robert’s father had bought for him and that he named for the flying mount of the Hindu god Vishnu.46 It was on one such jaunt that Oppie confided to Ernest that physics and the desert were his two enduring loves.

  In summer, a rough-hewn log cabin on six acres in the mountains east of Santa Fe became a sanctuary. Years earlier, Oppie and Frank had come across the cabin while horseback riding in the Pecos wilderness near Cowles. The older brother had first come to the area as a sickly teenager, staying at a nearby dude ranch while he recovered from a bout with colitis. Oppie named the ranch “Perro Caliente” (hot dog in Spanish) upon learning that the land was available on a long-term lease from the Forest Service. Between the end of Caltech’s term and the start of classes at Berkeley in mid-August, the Oppenheimers and a select band of their friends, which often included Lawrence, spent idyllic days at the ranch.47

  When Lawrence married, Oppie simply became part of Ernest’s extended family. Robert presented the couple with a silver coffee service as a wedding gift. Since Oppenheimer’s flat was only around the corner and up the hill from the Lawrences’ house, the man the children knew as “Uncle Robert” was a frequent and welcome dinner guest, always bringing flowers—usually orchids—for Molly.48

  The bond between Oppenheimer and Lawrence was further strengthened by their work together at a time of great ferment in high-energy physics. He and Ernest were “busy studying nuclei and neutrons and disintegrations; trying to make some peace between the inadequate theory and the absurd revolutionary experiments,” Oppie wrote Frank in fall 1932.49

  While Oppenheimer, as a theorist, likely viewed Lawrence’s focusing of the cyclotron beam with iron shims as akin to tuning a concert piano with matchbooks, he was surprisingly solicitous of his friend’s feelings—in contrast to his attitude toward the rest of Berkeley’s physics faculty. Slow colleagues and dim-witted students alike came to be familiar with Oppie’s notorious “‘blue glare’ treatment.”50 Despite his misstep at Solvay, Lawrence was the exception. “For all his sketchi
ness, and the highly questionable character of what he reports, Lawrence is a marvelous physicist,” Oppenheimer confided to his brother in early 1934, adding, “But I think that he is probably wrong about the disintegration of the [deuteron].”51

  Lawrence, for his part, freely acknowledged his own intellectual debt to Oppie.52 In a confidential letter to university administrators urging his friend’s promotion to full professor, Ernest wrote of Oppenheimer: “He has all along been a valued partner at the Radiation Laboratory, providing on many occasions important interpretations of puzzling experimental facts brought to light in an almost virgin field of investigation.”53

  A growing mutual dependence caused the two men to ignore not only disparate temperaments but other, more significant differences between them. Whereas Ernest was constitutionally unable to feign laughter at an uncomprehended joke, Oppie’s sly, enigmatic smile became a distinguishing trait at Berkeley seminars. It was Oppenheimer’s fanatically loyal graduate students, not Oppie himself, who made legend the story of how their mentor had read Marx’s entire Das Kapital—in German—during a cross-country train trip and was learning Sanskrit at Berkeley in order to read the Hindu classics in the original. Yet, in the eyes of more detached observers, like Molly Lawrence, Oppenheimer was, at heart, a poseur.54

  His values had been influenced, if not shaped, by years spent at the Ethical Culture School, where a pedagogical philosophy known as “American Pragmatism” held sway. As interpreted by the school’s German-immigrant founder, Felix Adler, pragmatic ethics taught that there were few ideal, unchanging moral laws, but that values instead evolved over time to fit the needs of society.55 The result was a kind of high-minded ethical relativism that put the greatest emphasis upon the selfless act—what was known at the school as doing “the noble thing.”56