Before the Fallout

by Diana Preston

  Time would, however, show that the stout, ebullient, rough-edged Leslie Groves was an excellent choice. He might not be particularly good with people, but he had an impressive facility for grasping essentials, identifying problems, and securing solutions. Born in Albany, New York, in 1896, Groves—known to his family as Dick—was the descendant, on his father's side, of Protestant Huguenots who had fled religious persecution in France and emigrated to the United States in the seventeenth century. Their family name—originally Le Gros—became first La Groves and then simply Groves. On his mother's side, Groves came from Welsh farming stock.

  Groves's father, also named Leslie, was a conscientious but indecisive man who attempted various professions with limited success, moving from teacher to lawyer to Presbyterian minister to army chaplain. His limited means made him frugal—a trait he passed to his son. He also bequeathed his son a distrust of the British. As army chaplain to the U.S. Fourteenth Infantry, he had marched with the international relief force sent to Beijing in 1900 to relieve the foreign legations under siege there during the Boxer Rebellion. The British contingent reached Beijing first, convincing Groves senior that they had selfishly kept to themselves intelligence about the best route into the city.

  Early exposure to army life confirmed to the young Groves that it was the career he wanted. He worked single-mindedly to secure a cadetship at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, succeeding on his second attempt. He gained the nickname "Greasy Groves," perhaps because of the sweet tooth he would retain all his life and his fleshy physique. However, he did well at the academy, graduating fourth in his class ten days before the end of the First World War. He chose a commission in the Corps of Engineers and moved on to train at the Engineer School, where the assistant commander noted his "very keen mind." In 1922 Groves wed his childhood sweetheart Grace Wilson, who as a teenager had shrewdly captured two of his overriding characteristics—stubborness and love of sweet things—in a little rhyme:

  This is Dick and this is fudge

  From it little Dick won't budge.

  In September 1942 Groves told Grace and their children that he had a new job, "that it involved secret matters and for that reason was never to be mentioned. The answer to be given if they were asked what I was doing was, T don't know, I never know what he's doing.'" Groves's passion for secrecy would be a hallmark of his running of the Manhattan Project.

  Groves embraced his new role with energy and resolve. The very day after his appointment he took steps to secure stocks of uranium ore, dispatching a subordinate to New York to see Edgar Sengier, managing director of Union Miniere du Haut Katanga, which owned the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in the Belgian Congo. Sengier had left Brussels for the United States in October 1939. Toward the end of 1940, fearing that the Germans might invade the Belgian Congo, he had ordered his staff to ship to New York all the uranium ore in storage there. As a result, more than i,2co tons of ore were sitting snugly in two thousand steel drums in a warehouse on Staten Island. Groves immediately arranged to buy the entire stock, as well as a further three thousand tons to be shipped from Africa, thereby securing two-thirds of the U.S. bomb project's required stock of uranium ore.

  Two days after his appointment, Groves authorized the purchase of the site in Tennessee on which a few weeks earlier he had been advising Marshall. On 23 September, the day his promotion came through and he formally took charge of the Manhattan Project, Groves caught the train to Tennessee to see the fifty-six-thousand-acre site for himself. It lay along the Clinch River in rolling hills near the small rural town of Clinton and would soon be named Oak Ridge after the ridges overlooking the site. It would eventually house the project's massive U-23c. production plants.

  Groves returned to Washington and moved into an austere suite of rooms in the War Department Building. As he later wrote, "It was undoubtedly one of the smallest headquarters seen in modern Washington. Nevertheless, I fell far short of my goal of emulating General Sherman who, in his march from Atlanta to the sea, had limited his headquarters baggage to less than what could be placed in a single escort wagon." He organized his small team on "simple and direct" lines so he could make "fast, positive decisions." Realizing that delays in obtaining resources could prove fatal, he insisted on being given a top-priority—AAA—rating. When officials objected, he threatened to advise the president that the project would have to be abandoned. The threat worked.

  Routinely working fourteen hours a day, Groves reviewed all the scientific work currently under way and visited all the key laboratories. He was particularly concerned about the work on plutonium development—in his view "an even greater venture into the unknown than the first voyage of Columbus." In October 1942 he arrived on the neo-Gothic campus of the University of Chicago, where, in early 1942, Arthur Compton had relocated research directly related to making plutonium for the bomb. The focus of this work was to achieve the chain reaction needed to create plutonium. The project, led by Enrico Fermi, who had moved from Columbia, was being undertaken in the so-called Metallurgical Laboratory, or "Met Lab," a name chosen—like the British "Tube Alloys" and the German "Virus House"—to deter the curious.

  Despite such measures, word of the Manhattan Project inevitably spread among the relatively small scientific community. In the autumn of 1942 Philip Morrison, a young physics instructor at the University of Illinois, was visiting Chicago at Thanksgiving and called on fellow physicist Robert Christy, who had studied with him at Berkeley. As Morrison later wrote, Christy asked, " 'Do you know what we're doing here?' " Morrison "admitted that it was easy to guess: this must be the hidden uranium project to which so many others had gone. 'Yes,' he said, in his familiar style of calm speech, 'we are making bombs.' " Within weeks Morrison too had moved to Chicago to join him.

  Groves, who would have been horrified at such casual conversations about classified topics, joined the Met Lab scientists at one of their meetings to quiz them "about the plutonium process, and the anticipated explosive power of an atomic bomb, as well as of the amount of fissionable material that a single bomb would require." He was shocked by their answer to the latter. He had expected their estimate to be accurate "within twenty-five or fifty per cent." Instead, "they quite blandly replied that they thought it was correct within a factor of ten. . . . while I had known that we were proceeding in the dark, this conversation brought it home to me with the impact of a pile driver." Groves accepted reluctantly that they could not yet be more precise, but, as he later wrote, uncertainty about this critical aspect would plague the project until, in 194£, they could at last test a bomb.

  Groves nevertheless left Chicago somewhat reassured about plutonium. What he had heard from the scientists convinced him that it offered "the greatest chances for success in producing bomb material." Although the process was "extremely difficult and completely unnprecedented," it seemed to Groves more feasible than trying to extract U-235 from U-238, where success depended on the scientists' skill in separating materials with what he thought were "almost infinitesimal differences in their physical properties." At the same time, with characteristic common sense, he decided to try all routes.

  The meeting had been important in another respect. It drew battle lines between the army and the scientists that would endure until the project's end. Groves was well aware "that scientists didn't like me." His characteristic response was "Who cares?" He was determined to assert his authority and show that, despite his lack of scientific background, he would not allow science or scientists to overawe him. He was fond of saying that "atomic physics is not an occult science." As a result, he made the scientists a speech that did him few favors: "There is one thing I want to emphasize. You may know that I don't have a Ph.D. . . . But let me tell you that I had ten years of formal education after I entered college. Ten years in which I just studied. I didn't have to make a living or give time to teaching. I just studied. That would be the equivalent of about two Ph.D.s, wouldn't it?" This crass self-advertisement left many of the scientists dism
ayed that such a man was in charge of their work. As they came to know him better, some would revise that opinion, but a common view of Groves as a bully and a boor had been born.

  Groves, in turn, had formed a fairly poor view of the Met Lab scientists, later writing that "the unique array of scientific talent that had been collected there was imbued with an active dislike for any supervision imposed upon them and a genuine disbelief in the need for any outside assistance." To an extent he was right. Leo Szilard, who had moved from Columbia to Chicago with Fermi, was among those who felt it would be impossible to work with such a man and said so. Groves, in turn, had no intention of working with Szilard if he could help it. Their brief meeting had convinced him that the Hungarian was an interfering know-it-all of possibly dubious loyalty. He tried to persuade Henry Stimson to lock Szilard up for the duration of the war as an enemy alien. Stimson refused on the grounds that such an act would infringe the Constitution. Groves later wrote that this was the reply he had expected but that it had been worth a try. In fact, Szilard would remain a thorn in Groves's side throughout the project.

  According to some accounts, within days, Groves had also alienated Ernest Lawrence. At their first meeting at Berkeley, he warned the Nobel Prize winner that he had better do a good job since his reputation depended on it. Lawrence replied, "My reputation is already made. It is yours that depends on the outcome of the Manhattan Project."

  · · ·

  Everything Groves saw and heard in these early months convinced him that the project was an enormously bigger undertaking than he had previously thought. This, in a sense, cheered him up. One of his objections to taking responsibility for the bomb program had been its apparently small scale compared to engineering projects he had directed. Groves decided, in the interests of efficiency and simplicity, to appoint the Du Pont company to take charge of the engineering, construction, and operation of the industrial-scale plutonium plants that would have to be built. Although Bush and Conant were content, Groves knew that he would face a battle with the scientists about industrial involvement.

  The Du Pont company was not initially enthusiastic either. Their senior executives pointed out that their expertise was chemistry, not physics, and that "they were incompetent to render any opinion except that the entire project seemed beyond human capability." Groves required all his guile and energy to win their agreement. He clinched it by appealing to their patriotism and their purse. The president, he assured them, considered the project to be of the utmost national urgency, and provision would be made to protect the company against financial loss. There would also be a government fund to compensate any employee injured because of "the entirely unpredictable and unprecedented hazards involved." As Groves later wrote, the fate of the luminous dial painters of the 1920s who had licked radium-tainted brushes had not been forgotten.

  While final negotiations with Du Pont were still under way, news came of a great scientific breakthrough at the Met Lab in Chicago. On 2 December 1942, Arthur Compton telephoned James Conant with the news that "the Italian Navigator [Fermi] has reached the New World." When Conant asked, "How did he find the natives?" Compton replied, "Very friendly." What this actually meant was that Enrico Fermi had achieved the world's first self-sustaining chain reaction. The nuclear pile he had built at a cost of one million dollars in a squash court under the west stands of the disused university football stadium had gone critical.

  It was a formidable achievement. Over four weeks, Fermi and his students had positioned fifty-six tons of uranium and uranium oxide between black graphite bricks, creating a great layer cake measuring twenty feet high and twenty-five feet wide. As they sought to achieve the self-sustaining reaction, Fermi and his team progressively removed from the reactor a series of control rods, allowing more and more neutrons to be released from the uranium. By 11:35. a.m. on 2 December, the counters were clicking rapidly, but then, with a loud clap, the mechanisms designed to ensure safety slammed the control rods back home. As Fermi later recalled, "The safety point had been set too low." It seemed a good time to go to lunch.

  That afternoon the team changed the settings. Fermi was highly nervous as the last control rod—nicknamed "Zip"—was slowly withdrawn and the moment of criticality approached. He had constructed his machine in the heart of the city and was attempting something never done before. Three scientists, known as "the suicide squad," stood by with buckets of a cadmium salt solution—a substance that sucked up neutrons—which they were ordered to throw on the pile if the nuclear reaction showed signs of getting out of control. But all went well, and an audience of forty gasped as the Geiger counters clicked and the line on the graph paper shot up as the chain reaction began. "The event was not spectacular," Fermi wrote a decade later, "no fuses burned, no lights flashed. But to us it meant that release of atomic energy on a large scale would be only a matter of time." After a run of twenty-eight minutes the pile was safely closed down again by reinserting the control rods. Eugene Wigner produced a bottle of Chianti in Fermi's honor. After drinking the contents out of paper cups, those present signed their names on the bottle's straw covering.

  With hindsight, this event would be seen as the great turning point—the release of a transcendental source of energy. Laura Fermi would call it the atomic age's only true birthday. Many would dismiss what followed as mere engineering. However, that was not how things seemed to Groves in late 1942 with his great task still ahead of him. Despite Fermi's success, there was still no firm proof that controlled chain reactions in a nuclear pile could be used to produce plutonium on a large scale—or that a bomb using plutonium or U-235 would explode. Fermi's experiments were based on using "slow neu­trons"—that is, neutrons that had been slowed down using a moderator, in this case graphite. In a bomb the neutrons would be "fast" because it would be technically infeasible to include a moderator.

  A section (number 10) of Enrico Fermi's uranium pile, which produced the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction

  Nevertheless, the Chicago experiment was highly encouraging. On 28 December 1942 President Roosevelt formally approved funding for industrial-scale production plants for plutonium and U-23c. Groves was content for the uranium-separation plants and a small pilot plutonium-production plant to be built at Oak Ridge, where construction would start in February 1943. However, he decided not to locate the huge plutonium-producing reactor plants there. There would be practical problems over acquiring more land and ensuring sufficient power and water supplies, but, more important, he worried "about the possible danger to the surrounding population. . . . If because of some unknown and unanticipated factor a reactor were to explode and throw great quantities of highly radioactive materials into the atmosphere . . . the loss of life and the damage to health in the area might be catastrophic."

  Groves drew up a list of criteria for the plutonium site, one of which stipulated that no town of one thousand or more should be within twenty miles. Everything suggested that a location should be found in the West. For two weeks a reconnaissance party searched from Washington State to the Mexican border. The site Groves finally selected was near the small town of Hanford in Washington—a scrubby, unfertile area of sagebrush along the Columbia River, mostly used for grazing sheep. The population was small, and land values were low. In January 1943 Groves initiated what would be one of the largest land purchases of the war: more than four hundred thousand acres and space enough for the gargantuan physical and intellectual challenge ahead. Hanford would one day have 540 buildings, 600 miles of roads, 158 miles of railway track, and hire 132,000 people.

  · · ·

  In Russia the Nazi invasion had interrupted the already very limited fission research program. Facilities and personnel were transferred to Kazan and other industrial cities beyond the Urals and scientists diverted to more urgent defense projects such as devising ways to protect ships from magnetic mines. However, in early 1942 a sharp-eyed physicist, twenty-eight-year-old Georgii Flerov, had noticed that the names of all the well-
known scientists understood to have been working on atomic fission had disappeared from international academic journals. Personally and passionately convinced of the feasibility of constructing a nuclear weapon and suspicious about "dogs that did not bark," Flerov wrote to Stalin, urging that the Soviet Union should build the uranium bomb without delay.

  Flerov's messianic enthusiasm chimed with reports that had begun arriving in Moscow a few weeks earlier from a Soviet agent in London: Anatolii Gorskii, code-named "Vadim." These reports detailed top-level British discussions of the Maud Report. They revealed to the Russians that Britain had decided to build an atomic bomb, that it would be likely to take between two and five years, and that some of the necessary plant would be built in the United States. The source of this information was probably John Cairncross, the so-called Fifth Man of the group of spies recruited by the Soviets at Cambridge University in the 1930s and at that time the private secretary to Lord Hankey, then a minister in the war cabinet.

  At first the Soviet Union was too preoccupied with holding back the invading Germans to react to the startling intelligence, but in March 1942 the government interior minister Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's notorious police chief, ordered a thorough review of the Maud information. Eminent Soviet scientists, including Abram Joffe and Peter Kapitza, were consulted in strictest secrecy. Although Kapitza believed a nuclear bomb to be theoretically possible, he said that the Soviet Union was not ready for such a step; an atom bomb was not a weapon for the war with Germany but a matter for the future. However, others, including Igor Kurchatov, who at the outbreak of war had adopted the Roman custom of refusing to shave until the enemy was defeated and was growing ever more hirsute, were more enthusiastic. Their comments persuaded Stalin to revive the Soviet Union's nuclear research program and, in the words of Stalin's devoted aide Vy ache slav Molotov, "to realise the creation of an atomic bomb." By a strange irony the Maud Report was thus the catalyst not only for the U.S. bomb program but for the Soviet one as well.