109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  His personal life was equally flamboyant, and subject of much comment. Two years earlier in 1940, he had shocked friends and colleagues by marrying Kitty Puening after a whirlwind romance, and their son Peter had been born so soon afterward that Oppie had attempted to jokingly defuse the scandal by dubbing him “Pronto.” Kitty was dramatic, dark-haired, and petite; claimed to be a German princess; and was prone to putting on airs. She had also been married three times before the age of twenty-nine and had been with her previous husband for less than a year when Oppie met her at a Pasadena garden party. It was characteristic of Oppie that he would fall for someone so exotic, utterly unsuitable, and beyond reach as Kitty, who, among her many problems, was at the time another mans wife. Oppenheimer, who was besotted, called her “Golden.” His close-knit circle was less charitable, considering the poetic young Wunderkind—who was so bereft after his mother’s death in 1930 that he described himself to a friend as “the loneliest man in the world”—easy prey for a calculating woman. The faculty wives who had doted on Oppie, who was known for bringing flowers to dinner, took an instant dislike to her. After his marriage, many of his peers felt he became more socially ambitious than ever, as though seeking to remove himself from the dreary confines of academic life, and came to regard him with a mixture of envy and resentment. To Greene, however, he seemed even more of a romantic figure. While she would never have admitted it at the time, she was, she said, “more than a little in love” with her boss.

  Back in the spring of 1942, Oppenheimer had been summoned to the office of Arthur Compton, the director of the new Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) at the University of Chicago, and briefed on what was unofficially becoming known among physicists as the country’s “bomb headquarters.” Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Compton decided that America was moving far too slowly in its atomic bomb research and that the country needed to drastically step up its efforts if a weapon were to be developed in time to be used in the current war. Ever since December 1938, when the German and Austrian scientists Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner first reported their startling discovery that uranium atoms fissioned upon impact by neutrons, physicists in laboratories around the world had been working on how the process of fission, in which a large quantity of energy was released, along with neutrons, could possibly make a chain reaction—and a nuclear explosion. By the summer of 1939, with the drums of war beating in Europe, the Hungarian refugee scientist Leo Szilard had become so alarmed about reports that the Germans were working on a powerful new weapon that he prevailed upon Albert Einstein to write to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warning him about the military application of nuclear fission. The president had approved the formation of a uranium-research committee, and $6,000 had been appropriated, but there was so much confusion about the new science of fission that little had been accomplished.

  Impatient with the committee’s progress, Compton decided to centralize all the different teams at the Met Lab—the misleading name was meant to disguise its main purpose—to make a concentrated push to develop a method for making a fission explosive. He told Oppenheimer that even as they spoke, the Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was secretly at work in a squash court, tucked under the west stands of the university’s football field, to achieve the first chain reaction in a graphite pile. With all signs indicating that Fermi’s pile would work, Compton needed Oppenheimer, whom he regarded as having a brilliant mind, to take charge of a division of the Met Lab and organize a group to study the physics of an explosive chain reaction—or bomb. It was going to be an extraordinarily difficult task, but Compton thought Oppenheimer, despite his rather flamboyant personality, might be just the man to do it.

  As Oppenheimer commuted back and forth between Chicago and Berkeley organizing the conference on bomb development, Greene noticed a change in his attitude, a tenseness and excitement that alerted her to its importance. It was May 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor, and everyone involved in war work had a heightened sense of purpose. Many of his close colleagues had already been called on to do defense research. Lawrence was doing double duty at Berkeley and a radar lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Oppie had felt left behind and stuck with a heavier teaching load than usual because of all the absences. He had only been asked to step in and supervise the special summer conference because his predecessor, Gregory Breit, had succeeded in alienating almost everyone with his unreasonable demands and obsession with secrecy. Oppenheimer had been chafing on the sidelines, and he seized the chance to lead a brainy group exploring the possibilities of designing a nuclear bomb. At the same time, he knew that he had inherited a difficult position and that managing so many egotistical scientists, from such widely varied countries of origin, was not going to be an easy task.

  In June, Oppenheimer gathered the top theoretical physicists in the country, and they met in two attic rooms at Le Conte Hall. He had assembled a high-powered group, among them the Hungarian physicist Edward Teller, the German physicist Hans Bethe, the leading Swiss physicist Felix Bloch, Richard Tolman, and Oppies former student Robert Serber. Their meetings were veiled in secrecy, and the university had taken unusual measures to safeguard their privacy, including securing the windows and small balcony with heavy wire fencing and fitting the door with a special lock with a solitary key that was kept by Oppenheimer himself. Among the refugee scientists, there was a palpable anxiety to get under way immediately, amid worried conjecture about how far ahead the Germans might be and how much the strain of fighting a war might have slowed the Nazi weapons program.

  Greene had discerned this was defense-related work from the official letters she had typed, but when she walked into the room across the hall from the office one afternoon and saw what was on the blackboard, she realized for the first time what all the security precautions were for. “Somebody had drawn a spherical shape and, from the various scribbles, well, it was obviously a bomb,” she said. “So I knew then. I was glad to know what we were doing. Almost immediately after that, everyone started calling it ‘the gadget’”

  The goal of the special summer session was for Oppenheimer and his team to calculate to the best of their ability the exact specifications for the design of an atomic bomb. What was known to date was fairly rudimentary—the British had done some preliminary work—and the most they could do was make an educated guess at the force an atomic fission bomb could exert. So they had to begin with the basics, such as the size and structure of the bomb, work up an estimated critical mass, figure out how it might be made to explode, and then begin to try to address the practical problems entailed in assembling such a device, and ultimately detonating it. Oppie delegated teams to research different problems, and they met regularly to exchange information and ideas. Teller, who hardly knew Oppenheimer prior to the Berkeley conference and had only a moderate opinion of his abilities as a theoretical physicist, was impressed by his “sure, informal touch,” by his ability to motivate and guide the various participants, and by how much work was getting accomplished. “I don’t know how he had acquired this facility for handling people,” he said later. “Those who knew him well were really surprised.”

  By the end of July, after they had been meeting regularly for almost two months, Oppie called everyone to a meeting at Le Conte Hall to review their progress. After a discussion of the critical mass calculations presented by Serber’s group, and some consideration of the potential damage from the blast, neutrons, and radioactivity, it was decided that the goal looked feasible. Oppie became almost chipper, and the theorists continued to settle important questions about the plant design, to offer predictions and suggestions about what work would have to be done to make the job a success, and, as far as Greene could tell, to have what to a bunch of physicists was clearly the time of their life.

  So the days passed, with the physicists arguing back and forth, and the plans for the fission bomb progressing, until Teller introduced the idea of the Super—a hydrogen bomb based on the possibility o
f nuclear fusion—and everyone got sidetracked for weeks on end arguing about whether it would work or not and, as Serber put it, “forgot about the A-bomb, as if it were old hat.” Oppie was already exasperated that so much valuable time was being wasted on an entirely new and difficult proposal for a hydrogen bomb, with the problems of the atomic bomb still far from settled, when Teller brought the proceedings to a grinding halt by asking if the enormously high temperature of an A-bomb could ignite the earth’s atmosphere.

  The apocalyptic scenario Teller outlined forced Oppenheimer to abruptly adjourn the conference. They had no choice but to look over his figures and determine what the effects of the fission reaction would be. As Hans Bethe was by far the quickest at calculations—he and Oppie often whipped out their slide rules and raced to see who could run the numbers the fastest—he was assigned to check Tellers work. In the meantime, Oppie had to alert Arthur Compton at the Met Lab.

  Oppenheimer immediately phoned Compton and, after numerous frantic calls, finally tracked him down at his summer home in northern Michigan. Talking somewhat awkwardly, as Compton was calling from the tiny Otsego general store, Oppenheimer grimly reported that his group had “found something very disturbing—dangerously disturbing.” Oppie explained that he had to see him in person “immediately, without an hours delay.” Oppenheimer caught the first train out. Compton picked him up at the Otsego train station the following morning, and they drove down to the lakefront. Staring out at the empty stretch of beach, Oppie laid out the dangers raised by Teller and his calculations. As Compton recalled in his memoir, these were questions that “could not be passed over lightly”:

  Was there really any chance that an atomic bomb would trigger the explosion of the nitrogen in the atmosphere or of the hydrogen in the ocean? This would be the ultimate catastrophe. Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind!

  We agreed there could only be one answer. Oppenheimer’s team must go ahead with their calculations. Unless they came up with a firm and reliable conclusion that our atomic bombs could not explode the air or the sea, these bombs must never be made.

  During the last sultry weeks of July, the Berkeley conference limped to a close, and the group went their separate ways. Bethe had reached the “reliable conclusion” that there was a flaw in Teller’s theory, and while nitrogen and hydrogen were unstable, it was highly improbable that an atomic explosion would create the conditions to set them off. It was safe, at least as far as the atmosphere was concerned, to proceed with the atomic bomb. That fall, Oppenheimer continued to supervise bomb theory studies at Berkeley. As for Tellers Super bomb, Compton decided that the idea be kept a closely guarded secret, and it was shelved for the time being. But the lingering effects of that summer’s tension with Teller would surface again and again. “Oppie had trouble with Teller in the summer of’42,” said Greene. “After that, he [Oppie] always tried to keep him at arm’s length.”

  By the time General Leslie R. Groves paid his first visit to Berkeley on October 8, Oppenheimer’s plans for building an atomic weapon were in good order. Groves, however, wanted to satisfy himself that the many hurdles he foresaw had been addressed and that he and Oppenheimer were thinking along the same lines. A professional soldier and trained engineer, who had attended MIT and West Point and had just completed the construction of the Pentagon, a massive project that had included the building of everything from airfields and ports to factories, Groves was appointed by the Army Corps of Engineers to take charge of the entire atomic bomb project, known as the “Manhattan Engineer District” (and later as the “Manhattan Project”) because Groves’ predecessor had been based in New York City.

  Oppenheimer was aware, as were many of the top nuclear physicists and chemists at the time, that the Manhattan Project had already been under way for more than a year. In June 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had formed the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) to organize all of the various uranium and fission research projects in the country that could help lead to the achievement of a sustained chain reaction. The OSRD was run by Vannevar Bush, the former head of MIT and the Carnegie Institution, and his deputy, Harvard president James B. Conant. They were asked to form a new committee, codenamed “S-1,” which would be responsible for organizing and accelerating the atomic weapons research and for making sure authorized objectives were accomplished. Once S-1 delegated the bomb project to Groves, he would direct the development of the bomb and all the related projects, backed by a Military Policy Committee, which included Bush and Conant among others. This sent a clear signal that the scientists and army officers would have to put aside their natural suspicions and work together. Under Groves, the scientists would have to accept life under a military regime, with army representatives becoming a constant presence in their lives, laboratories, and meetings.

  While some scientists had initially greeted this proposal with open hostility, the heat of the battle against the Nazis had an ameliorating effect. The idea that the Germans might have nuclear weapons before the Allies was a constant threat. There was also no arguing the fact that the army was better at procurement and would undoubtedly run such a large-scale building and engineering operation more efficiently than the scientists themselves or, for that matter, a building full of bureaucrats in Washington. As Groves made clear when he was introduced to some of the research leaders at an October 5 meeting at the Met Lab, time was of the essence. He demanded results, and fast. Although a number of the scientists objected to Groves’ bullying tone, which Serber recalled as “You’re working for me now so you’d better toe the line,” there was not much they could do about it. Both groups recognized that it was vital to the success of the bomb project that they work smoothly together, and this hinged on a relationship of trust and understanding between the key players.

  An unlikelier pair than Oppenheimer and Groves could not have been found, and it did not seem to bode well for their partnership. Where Oppenheimer was tall, trim, and elegant, the general was bulky and square, his unwieldy frame threatening to burst from the constraints of his tightly belted pants, his rumpled appearance comically at odds with his rank. But in character, Groves was all spit and polish, a perfectionist who expected discipline and absolute devotion to the task at hand. He obsessed over the smallest details and labored exhaustively to achieve his objectives. His military aide, Colonel Kenneth Nichols, who was appointed to work with Groves on the bomb project, later described him as “the biggest S.O.B.” he had ever worked for: “He is most demanding. He is most critical. He is always a driver, never a praiser. He is abrasive and sarcastic.” Nichols also conceded that he would opt to have Groves as his boss again, because he was “one of the most capable individuals.”

  Even Bush, who was a hard-nosed Yankee with a flinty manner when pressed, was left flustered by their first encounter. He found Groves “abrupt and lacking in tact” and was so pessimistic about how the general would get on with the physicists on the project that, he worried to Conant in a letter, “I fear we are in the soup.” Compared with the subtle, soft-spoken Oppenheimer, Groves was a blunt and ruthless taskmaster, and few would have predicted that their first meeting would go well. Groves wasted no time in enlisting Oppenheimer in a detailed discussion of exactly what kind of bomb laboratory he envisioned. He not only wanted to take his measure of the man, he needed to see if the erudite theorist had a practical bone in his body and could possibly make a go of the weapons project. The general, raising his concerns about the assembly of the bomb, security, and other precautions he considered vital to the planning of the project, fired question after question at Oppenheimer. Oppie, who had always excelled as a teacher, patiently addressed each technical and organizational obstacle, so that the tough-minded Groves later reported to Compton that he was “strongly impressed by Oppenheimer’s intelligence and quick grasp of the problem.”

  Groves reportedly made an equally strong impression on Oppenheimer, when on thei
r subsequent meeting the general marched directly into his Berkeley office trailed by Colonel Nichols, immediately unbuttoned his jacket, handed it to his subordinate, and barked, “Find a tailor or dry cleaner and get this pressed!” According to Serber, who was working with Oppie in his office at the time, the colonel took the coat and walked out without a word, leaving the civilians in the room with a lasting impression of what Groves expected when he issued an order, petty or otherwise. “Treating a colonel like an errand boy,” said Serber. “That was Groves’s way.” Greene formed an impression of Groves as harsh, ill-tempered, and more than a little terrifying. But she marveled that Oppie was not in the least cowed by Groves’ brusque manner and immense command of power, and she watched as the two men quickly established a good rapport.

  Groves had met dozens of physicists since taking charge of the bomb project on September 23, 1942, and much to his dismay, he had found any number of them thoroughly objectionable—he loathed the eccentric Hungarian Leo Szilard almost on sight and thought him completely unsuitable for such a monumental task. He worried that “none of them were go-getters; they preferred to move at a pipe-smoking, academic pace.” So relieved was he at having found Oppenheimer, a man whom he felt had a big brain but was capable of the kind of vigilant thinking he admired, that he immediately asked to meet with him again in a weeks time. Groves requested that Oppie accompany him, Colonel Nichols, and another aide on their train trip back to New York from Chicago so they could talk at greater length. Given his marching orders, Oppie flew from Berkeley to Chicago and caught the Twentieth Century Limited, the high-speed passenger express, where he joined the three military men for dinner in the first-class dining car.