by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
In the midst of this ongoing crisis associated with the design of the plutonium bomb, Isidor Rabi paid one of his periodic visits to Los Alamos. He later remembered a gloomy session with a number of top scientists on the project as they talked of the urgency they felt about finding a way to make the plutonium bomb work. The conversation soon turned to the enemy: “Who were the German scientists? We knew them all,” Rabi recalled.
“What were they doing? We went over the whole thing again and looked at the history of our own development and tried to see where they could have been cleverer, where they might have had better judgment and avoided this error or that error. . . . We finally arrived at the conclusion that they could be exactly up to us, or perhaps further. We felt very solemn. One didn’t know what the enemy had. One didn’t want to lose a single day, a single week. And certainly, a month would be a calamity.” As Philip Morrison summed up their attitude in mid-1944, “The only way we could lose the war was if we failed in our jobs.”
Despite the reorganization, by late 1944 Kistiakowsky’s group had still not managed to manufacture shaped explosives (called lenses) that would precisely crush a loosely packed, grapefruit-sized sphere of plutonium symmetrically into a sphere the size of a golf ball. Without such lenses, an implosion bomb seemed impractical. Captain Parsons was so pessimistic that he went to Oppenheimer and proposed that they abandon the lenses and try instead to create a non-lens type of implosion. In January 1945, the issue was hotly debated between Parsons and Kistiakowsky in the presence of both Groves and Oppenheimer. Kistiakowsky insisted that implosion could not be achieved without the lenses, and he promised that his men would soon be able to make them. In a decision critical to the success of the plutonium bomb, Oppenheimer backed him. During the next few months, Kistiakowsky and his team managed to perfect the implosion design. By May 1945, Oppenheimer felt fairly confident that the plutonium gadget would work.
Bomb-building was more engineering than theoretical physics. But Oppenheimer was as singularly adept at marshaling his scientists to overcome technical and engineering obstacles as he had been at stimulating his students to new insights at Berkeley. “Los Alamos might have succeeded without him,” Hans Bethe later said, “but certainly only with much greater strain, less enthusiasm, and less speed. As it was, it was an unforgettable experience for all the members of the laboratory. There were other wartime laboratories of high achievement. . . . But I have never observed in any one of these other groups quite the spirit of belonging together, quite the urge to reminisce about the days of the laboratory, quite the feeling that this was really the great time of their lives. That this was true of Los Alamos was mainly due to Oppenheimer. He was a leader.”
IN FEBRUARY 1944, a team of British scientists led by the German-born Rudolf E. Peierls arrived in Los Alamos. Oppenheimer had first met this brilliant but unassuming theoretical physicist in 1929, when both men were studying under Wolfgang Pauli. Peierls had emigrated from Germany to England in the early 1930s, and in 1940 he and Otto R. Frisch had written the seminal paper “On the Construction of a Superbomb,” which had persuaded both the British and American governments that a nuclear weapon was feasible. During the next several years, Peierls worked on all aspects of Tube Alloys, the British bomb program. In 1942 and again in September 1943, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent Peierls to America to help expedite work on the bomb. Peierls visited Oppenheimer in Berkeley and was “very impressed with his command of things. . . . He was the first person I met on that trip who had thought about the weapon itself and the implications of the physics of what would be going on.”
Dr. Peierls spent only two and a half days on his first visit to Los Alamos. But Oppenheimer reported to Groves that they had agreed the British team could contribute substantially to studying the hydrodynamics of implosion. A month later, Peierls moved back to Los Alamos for the duration of the war. He admired how articulate and quick Oppenheimer was to understand anyone—but he particularly admired the way “he could stand up to General Groves.”
As Peierls and his team settled into Los Alamos in the spring of 1944, Oppenheimer decided to give Peierls the job ostensibly held by Edward Teller. The mercurial Hungarian physicist was supposed to be working on a complicated set of calculations necessary for the implosion bomb. But Teller wasn’t performing. Obsessed with the theoretical challenges posed by a “Super” thermonuclear bomb, Teller had no interest in a fission bomb. After Oppenheimer decided in June 1943 that wartime exigencies dictated a low priority for the Super, Teller became increasingly uncooperative. He seemed oblivious to any responsibility to contribute to the war effort. Always loquacious, he talked incessantly about a hydrogen bomb. Neither could he contain his resentment at having to work under Bethe. “I was not happy about having him as my boss,” Teller recalled. To be sure, his resentment was fueled by Bethe’s criticisms. Every morning Teller would have a bright new idea about how to make an H-bomb work—and overnight Bethe would prove it cockeyed. After one particularly trying encounter with Teller, Oppie quipped to Charles Critchfield, “God protect us from the enemy without and the Hungarians within.”
Oppenheimer, understandably, became increasingly annoyed by Teller’s behavior. One day that spring, Teller walked out of a meeting of section leaders and refused to do some calculations Bethe needed for his work on the implosion project. Extremely angry, Bethe complained to Oppie. “Edward essentially went on strike,” Bethe recalled. When Oppenheimer confronted him about the incident, Teller finally asked to be relieved of all responsibility for work on the fission bomb. Oppenheimer agreed, and wrote General Groves that he wished to replace Teller with Peierls: “These calculations were originally under the supervision of Teller, who is, in my opinion and Bethe’s, quite unsuited for this responsibility. Bethe feels that he needs a man under him to handle the implosion program.”
Feeling slighted, Teller let it be known that he was thinking of leaving Los Alamos altogether. No one would have been surprised if Oppenheimer had let him go. Everyone thought of Teller as a “prima donna”; Bob Serber called him “a disaster to any organization.” But instead of firing him, Oppenheimer gave Teller what he wanted, freedom to explore the feasibility of a thermonuclear bomb. Oppenheimer even agreed to give him a precious hour of his time once a week just to talk about whatever was on Teller’s mind.
Not even this extraordinary gesture satisfied Teller, who thought that his friend had become a “politician.” Oppie’s colleagues wondered why he bothered with Teller. Peierls considered Teller “somewhat wild; he can back an idea for a time and then it turns out to be nonsense.” Oppenheimer could be impatient with fools; but he was aware that Teller was no fool. He tolerated him because, in the end, he might contribute something to the project. When, later that summer, he hosted a reception for Churchill’s special representative, Lord Cherwell (Frederic A. Lindemann), Oppenheimer realized afterwards that he had inadvertently left Rudolf Peierls off the invitation list. The next day he apologized to Peierls and then quipped, “It could have been worse—it could have been Teller.”
IN DECEMBER 1944, Oppenheimer urged Rabi to make another visit to Los Alamos. “Dear Rab,” he wrote, “We have been wondering for some time when you could come out again. The crises here are so continuous that it is hard to find one time which would be better or worse than another from our point of view.” Rabi had just been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics in recognition for “his resonance method for recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei.” Oppie congratulated him: “It is nice to have the prize go to a man who is out of his adolescence rather than just entering it.”
Swamped with administrative work, Oppenheimer still found time to write the occasional personal letter. In the spring of 1944, he wrote to a family of German refugees whose escape from Europe he had facilitated. They were utter strangers, but in 1940 he had given the Meyers family—a mother and four daughters—a sum of money to pay their expenses to the United States. Four years later, the Meyers repaid O
ppenheimer and proudly informed him that they had become American citizens. He wrote back that he understood the “pride” they felt, and he thanked them for the money: “I hope it has not been a hardship for you. . . .” He then offered to return the money if they had any further need for it. (Years later, one of the Meyers daughters wrote in gratitude: “[I]n 1940 you brought us all over and we could save our lives.”) For Oppenheimer, the rescue of the Meyerses from the Nazi contagion was important in several respects. It was in the first instance a politically noncontroversial extension of his antifascist activism—and that felt good. Secondly, while a small act of generosity, it was nevertheless a profound and welcome reminder of why he was racing to build a horrific weapon.
And racing he was. Restlessness was part of his character—or so thought Freeman Dyson, a young physicist who came to know and admire Oppenheimer after the war. But Dyson also saw restlessness as Oppie’s tragic flaw: “Restlessness drove him to his supreme achievement, the fulfillment of the mission of Los Alamos, without pause for rest or reflection.”
“Only one man paused,” Dyson wrote. “The one who paused was Joseph Rotblat from Liverpool. . . .” A Polish physicist, Rotblat had been stranded in England when the war broke out. He was recruited by James Chadwick into the British bomb project and by early 1944 found himself in Los Alamos. One evening in March 1944, Rotblat experienced a “disagreeable shock.” General Groves came for dinner at the Chadwicks’ and in the course of casual banter over the dinner table, he said, “You realize of course that the main purpose of this project is to subdue the Russians.” Rotblat was shocked. He had no illusions about Stalin—the Soviet dictator had, after all, invaded his beloved Poland. But thousands of Russians were dying every day on the Eastern Front and Rotblat felt a sense of betrayal. “Until then I had thought that our work was to prevent a Nazi victory,” he later wrote, “and now I was told that the weapon we were preparing was intended for use against the people who were making extreme sacrifices for that very aim.” By the end of 1944, six months after the Allies had landed on the beaches of Normandy, it was clear that the war in Europe would soon be over. Rotblat saw no point in continuing to work on a weapon that was no longer needed to defeat the Germans.15 After saying good-bye to Oppenheimer at a going-away party, he left Los Alamos on December 8, 1944.
IN THE AUTUMN of 1944, the Soviets received the first of many intelligence reports directly from Los Alamos. The spies overlooked by Army counterintelligence included Klaus Fuchs, a German physicist with British citizenship, and Ted Hall, a precociously brilliant nineteen-year-old with a Harvard B.S. in physics. Hall arrived in Los Alamos in late January 1944, while Fuchs came in August as part of the British team led by Rudolf Peierls.
Fuchs, born in 1911, was raised in a German Quaker family. Studious and idealistic, he joined the German socialist party, the SPD, while studying at the University of Leipzig in 1931—the same year his mother committed suicide. In 1932, alarmed by the growing political strength of the Nazis, Fuchs broke with the socialists and joined the Communist Party, which was more actively resisting Hitler. In July 1933, he fled Hitler’s Germany and became a political refugee in England. Over the next few years, his family was decimated by the Nazi regime. His brother escaped to Switzerland, leaving behind a wife and child who later died in a concentration camp. His father was sent to prison for “anti-government agitation,” and in 1936 his sister Elizabeth killed herself after her husband was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. Fuchs had every reason to hate the Nazis.
In 1937, after earning a doctorate in physics in Bristol, Fuchs won a postgraduate fellowship to work with Oppenheimer’s former professor Max Born, who by then was teaching at Edinburgh. After the war began, Fuchs was interned in Canada as an enemy alien, and Professor Born helped to obtain his release by attesting that Fuchs was “among the two or three most gifted theoretical physicists of the young generation.” He and thousands of other anti-Nazi German refugees were released at the end of 1940; Fuchs was given permission to return to his work in England. Although the British Home Office knew all about his communist past, by the spring of 1941 Fuchs was working with Peierls and other British scientists on the highly classified Tube Alloys project. In June 1942, Fuchs received British citizenship—by then, he was already passing information to the Soviets about the British bomb program.
When Fuchs arrived in Los Alamos, neither Oppenheimer nor anyone else had any suspicion that he was a Soviet spy. After he was arrested in 1950, Oppie told the FBI that he had thought Fuchs was a Christian Democrat, and certainly not a “political fanatic.” Bethe considered Fuchs one of the best men in his division. “If he was a spy,” Bethe told the FBI, “he played his role beautifully. He worked days and nights. He was a bachelor and had nothing better to do, and he contributed very greatly to the success of the Los Alamos project.” Over the next year, Fuchs passed detailed written information to the Soviets about the problems and advantages of the implosion-type bomb design over the gun method. He was unaware that the Soviets were getting confirmation of his information from another Los Alamos resident.
By September 1944, Ted Hall was working on the calibration tests needed for the implosion-design bomb. Oppenheimer heard that Hall was one of the best young technicians on the mesa when it came to creating a test implosion. An extremely bright man, Hall that autumn was sitting on the edge of an intellectual precipice. He was a socialist in outlook, an admirer of the Soviet Union, but not yet a formal communist, and neither was he disgruntled or unhappy with his work or his station in life. No one recruited him. But all that year he had listened to “older” scientists—in their late twenties and early thirties—talk about their fear of a postwar arms race. On one occasion, sitting at the same Fuller Lodge dinner table with Niels Bohr, he heard Bohr’s concerns for an “open world.” Prompted by his conclusion that a postwar U.S. nuclear monopoly could lead to another war, in October 1944 Hall decided to act: “. . . it seemed to me that an American monopoly was dangerous and should be prevented. I was not the only scientist to take that view.”
While on a fourteen-day leave from Los Alamos, Hall boarded a train to New York City and simply walked into a Soviet trade office and gave a Soviet official a handwritten report on Los Alamos. It described the laboratory’s purpose and listed the names of the leading scientists working on the bomb project. In the months that followed, Hall managed to pass the Soviets much additional information, including critical information on the design for the implosion bomb. Hall was the perfect “walk-in” spy; he knew what the Russians needed to know about the atomic bomb project; he needed nothing himself and expected nothing. His sole purpose was to “save the world” from a nuclear war that he believed was inevitable if the United States emerged from the war with an atomic monopoly.
Oppenheimer knew nothing about Hall’s espionage activities. But he did know that a group of twenty or so scientists, some of them group leaders, had begun meeting informally once a month to talk about the war, politics and the future. “It used to be in the evenings,” recalled Rotblat, “usually at somebody’s house like the Tellers’, someone who had fairly large rooms. People would meet to discuss the future of Europe, the future of the world.” Among other issues, they talked about the exclusion of Soviet scientists from the project. According to Rotblat, Oppenheimer came to at least one of their meetings and Rotblat said later, “I always thought he was a soul mate in the sense that we had the same humanitarian approach to problems.”
BY LATE 1944, a number of scientists at Los Alamos began to voice their growing ethical qualms about the continued development of the “gadget.” Robert Wilson, now chief of the lab’s experimental physics division, had “quite long discussions with Oppie about how it might be used.” Snow was still on the ground when Wilson went to Oppenheimer and proposed holding a formal meeting to discuss the matter more fully. “He tried to talk me out of it,” Wilson later recalled, “saying I would get into trouble with the G-2, the security people.”
<
br /> Despite his respect, even reverence, for Oppie, Wilson thought little of this argument. He told himself, “All right. So what? I mean, if you’re a good pacifist, then clearly you are not going to be worried about being thrown in jail or whatever they would do—have your salary reduced or horrible things like that.” So Wilson told Oppenheimer that he hadn’t talked him out of at least having an open discussion about an issue that was obviously of great importance. Wilson then put up notices all over the lab announcing a public meeting to discuss “The Impact of the Gadget on Civilization.” He chose this title because earlier, at Princeton, “just before we’d come out, there’d been many sanctimonious talks about the ‘impact’ of something else, with all very scholarly kinds of discussions.”
To his surprise, Oppie showed up on the appointed evening and listened to the discussion. Wilson later thought about twenty people attended, including such senior physicists as Vicki Weisskopf. The meeting was held in the same building that housed the cyclotron. “I can remember,” Wilson said, “it being very cold in our building. . . . We did have a pretty intense discussion of why it was that we were continuing to make a bomb after the war had been [virtually] won.”
This may not have been the only occasion when the morality and politics of the atomic bomb were discussed. A young physicist working on implosion techniques, Louis Rosen, remembered a packed daytime colloquium held in the old theater. Oppenheimer was the speaker and, according to Rosen, the topic was “whether the country is doing the right thing in using this weapon on real live human beings.” Oppenheimer apparently argued that as scientists they had no right to a louder voice in determining the gadget’s fate than any other citizen. “He was a very eloquent and persuasive guy,” Rosen said. The chemist Joseph O. Hirschfelder recalled a similar discussion held in Los Alamos’ small wooden chapel in the midst of a thunderstorm on a cold Sunday evening in early 1945. On this occasion, Oppenheimer argued with his usual eloquence that, although they were all destined to live in perpetual fear, the bomb might also end all war. Such a hope, echoing Bohr’s words, was persuasive to many of the assembled scientists.
