The New York Times headline was stark:
PAN AM CLIPPER CRASHES AT LAGUARDIA
Mysterious Yellow “Dirt” in Debris
A Pan American Clipper on the African route broke open on landing at LaGuardia Field yesterday, spreading suitcases and an unidentified yellow substance across the runway.
Karl handed the newspaper back to Groves. “So the yellowcake shipment got out of hand?”
“Dummies in the Congo put it in ordinary leather suitcases.” Groves grimaced and fingered his curly chestnut hair. “Uranium is heavy as hell. Screwed up the balance of the plane. The Clipper came in low. When the rear wheel came down it blew, the whole assembly fractured—blooey! Popped the whole compartment open, the plane slid all the way in. No fire, thank God. Passengers okay, but it spread luggage all over the landing strip. Ripped up the luggage. The yellowcake got out.”
“How radioactive was it?”
“Recall that cake I tossed into your lap?” Groves paced his Manhattan office, his belly protruding over his brass belt buckle.
“Warm stuff, then. How many were exposed?”
“Pan Am got them off the field pronto. “Undetected, pretty much, until some-damn-body wondered why there was so much yellow everywhere. And why the army sealed off the area, scraping up the stuff. About a ton of it.” Groves grimaced.
“I didn’t read about that.”
“The cheaper papers nailed it. We asked the New York Times, sure, but word got out on the newswire.”
All this had escaped Karl. “What were the Geiger counter readings at the airfield?”
Groves scowled, sat back down. “Pretty bad, if we’d left people to work around there.”
“So word didn’t get out about what it was?”
“Not so far. We had to hose down the whole airfield to get the dose count down too. People noticed, for sure.”
Karl paced, thinking. “The Germans can get the Times, right?”
“Yeah. So we’ve got to float some cover story. Any ideas?”
“Say it was a mineral used to make paint. Not really untrue, either.”
Groves considered. “Sounds right, yeah. I had a team with Geiger counters cover the area. Some residual radiation, nothing big.”
“It’s supposed to rain tonight. That’ll wash it away.”
“If the Times gets word it’s radioactive, there’ll be plenty more coverage.”
Karl nodded. “So ask them not to cover it.”
Groves looked startled. “You think they’ll do it?”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t like alerting newspapers that we have something vital going on here, see?” Groves shook his head. “Let’s hope it dies down.”
“The Germans might suspect, though, just from this story.”
Groves sighed. “A chance we gotta take.”
• • •
The war intruded everywhere.
He and Marthe went to see newsreels but few dramatic movies. The news was shocking, and sometimes they had to look away from the screen. But at least it was real. Hollywood had gone for patriotic schlock. Sherlock Holmes and the Invisible Man were updated and turned into Nazi hunters. Staged combat films always showed that Democratic Man was superior to the jackbooted automatons that tyranny creates. Since California had beaches, there were plenty of navy and marine assault movies. It felt odd to watch a film about this, when on the same day newspapers headlined amphibious assaults on islands hard to pronounce. Occasionally a gem came through, as when the film Casablanca appeared in November, just when the USA made its first direct attack on German forces with troops landing at Casablanca, North Africa. In the movie Bogart fought with quips, and in the real North Africa the US Army used tanks.
Karl had to admit the film was good, beyond its propaganda. Somehow scenes that seemed cliché nonetheless worked with quick humor and sounded sardonic notes. Marthe loved the Paris scenes, though of course they had been shot in Hollywood.
The country was changing, and they all felt it in the air. Loafing on the job had become synonymous with treason. Engineers were in more demand than infantry. Karl pledged to buy ten dollars a month of war bonds. Everyone feared the Germans were far ahead of the Manhattan Project. Fermi entertained a dinner party with a dirty physics joke he had invented. “Heisenberg, you see, he is a terrible lover. If he has the right position, he doesn’t have momentum.” The physicists laughed and their wives looked puzzled. Fermi went on, “And when he can find the energy, pffft!—he doesn’t have the time.”
When Karl explained this to Marthe, on the way home, she laughed dutifully. “So this is how you men learn your physics, eh?”
• • •
A week later Marthe was incensed. She held up a thin letter. “My cousin Pierre Malartre is in prison camp. His letter took three months to arrive—sent in January.”
“From where?” Karl ran his eyes quickly over the lines, in French, on onionskin paper.
“Germany—and look.” A big white sticker at the envelope’s end: INSPECTED BY 8349. “They’re reading our mail.”
“From a war zone, an enemy country.”
“I do not want them to!”
“It’s a war. Better they tell you about it, at least. What’s he say?”
“They had a terrible cold winter.” She paused. “I wonder if we can send him food through the Red Cross.”
“I think so. Look—he’s alive and out of immediate danger. Sounds like good news to me.”
“I hear so little from my family in France now.”
He sighed. “And a big hollow silence from so many of our distant relatives, scattered across Europe.”
“Jews.”
“Yep.”
• • •
Maria Goeppert Mayer came into Karl’s office waving a newspaper, eyes dancing. “What means this?” Her English was getting better but when excited she reverted to German sentence structure. Karl looked at the Daily News headline.
ROOSEVELT DENIES URANIUM IS FOR BIG BOMB
Yellow paint materials at LaGuardia not part of military program
“Damn!” Karl said. “How did this get out?”
Maria said, “A reporter got some yellowcake, had a chemist look at it. Some physicist I never heard of guessed it might be part of some bomb. A reporter got a question about it into the White House.” She looked a bit bewildered by how complicated news stories were in America.
“Crazy for the president to even answer this,” Karl said. “What a price we pay for a free press!”
Maria nodded. “Ja. Better than not free, still. But . . . this will send a signal to Heisenberg, for sure.”
“You’re sure Heisenberg is running the German bomb program?”
Maris sighed. “He is the obvious one. And smart enough to make it work, if the Nazis get out of his way.”
They stared at each other speechlessly. Karl resolved to definitely not bring this up with General Groves, at all. Best to stay away from him for a good long while.
• • •
More physicists flowed through Columbia. Many were Brits headed for Oppenheimer’s growing Los Alamos lab in New Mexico, devoted to figuring out how to make a plutonium bomb. Karl thought that was a waste of time. “Sure,” he told Teller, “if they get enough out of the reactors we haven’t built yet. But can they handle this new element we know nothing about?”
Teller scowled. “Oppenheimer thinks they can calculate . . . Um, yes.”
“We have uranium coming out now—not fast, but Oak Ridge is scaling up. We know how to build a U-235 bomb. We won’t even have to test it!”
“You think not?” Teller looked worried. “Drop on some target, the Germans find it—if it doesn’t go off, we give our hand away.”
“It’ll work,” Karl said more firmly than he actually believed. He had never designed a bomb before, and neither had any of the brainy bunch working seven days a week to give birth to one.
Still, through innumerable meetings and coffee chats a
nd blackboard arguments, a consensus grew. Their early estimate of a one-kilogram bomb was wrong, because the nuclear burn wouldn’t really be efficient. A somewhat enriched bomb of U-235 could weigh sixty kilograms—a cube six inches on a side—and burn up only 1 percent of its mass, yet still flatten a city. Karl calculated that he could hold an ounce or two in his lap for a month without any health risk. But assembled swiftly, neutrons would spit from one disintegrating nucleus to the next, and the whole cube would heat and explode.
The group had to produce neat visuals so the military could understand the major issues. Karl found himself using slides that reflected more confidence than he actually had.
They staged a demonstration of the shotgun assembly method, whose cover illustration was:
Assembly
Oppenheimer’s guys—it was all guys except for the secretaries—thought it better to make plutonium in the reactors being built along the Columbia River and slam it inward, in a spherical collapse. This idea too had a detailed report with a cover illustration senior officers could understand at a glance.
Following Oppenheimer’s talks, Karl stood to say many times, “Implosion is trickier. Much faster, sure. But we don’t know how to do it right now.” He learned that you had to hammer arguments home again and again. It was like framing a house, one patient nail at a time. At times the talking blotted out the physics, robbing him of what he most liked to do.
Karl argued before countless panels, “Remember, this has to be an actual bomb and will have to weigh a lot. It may yield a bigger bang, but the bomb will be so big we maybe can’t get it into any existing bomber.”
He had become privy to classified plans for the British Lancaster bomber, a big four-engine workhorse. The USA didn’t have any plane of that capability yet. The big Lancaster bomb bay could accommodate a shotgun bomb, just barely. The British adviser on aircraft called it an “A-bomb,” as even scientific reports did, copying from the old H. G. Wells story that confused nuclear and atomic processes. The shotgun nuclear bomb would have to fly in a Lancaster, so the British had to be brought in.
They had started to think about how to deliver a bomb, whose mass and size they were still quite uncertain about. But it would be bigger than any bomb ever used, that was clear.
General Groves was there, sitting in the back. He barked out, “Bring some pilots and engineers in on this. Guys who’ve actually flown those birds. We’ve got American pilots working with the Brits—get them.”
Then Groves left, hat tilted at a jaunty angle, striding out powerfully and not looking back.
PART V
* * *
MORAL CALCULUS
If you chase two rabbits, you catch none.
—Confucius
1.
November 1943
Karl inhaled the moist aroma of Washington Square with a sigh, glad to be back in his familiar New York. A week at Oak Ridge had worn him down with its endless details of the ever-larger centrifuge networks, the monotonous ferreting out of minor flaws—all to enhance the efficiency of capturing specks of U-235.
He had been encouraged to see that Oak Ridge was now a sprawling complex, a dizzying mix of accents. He was only momentarily startled when a man at the small cocktail party General Groves put on asked, “Would you like some ass in your drink?” It turned out the bartender was from Texas, a land Karl knew not. Ice did indeed improve the bourbon.
Oak Ridge’s busy hustle he had found tiring. Machine shops, transformer stations, test sheds, assembly lines, slapped-together plywood warehouses right next to barracks and cafeterias. Black Bakelite instrument panels, patchboard electronics, flickering oscilloscopes. Karl liked problems, but not the stale routines of squeezing every tiny improvement out of a running, ever-larger regiment of whirring centrifuges. Even his small discoveries came with the need to get some stiff military type, an officer with scrambled eggs on his hat, to sign the right paperwork.
Now he was headed to another meeting with Groves, cutting across Washington Square beside a pickup jazz combo playing for pocket change to an audience of NYU students and bums. By the big fountain splashing at the center, black boys did gymnastics for an earnest-faced covey of housewives holding shopping bags. Dogs capered and barked their pack signals near the chess hustlers crouched over the outdoor tables, waiting for naive prey to give them a little money.
Government regulations had limited fabric lengths, banished pleats, and forbade having more than one pocket. Men now had a slim trim in the pant legs and women looked more military—gray flannel suits, low-heeled shoes in polished fake leather, shoulder-strap bags, berets and felt cloche hats. Short skirts, too, which Karl enjoyed, and long-sleeved blouses with deep décolletages, often of rayon or cheaper stuff.
The war had seeped into everything. People listened to the news that ran in tinny, excited voices in bars and lobbies and even street corners. Chewing gum now came in cellophane, not tinfoil. Food and gasoline were scarce. A company marketed toilet paper with WIPE OUT HITLER and a sketch of Adolf on every tissue; it sold out everywhere.
The news was an anthology of disasters. Himmler had ordered Gypsies into the same camps as Jews, since they were an “under-race.” The marines had landed at an island nobody ever heard of, Tarawa, and took it with heavy casualties. The Soviet front was a slaughterhouse. Still, British bombers had hit a power station in Norway, and the fight in North Africa was going well.
Karl entered the elderly-looking, vaguely Moorish Hotel Earle. A liveried doorman directed him to a clanking elevator. Groves himself opened the door on a rather grand room where a tall, blocky man with a dark complexion sat in a high-backed chair, reading an issue of Le Monde. A Le Figaro lay on the broad arm of his chair. This seemed an expensive affectation to Karl, who noted the way the big man nonchalantly displayed them. He glanced at Karl, then back at his newspaper.
“C’mon,” Groves said in his bulldog growl, “other room. Where’s your bodyguard?”
“Called in sick,” Karl said. In fact, Karl had slipped away from Columbia without telling Eric Thompson at all. He didn’t like being “chaperoned,” as he called it.
They went into an office setup, a desk and files. A Colonel Ken Nichols, according to his name badge, sat at a desk covered with papers. Groves unbuttoned his wrinkled tunic, took it off, handed it to Nichols. “Take this, find a dry cleaner, get it cleaned right away.” Treating a colonel like an errand boy was part of the Groves way. Nobody should ever doubt who was in charge. Or as Groves had put it after he had a few bourbons in him, “Ass—kick it or lick it.”
Groves shut the door. “Don’t want Nichols hearing this. How’s things going at Oak Ridge? I get my reports, but I like to hear it from somebody who runs the numbers.”
“We’re going better. Could have a critical mass by spring.”
“Great! I want to see it tested.”
Karl masked a flicker of irritation. “Our production rate now will give us a new warhead maybe every three, four months. Testing it will make the war run longer.”
“Uh. But to be sure it works—”
“Fermi’s sure. That’s good enough for me.”
Groves frowned, paced. “Fermi’s not a weapons guy.”
“Neither am I, or Urey—but the physics is damned simple.”
“We’ll decide that later.” Groves waved the matter aside, shook off his mood, and pointed. “That guy sitting outside, recognize him?”
“Um, sort of.” Some dim memory nagged at Karl.
“Moe Berg. Until he’s finished reading a paper, he considers it ‘alive’ and refuses to let anyone else touch it. When he’s done, it’s ‘dead’ and anybody can read it. Says he wants to integrate everything from various papers, get a picture—every day.”
“Then he’s—”
“Yep, from intelligence. I want to bring him onboard for some espionage work.”
Karl felt a memory tug at him. “There’s something else about him. . . .”
“You a baseball fa
n?”
“Not really.”
“He was a major league catcher for the Sox.”
“Ah! I saw him at a game.” The only one he had ever seen, with Anton—who had become a big fan. Karl recalled Berg crouching behind home plate like a bear.
“Casey Stengel said he was the strangest man ever to play baseball. Got a law degree, went to Columbia and Princeton.”
“Strange?”
“The Dodgers scout summed him up as ‘Good field, no hit.’ And a guy from the Senators speaks seven languages—and he can’t hit in any of them.”
Karl laughed dutifully, as he knew Groves expected. “The languages will help in his espionage, right?”
“Should, sure.” Groves frowned, as if reviewing things he would not reveal. “I want you to brief him on the physics. He’s going on a mission to find out what the Krauts have been doing.”
“Where?”
“Italy first. Then France.” Groves looked pensively out the window at Washington Square.
Karl studied the high ceilings bordered by elaborate moldings, the casement windows with leaden mullions looking grandly out over a huge elm tree, rippling in the soft wind. “That’s the oldest tree in the city, the hanging tree—used for executions around the time of the Revolution.”
“Um.” Groves was not interested in tourist talk. “Wanted to tell you about that heavy water plant in Norway we bombed. The catcher found it—Moe. He went in secretly and located it precisely in a gorge. I asked for a bombing raid, and the Royal Air Force nailed it.” Groves smiled, puffed up a bit by having a battlefield role.
Karl sighed. Heavy water was a good neutron moderator. “So the Germans are building a reactor.” Like Fermi’s. And Heisenberg let Bohr know with that sketch he casually made.
“Yep! I want to know how far along they are. That’s Moe’s job. He’s the best. But he needs to know a lot of the physics, how to discuss it with Italian and French scientists. That’s your job—teach him. And quick.”
“So he can look for signs of the right interest areas?”
The Berlin Project Page 15
