by Ray Monk
Of course, from a security point of view, the much more serious espionage of Klaus Fuchs was a far bigger blunder, but in that case Lansdale could perhaps take some comfort from the fact that it was a blunder committed by the British security services rather than his own. Unknown to Lansdale, however, there had been at least one other ‘blunder’ committed by his own team, one that led to the Soviets acquiring much more useful information than they ever got from David Greenglass. Again it involved a young man brought to Los Alamos in 1944, though this time a fully fledged scientist rather than a relatively uninformed member of SED.
The man in question was Theodore Hall. Known as ‘Ted Hall’ for most of his life, he was the youngest child of a Russian Jewish family, the Holtzbergs, from New York. The change of name came when he was eleven, when his older brother, Ed, discovered that a Jewish name was a barrier to employment. A precociously brilliant boy, Ted won a place to study at the prestigious Townsend Harris High School. Already he had dreams of being a physicist. When his mother asked what he would like for his twelfth birthday, he told her he wanted The Mysterious Universe by James Jeans. In 1942, just before his seventeenth birthday, Hall, who had already spent two years at Queens College, transferred to Harvard. There his imagination was fired by a course on ‘Kinetic Theory and Statistical Mechanics’, given by Oppenheimer’s ex-student and collaborator Wendell Furry. The following year, still only eighteen, Hall took a postgraduate class on quantum mechanics and attracted the attention of its convenor, John H. van Vleck, one of the ‘luminaries’ who had taken part in the pre-Los Alamos seminars at Berkeley in the summer of 1942. When Bush told van Vleck and Edwin Kemble, who was still at Harvard, that more bright physicists were needed for Los Alamos, Hall was one of those selected, becoming, in the New Year of 1944, the youngest scientist to work on the bomb project.
At first, Hall was assigned to work under Bruno Benedetto Rossi, measuring fission cross-sections using fast neutrons on the U-235 that was beginning to arrive from Oak Ridge. While he was working on this, in June 1944, Hall graduated in absentia from Harvard. Soon afterwards he was promoted to a new position as leader of a team making and testing equipment for the RaLa experiments. In particular, Hall and his team were making the ionisation chambers that would detect the gamma rays emitted from the radioactive lanthanum. ‘We were turning out ionization chambers like sausages,’ Hall later said. ‘It made me feel funny to blow up all those ionization chambers we had built so carefully. We would just destroy them and build some more.’
In October 1944, soon after his nineteenth birthday, Hall was given two weeks’ leave, which he spent in New York. While there, he decided to tell the Soviet Union about the work being done at Los Alamos. He was not recruited, nor was he bribed. His decision was made quite unilaterally and independently. When he tried to explain it later in life, he said: ‘It seemed to me that an American monopoly was dangerous and should be prevented.’ Hall’s method of contacting the Soviets was remarkable for its lack of guile. He simply walked into the offices of Amtorg, the Soviet import/export company, and told the first person he saw there, a man stacking boxes, that he had secret information he would like to share. The man put him in touch with Sergei Kurnakov, a writer and journalist who was also a low-ranking NKVD officer. When Hall met Kurnakov, he handed him a file that he had written containing a report on the activities at Los Alamos, which was subsequently sent to Moscow. By the time he returned to Los Alamos, Hall was officially a Soviet agent, with his own code-name: Mlad, an old Slavic word for ‘young’.
After his return to Los Alamos, Hall took part in several crucial RaLa experiments that culminated in a set of three, conducted in February 1945, which finally produced the smooth shock wave they had been looking for. The crucial step that made this possible was the invention by Luis Alvarez of an electric detonator that enabled all the shaped explosives to be detonated at exactly the same time. After repeating the successful experiment on 24 February, the design for ‘Fat Man’ was settled. ‘Now we have our bomb,’ Oppenheimer was heard to exclaim.
Almost as soon as the design was complete, Soviet agents received details of it. On 16 February 1945, Klaus Fuchs, who had been out of contact with the Soviets since his move from New York to Los Alamos in August 1944, met Harry Gold in Boston, where Fuchs’s sister lived. The information Fuchs was able to hand Gold was wide-ranging, detailed and accurate; it covered the design of the bomb, the metallurgy of plutonium, Segrè’s results on spontaneous fission in plutonium and much more. However, because of the convoluted logistics of espionage, Fuchs’s report did not reach Moscow until April 1945, by which time the Soviets already had a report on the two types of bomb being developed at Los Alamos, less detailed than Fuchs’s, but no less accurate. The source of this information was almost certainly ‘Mlad’, with some additional details from David Greenglass.
When Lansdale spoke in 1954 of the Greenglass case as the ‘blunder of the century’, he would not have known anything about Hall’s more serious espionage. The FBI, on the other hand, knew about Hall from the same source that they knew about Fuchs, Gold and Greenglass: the Venona transcripts. Unlike Fuchs, Gold and Greenglass, however, Hall, when he was interviewed by the FBI, made no confession; he simply denied everything. Faced with the choice of attempting to prosecute Hall on the basis of Venona evidence – and therefore revealing to the outside world the existence of that evidence – or of keeping Venona a secret at the expense of letting Hall go free, the FBI chose not to prosecute. Hall was therefore able to pursue a successful career as a scientist, ending up as the director of a biological laboratory in Cambridge, England, where he lived from 1962 until his death from cancer in 1999. Towards the end of his life, when his role in Soviet espionage became widely known through the publication of the Venona transcripts, Hall made an unrepentant statement, declaring that: ‘in essence, from the perspective of my 71 years, I still think that brash youth [his earlier self] had the right end of the stick. I am no longer that person; but I am by no means ashamed of him.’
What Fuchs and Hall handed over to the Soviets in the spring of 1945 – the design of the plutonium implosion bomb – was arguably Oppenheimer’s greatest achievement. Not that he himself had designed it, but it was he who had planned and coordinated the remarkable effort required to produce the design; he who had led weekly meetings of scientists to bring problems out into the open; he who had been able to discuss the mathematics of implosion with Peierls, the merits of various explosive materials with Kistiakowsky, the implications of RaLa experiments with Rossi, the invention of electric detonators with Alvarez, and to oversee dozens of groups of scientists employing hundreds of SEDs on thousands of experiments. It was the birth of what is known today as ‘Big Science’.
The effort involved in leading and coordinating a scientific project on such an unprecedented scale was having a physically observable effect on Oppenheimer. In 1944, he was still only forty, but he looked at least ten years older. He had always been slender, but, by the end of the year, his weight had dropped to 115 pounds (about eight stone) and he looked gaunt. He had been a heavy smoker for years, but now he was never without a cigarette or a pipe and his persistent, nasty cough got worse. He also drank too much, though in this respect he was outdone by Kitty, upon whom the strain seemed, if anything, to take an even greater toll.
As the wife of the director, Kitty was in a perfect position to be Los Alamos’s leading hostess, at the very centre of its social life. This was, however, a role she had absolutely no interest in filling. She and Oppenheimer gave parties, but they were infrequent and rather joyless affairs. While Deak Parsons’s wife, Martha, moved to fill the vacant position of social hub, Kitty became an increasingly isolated figure. ‘She didn’t get along very well with women,’ remarked Priscilla Duffield, Oppenheimer’s secretary, and her imperious manner and sharp tongue also alienated many men. Kitty was, Duffield said, ‘one of the few people I’ve ever heard men – and very nice men – call a bitch . . . She could
be really mean. She could also cause trouble for you, so you had to be very careful.’
It is a view echoed by many, including Phil Morrison’s wife, Emily, who recalled that, though Kitty could be ‘very bewitching’, she was certainly ‘someone to be wary of’. Kitty would, Emily Morrison later said, adopt and reject people apparently at random, so that even those she treated well felt insecure in her friendship, watching her be mean to others and wondering whether they would be next to feel her spite. Of the people she suddenly turned on, one of the most difficult for Oppenheimer was Charlotte Serber, who, for some reason, Kitty suddenly stopped having anything to do with. ‘Everybody was aware of it, and it was very hurtful,’ remembered Shirley Barnett, the wife of the Oppenheimers’ paediatrician. ‘But Kitty was capable of that.’ Barnett herself was adopted by Kitty as a companion, because, she thought, ‘I was young and less threatening than the others.’ Kitty would take her shopping to Santa Fe or Albuquerque. ‘She always had a bottle of something with her when she was driving, and you could always tell when she was getting drunk because she would talk more freely.’ ‘She was fascinating,’ Barnett concluded, ‘but not very nice.’
Jackie Oppenheimer, who came to Los Alamos in early 1945, when Frank was transferred there from Oak Ridge, recalled her own unhappy experiences of Kitty and her drinking:
It was known that we didn’t get on well together and she seemed determined that we should be seen together. On one occasion she asked me to cocktails – this was four o’clock in the afternoon. When I arrived, there was Kitty and just four or five other women – drinking companions – and we just sat there with very little conversation – drinking. It was awful and I never went again.
Making Kitty’s life more difficult, and driving her deeper into alcoholism, was the birth of her daughter, Katherine. ‘Toni’, as she would be known throughout her life, was born on 7 December 1944, right in the middle of the most intense period of Oppenheimer’s time as director. This was when the search for a workable implosion design was at its most feverish, and before it was known that it would end successfully. It was when Oppenheimer was at his busiest and most anxious, and, though the baby was publicly heralded as a source of great delight and an endless stream of visitors came to the hospital specially to see her and to share (what was assumed to be) the Oppenheimers’ joy, the truth was, at that point in their lives, the responsibility of looking after a baby was the very last thing either Kitty or Robert Oppenheimer wanted.
Jackie Oppenheimer was shocked when she arrived at Los Alamos to discover that, after Toni’s birth, Kitty ‘would go off on a shopping trip for days to Albuquerque or even to the West Coast and leave the children in the hands of a maid’. Even more shocking to some was the fact that in April 1945, when Toni was just four months old, Kitty left Los Alamos for Pittsburgh, taking Peter, now nearly four years old, with her, but leaving baby Toni in the hands of a friend called Pat Sherr, who had recently had a miscarriage. She would not return for three and a half months, during which time Oppenheimer, fantastically busy, showed little inclination to spend much time with his daughter. ‘It was all very strange,’ Sherr later said. ‘He would come and sit and chat with me, but he wouldn’t ask to see the baby.’ Then, one day, shortly before Kitty’s return, Oppenheimer asked Sherr if she would like to adopt Toni. ‘Of course not,’ Sherr replied. Why would he even ask such a thing? ‘Because,’ said Oppenheimer, ‘I can’t love her.’
Poor little Toni arrived at a bad time, her first six months coinciding with the preparations for perhaps the most momentous scientific experiment in history: the test of the implosion bomb. The decision to conduct a full-scale test of an implosion bomb had been made back in March 1944, a month or so before it was finally established that implosion was the only hope for a plutonium bomb. Implosion was such a complicated and as yet little-understood process that it was felt such a test would be necessary. Responsibility for organising the test was given to E-9, a specially created group of the Engineering Division, which after the massive reorganisation of the late summer of 1944 became ‘X-2 Development, Engineering, Tests’, part of Kistiakowsky’s Explosives Division. The group leader was Kenneth Bainbridge.
In March 1945, X-2 was dissolved and Bainbridge was put in charge of what by then had acquired the name ‘Trinity Project’. When Oppenheimer was asked many years later about the name ‘Trinity’, he gave characteristically evasive answers. In 1962, Groves himself asked Oppenheimer about it, suggesting that perhaps the name was chosen because it would be inconspicuous in an area where a lot of rivers and peaks were called ‘Trinity’. In his reply, Oppenheimer rejected that suggestion. ‘Why I chose the name,’ he told Groves, ‘is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne,fn55 written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation’:
As West and East
In all flat Maps – and I am one – are one
So death doth touch the Resurrection.
‘That still does not make a Trinity,’ Oppenheimer acknowledged, ‘but in another, better known devotional poemfn56 Donne opens, “Batter my heart, three person’d God”; beyond this, I have no clues whatever.’
These allusions to Donne suggest that Oppenheimer chose the name in memory of Jean Tatlock, who loved Donne’s poetry, but it also seems possible that the name occurred to Oppenheimer in memory of the ‘pygmy triumvirate’, the ‘great troika’ of which he had been a part during his first trip to New Mexico. After all, the site chosen for the Trinity test, the Jornada del Muerto region north-west of Alamogordo, was not very far from areas of New Mexico – Roswell and Albuquerque, in particular – associated with that group, especially with Paul Horgan, the man who had coined those names.
The decision to use the Jornada del Muerto was made in September 1944, after which the US army took steps to secure an area occupying more than 400 square miles for the use of the test. On this site a base camp was constructed, which was ready by the end of December 1944. This then became home to a detachment of military police led by Lieutenant H.C. Bush.
With the successful conclusion of the implosion research in February 1945, Groves announced that the design of ‘Fat Man’ was frozen. That job was finished. The following month, Oppenheimer created a new division, the Trinity Project Division, made up chiefly of scientists from the Research Division, which would have responsibility for the coming test in Jornada del Muerto. The division leader was Kenneth Bainbridge. Despite all the work that had been done on the metallurgy of plutonium, the energy release of fission using fast neutrons, and so on, there was little consensus on exactly how big the blast would be when the Fat Man bomb went off. Some were still sceptical that it would work at all, while among those who expected some kind of explosion the estimates of the energy yield, in terms of equivalent amounts of TNT, varied from 200 to 10,000 tons.
As Bainbridge was beginning the preparations for the Trinity test, the world outside Los Alamos was changing quickly and drastically. Hitler’s Third Reich was collapsing rapidly, under assault from the east by the Russians, from the west by the Allies, and from the air by the most relentless and deadly bombing campaign the world had ever seen. In February 1945 the historic city of Dresden was reduced to a smoking ruin when nearly 4,000 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices were dropped on it by more than 1,000 British and American heavy bombers. About 25,000 people were killed and more or less the entire city was destroyed. Berlin, too, came under heavy bombardment, and by April Russian tanks were approaching the city.
On 12 April 1945, on the brink of victory over the Germans, President Roosevelt suddenly died of a brain haemorrhage. At Los Alamos, three days later, a memorial service was held in a cinema, at which Oppenheimer, as Philip Morrison later put it, ‘spoke very quietly for two or three minutes out of his heart and ours’. The memorial address that Oppenheimer gave on that occasion has subsequently been published, revealing its eloquence to be tinged with a slightly histrionic note that was p
erhaps in keeping with the mood of his audience. ‘We have been living through years of great evil,’ Oppenheimer said, ‘and of great terror.’
Roosevelt has been our President, our Commander-in-Chief and, in an old-fashioned and unperverted sense, our leader. All over the world men have looked to him for guidance, and have seen symbolized in him their hope that the evils of this time would not be repeated; that the terrible sacrifices which have been made, and those that are still to be made, would lead to a world more fit for human habitation. It is in such times of evil that men recognize their helplessness and their profound dependence. One is reminded of medieval days, when the death of a good and wise and just king plunged his country into despair and mourning.
He ended with reflections on a quotation from the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.’
The faith of Roosevelt is one that is shared by millions of men and women in every country of the world. For this reason it is possible to maintain the hope, for this reason it is right that we should dedicate ourselves to the hope that his good works will not have ended with his death.
Just over two weeks after Roosevelt’s death, Hitler too was dead, having shot himself in his bunker under Berlin on finally accepting that the war was lost. A week later, on 8 May 1945, the Germans offered their unconditional surrender.
At Los Alamos, the defeat of Germany did not in any way diminish the sense of urgency with which the newly established Trinity Project Division set about its task of organising the test of the plutonium bomb. Before attempting the full test, it was decided that a kind of dress rehearsal should be conducted, using 100 tons of TNT. The point of this was to calibrate and test the equipment that would be used for the real thing. This rehearsal took place on the morning of 7 May 1945. The TNT, stacked on a platform on top of a 20-foot tower, was exploded and measurements taken of the blast effect, the shock waves and the damage to equipment.
