by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer immediately wrote back, thanking Weisskopf for his “interesting” letter. He said he had already learned of Heisenberg’s scheduled visit to Switzerland and had discussed the issue with the “proper authorities” in Washington. “I doubt that you will hear further of the matter, but [I] wanted to thank you and assure you that it is receiving the attention it deserves.” The “proper authorities” with whom Oppenheimer had indeed already talked of this matter were Vannevar Bush and Leslie Groves, and he now passed on Weisskopf’s letter to them. But he did not endorse the proposal—even a successful kidnapping of Heisenberg would alert the Nazis to the high priority the Allies assigned to nuclear research. On the other hand, Oppenheimer could not refrain from remarking to Bush “that Heisenberg’s proposed visit to Switzerland would seem to afford us an unusual opportunity.”
Much later, Groves seriously pursued the notion of kidnapping or assassinating Heisenberg; in 1944 he dispatched OSS agent Moe Berg to Switzerland, where the former baseball player stalked the German physicist in December 1944—but ultimately decided not to attempt an assassination.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Too Much Secrecy”
. . . this policy puts you in the position of trying to do an extremely difficult job with three hands tied behind your back. . . .
DR. EDWARD CONDON to Oppenheimer
THE DIRECTOR’S FIRST REAL ADMINISTRATIVE CRISIS occurred early that first spring. With General Groves’ approval, Oppenheimer had appointed his former Göttingen classmate Edward U. Condon as associate director. Condon’s job was to relieve Oppenheimer of some of his administrative burdens and to serve as liaison with the Army’s military commander at Los Alamos. Two years older than Oppenheimer, Condon was both a brilliant physicist and a seasoned laboratory administrator. After earning his doctorate at Berkeley in 1926, Condon had won postdoctoral appointments in Göttingen and Munich. For the next decade he taught at several universities, including Princeton, and published the first English-language textbook on quantum mechanics. In 1937, he left Princeton to become associate director of research at Westinghouse Electric Company, a major industrial research center. Over the next few years, he supervised the company’s research in nuclear physics and microwave radar. By the autumn of 1940, he was working full-time on war-related projects, primarily radar, at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory. In short, Condon was, in terms of experience at least, significantly more qualified than Oppenheimer to lead the new laboratory in Los Alamos.
Condon had not been as politically active as Oppenheimer in the 1930s, and he certainly was not affiliated with the Communist Party. He thought of himself as a “liberal” New Dealer, a loyal Democrat who voted for Franklin Roosevelt. Raised as a Quaker, Condon once told a friend, “I join every organization that seems to have noble goals. I don’t ask whether it contains Communists.” An idealist with strong civil-libertarian instincts, Condon believed that good science could not come without a free exchange of ideas, and he lobbied vigorously for regular contacts between physicists at Los Alamos and the other labs around the country. Inevitably, he quickly attracted the ire of General Groves, who heard repeated reports of security infractions from his military representatives in Los Alamos. “Compartmentalization of knowledge, to me,” Groves insisted, “was the very heart of security.”
In late April 1943, Groves was angered to learn that Oppenheimer had traveled to the University of Chicago, where he had discussed the production schedule for plutonium with the director of the Manhattan Project’s Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab), the physicist Arthur Compton. The general blamed Condon for this ostensible infringement of security. Descending on Los Alamos, Groves stormed into Oppenheimer’s office and confronted the two men. Condon stood his ground against the general, but, to his astonishment, he realized that Oppenheimer was not backing him up. Within a week, Condon decided to tender his resignation. He had intended to stay for the project’s duration, but had lasted just six weeks.
“The thing which upsets me most is the extraordinarily close security policy,” he wrote Oppenheimer in his resignation letter. “I do not feel qualified to question the wisdom of this since I am totally unaware of the extent of enemy espionage and sabotage activities. I only want to say that in my case I found that the extreme concern with security was morbidly depressing—especially the discussion about censoring mail and telephone calls.” Condon explained that he was “so shocked that I could hardly believe my ears when General Groves undertook to reprove us. . . . I feel so strongly that this policy puts you in the position of trying to do an extremely difficult job with three hands tied behind your back. . . .” If he and Oppenheimer truly could not meet with a man like Compton without violating security, then “I would say the scientific position of the project is hopeless.”
Condon concluded that he could better contribute to the war effort by returning to Westinghouse and working on radar technology. He left saddened and perplexed by Oppie’s apparent unwillingness to defy Groves. Condon was unaware that Oppenheimer had yet to receive his own security clearance. The Army’s security bureaucracy was still trying to block Oppenheimer’s clearance and Oppie knew he could not press Groves about security—not if he wanted to keep his job.
Oppenheimer had much invested in his relationship with Groves. The previous autumn, each man had taken the measure of the other and arrogantly calculated that he could dominate their relationship. Groves believed the charismatic physicist was essential to the success of the project. And precisely because Oppenheimer came with left-wing political baggage, Groves thought he could use Oppie’s past to control him. Robert’s calculation was equally straightforward. He understood that he could keep his job only if Groves continued to consider him far and away the best director available. He realized that his communist associations gave Groves a certain hold over him, but by demonstrating his unique competence, he believed, he would convince the general to allow him to run the laboratory as he saw fit. Oppenheimer didn’t disagree with Condon; he too was convinced that onerous security regulations could smother the scientists. But he was confident that over time he would prevail. After all, in the end, Groves needed Oppenheimer’s skills as much as Oppenheimer needed Groves’ approval.
In retrospect, they were a perfect team to lead the effort to beat Germans in the race to build a nuclear weapon. If Robert’s style of charismatic authority tended to breed consensus, Groves exercised his authority through intimidation. “Basically his way of running projects,” observed Harvard chemist George Kistiakowsky, “was to scare his subordinates to a point of blind obedience.” Robert Serber thought that with Groves it was a “matter of policy to be as nasty as possible to his subordinates.” Oppie’s secretary, Priscilla Green Duffield, always remembered how the general would stride past her desk and, without even a hello, say something rude such as, “Your face is dirty.” This crude behavior made Groves the object of most of the complaints on the mesa, and this deflected criticism from Oppenheimer. But Groves refrained from such behavior around Oppenheimer, and it was a measure of Oppenheimer’s leverage in their relationship that he usually got his way.
Robert did what was necessary to appease Groves. He became what the general wanted, a deft and efficient administrator. At Berkeley, his office desk had typically been stacked with foot-high piles of paper. Dr. Louis Hempelmann, the Berkeley physician who came to Los Alamos and became the Oppenheimers’ close friend, observed that on the mesa, Robert “was a clean-desk man. Never any paper there.” There was also a physical transformation: Oppie cut his long, curly hair. “He had his hair [so] closely clipped,” remarked Hempelmann, “I almost didn’t recognize him.”
In point of fact, even as Condon was quitting Los Alamos, Groves’ compartmentalization policy was breaking down. Oppenheimer may have avoided a confrontation over the issue, but the policy was becoming a sham. As the work progressed, it became increasingly important to have all “white badge” scientists free to discuss their ideas and problems with each other.
Even Edward Teller understood that compartmentalization was an impediment to efficiency. Early in March 1943, he explained to Oppenheimer that he had written an official letter to him discussing “my old anxiety: too much secrecy.” But then he confided, “I did not do so to annoy you but to give you a possibility to use the statement at any time in case you see any advantage in doing so.” Groves soon realized what he was up against. Try as he might, he could not even get the most responsible and senior scientists to cooperate. On one occasion when Ernest Lawrence was visiting Los Alamos and due to lecture there to a small group of scientists, Groves took the physicist aside and carefully briefed him on what he was not allowed to say to his audience. To his dismay, just a few moments later, Groves heard Lawrence up at the blackboard saying, “I know General Groves doesn’t want me to say this, but . . .” Officially nothing changed, but in practice compartmentalization among the scientists grew more and more lax.
Groves often blamed the collapse of compartmentalization on Condon’s influence over Oppenheimer. “He [Condon] did a tremendous amount of damage at Los Alamos in the initial setup,” Groves testified in 1954. “I could never make up my own mind as to whether Dr. Oppenheimer was the one who was primarily at fault in breaking up the compartmentalization, or whether it was Dr. Condon.” It was one thing, he thought, to have the top twenty to thirty scientists freely talking to each other. But when hundreds of men ignored the policy, compartmentalization became a joke.
Groves eventually came to recognize that at Los Alamos the rules of science had trumped the principles of military security. “While I may have dominated the situation in general,” he testified, “I didn’t have my own way in a lot of things. So when I say that Dr. Oppenheimer did not always keep the faith with respect to the strict interpretation of the security rules, if I could say that he was no worse than any of my other leading scientists, I think that would be a fair statement.”
In May 1943, Oppenheimer presided over a meeting in which it was decided that a General Colloquium would be held every other Tuesday evening. He persuaded Teller to organize the meetings. When Groves said he was “disturbed” by the wide-ranging scope of these discussions, Oppie replied quite firmly that he was “committed” to the colloquia. His only concession was to agree to restrict attendance to scientists. He also argued adamantly that his people had to be able to exchange information with their counterparts at other Manhattan Project sites. That June, for instance, he insisted on Enrico Fermi being permitted to visit Los Alamos from the Met Lab in Chicago. He told Groves that because Fermi’s trip was of the “highest importance,” he simply would not take responsibility for its cancellation. Groves relented and Fermi was allowed to visit.
Late in the summer of 1943, Oppenheimer explained his views on security to a Manhattan Project security officer: “My view about the whole damn thing, of course, is that the [basic] information we are working on is probably known to all the governments that care to find out. The information about what we’re doing is probably of no use because it is so damn complicated.” The danger, he said, was not that technical information about the bomb might leak to another country. The real secret was “the intensity of our effort” and the scale of the “international investment involved.” If other governments understood the resources America was throwing into the bomb effort, they might attempt to duplicate the bomb project. Oppenheimer didn’t think even this knowledge would “have any effect on Russia,” but “it might have a very big effect on Germany, and I am as convinced about that . . . as everyone else is.”
Even as Oppenheimer was distracted by the demands of Groves’ security officers, some of his younger protégés were complaining that the Army’s clumsy management of the Manhattan Project was wasting precious time. By the time Los Alamos opened in March 1943, four years had passed since the discovery of fission and most of the physicists working on the project assumed that their German counterparts had at least a two-year lead. Feeling a desperate sense of urgency, they were angered by the Army’s security precautions, the plodding bureaucracy—and anything that seemed to cause delays. That summer, Phil Morrison reported in a “Dear Opje” letter from the Met Lab that “the drive which accompanied last winter’s work seems nearly gone. Relations between our people and the contractor’s are impossibly bad . . . the result is intolerable and incompatible with speedy success.” A dozen of the Chicago lab’s younger scientists were so alarmed that they had signed a letter addressed to President Roosevelt reporting that it was their “sober judgment that this project is losing time. The Army direction is conventional and routine. . . .” Speed was essential. And yet, the Army was not consulting the “few scientific leaders who alone are competent in this new field. The life of our nation is endangered by such a policy.”
Three weeks later, on August 21, 1943, Hans Bethe and Edward Teller wrote Oppenheimer of their own frustrations with the pace of the project. “Recent reports both through the newspapers and through the secret service, have given indications that the Germans may be in possession of a powerful new weapon which is expected to be ready between November and Jan.” The new weapon, they warned, was probably “Tube-Alloys”—the British code name for an atomic bomb. “It is not necessary,” they wrote, “to describe the probable consequences which would result if this proves to be the case.” They then complained that the private companies responsible for the production of bomb-grade uranium were retarding the program. The solution, they argued, was to “make available adequate funds for the additional program, directly to those scientists who are most experienced in the various phases of the problem.”
Oppenheimer shared their concerns. He too was worried that they might be falling behind the Germans, and so he worked harder and exhorted his people to do the same.
WITH THE TITLE of scientific director, Oppenheimer’s authority inside Los Alamos was nearly absolute. Though he ostensibly shared power with a military post commander, Oppie reported directly to General Groves. The first post commander, Lt. Col. John M. Harmon, had numerous arguments with the scientists and as a result he was replaced in April 1943, after only four months on the job. His successor, Lt. Col. Whitney Ashbridge, understood that his job was to minimize friction and keep the scientists happy. Ashbridge, coincidentally a graduate of the Los Alamos Ranch School, lasted until the autumn of 1944, when, overworked and exhausted, he suffered a mild heart attack. He was replaced by Col. Gerald R. Tyler. Thus, Oppenheimer literally worked through three army colonels.
Security was always a headache. At one point, Army security stationed armed military police outside Oppenheimer’s “Bathtub Row” house. The MPs inspected everyone’s pass, including Kitty’s, before allowing them to enter the house. Kitty frequently forgot to take her pass when she left and always made a scene when they wouldn’t let her back in. Still, she was not entirely unhappy about their presence: Always ready to seize an opportunity, she occasionally used the MPs as baby-sitters for Peter. When the sergeant in charge of the detail realized what was happening, he had the MPs withdrawn.
As part of his understanding with General Groves, Oppenheimer had agreed to name a three-man committee to be responsible for internal security. He appointed his assistants David Hawkins and John Manley, and a chemist, Joe Kennedy. They were responsible for security inside the laboratory (the T-Section), which was enclosed within a second, inner barbed-wire fence that was off-limits to MPs and soldiers. The internal security committee dealt with such prosaic matters as checking to make sure that scientists locked their file cabinets when they left their offices. If someone was caught leaving a secret document on his desk overnight, then that scientist was required to patrol the lab the next night and try to catch someone else. One day, Serber saw Hawkins and Emilio Segrè having an argument. “Emilio, you left a secret paper out last night,” Hawkins said, “and you have to go around tonight.” Segrè retorted, “That paper, it was all wrong. It would only have confused the enemy.”
Oppenheimer struggled constantly to protec
t his people from The Hill’s security apparatus. He and Serber had numerous discussions about how to “save” various people from being dismissed. “If they had had their way,” Serber said of the security division, “there wouldn’t have been anybody left.” Indeed, in October 1943 the army’s security investigators recommended that Robert and Charlotte Serber both be removed from Los Alamos. The FBI charged, with typical hyperbole, that the Serbers were “entirely saturated with Communist beliefs and all of their associates were known radicals.”
While Robert Serber’s views were certainly leftist, he had never been as politically active as his wife. Charlotte had poured her energies in the late 1930s into such projects as raising funds for the Spanish Republicans. But, of course, Oppenheimer himself had been more politically active than Charlotte. It is unclear from the documentary record how the Army was overruled, but Oppie probably vouched personally for the Serbers’ loyalty. One day Capt. Peer de Silva, the chief resident security officer, confronted Oppenheimer with Serber’s political background, only to have Oppenheimer dismiss it all as unimportant: “Oppenheimer volunteered information that he had known Serber was formerly active in Communist activities and stated that, in fact, Serber had told him so.” Oppenheimer explained that he had told Serber, prior to bringing him to Los Alamos, that he would have to drop his political activities. “Serber promised me he would, therefore, I believe him.” Incredulous, De Silva thought this evidence of Oppenheimer’s naïveté, or worse.
