Big Science

by Michael Hiltzik

  Compton relayed Lawrence’s words to Bush the next day, repeating Ernest’s dreary assessment of Briggs as “slow, conservative, methodical, and accustomed to operate at peacetime government bureau tempo.” Briggs’s management, Lawrence had argued, left American science hamstrung by comparison with the British and, more perilously, with the Germans, even though the United States boasted “the most in number and the best in quality of the nuclear physicists of the world.” Thinking that the voluble Lawrence himself stood the best chance of communicating the urgency of the situation to Bush, Compton and Conant decided to send him to New York to make his pitch to the NDRC chairman in person.

  This was a blunder, as Conant should have realized. Having worked as Bush’s deputy at the NDRC for nearly a year, Conant knew that his boss could be “very vindictive when people went out of channels.” Sure enough, Bush interpreted Lawrence’s visit as an attempt to short-circuit his own prerogatives of command. He laid into the dumbfounded Lawrence the moment he walked in the door. “I told him flatly that I was running the show, that we had established a procedure for handling it, that he could either conform to that as a member of the NDRC and put in his ‘kicks’ through the internal mechanism, or he could be utterly on the outside,” Bush related to his friend Frank Jewett, the head of Bell Laboratories. He further informed Lawrence that he intended to back up Briggs “unless there was some decidedly strong case” for accelerating uranium research, which he had yet to see.

  Ernest was properly apologetic (“He got into line,” Bush told Jewett), but realistically, Bush was working at a disadvantage. In the end, science was going to dictate the course of the NDRC’s program, and the science of the atomic nucleus was on Lawrence’s side. In fact, Bush acknowledged privately that most atomic physics went “over my head.”

  There were other reasons to keep Ernest Lawrence in the loop. He was not only one of the most accomplished nuclear physicists in the country but also a peerless organizer of research, as he showed in the creation of the Rad Lab at MIT—so much so that Bush would soon ask him to orchestrate the research and development of an underwater communications technology for submarines in San Diego. Lawrence placed that project under McMillan, whom he extracted from the radar program for the purpose. “You did a very fine piece of work for the radiation group [meaning the radar group],” Bush wrote Lawrence in July in gratitude before adding imperiously, “I think with a clear conscience you can now put your prime efforts on the submarine matter. It very much needs your heavy attention.” As if attempting to smooth any ruffled feathers, he closed the letter with the reassuring words “I’ve been putting a lot of thought on the uranium matter.”

  Bush fulfilled that promise a few weeks later by placing Lawrence on a special committee formed under Compton to review the Briggs committee’s work. Within a week, they had canvassed all the members of the Briggs panel and come away even more shocked at their complacency than they expected.

  “Two facts were at once apparent,” Compton wrote later. “The first was that uranium fission would one day be of very great importance to the world. The second was that not a single member of the Briggs Committee really believed that uranium fission would become of critical importance in the war . . . This committee had been considering these possibilities for a year and a half . . . No one had felt keenly enough its possible contribution to the war effort to move away from another field of study.” Perhaps this latter finding should not have been so surprising: after all, Lawrence himself was still thoroughly preoccupied with his other work—namely, the construction of the 184-inch cyclotron on the hillside above the university.

  On May 17 Compton sent Bush his panel’s unanimous report on the Briggs committee. The report discussed three possible military applications for fissionable uranium: dropping radioactive materials over enemy territory; generating power for submarines and other oceangoing vessels; and development of a bomb based on U-235. The most modest of these options, the radioactive spray, would take at least a year to perfect after the first chain reaction was achieved. That could come in as soon as eighteen months if Fermi’s program had full government support. Given the still-unsolved challenge of separating U-235, bombs seemed to be three to five years off.

  Compton described these findings later as “on the whole hopeful.” But to Bush, they suggested that uranium research could be safely laid aside for the duration of the war. The bottom line, he felt, was that there was “certainly no clear-cut path to defense results of great importance.” As a check on his own reaction, he created yet another technical panel, this one headed by Jewett, to review Compton’s report. By the time they convened, there was one more piece of technical evidence to weigh, for Lawrence had uncorked another surprise: Glenn Seaborg of the Berkeley Rad Lab had discovered and refined a small quantity of a new radioactive element, a daughter of element 93, which was itself a daughter of neutron-bombarded U-238. Chemically distinct from uranium and therefore theoretically separable by chemical means, element 94 appeared to be about five times more fissionable than uranium. At the moment, 94 had not been named, but in due course it would become known as plutonium.

  Lawrence tried to communicate his excitement about Seaborg’s discovery in writing, via a memo to Jewett’s committee declaring that “an extremely important new possibility has been opened for the exploitation of the chain reaction.” A power plant based on element 94 would require perhaps a hundred pounds of the material, rather than the hundred tons thought to be necessary for uranium reactors. Most strikingly, in a chain reaction in 94, “energy would be released at an explosive rate which might be described as a ‘super bomb.’ ”

  Had Lawrence addressed the committee personally with his customary verve, he might well have convinced its members of the importance of the new discovery. But he was stuck in Berkeley helping Molly tend to their daughter Margaret, who had undergone an emergency appendectomy. Also absent was Compton, who was away on a summertime jaunt to South America. So the significance of 94 sailed over the heads of Jewett’s committee, which endorsed increased funding for chain reaction research but remained cold to the prospects of a bomb. With a second equivocal report in hand, Bush was on the verge of terminating fission research altogether as a war program.

  Then Ernest rescued it for good.

  • • •

  The MAUD Committee’s final report on July 15, 1941, came to conclusions dramatically different from all Briggs’s deliberations and Bush’s technical studies. The report treated the inherent uncertainties of research and development not as disqualifying obstacles (the American mind-set) but as challenges well within the ability of British and American scientists to overcome. It projected that an “effective uranium bomb” could be made with 25 pounds of U-235 and that a plant to produce 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) per day of the separated isotope—nearly enough for three bombs a month—could be built for the equivalent of about $20 million. The committee made short work of US concerns that the bomb might come too late to affect the war. Instead, it concluded that the first bombs could be produced by the end of 1943, and therefore were “likely to lead to decisive results in the war.” The members urged that work proceed “on the highest priority” and in close collaboration with the United States.

  G. P. Thomson, the MAUD chairman, sent the report and its technical appendices to Briggs for forwarding to Bush and awaited the inevitable invitation to collaborate with the United States. For a month, he heard nothing. Then, learning that Oliphant was heading across the Atlantic for a meeting on radar, Thomson asked him to make “discreet enquiries” about the American reaction to the documents. Immediately upon landing in Washington, Oliphant called on Briggs, only to learn in dismay that “this inarticulate and unimpressive man had put the reports in his safe” without even showing them to his own committee. Oliphant also met with Bush and Conant, who both told him they had heard nothing of the British findings.

  Fed up with the same phlegmatic American approach to fission’s military potential
that had driven Szilard to distraction, Oliphant decided to make his case to the one man he thought would comprehend the MAUD Committee’s findings, and who had the standing to beat the American establishment over the head with them. He wired Ernest Lawrence, pleading for an urgent meeting. “I’ll even fly from Washington to meet at a convenient time in Berkeley,” he wrote. Lawrence, whose friendship with Oliphant grew out of the bonds forged during the deuteron fiasco of 1933, happily tendered the invitation.

  At Berkeley, Lawrence drove Oliphant up to the hill above campus for an obligatory visit to the ravine being readied for the 184-inch, whose towering magnet was standing in an open field like a monolith at Stonehenge. Back in his office, Lawrence asked Oppenheimer to join them. Oliphant outlined the MAUD report for both men, relieved at last to be addressing an audience receptive to the potentialities of a fission-induced explosion and to the need for urgency. A few days later, he wrote Lawrence to express his confidence that “in your hands the uranium question will receive proper and complete consideration, and I do hope that you are able to do something in the matter.” His confidence was not misplaced. Lawrence had already telephoned Arthur Compton to set up a meeting in Chicago. The stage was set for one of the most important events of the prewar period.

  • • •

  On that “cool September evening,” Compton, Conant, and Lawrence arranged themselves around the fireplace in Compton’s living room. Lawrence began by repeating what he had learned from Oliphant. Addressing Conant, he underscored the significance of element 94, described how it could be made from a chain reaction in U-238 and chemically separated, and mentioned new strides being made at the Rad Lab in the physical separation of U-235 from U-238. He repeated Oliphant’s fears that the Nazis were counting on their own atomic bomb to decide the war. “If they succeeded first,” Compton recalled Lawrence’s warning, “they would have in their hands the control of the world.”

  Lawrence spoke forcefully, even passionately. As the practical details piled up in his mind, Conant, who had come to Chicago still imbued with the skepticism about atomic weaponry prevailing in Bush’s circle, finally began to reconsider.

  Conant had advised Bush to put the uranium project on the shelf for the duration of the war, but that advice had been based on his impression that a bomb was purely conjectural. Now he turned to Lawrence. “You put before me plans for making a definite, highly effective weapon,” he said. “If such a weapon is going to be made, we must do it first. We can’t afford not to. But I’m here to tell you, nothing significant will happen on a job like this unless we get into it with everything we’ve got.”

  He looked Lawrence in the eye. “Ernest,” he said, “you say you are convinced of the importance of these fission bombs. Are you ready to devote the next several years of your life to getting them made?”

  Conant was telling him point-blank to put up or shut up. Compton saw Lawrence freeze, his mouth half open in surprise. Ernest’s hesitation lasted only a moment. Then he replied, “Jim, if you tell me this is my job, I’ll do it.”

  It was the moment of truth, for both Lawrence and the bomb project. Bush and Conant had been skeptical about an atomic weapon in part because of the reluctance of eminent physicists to commit themselves to the work not only in word but deed. Conant declared later that he fully intended his question to Lawrence as a test—even a dare. “Lawrence was particularly vociferous about the need for mobilizing all scientific talent for the uranium program,” he wrote. “I could not resist the temptation to cut behind his rhetoric.”

  Ernest met the challenge. The Chicago meeting was the watershed moment in the atomic bomb project. Before, Conant had leaned heavily against pursuing the bomb. Now his weight was on the other side. Shortly after the meeting, he reported the details to Bush (calling it an “involuntary conference to which [I] had been exposed,” as though he had been caught unawares by its subject matter). On October 9, two weeks later to the day, Bush was back at the White House, bearing a copy of the MAUD report along with a page of talking points prepared by Conant. He delivered the MAUD conclusions with such conviction that Roosevelt agreed to launch without delay a comprehensive research program aimed at building the bomb. Only the actual construction of a uranium separation plant was be held in abeyance without a further order from the White House.

  The president named a “top policy group” to make major decisions on the program. They, and only they, were to have full knowledge of all its details: Roosevelt himself, Vice President Henry Wallace, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, and Bush and Conant. The quest for the bomb was now fully under way.

  To Bush, the sequestering of knowledge and policy authority had one special virtue: it clipped Lawrence’s wings. “Much of the difficulty in the past has been due to the fact that Ernest Lawrence in particular had strong ideas in regard to policy, and talked about them generally,” Bush wrote Frank Jewett. He made Lawrence and Compton aware that henceforth their portfolio was to be exclusively scientific and technical. The debate over whether to build the bomb was over. Now they could move ahead—but under standards of military secrecy even more stringent than those of Briggs, about which Lawrence had groused constantly. He would soon come around.

  Compton received the green light from Bush and Conant to review and coordinate American research on fission. Members of the scientific community were expected to “throw themselves into this exploration with everything they had,” he recalled. “Lawrence’s commitment of his own war years set the pattern.” Compton scheduled a meeting with Lawrence and several other members of his technical committee for October 21 at the General Electric research facility in Schenectady. Lawrence responded to the summons by informing Compton, as a fait accompli, that he would be introducing a new participant to the technical roundtable: Robert Oppenheimer. He told Compton simply, “Oppenheimer has important new ideas.”

  Yet Ernest’s decision to invite Oppie into the discussion had been a close call. Despite his continued admonishments to Oppenheimer to abandon his political “leftwandering,” Oppenheimer found it hard to cease his engagement with liberal causes. Only a few weeks earlier, he had infuriated Ernest by hosting at his home an organizational meeting for a Berkeley branch of the American Association of Scientific Workers (AASW), a leftist union whose British branch had Communist associations. Worse, he had cajoled Martin Kamen and another Rad Lab scientist, Al Marshak, into attending. They arrived at Oppie’s house to find fifteen employees of various Berkeley labs seated on the floor, listening to two labor organizers outline their goals. Finally, Oppie asked for the audience’s views. When Kamen’s turn came, he recalled, “I embarrassedly asked if permission had been obtained from E.O.L. for people such as Al and myself to be approached.”

  The question stopped Oppenheimer in his tracks, for, like every other habitué of the Rad Lab, he knew of Ernest’s ingrained suspicion of anything that smacked of politics. The previous August, Lawrence had curtly rebuffed an invitation from Harold Urey to join with other American Nobel laureates in a “Federal Union of Democracies of the World”—a fairly innocuous antitotalitarian “campaign from the standpoint of ideas,” in Urey’s description, “one that I believe is just as important as any aid which we can give for national defense on the physical side.” Lawrence replied that “the idea of a federation of democracies may have much practical merit, but . . . I would not think of using my position as a scientist in furthering such a political movement.”

  Oppenheimer, in his predilection for action, had foolishly overlooked Lawrence’s mind-set. The next day, a shaken Oppie buttonholed Kamen at the lab and revealed that he had just reported the unionization meeting to Ernest, who “blew a gasket.” Oppie angered Ernest even further by refusing to reveal which Rad Lab members had attended. “They’ll have to come tell you themselves,” he said.

  Kamen went to Lawrence and confessed, explaining that he had been against the AASW idea from the start. His demurrer did not seem to register
. “He urged me to ‘get out,’ ” Kamen recalled, “whereupon I hotly asserted that I had never been ‘in.’ ”

  For the moment, Lawrence considered that Oppenheimer’s talents as a theoretician outweighed his demerits as a political dabbler. He swallowed his misgivings, vouched for Oppie’s scientific judgment to Compton, and escorted him to the Schenectady meeting. There Oppenheimer delivered an impressively detailed explication of atomic bomb physics, along with his own rough estimate that 100 kilograms of U-235—that is, 220 pounds—would be enough for a practical device. (This proved to be an overestimate: the core of the Hiroshima bomb, which comprised uranium enriched to 80 percent U-235, weighed about 140 pounds.)

  Oppenheimer’s exposure to the high-level deliberations in Schenectady impressed upon him, more directly than Lawrence’s scolding, the wisdom of shedding his political entanglements. Here was an opportunity to make practical use of the theories in which he had marinated for years—and in the service of a fight against Fascism that he took seriously indeed. Anxious to signal that his involvement in the effort would be trouble-free, he wrote Ernest on November 12 to assure him that “there will be no further difficulties at any time with the A.A.S.W. . . . I doubt very much whether anyone will want to start at this time an organization which could in any way embarrass, divide, or interfere with the work we have in hand. I have not yet spoken to everyone involved, but all those to whom I have spoken agree with us; so you can forget it.”

  Compton’s report of the Schenectady meeting to Bush asserted firmly the practicality of building a “fission bomb of superlatively destructive power” and of separating isotopes on an industrial scale for no more than $100 million. For the first time, Bush had received an unequivocal endorsement of the idea that an atomic bomb could be developed in time to influence the course of a war he knew was coming. He delivered the report to Roosevelt on November 27, with a covering letter stating that he was forming an engineering team and accelerating all other necessary research. It was understood that he would proceed unless and until an order came from the White House to stand down. But the only direct response from the White House to Bush would arrive nearly two months later, on January 19, 1942, when Compton’s report came back to him with FDR’s handwritten note: “V.B. OK—returned—I think you had best keep this in your own safe.”