109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  It was always a wonder to Dorothy that with so much work to do the scientists still found time to stir up trouble. That autumn, the talk on the mesa turned to the coming presidential election, and people became agitated about their right to vote. Roosevelt stirred deep emotions in the scientific populace, and they were worried that because of the usual last-minute problems, they might find themselves disenfranchised. They had surrendered their freedom and privacy in order to serve their country, but those who were citizens were not about to give up their vote. People raised their voices at town meetings, and the issue became the focus of much excited chatter on the vine. Dorothy learned that before the war Los Alamos had been entitled to its own ballot box. But the box had disappeared along with many of the school’s more civilized features, and it seemed unlikely the army would be in a hurry to put it back anytime soon.

  In the beginning, the post administration assured the scientists that they would be able to vote. The first group of citizens eager to register volunteered to make the seventy-five-mile trip to the county seat, Bernalillo, which at the thirty-five-mile-per-hour wartime speed limit promised to take the better part of a day “Ten of us in two groups went, and all of us were Democrats,” recalled Priscilla Greene. The only problem was that when the local sheriff caught wind of the expedition, he worried that hundreds of liberal voters would swing the county and possibly lose him his job in the New Mexico Republican administration. “Los Alamos was part of Sandoval County, which at that point had a one hundred percent Republican majority,” explained Priscilla, “and they got an injunction [against letting the Hill people register].” The army promised to look into contesting the injunction, but kept putting them off with various excuses, and finally decided against doing so because the scientists’ names would have to go on the voters’ rolls if they registered, and that was out of the question. All lists of names were restricted and had to remain classified information. The senior scientists had been told all along that if they wanted to vote, they would have to vote by absentee ballot, so the few who had made arrangements to do so were the only civilian members of the Los Alamos community who voted that year. There was nothing the rest could do but chalk it up to the stupidity and madness of life under military rule.

  Nevertheless, there were many victory bashes after FDR’s reelection, not that they needed much of an excuse to celebrate. Despite the accelerated work schedule, their enthusiasm for parties was undimmed. Saturday night gatherings, whether large and loud or small and intimate, usually lasted until dawn. The walls were too thin, their private lives too exposed, and the liquor too strong for it to be any other way. It was impossible to seriously misbehave, but for all their awareness of being monitored, they were, as Bob Bacher’s wife, Jean, put it, “peculiarly uninhibited and completely unrelaxed.” They went to see Our Hearts Were Young and Gay in the post theater and felt incongruously happy and safe in their secretive little utopia, where no one was old, or sick, or handicapped, and children could roam freely without fear of strangers or crime. They jammed incredible numbers of people into their little GI apartments for cocktails, and couples danced in the hallways and out on the porch. For all their worldly sophistication, even the most serious scientists engaged in adolescent binges and frat-house hijinks. Pranks, practical jokes, and ridiculous propositions were usually the climax of a long evening of drinking. During a particularly rowdy affair at the Bainbridges’ house on Bathtub Row, a pretty young wife wagered five dollars that no one would dare take advantage of the enviable porcelain fixture—one of only six on the mesa—to “take a bath then and there.” Naturally, a young man came forward to take up her challenge. “When he discovered the door to the bathroom had no lock, he borrowed a pair of Ken’s trunks, drew a tub full of hot water and prepared to soak in comfort,” recalled Bernice Brode. “But of course, everyone crowded in as witnesses, offering to scrub his back and wash behind his ears. When a couple of not-entirely-sober friends tried to climb in too, the water started to run into the hall, and Peg put a stop to the fun.”

  After another Saturday night bash, a number of guests deliberately hung around until the early hours of the morning to arrange several dozen empty liquor bottles beside the front door of the stone house where George Kistiakowsky lived. They placed a large sign over the bottles, which read, “Milkman, only two quarts today, please.” Apparently, Kistiakowsky, who was not religious, could be counted on to sleep in while churchgoing families passed by his house on the way to and from Sunday services. “George was quite angry about the prank, and none confessed to it,” recalled Brode. “However, the next Monday morning, the Bainbridge family could not get out either door, as huge piles of logs had been banked against them. Ken had to climb out a window to go to work.”

  Planning parties and events became a staple of mealtime conversation, and the preparations usually focused on rounding up enough alcohol to guarantee a hardy punch. Dorothy would look on in amusement as they piled cases of cheap rum in her office and passed up lunch at La Fonda to scurry around town laying in supplies for that weekend’s debauchery. Personal inspiration, private deals, and devious wangling accounted for much of the alcohol that found its way up to the Hill. When word spread that Sam Allison was coming from Chicago and would be driving his car, people rushed to put in orders for their favorite drink. On the last leg of his trip, Allison was hit by a rock slide on a steep patch of highway between Taos and Santa Fe and knocked over the edge and into the river. He survived unscathed and called the laboratory, which dispatched a jeepload of GIs to rescue him. The army boys succeeded in hauling out his car, which had somehow managed to plunge forty feet down into the Rio Grande and land upright on its wheels, its trunk still intact and packed to the brim with booze. When he finally made it up to the Hill, he found his colleagues were far more concerned about the possibility of broken bottles than broken bones.

  They had become adept at making their own fun. They found any excuse to dress up, flocking to dances in Fuller Lodge in black tie—the women in floor-length gowns and carefully hoarded, prewar nylons. Costume parties drew the biggest crowds, and at one particularly wild affair, the normally retiring Klaus Fuchs led a conga line through the post Commissary before passing out cold behind the bar. By now there was a club or mesa organization for everything, and all staged magic shows, variety shows, and quiz shows, the latter requiring the theorists to display their erudition in more plebian realms. The high point came when Teller was called on to answer this trivia question: “The General wants to know whether the whistle blows at 7:00 or 7:30 in the morning.” This was greeted with hoots of laughter, as everyone was well aware that Teller disdained the Tech Area siren, slept late, and enjoyed playing his piano at all hours of the night. But he received a round of applause when he gamely stood and faced the crowd.

  The biggest hit of the season was the Little Theater Group’s presentation of Arsenic and Old Lace, which played to a packed house, in part because nearly everyone on the post had been approached about auditioning for a role or providing props or assistance of some kind. The climax came at the end of the last act, when the dead bodies were brought up from the cellar, and the audience was delighted to see Oppenheimer, his face heavily dusted with flour, playing one of the stiffs, carried in on a board and laid out on the floor. After his scene-stealing appearance, a dozen of the leading men on the Hill joined Oppie on stage as corpses—including Deke Parsons, Bob Bacher, Cyril Smith, Otto Frisch, and Harold Agnew—each to wild applause. Afterward, everyone congratulated Oppie on his rigid performance, and Cyril Smith joked that, for his part, it was “the most restful occupation he had on the mesa.”

  Winter came suddenly that year, and they woke up one morning to find a blizzard had dumped ten inches of snow on their mountain stronghold. The children whooped for joy as they headed out the West Gate for Sawyers Hill. Entertainment was in short supply, and skiing was a favorite pastime. They were surrounded on all sides by wonderful ski country, but while Hans Bethe could go up or dow
n any kind of mountain in skiis no matter how steep or thickly studded with trees, the lack of a clear run made it difficult for the less intrepid. George Kistiakowsky, an expert skier and their resident demolition expert, decided it was high time to do something about the situation. He teamed up with Hugh Bradner and Seth Neddermeyer, and together they scrounged some Primacord and Composition C—a puttylike plastic explosive—from their experiments and set about creating a long extension to Sawyers Hill. They set up half necklaces around the trees, which when detonated, “cuts as if you had a chain saw,” recalled Kistiakowsky, “and its faster. A little noisier, though.” After a dozen jaw-rattling explosions, they managed to clear one medium-steep hill, though, according to Bradner, “in most cases the trees failed to fall the way we wanted them to.” They then liberated a length of rope from one of the laboratories and, using a snow tractor borrowed from the army, managed to rig up a reasonable facsimile of a rope tow. Such frivolous use of supplies was officially discouraged, but as on so many other occasions, they knew they could count on Oppie to look the other way.

  As their second Christmas on the Hill approached, women began descending on Santa Fe in a fruitless hunt for goods that had long ago disappeared off the shelves. Dorothy was deluged with requests for skates and skiis, baby clothes and anything that might pass as a maternity dress. The rapid population growth on the Hill had strained the resources of the little town, and the shops were out of everything. Because of wartime rationing, the amount of goods the local stores were allowed to order was based on the tiny population of Santa Fe alone, and not on the needs of a burgeoning mountaintop city that for all intents and purposes did not exist. There were no new boots to be had, no cribs, no electric ovens, no tires for the car—new, used, or even patched and tread-worn. None. The town was tapped out. There was nothing to do but try to order things from a store back in civilization and have it shipped at considerable expense, or wait and hope the war would soon be over and they would be allowed to leave.

  People haunted Dorothy’s office at 109 East Palace in hopes of snagging the first coveted copies of the Sears Roebuck catalog. When they returned to the post, they would run down the street yelling, and everyone in earshot would gather around for a look. Since nearly all personal shopping had to be done by mail, they would pore over the pages, nearly swooning at the wealth of merchandise on display. For some mysterious reason the Montgomery Ward catalog was freely available, while others were so much in demand at Los Alamos that one company dispatched a stern note: “Sir: We don’t know what you are doing to our catalogs. We have sent more than 100 catalogs to this address and will send no more.” The treasured volumes, thick as telephone books, were jealously guarded and passed along from family to family until they were dog-eared and torn. On one occasion the Tech Area operator, by request, sent a pointed message over the laboratory loudspeaker system: “Attention, please. Will the person who took the Sears Roebuck catalog from Harold Agnew’s room please return it immediately. Repeat—immediately!”

  Despite Groves’ objections, Los Alamos’s baby boom continued unabated. One after another, the scientists’ wives announced they were pregnant. Oppenheimers assistant, Priscilla Greene, was expecting, as were Elsie McMillan, Beverly Agnew, and Rose Bethe. Phyllis Fisher, the wife of the young physicist Leon Fisher, was reassured to learn that a whole group of her friends would be “waddling around the mesa together,” as though these real-life babies-to-be would somehow counterbalance the “awesome baby” that the project would give birth to in a few months. “It seemed to me that we were all striving to maintain the fiction that somehow life could be normal in that very abnormal setting,” she observed, adding, “Perhaps that was a vain hope.”

  On December 7, 1944, the birth of Katherine Oppenheimer was announced, and the whole town shared in their director’s pride and delight. Everyone was in the habit of dropping by the hospital to see the newborns, and friends often stood on packing crates outside the maternity ward’s window for a peek and a chat. So many people wanted to see the boss’s baby daughter that the hospital staff was finally forced to hang a hand-lettered sign that read OPPENHEIMER over her crib, and visitors’ hours were suspended to make way for the steady stream of well-wishers who filed by for days. Undeterred by the bad weather, Dorothy drove up with chains on her tires just to see the new addition to Box 1663. “Little Toni,” as she was called, had been born into such great secrecy that when Dorothy filled out her birth certificate, she could only list the benign rural post office box in Sandoval County as the home address. She brought Kevin with her; and as it had been his birthday the day before, she had arranged a special treat. Dorothy had worked out a deal with the sergeant who was the head of the post motor pool “to borrow” one of the heavy, four-wheel-drive army vehicles for the fifteen-year-old to take for a spin. “The snow must have been two feet deep,” recalled Kevin. “I remember driving up and down the main street, and I thought I had died and gone to heaven.”

  It was a madly busy holiday season. There was something in the air—no one was in the mood for quiet reflection. People threw themselves into the festivities with abandon, singing, drinking, and dancing until dawn. There were endless rounds of parties, and vats of heavily spiked eggnog were consumed. A group of families banded together and organized a big New Years Eve bash at Fuller Lodge, and at the stroke of midnight, they rang in 1945 with the old Ranch School bell used to call the boys to meals. It was such a memorable evening that they all agreed it should become a mesa tradition—that is, if they were all still captive there in twelve months’ time. Even as they joined hands and broke into a rousing rendition of “Auld Lang Syne,” they heard the quaintly nostalgic words as they never had before, and sang their hearts out, not knowing what the coming year would bring.

  FIFTEEN

  Playing with Fire

  THERE WERE MANY lighthearted moments that winter, but while relieving the boredom of people’s regimented lives, those good times did nothing to dispel the deepening chill that had settled over the community. The construction of the Trinity site had been completed, and as the laboratory moved into the final production and testing phase, a growing sense of foreboding tugged at everyone’s thoughts. In February, Groves swept in for a conference, and they came to the decision that the time had come to “freeze” the implosion program and focus their efforts on one of the several designs they had been considering. Oppenheimer had set July 20, 1945, as the target date for having both bombs ready. He drew up a schedule and methodically drove the divisions forward, checking off stages as they were completed. The men toiled at a frenzied pace to prepare for the test shot. Even at parties they never seemed to unwind, but gathered in tight knots and discussed complex equations in low, urgent voices.

  The fissionable materials—plutonium and uranium 235—were now coming off the production lines in large quantities, and the physicists were faced with the long, arduous task of converting them into metal, casting them, and finally delivering the explosive devices to be used in the bombs. At the Omega site, an operations lab set up in a canyon well removed from the crowded mesa, Don Kerst and Fermi had just about completed work on what was called the “Water Boiler,” code for a small nuclear reactor, and were ready to begin preliminary tests to measure the critical mass of the uranium 235 bomb. As the critical assembly tests progressed, Fermi grew increasingly nervous and kept finding excuses to take his crew on long hikes in the mountains.

  All of the work at the Omega site focused on preparing experiments that could help reveal the performance of the bomb. But as Segrè recalled, a nuclear explosion was such a completely new and complex event—with mechanical, thermal, optical, chemical, and nuclear aspects—that in some cases they did not even know the order of magnitude of the quantities to be measured, and consequently needed equipment that could cover a vast range. The physicists were dealing with a host of unknowns, under extremely unusual conditions, and, as Segrè noted, this “worried everyone”:

  There was obvious
ly plenty to measure; the energy released was the overall central parameter, which could be inferred in many different, independent ways. Each measurement had its particular difficulties, but one was common to all of them: the experiment could not be repeated. If something failed, there was no second chance.

  During this period, Otto Frisch proposed an extremely bold experiment that would simulate bomb conditions and go, as he put it, “as near as we could possibly go towards starting an atomic explosion without actually being blown up,” a risky procedure that Feynman likened, with false levity, to “tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon.” Nonetheless, Frisch managed to convince Oppenheimer and the senior physicists that with the proper precautions, the “Dragon Experiment” could be conducted with complete safety.

  Once his experiment was given the green light, the experimental setup was completed in a few weeks, with Frisch as group leader. His idea consisted of using some of the U-235 to assemble an explosive device, but leaving a sizable hole, so that when the missing core of enriched uranium hydride was dropped into the ring, it would cause the material to go supercritical for a fraction of a second. The core would immediately be pulled back and could subsequently be reinserted to enable more measurements. This would allow them, through repeated efforts, to learn exactly how much uranium would be needed for Little Boy.