by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
The breathtaking scenery compensated in part for the utilitarian ugliness of the town. “We could gaze beyond the town, fenced in by steel wire,” wrote Bernice Brode, the wife of physicist Robert Brode, “and watch the seasons come and go—the aspens turning gold in the fall against the dark evergreens; blizzards piling up snow in winter; the pale green of spring buds; and the dry desert wind whistling through the pines in summer. It was surely a touch of genius to establish our strange town on the mesa top, although many sensible people sensibly said that Los Alamos was a city that never should have been.” When Oppenheimer spoke of the mesa’s beauty during a recruiting trip to the University of Chicago, an urbane Leo Szilard was heard to exclaim, “Nobody could think straight in a place like that. Everybody who goes there will go crazy.”
Everyone had to change lifelong habits. At Berkeley, Oppenheimer had refused to schedule a class before 11:00 a.m., so he could socialize late into the evening; at Los Alamos, he was invariably on his way to the Technical Area by 7:30 a.m. The Tech Area—known simply as the “T”—was surrounded by a 9½-foot-high -foot-high woven wire fence, topped by two strands of barbed wire. Military police guarding the gate inspected everyone’s colored badges. A white badge designated a physicist or other scientist who had the right to roam freely throughout the “T.” On occasion, Oppenheimer absent-mindedly forgot about the all-too-visible armed guards stationed everywhere. One day he drove up to Los Alamos’ main gate and, without even slowing down, whizzed through. The astonished MP shouted a warning and then fired a shot at the car’s tires. Oppenheimer stopped, backed up the car and, after murmuring an apology, drove off. Understandably worried about Oppenheimer’s safety, Groves wrote to him in July 1943 requesting that he refrain from driving an automobile for more than a few miles—and, for good measure, “refrain from flying in airplanes.”
Like everyone else, Oppenheimer worked six days a week, taking off Sunday. But even on workdays he usually wore casual clothes, reverting to his New Mexico wardrobe of jeans or khaki pants with a blue tieless workshirt. His colleagues followed suit. “I don’t recall seeing a shined pair of shoes during working hours,” wrote Bernice Brode. As Oppie walked to the “T,” his colleagues often fell in behind him and listened quietly as he softly murmured his thoughts of the morning. “There goes the mother hen and all the little chickens,” observed one Los Alamos resident. “His porkpie hat, his pipe, and something about his eyes gave him a certain aura,” recalled a twenty-three-year-old WAC who worked the telephone switchboard. “He never needed to show off or shout. . . . He could have demanded Priority One with his telephone calls but never did. He never really needed to be as kind as he was.”
The director’s studied informality endeared him to many who might otherwise have felt intimidated in his presence. Ed Doty, a young technician with the Army’s Special Engineer Detachment (SED), wrote his parents after the war about how “several times Dr. Oppenheimer has called for something or other . . . and every time, when I would answer the phone with ‘Doty,’ the voice at the other end would say, ‘This is Oppy.’ ” His informality contrasted sharply with the manner of General Groves, who “demanded attention, demanded respect.” Oppie, on the other hand, got attention and respect naturally.
From the beginning, Oppenheimer and Groves had agreed that everyone’s salaries were to be pegged according to each recruit’s previous job. This resulted in wide disparities since a relatively young man recruited from private industry might well be paid much more than an older, tenured professor. To compensate for this inequality, Oppenheimer decreed that rents would be pro-rated according to salary. When the young physicist Harold Agnew challenged Oppenheimer to explain why a plumber could earn nearly three times the pay of a college graduate, Oppie replied that the plumbers had no idea of the laboratory’s importance to the war effort, whereas the scientists did—and that, explained Oppenheimer, justified the pay difference. The scientists, at least, were not working for the money. Oppenheimer himself had been six months in Los Alamos when his secretary reminded him one day that he had not yet received a salary check.
Everyone put in long hours. The laboratory was open day and night and Oppenheimer encouraged people to set their own schedules. He refused to allow time clocks to be installed, and a siren was introduced only in October 1944, when one of General Groves’ efficiency experts complained about the laxness in regular work hours. “The work was terribly demanding,” Bethe recalled. The leader of the Theoretical Division thought that as science his work was “much less difficult than many things I have done at other times.” But the deadlines were highly stressful. “I had the feeling, and this came in my dreams,” Bethe said, “that I was behind a terribly heavy cart which I had to push up a hill.” Scientists accustomed to working with limited resources and virtually no deadlines now had to adjust to a world of unlimited resources and exacting deadlines.
Bethe worked in Oppenheimer’s headquarters, the T-Building (“T” for “Theoretical”), a drab two-story green structure that quickly became the spiritual center of The Hill. Nearby sat Dick Feynman, who was as gregarious as Bethe was serious. “For me,” Bethe recalled, “Feynman sort of materialized from Princeton. I hadn’t known about him, but Oppenheimer had. He was very lively from the beginning, but he didn’t start insulting me until about two months after he came.” The thirty-seven-year-old Bethe liked to have someone around who was willing to argue with him, and the twentyfive-year-old Feynman loved to argue. When the two of them were together, everyone in their building could hear Feynman yelling, “No, no, you’re crazy,” or “That’s nuts!” Bethe would then quietly explain why he was right. Feynman would calm down for a few minutes and then erupt again with “That’s impossible, you’re mad!” Their colleagues soon nicknamed Feynman “The Mosquito” and Bethe “The Battleship.”
“OPPENHEIMER AT LOS ALAMOS,” Bethe said, “was very different from the Oppenheimer I had known. For one thing, the Oppenheimer before the war was somewhat hesitant, diffident. The Oppenheimer at Los Alamos was a decisive executive.” Bethe was hard-pressed to explain the transformation. The man of “pure science” he knew at Berkeley had been entirely focused on exploring the “deep secrets of nature.” Oppenheimer had not been remotely interested in anything like an industrial enterprise—and yet at Los Alamos he was directing an industrial enterprise. “It was a different problem, a different attitude,” Bethe said, “and he completely changed to fit the new role.”
He rarely gave orders, and instead managed to communicate his desires, as the physicist Eugene Wigner recalled, “very easily and naturally, with just his eyes, his two hands, and a half-lighted pipe.” Bethe remembered that Oppie “never dictated what should be done. He brought out the best in all of us, like a good host with his guests.” Robert Wilson felt similarly: “In his presence, I became more intelligent, more vocal, more intense, more prescient, more poetic myself. Although normally a slow reader, when he handed me a letter I would glance at it and hand it back prepared to discuss the nuances of it minutely.” He also admitted that in retrospect there was a certain amount of “self-delusion” in these feelings. “Once out of his presence the bright things that had been said were difficult to reconstruct or remember. No matter, the tone had been established. I would know how to invent what it was that had to be done.”
Oppenheimer’s frail, ascetic physique only accentuated his charismatic authority. “The power of his personality is the stronger because of the fragility of his person,” John Mason Brown observed some years later. “When he speaks he seems to grow, since the largeness of his mind so affirms itself that the smallness of his body is forgotten.”
He had always had a knack for anticipating the next question to be faced in solving any theoretical physics problem. But now he surprised his colleagues with his seemingly instantaneous comprehension of any facet of engineering. “He could read a paper—I saw this many times,” recalled Lee Dubridge, “and you know, it’d be fifteen or twenty typed pages, and he�
�d say, ‘Well, let’s look this over and we’ll talk about it.’ Oppie would then flip through the pages in about five minutes and then he’d brief everybody on exactly the important points. . . . He had a remarkable ability to absorb things so rapidly. . . . I don’t think there was anything around the lab of any significance that Oppie wasn’t fully familiar with and knew what was going on.” Even when there was disagreement, Oppenheimer had an instinct for preempting arguments. David Hawkins, the Berkeley philosophy student Oppenheimer had recruited to serve as his personal assistant, had many opportunities to observe his boss in action: “One would listen patiently to an argument beginning, and finally Oppenheimer would summarize, and he would do it in such a way that there was no disagreement. It was a kind of magical trick that brought respect from all those people, some of them superiors in terms of their scientific record. . . .”
It helped that Oppenheimer could turn on—and off—his personal charm. Those who knew him from Berkeley understood that this was a man with a remarkable flair for drawing others into his orbit. And those, like Dorothy McKibbin, who met him for the first time in New Mexico invariably found themselves eager to please him. “He made you do the impossible, ” McKibbin recalled. One day, she was called from Santa Fe to the Site and asked if she would help to alleviate the ongoing housing crisis by taking over a lodge ten miles up the road and turning it into housing for a hundred employees. McKibbin resisted. “Well,” she protested, “I’ve never run a hotel before.” At that moment the door of Oppenheimer’s office opened and he stuck his head out and said, “Dorothy, I wish you would.” He then withdrew his head and closed the door. McKibbin said, “I will.”
“I think he had no great reluctance about using people,” recalled John Manley. “If he found that people were useful to him, why it was just natural to him to use them.” But Manley thought many people, himself included, enjoyed being used by Robert because he did it so adroitly. “I think that he really realized that the other person knew that this was going on; it was like a ballet, each one knowing the part and the role he’s playing, and there wasn’t any subterfuge in it.”
He listened to and often accepted the advice of others. When Hans Bethe suggested everyone would benefit from a weekly open-ended colloquium, Oppenheimer immediately agreed. When Groves first learned of it, he tried to stop it, but Oppenheimer insisted that such a free exchange of ideas among the “white badge” scientists was essential. “The background of our work is so complicated,” Oppie wrote Enrico Fermi, “and information in the past has been so highly compartmentalized, that it seems that we shall have a good deal to gain from a leisurely and thorough discussion.”
The first colloquium was convened on April 15, 1943, in the now empty schoolboys’ library. Standing before a small blackboard, Oppenheimer offered some perfunctory words of welcome and then introduced Bob Serber, his former student. Serber, he explained, would brief the assembled scientists, numbering no more than forty, on the task at hand. Speaking from notes with his habitual stutter, the shy and awkward Serber took center stage. “Security was terrible,” Serber later wrote. “We could hear carpenters banging down the hall and at one point a leg appeared through the beaver-board ceiling, presumably belonging to an electrician working up above.” After only a few minutes, Oppenheimer sent John Manley up to whisper in Serber’s ear that he should stop using the word “bomb” in favor of something more neutral like “gadget.”
“The object of the project,” Serber said, “is to produce a practical military weapon in the form of a bomb in which the energy is released by a fast-neutron chain reaction in one or more of the materials known to show nuclear fission.” Summarizing what Oppenheimer’s team had learned from their Berkeley summer sessions, Serber reported that by their calculations an atomic bomb might conceivably produce an explosion equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT. Any such “gadget,” however, would need highly enriched uranium. This core of enriched uranium, approximately the size of a cantaloupe, would weigh about thirty-three pounds. They could also construct a weapon from the even heavier element of plutonium—produced via a neutron-capture process using U-238. A plutonium bomb would need far less critical mass, and the plutonium core might therefore weigh only eleven pounds and appear no larger than an orange. Either core would need to be packed within a thick shell of ordinary uranium the size of a basketball. This would bring the weight of either device to about a ton—still something deliverable by airplane.11
Most of the scientists in Serber’s audience already understood the theoretical possibilities inherent in the new physics—but compartmentalization had kept many of them in the dark about the details. Few had realized how many of the basic questions had already been answered, at least in broad outline. The obstacles remaining to building a practical military weapon were large but not insurmountable. Some of the physics of building an atomic bomb was still uncertain, but the real imponderables lay in the field of engineering and ordnance design. Producing sufficient amounts of either U-235 or plutonium would require a massive industrial effort. And even if sufficient bomb-grade materials could be produced, no one was quite sure how to design an atomic bomb that would detonate efficiently. But even a onetime skeptic like Bethe understood, as he later put it, “That once plutonium was made, it was almost certain that a nuclear bomb could be made as well.” Thus, the real news to Serber’s audience was that they had a mission that could contribute enormously to the war effort. This fact alone lifted morale. Serber’s first talk conveyed what Oppenheimer wanted: a sense of mission and a realization that they had the means to change history. But could they solve the technical problems before the Germans? Could they indeed help win the war?
Over the next two weeks, Serber gave four more hour-long lectures, stimulating the kind of creative dialogue that Oppenheimer wanted. Among many other issues, Serber briefly summarized the actual mechanics of what he called “shooting”—the problem of how to bring together the critical masses of the uranium or plutonium so as to initiate a chain reaction. Serber dwelled on the most obvious method—the gun assembly—whereby criticality would be achieved by firing a slug of uranium into another mass of U-235, leading to an explosion. But he also suggested that “the pieces might be mounted on a ring as in the [accompanying] sketch. If explosive material were distributed around the ring and fired, the pieces would be blown inward to form a sphere.” The idea of imploding fissionable material had first been suggested by Oppenheimer’s old friend Richard Tolman during the summer of 1942, and he and Serber had thereupon written a memorandum on the subject for Oppenheimer. Tolman later wrote two other memos on implosion, and in March 1943 Vannevar Bush and James Conant urged Oppenheimer to explore the implosion design. Oppenheimer reportedly replied, “Serber is looking into it.” Although Tolman’s proposal had not included the notion of actually compressing solid material so as to increase its density, the idea was sufficiently well formulated to warrant inclusion in Serber’s lecture notes, if only as an aside. But this was enough to spark the interest of another physicist, Seth Neddermeyer, who asked Oppenheimer’s permission to investigate its potential. Soon, Neddermeyer and a small team of scientists could be found in a canyon near Los Alamos, testing implosion explosives.
Serber’s lectures would have a long life. Using Serber’s notes, Ed Condon typed up the lectures as a twenty-four-page summary. This became a mimeographed booklet, titled The Los Alamos Primer, which was passed out to newly arriving scientists. Among others, Enrico Fermi attended some of Serber’s lectures, and he then remarked to Oppenheimer, “I believe your people actually want to make a bomb.” Oppenheimer was struck by the note of surprise in Fermi’s voice as he said this. Fermi had just come from Chicago, where he found the atmosphere among the scientists oddly subdued in comparison to the exhilaration he often encountered among the men in Oppie’s mesa laboratory. Everyone, whether in Chicago or Los Alamos or elsewhere, held the sobering thought that if an atomic bomb was possible, the Germans might be ahead in the race to build
one. But whereas at Chicago, many of the senior scientists were troubled and even depressed by this realization, at Los Alamos, under Oppenheimer’s charismatic leadership, this awareness seemed only to inspire the men to forge ahead with their work.
Fermi took Oppenheimer aside one day and suggested another way to kill large numbers of Germans. Perhaps, he said, radioactive fission products could be used to poison Germany’s food supply. Oppenheimer seems to have taken the proposal seriously. After urging Fermi not to mention the matter to anyone else, Oppenheimer reported the idea to General Groves and later discussed it with Edward Teller. Teller reportedly told him that separating out strontium-90 from a chain-reacting pile was feasible. But by May 1943, Oppenheimer had decided to recommend a delay in action on the proposal—for a gruesome reason: “In this connection,” he wrote Fermi, “I think that we should not attempt a plan unless we can poison food sufficient to kill a half a million men, since there is no doubt that the actual number affected will, because of non-uniform distribution, be much smaller than this.” The idea was dropped, but only because there seemed no efficient way to poison large numbers of the enemy population.
Wartime compelled some mild-mannered men to contemplate what was once unthinkable. In late October 1942, Oppenheimer received a letter marked “secret” from his old friend and colleague Victor Weisskopf, who wrote to report alarming news in a letter he had just received from the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, then residing in Princeton. Pauli had written that their former German colleague, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, had just been appointed director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, a nuclear research facility in Berlin. Moreover, Pauli had learned that Heisenberg was scheduled to give a lecture in Switzerland. Weisskopf reported further that he had discussed this news with Hans Bethe, and the two men had agreed that something should be done immediately: “I believe,” Weisskopf wrote Oppenheimer, “that by far the best thing to do in this situation would be to organize a kidnapping of Heisenberg in Switzerland. That’s what the Germans would do if, say you or Bethe would appear in Switzerland.” Weisskopf even volunteered himself for the job.
