Making of the Atomic Bomb

by Richard Rhodes

  My friends, both in Pasadena and in Berkeley, were mostly faculty people, scientists, classicists, and artists. I studied and read Sanskrit with Arthur Ryder. I read very widely, mostly classics, novels, plays, and poetry; and I read something of other parts of science. I was not interested in and did not read about economics or politics. I was almost wholly divorced from the contemporary scene in this country. I never read a newspaper or a current magazine like Time or Harper’s; I had no radio, no telephone; I learned of the stock market crash in the fall of 1929 only long after the event; the first time I ever voted was in the Presidential election of 1936.1717, 1718 To many of my friends, my indifference to contemporary affairs seemed bizarre, and they often chided me with being too much of a highbrow. I was interested in man and his experience; I was deeply interested in my science; but I had no understanding of the relations of man to his society. . . .

  Beginning in late 1936, my interests began to change.

  Oppenheimer reports three reasons for the change. “I had had a continuing, smouldering fury about the treatment of the Jews in Germany,” he mentions first. “I had relatives there, and was later to help in extricating them and bringing them to this country.” They arrived only a few days after his father’s death and he and Frank volunteered responsibility for them.

  Second, says Oppenheimer, “I saw what the Depression was doing to my students.” Philip Morrison, one of the wittiest of the young theoreticians, polio-crippled and poor, remembers in compensation the “very grave, very profound involvement in physics, the love of the whole thing, which we all had in those days.”1719 Oppenheimer could take his admiring students to dinner; he was unable to find them jobs. “And through them,” he testifies, “I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives.1720 I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.”

  He had no framework yet. A woman would help him with that, her involvement the third reason he gives for his entry into the world: Jean Tatlock, the lithe, chiaroscuro daughter of an anti-Semite Berkeley medievalist. “In the autumn [of 1936], I began to court her, and we grew close to each other. We were at least twice close enough to marriage to think of ourselves as engaged.” Tatlock was bright, passionate and compassionate, frequently depressed; their relationship was an ocean of storms. But so were Tatlock’s other commitments. “She told me about her Communist Party memberships; they were on again, off again affairs, and never seemed to provide for her what she was seeking.” The couple began to move together among what he calls “leftwing friends. . . . I liked the new sense of companionship, and at the time felt that I was coming to be part of the life of my time and country.”1721 He was taken with the causes of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War and the migrant workers in California, to both of which he contributed time and money. He read Engels and Feuerbach and all of Marx, finding their dialectics less rigorous than his taste: “I never accepted Communist dogma or theory; in fact, it never made sense to me”.1722

  He met his wife, Kitty, in the summer of 1939 in Pasadena. She was petite and dark, with a broad, high forehead, brown eyes, prominent cheekbones and a wide, expressive mouth. On the rebound she had married a young British physician, “Dr. [Stewart] Harrison, who was a friend and associate of the [Richard] Tolmans, [Charles C.] Lauritsens, and others of the California Institute of Technology faculty [Harrison was doing cancer research]. I learned of her earlier marriage to Joe Dallet, and of his death fighting in Spain. He had been a Communist Party official, and for a year or two during their brief marriage my wife was a Communist Party member. When I met her I found in her a deep loyalty to her former husband, a complete disengagement from any political activity, and a certain disappointment and contempt that the Communist Party was not in fact what she had once thought it was.”1723 The involvement was apparently immediate and intense.

  Probably with his wife’s encouragement, but certainly with his own growing good sense, Oppenheimer began to jettison political commitments that had come to seem parochial. “I went to a big Spanish relief party the night before Pearl Harbor,” he testifies in example, “and the next day, as we heard the news of the outbreak of war, I decided that I had had about enough of the Spanish cause, and that there were other and more pressing crises in the world.”1724, 1725 He was willing similarly to abandon the American Association of Scientific Workers at Lawrence’s insistence in order to help, as he supposed, to beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb.

  By then, says Bethe, though Oppenheimer had been a poor teacher when he began, pitching quantum theory well above his students’ untrained range, he had “created the greatest school of theoretical physics that the United States has ever known.” Bethe’s explanation for that evolution reveals the seedbed of Oppenheimer’s later administrative leadership:

  Probably the most important ingredient he brought to his teaching was his exquisite taste. He always knew what were the important problems, as shown by his choice of subjects. He truly lived with those problems, struggling for a solution, and he communicated his concern to his group. . . . He was interested in everything, and in one afternoon [he and his students] might discuss quantum electrodynamics, cosmic rays, electron pair production and nuclear physics.

  During the same period Oppenheimer’s clumsiness with experiment evolved to appreciation and he consciously mastered experimental work—hands off. “He began to observe, not manipulate,” a former student notes. “He learned to see the apparatus and to get a feeling of its experimental limitations. He grasped the underlying physics and had the best memory I know of. He could always see how far any particular experiment would go. When you couldn’t carry it any farther, you could count on him to understand and to be thinking about the next thing you might want to try.”1726

  It remained for Oppenheimer to learn to control his “beastliness” and submerge his mannerisms. But he was always a quick study. Significantly, he was least convoluted, most direct, least mannered, most natural living simply at his unadorned ranch in the Pecos Valley high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico.

  Oppenheimer first met General Leslie R. Groves when Groves came to Berkeley from Chicago on his initial inspection tour early in October 1942. They attended a luncheon given by the president of the university; afterward they talked. Oppenheimer had already discussed the need for a fast-neutron laboratory at the Met Lab technical council meeting on September 29.1727 He envisioned more responsibilities for that laboratory than basic fission studies, as he testified after the war:

  I became convinced, as did others, that a major change was called for in the work on the bomb itself. We needed a central laboratory devoted wholly to this purpose, where people could talk freely with each other, where theoretical ideas and experimental findings could affect each other, where the waste and frustration and error of the many compartmentalized experimental studies could be eliminated, where we could begin to come to grips with chemical, metallurgical, engineering, and ordnance problems that had so far received no consideration.1728

  Memory compresses the laboratory’s evolution here, however; Oppenheimer is not likely to have discussed eliminating Groves’ cherished compartmentalization at their first meeting. To the contrary, he goes on to say, the two men first considered making the laboratory “a military establishment in which key personnel would be commissioned as officers,” and he carried the idea far enough before he left Berkeley to visit a nearby military post to begin the process of commissioning.1729

  Groves remembers that his “original impression gained from our first conversation in Berkeley” was that a central laboratory was a good idea; he felt strongly that “the work [of bomb design] should be started at once in order that one part of our operation, at any rate, could progress at what I hoped would be a comfortable pace.”1730, 1731 His immediate concern was leadership; he believed that the right man at the helm could sail even the most ungovernable boat. Ernest Lawrence would have been Groves’ first c
hoice, but the general doubted if anyone else could make electromagnetic isotope separation work. Compton had his hands full in Chicago. Harold Urey was a chemist. “Outside the project there may have been other suitable people, but they were all fully occupied on essential work, and none of those suggested appeared to be the equal of Oppenheimer.”1732 Groves had already sized up his man.

  “It was not obvious that Oppenheimer would be [the new laboratory’s] director,” Bethe notes. “He had, after all, no experience in directing a large group of people. The laboratory would be devoted primarily to experiment and to engineering, and Oppenheimer was a theorist.”1733 Worse—in the eyes of the project leaders, Nobel laureates all—he had no Nobel Prize to distinguish him. There was also what Groves calls the “snag” of Oppenheimer’s left-wing background, which “included much that was not to our liking by any means.”1734 Groves had not yet wrested control of Manhattan Project security from Army counterintelligence, and that organization adamantly refused to clear someone whose former fiancée, wife, brother and sister-in-law had all been members of the Communist Party once and perhaps, gone underground, still were.

  The general wanted Oppenheimer anyway. “He’s a genius,” Groves told an interviewer off the record immediately after the war. “A real genius. While Lawrence is very bright he’s not a genius, just a good hard worker. Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up.1735 Well, not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn’t know about. He doesn’t know anything about sports.”

  Groves proposed Oppenheimer’s name to the Military Policy Committee. It balked. “After much discussion I asked each member to give me the name of a man who would be a better choice. In a few weeks it became apparent that we were not going to find a better man; so Oppenheimer was asked to undertake the task.”1736 The physicist demurred later that he was chosen “by default. The truth is that the obvious people were already taken and that the Project had a bad name.”1737 Rabi would come to think that “it was a real stroke of genius on the part of General Groves, who was not generally considered to be a genius, to have appointed him,” but at the time it seemed “a most improbable appointment. I was astonished.”1738 Groves on his way from Chicago to New York asked Oppenheimer on October 15, 1942, to ride on the train with him as far as Detroit to discuss the appointment. The two men met with Vannevar Bush in Washington on October 19.1739 That long meeting was apparently decisive. Security questions would have to wait.

  The next problem was where to locate the new laboratory. Already at his first meeting with Oppenheimer in Berkeley, Groves had stressed the need for isolation; however much or little the scientists who gathered at the new center would be allowed to talk to each other, the general intended to divide them away from the populace. “For this reason,” Oppenheimer wrote his Illinois colleague John H. Manley in mid-October, “some rather far reaching geographical change in plans seems to be in the cards.” (In the same letter Oppenheimer proposed “start[ing] now on a policy of absolutely unscrupulous recruiting of anyone we can lay hands on.”1740, 1741 He wanted the best he could get, and soon asked Groves for the likes of Bethe, Segrè, Serber and Teller.)

  Site Y, as the hypothetical laboratory was initially called, needed good transportation, an adequate supply of water, a local labor force and a moderate climate for year-round construction and for experiment conducted outdoors. In his memoirs Groves lists safety as the primary reason he insisted on isolation—“so that nearby communities would not be adversely affected by any unforeseen results from our activities”—but the high steel fence topped with triple strands of barbed wire that eventually surrounded the laboratory was clearly not designed to confine explosions. Groves was in the midst of selecting sites for Manhattan Project production centers; the difference between his criteria for those locations and his criteria for Site Y was that at the bomb-design laboratory “we were faced with the necessity of importing a group of highly talented specialists, some of whom would be prima donnas, and of keeping them satisfied with their working and living conditions.”1742 If that in fact was Groves’ intention, it was one of the few wartime goals he failed to achieve.1743

  The general assigned the task of identifying a suitable location for the laboratory to Major John H. Dudley of the Manhattan Engineer District. Groves gave Dudley criteria more specific than satisfying prima donnas: room for 265 people, location at least two hundred miles from any international boundary but west of the Mississippi, some existing facilities, a natural bowl with the hills nearby that shaped the bowl so that fences might be strung on top and guarded. Traveling by air, rail, auto, jeep and horse through most of the American Southwest, Dudley found the perfect place: Oak City, Utah, “a delightful little oasis in south central Utah.”1744 But to claim it the Army would have had to evict several dozen families and remove a large area of farmland from production. Dudley thereupon recommended his second choice: Jemez Springs, New Mexico, a deep canyon about forty miles northwest of Santa Fe on the western slope of the Jemez Mountains—“a lovely spot,” Oppenheimer thought in early November before he toured it, “and in every way satisfactory.”1745

  When the newly appointed director arrived on November 16 to inspect the Jemez Springs location with Dudley and Edwin McMillan, who was helping start the laboratory, he changed his mind. The canyon felt confining; Oppenheimer knew the region’s grand scenic vistas and decided he wanted a laboratory with a view. McMillan also remembers expressing “considerable reservations about this site”:1746

  We were arguing [with Dudley] when General Groves showed up. This had been planned. He would come in sometime in the afternoon and receive our report. As soon as Groves saw the site he didn’t like it; he said, “This will never do.” . . . At that point Oppenheimer spoke up and said “if you go on up the canyon you come out on top of the mesa and there’s a boys’ school there which might be a usable site.”

  Oppenheimer proposed the boys’ school site, grouses Dudley, “as though it was a brand new idea.” Dudley had already scouted the mesa twice, rejecting it because it failed to meet Groves’ criteria. But a mesa is an inverted bowl, its perimeter similarly fencible. And the first requirement was to make the longhairs happy. “As I . . . knew the roads (or trails),” Dudley says sardonically, “ . . . we drove directly there.”1747

  “The school was called Los Alamos,” the daughter of its founder writes, “after the deep canyon which bordered the mesa to the south and which was groved with cottonwood trees along the sandy trickle of its stream.”1748 Ashley Pond, the founder, had been a sickly boarding-school boy sent West for his health, like Oppenheimer, who returned to New Mexico in later adulthood when his father died and left him with independent means. He opened the Los Alamos Ranch School on the 7,200-foot mesa in 1917. It was organized to invigorate pale scions, as Pond had been invigorated: boys slept on unheated porches of a chinked-log dormitory and wore shorts in winter snow; each was assigned a horse to ride and groom. It was, Emilio Segrè writes, “beautiful and savage country”: the dark Jemez Mountains to the west that formed the higher rim of the Jemez Caldera, the slumped cone of the old volcano of which Los Alamos was eroded tuffaceous spill; precipitously down from the mesa eastward the valley of the Rio Grande, “hot and barren” except for the green meander of the river, writes Laura Fermi, with “sand, cacti, a few piñon trees hardly rising above the ground, and space, immense, transparent, with no fog or moisture”; farther east the wall of the Rocky Mountains as that range extends south into New Mexico to form the Sangre de Cristo, reversing hue from green to red progressively at sunset.1749, 1750 “I remember arriving [at Los Alamos],” McMillan continues of that first inspection, “and it was late in the afternoon. There was a slight snow falling. . . . It was cold and there were the boys and their masters out on the playing fields in shorts. I remarked that they really believed in hardening up the youth. As soon as Groves saw it, he said, in effect, ‘This is the place.’ ”1751

  “My two great
loves are physics and desert country,” Robert Oppenheimer had written a friend once; “it’s a pity they can’t be combined.”1752 Now they would be.

  Leo Szilard, urban man, habitué of hotel lobbies, took a different view of the location when he heard about it. “Nobody could think straight in a place like that,” he told his Met Lab colleagues. “Everybody who goes there will go crazy.”1753 The Corps of Engineers’ appraisal prepared on November 21 describes a large forested site thirty-five miles by road northwest of Santa Fe with no gas or oil lines, one one-wire Forest Service telephone, average annual precipitation of 18.53 inches and an annual range of temperatures from —12° to 92°F.1754 The land and improvements, including the boys’ school with its sixty horses, two tractors, two trucks, fifty saddles, eight hundred cords of firewood, twenty-five tons of coal and sixteen hundred books, were worth $440,000. The school was willing to sell. The Manhattan Project acquired its scenic laboratory site.

  Groves convinced the University of California to serve as contractor to operate the secret installation. Construction—of cheap, barracks-like buildings not intended to outlast the war, with coal-burning stoves and no sidewalks on which to escape the mire of spring and autumn mud—began almost immediately. “What we were trying to do,” writes John Manley, the University of Illinois physicist working with Oppenheimer then, “was build a new laboratory in the wilds of New Mexico with no initial equipment except the library of Horatio Alger books or whatever it was that those boys in the Ranch School read, and the pack equipment that they used going horseback riding, none of which helped us very much in getting neutron-producing accelerators.”1755 Robert R. Wilson, a young Berkeley Ph.D. teaching at Princeton, went up to Harvard for Oppenheimer and negotiated with Percy Bridgman for the Harvard cyclotron; Wisconsin would contribute two Van de Graaffs; from other laboratories, including Berkeley and the University of Illinois, Manley scavenged other gear. In the meantime Oppenheimer crisscrossed the country recruiting: