Doomsday Men

by P. D. Smith

  A month after being appointed director, Robert Oppenheimer had proposed a site for his new laboratory. He had spent time in New Mexico after returning from his trip to Europe in 1933, on which he visited the St Joachimsthal mines. Los Alamos was about thirty miles from Santa Fe. Oppenheimer loved the harsh landscape here, and with his brother owned a small ranch nearby, in the upper Pecos Valley. Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers had named the location Los Alamos after the poplar trees in the canyon. It was an ancient landscape of deep canyons and caves in which traces of the first inhabitants of the Americas could still be found. To the west of Los Alamos were the Jemez Mountains, while to the east lay the Sangre de Cristo range, whose Truchas Peaks rose to 13,800 feet. In the distance was the Valle Grande, the crater of what had once been the largest volcano on earth. It was a landscape that was familiar with awesome explosions.

  Oppenheimer and Groves personally inspected the site in November. The mesa, the flat high ground overlooking the canyon, was home to the Los Alamos Ranch School for boys. The students, who included William S. Burroughs and Gore Vidal, could (as William Laurence said) ‘do their algebra on horse-back’ if they were so inclined.14 The only access to the mesa was up a winding mountain road. Isolation was essential, said Groves, for reasons of safety (in case of unplanned explosions) and security. Eventually the top-secret research facility would be surrounded by armed guards, barbed-wire fences and dogs.

  ‘Nobody could think straight in a place like that,’ objected Szilard when the school was proposed as the home of the Manhattan Project. ‘Everybody who goes there will go crazy.’15 By 1945 there were 6,000 people living there. With just five bathtubs between them, Szilard would have hated it. Edward Teller arrived with the first of the scientists in late March 1943. The place was ‘both peculiar and outlandish’ he said, but it ‘became dear to many who lived there’.16

  In November 1942, two men appeared at the Los Alamos Ranch School. One of the former pupils, Stirling Colgate, recalled that ‘we were required to say our yes sirs to a Mr Jones, who was wearing a fedora, and to a Mr Smith, who was wearing a porkpie hat. The names were obviously pseudonyms.’

  Colgate was a keen student of physics and instantly recognized ‘Mr Jones’ as Ernest O. Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron. ‘Mr Smith’ was Robert Oppenheimer. The schoolboy had seen their photographs in his textbooks. ‘The discovery of fission had been big news,’ said Colgate:

  In fact, we were even aware of the idea of a chain reaction. Clearly, the school was about to be converted to a laboratory to work on a very secret physics project. Why else would top physicists be visiting a place out at the end of nowhere with no water, no roads, no facilities? What was really going on was obvious! We were secretly amused by the pretense.17

  Stirling Colgate later became a nuclear weapons physicist. His interest in physics may have been precocious, but the military applications of physics were widely discussed at the time. In 1939 the news of fission had provoked as much excitement around the world as had greeted the discoveries of X-rays and radium forty years before. In the year following Hahn and Strassmann’s experiment demonstrating fission, at least a hundred scientific papers were published on the subject. Newspapers and magazines were quick to pick up on the news and herald the dawn of the atomic age.

  In September 1939 the British popular science journal Discovery published a prophetic editorial by C. P. Snow, which began: ‘Some physicists think that, within a few months, science will have produced for military use an explosive a million times more violent than dynamite.’ Snow’s article had the dramatic title ‘A New Means of Destruction?’ What Snow said confirmed Szilard’s fears about the proliferation of atomic knowledge, fears that had haunted him for the last six years. ‘It is no secret,’ wrote Snow:

  laboratories in the United States, Germany, France and England have been working on it feverishly since the Spring. It may not come off. The most competent opinion is divided upon whether the idea is practicable. If it is, science for the first time will at one bound have altered the scope of warfare. The power of most scientific weapons has been consistently exaggerated; but it would be difficult to exaggerate this.18

  Snow warned that if ‘the uranium bomb… is not made in America this year, it may be next year in Germany’. He was also pessimistic about the future, doubting that ‘men can be trusted with a new weapon of gigantic power’. For him, the idealism that had accompanied the invention of flight showed that high hopes for a new discovery are often wrong: ‘we cannot delude ourselves that this new invention will be better used’.19

  Douglas Mayer, writing in the same journal, quoted Joliot-Curie’s team in Paris as claiming that there was a ‘considerable’ danger of ‘a system containing uranium in high concentration’ exploding once the chain reaction had started. The world now faced a choice, concluded Mayer: ‘Will it create a streamlined world where a pinch of salt is sufficient fuel for the Queen Mary, or shall we have a Wellsian chaos with each nation dropping bouquets of uranium bombs in a policy of encirclement?’20

  In the month that Europe went to war, superweapons haunted people’s fears of what was to come. At the end of September, Hitler bragged about the terrors of a new superweapon that he intended to unleash on Britain. An anonymous correspondent to The Times poured scorn on the idea: ‘What, many of us ask, can it be this time: some new and fearful gas; a death ray; some super-atomic bomb; germs; pilotless aeroplanes; or something we cannot even imagine?’ It was this same scepticism about new weapons that had caused British military commanders in 1915 to ignore reports at Ypres that gas cylinders were being deployed. The letter, signed ‘Civilian’, rejects the idea that new weapons win wars. ‘Our belief that we are fighting to destroy evil will make us welcome sacrifice and bear these “new weapons” with fortitude in our struggle to destroy civilization’s greatest menace.’21 But civilians would need more than fortitude to survive a war fought with superweapons.

  By 1940, the possibility of ‘the development of an explosive a million times more powerful than dynamite’ was common knowledge.22 In February the previous year, at a meeting of the American Physical Society at Pupin Hall, Columbia University’s physics laboratory, Bohr and Fermi had discussed the different responses of uranium 235 and uranium-238 under bombardment from neutrons. Bohr had just revealed that it was the rare isotope uranium-235 that had fissioned in Hahn and Strassmann’s experiment. Listening intently in the audience was the New York Times’ science correspondent.

  ‘I watched them write strange hieroglyphics on the blackboard,’ wrote William Laurence later, ‘heard them speculate about the possibility of a chain reaction, about fantastic amounts of energy being liberated. And as I sat there listening and watching, the figures on the blackboard suddenly started a chain reaction in my brain.’ Afterwards he rushed up to Bohr and Fermi.

  ‘Does this add up to an atomic bomb?’ he blurted out.

  There could not have been two more cautious scientists on the planet, as far as atomic energy was concerned. Fermi had just described Szilard’s idea of an atomic bomb as ‘Nuts!’ In response to Laurence’s question, Fermi estimated that it might take twenty-five or fifty years to build a bomb. But Laurence was not reassured. He described himself as a ‘frightened man’ after this physics conference.23 The journalist did, however, manage to restrain himself from speculating in print about any imminent threat from an atomic bomb.

  A year later, in 1940 when the news broke that uranium-235 had been separated, Laurence decided to voice his fears about a superbomb. Apparently it was his wife who finally convinced him to go public. ‘If the world is to come to an end,’ she told him, ‘let it know the worst as soon as possible.’ Before he started writing, Laurence had to first convince his editor that he was not ‘attempting to emulate Jules Verne and H. G. Wells as writers of scientific fiction’.24 The result was a dramatic front-page story in the New York Times, headlined VAST POWER SOURCE IN ATOMIC ENERGY OPENED BY SCIENCE. A subheading echoed the fear
s of Szilard and his Hungarian friends: ‘Germany Is Seeking It’.

  In his article, Laurence proclaimed that the separation of uranium-235 was ‘regarded as ushering in the long dreamed of age of atomic power, and, therefore, as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, discovery in modern science’. However, because of ‘the tremendous implications this discovery bears on the possible outcome of the European war’, scientists were ‘reluctant to talk about this development’. Ominously, he reported that the Nazi government had already ‘ordered its greatest scientists to concentrate their energies on the solution of this problem’. He raised the frightening spectre of German scientists ‘carrying on their tasks feverishly at the laboratories of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute at Berlin.’ Beneath the subheading ‘Terrific Explosive Power’, Laurence stated that ‘one pound of U-235 contains as much energy as 15,000 tons (30,000,000 pounds) of TNT’.25

  Laurence had hoped that his article in the highly respected New York Times would ‘galvanize Washington into action’. America needed to build the bomb before the Germans did. Instead, all that happened was that a Congressman cited his article during a speech ‘on the threat of atomic energy to the petroleum industry’.26 So towards the end of the year, he wrote another article on the subject, which was duly published in September by the Saturday Evening Post.

  Unknown to Laurence, behind the scenes the wheels of government were gradually moving. After the war, Laurence discovered that the FBI had contacted the Post’s editor and demanded that the September issue be taken out of circulation. They even contacted libraries across America, telling them to remove it from their shelves. Anyone specifically requesting it was to be reported to the FBI. After VE day, Army Intelligence showed Laurence both his articles, ‘beautifully preserved in cellophane’. They had been found by intelligence officers among files compiled by the Nazis on atomic energy.27

  During the war, the Office of Censorship in America prevented newspapers from writing about atomic fission or even speculating about Nazi progress towards atomic energy. However, one rather remarkable story somehow managed to slip through. On 27 November 1944, Time magazine published a science piece titled ‘V-3?’ on the Nazis’ new secret weapon, the ballistic missile. ‘The terrible novelty of V-2 had by no means worn off yet,’ claimed Time, ‘but London last week was already abuzz with speculation about V-3 – supposedly an atomic bomb.’28 The article openly discussed German plans for a missile with an atomic warhead. Indeed, recent research suggests that Nazi scientists working independently of Heisenberg may have designed just such a weapon and possibly even tested a prototype. So seriously was the threat taken that in the previous year Allied planes bombed the factory at Rjukan, Norway, that produced heavy water, an alternative neutron moderator to graphite.

  Time’s science writer also discussed a dispatch from London claiming that German scientists might have found a way to use a ‘Neuman’ demolition charge to create an implosion. Such an imploding charge might be used to mimic the conditions in a dense star and ‘develop pressures of tens of thousands of tons per square inch at the center, perhaps enough to disintegrate an unstable atom such as uranium and release its explosive atomic energy’. The explosion would be of ‘unheard-of violence’.29 Unknown to the writer of this article, implosion was precisely how the Los Alamos scientists intended to trigger the plutonium bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, thanks to the calculations of another member of the Hungarian Quartet, John von Neumann.

  Apart from Time’s article on the nuclear missile, the subject of atomic bombs was taboo for journalists during the war. But there was one part of the media that the intelligence services ignored, at least initially: the science fiction pulp magazines. Astounding Science Fiction, under its editor John W. Campbell, Jr – author of one of the all-time classics of science fiction, ‘Who Goes There?’ (1938) – had long ago cornered the market in stories speculating about the applications of atomic energy. As well as having a large readership among technophile adolescents, Astounding was also read by scientists. According to Louis N. Ridenour, a scientist who worked on radar during the war and who was himself a writer of science fiction, Astounding was ‘actually read by a certain number of highly educated people for its occasional thoughtful stories in which the impact of rapidly developing science on society is more or less intelligently examined’.30

  Many of the stories in Astounding explored the implications of power generation from atomic energy. Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘Blowups Happen’, written in 1939 and published in September 1940, included a detailed account of ‘the most dangerous machine in the world – an atomic power plant’. In common with journalists and even some scientists at this time, Heinlein’s story suggests – wrongly – that a reactor was the same thing as a ‘uranium bomb’. The operators of Heinlein’s reactor, known as ‘the bomb’, live in fear of making a mistake and causing ‘an explosion which would dwarf the eruption of Krakatoa to popgun size’. Indeed, a ‘blowup’ at the reactor could ‘destroy the entire human race’. Understandably, the plant’s atomic engineers are placed under enormous stress, believing as they do that ‘the lives of every human being on the planet’ depend on their decisions.31 To identify early signs of stress, psychiatrists are employed to observe the engineers. One of them is a ‘Dr Silard’. This was the first of several appearances that Szilard would make in fiction and film in the coming years.32

  Two years after ‘Blowups Happen’, Lester del Rey’s ‘Nerves’ also described a reactor accident which threatens the future of the planet. It appeared just two months before Fermi and Szilard’s top-secret atomic pile went critical. According to del Rey, the issue of Astounding containing his story was classified secret when it arrived at the Manhattan Project facilities. Technicians were unable to read it unless they had top security clearance, even though in the rest of America it was freely available on the news-stands.

  The atom still fascinated fiction writers, as it had ever since the discovery of radium. Campbell himself, under the pen name of Don A. Stuart, had imagined a reactor that runs on water as early as 1934 in his story ‘Atomic Power’. A. E. van Vogt’s ‘The Great Engine’, from 1943, described a miraculous ‘atomic engine’ which enables humankind to achieve Otto Mandl’s dream of interplanetary travel. Theodore Sturgeon’s ‘Artnan Process’, from June 1941, finds a fantastic solution to a problem which the Manhattan Project scientists were very much concerned with at the time: how to separate fissile uranium-235 from natural uranium in large quantities. However, it is extremely unlikely that Sturgeon’s idea of a mould that consumes uranium and then excretes the rare, fissionable isotope ever occurred to scientists in the real world.33

  An illustrator for Amazing Stories in October 1939 tries to predict what an atomic power plant will look like fifty years in the future. According to the caption: ‘The power locked in the atom is inconceivably great and its release, even in part, would instantly reduce all other forms of power plants to antiquated and obsolete equipment.’

  Clifford D. Simak’s ‘Lobby’ (1944) is more realistic. This account of the development of an ‘atomic power plant’ suggested that the revolutionary new energy source would face opposition from the conventional ‘power lobby’ in America. Simak’s atomic scientist, Butler, is a classic inventor-scientist motivated by utopian dreams:

  You’ve seen his kind. Has one ruling passion. The only thing that counts with him is atomic power. Not atomic power as a theory or as something to play around with, but power that will turn wheels – cheap. Power that will free the world, that will help develop the world. Power so cheap and plentiful and safe to handle that no man is so poor he can’t afford to use it.34

  It was this vision, inherited from Soddy and Wells, that had inspired Szilard for the last decade.

  Like Heinlein, Simak believed that a power plant could explode like a bomb. Butler therefore builds his prototype reactor in Montana, away from cities. When it is sabotaged by businessmen who own conventional power stations, Butler’s business partn
er, Cobb, witnesses the explosion in his helicopter at night. Simak’s remarkable description anticipates accounts of the top-secret Trinity test, conducted just a year later in the desert wasteland of New Mexico:

  Suddenly the sky above the peak flashed.

  That was the word that best described it – flashed. There was no consciousness of fire, no flame, no glow – just a sudden, blinding flash, like a photographer’s bulb popping – a million bulbs popping. A flash that came and lasted for one split second, then was gone, leaving a blackness that for a moment blotted out the moon and the snowy peaks – a blackness that persisted until one’s eyes could readjust themselves.

  The ship plowed on, while Cobb, blinded, reached out for something to clutch, instinctively reacting to the bewilderment of blackness.

  Sound came. A sudden clap of sound that was vicious and nerve-wrenching. Like one short gasp of a million thunders rolled together.

  The ’copter bucked and plunged and Cobb reached out blind hands, hauled back on the wheel to send it rocketing skyward. Beneath him the ship jerked and trembled, wallowing in tortured air.35

  In pulp fiction of this period, science or scientists are rarely criticized. Accidents happen because of political or commercial pressures that cause human errors. Cleve Cartmill’s story ‘Deadline’, from March 1944, is an exception. It depicts an irresponsible scientist who has succeeded in building an atomic bomb. Its contents so shocked the American secret services that as soon as it was published in Astounding, Army Intelligence agents swooped on the editor, the author and even the illustrator. They were convinced that Cartmill must have had a source inside the Manhattan Project. As he explained, however, the only source he had was articles, such as William Laurence’s, published in 1940. Eventually Army Intelligence reluctantly accepted his account, but still threatened to shut Astounding down. However, Campbell successfully argued that Astounding had such a reputation for publishing stories about atomic energy that if they suddenly stopped printing them it would be a dead give-away to the Nazis that America was building an atomic superweapon.