Making of the Atomic Bomb

by Richard Rhodes

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  The bow of the Carpathians as they curve around northwestward begins to define the northern border of Czechoslovakia. Long before it can complete that service the bow bends down toward the Austrian Alps, but a border region of mountainous uplift, the Sudetes, continues across Czechoslovakia. Some sixty miles beyond Prague it turns southwest to form a low range between Czechoslovakia and Germany that is called, in German, the Erzgebirge: the Ore Mountains. The Erzgebirge began to be mined for iron in medieval days. In 1516 a rich silver lode was discovered in Joachimsthal (St. Joachim’s dale), in the territory of the Count von Schlick, who immediately appropriated the mine. In 1519 coins were first struck from its silver at his command. Joachimsthaler, the name for the new coins, shortened to thaler, became “dollar” in English before 1600. Thereby the U.S. dollar descends from the silver of Joachimsthal.

  The Joachimsthal mines, ancient and cavernous, shored with smoky timbers, offered up other unusual ores, including a black, pitchy, heavy, nodular mineral descriptively named pitchblende. A German apothecary and self-taught chemist, Martin Heinrich Klaproth, who became the first professor of chemistry at the University of Berlin when it opened its doors in 1810, succeeded in 1789 in extracting a grayish metallic material from a sample of Joachimsthal pitchblende. He sought an appropriate name. Eight years previously Sir William Herschel, the German-born English astronomer, had discovered a new planet and named it Uranus after the earliest supreme god of Greek mythology, son and husband of Gaea, father of Titans and Cyclopes, whose son Chronus with Gaea’s help castrated him and from whose wounded blood, falling then on Earth, the three vengeful Furies sprang. To honor Herschel’s discovery Klaproth named his new metal uranium. It was found to serve, in the form of sodium and ammonium diuranates, as an excellent coloring agent of ceramic glazes, giving a good yellow at 0.006 percent and with higher percentages successively orange, brown, green and black. Uranium mining for ceramics, once begun, continued modestly at Joachimsthal into the modern era. It was from Joachimsthal pitchblende residues that Marie and Pierre Curie laboriously separated the first samples of the new elements they named radium and polonium. The radioactivity of the Erzgebirge ores thus lent glamour to the region’s several spas, including Carlsbad and Marienbad, which could now announce that their waters were not only naturally heated but dispersed tonic radioactivity as well.

  In the summer of 1921 a wealthy seventeen-year-old American student, a recent graduate of the Ethical Culture School of New York, made his way to Joachimsthal on an amateur prospecting trip. Young Robert Oppenheimer had begun collecting minerals when his grandfather, who lived in Hanau, Germany, had given him a modest starter collection on a visit there when Robert was a small boy, before the Great War. He dated his interest in science from that time. “This was certainly at first a collector’s interest,” he told an interviewer late in life, “but it began to be also a bit of a scientist’s interest, not in historical problems of how rocks and minerals came to be, but really a fascination with crystals, their structure, birefringence, what you saw in polarized light, and all the canonical business.” The grandfather was “an unsuccessful businessman, born himself in a hovel, really, in an almost medieval German village, with a taste for scholarship.”444 Oppenheimer’s father had left Hanau for America at seventeen, in 1898, worked his way to ownership of a textile-importing company and prospered importing lining fabrics for men’s suits at a time when ready-made suits were replacing hand tailoring in the United States. The Oppenheimers—Julius; his beautiful and delicate wife Ella, artistically trained, from Baltimore; Robert, born April 22, 1904; and Frank, Robert’s sidekick brother, eight years younger—could afford to summer in Europe and frequently did so.

  Julius and Ella Oppenheimer were people of dignity and some caution, nonpracticing Jews. They lived in a spacious apartment on Riverside Drive near 88th Street overlooking the Hudson River and kept a summer house at Bay Shore on Long Island. They dressed with tailored care, practiced cultivation, sheltered themselves and their children from real and imagined harm. Ella Oppenheimer’s congenitally unformed right hand, hidden always in a prosthetic glove, was not discussed, not even by the boys out of earshot among their friends. She was loving but formal: in her presence only her husband presumed to raise his voice. Julius Oppenheimer, according to one of Robert’s friends a great talker and social arguer, according to another was “desperately amiable, anxious to be agreeable,” but also essentially kind.445, 446 He belonged to Columbia University educator Felix Adler’s Society for Ethical Culture, of which Robert’s school was an extension, which declared that “man must assume responsibility for the direction of his life and destiny”: man, as opposed to God. Robert Oppenheimer remembered himself as “an unctuous, repulsively good little boy.” His childhood, he said, “did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things. It gave me no normal, healthy way to be a bastard.”447 He was a frail child, frequently ill. For that reason, or because she had lost a middle son shortly after birth, his mother did not encourage him to run in the streets. He stayed home, collected minerals and at ten years of age wrote poems but still played with blocks.

  He was already working up to science. A professional microscope was a childhood toy. He did laboratory experiments in the third grade, began keeping scientific notebooks in the fourth, began studying physics in the fifth, though for many years chemistry would interest him more. The curator of crystals at the American Museum of Natural History took him as a pupil. He lectured to the surprised and then delighted members of the New York Mineralogical Club when he was twelve—from the quality of his correspondence the membership had assumed he was an adult.

  When he was fourteen, to get him out of doors and perhaps to help him find friends, his parents sent him to camp. He walked the trails of Camp Koenig looking for rocks and discoursing with the only friend he found on George Eliot, emboldened by Eliot’s conviction that cause and effect ruled human affairs. He was shy, awkward, unbearably precious and condescending and he did not fight back. He wrote his parents that he was glad to be at camp because he was learning the facts of life. The Oppenheimers came running. When the camp director cracked down on dirty jokes, the other boys, the ones who called Robert “Cutie,” traced the censorship to him and hauled him off to the camp icehouse, stripped him bare, beat him up—“tortured him,” his friend says—painted his genitals and buttocks green and locked him away naked for the night.448 Responsibly he held out to the end of camp but never went back. “Still a little boy,” another childhood friend, a girl he liked more than she knew, remembers him at fifteen; “ . . . very frail, very pink-cheeked, very shy, and very brilliant of course. Very quickly everybody admitted that he was different from all the others and very superior. As far as studies were concerned he was good in everything. . . . Aside from that he was physically—you can’t say clumsy exactly—he was rather undeveloped, not in the way he behaved but the way he went about, the way he walked, the way he sat. There was something strangely childish about him.”449

  He graduated as Ethical Culture’s valedictorian in February 1921. In April he underwent surgery for appendicitis. Recovered from that, he traveled with his family to Europe and off on his side trip to Joachimsthal. Somewhere along the way he “came down with a heavy, almost fatal case of trench dysentery.” He was supposed to enter Harvard in September, but “I was sick abed—in Europe, actually, at the time.”450 Severe colitis following the bout of dysentery laid him low for months. He spent the winter in the family apartment in New York.

  To round off Robert’s convalescence and toughen him up, his father arranged for a favorite English teacher at Ethical Culture, a warm, supportive Harvard graduate named Herbert Smith, to take him out West for the summer. Robert was then eighteen, his face still boyish but steadied by arresting blue-gray eyes. He was six feet tall, on an extremely narrow frame; he never in his life weighed more than 125 pounds and at times of illness or stress could waste to 115. Smith gui
ded his charge to a dude ranch, Los Piños, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains northeast of Santa Fe, and Robert chowed down, chopped wood, learned to ride horses and live in rain and weather.

  A highlight of the summer was a pack trip. It started in Frijoles, a village within sheer, pueblo-carved Cañon de los Frijoles across the Rio Grande from the Sangre de Cristos, and ascended the canyons and mesas of the Pajarito Plateau up to the Valle Grande of the vast Jemez Caldera above 10,000 feet. The Jemez Caldera is a bowl-shaped volcanic crater twelve miles across with a grassy basin inside 3,500 feet below the rim, the basin divided by mountainous extrusions of lava into several high valleys. It is a million years old and one of the largest calderas in the world, visible even from the moon. Northward four miles from the Cañon de los Frijoles a parallel canyon took its Spanish name from the cottonwoods that shaded its washes: Los Alamos. Young Robert Oppenheimer first approached it in the summer of 1922.

  Like Eastern semi-invalids in frontier days, Oppenheimer’s encounter with wilderness, freeing him from overcivilized restraints, was decisive, a healing of faith. From an ill and perhaps hypochondriac boy he weathered across a vigorous summer to a physically confident young man. He arrived at Harvard tanned and fit, his body at least in shape.

  At Harvard he imagined himself a Goth coming into Rome.451 “He intellectually looted the place,” a classmate says.452 He routinely took six courses for credit—the requirement was five—and audited four more. Nor were they easy courses. He was majoring in chemistry, but a typical year might include four semesters of chemistry, two of French literature, two of mathematics, one of philosophy and three of physics, these only the courses credited.453 He read on his own as well, studied languages, found occasional weekends for sailing the 27-foot sloop his father had given him or for allnight hikes with friends, wrote short stories and poetry when the spirit moved him but generally shied from extracurricular activities and groups. Nor did he date; he was still unformed enough to brave no more than worshiping older women from afar. He judged later that “although I liked to work, I spread myself very thin and got by with murder.”454 The murder he got by with resulted in a transcript solid with A’s sprinkled with B’s; he graduated summa cum laude in three years.

  There is something frantic in all this grinding, however disguised in traditional Harvard languor. Oppenheimer had not yet found himself—is that more difficult for Americans than for Europeans like Szilard or Teller, who seem all of a piece from their earliest days?—and would not manage to do so at Harvard. Harvard, he would say, was “the most exciting time I’ve ever had in my life. I really had a chance to learn. I loved it. I almost came alive.”455 Behind the intellectual excitement there was pain.

  He was always an intensely, even a cleverly, private man, but late in life he revealed himself to a group of sensitive friends, a revelation that certainly reaches back all the way to his undergraduate years. “Up to now,” he told that group in 1963, “and even more in the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence, I hardly took an action, hardly did anything or failed to do anything, whether it was a paper in physics, or a lecture, or how I read a book, how I talked to a friend, how I loved, that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong.”456 His friends at Harvard saw little of this side—an American university is after all a safe-house—but he hinted of it in his letters to Herbert Smith:

  Generously, you ask what I do. Aside from the activities exposed in last week’s disgusting note, I labor, and write innumerable theses, notes, poems, stories, and junk; I go to the math lib[rary] and read and to the Phil lib and divide my time between Meinherr [Bertrand] Russell and the contemplation of a most beautiful and lovely lady who is writing a thesis on Spinoza—charmingly ironic, at that, don’t you think? I make stenches in three different labs, listen to Allard gossip about Racine, serve tea and talk learnedly to a few lost souls, go off for the weekend to distill the low grade energy into laughter and exhaustion, read Greek, commit faux pas, search my desk for letters, and wish I were dead. Voila.457

  Part of that exaggerated death wish is Oppenheimer making himself interesting to his counselor, but part of it is pure misery—considering its probable weight, rather splendidly and courageously worn.

  Both of Oppenheimer’s closest college friends, Francis Fergusson and Paul Horgan, agree that he was prone to baroque exaggeration, to making more of things than things could sustain on their own.458 Since that tendency would eventually ruin his life, it deserves to be examined. Oppenheimer was no longer a frightened boy, but he was still an insecure and uncertain young man. He sorted among information, knowledge, eras, systems, languages, arcane and apposite skills in the spirit of trying them on for size. Exaggeration made it clear that he knew you knew how awkwardly they fit (and self-destructively at the same time supplied the awkwardness). That was perhaps its social function. Deeper was worse. Deeper was self-loathing, “a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong.” Nothing was yet his, nothing was original, and what he had appropriated through learning he thought stolen and himself a thief: a Goth looting Rome. He loved the loot but despised the looter. He was as clear as Harry Moseley was clear in his last will about the difference between collectors and creators. At the same time, intellectual controls were the only controls he seems to have found at that point in his life, and he could hardly abandon them.

  He tried writing, poems and short stories. His college letters are those of a literary man more than of a scientist. He would keep his literary skills and they would serve him well, but he acquired them first of all for the access he thought they might open to self-knowledge. At the same time, he hoped writing would somehow humanize him. He read The Waste Land, newly published, identified with its Weltschmerz and began to seek the stern consolations of Hindu philosophy. He worked through the rigors of Bertrand Russell’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s three-volume Principia Mathematica with Whitehead himself, newly arrived—only one other student braved the seminar—and prided himself throughout his life on that achievement. Crucially, he began to find the physics that underlay the chemistry, as he had found crystals emerging in clarity from the historical complexity of rocks: “It came over me that what I liked in chemistry was very close to physics; it’s obvious that if you were reading physical chemistry and you began to run into thermodynamical and statistical mechanical ideas you’d want to find out about them. . . . It’s a very odd picture; I never had an elementary course in physics.”459

  He worked in the laboratory of Percy Bridgman, many years later a Nobel laureate, “a man,” says Oppenheimer, “to whom one wanted to be an apprentice.”460 He learned much of physics, but haphazardly. He graduated a chemist and was foolhardy enough to imagine that Ernest Rutherford would welcome him at Cambridge, where the Manchester physicist had moved in 1919 to take over direction of the Cavendish from the aging J. J. Thomson. “But Rutherford wouldn’t have me,” Oppenheimer told a historian later. “He didn’t think much of Bridgman and my credentials were peculiar and not impressive, and certainly not impressive to a man with Rutherford’s common sense. . . . I don’t even know why I left Harvard, but I somehow felt that [Cambridge] was more near the center.”461 Nor would Bridgman’s letter of recommendation, though well meant, have helped with Rutherford. Oppenheimer had a “perfectly prodigious power of assimilation,” the Harvard physicist wrote, and “his problems have in many cases shown a high degree of originality in treatment and much mathematical power.” But “his weakness is on the experimental side. His type of mind is analytical, rather than physical, and he is not at home in the manipulations of the laboratory.” Bridgman said honestly that he thought Oppenheimer “a bit of a gamble.”462 On the other hand, “if he does make good at all, I believe that he will be a very unusual success.” After another healing summer in New Mexico with Paul Horgan and old friends from the summer of 1921, Oppenheimer went off to Cambridge to attack the center where he could.

  J. J. Thomson still worked at the Cavendish. He let Oppen
heimer in. “I am having a pretty bad time,” Oppenheimer wrote to Francis Fergusson at Oxford on November 1. “The lab work is a terrible bore, and I am so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything. . . . The lectures are vile.” Yet he thought “the academic standard here would depeople Harvard overnight.”463 He worked in one corner of a large basement room at the Cavendish (the Garage, it was called); Thomson worked in another. He labored painfully to make thin films of beryllium for an experiment he seems never to have finished—James Chadwick, who had moved down from Manchester and was now Rutherford’s assistant director of research, later put them to use. “The business of the laboratory was really quite a sham,” Oppenheimer recalled, “but it got me into the laboratory where I heard talk and found out a good deal of what people were interested in.”464

  Postwar work on quantum theory was just then getting under way. It excited Oppenheimer enormously. He wanted to be a part of it. He was afraid he might be too late. All his learning had come easily before. At Cambridge he hit the wall.

  It was as much an emotional wall as an intellectual, probably more. “The melancholy of the little boy who will not play because he has been snubbed,” he described it three years later, after he broke through.465 The British gave him the same silent treatment they had given Niels Bohr, but he lacked Bohr’s hard-earned self-confidence. Herbert Smith sensed the approaching disaster. “How is Robert doing?” he wrote Fergusson. “Is frigid England hellish socially and climatically, as you found it? Or does he enjoy its exoticism? I’ve a notion, by the way, that your ability to show him about should be exercised with great tact, rather than in royal profusion. Your [two] years’ start and social adaptivity are likely to make him despair. And instead of flying at your throat . . . I’m afraid he’d merely cease to think his own life worth living.”466 Oppenheimer wrote Smith in December that he had not been busy “making a career for myself. . . . Really I have been engaged in the far more difficult business of making myself for a career.”467 It was worse than that. He was in fact, as he later said, “on the point of bumping myself off. This was chronic.”468 He saw Fergusson at Christmastime in Paris and reported despair at his lab work and frustration with sexual ventures. Then, contradicting Smith’s prediction, he flew at Fergusson’s throat and tried to strangle him. Fergusson easily set him aside. Back at Cambridge Oppenheimer tried a letter of explanation. He wrote that he was sending Fergusson a “noisy” poem. “I have left out, and that is probably where the fun came in, just as I did in Paris, the awful fact of excellence; but as you know, it is that fact now, combined with my inability to solder two copper wires together, which is probably succeeding in getting me crazy.”469