Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  Another among Tatlock’s circle of radical friends was Haakon Chevalier, a thirty-five-year-old assistant professor of French literature at Berkeley when Oppenheimer first met him in early 1937.33 Born in Lakewood, New Jersey, of French and Norwegian parents, Chevalier was a big man who combined continental manners with Viking good looks. (“6 ft. 1 in.; 175 lbs.; slender; left cheek twitch, large hands” is how the FBI would later describe Chevalier.) He had led a picaresque life—including a stint as a deckhand on a four-masted schooner during an around-the-world voyage in 1921—before returning to the United States and entering academe.34

  Following visits in 1932–33 to New York and Paris—the site of what he later described as his own political awakening—Chevalier began attending Communist Party meetings shortly after he came home to Berkeley.35 Having literary ambitions of his own, Chevalier dreamed of one day writing a semiautobiographical novel describing his private intellectual journey to radicalism. (“A gradual disintegration, disgust with the contemporary world, modern America, various escapes, until at the end he finds a hope in Communism” is how he outlined the protagonist’s role in notes taken on the steamer back from Europe.)*36

  For the interim, however, Chevalier’s heroic deeds, like his novel, remained the stuff of fantasy. In 1931, he had married a former student, Barbara Lansburgh, an heiress whose grandfather had built San Francisco’s first department store during the Gold Rush. By 1939, the couple had rented a ten-room, Tudor mansion high in the Berkeley hills. The house became the venue for political benefits which the Chevaliers hosted. Money raised from the sale of drinks and orchid corsages went to the Spanish Loyalists, California’s farmworkers, and other progressive causes of the day.37

  Despite surrounding himself with the trappings of affluence, Chevalier remained a zealous defender of the party line throughout the Stalinist purges. When Berkeley radicals, protesting the expulsion of a Communist student from a nearby junior college, were followed back to campus and hounded by the school’s football team, Chevalier offered the terrorized students shelter in his faculty office.38 A week before the Nazi-Soviet pact was announced, he joined a handful of Californians in signing an open letter, later published in Soviet Russia Today, attributing to “fascists” and “reactionaries” the “fantastic falsehood that the USSR and the totalitarian states are basically alike.”39

  Oppenheimer had met Chevalier, like Tatlock, at a rally for the Spanish Loyalists; the two men and Oppie’s girlfriend subsequently helped organize an East Bay fund-raiser that purchased an ambulance which was sent to Spain.40 Shortly thereafter, Oppenheimer and Chevalier founded a campus branch of the American Federation of Teachers following a union organizing meeting at Berkeley’s Faculty Club. Local 349 apparently spent more time taking controversial stands on international issues than lobbying for higher salaries—a rally at Oakland High School, where Oppie was the featured speaker, attracted only a few members—but the two men remained dedicated to the union nonetheless. Chevalier briefly served as its president; Oppenheimer was elected to the role of recording secretary, where, improbably, he licked stamps and addressed envelopes.41

  By the late 1930s, Oppenheimer’s flat on Shasta Road had become a political as well as a physics salon, attracting “those who desired respite from the halls of academe—professors, graduate students, the Berkeley intellectual Left,” observed one habitué.42 The frozen martinis remained, but Bach fugues had been replaced by Mozart’s Concerto No. 24 in C Minor on Oppenheimer’s custom-built record player. Oppie and Chevalier thought the Allegretto perfect for a revolutionary anthem.

  Trips continued across the Bay to Jack’s, with the coterie of favored students in tow. Yet dinner now typically followed not a dissertation defense but a political rally.43 From one of his graduate students, Oppie bought a subscription to People’s World.44

  Coincident with the founding of the teachers union local, Oppenheimer and Chevalier also began meeting regularly with a group of like-minded colleagues to discuss the issues of the day. The group usually met evenings, once or twice a month, alternating between members’ homes during the school term. Besides Oppie, Chevalier, and Thomas Addis, the regular attendees included Arthur Brodeur, chairman of the Scandinavian languages department at Berkeley; Paul Radin, an anthropology professor on campus; Robert Muir, an employee of the California Labor Bureau, and Lou Goldblatt, a union organizer from San Francisco.45

  Oppenheimer would later characterize the group as an innocent and rather naive political coffee klatch. To Chevalier, however, it was something much more: “a ‘closed unit’ of the Communist Party”—in effect, a secret Communist “cell” whose members, part of the CP’s so-called professional section, were discouraged from holding open membership in the party.46

  After Oppenheimer helped Chevalier edit a broadside for a political rally, the two got the idea of publishing a periodic newsletter. Titled Report to Our Colleagues, on February 20, 1940, the first edition was sent to faculty members at Berkeley as well as to colleges and universities up and down the West Coast. According to Chevalier, Oppie wrote most of the four-page pamphlet, paid for the printing, and even chose the epigram: “But curs’d is he who is their instrument.”*

  A second report, bearing a quotation from W. H. Auden, one of Oppenheimer’s favorite poets, followed on April 6.47 Like the first, it closely followed the party line, which at the time strongly opposed intervention:

  Europe is in the throes of a war. It is a common thought, and a likely one, that when the war is over Europe will be socialist, and the British Empire gone. We think that Roosevelt is assuming the role of preserving the old order in Europe and that he plans, if need be, to use the wealth and the lives of this country to carry it out. We think, that is, that Roosevelt is not only a “war-monger” but a counter-revolutionary war-monger. We think it is this that has turned him from something of a progressive to very much of a reactionary.48

  “There has never been a clearer issue,” April’s Report noted in conclusion, “than that of keeping this country out of the war in Europe.” The second Report, like the first, was signed “College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California.”

  * * *

  Oppenheimer’s emotional isolation from the war was shaken by the fall of France in summer 1940. Driving back to Berkeley from the American Physical Society’s annual meeting in Seattle, Washington, late that June, colleagues were struck by the eloquence and passion with which Oppenheimer denounced fascism as a threat to civilization.49

  But Oppie evidently remained ambivalent about what he called the “hocuspocus” going on in Europe. As much as a year later, only six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he wrote to friends that his “own views could … hardly be gloomier, either for what will happen locally & nationally, or in the world.”50

  Thus far, Lawrence had observed Oppenheimer’s political activism from afar, with a combination of concern and bemusement.51 But a telling incident that occurred at this time sparked a blowup between the two friends. When Ernest came across a notice that Oppie had written on the Rad Lab blackboard, announcing an upcoming benefit for the Spanish Loyalists, the boys saw him silently clench and unclench his jaw in rage before wiping the notice off the board. Later that day, Ernest angrily admonished Oppie to never again bring politics into the laboratory. Alvarez, seated nearby at the controls of the cyclotron, was shocked; it was the first time he could remember seeing the two men argue.52

  * * *

  By the late spring of 1940, Edward Teller was still waiting for a response to the letter by Einstein and Szilard. Roosevelt had put the matter in the hands of the director of the National Bureau of Standards, Lyman Briggs—a slow-moving, pipe-smoking physicist who was an expert in pedology, the science of soils. Briggs seemed more agitated about the possibility of a security leak than with the prospect of a German atomic bomb. After Briggs excluded Fermi—technically still an enemy alien—from meetings of his Uranium Committee, Teller agreed to go in the Italian’s pl
ace. While Edward succeeded in getting $6,000 to pay for the graphite needed for the first large-scale fission experiment, he, like Wigner and Szilard, was becoming daily more frustrated at the seemingly glacial pace with which atomic research seemed to be proceeding in his adopted country.53

  Like Lawrence, Teller had hitherto shown little interest in politics. Although a resident of Washington, D.C., Edward had yet to visit the Capitol or even listen to one of Roosevelt’s famous fireside chats. But Germany’s invasion of the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, brought a sudden end to Teller’s personal isolationism. He canceled previous plans in order to attend the annual Pan American Scientific Conference a few days later, where FDR was the keynote speaker.

  Roosevelt appealed to the nation’s scientists to “act together to protect and defend, by every means at our command, our science, our culture, our American freedom and our civilization,” Teller remembered. For Edward, the moment was one of epiphany: “I had the strange impression that he was talking to me.” Indeed, FDR’s call to arms was the president’s real answer to the letter from Einstein and the Hungarians, Teller felt. Roosevelt’s twenty-minute speech “resolved my dilemma,” Edward later wrote.54

  That summer, after Teller and a friend, Cornell physicist Hans Bethe, had finished a teaching stint at Stanford, the pair drove down to Pasadena to ask Caltech’s famed aerodynamicist, Theodore Von Kármán, how they might contribute to the war effort. Bethe and Teller spent two days at Caltech and several more on the drive back east, discussing the behavior of air behind a shock wave—a subject of great importance to ballistics, Von Kármán had told them. A month later, Bethe mailed their paper to Caltech. Although it was unclassified—neither Bethe nor Teller was yet a citizen—the U.S. Army kept the document behind locked doors.55

  * * *

  At Berkeley, meanwhile, the war had brought about changes both subtle and large. Since travel across the Atlantic was deemed too hazardous, Ernest received his Nobel prize at a ceremony in Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall. Sweden’s consul general stood in for the king.

  But the bad news from Europe could do nothing to dim the luster of Lawrence and his laboratory. In February 1940, Life magazine featured a two-page color photograph of the new medical cyclotron at the Crocker lab.56 “There are no insurmountable technical difficulties in the way of producing greater cyclotrons,” Ernest told a reporter from the campus newspaper, adding that only “financial” obstacles remained. “This problem has now been handed over to the University president,” he observed imperiously.57

  Because of the Nobel prize, Lawrence had also begun to receive recognition from the world outside science and medicine. That March, he was invited to a “Young Men of the Year” banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria organized by Minnesota governor Harold Stassen. Lawrence was thrilled to be the only physicist in a constellation of ten notables that included Spencer Tracy and Lou Gehrig.58

  In early April, the news that Lawrence had been anxiously awaiting finally arrived in a telephone call from Rockefeller’s Warren Weaver, who confirmed the foundation’s grant of $1.15 million for the great cyclotron. Ernest told Weaver that he expected completion of the big machine by late June 1944—presuming no “unforeseen difficulties” intervened.59

  Ebullient, Lawrence telegraphed his thanks to Bush. Lawrence showed his gratitude to Alfred Loomis in more tangible fashion: he and Karl Compton sponsored Loomis for membership in the National Academy of Sciences. Recognition by his peers in academe was one of the few things that had eluded Loomis in his life, but there was perhaps nothing he valued more.60

  Operating behind the scenes, Alfred continued to make the big wheels turn for Ernest. While Lawrence was in New York for the Waldorf-Astoria dinner, Loomis introduced him to Edward Stettinius, president of U.S. Steel, who promised to set aside enough metal from the current mobilization to build the big accelerator. Following Loomis’s similar appeal to the Guggenheims, the Phelps Dodge Corporation agreed to supply 400 tons of copper at a bargain rate for the machine’s magnetic coils.61

  In addition, Loomis continued to support Lawrence in his traditional way. With Sproul’s approval, the wealthy entrepreneur established a $30,000 unrestricted bequest at the university for Lawrence’s personal use. Because of the Loomis fund, Molly could henceforth accompany Ernest on his increasingly frequent trips back east.62

  Lawrence had meanwhile located another prospective donor for the giant machine while on a visit with out-of-town guests to the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. As others in his entourage watched the Folies Bergère, Lawrence mentally sized up the portable steel-frame structure that had been custom-built for the show.63

  With his appeal to the Folies pending, Lawrence eyed a prospective building site on campus, in Strawberry Canyon, where a stream meandered through tall redwoods. Current occupants included the university’s poultry husbandry department. But Sproul soon offered Ernest a better and far more prominent location: the summit of Charter Hill, where a big white C stood out against the green grass.64 Lawrence no doubt thought it appropriate that the Rad Lab would henceforth occupy the heights above campus, next to the university’s symbol.

  * * *

  Gradually, however, despite Lawrence’s efforts, the overseas conflict began to impinge upon his Mecca.65 He felt the possibility of an atomic bomb “in his bones,” Ernest told Arthur Compton that spring.66

  Still, Lawrence was too busy fixing teething problems with the 60-inch and promoting the great cyclotron to carry out the work that might have settled the question of whether a uranium bomb was feasible. Not enough of the element’s scarce fissionable isotope, U-235, had yet been separated from natural uranium, U-238, to conduct the necessary experiments in any case. The physicist whom Briggs asked to carry out that task, Minnesota’s Alfred Nier, had run into difficulties trying to “soup up” the apparatus he was using to separate the isotopes.67

  Others in Berkeley and at the Rad Lab had already begun to respond to the clarion call. At the army’s request, Alvarez designed a Geiger counter that could be concealed in a book and smuggled into Germany, in an effort to determine if the Nazis were already at work on a fission weapon.68

  McMillan and Segrè were engaged in a search for as-yet-undiscovered fissionable elements, farther up the periodic chart than uranium. Abelson, now at Washington’s Carnegie Institution, returned to Berkeley that spring for a brief working vacation to help out. By bombarding uranium with neutrons in the 60-inch, Abelson and McMillan created a previously unknown and unstable transuranic with an atomic number of 93. It decayed after two days to a stable new element with an atomic number of 94. Following the convention, McMillan named element 93 “neptunium,” for the planet next in line after Uranus. Abelson’s vacation ended before he and McMillan could prove the existence of element 94, so it remained unnamed. Since neptunium had many of the same properties as uranium, however, both it and the mysterious 94 seemed logical candidates for fission.69

  On the same day in June 1940 that Abelson and McMillan announced their discovery in the Physical Review, the Germans entered Paris.

  * * *

  The Hungarians were not the only ones frustrated at the somnolent pace of Briggs’s Uranium Committee. Bush, Conant, and Karl Compton joined with National Academy of Sciences’s president Frank Jewett later that month to lobby for an organization that would mobilize America’s scientific manpower. Headed by Bush, the National Defense Research Committee would become the dynamo behind technical ideas aimed at helping win the war, if and when America entered the conflict.

  Bush moved quickly to have the NDRC assume oversight of Briggs and the Uranium Committee.70 Although it was too late to keep Berkeley’s discovery of neptunium under wraps, Bush suggested a voluntary moratorium upon the publication of scientific papers dealing with uranium and fission. By informal agreement among the scientists themselves rather than by government fiat, the age of discovery in high-energy physics had come to an end, at least for the duration.

 
; Lawrence returned to the Rad Lab from vacation in August, disappointed that so little progress had been made in atomic research during his absence. Nonetheless, he remained unwilling to take a more direct role in preparing the nation for war.71 Ernest also brushed off an appeal from Columbia University chemist Harold Urey that he join in endorsing the interventionist cause.72

  A few days later, Bush tried another approach: flattery.73 He hoped to recruit him to head “a sort of fire department,” Bush wrote Lawrence, emphasizing that he would not have to abandon his work at the Rad Lab.74 The kind of organization that Bush had in mind would have started fires under recalcitrant research problems, not put them out. But, while Lawrence agreed on the need for such an effort, Bush himself abandoned the idea when Ernest pointed out that senior scientists would surely object to reporting to a younger man.75

  On October 2, 1940, Bush telegraphed Lawrence again, this time with a single urgent question: “When could you come for conferences important matter?”76

  The meeting to which Lawrence was summoned dealt not with the atomic bomb but with a new British invention: microwave radar. It took place over the weekend of October 12–13 at Alfred Loomis’s mansion-laboratory. Bush, Karl Compton, and the Cavendish’s John Cockcroft also attended. Loomis was the logical host, since his institute had done some of the earliest work in the country on radar detection. (Loomis’s colleagues had invented the world’s first portable radar gun, successfully testing it the previous summer on unsuspecting motorists traveling a nearby highway. “For the Lord’s sake, don’t let the cops know about this,” one researcher reportedly warned.)77

  Of immediate interest to the British, of course, was using radar to detect and intercept the German bombers that were then attacking London in the Blitz. While the key invention, the cavity magnetron, came from a laboratory in England, the British wisely realized that their wealthy American cousins had a better chance of improving radar in time for it to make a difference in the war.