Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  But although Szilard preferred to stay in New York, he understood the importance of centralizing research work and admired Compton’s talents as an organizer and a leader. “Most people consider him as the only hope to bring order into the present mess,” Szilard had observed the month before. (If anything, he felt Compton was not aggressive enough. “Compton seems to be too modest to realize that he could carry this matter by the sheer weight of his personality,” Szilard wrote.) 5 So Szilard would go to Chicago.

  Having persuaded Szilard to move, Compton phoned Fermi and asked him to relocate to Chicago as well. Fermi was reluctant. He resented that he did not have full security clearance for war work because he was still a “registered enemy alien,” but now he was being asked to take a leading role in the country’s most secret military project. He told Compton that he liked Columbia and enjoyed his home in New Jersey. Yet his adopted country was now at war and Fermi wanted to prove his patriotism. He agreed to go. 6

  All-out work at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory began in February 1942. The primary purpose of the Met Lab was to achieve a chain reaction in order to test the feasibility of producing plutonium in an atomic pile. There was also the question of how to separate the plutonium once it was produced. Physicists and chemists exploring the properties of this strange element worked in Eckart and Ryerson Halls, three-story gray stone neo-Gothic buildings that stood side by side on the northeast corner of the University of Chicago quadrangle. Their cramped labs and offices were partly lighted by leaded-glass windows that shook against the bitter-cold winds of a midwestern winter.

  The war was going very badly for the United States and its allies in early 1942. Nazi Germany controlled most of Europe and was threatening to take over Russia and North Africa. The bulk of the American Pacific Fleet lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Japan was continuing its onslaught in the Pacific. The Philippine capital of Manila had fallen, and American troops were retreating to the island of Corregidor. Japanese troops had made it as far as New Guinea and Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Not until the Battle of Midway, four months away, would the tide of the war in the Pacific at last begin to turn; the tide of war in Europe would not turn until the Battle of Stalingrad almost a year away.

  The refugee physicists watched in horror as their homelands fell to the Axis like dominoes, and feared that America might be next. They felt a sense of impending doom. They were not alone. The atmosphere at the Met Lab was nervous and embattled. “We felt behind the Germans,” said a scientist who was there—in danger of losing the race for the bomb. 7 Met Lab staff knew that Hahn, the discoverer of fission, had a two-year head start and that German engineering was the most respected in the world, especially when it came to arms; panzer tanks rolling across Europe in the blitzkrieg seemed unstoppable. The feeling of desperation was especially keen among the refugees, most of whom had studied in Germany, knew Germany as the prewar center of nuclear physics, and were inclined to give the Germans much credit for what they could do.

  Compton tried to calm the refugees’ anxiety, but he was less successful than Fermi, who was one of them yet still managed to joke that the Nazis could not fight a war and build an atomic bomb at the same time. Despite this bravado, Fermi privately began to think about what country he and his family should escape to next if America fell to the Nazis. Another leading refugee scientist balked at being fingerprinted by security officials at the Met Lab. “If the Germans win, they’ll use these prints to track us down and kill us all!” he nervously protested. 8

  Few things focus the mind like the bark of a bloodhound. There was the constant fear that with one small error—one lost day—the scientists might awaken one morning to read the news that Nazi Germany had unleashed a powerful new bomb. “The feeling was that we were a small group of people with a terribly important mission,” recalled a physicist at Chicago. “If we failed, the United States and its allies might come into terrible harm. We were afraid.” 9 They worked long hours without complaint, putting in a full day and then returning to the Met Lab in the evening after dinner, six days a week. Every day, every moment, counted.

  Heavy security heightened the stress. “I am determined to have secrecy observed to the utmost,” Compton told lab personnel. “We are at war.” 10 Anyone mentioning the word uranium or plutonium received a stare and a warning. Each newcomer to the Met Lab was shown a film that darkly depicted the ominous consequences of negligence and carelessness. A list was passed around at each meeting where new information was revealed, and every scientist signed his name, with the date, showing that he had attended. (One refugee scientist hesitated to sign, fearing that the lists would fall into the hands of the Nazis if America lost the war.) Posters shouting DON’T BE A BLABOTEUR were plastered everywhere.

  On the outside, Chicago looked like any university. But if anyone entered Eckart or Ryerson Hall, he was quickly confronted by armed guards who asked what business he had being there. There were security passes, papers marked TOP SECRET, and an unlimited budget. Spending during the first six months of 1942 reached $590,000 for materials and $618,000 for salaries—enormous sums for physicists accustomed before the war to conducting research on a few thousand dollars per year. “Within a year,” said one Met Lab physicist, “I was ordering a million dollars’ worth of material at a time without a qualm.” 11 In March 1942 there were only 45 people at the Met Lab, including secretaries. By June there were 1,250. At its peak six months later, the Met Lab employed 2,000 people.

  Arthur Compton was an effective leader of the Met Lab, steady and imperturbable. He could be irritable, but he had great resources of temperament and knew that this was too serious a time to let irritability flash. His door was always open. He tracked problems carefully. He trusted refugees at a time when many in Washington did not. He understood personalities and egos: how to accommodate them, how to assuage them when they clashed, how to mold them into an effective team. He also realized that scientists needed freedom to exercise their imagination. He understood their strengths and weaknesses and treated them with sensitivity. He combined skill in research with finesse in administration.

  Compton needed all these qualities because overseeing a bunch of bright scientists was no easy task. They were all independent, and more than a few were egotists. That certainly was true of Szilard. Opinionated, immodest, pushy, and demanding, Szilard was a difficult man even for his friends and rubbed many people—especially bureaucrats and soldiers—the wrong way. “He was odd,” said a colleague who liked him. “There was no doubt about it: eccentric.” 12 “He’s a queer fish,” thought another, “very pleased with his own ability as a physicist.” Szilard even threatened at one point to resign from the project and “file patent applications” if his salary wasn’t raised. 13 So adept was he at offering his opinions and telling others what to do that colleagues took to calling him “the General.”

  A gadfly and an iconoclast, Szilard moved through the Met Lab like a whirlwind, firing off hectoring memos to Compton and kibitzing other scientists. His passion for politics began to rival his interest in physics in June 1942, when he learned of a visit by two army colonels to Compton’s office. Szilard had assumed that one atomic bomb would be enough to sober humanity into forsaking war. “You’ve got to sit down and get reoriented,” the colonels had instead told Compton’s assistant. “The thing we’re talking about is not a few bombs; what we are talking about is production capacity to continue delivering bombs at a given rate. That, you will discover, is a very different problem.” 14 Their comment shocked Szilard and his Met Lab colleagues, who began to fear where the military was taking the project.

  The military, for its part, viewed scientists as nonconformists with strange accents, no discipline, and a lot of arrogance. Generals and admirals were horrified at the absence of a chain of command below Compton and at the freewheeling structure of the Met Lab, and were skeptical about the likelihood of physicists producing anything useful.

  Army Brigadier General Lesl
ie Groves, whom the War Department appointed czar of the Manhattan Project on September 17, 1942, certainly felt this way. Groves was a career officer and son of an army chaplain who was a strict disciplinarian. He had grown up a service brat shaped by the military culture and the traditional American values of God and country. He had attended the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where he graduated fourth in his class in 1918—too late to take part in the fighting in World War I—then joined the Corps of Engineers. As a construction engineer, he had never commanded troops in combat, but he was very patriotic and very ambitious.

  Alert and confident, Groves assumed a commanding manner. But his authority and pugnacity were belied by his appearance. He had an oversize waistline that gave a midriff bulge to his starched khakis. He was addicted to ice cream, and there was always a box of chocolates in his office safe. All this, along with a small mustache and too-tight collar, made Groves look rather like an Oliver Hardy in uniform. But his steel-blue eyes were penetrating, and his facial expression was decisive. He knew his business and he knew how to get things done.

  With Groves, you had better do your job, do it well, and do it on time. If you did not, he screamed and threatened and his neck veins popped out in anger. He had no patience for procrastination, no tolerance for sloppiness, no time or talent for small talk. An army subordinate remembered Groves as

  the biggest sonovabitch I’ve ever met in my life, but also one of the most capable individuals. He had an ego second to none, he had tireless energy—he was a big man, a heavy man but he never seemed to tire. He had absolute confidence in his decisions and he was absolutely ruthless in how he approached a problem to get it done. But that was the beauty of working for him—you never had to worry about the decisions being made or what it meant…. I hated his guts and so did everybody else but we had our form of understanding. 15

  Most of Groves’s subordinates feared him; only a few liked him. He preferred it that way.

  The bitterest day of Groves’s life was when he was ordered to assume direction of the Manhattan Project, which Roosevelt and Stimson transferred to the Army Corps of Engineers’ control when it became clear that its scale would be far beyond the managerial and logistical capacities of Bush and Conant. “What little I knew of the project,” Groves later wrote, “had not particularly impressed me.” 16 He had spent the first year of the war overseeing construction of the Pentagon and expected to be assigned a field command as a reward. Now he would spend the rest of the war overseeing a bunch of “long-hairs” on a potential boondoggle—“a crazy Buck Rogers project,” he called it—with a budget that amounted to less than what he had spent on the Pentagon in a week. Even though he was not pleased, he would make the most of it. He would throw himself into the project with enormous energy and no letup. He expected friction with scientists who lacked discipline and did not know how to take orders. But now he was in the driver’s seat—he was the boss.

  Groves’s brusque demeanor explained much of the tension that would develop between him and the Manhattan Project scientists. Vannevar Bush wrote a memo after meeting him that said in part: “Having seen Groves briefly, I doubt whether he has sufficient tact for such a job. I fear we are in the soup.” 17 Other scientists were appalled at the general’s apparent lack of intellectual curiosity. Groves told Ernest Lawrence during one of his trips to Berkeley, “I’m not the least bit interested in the scientific knowledge of the world, except insofar as it gets the job done.” 18 The story spread among scientists like wildfire.

  From the beginning, Groves distrusted the scientists, particularly the accented foreigners and their tendency to break into incomprehensible languages when they talked to one another in his presence. What were they saying? He viewed scientists as intelligent and curious, but also undisciplined and unfocused. They needed enforceable rules. To him, they neither understood nor respected the military ethos of obedience and conformity. The stage was set for trouble.

  In September 1942 Szilard circulated a memo around the Met Lab:

  Compton delegates to each of us some particular task and we can lead a very pleasant life while we do our duty. We live in a pleasant part of a pleasant city, in the pleasant company of each other, and have in Dr. Compton the most pleasant “boss” we could wish to have. There is every reason why we should be happy and since there is a war. on, we are even willing to work overtime.

  Alternatively, we may take the stand that those who have originated the work on this terrible weapon and those who have materially contributed to its development have, before God and the World, the duty to see to it that it should be ready to be used at the proper time and in the proper way.

  I believe that each of us has now to decide where he feels that his responsibility lies.

  Szilard insisted that scientists pay more attention to the consequences of their work:

  It is within our power to construct atomic bombs. What the existence of these bombs will mean we all know. It will bring disaster upon the world even if we anticipate them [i.e., the Germans] and win the war, but lose the peace that will follow…. One has to visualize a world in which a lone airplane could appear over a big city like Chicago, drop his bomb, and thereby destroy the city in a single flash. Not one house may be left standing, and the radioactive substances scattered by the bomb may make the area uninhabitable for some time to come.

  It will be for those whom the constitution has entrusted with determining the policy of this country to take determined action near the end of the war in order to safeguard us from such a “peace.”…

  Perhaps it would be well if we devoted more thought to the ultimate political necessities which will arise out of our present work. You may feel, however, that it is of more immediate concern to us that the work which is pursued at Chicago is not progressing as rapidly as it should. 19

  Thanks to comments like this, Szilard’s colleagues at the Met Lab looked upon him as the conscience of the project. He was the one who got them thinking about the moral and political implications of what they were doing. Groves, on the other hand, looked upon Szilard as a troublemaker and a menace. “What a pain in the neck Szilard was,” Groves complained to an interviewer after the war. 20 “Sure, we should never have had an atom bomb if Szilard had not shown such determination during the first years of the war. But as soon as we got going, so far as I was concerned he might just as well have walked the plank!” 21 Groves even tried to send Szilard to an internment camp. The general drafted a letter for Secretary of War Stimson that said: “It is considered essential to the prosecution of the war that Mr. Szilard, who is an enemy alien, be interned for the duration of the war.” 22 Stimson refused to sign it.

  Although Stimson denied Groves’s request, the general found other ways to harass Szilard. He required that “enemy aliens” account for their whereabouts at all times and further compelled Szilard to obtain army authorization every time he wanted to leave Chicago. The restrictions became new rules to be broken, and Groves reacted by ordering security agents to shadow Szilard. The agents’ reports on his movements read less like a John le Carre novel than a Marx Brothers’ script:

  Surveillance reports indicate that Subject is of Jewish extraction, has a fondness for delicacies and frequently makes purchases in delicatessen stores, usually eats his breakfast in drug stores and other meals in restaurants, walks a great deal when he cannot secure a taxi, usually is shaved in a barber shop, speaks occasionally in a foreign tongue, and associates mostly with people of Jewish extraction. He is inclined to be rather absent minded and eccentric, and will start out a door, turn around and come back, go out on the street without his coat or hat and frequently looks up and down the street as if he were watching for someone or did not know for sure where he wanted to go. 23

  Szilard usually knew exactly where he wanted to go but was often so annoyed by his tails that he deliberately tried to trick them. Other times he took pity on the agents and invited them along for a taxi ride or a cup of coffee. “Why can’t you be a
good American?” a security agent once asked him, half exasperated, half begging. “Like who?” “Well, like me.” “Ugh. No,” said a smiling Szilard. 24

  When the surveillance turned up nothing, Groves ordered Szilard’s phone tapped and his mail opened. He had the power to dismiss Szilard from the project and at one point took a step in that direction by threatening to make him take “an indefinite leave of absence without pay.” Groves told a security officer that “the investigation of Szilard should continue despite the barrenness of the results. One letter or phone call once in three months would be sufficient for the passing of vital information and until we know for certain that he is 100% reliable we cannot entirely disregard this person.” 25

  But Szilard was irrepressible. That—and his talents as a physicist—made him a favorite of Compton, despite their very different backgrounds and temperaments, and when Groves pressured Compton to fire Szilard, Compton protected him, even writing to officials in Washington in praise of his efforts:

  Szilard was the first in this country, perhaps anywhere, to advocate trying to secure a chain fission reaction using unseparated [uranium]. He has perhaps given more concentrated thought on the development of this project than has any other individual. As an experienced physicist and engineer and a man of unusual originality, his thoughts have been of great value in determining the direction of our work. He has likewise been from the beginning actively concerned with the more far-reaching problems of organization and civil and military uses of the process. Even though not all of his ideas are practical, I consider him one of the most valuable members of our organization.

  Compton also noted Szilard’s early efforts to keep fission secrets from the Nazis, and his vocal advocacy of a bomb program. Compton concluded his assessment by characterizing Szilard as “an independent individualist, vitally and I believe unselfishly concerned with the effective progress of our program.” 26