Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  On a walk together along the shores of Lake Michigan, Oppenheimer sought Teller’s advice about how best to organize the new lab. Later, sharing a berth on a train to Washington, Oppie was unusually solicitous of Edward—even rebandaging an infected wound on the latter’s finger.

  But Teller professed to find an ominous undertone in an innocuous remark that Oppenheimer uttered during the trip. Complaining, good-naturedly, about the restrictions that Groves was already imposing upon the project in the name of secrecy, Oppie predicted that the time would come “when we will have to do things differently and resist the military.”

  Teller, taken aback, voiced his objections. Privately, he wondered whether Oppie’s comment did not foreshadow some future, unspecified act of civil disobedience, or worse. Oppenheimer, he noted, abruptly changed the subject. But the distance between them, Teller felt, had begun to grow.56

  Three weeks after receiving Bush’s wary benediction, Oppenheimer gave the army a list of personnel to be recruited for the new laboratory. The list contained forty-four names—McMillan, Segrè, Serber, Teller, and Bethe were prominent among them. Fermi would remain behind in Chicago, at least initially, to continue work on the atomic pile. Alvarez, originally suggested by Bethe, was stricken from the list by Oppenheimer and Teller. Luie was already busy with the radar project at MIT in any case, and his oversized ego may also have been a factor against him.57

  On November 16, Oppenheimer and McMillan met up with John Dudley, an army colonel from the corps’s Manhattan District, at the Hilton hotel in Albuquerque. From there the trio proceeded through a light snowstorm in an unmarked army sedan to the remote spot that Dudley had picked for the lab.58

  The site, Jemez Springs, was a deep and heavily wooded canyon an hour’s drive northwest of Santa Fe. Oppenheimer and McMillan found the location depressing—too dark, too confining. Groves, joining the group, worried about flash floods and the difficulty of building housing for the 265 people he told Dudley he thought the lab would employ.59 Another headache was the close proximity of an Indian reservation, which Groves feared might require him to divulge the greatest secret of the war to Harold Ickes, FDR’s garrulous secretary of interior.60

  At Oppenheimer’s suggestion, the group drove out of the canyon and up a mesa on the other side of the Jemez Mountains to the site of a private boys’ school. Oppie knew of the school from summers spent at nearby Perro Caliente. The Los Alamos Ranch School took its name from the thick stands of trees growing on the two-mile-long mesa: Los Alamos was Spanish for “the cottonwoods.”

  At an elevation of 7,200 feet, the mesa had a commanding vista of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east and was sufficiently isolated to satisfy Groves’s concern with security. Although Indian reservations surrounded the land, they were at a far enough remove to avoid interference from Ickes.

  The army began negotiations to purchase the land less than a week later; the Ranch School had never fully recovered from the depression, and the owners were eager to sell. A headquarters office for the project was rented on East Palace Avenue in Santa Fe, thirty miles to the southeast. A week later, Oppenheimer and McMillan returned with Lawrence to show him the proposed location of the new laboratory. “Lawrence was pleased by the site, and so, again, were we,” Oppenheimer reported to Groves.61

  Lawrence and McMillan also accompanied Oppenheimer on a cross-country recruiting drive for the new lab a few days later. In Washington, the three pressed Bush and Conant to release scientists from the government-funded laboratories at MIT and San Diego so that they could go to New Mexico.62

  The remoteness of the site and Groves’s strict security restrictions imposed unique burdens upon the recruiters. Because the army wanted to protect the identity of scientists working at the lab, there would be neither banks nor a post office at Los Alamos. Except for occasional forays to Santa Fe and the nearby Indian ruins, residents remained essentially prisoners behind the wire. (Los Alamos, Teller would observe, “gave one a new appreciation of grass and strangers.”) But Oppenheimer found potential recruits worried less about the isolation and secrecy than about the army’s domination of the project.

  Initially, Oppie had not questioned Groves’s decision to make the laboratory a military installation. Groves justified the move on the grounds that work at the lab would be inherently dangerous. (Unmentioned was the fact that such an arrangement also promised to make discipline easier—and would allow the general to court-martial anyone who violated his edicts.)

  Early in 1943, Oppenheimer would even report to the Presidio for a physical examination, the first step toward receiving an army commission as a lieutenant colonel, the highest rank that Groves could obtain for a laboratory director. Groves instructed the officer who accompanied Oppie to advise the doctors that they were not to flunk the subject because of any physical or psychological infirmity. The examiners declared Oppenheimer eleven pounds underweight but otherwise fit for duty. Afterward, Oppie was measured for a uniform.63

  However, avuncular advice from two senior physicists—Isidor Rabi, then at MIT’s Rad Lab, and Caltech’s Robert Bacher—persuaded Oppenheimer that he should insist upon “scientific autonomy” for Los Alamos. Reluctantly, Groves backed down.64 With the army willing to cede at least some authority to civilians, the pace of recruiting picked up.65

  Oppie surprised all by submitting a detailed organization chart in mid-December 1942. The lab was to have four main components: Bethe would head the Theoretical, or “T,” Division. Bacher was in charge of Experimental Physics. Chemistry and Metallurgy would be in the hands of two men: Cyril Smith, a metallurgist then working for the NDRC in Washington, and Joseph Kennedy, the young Berkeley chemist who had predicted to Lansdale that no nation would have enough uranium to build a bomb during the war. The Ordnance Division, which would actually assemble the bomb, was to be headed by a navy captain, William “Deke” Parsons.66

  John Manley, a University of Washington physicist originally assigned to help Oppenheimer at Chicago, became Oppie’s right-hand man for planning and staffing the New Mexico lab. Asked to calculate the total number of buildings that would be required, Manley had simply added up the space committed thus far to atomic research at universities around the country; he estimated that about two dozen scientists would need offices.67 Oppenheimer, looking ahead, ordered the buildings enlarged to allow for expansion and added a cryogenics laboratory to the blueprints, for research on the Super.68

  * * *

  As late as the end of 1942, exactly who or what would administer Los Alamos for the army had yet to be decided. But Chicago’s Met Lab and the Rad Lab at MIT had established the precedent of university-run, federally funded laboratories for defense work in the wartime emergency. Oppenheimer suggested Caltech or Harvard as possible candidates to run the new lab in the desert.69

  Groves, too, recognized, albeit grudgingly, that an affiliation with academe offered the best chance of attracting the “prima donnas” that he hoped would join the project. But New Mexico contained no university of a size or stature equal to the job, and Oppenheimer—nursing his own unspoken grievances—refused to make the case for his adopted alma mater.

  Lawrence showed no such reticence. As Berkeley’s biggest booster, he had already begun urging Sproul and the university’s comptroller to bid on the army contract.70

  The university’s representatives in these negotiations was Robert Underhill, a short, stocky, determined man with a salt-and-pepper crew-cut. Underhill would later describe his charter from Sproul as “to see to it that the University didn’t lose any money.”71 A 1915 graduate of Berkeley’s College of Commerce, Underhill had been an accountant at a paint company before joining the university. By 1933 he was secretary-treasurer to the regents. As deputy chairman of a university committee created on the eve of the war to handle secret defense contracts, Underhill knew better than to ask questions.

  Even so, he hit a brick wall with Oppenheimer and Groves, who refused even to divulge the name of the sta
te that the secret laboratory would be located in—saying only that it was in “the Rocky Mountain area.” (The general relented after Underhill explained that the university’s insurance carrier would refuse to write an indemnification policy without such information.)

  Underhill found Oppenheimer similarly tight-lipped when he visited Eagle Hill on a Sunday afternoon. Oppie at one point stopped speaking entirely, resuming only when Underhill threatened to walk out of both the meeting and the contract unless he were told more. Still, Oppie spoke “very guardedly and I learned very little,” Underhill subsequently recalled.72

  Remarkably, neither Sproul nor Underhill had been told the purpose of the secret enterprise that they were being asked to run in the far-off desert.*73 When Berkeley’s business manager complained to Groves in January that he had yet to see “the scratch of a pen—one written word” on the subject, Groves asked Stimson to personally reassure Sproul as to the project’s importance.74 (Sproul drolly assured Conant, in reply, that he had “no doubt as to which project is first and foremost, even if I were not reminded frequently by its distinguished director.” But he was, Sproul protested, already doing everything he could for Ernest Lawrence: “Indeed, I have done enough so that there is some conflict in the minds of the faculty in general as to whether I am administering a University or a Radiation Laboratory.”)75

  Spurred on by Lawrence, Sproul and Underhill agreed to take the leap into the void. On February 1, 1943, Sproul initialed a $150,000, six-month contract between the university and the government “for certain investigations to be directed by Dr. J. R. Oppenheimer.”76 The single-page document specified that details of the contract would be worked out later.77

  * * *

  With plans for Oppenheimer’s desert laboratory in place, the other crucial part of the Manhattan Project—obtaining the fissionable material for the bomb—had hit a major snag near the end of 1942.

  In November, a British scientist casually mentioned to Conant over lunch that naturally occurring impurities in plutonium might cause it to fission spontaneously, making it unusable in a weapon. Seaborg had, in fact, pointed out this very problem to Oppenheimer weeks earlier. But it came as sudden and unexpected news to Conant and Groves.

  Most worrisome of all was the fact that the warning had come from a British scientist. Groves feared that Lawrence’s optimism might have subtly infected the entire U.S. project, causing other potentially fatal flaws to be overlooked. The fact that Fermi was building the world’s first nuclear reactor in a heavily populated part of Chicago undoubtedly added to this concern.78

  Lingering doubts and a pessimistic report by DuPont—the contractor chosen to build the plutonium production reactors at Hanford, in Washington State—prompted Groves to order a reappraisal of the entire S-1 Project that fall. He and Conant picked a five-man committee, chaired by MIT chemical engineer Warren Lewis, to review the status of Urey’s gaseous diffusion project at Columbia, Lawrence’s Calutrons, and Fermi’s atomic pile. Lewis’s committee arrived in Berkeley for an inspection visit on November 28.

  Lawrence worried most about the reaction of DuPont’s representative on the panel, engineer Crawford Greenewalt. Since “Greenie” was the man responsible for the negative report on Hanford, Ernest was eager to make a good impression.79

  Lawrence had long since abandoned taking lab visitors to DiBiasi’s, the cheap Italian eatery in Albany, in favor of Trader Vic’s, an ersatz-Polynesian restaurant in downtown Oakland whose owner had become a friend.80 “Vics” was famous for its Mai Tais—potent rum drinks served in tall glasses topped by paper umbrellas. Ernest’s favorite table was on a raised platform near the bar, underneath a painting of a hula dancer. Dinner that night for the Lewis Committee followed a full-day tour of the Rad Lab and its one-sixteenth-scale model of a production Alpha Calutron. But Lawrence’s hospitality failed to make a dent with Greenewalt, who showed a flinty indifference to Ernest’s trademark bonhomie.

  What bothered Greenewalt most was Lawrence’s incessant talk about future plans for even bigger machines. Greenewalt glimpsed in the prototype Calutron the “mess of machinery” that Conant feared, but without results. Oppenheimer, tagging along on the tour, had tried at one point to rein-in Lawrence’s jaunty enthusiasm. “So as a result of Oppenheimer holding Lawrence down, we finally got a view of what they had actually done,” Greenewalt wrote in his diary that night.81 The poker-faced engineer and the rest of Lewis’s committee returned to Chicago in time to witness the successful start-up of Fermi’s atomic pile.

  Lewis submitted his report to the Military Policy Committee in early December. He recommended giving priority to gaseous diffusion and Fermi’s plutonium-producing reactor. But the report cast a baleful eye upon electromagnetic separation, and Lewis dismissed Lawrence’s Calutrons as unlikely to produce enough U-235 in time to be useful in the war.82

  Conant and Groves simply ignored Lewis’s advice. On December 10, 1942, the Military Policy Committee approved plans to build Lawrence’s proposed 100-gram-a-day separation facility.

  At Berkeley, the atomic bomb project had meanwhile outgrown Donner Laboratory, so Lawrence and his Rad Lab colleagues moved into the New Classroom Building nearby.83 A campus policeman was stationed at the door, and Ernest’s red leather chair was ceremoniously transferred from LeConte library to his new office on the second floor. Two days before Christmas, Lawrence presided over a first meeting with Groves and contractor representatives concerning construction of a planned 500-tank Alpha Calutron at Y-12, the army’s code name for the electromagnetic separation plant in Tennessee’s Bear Creek Valley.84

  The Alpha Calutron design was frozen at year’s end. Groves notified Stone and Webster that he expected the inaugural racetrack to be operating by the summer. The army had recently picked Tennessee Eastman Corporation to run the production plant, and employees of the company were already beginning to arrive in Bear Valley. Wallace Reynolds, the Rad Lab’s business manager, opened one office at Oak Ridge and another near the contractor’s headquarters in Boston to coordinate work on the Calutrons. In mid-February 1943, Stone and Webster broke ground for the first racetrack before the construction drawings had even been approved.85

  * * *

  On March 16, Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer left Berkeley for Santa Fe by train, bound for Los Alamos. Their son, Peter, a toddler not yet two, would follow with his nurse a few days later. In the weeks before, Oppenheimer had been saying his good-byes. He and Steve Nelson had met for lunch at a restaurant on University Avenue. Oppie, Nelson later wrote, was “excited to the point of nervousness. He couldn’t discuss where he was going, but would only say that it had to do with the war effort.”86 They talked instead of other things: Spain and the war.

  A last-minute call from Jean Tatlock—who continued to lean upon Oppie at moments of psychological distress—went unanswered.87

  Another friend to whom Oppie bid adieux was Haakon Chevalier, who would subsequently describe their leave-taking elegiacally, as evoking “a ‘Cherry Orchard’ mood.”88 Chevalier remembered Oppenheimer expressing the fear that the Germans might win the war. “But perhaps we can think up a few tricks,” Oppie added, brightening.89 Barbara Chevalier had figured out that the couple must be headed for the mountains, since Kitty was buying woolen clothes for Peter. Oppie would later recall only that he had complained to Chevalier about his security clearance being held up.90

  Their political coffee klatch had held its final meeting the previous spring, before disbanding on account of the war; Oppenheimer had missed this last gathering, having been summoned to Chicago by Compton.91

  Chevalier, too, was adjusting to changes brought about by the war. He had long been aware that his fortunes at the university were on the wane. His department chairman had informed him that he should look for a teaching job elsewhere. But Chevalier, like Oppenheimer, was also feeling guilty to be sitting out the war. A week before he bid farewell to Oppie, Haakon had written to his son, Jacques, an undergraduate at Yale:
<
br />   We are such a small part of this big, world-shaking revolution that we may well feel discouraged. But the world does move, however slowly, and perhaps, even in our small way, we shall be able to play an effective role. It is ironic for me to feel how little I am doing for this war while I imagine the possibility of doing so much. I certainly don’t intend to resign myself to remaining a bystander, but as yet I am not reconciled to becoming a small cog in the monster machine, where my hands would be tied and where, though I would be an integral part of the “war effort” I might have fewer possibilities of doing some [sic] effective within my feeble competence than if I retain, for the time being, some freedom of action.*92

  PART TWO

  INSIDE THE WIRE

  We shall all be one large family doing work inside the wire.

  —Robert Oppenheimer, Los Alamos, 1943

  5

  ENORMOZ

  OPPENHEIMER HAD BARELY unpacked at Los Alamos when Underhill arrived by train on his first inspection trip. The regents’ representative was still hoping to learn what he and Sproul had committed the university to do. Oppie, however, did his best to frustrate Underhill’s investigation. Wedged in the backseat of an army sedan between Oppenheimer and Priscilla Duffield, Oppie’s secretary at the lab, Underhill was driven quickly up the rough and dusty road that led to the mesa before being taken back to Santa Fe. The lab’s director volunteered no useful information about the project during the drive.

  Undeterred, Underhill would make monthly visits to Los Alamos for the duration of the war. As ever, the regents’ representative remained the soul of discretion. To discourage questions from curious strangers, Underhill told everyone he met on the east-bound train that he was a farmer from Manhattan, Kansas—a town the railroad bypassed. On the return trip, Underhill introduced himself as a California olive farmer, knowing that there were only a few places in the state where olives were grown. He memorized the market price of oats and alfalfa and read a book on olive tree diseases so that his cover would be all the more believable.1