109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  Everything went as planned. “When the core was dropped through the hole,” recalled Frisch, “we got a large burst of neutrons and a temperature rise of several degrees in that very short split second during which the chain reaction proceeded as a sort of stifled explosion.” There was always the danger of a runaway reaction. They were all aware that the assembly could become critical in no time, and that even a minor mistake could result in death. They devised a reliable system of safety checks and made a strict rule that no one could work alone, so that someone would always be monitoring the equipment and careless accidents could be avoided.

  Despite all his precautions, however, Frisch nearly made a fatal mistake while working on an unusual assembly he dubbed “Lady Godiva.” He and his assistant were standing by the neutron-counting equipment when they both saw the red signal lamps start blinking faster and faster. His assistant, a young graduate student, panicked and pulled the plug on the meter. Frisch yelled out, “Do put the meter back, I am about to go critical.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the signal lamps had stopped flickering and were now glowing red. Thinking quickly, he removed some of the blocks of uranium compound he had just added and the lights began flickering again as the meter slowed. “It was clear to me what had happened,” he recalled. “By leaning forward I had reflected some neutrons back into Lady Godiva and thus caused her to become critical.” He had not felt anything, but after carefully completing the experiment, he checked the radioactivity counter and found that he had received a rather large dose, though within the lab’s permissible parameters. Had he hesitated for even two seconds before removing the fissionable material, the dose would have been lethal.

  Even after his close call, Frisch continued to work with critical masses, maintaining that the danger was largely psychological: “Assembling a mass of uranium-235 was something we completely understood, and as long as we hadn’t reached the critical amount—when the chain reaction began to grow spontaneously—the assembly was completely harmless.” Overeagerness and haste were the real threats, and a bright young physicist who pushed too hard for results would pay the price. They were all working under enormous pressure. The uranium had to be returned shortly to be turned into metal and assembled into a real atom bomb, so they worked at a frantic pace to complete their experiments, putting in seventeen-hour days and snatching a few hours sleep from dawn till mid-morning.

  Progress was being made in other areas. James Conant visited Los Alamos again to obtain a firsthand report on the “Christy bomb,” project slang for the ingenious proposal made by Bob Christy, one of Oppie’s former students, to simplify the design of the plutonium bomb. His modification promised to save the physicists an enormous amount of work. After the meeting, Oppenheimer and the others left, leaving only Conant and Teller in the room, sitting together in contemplative silence for a few moments. Then Conant muttered, more to himself than anyone else, “This is the first time I really thought it would work.” Teller stared at him. “That was the first indication I had of how little confidence those in the highest scientific quarters had in our work,” he recalled. “I was slightly shocked.”

  There were still too many unknowns and uncertainties, and Oppenheimer decided they needed to have some sort of dry run. They had to have at least a working idea of the conditions they could expect at ground zero, to check their equipment and correct for any weaknesses in their plans. The idea was to explode one hundred tons of conventional explosives at the Trinity site and then perform all the same measurements they would later make on the atomic bomb. Although TNT could only approximate the atom bomb’s effect—for example, it did not emit neutrons or gamma rays—it would at least give them a chance to study the blast effects of a huge explosion and begin to calibrate their instruments for the final shot. This was the best they could do without wasting any of their valuable nuclear explosives.

  Bainbridge was asked to hastily organize the dress rehearsal. By March, Project Trinity was formalized, and Oppenheimer tapped Bainbridge, a three-year veteran of the MIT Rad Lab, to be director of the test program. Oppie appointed Johnny Williams as deputy director to help oversee the construction crews and make sure the scientific facilities and shelters conformed to the project’s needs and were completed on time. Dozens of physicists were called away from their divisions and assigned to work on experiments designed to obtain measurements on the blast, heat, and radiation effects of a nuclear explosion. He formed the Cowpuncher Committee to “ride herd” on the implosion program and make sure they met their deadline. As Bainbridge observed, “The great push to solve the problems of the implosion method had meant that only a small amount of staff time, shop time, and money could be spent in preparation for a test.” Every decision they made had to be considered on the basis of the time scale for completion. There would be no delay of the implosion test.

  As the secrecy intensified, the already high-strung character of the mesa altered perceptibly. The military personnel, feeling more useless and beside the point than ever, were increasingly irritable and impatient. The scientists, dashing between the mesa and the remote test site, were harassed and exhausted. Wives who had been close friends became guarded about their husbands’ new responsibilities and whereabouts, and no longer felt free to confide their mutual worries. For the first time since they had arrived at Los Alamos, the wives could not rely on one another to help defuse the tension, and their fears and anxieties hung heavily in the air. “The wives couldn’t talk to each other,” said Dorothy, who had by then gleaned the purpose of “the gadget,” but was in no position to enlighten anyone else. “Each didn’t know how much the other knew about what their husbands were doing.”

  The laboratory work continued around the clock, and the men pulled double shifts and returned to their experiments at all hours. The lights burned in the Tech Area all night, and the intermittent power outages that had plagued the community from the beginning became more frequent, the lights often blinking off and on during the busy dinnertime hours. A supplementary power line was run from the post to Albuquerque to help alleviate the problem. Ironically, it resulted in one of the worst security breaches by inadvertently carrying back Los Alamos’s closed-circuit radio broadcast to civilization. Dorothy, who often brought morsels of news from town, reported that several friends from Albuquerque who had been visiting her were “simply agog” at what they were picking up on this mysterious station. “They can’t imagine where the broadcasts come from or why none of the entertainers have last names,” Dorothy told them. “Children’s stories are read by Betty, newscasts compiled by Bob, and Mozart’s piano Sonatas played by Otto have them guessing.”

  They all laughed because it was too serious not to. “We laughed all the time, and at everything, or else we would have lost our minds,” said Marguerite Schreiber, who was married to the physicist Raemer Schreiber, “because really, the atmosphere was icy. There was very little conversation between husbands and wives. It was a very cold, lonely and difficult time. We simply put one foot in front of the other, minded our p’s and q’s, and tried to get through it. We didn’t look ahead because we didn’t know how long it would last.” Marge Bradner never asked her husband what was going on, even when he went off to the distant operation sites for days at a time. “I had no idea what my husband was doing,” she said. “I didn’t know, and I didn’t speculate because I didn’t want to know.”

  Even for those who knew about the “gadget,” there were still too many unknowns not to lie in bed awake worrying into the night. Would the bomb work? Would it blow apart New Mexico and them with it? Or the world? Would it finally end the war? Would everything be all right? For many of the refugee scientists, who had already been through terrible times, the future was fraught with terrifying questions that haunted their sleep. What had happened to their families? Would they be able to find them after the war? Where would they go? When they left Los Alamos, they would be without savings, homes, jobs, or even countries to call their own anymore. Many of them ha
d left everything behind when they fled Europe, and they knew it was doubtful that their property or possessions could be reclaimed. When one distraught wife discovered she was pregnant and told her husband, after a long, anguished discussion, they decided they could not afford a baby at that time. Moreover, they did not see how they could bring a child into such an uncertain world. The unhappy woman went to Dorothy with their problem. Dorothy did not presume to judge them, nor did she try to convince the woman to change her mind. She simply promised to help. After making discreet inquiries in town, she located a reputable woman doctor in Santa Fe, who in turn provided the name of another physician in the neighboring town of Espanola who was not frequented by the scientific community. The clandestine arrangements were necessary not simply because of the desire to avoid scandal, but because abortions were illegal at the time.

  The mounting tension manifested itself in different ways all over town and exacerbated some long-standing problems on the overcrowded mesa. The spread of Quonset huts and trailers had grown to slumlike proportions, and the sanitary conditions were beyond belief. A group of Hill wives made a study of the Spanish American quarter and reported to the army administration that the lack of latrines and adequate facilities could lead to the spread of disease. A new influx of rowdy machinists was also creating havoc. Rumor had it they had been offered inducement wages to leave their families and work on the isolated site, but Dorothy, relaying complaints from local Santa Feans, was concerned that their hell-raising behavior was “giving the Hill a terrible reputation.” For certain, it was keeping security busy both on the post and in town.

  Groves had brought in yet another new commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Gerald Tyler, to try to get a grip on the situation before it spiraled out of control. Tyler, much to everyone’s amazement, took it upon himself to actually try to improve the quality of life on the mesa for both the civilians and the troops. He risked the generals wrath by asking the higher authorities in Washington for more money and oversaw the construction of a new cafeteria, additional barracks for the WACs, and a recreation hall for the soldiers. The food at the new cafeteria was positively gourmet compared to the mystery meat and gray vegetables that congealed on their trays in the mess hall, and even the most work-obsessed physicists began turning up for steak night once a week.

  To everyone’s relief, the army finally modified the regulations restricting their movements. By late 1944, even their hard-driving general recognized that the isolation and stress were becoming too much for the mesa’s inhabitants. They were jumpy and restless. The scientists and their families had been cooped up for too long and were badly in need of a break, and Groves determined that “the improvement in morale would outweigh the increased security risks.” Short, one-week vacations were encouraged, as long as the usual precautions were observed. The men needed to get away from the constant pressure of hurrying to finish the bomb, hurrying to end the horror and killing once and for all. They bottled it all up inside, recalled Elsie McMillan, and going to a party or two or taking a Sunday off was not enough. “We were tired,” she wrote. “We were deathly tired. We had parties, yes, once in a while, and I’ve never drunk so much as there at the few parties, because you had to let off steam, you had to let off this feeling eating your soul, oh God are we doing right?”

  Some couples took advantage of the new rules to take a winter sojourn to Denver or Colorado Springs, while others made a quick trip home to see ailing parents who were full of questions and recriminations and could not understand why visits had been barred for so long. Oppenheimer was far too busy to get away, but Kitty began escaping the confines of the post as often as possible. “She would go off on a shopping trip for days to Albuquerque or even to the West Coast and leave the children in the hands of a maid,” recalled Jackie Oppenheimer, who had recently moved to the Hill with Frank, who had been working at the Oak Ridge plant before Groves transferred him to Los Alamos. Assigned to Bainbridges safety crew, Frank was often away at the Trinity site, and the two sisters-in-law were thrown together. The close proximity did not improve their relationship, however, and Jackie was appalled by Kitty’s behavior:

  When we went up to Los Alamos, Kitty made a dead set at me. It was known that we didn’t get on together and she seemed determined that we should be seen together. On one occasion she asked me to cocktails—this was four o’clock in the afternoon. When I arrived, there was Kitty and just four or five other women—drinking companions—and we just sat there with very little conversation—drinking. It was awful and I never went again.

  Many of the young Hill wives found Kitty disconcerting and kept their distance. She in turn avoided most of their clubs and societies. Kitty had “no friends at Los Alamos,” according to Priscilla Greene, and the few she did have were generally men. She was increasingly rude and impossible, and the mesa buzzed with stories about her erratic behavior. “She was really rotten to Jackie,” said Shirley Barnett. “She made a point of it, and it did not go unnoticed.”

  Kitty had brought her own troubles to the mesa, and she reacted to the stress of that bleak winter by becoming even more melancholy and withdrawn. Barnett, who sometimes went to visit, remembered thinking the atmosphere of the bungalow was infused with gloom. After the birth of her second child, Kitty seemed to go into a depression, often going days without leaving the house. “She was often ill, and took various drugs to quiet her nerves,” recalled Barnett, who spent many hours listening to her while she chain-smoked cigarettes. “She spent a lot of afternoons [lying] on the couch with the curtains closed, ‘suffering from the vapors,’ Really, I think it was nothing more than she had overindulged. I don’t know what Oppie thought. He wasn’t in great shape himself at that point, and he had so much to do he couldn’t fret too much about it.”

  It is not clear why Oppie wanted Frank and Jackie at Los Alamos, except perhaps that having his brother by his side was a comfort. They were close, and Frank was someone he could talk to and consult about things that were weighing on his mind. For Frank, however, being at Los Alamos was fraught with problems. For one thing, he was painfully aware of how wretched Kitty was to his wife. While he himself was warmly received on the Hill, people were forever commenting on his striking resemblance to his older brother and their shared mannerisms—they could often be seen in the Tech Area talking and walking in circles, and rubbing their palms together in identical fashion—and the comparisons could be trying. Frank tried to fit in, but he was a late arrival in the mesa’s tribal society. “I think it wasn’t easy being Oppie’s little brother at Los Alamos,” observed Barnett. “He had chosen to follow in his footsteps, but he ended up being so overshadowed. I think Frank had a hard time dealing with the fact that his brother had become such an important man.”

  Groves had repeatedly brought Frank to Los Alamos in hopes that he would have a soothing effect on Oppenheimer, who, as usual, looked at death’s door. Oppie was sleeping only a few hours a night, his weight had dropped to 114 pounds, and he appeared to be living on nervous energy. Groves was genuinely concerned that his poor body might not be able to take much more abuse and wanted to surround him with people who would help sustain him during the nerve-wracking run-up to the test. “Frank turned into one of the prime worriers of all time, that was how he tried to keep Robert well,” recalled Rabi, then director of the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, whom Groves brought in a few weeks later for much the same reason. “As for me, I was invited just because Robert liked me. He’d asked me to join his project as experimental physics director and I’d refused because of my radar work. Now he was under tremendous strain and I was supposed to watch him and look after him.”

  Dorothy saw little of Oppenheimer during that period. He was always on the move, running back and forth between the Tech Area and the top-secret desert location to the south. But she was always available at a moment’s notice if he needed her. When a bad case of chicken pox confined him to his bed, she fussed over him as she would over a sick child, berating his staff
and shooing people out of the room so he could get some rest. “She was absolutely devoted to him,” said Barnett. “She was someone he could talk to, someone he knew he could trust.” For Oppenheimer, her warm embrace must have been wonderfully reassuring in an agonizing time. “She loved him,” said Marge Schreiber. “She tried to take care of him. She mothered him, and he needed it, God knows. He was carrying such an awful burden. He needed all the help he could get, and she was there, and she was up to it.”

  To complicate matters, his faithful assistant, Priscilla Greene, was getting bigger and bigger by the week and wanted to stop working. Oppenheimer kept putting her off. No matter how many people she suggested as her replacement, he found a reason to disqualify them. But the office was busier than ever with the test preparations, and neither Shirley nor Dorothy could cope with all the responsibility. Finding Oppie a new secretary became so imperative even Groves got involved. He trolled the War Department for names and came back with a list of suitable candidates, all of whom Oppie vetoed. Exasperated, Groves demanded, “Do you have ideas?” Oppenheimer replied, “Yes. I’d like to have Anne Wilson come here,” referring to the lively, doe-eyed admirals daughter who was a member of the generals small staff. Surprised, Groves called Wilson into his office and asked her if she wanted to go. When she immediately replied, “Yes,” he sighed and said, “You deserve each other.”

  Before Wilson left for Los Alamos, they had a little send-off for her at the War Department office, complete with a cake in honor of her twenty-first birthday. Everyone gave her packs of cigarettes as gifts because they were so hard to come by. At one point, Groves took her aside and warned her that the scientists on the Hill might not welcome her with open arms. “They’ll just think I’m sending in one of my spies,” he told her, and then he proceeded to make it clear that nothing could be further from the case. By choosing the Los Alamos assignment she needed to understand that this part of her life was over and she was starting something completely new.