ALSO BY BRIAN VANDEMARK
INTO THE QUAGMIRE
IN RETROSPECT (with Robert McNamara)
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 by Brian VanDeMark
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First eBook Edition: September 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2807-9
TO
ROBERT DALLEK AND ROBERT MCNAMARA
Mentors and Friends
Contents
ALSO BY BRIAN VANDEMARK
Copyright
Preface
PROLOGUE: Nine Physicists and the Discovery of Fission
PART I: A FEARSOME GRAIL
CHAPTER 1: Exodus
CHAPTER 2: The Gathering Storm
CHAPTER 3: The Manhattan Project
CHAPTER 4: The Met Lab
CHAPTER 5: Los Alamos
CHAPTER 6: The Decision to Use the Bomb
PART II: PANDORA’S BOX
CHAPTER 7: Three Fires
CHAPTER 8: An End, a Beginning
CHAPTER 9: The Superbomb Debate
CHAPTER 10: The Oppenheimer Affair
CHAPTER 11: Twilight Years
EPILOGUE: The Atomic Scientists and Today
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PREFACE
This is the story of nine men who helped create the atomic bomb, which forever changed their lives and the world. Their story is a compelling one, filled with elements of great drama, emotion, irony, and tragedy. It is not surprising, therefore, that the story of the bomb’s creation has been told often, and well, by others much more knowledgeable about nuclear physics than I. 1 My aim is different. It is to explore the human story behind the atomic bomb by probing its creators’ thoughts, feelings, and judgments. What motivated them? How did they relate to one another? How did they deal with the political and moral issues posed by nuclear weapons? Put simply: Why did they do it, and what did it mean to them?
People usually think about what the atomic scientists did, instead of who they were, because they do not see them as human beings with personal histories and emotional lives, hearts—sometimes broken—as well as heads. Scientists themselves have contributed to this popular image. Very often they have represented themselves as calmly rational and coldly objective—above human frailty and unaware of man’s condition. But scientists are first and foremost people, people who know just how imaginative and human an enterprise science really is.
All of this suggests that the history the atomic scientists made is not as simple as people have usually portrayed it. Numerous myths and caricatures have grown up around the atomic scientists (and the bomb) since 1945. Too often these men (and they were almost all men) have been flat screens on which one-dimensional fictions and fantasies were projected. But the atomic scientists were not all good; they were not all bad. To understand them is to recognize their good intentions and at the same time to confront the doubtful morality of their achievement. Good history does not fear ambiguity, nor does it reduce complex and sometimes contradictory individuals to simple stereotypes.
Physics, like everything that is potentially constructive, can be put to destructive ends. It has two faces, benign and threatening, bringing blessings and curses. Each of the atomic scientists, like each of us, can make imperfect choices that seem reasonable—even responsible—in the context of the times but are impossible to undo once the course is set. They, like us, do things they think are right at the time, and later come to regret them. They, like us, have rich human stories of ambition and disappointment, achievement and failure, cooperation and rivalry, jealousy and revenge. Their story helps illuminate how people deal with circumstances, the legacy of creation, and an imperfect world that sometimes forges good from evil and evil from good. Their story has moral reverberation, that strange and haunting quality generated by a tale that is not always pleasant but that entrances us because it has an effect beyond itself. This effect may be as simple as inspiring us to do something practical about the legacy of their creation, or at least to feel that we should.
Many physicists contributed to the making of the atomic bomb. Clearly, not all of them can be treated, not even in a big book like this one. I therefore used three criteria to select the subjects of this study: 1. those who contributed centrally to the bomb’s creation; 2. those who voiced moral and political judgments about the bomb; and 3. those whose views represented a range of opinions and responses. Based on these criteria, I chose to write about the following nine physicists, in alphabetical order:
Hans Bethe
Niels Bohr
Arthur Compton
Enrico Fermi
Ernest Lawrence
Robert Oppenheimer
I. I. Rabi
Leo Szilard
Edward Teller 2
This book treats these nine physicists as a group rather than as discrete subjects. It seeks to integrate what might otherwise be a string of disparate biographies into something like a history of a scientific generation, and to do so without slighting either the individual physicist or the larger setting. It follows their intertwined lives chronologically, showing how they related to one another and reacted to the history they made together. Part I traces the atomic scientists’ effort to build the bomb and, with it, to end World War II. Part II explores how the atomic scientists came to understand the bomb’s consequences, both for their own lives and for the world they changed forever through their creation.
Two themes—two morals of the story—emerge along the way. The first is how inexorable was the trap into which the atomic scientists fell, a trap largely of their own making. The atomic scientists were deeply thoughtful men, no fools in any way, yet they were drawn into a frenzy of creation, throwing themselves into the enterprise and laboring beyond all expectations of human capacity to produce a weapon of unprecedented destructiveness. The effort quickly took on a life, and a momentum, of its own, a chain reaction from a chain reaction. When it was done, the bomb they had made horrified and frightened them. The atomic scientists originally sought to build something that would save the world and ended up believing what they created might destroy it. They came to fear the very thing they had built to end fear.
The second theme is the political and moral awakening of the atomic scientists. Twentieth-century physics was a great adventure of imagination and intelligence, and until the discovery of fission it was carried on in an ivory tower, far removed from the world of politics. It was “pure” science—a contest of the human mind with nature; the object was not to change the world but to understand it. Scientists did physics because it was there to be done and because it was wonderfully interesting. They rarely addressed the political implications of their research or applied moral considerations to their work. They were detached and above such things. But their work on the bomb shook the atomic scientists out of their detachment and forced them to confront larger implications. For the first time, they began to ask questions about politics and morality in the same searching way they had always asked them about Nature. And as they asked these questions, they transformed themselves.
The atomic scientists’ struggle t
o come to terms with what they had done is emblematic of the larger and continuing human struggle created by the opening of the Pandora’s box of nuclear weapons. Some of the questions the atomic scientists wrestled with, we are still wrestling with now. Today, as we rush headlong into a future filled with the promise of potentially astonishing scientific and technological advances, we are continually drawn back to the most momentous scientific achievement of the twentieth century—an achievement that raises questions so profound that they seem to transcend time itself.
PROLOGUE
Nine Physicists and the
Discovery of Fission
HE FIRST LEARNED the news in late January 1939, just seven months before World War II began. Eugene Wigner, a fellow Hungarian physicist whom he had known since their student days together at the University of Berlin, lay ill in the Princeton University infirmary with jaundice. Although weak, Wigner instantly recognized the short, portly man with curly dark hair, enormous head, flat cheekbones, and gentle, soulful eyes when he walked into the infirmary room. It was Leo Szilard. Szilard had come out of friendship, but business was still permissible, indeed necessary, since Wigner had urgent news: a chemist working at Berlin’s Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Otto Hahn, had split uranium the month before.
Szilard, shocked, wanted details. What Hahn had done, repeating an experiment first conducted by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in 1934, was to bombard uranium atoms with neutrons (particles with no charge that could pass through the electrical barrier surrounding the atom). Nuclear physics was still in its infancy, and measurements were done by methods that were often crude and amorphous. Fermi had surmised that the uranium atoms had absorbed the neutrons and, in the process, had been transformed into heavier, man-made “transuranic” elements. German chemist Ida Noddack, following reports of Fermi’s experiment in scientific journals, had suggested a chemical analysis of “transuranic” elements to see if they were actually fragments of split atoms. But Fermi had not pursued Noddack’s suggestion, because he did not think a slow neutron with very little energy could split the massive uranium nucleus. Had he thought so, he might have discovered fission five years earlier.
Now, several years later, Hahn had followed Noddack’s suggestion and did some careful chemistry. Common uranium has 92 protons (positively charged particles) and 146 neutrons, a total of 238 particles in its nucleus. By Fermi’s logic, transuranic elements would contain more of both. To Hahn’s astonishment, he found barium instead. Barium has a much lighter nucleus than uranium: 56 protons and 82 neutrons—a total of 138 particles. Hahn was puzzled. How could a uranium nucleus be split in half by a slow neutron of very low energy? It was as if a thick steel girder had been cleaved by a rubber band.
Rather than publish his findings immediately, Hahn wrote his former colleague Lise Meitner, a brilliant theoretical physicist who had been forced to leave the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Sweden a few months earlier because of her Jewish ancestry. Hahn asked her for assistance in interpreting the unexpected results.
Hahn’s letter reached Meitner at the seaside resort of Göteborg, where she had gone with her visiting nephew Otto Frisch, another brilliant theoretical physicist up from Copenhagen to be with his aunt during her first holiday in exile. When she read Hahn’s letter to him, Frisch disagreed and almost refused to listen. When his aunt persisted, he suggested they go for a walk, she on foot, he on skis. It must have been a strange sight: the diminutive sixty-year-old Meitner trudging through the snowy woods outside Göteborg alongside her thirty-four-year-old nephew on skis, both struggling to make sense of Hahn’s letter. Like all other physicists of the time, they assumed heavy nuclei could not be split in two. Could that assumption be wrong? They now began to question it. Using Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s “liquid drop” model of the atomic nucleus as their theoretical guide, Meitner and Frisch reasoned that the stresses on a heavy uranium nucleus triggered by neutron bombardment could make it wobble like a perturbed drop of water and eventually split it into two smaller, lighter nuclei. This might explain Hahn’s strange discovery.
Meitner and Frisch then went one fateful step further in their interpretive speculation. Using Albert Einstein’s famous formula for the conversion of matter into energy (E = mc2, an enormous number), * they calculated the energy that would be released when splitting apart or “fissioning” the nucleus of a uranium atom. The figure was staggering: 200 million electron volts of energy. Two hundred million electron volts is not a large amount of energy—only about enough to nudge a speck of dust—but it is an awesome, almost unimaginable amount of energy from a single, tiny atom. And in just one gram of uranium there is an astounding number of atoms: about 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000.
As he stood in Wigner’s infirmary room, these details struck Leo Szilard like a thunderbolt. What Szilard had dimly imagined for years—yet vaguely dreaded—had been found. Fissioned uranium released a million times more energy than dynamite, which was the most explosive force known at that time. Such energy might be harnessed into a terrible weapon of mass destruction. Such a weapon in the hands of Hitler and the Nazis would give them an instrument with which to enslave the world. This seemed an all-too-plausible danger because Germany had some of the best scientific brains in the world—like Otto Hahn—and the industrial capacity to do the job. Suddenly, a dramatic melancholy fell upon Szilard.
The discovery of fission spread among the other physicists like wind across a field of wheat. Hungarian physicist Edward Teller was looking forward to seeing Szilard at the Third Annual Conference on Theoretical Physics in Washington, D.C., where Teller had sought refuge as a professor at George Washington University after fleeing Nazi persecution four years earlier. The participants at the Washington conference would include Bohr, who was coming from his world-famous institute in Copenhagen, and Fermi, who had been awarded the Nobel Prize the month before for his research on neutrons.
Bohr himself had learned of fission from Otto Frisch just before leaving Copenhagen. “How could we have missed it all this time?” he exclaimed in utter astonishment. When Bohr’s ship docked in New York two weeks later, he took the train to Washington and arrived at the home of Russian physicist George Gamow, the conference organizer and a colleague of Teller’s, late in the afternoon on the day before the conference began. An hour later Gamow phoned Teller in great agitation. “Bohr says uranium splits,” he told Teller. That was all of Gamow’s message. It was enough. Teller understood what fission might mean.
Bohr opened the conference the next morning by announcing the discovery. It escaped few, if any, that the atom had been split in Nazi Germany. Teller glanced across the auditorium at Fermi as Bohr spoke. Fermi’s wife was a Jew, and he had become uneasy about remaining in Mussolini’s Italy, an ally of Hitler’s Germany. Leaving everything behind, Fermi had taken his family out of Italy the month before when he left to accept the Nobel Prize. They had used the prize money to travel on to New York, where Fermi was settling in as a professor at Columbia University.
Fermi had learned of fission a few days before the conference began from I. I. Rabi, his colleague on the physics faculty at Columbia who himself had picked up the news at Princeton while his friend Szilard was there. A short time later Rabi saw Fermi standing at his large office window on the top floor of Pupin Hall high above the Columbia campus, looking down the length of Manhattan’s grid of skyscrapers crisscrossed by streets teeming with pedestrians and taxis. Fermi cupped his hands as if he were holding nothing larger than a ball. “A little bomb like that,” he said simply, “and it would all disappear.” 1
Hans Bethe, who also attended the Washington conference, had fled Nazi Germany the same year as Teller. He pondered the consequences of fission on the long train ride back to Cornell University in upstate New York after the conference. Bethe realized that atomic bombs were now theoretically possible, though he did not believe they were even remotely feasible. The task of making an atomic bomb was simply too big and too difficult from a technical
and engineering point of view. There was simply no way, Bethe was convinced, to produce fissionable uranium even in amounts as small as a millionth of a gram; a kilogram of fissionable uranium was far beyond the reach of science, he thought.
Arthur Compton, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at the University of Chicago who personally knew most of those at the Washington conference, learned of fission while at the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas. Could a chain reaction of splitting uranium atoms occur? he wondered. The amount of energy released by such a chain reaction, according to his quick calculations, was enormous. Here was something of great importance, thought Compton, and also of great danger.
Ernest Lawrence, Compton’s former graduate student and now a successful and ambitious professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, grasped the larger meaning of fission at once. Its military potential—which many physicists such as Bethe considered insurmountable—seemed like a heroic challenge to him. “This uranium business is certainly exciting,” he wrote Fermi within weeks. 2 Lawrence was determined to do what he could to make sure that if an atomic bomb was possible, America would get it first.
Working at the blackboard in his office, Lawrence’s charismatic Berkeley colleague Robert Oppenheimer tried at first to prove that fission could not happen. Within a week, however, Oppenheimer the theoretician had decided that it could and that additional neutrons would be released. Within another week there was a crude drawing on his blackboard of a bomb. Oppenheimer wrote to a colleague that a ten-centimeter cube of uranium “might very well blow itself to hell.” 3
Nine physicists. Colleagues and friends. For the European refugees among them, the 1930s had been a decade of indelible scarification. When Nazism first began to spread like a malignant cancer, they had felt secure in their ivory towers, hoping that Hitler was not really a problem or, if he was, that he would go away. They felt no urgency because they believed politics was not a physicist’s concern, much less a physicist’s responsibility. But the rise of Hitler made politics personal, even for cloistered physicists. The world they knew and the scientific values they cherished were being destroyed, and that deeply painful but inescapable fact became increasingly difficult, and finally utterly impossible, for them to ignore. They wanted to preserve that world and those values. That was the fundamental thing that moved them. But one by one they had realized that if they were to stay in Europe, there would be no future. Deep down, they sensed that the world as they’d known it had only a little more time to run. So they packed what they could and brought their heavy accents and heavy wool suits to a New World that welcomed them.
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