Laura herself was more circumspect than some about the use of the bomb, and we can assume her husband was, as well. For both of them, the merits of ending the war quickly outweighed the enormous loss of life involved. They also knew that the massive conventional fire bombings of major Japanese cities had led to similar, or even greater, fatalities than the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the other hand, they understood that these weapons had their own unique psychological terror and that, if used by both sides in a major future conflict, no one would be safe.
Maria Fermi had strong views about the project in which her brother had a starring role. Soon after the news of the bombings, she wrote to Enrico:
People of good judgment abstain from any technical comment, and realize that it would be vain to seek who is the first author in a work which is the result of a vast collaboration. All, however, are perplexed and appalled by its dreadful effects, and with time the bewilderment increases rather than diminishes. For my part I recommended you to God, Who alone can judge you morally.
Fermi and his family remained at Los Alamos until the end of 1945. Useful research remained to be done, on both the Super and the water boiler. Fermi wanted to finish his comprehensive lectures on nuclear physics, which were declassified in time for publication in the Collected Papers in 1965. As published, they were not written by him but rather put together as lecture notes by several of those who attended the lectures, reviewed and supplemented for publication by Fermi’s young collaborator, Bernard Feld. The papers cover virtually every aspect of nuclear physics then known to Fermi and thus to the physics world more generally, in a straightforward manner.
Fermi also lectured on the then-current state of the Super project. Teller had not been able to solve some of the basic problems with the design of the weapon, and Fermi’s lectures point out the flaws in the conception of the device as it stood in August 1945. These lectures remained classified until 2009 and were not included in the Collected Papers. Reviewing the progress Teller and Fermi made in thinking about a fusion device, they are highly technical, but the final paragraph indicates with typical Fermi humor the basic differences between the two physicists on the subject, at least during the final months of 1945:
In concluding this series of lectures, it should be stated that they may represent a somewhat pessimistic view, in that Teller who has been in charge of most of the work reported is inclined to be more optimistic than is the lecturer. The procedure that has been adopted to try to resolve the question of practicability of the super [sic] is that Teller shall propose a tentative design which he considers somewhat overdesigned, and the lecturer will try to show that it is underdesigned. (This makes the pope the devil’s advocate!)
By the end of December 1945, with his lectures completed, Fermi was ready to return to Chicago, to a position in a new institute at the University of Chicago organized just for him.
HOW DID FERMI’S FORMER COLLEAGUES IN ITALY SPEND THE WAR?
Rasetti spent the war at Laval University in Quebec. Fermi invited him to come to Los Alamos to work, but Rasetti rejected the offer on moral grounds. He wanted nothing to do with weapons and nuclear fission, considering them an abomination. When Rasetti moved to a position at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore after the war, he resumed contact with Fermi and the two men worked closely together on getting compensation for the slow-neutron patent.
Soon after Italy entered the war, Amaldi was drafted and served for some time on the front lines. Prior to this, he and his fellow physicists followed the discovery of fission and discussed its implications. They decided not to pursue work on fission weapons, once again largely on moral grounds. When Amaldi returned from the front lines, he endeavored to preserve what he could of the records of the Rome physics department and brought as much as possible to store at his home at Via Parioli, convinced that these records would be safer in his apartment than they would be at the more centrally located Sapienza campus. He also stashed expensive and vital equipment there. Italians credit him with preserving Italian physics during the war against tremendous odds.
Others, including former Fermi student Oreste Piccioni, stayed behind as well. Piccioni, with two colleagues, Marcello Conversi and Ettore Pancini, conducted an ingenious experiment under extremely difficult conditions in a basement in Rome at the height of the fighting over the city in 1945, which would have an enormous impact on postwar particle physics when the results were published in 1947. Fermi remained concerned about his Italian colleagues throughout the war and made several attempts to locate them and assure himself of their safety. Indeed, in one of his 1938 letters to Pegram, after accepting the position at Columbia, Fermi urged Pegram to find roles for some of his colleagues most at risk. Many of those he left behind, however, never made it to the United States once the war started; colleagues like Oreste Piccioni would have to wait until the war ended.
ENRICO FERMI IS OFTEN CALLED THE “FATHER OF THE NUCLEAR AGE.” Looking back over the period 1939 through 1945, a more nuanced evaluation emerges.
Several points are beyond dispute. Fermi and Szilard came up with the first crucial experiments in 1939 to explore how chain reactions might be created using uranium and they made the providential observation that graphite would be a more suitable moderator for the first chain reactions than heavy water. The German effort foundered largely because Heisenberg opted for a heavy water reactor. Could the atomic bomb have been developed without these experiments leading to the first Chicago pile? The pile itself was an important invention in the process of weapons development not simply because it demonstrated the physics of fission chain reactions. It also served as a model for the development of plutonium production reactors. No amount of cyclotron bombardment of uranium would have produced enough plutonium for a bomb and the enormous Hanford reactors would not have been possible without the work Fermi and his colleagues completed in Chicago in December 1942. Perhaps of equal importance, the project now had a device that could generate huge numbers of neutrons to be studied for their properties and their ability to create an explosive chain reaction in uranium and plutonium. CP-2 and CP-3 were also invaluable in assessing the level of impurities in the various components that were required in the manufacture of these first weapons. Finally, as the water boiler story illustrates, these reactors could be used to test estimates of critical mass. Fermi’s work on these new reactors is a central part of the Manhattan Project story.
His work at Los Alamos is harder to evaluate. Although the water boiler project was clearly important, much of his role consisted of day-to-day advice and counsel across a wide range of technical issues, ranging from neutron diffusion studies to pressure wave calculations to the design of complicated electronic circuitry. He was the “go-to” physicist when other physicists ran into problems that stumped them. He usually saw quick, practical solutions to the problems others brought to him and became a highly valued resource for everyone at Los Alamos. Oppenheimer came to rely extensively on his scientific judgment for a wide variety of issues, as did Bethe and other division heads.
And yet Fermi did not design the bombs themselves. Others did that work, although Fermi was consulted on a variety of matters relating to weapons design and weapons physics. Nor was he central to the work done by Oppenheimer and others at Berkeley from 1942 through 1943, on the physics of fast-neutron collisions with uranium. He contributed little to the work of Lawrence, Urey, and others on isotope separation and uranium enrichment, work that was every bit as important to the ultimate success of the project as was the Chicago pile. Nor was he a chemist. It was the methodical, dedicated Glenn Seaborg and his team who figured out how to extract plutonium from the spent uranium fuel rods once they were removed from the plutonium reactors. Von Neumann was the key man on the pressure wave calculations required for the implosion device, with Fermi contributing where he could. Kistiakowsky and a crack team of ordnance experts engineered the high explosives required for both gun-type and implosion devices.
In
missing the possibility of xenon poisoning during high-power reactor operations, Fermi risked bringing the plutonium project to a complete halt. Nature, along with John Wheeler and Charles Graves, came to his rescue and the B reactor went on to produce a major portion of the nation’s plutonium reserve. That it worked in the end does not diminish the fact that Fermi missed a major technical issue. As we have seen before, in the case of the discovery of fission in December 1938, he may have been the Pope, but he wasn’t infallible.
The Manhattan Project was far from being a one-man show. Hundreds of scientists at Los Alamos, Chicago, Oak Ridge, and Hanford contributed to the effort, as did thousands of engineers, construction workers, “computers,” secretaries, and lower-level military personnel. Many of these thousands learned the ultimate objective of their work only when the president announced the use of these bombs on Japanese cities in August 1945.
The decision to team Groves and Oppenheimer was perhaps the single most important decision necessary for the project to succeed. Groves was one of the very few individuals in the country who could run a vast, multibillion-dollar project under the requisite tight security and even tighter deadlines. Oppenheimer was ideally suited to work with Groves, on the one hand, and to work with a group of scientists on the other. It is hard to imagine that the Manhattan Project could have succeeded without either of these two giants.
Other scientists were also crucial to the effort: Bethe, von Neumann, Alvarez, Segrè, Serber, Bainbridge, Feynman, Neddermeyer, to name but a few of the hundreds of brilliant physicists who came to the mesa and devised the bomb.
Was Fermi’s work central to their success? No doubt it was. Would the project have succeeded without him? Perhaps eventually, but it would almost certainly have taken far longer to complete. At the particular moment in early 1939 when Szilard collared him at the King’s Crown Hotel on 116th Street in Manhattan, Fermi was the most knowledgeable person on the planet regarding neutron physics, a result of the grueling, intensive work he did with Amaldi from 1935 to 1938. That Szilard latched on to him to push the experimental agenda that resulted in a working nuclear reactor is one of history’s great coincidences. It is not at all clear that Fermi would have chosen to develop a controlled chain reaction without the brilliant, persistent, and occasionally annoying Szilard prodding him along. He may well have decided to pursue other types of technical studies. He may even have moved away from neutron physics completely, toward his next great adventure, particle physics. Could Szilard have approached other talented physicists? Of course he could have, but we will never know how these potential collaborators would have fared in the process. What we do know is that Fermi agreed to explore the chain reaction with Szilard and that exploration made history. It made the atom bomb possible and ushered humankind into the nuclear era.
In the process, Fermi and his colleagues became a species that had never really existed before the war: public scientists. Prior to the war, basic research was conducted on shoestring budgets at universities throughout the world and at a very few institutions like the Bureau of Standards, established to conduct research for the public good. It was conducted in small groups, often just a handful of scientists working together on tabletop experiments, freely communicating their results via professional journals with their colleagues around the world. Fermi became a government scientist, as did all of his colleagues during the Manhattan Project. Much of their work was conducted under government secrecy and continued under such constraints into the postwar era. The US government soon established great national laboratories throughout the country, legacies of the Manhattan Project, that continue to operate today at Los Alamos, Hanford, Oak Ridge, and elsewhere.
The Manhattan Project was not only the beginning of classified science. It was the birth of “big science,” funded by governments on an increasingly enormous scale. Gone forever were the early-twentieth-century tabletop experimental days of Rome, Cambridge, Paris, and Columbia.
The profound consequences of this revolution were only just being understood when Fermi returned to Chicago, but a man named Walter Bartky, the dean of the University of Chicago’s division of physical sciences, was a keen observer of the revolution. Out of these observations he developed a plan, one in which he hoped Fermi would again play a central role.
PART FOUR
THE CHICAGO YEARS
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
RETURN TO CHICAGO
THE FERMIS ARRIVED BACK IN CHICAGO ON JANUARY 2, 1946. BY June they moved to a new house not far from the old one, at 5327 University Avenue. Like the one on Woodlawn Avenue, it was a grand, three-story turn-of-the-century brick edifice. This house served as the Fermi family home until 1956, when, after Enrico’s death, Laura moved to an apartment. Nella and Giulio both returned to the Lab School. Laura picked up where she left off in the summer of 1944, managing a busy social schedule, hosting numerous parties for faculty and students, many of which involved square dancing, often with Harold Agnew calling the moves. She started a book group, called The Paperbacks, which focused on a range of classics.
After the war, Enrico Fermi gradually became a more well-rounded, if not exactly worldly, person. He occasionally joined Laura’s reading group. Though the fact that he might not have read a book never prevented him from having strong views on it, the group did seem to broaden his philosophical and cultural interests. He commented to Segrè that he would occasionally persuade the group of his views by “using the old Italian method of shouting louder than his opponent.” In the summer of 1953, he was invited to speak at a seminar in Aspen for twenty young businessmen that was designed to expose them to a broad range of readings in history, culture, and philosophy. Fermi enjoyed the week and was amused to be considered a “philosopher” by the conference organizers. Fermi confided to Segrè that he had been thinking about the philosophical aspects of quantum theory, aspects that earlier held no interest for him. He did not, however, bother to commit any of those thoughts to paper. Amazingly, Laura even persuaded Enrico to attend a performance of the highly popular musical South Pacific, for Enrico a major concession to the musical arts.
IN THEIR TEENAGE YEARS, NELLA AND GIULIO EXPERIENCED THEIR father in different ways.
Nella admired her father and had the easier relationship with him of the siblings. At a conference at Cornell in 2003, she described her father trying to teach her algebra when she was eleven. He was not particularly successful, but laid the foundation, she felt, for a quicker understanding of the subject when it came time to study it at school. She also described his carpentry projects around the house. They were more functional than aesthetic. When Laura complained about the crudeness of one such project, Fermi observed that the work was hidden behind the couch, so no one would notice. As Laura stormed off, he turned to Nella and, in a highly revealing moment, advised his daughter, “Never make something more accurate than absolutely necessary.” The two of them would sometimes cook together when Laura was out of town. Not surprisingly, he could be quite literal in his interpretation of recipes. Nella remembers fondly the time when her father came home from the lab with a new substance for which he had been asked to think of some uses. It had the consistency of putty when pulled apart slowly but broke like glass when pulled apart quickly. He showed it to Nella and Giulio, but none of them could figure out what it might be good for. It was “Silly Putty,” which was a popular toy in the 1950s and 1960s. For a time they played with another new toy, the “dunking bird,” a plastic bird that, properly set up, would repeatedly dip its beak into a glass of water and then straighten up. They had good fun, even though, as Nella was quick to note, her father was never particularly demonstrative.
Giulio had a more troubled relationship with his father. A very bright boy with a tendency toward depression, he never felt comfortable in his father’s shadow. He rarely if ever spoke about his father in his later years, but he did occasionally confide in Robert Fuller, his lifelong friend from his undergraduate years. Giulio told Fuller of his frustration
at not being able to build a working electric motor and his humiliation every time his father would step in to fix the problem at hand. He talked about his feelings of inadequacy when he compared himself to his father and of his father’s relative insensitivity to this. The problems Giulio faced came to a head when he was sixteen, about ready to attend college. He tried to commit suicide by slitting his wrists. Fuller notes that Giulio first realized just how much his father really cared for him in the ambulance ride to the hospital that terrible day. He recovered and, after a short and miserable spell at the University of Chicago, found some distance and peace at Oberlin College, where few of his fellow students knew of his relationship with one of the towering scientific figures of the twentieth century. By the time Giulio arrived at Oberlin, he had changed his name to “Judd,” a name he kept for the rest of his life. The effect was to create a distance from his famous father and his Italian heritage.
It wasn’t that Fermi was a particularly bad parent. He may have been inattentive, but no more so than other career-driven fathers in America during the immediate postwar period. Giulio had the misfortune of inheriting a delicate psyche, perhaps directly from his grandmother, Ida. His sensitive makeup was simply ill-suited to life with Enrico.
MORE GENERALLY, THE WAR CHANGED EVERYTHING. ENRICO FERMI was now a national figure, even a bit of a celebrity. The best-selling official report on the Manhattan Project was partly responsible for this. Journalists’ intense interest in the Manhattan Project made Oppenheimer and Groves superstars, but Fermi became famous as well, although to a lesser degree. He was inundated with invitations and requests for interviews for the remainder of his life. He participated in documentaries about the Manhattan Project, gamely re-creating for famed CBS broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow the moment in December 1942 when he achieved a controlled chain reaction. He posed impishly in a famous photo session in front of a blackboard, which displays a formula for the fine structure constant that is clearly wrong. Because he knew as much about that constant as anyone alive, he almost certainly wrote it incorrectly to see whether anyone would notice. Along with four other University of Chicago alumni of the Manhattan Project, he was honored by the US Congress with the Medal of Merit. A plaque commemorating CP-1 was unveiled at a ceremony on the tenth anniversary of the event, presided over by University of Chicago president Hutchins.
The Last Man Who Knew Everything Page 31
