109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  Not everyone in the War Department wanted her to make such a clean break. On one of her last days at work, John Lansdale sauntered over and asked casually, “How would you like to make an extra $100 a week?” When she asked what she would have to do for that kind of money, he replied, “Just send me a little three-page report once in a while and tell me how they are doing.” Wilson was flabbergasted. “I was really outraged,” she said. “I told him I couldn’t believe he thought I would do such a thing.” She understood perfectly that he was attempting to enlist her to spy on one of their own. The more she thought about it, the angrier she got. She had listened in on and transcribed hundreds of the general’s telephone conversations with Oppenheimer and the other Manhattan Project leaders, and he had never once expressed disapproval of Los Alamos’s director. “Groves always trusted Oppenheimer,” she said. “He had picked him and he didn’t second guess himself. He couldn’t. There he was all by himself, running this huge project. He had complete confidence in himself and his judgment—otherwise he couldn’t have done what he did.”

  When Wilson arrived at 109 East Palace, it was still very cold, and as she headed up the steep, winding road to the laboratory, it started to snow. As soon as she arrived, she was told at the gate to go straight to Oppenheimer’s house on Bathtub Row, as he had organized a party so she could meet everybody. When Oppie opened the door, she was shocked at his appearance. He was still recovering from the chicken pox, and a week’s growth of dark beard covered a mottled red face that was still too tender to shave. He had suffered from fevers of 104 degrees and looked emaciated. She remembered thinking, he was the skinniest man she had ever seen in her life and she wondered how he managed to keep chain-smoking cigarettes in his condition.

  Oppenheimer made her one of his famous martinis and introduced her around. Before she knew it, the room was spinning. “Nobody told me you could not drink at that altitude, so I had two martinis, and the second one just plowed me under,” she said. “I wondered why Robert kept pressing little snacks on me during the party. Everybody up there knew exactly what was going to happen. I think they enjoyed doing that to newcomers. It was very embarrassing, and Robert had to walk me back to my room in the nurse’s quarters.” A few weeks later, Kitty stopped in to see Wilson at the office and asked how she was settling in. Then Kitty let her have it. “She gave me a little chat to the effect of ‘Lay off,” said Wilson. “I was really astounded. I was still quite innocent, and though I thought Robert was marvelous, I had never thought about him that way.”

  Week swiftly followed week, and there was an inescapable sense that they were hurtling to the finish line. The Big Three—FDR, Churchill, and Stalin—met at Yalta in February 1945 and plotted the fate of postwar Europe following the inevitable German surrender. But the fighting in the Pacific was bloody as Allied forces slugged their way through the heavily fortified islands and atolls, and a land invasion of Japan loomed as an awful prospect, particularly for those with family members in uniform. The amphibious assault on Iwo Jima had resulted in one of the worst battles of the war. By the time the eight-square-mile volcanic island was secured in mid-March, 6,821 Americans had been killed and another 20,000 wounded. The battle for Okinawa was even worse. Victory came at a terrible price, with nearly 50,000 casualties and as many as 12,000 dead. The fact that more than 110,000 Japanese had died trying to prevent the island’s capture was an ominous sign of how fiercely the Japanese would fight to defend their mainland.

  With the approach of spring came the howling dry winds and drought, and the fear of what a fire could do to their tinderbox of a town. Their uncontrollable furnaces kept their flimsy houses heated between 90 to 100 degrees no matter what they did, and everyone’s backyard looked like a coal bin. Explosions from the canyons below shook the mesa several times a day, each blast rattling windows and knocking paintings off the walls. At those times, the sweet scent of pine, which permeated the mesa, mingled with the acrid smell of explosives, serving as a constant reminder of the laboratory’s deadly purpose. Everyone was on the alert for a sudden blaze. Every time the siren wailed—and it wailed repeatedly that spring—people stopped in their tracks, paralyzed by fear. The extreme cold and occasional flurries did nothing for the water table, and there were rumors the community might run out of water. The dire warnings in the Bulletin returned, ordering people to conserve in order to avoid “drastic restrictions” and reminding them over and over again to carefully extinguish cigarettes, cigars, pipe ashes, and, most of all, campfires. “Fighting fires is dangerous work and requires manpower greatly needed for important Project work,” the paper chided.

  Then one evening their worst fears were realized. The siren howled, bringing them all running from their dinner tables. Eleanor Jette remembered looking out the window and seeing “the orange glow of flames reflected in the night sky”:

  C-Shop, our main machine shop, was ablaze. It was just inside the Tech Area fence. Frantic MPs struggled to keep the fence and road clear of the townspeople and their children. The buildings inside the Tech Area had brick firewalls. The fire escape from the administration building opened onto its firewall and overlooked the C-Shop. The Commanding Officer, the Director of the Laboratory, the Tech Board and its alternates, which included Eric [Jette], watched the fire fighters from the fire escape. The flickering light of the flames illuminated their grim, set faces. The faces reflected fear for the work program and concern lest the fire spread and wipe out the entire town.

  White-faced, the onlookers watched as the firefighters finally doused the flames, using vast quantities of their dwindling water. By the time the shop was reduced to smoldering ruins, there was only an hour’s supply of water left in the storage reservoir. Someone in the crowd asked if it was sabotage. Another worried out loud what would have happened if it had been the D building, which was already “hot” from all the radiation. No one answered. It terrified them to think how much damage could have been done and how many months it could have delayed their work—delayed the end of the war. They were playing with fire, literally and figuratively, and the dangers were too great to contemplate.

  When the announcement crackled over the Tech Area loudspeaker that President Roosevelt had died suddenly on April 12, the scientists rushed into the hallways. The news, Serber recalled, struck them “like a blow.” Grief and shock drained the color from their faces. Everything seemed lost. Oppenheimer emerged from his office and spoke briefly to those assembled on the steps outside, his rousing, impromptu tribute rallying those bordering on despair. Word reached Dorothy later that day. She was on the Hill, caring for Kevin, who was in the post hospital with pneumonia. When she sunk heavily down on the bed to tell him the news, there were tears in her eyes.

  Oppenheimer organized a memorial service for the following Sunday, and everyone went, crowding into the cold theater. A night’s worth of snow had hushed the normally busy mesa and veiled the town in white. “It was no costume for mourning,” Phil Morrison recalled, “but it seemed recognition of something we needed, a gesture of consolation.” Oppie stood before the lowered American flag, looking pale and gaunt, and strangely naked without his beloved hat. Aware as always of the community’s precarious morale, he spoke movingly and eloquently of their fallen leader in a voice so low many found themselves standing on their toes, straining to catch every word:

  When, three days ago, the world had word of the death of President Roosevelt, many wept who are unaccustomed to tears, many men and women, little enough accustomed to prayer, prayed to God. Many of us looked with deep trouble to the future; many of us felt less certain that our works would be to a good end; all of us were reminded of how precious a thing human greatness is.

  We have been living through years of great evil, and of great terror. Roosevelt has been our President, our Commander-in-Chief and, in an old and unperverted sense, our leader. All over the world men have looked to him for guidance, and have seen symbolized in him their hope that the evils of this time would not be repea
ted; that the terrible sacrifices which have been made, and those that still have to be made, would lead to a world more fit for human habitation. It is in such times of evil that men recognize their helplessness and their profound dependence. One is reminded of medieval days, when the death of a good and wise and just king plunged his country into despair, and mourning.

  In the Hindu scripture, in the Bhagavad Gita, it says, “Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.” The faith of Roosevelt is one that is shared by millions of men and women in every country of the world. For this reason it is possible to maintain the hope, for this reason it is right that we should dedicate ourselves to the hope, that his good works will not have ended with his death.

  Afterward, the scientists and their families stood there bowed and silent, too saddened to speak. It was a terrible loss, and a very personal one, for they had thought of themselves as working directly for the president and had pinned their hopes on him. Los Alamos had been Roosevelt’s clandestine project, and his successor, Harry S. Truman, knew nothing of the bomb—or of their existence. It was terrifying to think that the government’s new leader, a man about whom they knew so little, was only then being informed of the massive Manhattan Project, their secret city in the wilds of New Mexico, and the $2 billion that had been wagered on the development of an experimental new weapon without the consent of Congress, or the American people. High on their mountaintop, they felt more alone than ever.

  SIXTEEN

  A Dirty Trick

  ON MAY 2, 1945, barely three weeks after FDR’s death, Berlin surrendered. On May 4, Oppenheimer circulated a memo from Washington. The War Department sent its congratulations to the scientists, but cautioned them against thinking that this development meant their services were no longer required. There would be no break in the all-out drive to complete the bomb.

  RESTRICTED

  May 4, 1945

  FROM: J. R. Oppenheimer

  TO: All Project Employees

  The following message is from the Honorable Robert P. Patterson, Under Secretary of War, to all project employees:

  “I want to congratulate you on the vital war contribution you have made in developing this project. I thank you on behalf of the Army for the great work you have done here and the sacrifices many of you have made in coming to work here.

  “The work you are doing is of tremendous importance and must go forward with all possible speed. At the same time, it must be kept secret from the enemy.

  “The army cannot give you and your work the public recognition it deserves. Nevertheless, I want to tell you of the importance of the work, and that is why I am giving you this message.

  “The importance of this project will not pass away with the collapse of Germany. We still have the war against Japan to win. The work you are doing must continue without interruption or delay, and it must continue to be a secret.

  “We still have a hard task ahead. Every worker employed on this project is needed! Every man-hour of work will help smash Japan and bring our fighting boys home.

  “You know the kind of war we are up against in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor—Bataan—Corregidor—Tarawa—Iwo Jima—and other bloody battles will never be forgotten.

  “We have begun to repay the Japanese for their brutalities and their mass murders of helpless civilians and prisoners of war. We will not quit until they are completely crushed. You have an important part to play in their defeat. [There] must not be a let-up!”

  RESTRICTED

  May 8 was V-E Day, but after so many tumultuous months it was something of a letdown at Los Alamos. In Italy, Mussolini had been shot and his body brought to Milan for public display. He was strung up in the main square in the same place where partisan bodies had been left as a warning to members of the resistance in 1944. Thousands crowded around to spit on and kick his corpse. The Los Alamos inhabitants read of Hitler’s suicide in an underground bunker, and of Germany’s surrender, while still working doggedly to set up the preliminary shot in the desert. In the days that followed, the papers were full of monstrous accounts of Hitler’s butchery and of the six million Jewish men, women, and children who were systematically hunted down, murdered, gassed, tortured, and condemned to concentration camps as he tried to fulfill his twin ambitions: the establishment of a “master race” and the total domination of Europe. Safe in their sky-high fortress, the scientists could not help the sick feeling that they were too late. They had all been told, had absolutely believed, the atomic bomb would be needed to bring the Nazis to their knees. But that had happened without them. “For me, Hitler was the personification of evil and the primary justification for the atomic bomb work,” recalled Segrè. “Now that the bomb could not be used against the Nazis, doubts arose. Those doubts, even if they do not appear in official reports, were discussed in many private conversations.”

  It was a dirty trick of war that the end of the fighting in Europe in no way slowed the pace of the work on the Hill, which had taken on a momentum of its own and was nearing its climax. The atomic bomb, once a hypothetical, had become a necessity, and all indications were that Japan was now the inevitable target. Events were moving so quickly that the scientists were powerless to turn back. Most of them alternated between feeling elated and deeply apprehensive. They could not keep their thoughts from turning to the life and work they had left behind, and all the family and friends that awaited them outside the wire in civilized society. At the same time, their relief that the war was coming to a close was tempered by the alarming estimates of casualties that would be incurred in the coming invasion of Japan. The worst was far from over in the Pacific, and the radio broadcast dire predictions of what lay in store in the island battles for the Philippines and Okinawa. They could not share their doubts and misgivings with their wives, but the scientists realized with growing certainty that before they were released from their semicaptivity on the mesa, the terrifyingly powerful weapon they had been working on for the past two years would be unleashed on the world.

  Ironically, the full-dress rehearsal shot at Trinity, which had been planned for May 5, took place on May 7, 1945, the last day of the European war. Hundreds of crates containing TNT were gingerly stacked on the platform of a twenty-foot wooden tower. Kistiakowsky had procured the special, fast-acting explosives, and had had the foresight to have them packaged so they could withstand considerable manhandling. This proved fortuitous when several crates fell off one of the panel trucks transporting them from the depot and several others were knocked off the elevator while being loaded onto the platform. To simulate as closely as possible the radioactive effects of the implosion bomb, 1,000 tubes of dissolved reactor fuel from Hanford were interspersed in the stack of crates. When detonated, the 100 tons of TNT produced an orange fireball that could be seen for sixty miles. The physicists, who watched the dawn sky light up from 10,000 yards away from ground zero, took grim satisfaction in the success of their experiment. Their optical cameras and acoustical gauges had duly recorded one of the largest explosions in history. But the celebration at base camp that night was muted. They knew the blast they had just witnessed would be dwarfed by what was to come.

  After the preliminary test, a new urgency took hold. The run-through had revealed many shortcomings in their equipment and turned up flaws in the test operations and organization of the test site. Trinity base camp, rushed into construction during the winter of 1944, had become a satellite city to Los Alamos, complete with scientific buildings, barracks, and an elaborate communications system requiring hundreds of miles of wire running along an extensive network of new roads. But the hasty construction showed, and the large group of physicists who had packed into GI sedans for the field test returned to Los Alamos full of complaints. The test site was understaffed, the shelters were dodgy, and the existing communications were woefully inadequate and had broken down repeatedly. Even worse was the state of the roads. The crumbling surface was so slippery that their vehicles careened all over and constan
tly got mired in pits of sand. The clouds of dust got into everything, and some of the physicists worried their delicate equipment would never survive the jarring 230-mile journey.

  The living conditions at the base camp were almost intolerable. The desert was broiling hot, with temperatures reaching above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and even though they stripped down to shorts and shoes, they had to retreat from the brutal midday sun. The hard water and alkaline dust clogged their nostrils and lungs, and dehydration and dysentery were rampant. Work began at 6:00 A.M. and often continued after dinner and well into the night, when it was cooler. Days that stretched for ten to eighteen hours were not unusual, but bone tired as they were, when they finally collapsed in their bunks, it was hard to sleep, especially when bedrolls had to be carefully combed for tarantulas and scorpions before being used. It did not help that on two separate nights B-29s from the Alamogordo Air Base mistakenly took their camp as a lighted target for their night exercises and nearly obliterated the site. The airmen apparently needed the practice because their one-hundred-pound bombs, carrying five-pound black powder flash units, fell wide, and all they succeeded in blowing up was the Trinity carpentry shop and stables. The barracks, where all the scientists and soldiers slept, survived unscathed. The truth was no one wanted to stay in the “dread Jornada” a moment longer than necessary.

  Despite the hardships, Oppenheimer kept the Trinity crew to a tight schedule, running them through drills designed to weed out as many technical problems as possible before the actual test. Groves approved the installation of additional phone lines and a public address system for the shelters, and agreed to blacktop twenty-five miles of road at a cost of $125,000. Laboratory personnel shuttled back and forth between Los Alamos and Trinity in buses and cars. Truckloads of equipment took off for the remote southern site, convoys of two to ten trucks departing every evening after dark to avoid detection and the broiling desert sun. An entire detachment of MPs was transferred from Los Alamos to Trinity to guard the base camp during the ongoing preparations. Top army officials came through for inspection tours. In late May, Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, deputy military commander of the Manhattan Project, and Richard Tolman, one of Groves’ chief scientific advisors, paid the test site a visit and, as Baindridge put it, treated him to “a friendly between-the-halves fight talk.” Their agenda, probably at Groves’ suggestion, was to see how much time Oppie was spending at Trinity and to see if his presence there could be curtailed. “Essentially, they ordered me to keep Robert Oppenheimer away from the tower and the bomb before the final test for his own safety, and not let him know I was trying to do it,” recalled Bainbridge. “No way! The bomb was Robert’s baby and he would and did follow every detail of its development.”