“We keep things quiet that way. The Belgian Union Minière guys, they pack it in suitcases, check it through. It’s down below the passengers, and the bags have heavy lining. No real radiation risk there, minimal dosage.”
Karl sat back and let warm bourbon flavor swarm up into his nostrils. “But . . . as baggage . . . ?”
“There’s a war on, y’know. Here, have another.”
• • •
On the train back to New York, Karl sat with Fermi. The Italian had been here advising another group at Oak Ridge, working on how to build reactors. The simplest way to make the new element, plutonium, was to put uranium ore in a box and let the decay deliver neutrons, making some plutonium, proving the method.
Fermi was tired, but together they relaxed and sipped some of the Groves bourbon he had bestowed on each of them. Wistfully, Fermi recalled doing, just two years before, the hard manual labor of assembling carbon bricks for a test. The physicists on the seventh floor of Pupin Laboratories started looking like coal miners. Their wives wondered what was happening.
“We looked like honest laborers,” Fermi chuckled, “real working men.”
To measure how well neutrons diffused through graphite, Fermi had gotten Columbia to give him a very big room in Schermerhorn Hall. They built a big pile of graphite, which is black, and so is uranium oxide. Handling many tons of both makes people very black. Fermi asked Karl to help, and Karl did his best, but it wore him down. He couldn’t think by the time he got home, so the evenings, when he often did his best work, were lost to him. It was harder to believe in serene mathematical beauties when you have dirty hands. Marthe got irked too, at having to launder his clothes just to get the black grains out. “Impossible! Dégueulasse! ” she cried in severe French. He had to ask and learned that dégueulasse meant disgusting.
Then the sciences dean had noted that there was a football squad at Columbia with many husky boys, who took jobs by the hour to get themselves through college. So why not hire them? Soon Karl found himself working beside undergraduates who could lift fifty pounds without blinking an eye. They would come in after football practice, wearing their sweaty uniforms. Columbia footed their laundry bills as well.
Fermi laughed as they reminisced. “Good work. We found how many neutrons a fission spits out, about 2.3, and how far they go. Crucial information, all classified, of course. That seems like a very long while ago.”
They were riding in a nearly deserted carriage, so Karl leaned forward and said softly, “How do we build the ‘gadget’? Groves has Oppenheimer looking at that, but I want to think ahead, see if there’s some simple way to do it.”
Fermi nodded. “I have been working on building the reactors. I do not think-a, if we get plutonium from them, detonation will be simple.”
“Why?”
“Plutonium reacts quicker than uranium. It will fizzle unless assembled very fast.”
Fermi gave him a significant look. There was more to the issue, but Fermi could not use technical terms in a public place—even though the nearest person was a soldier sprawled asleep two seats away.
Karl nodded and thought. It had taken him weeks of working through nuclear cross-section data, then using differential equations, to explore the intricate dynamics of colliding chunks of radioactive atoms. The U-235 spit out neutrons that raced ahead of any slug driven by explosives. The angry energies housed in the U-235 communicated with each other as if you slammed two blundering masses together. They could get to a critical mass as they approached each other.
For the mechanics, he had brushed up on old courses taken while he was a rather puzzled undergraduate. He had spent endless hours with his “slippery stick” as Marthe called it, the Keuffel & Esser slide rule that was the best at scientific calculations. They were not made by earnest German engineers and craftsmen, as he had at first thought, but rather came from a factory in Hoboken. Somehow it felt better to work with a Jersey product than a German one. Once he had the principles straight, the equations worked out and double-checked, the numbers tumbled out.
Karl leaned over and in a whisper said, “I calculate that with a slug of ninety percent U-235, you could make a simple ‘shotgun’ bomb. Shoot a plug of U-235 into a hollow cylinder of U-235, force fast neutron production. Maybe even one percent of the bomb could convert into energy—the equivalent of tens of thousands of tons of TNT, going off all at once.”
Fermi frowned. “Si, a ‘shotgun’ assembly, simplest. The Berkeley gang—Lawrence and Oppenheimer, mostly—want to use plutonium in them. Is too much of a good thing.”
Karl felt the clacking train accelerate, giving them more background noise to cloak their words. “Certainly plutonium has more energy per nucleus, but what happens to it during the microseconds while the ‘bullet’ goes through ‘the barrel’ at the center of a plutonium cylinder?”
Fermi’s eyes roved to the ceiling as he thought, remembering. “In my lab, we did this experiment. Take a few milligrams of plutonium and expose it in our atomic pile. I stood nearby while the operators at the big cubic atomic pile slid the exposed plutonium back out. The sample was behind lead shields, but the Geiger counter mounted on a wood table told the tale. The pile-exposed plutonium had ‘seen’ the uranium fissioning inside the pile, and now was spitting out alpha particles, electrons, neutrons. Mama mia, the entire radioactive zoo.”
“That strongly?”
Fermi nodded. “It’ll do that the first microsecond it charges down the barrel. The heat will stop the plutonium bullet and the whole assembly will blow apart, before we get critical mass. Of course we do not publish this.”
“Damn,” Karl said. “I figured that it would be a major issue, but—”
“We can make a quick shotgun device with uranium,” Fermi said. “Plutonium, we’ll have to be maybe a hundred times faster.”
They both pondered this in silence.
Fermi said mildly, “We also had something of a scare, at a meeting with Teller and Oppenheimer and the theory gang. We were just tossing around ideas.”
“Scare?”
“We were discussing whether a fission event could then give us the neutrons and energy to make hydrogen burn together—to fuse.”
Karl recalled that diagram that started it all, when Bohr spoke—the curve of binding energy. At the left side, the lightest elements had an energy gain if you could slam their nuclei together. But— “That takes a hell of a high temperature.”
“It does.” Fermi pursed his lips. “But it could happen. Coat a fission core with heavy hydrogen, we calculated, let the fission heat it—and that could make a far more powerful weapon.”
Karl was stunned. “Let’s stick to just fission.”
“I agree. But then Teller said, so hydrogen could work. Then why can’t a fission event ignite the nitrogen in our air?”
A cold sensation swept over Karl. “Could . . . could it?”
Fermi chuckled. “We calculated it together. The large electrical repulsion between the nitrogen atoms makes it not work, after all.”
Karl felt a kind of conceptual vertigo. “Thank God.”
“I thought you did not believe in God.” Fermi nudged him.
“I don’t . . .”
“Neither do I. But I believe in the devil, and his name now is Hitler.”
Karl sat in silence. So this bomb we’re working toward, it’s just the starter kit for . . . The rich southern land slid by outside as he gazed into an abyss. Fermi too caught the mood, and they sat staring into the distance.
“You are Fermi and Cohen, right?” a tall blond man said. Two men in suits had appeared and stood in the aisle, looking at them. Both were bulky, solid.
Karl and Fermi said yes. “Got ID?” the tall one asked, and the scientists showed theirs. Only a few years ago, Karl thought, he would have been insulted by such a demand.
The tall one said, “General Groves has assigned protective security to about a dozen of you key scientists. We’re your team. We got on at the l
ast stop.”
Karl and Fermi were stunned. The tall one said, “We spotted you because you were using technical words. Maybe not the best place to do that talking.”
Karl and Fermi nodded, reproved. The second man said to Fermi, “I am your bodyguard, Johnny Baudino. I gather your title is Excellency Fermi.”
Fermi laughed. Karl was vexed. “Why this?”
“General Groves fears that assassination-as-sabotage is a real possibility, sir,” the tall man said. “I’m your guard, Dr. Cohen. Eric Thompson. We’re with Military Intelligence.”
Karl sighed. More procedural trouble that would burn up time. He held on for another moment to what he felt now, a touch of dizzy revelation. The war had changed, off on a path few knew, but one that could be decisive. This was no longer the grinding, big-battle war the endless commentaries expected. Maybe, just maybe, a decisive weapon could end it quickly. This territory was the unknown.
So much for the freewheeling exploration of the early days. With huge stacks of money came controls, paperwork, and now guards. At least Marthe and Karl’s mother would get a laugh out of this.
• • •
A week later the laughs were gone. The rules General Groves had set could have been chosen by an old-world mother for her teenage daughter.
Enrico was not to walk by himself in the evening, nor was he to drive without escort to the newly built Teaneck Laboratory twenty miles from home. Fermi had resisted efforts to move the big reactor pile to Chicago when he learned the Manhattan Project wanted him to set it up in a squash court, inside a football stadium. So the pile got built in New Jersey. It became the model for many more in Washington State. Fermi often introduced Baudino to his fellow scientists as “my colleague,” saying, “Soon Johnny will know so much about the project he will need a bodyguard too.”
Karl had to endure the tall Eric Thompson, walking with him going to and from work. Eric spent most of his day playing cards with Urey’s bodyguard. It seemed a waste of manpower to everyone. Szilard’s guy didn’t like cards and instead spent his days studying for a degree in mathematics; he was a Hungarian. “I want to get something out of this war, see?” the man said.
2.
March 22, 1943
Walking home one somber day, with the wind still bitter, Karl thought about how he had gotten here. Rabbi Kornbluth’s insider ability to find a hundred thousand dollars or so among a half-dozen investors had been crucial.
That sum was nothing now, but it had been critical when he and Urey had nowhere to go for even ten thousand bucks. They built from that small foundation. A decent sum for the work of the Beams team in Virginia, and more for Fermi’s work, through Urey’s crafty grantsmanship in Washington. Now Groves came in and decided in their favor, settling a half year of disputes among the high committee that ran the whole shebang.
And now German tank forces were advancing around Kharkov, but the Brits and Americans had overrun German tank divisions in Tunisia. The war ground on, pluses and minuses every day.
He was lucky to be in the thick of things that mattered. If he hadn’t just gotten back from France with Marthe when Urey needed help, he’d now be at some chemical company, doing quality assurance or devising better industrial processes for explosives. He was a lucky man. Life was contingent, undetermined, and the big things you never saw coming.
As he came into their apartment, three-year-old Martine came squealing into his arms. He whirled her around, showered with shrieks, and they did a little dance for her to show off her footwork, better every day now. Marthe sat, heavily pregnant, enjoying the floor show and very carefully opening an onionskin letter. He went over, kissed her, nuzzled a bit. The letter was written in her mother’s thin handwriting, from occupied France. Her family referred to Marthe’s parents as Rama and Ripou. Ripou was a colonel in the French army, now sent back to Marseille in June 1942. He left the army, joined his wife. No word since then, an alarming silence.
“He has refused to command a prisoner compound,” Marthe said. “Doesn’t want to serve with the army or the Free French, either. They’ve gone into hiding.”
“In France? How?” Karl was astounded. He had gotten on passably with his in-laws, even when they tried to block Marthe’s returning to Paris from Lebanon to join him. Ripou was a stern, hard-line military type, a bit beaten up by running occupations in Lebanon and Syria. But that had kept him out of the collapse of the French in May 1941, and possibly had saved his life.
Marthe said, “By ‘going to ground,’ as you say in English.”
“Where?”
“Grasse, just inland from the Riviera. The Vichy government is looking for him—he’s a traitor in their eyes.”
“What? They could try him for refusing an order?”
“No one knows what, I gather.” Marthe frowned. “These Red Cross messages, only twenty-five words! But Rama wrote around in the margins.”
“So they’re holed up?” Somehow living on the sunny Riviera seemed not so bad, but he kept that to himself.
“With a vegetable garden, Rama says.” Marthe frowned. “She says she may have tuberculosis, too.”
“Damn! Anything we can do?”
Marthe gave him a wan smile. “Send a Red Cross package, perhaps.”
“Hell, send them ten!”
• • •
Bureaucrats now called the program the Manhattan Engineer District, apparently to make it sound dull and discourage speculations about where so much effort was going. The name stuck, although Groves moved most of the work from Columbia and his office at 230 Broadway to Oak Ridge, and later to big reactors outside the small town of Hanford, Washington, along the Columbia River.
Eric the bodyguard was always there at Columbia University. Levels of administration grew, though mostly at Oak Ridge. The pace accelerated. Improving the centrifuges became Karl’s focus.
Insights and observations from many scientists now passed before his eyes. He gave talks to larger and larger audiences of scientists and engineers. He learned to blend together work from many minds—ideas that had long since been field-stripped, sorted, and stowed in the toolbox with the serial numbers filed off. His world became one of low-leakage seals for rotating equipment, mass spectrometers for process analysis, leak detectors, circuit boards—all needed for both laboratory research and plant construction. This was not dispassionate science, no search for truth, but rather a new beast in the world—a targeted gamble to change the basic rules of warfare, by accelerating the damage levels to astronomical heights. And stop the Germans, who must be well ahead of the Allies. They had set up an entire group in Berlin when the USA effort was a dozen people at Columbia, with a budget measured in thousands of dollars.
The beginnings of all this now seemed to lie far back in the past, in a rosy, cozy world when he and Marthe had wed and the war was still only a haunting possibility. That age was gone. Now Karl worked long hours but took care to stay close to his family. He even pretended interest in Marthe’s joining a knitting group that made clothes for soldiers.
Amid the steadily rising din of Manhattan, he had done well. Urey gave him a raise, and shortly after he gained the title of director of the Theoretical Division at Columbia. The title covered only the centrifuge work and Karl knew it was because Fermi didn’t want to run the group. With the money he bought nine acres of mostly forested land far out in the boonies, mid-Long Island, beside a potato field. The land cost $550, and they bought it in ten installments. It frustrated him that they had to buy it under Marthe’s maiden name. The Realtor had hinted strongly that this would be far easier, both with the banks and the county offices, than for a Cohen.
They spent weekends there and Eric the silent guard dutifully came along too, pitching a tent nearby in the woods. He even enjoyed it, camping and swimming when it was warm. Karl bought an old black Plymouth and used carefully hoarded gasoline ration cards to get them there. They had a log cabin brought in and planted in the middle of their plot, and a well dug. Karl had t
o pump the water with the manual lever, hard work, so Marthe used every drop three times: drinking and dishes, bathing, and finally, washing the floors. They used kerosene lanterns for light, as there was no electricity for many miles. The iceman came weekly with huge blocks of cloudy ice for the icebox. Still, they all liked it, a small garden oasis far from the ever-noisier concrete canyons of Manhattan.
So much destruction had descended on the world now, it echoed through every hour. At times the world seemed to be insane. The 1930s had been crazy enough, certainly; there had been wars where people could take a streetcar to the front. Now the scale was enormous and the countless dead strewn across Europe and Asia were merely the Not Present on various roll calls, their voices forever stilled. Only their deeds testified to them now. The outcome of this monstrous war was still quite unsure. The only certainty was the death count, well into the millions, and accelerating by the day.
• • •
Security worries rose steadily. General Groves was startled by a piece in Time magazine titled “Science Hush-Hushed,” and called Karl in:
Exploration of the atom—chief interest of physicists—has come to a stop. . . . Such facts as these add up to the biggest scientific news of 1942: that there is less and less scientific news. Technical journals are thinner by as much as 50%, and they will get more so: much of the research now published was completed a year ago before the conversion of U.S. science to wartime uses had reached all-out proportions. A year ago one out of four physicists was working on military problems; today, nearly three out of four. And while news from the world’s battlefronts is often withheld for days or weeks, today’s momentous scientific achievements will not be disclosed until the war’s end. . . . Pure research is not secret now. In most sciences it no longer exists.
Groves tossed it on his desk. “Do you think this is a leak?”
Karl studied the story. “Just a smart reporter putting facts together.” He smiled. “It’s still a free country, even in a war.”
• • •
The Berlin Project Page 14
