The film and shock-wave data allowed Karl and the Los Alamos team to calculate the yield, about thirteen kilotons of TNT. The film images in visible light and infrared showed that the fireball was about a hundred yards across.
Luis Alvarez, using a cane to walk now, said, “I wish I’d been there to see it.” Karl nodded, speechless. We killed so many. . . .
Freeman Dyson sat quietly at the end of their worktable, calculating, and then, as they argued details of the shock-wave analysis, he said, “I have another way.”
In a few quick, modest moments he sketched how he used the radius of the fireball in each frame of the film, with the time of the frame, to calculate the energy necessary to expand the fireball against atmospheric pressure. “So I calculate about fifteen kilotons,” he concluded.
Feynman applauded. “Elegant!”
Fred Reines tossed on the table a teletype translation from the German radio broadcasts. “They’re announcing state funerals. We got a lot of the party heads, not many military.”
Karl had seen the same news. “Surprisingly few civilians dead, about eleven thousand. Lots of buildings down, including some museums. I hope they moved the great art away by now. The bust of Nefertiti was there; I saw it once.”
Feynman eyed the teletype bundle as though it were a rattlesnake. “Until now, y’know, this was fun physics.”
Nobody spoke for a long time.
• • •
Karl noticed that at the entrance to the air base a big display showed high-level Nazis they had gotten with the bomb, as a kind of consolation.
Heinrich Himmler
Hermann Göring
Joseph Goebbels
He looked at the first three, whom he recognized, and thought of how many lives these men had already taken. Now they knew what was meant in a novel he had read called The Big Sleep. Something about how everyone sleeps the big sleep in the end; it didn’t matter where you rested. Fair enough.
These men had been evil. Theirs was an evil existing for the sake of itself, for the pleasure of it. These were not the faces of men who sprang from a sad, limited, tormented, or unbalanced childhood and now acted out their angers on a larger stage, as some psychologists explained it. To Karl they came from a primordial blackness reaching up again through a dark and vulnerable soul, revealing all the horror that had always been within mankind, frustrating all rational analyses. Blackness for its own sake, without mercy or scruple.
He wondered if he felt any guilt over these men’s deaths and realized that he could not. But the countless Berliners who had died along with these princes of evil, yes, he did regret. How many more would it take?
• • •
“How soon can we get another bomb?” Groves asked, frowning, pacing his office like a restless bear in clothes too tight. Moe sat in a chair, pretending not to read an issue of the Times of London.116
“Late August,” Karl said. “I just got a teletype from Oak Ridge.”
“No way any faster?”
“We used sixty-four kilograms—that’s one hundred forty-one pounds of ninety percent or better U-235—on Berlin. We and the Los Alamos boys agree: better to overdo it and not risk a fizzle.” Karl paused, not liking what he had to say. “Right now we have about thirty pounds at Oak Ridge.”
“Damn!” Groves all but growled. “How low could we go, your theory guys say?”
“Maybe thirty kilograms—sixty-six pounds. But at that mass it has to work exactly right to work at all.”
“Damn! So again—when can we get one just like the last?”
Karl knew how gradually more centrifuges were coming online at Oak Ridge. “September, to be safe.”
3.
Freeman said to Karl one morning, “Let’s take the train to London.”
“Well, I . . .”
“We both need a break from this gloom.”
True enough. The Normandy campaign was inching inland, as Rommel slammed all the tank and infantry he could at the Allies. The carnage was steady, large, thousands dying every day. Karl read the newspapers after Moe was done with them, and mostly fretted.
So he went with Freeman on the long, rumbling London train ride, to have dinner with the Nobel laureate Paul Dirac. “His lectures were like exquisitely carved marble statues falling out of the sky, one after another. He seemed to be able to conjure laws of nature from pure thought.” Even in lectures he spoke as little as possible. Dirac’s colleagues jokingly defined a conversational unit of a dirac—one word per hour. “A student in class raised his hand and said, ‘I don’t understand the equation on the top right-hand corner of the blackboard.’ Dirac said nothing. The class murmured nervously. After a long interval of uneasy silence, I asked Dirac if he would answer the question. Dirac laconically replied, ‘That was not a question, it was a comment.’ Then he left.”
They met Dirac in a small, elegant, Regency-style restaurant in Soho. The district was famously swanky and vice-ridden, but Karl found it mostly, as the English would say, tatty. The war had worn London down.
The man who held a chair at Trinity College, which had produced Newton, Nehru, and Maxwell, was slim and dapper in a black suit, and greeted Karl with a nod. Over a rather thin meal with overboiled vegetables, Karl learned that Dirac had elegantly treated the centrifuge separation problem, when asked years ago by the English nuclear program. His work had never made it through the security barriers to the Manhattan Project.
“I wish I’d had your work to help,” Karl said, and Dirac nodded. They laughed at Dirac’s description of the poor writing he had to wade through to find out what was known by the engineers. Bad punctuation leaped out at him, sloppy grammar, misuse of “who” and “whom” and other crimes against the accusative.
It was a delight to speak of something other than the war, though Karl knew that couldn’t last long. Freeman led them to a cocktail party at the substantial apartment of an Austrian chemist who had barely gotten his family out in 1938. It was somewhat merry, with crosscurrents of several languages through the crowded rooms. Everyone wanted to talk about the A-bomb, and Karl did not. In fact, he couldn’t—it was still formally classified, though on every front page. Groves had given orders to drop no hints to anyone, especially about where the work was done and the attack staged; the Germans could still go after it.
He could hear the class system in rounded vowels that bespoke Eton and Oxford. By now he saw that status kept the wheels greased in the British military’s endless protocols and musty hierarchies. He learned that “seasoned skiver” meant lazy scheming, a minimal effort to get by without getting caught. Dyson was a Cambridge man but spoke without class affectation. Still, in many ways, humorless martinets abounded.
So Karl listened, mostly. The invasion had somehow led to more news from the eastern front, and at this party, news of the siege of Leningrad was the latest revelation. People there had tried to get by on virtually inedible food substitutes: cottonseed cakes that were normally used as fuel in ship furnaces; sheep guts, together with calf skins from a tannery, which were turned into “meat jelly”; fermented birch sawdust that was turned into “yeast extract,” which, dissolved in hot water, was considered “yeast soup.” As the civilians grew more desperate, they scraped dry glue from the underside of wallpaper, or boiled leather shoes and belts, hoping in vain that they could be eaten or at least chewed. “Zoologists survived the siege: they knew how to catch rats and pigeons,” a man from the Foreign Office said in rolling vowels. “Impractical mathematicians died.”
As he ate beef stew, Karl recalled Marthe’s joke about French slang—that a term for the English was les rosbifs because the French thought that was the only food worth eating here. He doubted anyone in the Leningrad famine made jokes about food.
The rooms got stifling, fed by substantial alcohol and general war jitters. Karl hung his jacket in the hall closet and got out onto a high balcony for air, with darkened London slumbering below. Dirac followed him. “That closet is the richest room in t
he city, I’ll wager.”
Dirac’s opening a topic startled Karl more than the sentence. “Why?”
“Our host is a friend; I helped him ship his goods here from Austria. You noted the coat hangers?”
“Yes, heavy.”
“They’re platinum.”
Karl smiled. “Platinum is silvery, so . . .”
“The Nazis forbade currency and property transfers, so he used his chemist credentials to buy a lot of platinum, then fashioned it into wires, shaped them into coat hangers, and painted them black. Nobody in customs spotted them. He’s selling one at a time to support his family.”
Karl laughed. Even war could be funny. Maybe especially so.
• • •
Groves looked sternly at Karl across his cluttered desk and said, “Why go home now? We’re close to victory.”
“There’s nothing to do except wait for the next bomb, and . . . I want to see my family.”
Groves shrugged. “Don’t we all? Okay, Karl, write up what you think about using a smaller chunk of U-235 in the next bomb. Then we’ll find a way back home for you.”
Going out onto the airstrip, he felt as if he were lighter, the day brighter, life better.
• • •
Feynman pushed teletype sheets across their worktable. “Get a load of what Oppenheimer sent. Calculations of how skimpy a critical mass we can get away with.”
Karl said, “We agreed we’d each do our own estimate, then pool them. But we need to see the Los Alamos calculation, not just their result.”
Feynman shrugged. “He’s got some of it here, at least. But get this—he starts off with, ‘I thought of a verse from the Hindu holy book the Bhagavad Gita (XI,12): ‘If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.’ Religion!”
Karl let that one go by. As soon as he corralled the estimates Groves wanted, he was flying home. “Okay, let’s start—”
The door opened and Groves came in, face red. “Just got an intelligence report. A captured SS officer says there’s a plan, proposed by the Luftwaffe and approved by Hitler. They’ll set up special POW camps for captured British and American airmen, smack in the center of large German cities. So our guys would be human shields against A-bombs.”
Fred Reines stood, shocked. “That would contravene the 1929 Geneva Convention!”
Groves smiled sardonically. “You think Hitler cares?”
Feynman grimaced and said, “Figure they’ll do it?”
Groves grimaced and circled their table, emitting a low, frustrated growl. “If they do, we go after their tank divisions.”
Three hours later, their estimates in order, Karl went to Groves’s office to tell him, “I’ll have the report written up in a day, General. Can you arrange my flights back home?”
Groves nodded over a stack of paperwork. “Hate to lose you, Karl. You stepped in when Luis went down, and I appreciate that.” He sighed. “Now we’re done, I don’t know how much longer I’ll be here either.”
“They’d send you home?”
“Yeah, that’s the hell of it. General Marshall let me come over because the bomb is my baby. You guys did the essential, and nobody over here knew diddly about it. So I got into a combat command!—what I always wanted. But now Oppie is running Los Alamos and Fermi is out in Washington State, getting those reactors started along the Columbia River, to make that plutonium—which we don’t need now. I can’t let that go for long without supervision.”
“Good luck, sir.” Karl left to find a typist. He might try dictating the report and filling in the numbers once he’d checked them again. That might save a day. It amused him that Groves wanted to stay here at all. Karl certainly did not. Not after Berlin.
• • •
He got it done by early evening. Karl was tired of the base, and the endless details of how to trim down the critical mass, all done amid the roars and rattles of planes landing and taking off, fleets of metal spanning the skies. He was far out of place here. An army sergeant under Groves, who managed moving gear around, took him aside and said, “Need a break? Step on out?”
“I miss my wife . . . sure.”
The big problem was how to get free of the constant hum and hammer of the base. They were thoroughly encased, far from towns, and the security perimeter was three barbed-wire fences deep. So the sergeant improvised.
They got a Jeep. The tricky part was, drivers had to report in miles driven daily. So at night the sergeant tipped the Jeep onto its back and ran it in reverse. The wheels spun fast and sure in the air, and the simple mileage gauge ran backward. That way they quickly subtracted the forty miles needed to get into the nearest town with a working pub and back. Karl managed to wedge Feynman and Freeman into the back, and Feynman kept them laughing with jokes all the way. He proved to be a charmer in the pubs, too. Soon enough the Englishwomen had formed circles around him at the bar, and Karl got to sit with Freeman in a corner.
“I hear from a friend the Germans are working on some kind of advanced rocket,” Freeman said. “Much bigger range than those little V-1s.” Ah, Karl thought. Maybe a bomb carrier that could reach . . . New York? With an A-bomb, if they’re making one? But he said nothing; it was never smart to talk about technical matters in a pub.
That night he felt light and happy, only a day or two from going home. The atmosphere of ordinary pubs now seemed warm, reassuring, and details like the long pull levers to summon a pint had a touch that he knew he would miss. The others in the chatty crowd were still coming down from the euphoria after Berlin, and he let their elation lift him into a kind of buoyant nostalgia for the present moment. Yet at the same time he knew he had gotten over the war and would not miss it.
He slept well but had dreams of wandering in a silent mansion, of opening doors down endless gray corridors, only to find behind each door a brick wall. Pretty obvious symbolism, yes, he realized. But no Freudian, he.
4.
The next morning he picked up the typed and copied report and marched right over to Groves’s office, whistling. The Los Alamos guys and he were fairly sure a warhead needed close to the uranium mass Little Boy had carried, say within 80 percent. Using a bit less than the Berlin bomb could shave a week or two off the time to deliver the next bomb. The explosive yield would be lower, but time was more important, everyone said.
It was a fine summer day. Karl whistled as he strode along. He was going to ask Groves to fly him down to London, to an airstrip where he could get a flight to the USA. He knocked on the door and Groves barked something, but when he opened the door, the lanky army lieutenant, James Benford, was there. They were studying a map. Both turned and looked up at him with dismay.
“That damned Campbell guy was right,” Groves said. “I guess the Krauts do read his magazine.”
Benford showed Karl the main highway leading from the Normandy beaches toward the city of Angers. He pointed out details and said with a soft drawl, “The road’s good and straight. Our armored came down it, some British, too. I was up on a hill to the southwest, calling down our battalion’s fire on the German panzer division retreating back inland. I saw this gray airplane come down and fly along the highway, quicker’n you could follow it in field glasses. It dropped a long stream of dark dust on the highway, starting with the first of our tanks. Nobody could hit it, too fast.”
“It’s uranium, got to be,” Karl said. “Probably both isotopes, not bothering to separate them—if they even know how. But the cleaned mixture is still pretty radioactive.”
Benford’s lean frame stiffened. “You got that right. I had the Operation Peppermint teams go down there, scoop up some of it. Their Geigers wailed like a stuck pig. Their films clouded up right away.”
Groves asked Benford, “That valise you’re carrying, what’s in it?”
Benford picked it up, a worn leather case. “A sample of the dust. They told me to bring it here for you to see, since it’s your area, General.”
Groves stepped away from it. “Hell, is it shielded?”
“In a steel box,” Benford said.
“If it’s uranium, it’ll be putting out alpha particles, which couldn’t get through that leather anyway.” Karl waved the issue away. “Normally I’d say take that sample to the chem guys in London, but look—let’s have it. We can rig a little lab work to see if it’s uranium. Oh yeah—any troops reporting sick?”
“Some, seem to be. A few said the dust made them sneeze. Then a while later they felt feverish.”
Karl blinked. “Issue simple face masks, if you can find them. Mostly, just get away from that highway.”
Groves picked up the map and taped it to his work board. Something about the man seemed not dismayed but elated.
“I see why they hit us there. It’s the fast track toward Paris.” He jabbed the map with his forefinger. “German commanders at all levels failed to react to the assault phase in a timely manner. Communications problems hindered their maneuvers, and Allied air and naval firepower knocked them down hard. Local commanders didn’t mount an aggressive defense on the beach, as Rommel told them—I read the speech, we captured a copy of it on the first day.”
Ah yes, Kart realized. Groves was their go-to general for things radioactive. Here was a brand-new war, and the major point for Groves was that he was in it.
Groves gestured in big sweeps around the map. “The Kraut High Command is fixated on the Calais area, Eisenhower says—I heard him just yesterday in London. So we’re flanking around them. That’s von Rundstedt’s front, but Hitler won’t let him commit the armored reserve—or so Military Intelligence says. They’re got the terrain advantage, but we’ve got air power. So they use this goddamn dust to stop us. We’ve gotta—”
Karl held up his hand and Groves stopped. “They’re telling us something.”
“Huh?” Groves frowned.
“There must have been tons in that fast airplane. It flew low to drop the dust right on the highway.”
The Berlin Project Page 28
