Françoise was not alone in receiving painful reports from home as the Allies penetrated German-occupied zones. Not long after the first troops had entered Rome in June, Oppenheimer had called Emilio Segrè into his office and gravely informed him that military intelligence had learned that although his father, a well-to-do Jewish paper manufacturer, was safe, his mother had been captured by the Nazis in the fall of 1943. Her fate was unknown. Segrè was too shocked to respond at first, and unsure he had made himself understood, Oppenheimer was forced to repeat the news to him several times.
In the days that followed the liberation of Paris, elation soon gave way to the familiar driving anxiety. Hitler had been dealt a major defeat, and for a brief moment, it had seemed that after years of devastation and struggle, Europe was finally rising up and shaking off the chains of German occupation. In the days that followed, Toulon, Marseilles, and Brussels were liberated in rapid succession, and the battle for France seemed almost over. Allied forces were poised to advance into Germany. But then, as so many times before when the scientists had allowed themselves to believe the end was in sight, progress stalled. American and British paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines at Arnhem were killed and captured in staggering numbers as the German reinforcements surrounded them. Their grief at the numbers of men who lay dead on the bridges over the Rhine was compounded by the losses on the beaches of Guam. In the last bittersweet days of summer, their spirits rose and sank with every new radio dispatch, and the slender hope that what they were working on at Los Alamos might not be needed after all flickered and went out.
FOURTEEN
A Bad Case of the Jitters
AN EARLY SEPTEMBER frost turned the aspens lining the road to Los Alamos brilliant yellow overnight. The summer holiday was over, and it was with a feeling of relief that Dorothy packed Kevin off to school. He and some teenage pals had recently gone joyriding around the Plaza and had been hosing down bystanders with large bottles of seltzer before being apprehended by two MPs. Dorothy had been called down to the local jail and had had to do some fast talking to smooth things over. It was Fiesta time in Santa Fe again. The scientists piled into cars and went to see the traditional Corn Dances in San Ildefonso, and the triumphant return of the conquistadors, a colorful pageant that was reenacted every year in the Plaza. The entire British mission, almost to a man, begged for that Saturday off so they could join in the ritual festivities. For three days, everyone in town donned costumes and their best silver and turquoise jewelry, including Dorothy, who raised eyebrows by coming to work at 109 in long, brightly patterned Navajo skirts and white fiesta blouses. Since the scientists were supposed to remain apart from the locals, they refrained from dressing up, but, as she pointed out, they looked more conspicuous than ever on the crowded streets among the Indians, señores, señoritas, singers, and dancing clowns.
For a few days, the Plaza teemed with carnival-booth hawkers, performers of every kind and quality, and hundreds upon hundreds of camera-carrying tourists. Then, thankfully, it was over and order was restored. The weeks flew by so quickly that it was only by these seasonal markers that Dorothy, looking back over the jumble of events, could fix them in her memory. There was never a moment to think about what they were doing, the real purpose of the research in the Tech Area, or the ramifications of the powerful “gadget” that was buzzed about on the grapevine. She barely had time enough at the end of each week to catch her breath, do the Sunday wash, and get ready for business on Monday.
Despite the feverish pace, there was one isolated moment that would always remain etched in her mind. It was on a serenely blue New Mexico afternoon that she got a call from the director’s office reporting that a Japanese fire balloon had been sighted. Her heart had skipped a beat. Any threat to the laboratory was taken seriously by security, which was always on the lookout for intruders. The idea that they would be under attack by Japanese balloons seemed incredible, but in her confusion and alarm, she did not know what to think.
She remembered noticing that it was five o’clock and, glancing out the window, seeing the sun was about to set. The sky was clear and would soon be studded with stars. She thought of the horrifying possibility of an enemy presence floating over the valley under the cover of night. The news had been transmitted to the Albuquerque Army Air Base, and a fighter plane had been dispatched on a search-and-destroy mission. In the meantime, the caller from the Hill persisted, wanting to know if Dorothy would leave the office and look around “to see if there was anything in the sky that might be a Japanese balloon”:
The object was situated so many degrees from the sun, etc., and they had been observing it from the site and would like to know how it appeared from Santa Fe. I bustled out and scanned the skies from the Plaza and then drove to the top of old Fort Marcy and looked and looked. There was a certain apprehension and fear that crept around the mind and heart in contemplating such a possibility, with full knowledge of the danger to the Project. I could not see the object in question, but I did see little puffs of cloud, very frail and tenuous, which formed and reformed like vapor, and each one I imagined to be a small parachute with missile attached.
Dorothy stood on Fort Marcy Hill searching the horizon in the deepening twilight. When it grew dark, she could make out the small cluster of lights of Los Alamos miles away. She thought of her friends who lived on the site and wondered if they were safe. She shivered, less from the cold than the dread of what might be passing silently overhead.
What American military intelligence knew, but did not reveal until close to the end of the war, was that a Japanese balloon bomb offensive against the U.S. mainland had begun in the fall of 1944. The first reported launch took place on November 3, when a navy vessel spotted a balloon floating off the coast of California. Another was spotted outside the town of Thermopolis, Wyoming, and exploded in the sky. A few days later, two woodchoppers found the remains of a large Japanese balloon in the forest near Kalispell, Montana. In the months to come, balloon debris was found in Arizona, Alaska, Iowa, and Nebraska. All that fall and winter, fighter planes scrambled to intercept and shoot down balloons, and the exploded remains were taken to military labs to be examined. By spring, there were several reports per day, and exploded and unexploded balloon remains were turning up everywhere from Alaska and Washington to Colorado, Mexico, and Texas. In January 1945, the government, as part of its policy of wartime censorship, instructed the news media to withhold all stories about the Japanese “inter-continental free-flight balloons” to avoid panicking the civilian population, and to prevent the enemy from learning about the success rate of its attacks. Three months later, a confidential note to editors and broadcasters stated:
Cooperation from the press and radio under this request has been excellent despite the fact that Japanese free balloons are reaching the United States, Canada, and Mexico in increasing numbers. … There is no question that your refusal to publish or broadcast information about these balloons has baffled the Japanese, annoyed and hindered them, and has been an important contribution to security.
The Japanese called the rubberized silk and paper balloons “Fu-Go,” and they were launched from sites along the east coast of Honshu. Filled with hydrogen, they would quickly climb to a cruising altitude of 16,000 feet, where the high-speed wind currents would carry them across the Pacific to North America. Each balloon was anchored to an aluminum ring that was wired with thirty-two “blow-out plugs,” each supporting a sandbag. The plugs were designed to fire whenever the balloon dipped below a predetermined altitude, cutting free two bags of ballast and thus propelling the lightened Fu-Go back up into the jet stream. The last ballast bag was a weapon. If the balloons survived the 6,200 mile trip across the ocean, and everything went according to plan, the flash bomb would detonate over U.S. territory, causing damage and at the same time incinerating all evidence of the mysterious weapon. As part of their ambitious war plan, the Japanese sent an estimated 9,000 Fu-Go firebombs raining down on North America as a reprisal for
the bold “Doolittle Raid” in April 1942, when sixteen American B-25s under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle attacked Tokyo, and the subsequent escalation of the strategic bombing of Japan. Seven hundred of the lethal devices were launched in November 1944, and almost twice as many the next month, with an increasing number sent drifting over North America in the early months of 1945.
Designed as a terror weapon, the random attacks by the Fu-Gos were supposed to frighten civilians and ignite forest fires. The latter scenario was troubling, particularly in the dry summer months, when forest fires could endanger large portions of the Pacific Northwest. U.S. military intelligence was also afraid the balloons might be used as antiaircraft devices and, ultimately, in biological warfare. On the West Coast, the military organized the secret Firefly mission, at one point numbering three thousand soldiers, to put out fires started by Fu-Go bomb balloons. The closest the bombs came to wrecking disaster was on March 10, when a balloon descended in the vicinity of the Manhattan Project’s Hanford, Washington, production site. The parachute and cables caught on an electric line that fed power to the building containing the plutonium reactor, temporarily shutting it down.
In the end, because of mechanical malfunctions and the combined obstacles of distance and weather, only about a thousand Fu-Gos ever reached America. The Japanese ultimately considered the balloon barrage a failure, and it was halted after five months. Though it never became the propaganda weapon they had hoped for, the Fu-Gos succeeded in causing the only wartime fatalities within the continental United States. In May 1945, a balloon bomb in Oregon killed six members of a church picnic, five of them children, when it went off as they tried to drag it clear of the woods. Two weeks later, the War Department lifted the secrecy order, and the government issued a statement warning the public not to tamper with the hazardous balloons.
The Los Alamos project leaders had been informed that a number of Japanese fire balloons had landed in the Southwest. The laboratory staff knew little about the airborne threat but they were keenly aware that Site Y represented a vital target. With the approaching test, “people at Los Alamos were naturally in a state of some tension,” Oppenheimer admitted in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt written in 1950. He added that the fact that they all immediately jumped to the conclusion they were under attack showed that “even a group of scientists is not proof against the errors of suggestion and hysteria”:
Almost the whole project was out of doors staring at a bright object in the sky through glasses, binoculars, and whatever else they could find; and nearby Kirtland field reported to us that they had no interceptors which had enabled them to come within range of the object.
Dorothy’s account confirmed that Oppie and company had a bad case of the jitters. “The entire staff,” she noted, “from the Director down, was in a dither that day.” Work came to a standstill. Some of the scientists were convinced they could see some sort of suspicious “gondola” hanging from the balloon. Not everyone was convinced that what they were looking at was a balloon, and a few cooler heads suggested the mysterious orb might be a new star. “The scientists spent the afternoon craning their necks and evolving fantastic theories about the phenomenon,” she reported. “The personnel director, an astronomer by profession, was called on in his dual capacity to settle the argument in order to get the staff back to work. Since he would not make a flat statement, the speculation continued.”
At noon the following day, the same luminescent object again appeared in the sky. “Only then did all the experts agree that it was nothing more or less than the planet Venus, rarely seen in broad daylight,” wrote Dorothy. “But it did give many of us a few hours of rather quiet terror.”
With the brisk fall air, a back-to-school feeling permeated the mesa. The transformation of the laboratory had been completed over the summer and had cleared the way for a fresh start. The work had been messy and painful at times, particularly since none of the scientists were used to subjugating their interests and instincts to a large, cumbersome framework. But a number of chronic problems had been fixed in the process, and those individuals who could not adjust, or were not team players, had been threatened with removal or transferred to other divisions. A lot of anger and frustration had been vented, and the great majority, who had come to Los Alamos in the first place because of a strong sense of patriotic duty, were ready to put aside their differences and plunge back into the fray. Most of the physicists seemed reinvigorated, and even the Tech Area administration, which had never really settled into any kind of rhythm but lurched from one crisis to the next, seemed to function better. The new work hours on implosion were more grueling, but the divisions and groups were operating better, and overall there was less griping. As work on implosion progressed, Oppenheimer devoted himself to coordinating the different parts of the bomb project and making preparations for the test detonation of the plutonium device, which had been set for July 1945.
Stan Ulam, who had watched Oppenheimer overhaul the lab from top to bottom, marveled at what he called the “American talent for cooperation” and how it contrasted with what he had experienced in Europe:
People here were willing to assume minor roles for the sake of contributing to a common enterprise. This spirit of teamwork must have been characteristic of life in the nineteenth century and was what made great industrial empires possible. One of its humorous side effects in Los Alamos was a fascination with organizational charts. At meetings, theoretical talks were interesting enough, but whenever an organizational chart was displayed, I could feel the whole audience come to life with pleasure at seeing something concrete and definite (“Who is responsible to whom,” etc.).
As equally striking to Ulam as the cooperation was the conviviality, not only among the physicists, both theoretical and experimental, who differed greatly in temperament, but also among mathematicians, chemists, and engineers. “People visited each other constantly at all hours after work,” he wrote. “They considered not only the main problem—the construction of the atomic bomb and related physical questions about phenomena that would attend the explosion—the strictly project work—but also general questions about the nature of physics, the future of physics, the impact of nuclear experiments on technology of the future, and contrastingly its influence on the future development of theory.” Beyond this, there were wide-ranging discussions of the philosophy of science, and of course the world situation, from daily progress on the war fronts to the prospects of victory in the months to come. “The intellectual quality of so many interesting persons and their being constantly together was unique. In the entire history of science there had never been anything even remotely approaching such a concentration.”
Luis Alvarez, who had come to Los Alamos after stints at both the Rad Lab in Cambridge and the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago, was amazed at how effective Oppenheimer was at the helm of Los Alamos:
Remembering the unworldly and longhaired prewar Robert, I was surprised to see the extent to which he had developed into an excellent laboratory director and a marvelous leader of men. His haircut was almost as short as a military officer’s; he ran an organization of thousands, including some of the best theoretical and experimental physicists and engineers in the world. The laboratory’s fantastic morale could be traced directly to the personal quality of Robert’s guidance.
No one recognized better how difficult it was to achieve such solidarity and concentration of effort than James Conant, who had been traveling to the site every three weeks since August and was becoming a close advisor to Oppenheimer during the last, difficult stage of the project. The two tall, thin men, who shared a love of the mountains and rugged hiking trails, could often be seen heading into the hills at a rapid stride, deep in conversation. Conant was a man who had distinguished himself far beyond his profession as a chemist; he had served as chairman of the S-1 executive committee, was a member of Groves’ Military Policy Committee, and was one of the elite few with the background and knowledge of th
e new weapon’s development who could act as an intermediary between the White House and the scientists on the Hill. He had a firm grasp of the political and military problems facing them in the months ahead, and according to Manley, Oppenheimer came to view Conant as a statesmanlike figure, “a very wise, elderly person who in a normal sense of events he would have liked to have had as a godfather.”
By October, their relationship had reached the point where Conant often tried to cheer Oppie on, and perhaps understood that he was one of the very few outsiders who could provide the kind of encouragement and moral support Oppenheimer needed at this critical juncture. “Just a line to tell you again how satisfactory I think everything is going at Y,” Conant wrote after one of his inspection visits. “In all seriousness, you are to be congratulated on the progress made and the organization as it now stands. I enjoyed my trip immensely, and I am particularly grateful to you and your wife for your hospitality.”
Oppenheimer was restored to his old self again, if more nervous and distracted than ever. He paced constantly. From behind her typewriter, Shirley Barnett watched him do rings around the large conference table in his office, trailing plumes of gray smoke from his pipe. With so much doubt and uncertainty hanging over the project, everyone was showing signs of strain. On his last fly-by visit, Groves, who was always instituting more security strictures, berated Oppenheimer for wearing his trademark porkpie hat. “He said it made him too recognizable when he left the site, and that anybody could pick him out in an instant,” recalled Barnett. “Well, Oppie didn’t take kindly to that sort of thing.” The next time Groves came to visit he was prepared. He had an elaborate Indian headdress of eagle feathers that someone had given him as a gift, which he kept hanging on a wall. “It was enormous,” said Barnett. “So he put it on, and greeted the general by saying, ‘Is this better, sir?’” Oppenheimer was so pleased with his prank, he told everyone. While people laughed at the story, what they remarked on later was that despite all the battles of the past few months, their director and general still enjoyed a remarkably good relationship. “Both of them had a sense of humor,” added Barnett, “and they had a real mutual respect, which went a long way.”
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