Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  Most of the people employed to watch the dials and turn the valves and knobs were women. They were trained only in the skills required to do their specific job, which might be, for example, turning a knob when a dial they were watching moved too far to the left or to the right. What the dial was measuring and what the knob was controlling were kept secret from them and, while at work, they were not allowed to talk to their fellow employees, but only with their immediate superiors. Faced with almost any alternative, few people would have chosen to work under such conditions, but Groves did everything he could to ensure that, for many people, there was no alternative. He persuaded the Secretary of War, Robert Patterson, for example, to issue a directive to the US Employment Service, instructing it to ensure that in its offices near Oak Ridge and Hanford ‘workers must not be offered any other employment until after they have been rejected for employment on these projects’.

  Most of the workers at these plants lived in rapidly built basic flats and houses that were constructed specially for them close to their places of work. Shops, schools, post offices and even town halls were built to ensure that the workers had as few reasons as possible to venture outside the perimeters of the site in which they lived, and over time these sites became home to something close to the kind of communities one might find in any other American small town.

  Meanwhile, by the end of December 1942, Oppenheimer was playing a leading role himself in the creation of a new town and a new community at Los Alamos. In a letter he wrote to Hans and Rose Bethe on 28 December, he discussed not physics or bombs, but such things as the salaries on offer to scientists willing to come to Los Alamos (20 per cent on top of what they were already earning), the arrangements under way for the management of the town, what kind of school education would be provided and by whom, how many hospitals there would be, what laundry facilities would exist, what kind of restaurants would be available, what recreation would be on offer, how mail would be collected and delivered and what the housing would be like. The man in charge of the construction and management of the town was Colonel J.M. Harmon, and, Oppenheimer told the Bethes, the best guarantee that the arrangements would be satisfactory ‘is in the great effort and generosity that Harmon and Groves have both brought to setting up this odd community and in their evident desire to make a real success of it’.

  In his attempts to lure the scientists he wanted, it was perhaps inevitable that Oppenheimer would become involved in all aspects of planning for life in this ‘odd community’. After all, in urging them to come to Los Alamos, he was asking them not only to join a laboratory, but to take part in a new, hitherto untried and somewhat bizarre way of life: an isolated, self-contained community dedicated to a single task and committed to the utmost secrecy. And yet, for all that, his primary responsibility was for the scientific aspects of the work, as Conant and Groves made plain in a long letter of 25 February 1943, laying out Oppenheimer’s new job description.

  ‘We are addressing this letter to you,’ they began, ‘as the Scientific Director of the special laboratory in New Mexico in order to confirm our many conversations on the matters of organization and responsibility.’ The laboratory, they went on, ‘will be concerned with the development and final manufacture of an instrument of war’. Its work was to be divided into two periods: the first would be devoted to ‘experimental studies in science, engineering and ordnance’, while the second would involve ‘large-scale experiments involving difficult ordnance procedures and the handling of highly dangerous material’. During the first period, the laboratory ‘will be on a strictly civilian basis’, but when the work enters the second period (‘which will not be earlier than January 1, 1944’), ‘the scientific and engineering staff will be composed of commissioned officers’. The militarisation of the scientific staff thus outlined never took place, but the letter shows just how reluctant the leaders of the Manhattan Project were to abandon it.

  The laboratory, the letter further spelled out, was part of a larger project run by the Military Policy Committee, chaired by Bush and, in his absence, Conant. Groves ‘has been given over-all executive responsibility for this project’. The responsibilities of the Scientific Director – Oppenheimer – were given in this letter as:

  a. The conduct of the scientific work so that the desired goals as outlined by the Military Policy Committee are achieved at the earliest possible dates.

  b. The maintenance of secrecy by the civilian personnel under his control as well as their families.

  As the Los Alamos Ranch School was being transformed by a massive and hurried construction programme into a town fit to serve as home to some of the greatest scientists in the world and their families, Oppenheimer spent the first few months of 1943 preparing to achieve the goals he had been set by Conant and Groves. His plan was to begin the scientific work of the laboratory in the spring of 1943 with a series of introductory lectures given by Serber, which would summarise the current state of knowledge (most of which had not been published because of the voluntary self-censorship adopted by scientists in this area), followed by a large conference at which the work still remaining to be done would be outlined. In preparing for this conference, which was scheduled to take place in April 1943, Oppenheimer was helped enormously by Isidor Rabi, who became, as Hans Bethe put it, ‘the fatherly advisor to Oppie’.

  Oppenheimer himself moved to New Mexico on 16 March 1943, about three weeks before most of the other scientists and about a month before the conference was due to start. Shortly before he left Berkeley, an incident, later widely known as the ‘Chevalier Affair’, took place that would come to haunt him for the rest of his life. It happened at the Oppenheimers’ home during a dinner party they gave for the Chevaliers, knowing that they would not be seeing them again for a long time. Shortly before, Chevalier had been approached by George Eltenton, a British chemist and member of the Communist Party who lived in Berkeley and worked for Shell. Towards the end of 1942, Eltenton himself had been approached by people from the Soviet consulate in San Francisco, asking him if he knew anything about the work being done at the Rad Lab at Berkeley – work which, the Soviets believed, was of great military importance.

  One reason they had for this belief was that Steve Nelson had been tipped off about it by a member of the Young Communist League called Lloyd Lehmann, who, on 10 October 1942, was caught on the FBI microphones installed in Nelson’s house telling Nelson that ‘an important weapon was being developed’. Unfortunately for Oppenheimer, Nelson and Lehmann then went on to talk about someone working on the project who was ‘considered a “Red”’, who had been involved in the Teachers’ Committee and the Spanish Committee, but whom the government allowed to remain because he was such a good scientist. As the FBI would have been quick to realise, the man meant here was most likely Oppenheimer. Much more damaging were the remarks caught by the microphone about Rossi Lomanitz, who, it was said, was working on the project, but was considering quitting it’.fn47 To this, Nelson was heard to say that it was important that Lomanitz stay on the project in order to provide the Party with information about it. Naturally, it was agreed, Lomanitz would have to function as an undercover Party member. This recorded conversation in Nelson’s house would have extremely far-reaching consequences for Lomanitz. For the rest of the war he would be kept under tight surveillance, and strict measures would be taken to separate him from any military and government secrets.

  In response to this request for information about the projected new weapon, Eltenton told Peter Ivanov from the Soviet consulate that he would ask Chevalier to approach Oppenheimer. Chevalier agreed to do what he could, with the result that, when he arrived at the Oppenheimers’ home for the dinner party, he was, essentially, on a spying mission. Chevalier’s side of the story – given in his memoir, The Story of a Friendship – is that he was not approaching Oppenheimer for information, but rather alerting him to the fact that Eltenton had proposed sharing whatever information he had with Soviet scientists. It is, however, rather diff
icult to believe that, not least because Chevalier’s wife, Barbara, has dismissed it as a fabrication. According to her: ‘Haakon was one hundred per cent in favor of finding out what Oppie was doing and reporting it back to Eltenton. I believe Haakon also believed that Oppie would be in favor of cooperating with the Russians. I know because we had a big fight over it beforehand.’

  Oppenheimer, at his security hearing in 1954, said that, at this dinner party, Chevalier followed him into the kitchen and, when the two of them were alone, told him that he had seen George Eltenton recently and that Eltenton had a ‘means of getting technical information to Soviet scientists’. Oppenheimer says he reacted to this by saying something like ‘But that is treason’ or ‘That is a terrible thing to do’, with which Chevalier agreed and no more was said: ‘It was a brief conversation.’

  Eltenton later told the FBI that, after this dinner, Chevalier told him there was ‘no chance whatsoever of obtaining any data’ and that ‘Oppenheimer did not approve’. He also said that the next time Ivanov came to his house, he told Ivanov that Oppenheimer had refused to cooperate. By this time FBI microphones had picked up several remarks indicating that Oppenheimer was distancing himself from his former friends in the Communist Party. In the conversation between Nelson, Lehmann and a third man mentioned earlier it was said of the scientist who had been considered a ‘Red’ that, though he had in the past been active in Communist Party activities, he was now ‘jittery’. Then, in December, they heard Nelson saying that Bernard Peters had told him that Oppenheimer could not be active in the Party, because of his involvement in a special project.

  Shortly after Chevalier’s ham-fisted and unsuccessful attempt to recruit him as a spy, Oppenheimer arranged to meet Nelson for lunch. ‘I just want to say goodbye to you,’ Oppenheimer told him. From a security point of view, Oppenheimer’s behaviour during this lunch was unimpeachable. He told Nelson that he was leaving to take part in work that was related to the war effort, but did not tell Nelson what that work was about or where he was going. The impression Nelson formed from this meeting was that Oppenheimer, influenced by his wife, was determined to make a name for himself, and that that determination was turning him away from the Communist Party. ‘I think now he’s gone a little further away from whatever association he had with us,’ Nelson remarked to a fellow communist a few weeks after this lunch with Oppenheimer: ‘Now he’s got the one thing in the world, and that’s this project and that project is going to wean him from his friends.’ Nelson was right; this lunchtime meeting in March 1943 was the last time he ever saw Oppenheimer.

  Nelson’s impression that Oppenheimer’s all-consuming interest in ‘this project’ was driven by ambition, and that this ambition was fuelled by Kitty, was surely right. Missing, however, from Nelson’s assessment was the importance of Oppenheimer’s deeply felt and lifelong patriotism. In the 1930s he had set out to build an American school of theoretical physics that would enable the USA to replace Germany as the leading centre for research in that area; now he had a chance to lead a project that would not only demonstrate the superiority of American physics, but would also, in so doing, equip the US with a weapon that would enable it to win the war against Germany.

  The idea that he would endanger this position for the sake of doing a favour to old friends, or for the sake of enabling the Soviet Union to build a bomb of its own, is risible, as Chevalier had discovered. In arranging his farewell dinner with Chevalier and his farewell lunch with Nelson, there is a sense that Oppenheimer was not only saying goodbye to them, but was also marking the transition in his life from one phase to another. As he prepared to leave for New Mexico, he evidently saw himself as leaving behind not only his old comrades, but also his politically radical past. As he was to discover, however, the security services saw it rather differently.

  * * *

  fn44 The reactor Fermi was building was one that would use uranium-238 to generate nuclear energy through fission. Being a reactor rather than a bomb, it needed slow neutrons rather than fast ones, the aim being to produce a controlled fission chain reaction, not an explosion. The piles of graphite were to serve as what is called a ‘moderator’, the purpose of which is to slow the neutrons down. A by-product of this kind of reactor is plutonium. If it worked, Fermi’s experiment would show two crucial facts: first, that it is possible to initiate a chain reaction in uranium-238; and second, that it is possible to produce plutonium on a more or less industrial scale.

  fn45 Just as Oak Ridge was ‘Site X’, so Hanford was ‘Site W’, the electromagnetic plant at Oak Ridge was ‘Y-12’, the gaseous-diffusion plant was ‘K-25’, the uranium reactor at Oak Ridge ‘X-10’ and the thermal diffusion plant ‘S-50’.

  fn46 Gregg Herken, in Brotherhood of the Bomb, says it was on the train between Chicago and New York on 15 October 1942, but offers no evidence for this.

  fn47 That Lomanitz was at this time considering leaving his work at the Rad Lab was confirmed in an interview with Martin Sherwin in 1979, in which he discussed his moral qualms about creating such a powerful weapon and said that when he mentioned those qualms to Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer’s response was: ‘Look, what if the Nazis get it first?’

  12

  Los Alamos 1: Security

  ‘BULLDOZERS MOVED IN, and other weird machines roared up and down digging ditches for the foundations of future buildings. Everything was conducted in an element of extreme haste and mystery.’

  This is how Peggy Pond Church, daughter of Ashley Pond, the founder of the Los Alamos Ranch School, remembered the noisy and bewildering chaos that engulfed her previously tranquil home in the first few months of 1943. The task of making real Oppenheimer’s vision of an atomic-bomb laboratory in his beloved New Mexico mountains was enormous and hugely difficult, the more so because it had to be done extremely quickly and, as far as possible, in secret. Several thousand workmen, none of whom knew the purpose of the facility they were helping to construct, laboured hard to build roads, homes, offices and laboratories, under great pressure to get everything done as soon as was humanly possible.

  Despite these intense efforts, when Oppenheimer arrived on 16 March 1943, nothing was yet finished. He and his family were due to move into the building that had been the headmaster’s house, but, like all the other early arrivals, Oppenheimer spent the first few weeks living, not at Los Alamos, but at a hotel in Santa Fe, thirty-five miles south-east of Los Alamos. The nearest city of any size, Santa Fe became the first port of call for anybody going up to the new laboratory. There, the Manhattan Project acquired an office at 109 East Palace, an adobe building in the oldest part of the city that had once belonged to a Spanish conquistador. This office was where all new recruits initially reported for work. To run it, Oppenheimer employed a local woman called Dorothy McKibbin, whose job it was to welcome new arrivals, issue them with security passes and arrange transport for them to Los Alamos. Until its task was finished, Mrs McKibbin never knew, and never asked, what the purpose of the laboratory was. Her devotion to both Oppenheimer and her task was, however, unerring, and her enthusiasm for greeting the scientists, engineers and others who descended on her adopted home town unflagging.

  Among the first scientists to arrive after Oppenheimer were John Manley, Robert Serber and Hans Bethe, whose wife, Rose, came a week before him in order to help Oppenheimer arrange the living spaces. The first to be housed in Los Alamos were Oppenheimer and Kitty, who, together with the infant Peter (his second birthday still more than a month away), were finally able to move into their new home by the end of March. Though not at all grand by normal standards, the Oppenheimers’ house, a one-storey log-and-stone cottage, was to become the envy of the entire Los Alamos community. Though it lacked a kitchen, it was one of only six houses on the Hill that had its own bathtub. Very soon, those six became known collectively as ‘Bathtub Row’, the most elite housing Los Alamos could offer.

  Most people who knew them well thought that Kitty was very pleased that her husband had been appoi
nted to direct such an important enterprise as the United States atomic bomb laboratory, and many considered her to be proud to the point of being haughty in her dealings with her husband’s employees, but it should not be assumed that she liked being at Los Alamos. On the contrary, her life there seemed to be one of almost unrelieved torment. She had no interest in doing what might have been expected of the director’s wife: holding parties and being at the centre of the laboratory’s social life. She took herself too seriously as a scientist and an intellectual for that. To begin with, she was given a part-time job as a laboratory technician, working with a team studying the medical effects of radiation, but she soon abandoned that, and sank into a listless, depressed and lonely existence, enlivened only by bouts of drinking, sometimes with others, but often alone. Peter, meanwhile, received little attention from either of his parents.

  Soon after the Oppenheimers came the Serbers, who, to begin with, lived in what was known as the ‘Big House’. This had previously been the boys’ dormitory and, with just one big bathroom in the entire building, was intended for single men. As those single men began to arrive, the unsuitability of the Big House for married couples became increasingly manifest (‘two or three fellows were embarrassed by walking in on Charlotte while she was taking a shower,’ Serber remembers), and, after a little while, the Serbers moved into one of the specially built duplexes. These consisted of two apartments next to each other, each apartment having its own bathroom, which, by the standards of the housing at Los Alamos, was luxurious to an enviable extent.