Atomic Women

by Roseanne Montillo

  In a few simple words, and without any pleasantries, Fermi told Leona that he wanted her to join his staff. He didn’t know yet in what capacity she would be used, but he was sure they would find something productive for her to do. She seemed too clever for him not to hire her, he said. And that John Marshall had recommended her to him.

  After she nodded in agreement, Fermi asked her what she thought this project they were working on was about, what she suspected they were building behind those doors that they kept locked and guarded. And without hesitation, Leona told him that she believed they were working on constructing a bomb.

  Fermi took off his glasses and wiped them on the sleeve of his shirt. She would learn that he purchased inexpensive pairs of glasses, with various degrees of magnification, at the local drugstore, as he had a tendency to lose his glasses. Indeed, he thought, she seemed too clever for her own good.

  Pleased with herself, she said that she would be happy to come on board, appearing as if the idea had never crossed her mind before. But the truth was that she had thought of such a possibility some time before and had planned accordingly by making sure she met the scientists in the corridor.

  An astute woman, Leona had understood early on what the government was working on: a bomb to end the war, likely to be used against the Germans. And immediately she wanted to be a part of that plan. She knew that anyone who was anyone in the field was gradually collecting at the University of Chicago. And now she would become part of that exclusive group. She could not imagine what role she would play in the building of the atomic bomb. However, she knew that she would have her hand in history. She joined that illustrious circle in August 1942, never looking back and never asking herself too many questions.

  chapter twelve

  Coworkers

  Fermi told his group that Leona would now be a part of their team. He had given it much thought, and had decided that he was so impressed with her work and attitude that she would be assigned several jobs, some more complex than others. For one, she would be taking notes on his lectures, which in turn would be passed on to the crew in charge of building the first pile. An additional task was going to be more complicated: Fermi wanted her to build boron trifluoride counters, which would be used to detect neutron flux in the chain reaction that would eventually be tested.

  Nathalie Goldowski was delighted to meet Leona when she joined the laboratory. Although she wouldn’t have minded being the only female scientist in the group, having Leona there, she believed, would be a welcome reprieve from the mostly masculine environments she had worked in.

  Or so she had expected. But Leona’s high-pitched enthusiasm soon wore her out. She was too young, Nathalie thought upon meeting Leona—nearly ten years Nathalie’s junior. She was too excitable, too eager to prove herself. Leona needed to tone down her attitude and to refrain from sharing her ideas about the bomb’s purpose, about where and when it should be used. One needed to be impartial, Nathalie always told herself. With such a project, personal feelings should be kept in check. Objectivity was required.

  But maybe it was Nathalie herself who still hadn’t grown accustomed to the American way of life; to the familiarity these people felt with one another almost immediately, with their desire to smile broadly even when there appeared to be no reason for it; to the closeness they felt even with virtual strangers, comfortable enough to reveal their own deepest desires and resentments.

  Nathalie knew that she came off somewhat distant, maybe even aloof. She was what her fellow scientists described as a “hotshot” scientist, unafraid to experiment where others did not dare to go. That sense of adventure could also be seen in her apparel. Instead of wearing lab coats, she preferred clothing in dark shades, which clung to her buxom figure and matched her long black hair. Most of the other students worked, or had worked, in order to afford their tuition at the university, and frugality showed on their persons. They wore suits beneath their lab coats, just like their professors, but those outfits were well worn, frayed around the sleeves and cuffs. And while they tried to keep their hair and beards neatly trimmed, occasionally they resorted to homemade haircuts between the few professional ones. Nathalie, however, liked to be well groomed, and she never skimped on those luxuries, even if it meant doing without something else.

  The other scientists found her clothes and demeanor a little strange, her refusal to give up her femininity in favor of white lab coats a bit eccentric. Why couldn’t women be simply scientists, she often asked herself, without having to be judged for what they wore or how they looked? Why did they need to be called “women scientists”? Nathalie noticed that her peers in the laboratory were not described as “male scientists.”

  She sometimes told those closest to her that she got along better with dogs, of which she owned several. She spoke French to them, and they obeyed her commands only when addressed in that language. When visitors met the animals, they were startled to hear Nathalie speaking what sounded like gibberish in a language only her dogs understood. She had developed the same style of speaking even in the laboratory, French mingled with accented English.

  She did not believe, as others did, that science was cold and calculating and that it required a similar disposition to practice it. Nor did she believe that she needed to abandon her likes and adopt those of her male colleagues in order to do her job well. She did not care whether or not they agreed with her, whether or not they liked her. She was not there to please them.

  She knew that her coworkers paid too much attention to her outward appearance. However, the reality was that without Nathalie’s development of the aluminum coating for the uranium slugs required by the Hanford reactors in Washington State, plutonium production would have stopped. But later, after the project was finished and her colleagues were asked about her, it was her long black hair that they remembered. Her Parisian clothing seemed to be the thing her peers concentrated on, and her hair and aristocratic manners seemed to have irked her coworkers more than anything else about her. No one seemed to recall her contributions at Hanford.

  Although she was born in Russia, Nathalie had moved to Paris as a young girl with her mother to escape the Russian Revolution. She received her degree from the University of Paris in 1935, followed by a PhD in physical chemistry in 1939, at the age of thirty-two, with a concentration on the corrosion of metals. She later served as chief of metallurgy for the French Air Ministry. Nathalie and her mother left Paris when Hitler occupied France, landing in the United States. She had feared that in the United States her skills would go unrecognized and instead she would have to settle for a position as a domestic or, worse, as a nanny: She did not get along with children, nor did she like them much.

  But after working in the private sector for a while, she was hired for government work and sent to Chicago, where she advanced a project on preventing the corrosion of the aluminum that surrounded the uranium fuel in the plutonium production reactor. She didn’t know how she had come to the government’s attention, but she suspected Fermi, known in the laboratory as the “Benevolent Dictator,” had something to do with it. She never asked him about it but felt that the two shared a secret no one else needed to know.

  And now Nathalie watched silently as Leona was given the task of designing the project’s first nuclear reactor (she would go on to be the only woman on the team that designed and built the Chicago Pile-1, the world’s first nuclear reactor). But they would not be entirely her designs; she would use as models those of another physicist, Katharine “Kay” Way, who had found her way into the project in much the same way Leona had.

  On receiving notice via telegram, Katharine “Kay” Way hopped into her car and headed to Chicago. The five-hundred-mile ride from Tennessee to Chicago seemed long in her wreck of a car, which she had purchased from a friend for less than two hundred dollars. She could hardly contain her excitement. The telegram she’d received had informed her that the engineers on the Manhattan Project planned to use her designs to build the nuclear react
ors, a phenomenal outcome for an audacious young woman like herself.

  She had come to their attention because she had made sure of it. Unlike the many other scientists who had been pursued by the project’s officials, she had to nearly beg for a spot on the staff. But that was just like everything else Kay did. A runt, people called her, one who had to weasel her way into every opportunity. Even though that was the impression she gave others, the reality was much different. She worked hard for every break she got, and when hard work wasn’t enough, a little finagling made the difference.

  Kay was a graduate of Vassar College and Columbia University, where she had studied mathematics and physics, along with European languages. She had received her PhD in physics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she had been John Wheeler’s (a theoretical physicist and former colleague of Niels Bohr) first graduate student in nuclear physics before she was hired as an assistant professor by the University of Tennessee. It was there that she heard rumors traversing the hallways of a secret government project that was under way, and kept vigilant for any new developments.

  During her free time, she spent hours in the laboratory, where lately she had been interested in the construction of neutron sources, which produced neptunium-239. In 1942, she received an invitation to go to Washington to work with John Bardeen, who would later win two Nobel Prizes in Physics.

  It was from Bardeen that she received in-depth information on the nuclear project, especially on the facility located in Chicago. She began to write letters to everyone she knew and anyone who could help her, and given the need for physicists, she was quickly interviewed and hired.

  As she rumbled down the crooked roads from Tennessee to Chicago, ready and eager to do her part, she mused on how far she had come. They would use her designs to build the reactors, which could, in theory, make a difference in how the war turned out.

  Sure, she had been told that she was going to collaborate with others, including a young woman named Leona, who, she had been warned, had a tendency for taking charge of everything. But overall, this would be her project, with her designs, despite what anyone else tried to do. How proud she would feel going down in history, Kay later wrote; she had always yearned to do something different from her peers, and now it would happen. How exciting it would be to be known by everyone one day, for something that no man had been able to accomplish.

  chapter thirteen

  The Reactor

  Joan Hinton arrived in Los Alamos in the spring of 1944, tired and hungry. Hot, too. She entered 109 East Palace, the spot she had been instructed to go to await further instructions. This was the location that served not only as a reception venue but also as an information and traveling center. It also served snacks, something Joan appreciated, especially at that moment. There she would also find out how to finish her trip. As she read the instructions, a shiver ran down her spine. It was so thrilling, so exciting, this new adventure of hers—straight out of a spy novel, it seemed to her.

  Dotty McKibben greeted the new arrivals every day as they entered 109 East Palace and listened as they bombarded her with a slew of questions. The forty-five-year-old single mother had grown used to the inquiries, which were always the same, varying only in degrees of fatigue and frustration: Where should they go to now? How should they get there? Did they serve food anywhere around here? Where could they find a snack or a cold beverage? After answering their questions, Dotty doled out security passes and instructions, including the ones that told the scientists that, from now on, their new address would be PO Box 1663 and that advised them to refrain from calling one another by their professional titles and to refer to themselves only by their new given name.

  Much like the rest, Joan arrived there breathless and sweaty, tired from having slept little on the journey, the trains being slow, crowded, loud, and hot. She felt sticky all over and very drowsy. She wanted to curl up on a bench outside the office and rest. Instead, she was handed a yellow map that had been specifically prepared for the new arrivals and upon which several important points had been marked in red pencil. Then she waited for her ride, which would drive her to Los Alamos through scrappy roads and high mountains.

  Scientists, their families, and all other required personnel had started to move into the area in fall 1943, some five or six months before Joan arrived. All of them were stunned by the seclusion of the place. In fact, their nearest neighbors were the Indian pueblos of San Ildefonso and Santa Clara, some fifteen or twenty miles away. Santa Fe was about thirty miles to the southeast, and to reach it they had to cross the Rio Grande, a river that for many brought to mind cascades of water but in reality for most of the year was just a puny little trickle, as most of its waters were used for irrigation.

  The community had quickly mushroomed like a desert mirage. In a matter of months, a whole city had been set up; it soon began to welcome thousands of new residents to the area. Those living in the surrounding mountain abodes didn’t know what the newcomers were doing. The new arrivals were not the friendliest people, locals thought, not to mention that many of them spoke with strong foreign accents. They wore casual rumpled clothes, shoes that were worn and dusty, and gave the impression of being too mellow. Wouldn’t they go about in suits if they were doing something important?

  The inhabitants of northern New Mexico often wondered what was happening inside the facility. Maybe they were working for the Russians, some distrustful fellows whispered over cups of coffee, or building a submarine or two. Others, having noticed members of the Women’s Army Corps walking about, suspected that the compound was a home for pregnant members of that unit; the pregnant women were brought there to await the birth of their illegitimate children, they surmised, then taken away.

  J. Robert Oppenheimer was aware of the gossip that circulated around Los Alamos and realized that it was getting wilder by the minute. Still, he suspected that within those rumors someone would eventually land on the truth, and when that person did, there would be trouble. It seemed to him that the best way to counteract such a threat was to dispatch some fabrication of their own, a credible story that would sound much like a truth. He ordered various members of the team who were known to enjoy spending time in the local bars and cafés or shopping around town to somehow let it slip that in the laboratories they were actually building electric rockets. He knew this would make the rounds and eventually all the inhabitants in the area would start talking about it. However, he also advised his people to be wary of those who asked too many questions, for there might be spies lurking within the compound, too.

  The locals did not know precisely who Oppenheimer was or what he did, but they got accustomed to seeing him ride his chestnut mare along the trails to the west of Los Alamos, and sometimes even in town, smiling and waving and tipping his hat to those he passed by.

  As soon as Joan got to Los Alamos, she was warned to be careful about what she said and about the things she asked.

  She hadn’t needed much encouragement to travel to New Mexico. Her family and friends wouldn’t know where she was, and she couldn’t tell them. They would not know what kind of project she was working on, and if she suddenly felt the need to unburden herself, if doubts about her work crept in, she wouldn’t be able to reveal any of them. She also didn’t know how long she would be required to be in Los Alamos. The war, the conflict, could go on indefinitely; they had no final date for completing the project. It could be a handful of months, or it could be years.

  The fence, everybody knew, had been erected for two purposes: to keep nosy neighbors out and to keep employees in. It had the desired effect. No outsiders ever tried to break in, curious as they probably were. And, symbolically, it isolated the scientists, their families, and everybody else who worked within the compound from the rest of the community. It set them apart. Los Alamos became a world unto itself, where no one could go in or out without a specific purpose or permission from someone else; they even needed a pass to leave the premises for fun.

>   When Joan Hinton first approached the houses that had been built, they did not impress her. They looked like the tenement houses in the slums of major cities she had read about in books but never visited. Dispirited, she felt her initial excitement fade. There was laundry hanging everywhere on clotheslines stretching from fence to fence in small backyards. Garbage cans overflowed on the streets and in front yards. Dust from the roads coated cars, baby strollers, toys, front steps, and facades; even the people often went around covered in dust. They were hideous, these homes, even though people assured Joan that inside they were not as bad as they looked. She did not believe them.

  The houses were adorned with couches, chairs, tables, and cots, but the living conditions were spartan, the bare essentials made up of military furniture that was neither good-looking nor comfortable. She woke each morning more tired than when she went to bed, the cot hard, tough, and itchy on her back.

  The town had grown fast, and while at first there might have been some kind of plan for its construction, builders eventually did what they wanted with the design, so that in time it looked haphazard, without any order to its general look. In its so-called center was Ashley Pond, which was really not a pond but a little pool of water. In winter, the pond was used for ice-skating, while in the summer, people took advantage of its waters for swimming. On one side of this pond stood the laboratories, and on the other was the hospital. Opposite that were eight rows of ugly green barracks, which housed army personnel, and to the east were duplexes.