109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  EIGHT

  Lost Almost

  AFTER THE CHAOS of the first few months, life at Los Alamos eased into a more predictable, deliberate pace. The summer sun was hot, and the sky, porcelain blue with white clouds hugging the mountains, as in a postcard. The Jemez hills were topped with skullcaps of pale green, creating the illusion of grass, though they were really only the thick carpet of pine trees. The mud had dried to a fine brown dust that coated everything and which the trucks and cars kicked up into great choking clouds as they tore through town. The deafening grind of construction had quieted, if only sporadically. Ashley Pond sparkled in the sunshine, and for the first time since the scientists and their families had arrived, a certain harmony and beauty returned to the mesa. Little girls played hopscotch in front of their houses, boys played ball in the dirt road, and everywhere you looked there were people on bicycles.

  Oppenheimer, who enjoyed the rarified setting more than most, was at pains to point out the advantages of their splendid isolation. Sunburned as a native and clad in his uniform of blue jeans, checked shirt, and silver-studded New Mexican belt, Oppie urged everyone to get off the post on Sundays, their one day off, and wander out into the silent wilderness of aspens, blue spruce, and ponderosas. The hills were full of old trails established by generations of schoolboys, shady and sweet with the smell of pine. Oppie encouraged people to buy horses, and asked Dorothy to recommend some reputable local horse dealers. The army also had saddle ponies that could be rented by the hour, and provided stables and corrals for a small fee. A number of the scientists were skilled alpinists and shared Oppie’s romantic fascination with the mountains. The metallurgist Cyril Smith took to hiking up and down Lake Peak (12,500 feet), as did Fermi and Bethe, who claimed they did some of their best thinking that way. People took to calling Los Alamos “ShangriLa,” a joking reference to the idyllic city hidden in the mountains of Tibet featured in James Hilton’s popular novel Lost Horizon, which more than a few scientists had read before dropping out of sight themselves. They could not help but see their own community as a similar kind of social experiment, a separate culture, obscured from view, whose very existence was vigorously denied, which would either flourish or founder cut off from the outside world.

  Down below, in the real world, the slaughter in the Pacific continued unabated. The victory at Midway that had been so heartening in June 1942 seemed like a distant memory. Though the German Wehrmacht was driving deep into Russia, it had been checked in the desert. Rommel had been stopped at the border of Egypt. The Italian campaign had begun. Allied bombs rained on Sicily, and the invasion of the European mainland seemed inevitable. The possibility that one of the three Axis powers might fall was cause for hope. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared that the only terms the Allies would accept were those of “unconditional surrender.”

  The Los Alamos participants were starved for uncensored news on their mountaintop. Newcomers were thoroughly debriefed, and senior scientists returning from meetings in Washington or Chicago would find themselves surrounded at dinner at Fuller Lodge and inundated with questions. Almost everyone got The New York Times and devoured The Denver Post. People always fought over the local Santa Fe papers while waiting in line at the PX because there were never enough to go around. Dorothy scrounged all the extra copies she could and sent them up. She knew that many of her friends on the Hill were émigrés who had escaped Nazi persecution in their own countries. “Many had families and relatives still in Europe, living in poverty, concentration camps, subject to starvation or vicious death,” she recalled. “Anxiety and fear for their people haunted them day and night.”

  Bad news from the front cast a shadow across the entire mesa. At the same time, a victorious battle could be counted on to put the junior military personnel in a particularly foul temper. It was widely known that they had all applied for overseas service and were “burned to the ground,” as Smitty Carlisle put it, to find themselves stranded in the desert and missing all the excitement. One of the earliest bits of mesa lore had to do with a WAC who had never been farther west than Albany, New York. Just as the Hill bus rounded the highest point of the ascent and the jagged Jemez Mountains peeked out, she fainted dead away, though whether from amazement or sheer disappointment no one knew. Back in April 1943, when the first of the recently organized WAC detachments was ordered off the train in Lamy, Dorothy had had her hands full coping with the outpouring of grief and fury. “Of all the incoming personnel the WACs and some of the soldiers were at the lowest ebb in this office,” she wrote. “They had not been told what was going to happen to them”:

  One WAC told me she was not allowed to tell her closest buddy she was going overseas, and was whisked out of her bed at two A.M. and sent silently on her way. When the train ran west and stopped at Lamy she thought it was all a big mistake; the sand and piñon trees didn’t look like any ocean she had ever seen. The nightmare continued when she walked into the old mud building which had nothing marine about it and was told she had forty-five miles yet to go farther into that “beat up old land.” Many WACs were tearful in those early days, not that they weren’t good soldiers, but the shock was too much for them.

  Quite a few she ushered still weeping into army cars and sent up to the Hill. For weeks afterward, they could be seen moping around the mesa and were unnecessarily surly behind the checkout counters of the Commissary. Soldiers, who arrived with no further orders than Santa Fe, were also frustrated to learn they would be sitting out the war holed up in the desert. They did not even try to hide their contempt for the scientists, disdainfully referred to as “longhairs,” they had been assigned to babysit. To them, Los Alamos was an interminable limbo—“Lost Almost,” in the words of one dejected GI.

  Theirs was a community turned powerfully in on itself, ironically in ways that, a century earlier, would have been true of people isolated by long weeks of travel from the rest of the world and forced to make what amounted to a civilization of their own. In this case, however, they were not inventing their own culture, so much as being asked to accommodate to the most unusual and arbitrary of arrangements, and discontent festered despite the magnificent surroundings. Segrè never failed to be impressed by the view, but it did nothing to ease his doubts about their internment. The mess hall in Fuller Lodge had a porch that opened onto the lawn, and he often stood there after meals silently contemplating the Sangre de Cristos, dominated by Truchas Peak, and miles and miles of the Rio Grande Valley. One afternoon after admiring the vista with Rabi, Segrè observed that in all likelihood, “after ten years of looking at it, we would have had enough of the view.” Reminded of the comment by Rabi years later, Segrè said that it revealed “what we thought about the possible duration of our enterprise and of the war.”

  “It’s hard to believe we could be unhappy in such a beautiful, gorgeous part of the world, but we hated it so,” said Shirley Barnett. “All we could think about was home, what we missed—New England green. It was difficult because we did not know how long we were going to be there, we didn’t know how long the war was going to go on, and it had been going on a long time. There were times when all I wanted to do was pull down the shade and never see another mountain again. It was hard not to feel trapped.”

  The altitude and isolation worked on everyone’s nerves. Los Alamos ran on bells, military-style: the first whistle blew at 7 A.M., summoning the scientists to work in an hour’s time. For a population that was not used to obedience as a way of life, the shrill sirens only seemed to magnify the immense pressure of impossible deadlines and heavy responsibilities. Oppenheimer, who had never been known to keep regular hours at Berkeley, was now the first to arrive in the morning and often stayed in his office long after everyone else had left for the day. Sam Allison, an experimental physicist who temporarily shared an office with him when he first came to the site from Chicago, said his one ambition was to be already sitting at his desk when Oppie walked through the door.

  The
laboratory personnel were keenly aware of Oppenheimer’s nervous, chain-smoking presence, and his sense of urgency and determination drove them to extend themselves as never before. When security, following Groves’ orders, locked up the equipment each evening following the five o’clock siren, the physicists took to sawing off the padlocks on the stockroom doors, and stayed at the lab and worked into the night. They set up army cots and snatched a few hours sleep in their offices, not stopping to go home at all. The men were consumed with the grim task of beating the Germans to the draw in the development of a diabolically powerful weapon, and the even grimmer prospect of what their failure might mean. First and foremost on their minds was the idea, as Conant emphatically put it on one of his periodic visits to the site, that “whoever gets this first will win the war.”

  The heady experience of coming together on the mesa to create a unique scientific enterprise had given way to the harsh reality of everything that had to be accomplished. Above all, recalled Manley, the knowledge that the German scientists had a head start was a constant hand at their backs, a reminder of the need to push ahead and notch some progress:

  Just before Los Alamos really got going, the last measurements on how much uranium 235 might be needed for a weapon had increased over the previous low estimate by almost a factor of 2; it was about 5 kilograms in absolute amounts. These 5 kilograms meant nearly two months extra production for each weapon from the electromagnetic separator which had been authorized at a hundred grams a day. Since we had no idea where the Germans were in this whole business—whether they had isotope separation plants going, whether they had a chain reaction going and were making plutonium, or were almost ready to drop bombs—these two months could mean we’d lose. However, there was a chance we could recover some of this apparent loss. Maybe, if we were really clever and got an extremely good material we could get back most of that factor of 2 that we had just lost. We were playing that kind of game continually.

  The scientists were hardly alone in feeling the pressure. The physicists’ families also lived with it, lived with the feeling that the work took precedence over everything, that the work had to get done. “It was always hurry, hurry, hurry!” wrote Elsie McMillan. “Work this morning, work this afternoon, work until 4:00 A.M. Work, work, work.” To most of the physicists’ wives, it seemed as if the men disappeared into the Tech Area each morning as if into the belly of the beast, leaving them to fend for themselves. “The Tech Area was a great pit which swallowed our scientist husbands out of sight, almost out of our lives,” recalled Ruth Marshak, the wife of Robert Marshak, the deputy head of the Theoretical Division. Lonely, confused, and anxious, many of the women felt alienated from their husbands as never before. Physicists who for years had come home and bored their wives with endless hours of shop talk now never spoke of their work, which consumed their days, and sometimes their nights and weekends. They sat through family dinners in an exhausted stupor, staring at the ceiling, or persevered in making polite small talk, mentioning the leaky faucet or latest mesa traffic accident, which sounded unnatural and forced. They would suddenly disappear for days at a time, working around the clock on their experiments, only to return looking gray and worried. Cautioned not to share their burden, they let the silence build walls between them and their spouses. “Secrecy becomes a habit,” said Rose Bethe, who had known about the bomb project from its inception and had once engaged in long ethical arguments about it with her husband. “Hans stopped talking about his work. We just stopped talking.”

  Los Alamos was a community of walls within walls. To Ruth Marshak, the fence penning the compound “had a real and tangible effect on the psychology of the people behind it. It was a tangible barrier,” she said, “a symbol of our isolated lives. Within it lay the most secret part of the atomic bomb project.” The Tech Area, with its ominous third security fence segregating the scientists from their wives, represented an even more profound emotional and physical divide. This was the forbidden zone. It was impossible to enter the Tech Area without a badge: a white badge indicated the senior cadre of scientific personnel with full clearance and granted access to all Tech Area buildings; blue provided limited access, specific to one work station; orange was for the support staff—the secretaries, clerks, and typists—composed of scientists’ wives with skills and time and willingness to work.

  Inevitably, the badges came to connote a certain social status. Los Alamos was not a casteless society any more than the laboratory was. Social lines were drawn according to the importance of one’s position in the Tech Area hierarchy, with special distinction accorded to the handpicked crew who were first to arrive on the mesa with Oppie, facetiously referred to as “the Mayflower crowd.” Women who had badges were in the know, and they enjoyed a shared sense of excitement and purpose with the project leaders that some of the men’s own wives did not. Charlotte Serber, whom Oppie had made head of the Tech Area library and classified document room, had the honor of being the sole female group leader. Charlotte was privy to most of the work that was going on, as was Oppie’s assistant, Priscilla Greene. “They were major-domos, no doubt about it,” said Harold Agnew. “They more or less ran the place.” More important in the pecking order of Los Alamos, they were invited to the Oppenheimers’ home for dinner parties, where they traded stories about the latest Feynman safecracking incident and cryptic office gossip that made the other women present feel left out.

  Only a few physicists dared to violate Groves’ admonitions and confide in their wives the exact nature of what they were doing in the Tech Area. Some couples were so nervous that the army might be eavesdropping on their conversations, they would save private talks for long hikes or rides into the open countryside. Despite their suspicions and all too many slips of the tongue, most of the wives at Los Alamos existed in a peculiar state of deliberate ignorance. Many took the view that it was easier not to know, because that way they had no secrets to guard, though Elsie McMillan was glad when she finally learned the truth. “In a way I was fortunate to know what they were actually doing,” she recalled, “a fact I discovered from a high-up leak.” (Her sister, Mary, was married to Ernest Lawrence, the director of the top-secret Hanford site, which was producing the plutonium for the bomb.) “Ed nearly fell out of bed the night I admitted I knew,” Elsie said, “but it was a relief to be able to talk to each other freely in private. A relief that few other wives shared.”

  The pressures were immense, and insidious. “No wonder the inhabitants became touchy and restless,” observed Segrè, who had more perspective than most as he enjoyed the rare luxury of commuting back and forth between Los Alamos and Berkeley for the first few months of the project:

  Often they resented petty things to which they would never have paid attention under normal circumstances. Rank, housing assignments, the part of town in which one lived, social invitations, administrative assignments, everything became important, occasionally in a childish way. The fact that one willy-nilly always saw the same people added to the difficulties. The wives, displaced from their usual surroundings, only added to the problems. Without the absorbing technical work of the husbands, and unavoidably in the dark about what went on in the laboratories, they became depressed, quarrelsome and gossipy.

  There was no question that life at Los Alamos was hardest on the young mothers. “They turned to Henry, who had broad shoulders and dispensed as much wisdom as he could,” said Shirley Barnett. “Pediatricians fall into the category of confidante, and he was very tuned in to their psychological problems.” Henry Barnett, just out of medical school, had braced himself for wartime emergencies, but instead found himself dealing with an extremely high-strung group of women and children suffering from a host of stress-related problems, from headaches, insomnia, and fatigue to acute anxiety and depression. He and his colleagues diagnosed some of the problems as “Los Alamositis,” the result of so many people from so many different parts of the world coming together on the mesa and pooling their germs. It was not long before
“Doc” Barnett realized that much of the dizziness, exhaustion, and nausea he was seeing was due to morning sickness, as one young wife after another turned up pregnant. Because medical care at Los Alamos was completely free and very good, many of the young couples felt encouraged to get a start on their families. The hospital was soon busy delivering so many babies, it was dubbed RFD, for “rural free delivery.”

  For most women on the mesa, the chief indignity was the expectation that they would raise their families next to one of the world’s most advanced laboratories, while at the same time putting up with conditions straight out of the pioneer days. They complained to Dorothy about everything: it was a constant struggle to obtain fresh milk for babies, eggs were rotten on arrival, and what little fruit and produce the Commissary carried was shriveled and almost inedible after the long haul from Texas. There was never enough water—memos alerting them that “the water situation in this camp is critical” were frequent—and what little came sputtering out of the faucet was often accompanied by algae, sediment, and, on a bad day, worms. At other times, the water was so overchlorinated, it dissolved their precious hosiery, which was almost impossible to replace in Santa Fe. “The water went off when one had soaped for a shower but not entered it yet,” recalled Dorothy, reciting from a long list of grievances. “The power went off regularly at 5:30, just at dinner cooking time.” Tech Area experiments routinely drained all the juice from town, rendering hot plates and electric ovens useless. There were periods when the electricity stayed off for hours, making it necessary to eat by candlelight. If the meal was not ready, families often skipped dinner altogether. Bread never rose, cakes fell, and nerves frayed. The contrast between the latest accelerator in the laboratory and the hand-operated mangle in the posts laundry room was almost more than the women could bear.