109 East Palace

by Jennet Conant

  Dorothy, Oppenheimer, and Victor Weisskopf at a party in Los Alamos, circa 1944.

  Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty, enjoyed the perks of being the “First Lady” of Los Alamos, but she was moody and withdrawn and did not participate in the mesa’s active social life.

  George Kistiakowsky (below) and Enrico Fermi (left), both initially consultants at Los Alamos, were persuaded to move to the Hill during the project’s second year and helped with the big push to perfect the implosion bomb.

  (Right) Frank Oppenheimer, a physicist and Robert’s brother, came to Los Alamos in 1945 and worked at the Trinity site.

  Top scientific advisors Vannevar Bush (above, far left) and James B. Conant (above, center), touring one of the Manhattan Project sites with Groves.

  The scientists’ wives waged their own battles with Groves, demanding that something be done about the old-fashioned post laundry which had hand-operated mangles (above) and the chronic shortage of milk and eggs in the commissary (right).

  Scientists and soldiers lined up to buy newspapers, magazines, and cigarettes at the PX (below) but because of wartime shortages and uncertain deliveries, often had to do without.

  The pressure to build the bomb worked on everyone’s nerves, and drinking and dancing were popular ways to let off steam. A fair amount of carousing went on at the PX (above), which had a jukebox and a dance floor.

  Impromptu office parties like this SED bash in the electronics division were often fueled by Tech Area 200-proof liquor.

  Oppenheimer mandated that Sundays were a day of rest, and the scientists streamed down to the meadows for picnics. Dorothy McKibbin (left), taking a well-deserved nap. Robert Serber (below), one of Oppie’s protégés, tried to plant rumors that Los Alamos was really a rocket factory.

  Serber’s wife, Charlotte (above), was one of a handful of strong women Oppie counted on to help with the smooth operation of the laboratory, along with his assistant, Priscilla Greene (right), shown with Truchas, the English bulldog that Dorothy found for her.

  Hiking was a popular pastime. After Dorothy took over the old Frijoles Canyon Lodge at Bandelier National Monument and turned it into a weekend retreat, the scientists and their families flocked to the picturesque spot to escape the drab confines of their mountain hideout. Dorothy recalled that “some rode their horses over, some came to fish, and most came to eat because the food was excellent.”

  Shirley Barnett, one of Oppie’s assistants, and her husband, Henry, Los Alamos’s much in demand pediatrician. He had his hands full coping with the exploding birth rate at the laboratory.

  Skiing was an obsession with some of the more intrepid scientists, including Enrico Fermi (above, far left) and Hans Bethe (above, second from left), who were undaunted by the steep slopes around Los Alamos. Niels Bohr (left) put younger men to shame on Sawyer’s Hill.

  Oppenheimer (left) and Captain Peer de Silva, head of security at Los Alamos, scouting in spring 1944 for what became known as Trinity site, where the atomic bomb was to be first tested. Six months earlier, de Silva had sent Groves a memo saying he suspected Oppenheimer of playing a key part in attempts to pass “highly secret information” to the Soviet Union.

  (Above) The huge orange fireball and mushroom cloud of the Trinity test on July 16,1945. When Conant first saw the burst of white light, he thought the world was coming to an end.

  (Right) Oppenheimer and Groves next to the charred remains of the steel tower at ground zero.

  (Above) At the war’s end, Oppenheimer received the Army/Navy E Award (for excellence) on behalf of the laboratory.

  Edward Teller congratulated Oppenheimer on receiving the Fermi Award on December 2, 1963. The long overdue recognition marked Oppenheimer’s return from disgrace, but many of those present felt that Teller should not have attended the ceremony after he had questioned whether Oppie could be trusted with the nation’s atomic secrets during the Gray Board hearings.

  Dorothy continued to run her small outpost at 109 East Palace and to serve as “the gatekeeper” to Los Alamos until 1963. When she retired after twenty years, the office was closed. On the wall behind her are pictures of two of her heroes, I. I. Rabi (left) and Jim Conant (right). Time did not diminish her feelings for Oppie, and she remained his most devoted friend and ally to the end.

  A battered hero: After the Gray Board found him to be a security risk and stripped him of his clearance, Oppenheimer was humbled but not destroyed. He continued to teach and write and remained a dignified if poignant figure.

  No relation to the physicist Joseph McKibben who worked at Los Alamos.

  Two members—Fermi and Rabi—agreed, but made their renunciation of the hydrogen bomb conditional on the Soviets’ agreement to do the same. Glenn Seaborg, who did not attend, sent a letter that indicated that he was undecided.

  Neither Dorothy nor Oppie make any mention of the Serbers visit that summer. It may have been that because of Charlotte’s own Communist ties—both her brother and father were identified by the FBI as party members—Oppenheimer decided to omit any mention of them.

  For Army, most services free. For civilians, may be included in rent to make $150/mo. subsistence. Not yet decided.

  Chevalier was dismissed from his teaching post and left Berkeley. Years later, he maintained he was just trying to warn Oppenheimer about Eltenton, and never understood why Oppie turned the incident into such a “fantastic lie.”

  Oppenheimer’s letter states the incident took place “very shortly before the test,” but several other sources indicate it was at least several months prior to Trinity.

  The question of how heavy the sacrifice would be remains murky: Secretary of War Stimson asserted the November invasion would cost between a half million and a million Allied casualties, and at least as many Japanese lives. Army Chief of Staff Marshall reportedly put the figure closer to forty thousand. After the war, these casualty estimates became controversial and subject to a great deal of second guessing. Stimson was accused of inflating the figures by those who believed there was already ample evidence Japan had been pushed to the brink and could have been made to surrender without the bomb.

  The Alamogordo press release, the first of many that would be necessary, was prepared with the help of the New York Times’s science reporter Bill Laurence, to give it, in Groves’ words, “a more objective touch.” The Office of Censorship saw to it that no news of the explosion made it into any Eastern newspaper, except a few lines in one Washington paper. On the Pacific Coast, however, it got picked up by radio and got a lot of play.

  The death toll steadily went up as more information was available and as fatalities due to injuries and radiation exposure accumulated: the total number of deaths was closer to 140,000, with the five-year total estimated to reach 200,000.

  In a bizarre twist, Slotin was involved in a similar accident on the same day one year later. In October 1946, he was showing a group of physicists a plutonium assembly at Los Alamos and was using a screwdriver to lower one of the hemispheres of beryllium on the core when the tool slipped, the pieces came into contact, and the assembly went critical. Five others in the room were irradiated, but only Slotin, who was closest, died.

  ALAS later merged with similar groups to become the Federation of American Scientists.