109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  In early June, Dorothy left an assistant in charge at 109 East Palace, and she and Kevin moved up to Bandelier for the summer so she could fulfill her new innkeeping duties. With a crew of girls from San Ildefonso and plenty of help from the army, Dorothy went straight to work setting the place to rights. In five days, the main hotel was habitable, and in just under two weeks, they had cleaned up the lodge and surrounding cabins and had eighty clean beds freshly made up and waiting. The army helped out by bringing the camp into the twentieth century, installing a generator “with enough power to light Chicago.”

  In typical Los Alamos fashion, the estimates for the influx of new personnel had been way off, and the eighty new recruits never showed up. With only half that number of guests, and occupancy running considerably lower than what they had prepared for, Dorothy decided to turn Frijoles into a weekend resort for the scientists for the rest of the season. She knew they were going a little stir crazy on their mountain hideout and would welcome the change of scenery. She organized buffet lunches and dinners on Saturdays and Sundays, and the grateful scientists and their families flocked down to the picturesque spot for some badly needed R & R. After months of working six-day weeks, pure recreation was a luxury they had almost forgotten. Groves’ penny-pinching left no room for extras, and with little variety to their days, the weeks flattened into dull months. By comparison, Frijoles seemed like a desert oasis, and Dorothy’s lavish spreads, and the many small ways she catered to their comfort, all made for a sweet escape. Those with automobiles took advantage of her hospitality and made it a frequent stop. Those with horses, led by Oppenheimer, came by way of the old Indian trails, which snaked down and through the canyons. “Some rode their horses over,” recalled Dorothy. “Some came to fish, and most came to eat because the food was excellent.”

  The “Frijoles caper,” as she always referred to it, turned out to be an idyllic interlude for Dorothy and her son. The army had provided her with a 1941 Ford station wagon to do her daily run up to Los Alamos, and Dorothy, who had gunned her aging jalopy up and down the bumpy road too many times to count, insisted the government foot the bill for a spare tire and the tools to change it. Being so close by meant that both she and Kevin could spend much more time at the post, and they solidified new friendships on the Hill. Since the start of the project, Dorothy had been working around the clock, and her time with Kevin had been cut short. A few of Dorothy’s old friends even worried to her about whether she was giving the boy enough attention. But at Frijoles, they had adjoining cabins, and spent long, leisurely days together, and rediscovered a favorite pastime, spending many nights sleeping outside under the stars.

  Thirteen-year-old Kevin was enchanted by Tyuonyi and the Ceremonial caves, and by the solitude and mystery of the canyon. The park was situated in the Jemez range, at the site of the historic remains of a compact city-state built by the Anasazi, who thrived in their immense, terraced, tenement caves for hundreds of years before suddenly abandoning the settlement for reasons that remain unclear. Dorothy and Kevin immersed themselves in the history of the plateau and the earlier peoples, who had left behind the ruined stone palaces to testify to the former greatness of their vanished race. “It was this ancient, haunted place, and I had it all to myself,” said Kevin, who spent days exploring on his own and years later would return as chief ranger of Bandelier National Park. “It was an amazing time,” he said, and then added softly, “Amazing and unforgettable.”

  All of them fell under the spell of their magnificent surroundings. The spring columbines were in full bloom, and the Apache plumes and gentians were bursting with color. They shook off the khaki-colored dust of their army settlement, where only a few tough clumps of grass still grew around the old school buildings, and learned to appreciate again the pink cliffs and lavender vistas of the Sangre de Cristos, and the exhilarating sunshine and mountain air. For Dorothy and the scientists, worn down from months of labor, one of the great pleasures was wandering along the shady paths by the cool river, where they encountered porcupines, marmots, badgers, herds of deer, and beautiful birds of all kinds. It was hard to remember on those slow Sundays that the world was in turmoil, that Allied troops were being slaughtered on the beach in Normandy, and that the first V-1s were dropping on London. Even the fighting in the Philippines, and news reports of the Japanese defenders’ fierce resistance, seemed unreal. The protected valley with its sense of isolation made the war seem as distant and mute as a falling star. They felt as if they were on an adventure in a wild and romantic land, and it was all too easy to blot out the project and its fearful purpose.

  Dorothy could not help feeling once again that they were intruding on sacred ground, treading on the ashes of an older, wiser civilization. She knew they were not the first invaders and that throughout the centuries the deep caves had sheltered all manner of marauding tribes, renegades, and bandits. The physicists were the latest in a long line of outlaws. Restless and homeless as the herds of deer, they, too, were nomads. But they were more respectful than most of the strangers who had besieged the canyon, and she hoped they would be forgiven for trespassing. Over those fleeting weeks, the warmth and spirituality of Frijoles infected them all and eased their worries and lightened their hearts. They felt safe and close to nature, and that renewed their faith in an orderly world:

  Again the wooded valley and the rushing stream knew the presence of visitors who walked miles over their trails. One afternoon a staff car coming through the woods hit a wild turkey and killed it, in a great swirl of flying feathers, breaking the windshield, and astonishing the bird and driver equally. At twilight every night in the canyon hundreds of bats flew out of a cave high in the cliffs, and the watchers sat below close to the frieze which had once decorated the wall of a house, and thought of the people who had lived in the valley long before.

  THIRTEEN

  Summer Lightning

  BY AUGUST, Dorothy was back at her desk at 109 East Palace. True to her word, she had returned Frijoles Lodge to Mrs. Frey in a much better state than she had found it in. The Housing Office staff were busier than ever. People were arriving faster than they could find lodging for them, and they had to “work like dogs” to get them a place to hang their hats. The town was full to bursting. “They were streaming in,” Dorothy wrote, “all eager and bright, apart from their fatigue from traveling, with the assurance that their furniture would arrive by van immediately. I always responded sourly that I would faint if it did.”

  It was hard not to be curious about why so many new hands were suddenly needed “up yonder.” She tried not to ask questions—much. But it was impossible not to notice the tension on the faces of the project leaders coming through the office. High-ranking consultants were hurrying up to conferences on the Hill. James Conant, Groves’ primary science advisor, was becoming such a regular visitor to Los Alamos he was commonly known as “Uncle Jim.” Sir James and Lady Chadwick of the British mission moved from Washington with their seventeen-year-old twin daughters and crushed many families’ hopes by snagging one of the last of the old ranch houses.

  Security had been tightened again, and it was now standard practice to send a second car manned by G-2 agents to follow behind VIPs on their way up to the site, presumably for their protection or, more likely in Dorothy’s opinion, in case of a breakdown. The pace of the work at the laboratory had picked up noticeably. The scientists were going at it day and night with no regard for the clock. At Frijoles, she often heard as many as a half dozen explosions in an afternoon. Even in Santa Fe, she could hear the distant rumble echoing in the hills well into the night, like summer lightning. Using the familiar code, Dorothy would comment in passing on all the thunder. But it was thunder that brought no rain, only billowing smoke from the mountains and the sense of building pressure. “We felt the suspense and excitement of being connected with the unknown,” she wrote. “We realized the importance, the desperate intensity of the work.”

  Dorothy noticed a change in Oppenheimer as we
ll. In earlier times, he had been able to slip away now and then for a quiet dinner. “He would come to the house and he would make the best dry martinis,” she said. “And he would cook the steak and fresh asparagus, which was a ritual menu we’d have.” These days, however, Oppenheimer was driving himself harder than ever and rarely left the post, and then only on business. Since wartime shortages had made cigarettes scarce, he had taken up smoking a pipe, and the way he puffed on it fiendishly day and night revealed more about the extreme anxiety that tormented him than anything he could have said.

  He had always been rail thin, but over the summer he had dropped nearly ten pounds and was alarmingly gaunt. At times, he looked almost frail, as if the punishing workload might be too much for him. He seemed to have lost the transcendent calm that was the hallmark of his first year in the desert, a cool, reasoned detachment that had made him such a source of wisdom and inspiration to so many of the young scientists. All the uncertainty of the past few months, along with the project’s helter-skelter expansion, had put them behind schedule. Oppie was testy and unsociable, and he left people with the impression that he was downcast. The whole laboratory was affected by his mood, and frustration and pessimism emanated from its doors like hot, dusty swirls of desert wind.

  What Dorothy did not know was that the work at the laboratory had reached an impasse, and Oppenheimer was indeed at his lowest point since the beginning of the project. Ernest Lawrence, who was in charge of the enormous calutrons at Oak Ridge, had reported to Groves that the production was proceeding, but the yield was not what they had expected, and it was likely that they would be able to send only enough weapons-grade uranium 235 for one bomb. At the same time, it was becoming clear that the rate of production for plutonium was better, and its availability meant that more of the implosion bombs could be ready at an earlier date. But when the first reactor-produced plutonium had begun to arrive in Los Alamos from the plant in Hanford, the samples had turned out to be impure. Segre’s experiments confirmed the samples were poisoned by the isotope of plutonium 240, which was produced in a secondary reaction. The problem with Pu-240 was that it had a very high spontaneous rate of fission, too high to make the gun-assembly method practical. The danger of predetonation was too great, and it was probable that the bullet and target would melt before coming together. To purify the plutonium would require separating the isotopes, which would involve the construction of huge plants on a scale with those at Oak Ridge. That was prohibitive in both cost and effort.

  Segrè’s discovery of the high spontaneous fission rate of reactor-bred plutonium would turn out to be the most fateful single event since their arrival on the mesa. On July 17, Oppenheimer broke the news that they would have to abandon the plutonium-gun method. Work on the Thin Man was to be discontinued. There would be no shortcut to a second bomb. They would have to find a new technique for assembling the plutonium weapon. Oppie’s announcement came as a “big jolt,” recalled Manley.

  This terrible shock, and an inescapable one, was that the gun assembly method could not be used for plutonium. Of the two fissile explosives, U-235 and plutonium, we finally had to conclude that a gun just would not assemble plutonium fast enough. Another isotope besides the one that we wanted was also produced at the time in the piles. One could have separated out those bad plutonium isotopes from the good ones, but that would have meant duplicating everything that had been done for uranium isotope separation—all those big plants—and there was just no time to do that. The choice was to junk the whole discovery of the chain reaction that produced plutonium, and all of the investment in time and effort of the Hanford plant, unless somebody could come up with a way of assembling the plutonium material into a weapon that would explode.

  For Groves, and the members of the Military Policy Committee who helped set the direction of the project, this meant the implosion method had become a priority. Neddermeyer’s independent study was now to become a full-blown division with all the necessary support. The sizable quantity of plutonium promised by the Hanford reactors meant there would be enough for a field test of the plutonium weapon. This was crucial, as the new assembly method was so subtle and complicated that it would have to be thoroughly tested before the implosion bomb could be considered combat-ready. The success of the implosion bomb, Fat Man, depended on its design and the quality of the explosives, both of which Los Alamos would be responsible for developing.

  For Oppenheimer, this turn of events was an unmitigated nightmare. In July 1944, implosion looked like anything but a sure thing. Yet the urgency of getting the implosion method to work would necessitate both expanding and reorganizing the laboratory to meet this massive new challenge. Rabi recalled sitting in a Los Alamos meeting room while the senior scientists debated the problem. “The question was asked: Should the laboratory be extended? The big problem was: Where was the enemy in the field of work?” They reviewed everything they knew of the Nazi bomb effort since the announcement of uranium fission in 1939, as well as the history of their own development, and tried to figure out if the Germans had better judgment or had made the same mistakes. “We finally arrived at the conclusion that they could be exactly up to us, or perhaps further,” said Rabi. “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.”

  The shake-up of the laboratory would require the creation of new divisions and, far trickier from an administrative point of view, the appointment of new division heads. Here Neddermeyer’s personality, which up to now Oppenheimer had managed to treat with forbearance, presented a major problem. Neddermeyer was extremely difficult. He liked to proceed slowly and methodically, and was constantly in conflict with his boss, Captain Deke Parsons, a navy officer accustomed to running a large and efficient military ordnance operation. When Kistiakowsky arrived, Oppenheimer was relieved to be able to find someone so qualified to assign as Parsons’ deputy to run interference between the two scientists on the implosion project. But Kistiakowsky had quickly tired of refereeing Neddermeyer and Parsons, who were always “at each other’s throats” and shot off a memo asking to be released from the project. An additional complication was that Jim Tuck, a member of the British mission, had been experimenting with explosive lenses and had found a way to bend the explosion wave going through the explosive. As Kistiakowsky put it, “If you have two explosives with different detonation velocities, and you put them together in the right way, you can shape the wave, and instead of having it expand, make it converge.” Theoretically, it should be possible to line the core with explosive lenses and, by detonating them simultaneously, produce a tremendous symmetrical shock wave. It was the problem that Neddermeyer had been struggling for months to solve, but for which he had been unable to come up with an acceptable answer.

  Oppenheimer’s predicament was whether to leave Neddermeyer in place or risk alienating an extremely valuable member of the team, who had spearheaded implosion from the very beginning, by handing the new expanded implosion program over to someone else. During the last few weeks of July and the beginning of August, he agonized over what to do. “I remember Oppie’s even calling me in and asking what I thought of Seth Neddermeyer,” said Priscilla Greene. “He was hesitant about putting him in charge. [Neddermeyer] was sort of cranky, and didn’t communicate well, and could be stubborn about his ideas.” What followed was “a great period of tension” during which Oppie became more high-handed and abrupt than usual, and reverted to some of the bad habits he had been known for before the war. He relied increasingly on a close circle of intimate colleagues, shut others out, and summarily ended arguments with sardonic or wounding remarks. “But when he tried that on the scientists at Los Alamos,” Greene noted, “Robert didn’t always get away with putting them down.”

  Whether Oppenheimer was trying to goad Neddermeyer into action, or was simply at the end of his rope, the result was the same. Some of their fights were particularly bitter. Oppie’s mishandl
ing of Neddermeyer made him another enemy and alienated a number of the physicists close colleagues. “From my point of view, he was an intellectual snob,” Neddermeyer said after the war. “He could cut you cold and humiliate you right down to the ground. On the other hand, I could irritate him.” But even Neddermeyer acknowledged his deliberate pace was partly to blame. “He became terribly, terribly impatient with me in the spring of 1944,” he said. “I think he felt very badly because I seemed not to push things for war research but acted as though it was just a normal research situation.”

  In the end, Oppenheimer felt compelled to choose Kistiakowsky as head of the new X (Explosives) Division, the man he thought would best lead a crash effort on the daunting problem of producing an explosive lens for the implosion weapon. There was so much work to do on implosion that the whole project would essentially be transformed. Nearly every important scientist, except Teller, who was still single-mindedly focused on the Super, would be affected. Oppenheimer asked Alvarez to be Kistiakowsky’s chief aide, and Neddermeyer went back to working in a corner, off by himself. Bob Bacher was put in charge of the new G (Gadget) Division, which focused on weapons physics and the plutonium sphere. Parsons continued to head the Ordnance Division, concentrating on bomb construction and delivery. Parsons was also appointed associate director of the laboratory, along with Fermi, who would be moving to Los Alamos permanently that fall to lend a hand. Double-tracking the two projects meant that more manpower would be required to supplement the existing staff, and Oppenheimer arranged for hundreds more SEDs—personnel from the military’s Special Engineer Detachment—to come to the project to help with the implosion work and bomb construction.