109 East Palace Read online

  By this time, many of the scientists had been at Los Alamos just long enough to be thoroughly exasperated by the military mind-set that ruled the mesa. They had been struggling for several weeks to unpack and assemble their equipment, and they felt they had been hampered at every turn by the army engineers, who not only were responsible for the jerry-built structures they now found themselves in, but refused to change so much as a screw, even when the invaluable accelerator parts being unloaded could not fit through the door. To make matters worse, many of the laboratories still had no power, and when the scientists pushed to get the work completed as soon as possible, they found the construction crews unresponsive and indifferent to their sense of urgency. Procurement was turning out to be an even bigger problem, with ordering even the smallest missing part necessitating directives, requisition forms, and a tediously involved procedure. For their part, the local crews had been laboring for months under very trying conditions and foresaw that the nervous scientists’ constant requests for changes in the design would only result in chaos and more delays. They did not have the slightest idea what the project was about and regarded the whole thing as a giant boondoggle, probably the brainchild of some nut in Washington. Tempers erupted, and all the run-ins between the scientists and construction workers seemed to make the likelihood of their ever contributing anything to resolve the conflict half a world away that much unlikelier.

  For many of the laboratory staff, it was extremely difficult to come to terms with the fact that Los Alamos was an army post and Groves was indisputably in charge. He had failed to get them all into uniform, but in every other respect, his word was the law of the land. Groves had overall executive responsibility for both the military and the technical administration, each of which was headed in turn by the commanding officer and director. The CO, who reported directly to Groves, ran Los Alamos on a day-to-day basis, overseeing everything from the maintenance of all the living conditions and the conduct of military personnel to security, including the large military police force that patrolled the fenced perimeter twenty-four hours a day, both on horseback and in jeeps. K9 Corps dogs guarded the base of the cliffs.

  Groves was such a stickler for security that the first CO lasted only four months, leaving right around opening day. The rumor was that he had a weakness for alcohol that life on the isolated post had exacerbated. His successor, Lieutenant Colonel Whitney Ashbridge, was an engineer who had worked for Groves before and, fortunately for all involved, had attended the Los Alamos Ranch School and was already familiar with the lay of the land. His primary responsibility was to keep the makeshift community up and running and see to it that the scientists “stick to their knitting,” as Groves put it.

  Oppenheimer, as the laboratory director, also reported directly to Groves. From the very beginning, Groves had been apprehensive about the relations between the scientists and the military and had urged Oppie to appoint a special administrative assistant to manage the practical, housekeeping side of the project so that he could remain focused on the technical problems. Edward Condon was a first-rate physicist and had served as associate director of Westinghouse’s experimental laboratory, which led Groves to believe he would be able to speak the same language as the construction engineers and ensure good communication with the commanding officer. Instead, trouble arose as soon as the first scientists set foot on the post.

  As the new arrivals complained about everything from the roads and housing to the lack of facilities and a proper school for their children, the friction worsened. Groves felt that instead of proving himself an ally, Condon sided with the scientists and fought him on issue after issue. Their growing hostility culminated in a flare-up over compartmentalization, Groves’ fetish for secrecy between the separate units of the project. “The basic security problem was to establish controls over the various members of the project that would minimize the likelihood of vital secrets falling into enemy hands,” wrote Groves in his memoir. “Compartmentalization of knowledge, to me, was the very heart of security. My rule was simple and not capable of misinterpretation—each man should know everything he needed to know to do his job and nothing else.”

  Condon likened the policy to being asked to do “an extremely difficult job with three hands tied behind your back.” While Groves had bowed somewhat to the scientists demands and had eliminated the usual compartmentalization protocol within Los Alamos, he more than made up for this by drawing a tight ring of secrecy around the entire bomb laboratory. For Groves, the high steel fence surrounding the post was intended to contain every aspect of what went on there—to wall everyone and everything in, both literally and metaphorically. While the other classified Manhattan Project sites, including the uranium factories in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the graphite production piles in Hanford, Washington, sought to keep people from getting in, Los Alamos was expressly designed by Groves to keep any information or personnel from getting out. They were to be invisible to the outside world, cut off both physically and socially, and he would enforce this blanket security with the brass-knuckle vengeance he had been known for throughout his career. When he learned that Oppenheimer had violated security in late April by personally journeying to Chicago to ask Compton for a small amount of plutonium, and furthermore had disclosed exactly what he intended to do with it, Groves hit the roof. He called both Oppenheimer and Condon in on the carpet for a thorough dressing down.

  Condon did not take the reprimand in stride and barely six weeks into the job tendered his resignation. Furious, Groves told Oppenheimer that for his own protection he should demand that his second in command put his reasons for leaving in writing. In his letter to Oppenheimer, written at the end of April, Condon cited the “considerable personal sacrifice” to himself and his family as the main reason for his departure, but then in a lengthy tirade, placed the blame squarely on Groves’ policy of compartmentalization :

  The thing which upsets me the most is the extraordinarily close security policy. I do not feel qualified to question the wisdom of this since I am totally unaware of the extent of enemy espionage and sabotage activities. I only want to say that in my case I found that the extreme concern with security was morbidly depressing—especially the discussion about censoring mail and telephone calls, militarization and complete isolation of the personnel from the outside world….

  While I had heard there were to be some restrictions, I can say that I was so shocked that I could hardly believe my ears when General Groves undertook to reprove us, though he did with exquisite tact and courtesy, for a discussion which you had concerning an important technical question with A. H. Compton. To me the absence of such men as A. H. Compton, E. O. Lawrence, and H. C. Urey was an unfortunate thing but up to that time in your office on Monday I had put it down simply to their being too busy with other matters.

  Groves dismissed Condon’s letter as less than honest, and cowardly. Condon had interpreted the decision by Compton, Lawrence, and Harold Urey to stay away from the mesa as a sign that they did not think much would come of it. The bottom line, Groves concluded, was that Condon feared “the work in which [they] were engaged would not be successful, that the Manhattan Project was going to fail, and that he did not want to be connected with it.”

  In fact, Groves was willing to be far more flexible on the subject of security than army intelligence would have preferred. At Los Alamos, Groves confronted the problem that the army was dragging its feet when it came to providing clearances for the many foreign-born physicists because of their “enemy alien” status, even though a number of them had been working in highly sensitive areas for months already. Part of the army’s reluctance was that because they were refugees from countries that were now at war, obtaining reliable information about their backgrounds and politics was next to impossible, which made the screening process extremely slow and incomplete at best. In addition, almost all of the physicists had been at foreign universities where Communist doctrines were popular and had friends and colleagues who were avowed
members of the party. Given the limited number of first-class atomic scientists available, however, Groves was not prepared to part with someone as irreplaceable as Fermi on the basis of only vague suspicions. With so much at stake, Groves concluded it was worth taking the calculated risk that “among those whose employment would be an advantage to the United States, a reasonable distinction could be made between individuals whose use might be dangerous and individuals whose use would probably not be.” All decisions on security, including the clearance of personnel, “had to be based on what was believed to be the overriding consideration—completion of the bomb. Speed of accomplishment was paramount.”

  Despite the tendency of a few outspoken foreign scientists to criticize the army’s “gestapo” methods, the Italian physicist Emilio Segrè, a former student of Fermi’s who had escaped Mussolini’s Fascist regime and was awaiting clearance to work at Los Alamos, admired the American general’s pragmatism when it came to issuing clearances. As Segrè noted in his wartime memoir, “Groves wiggled out of this impasse with good sense”:

  When Groves saw that the usual security rules would preclude recruiting those he wanted, he invented new rules. Each of us was to guarantee some colleague he knew well. “Guarantee” sounded good, but how? Somebody proposed an oath on the Bible, but Groves objected: “Most of them are unbelievers.” An Intelligence officer then proposed an oath of personal honor, but Groves replied, “They do not have any sense of honor.” “Rather,” he concluded, “let them swear on their scientific reputation. It seems to me that is the only thing they care for.”

  In the end, Segrè swore an oath on his reputation as a physicist that Fermi was loyal, while Bethe and Bacher guaranteed Segrè’s loyalty, and the process continued on that way in a circle until every alien was cleared.

  For his part, Eugene Wigner refused to allow himself to be fingerprinted by Groves’ security people for fear of what might happen if the war did not go their way and the records fell into the hands of the Nazis. “I had no doubt that if the Germans won the war they would swiftly begin rounding up everyone in the Manhattan Project for execution,” he explained. “And the roundup would go easier with fingerprints.”

  If the opening conference had not gone so well, there is no telling how many of Oppenheimer’s recruits who endured this tense and trying time would have chosen not to stay on “for the duration,” as the unforeseeable length of the project was always described. But in those first few weeks, what impressed them more than all the annoyances and minor discomforts was the extraordinary dynamic between the professor and the general, and the almost spontaneous organization and productivity that it seemed to generate. Rabi, who was a consultant and had come from Cambridge only for the meetings, later marveled at the ease with which things seemed to come together:

  First, Robert Oppenheimer—of all people to select as director. It was astonishing! He could drive a car with only occasional accidents but never fix it. But he was a man of brilliant insight with a command of language that was very elevating. He set a high-level tone. Then there was General Groves, his boss, whom most of the scientists who worked at Los Alamos remember as a born malaprop. Now, that combination of Oppenheimer and Groves was remarkable because you would always tend to underestimate Groves, but he was the power behind Oppenheimer. That combination made the thing work.

  Despite all the difficulties, the project got off to a fast start, all the more so considering that, at the beginning, they had no equipment. As Rabi drily observed, “There were no materials for the bomb that we could assemble, and their properties were not known.” But as Richard Feynman, one of the youngest and most gifted graduate students observed, the theorists did not need a laboratory, let alone any apparatus, so they “could start working right away.” Oppenheimer nominated Serber to give a series of lectures to the gathering, which was attended by thirty of the most distinguished scientists in the country. They assembled in the old school library, which was empty because none of the technical books and reports had arrived yet either. Serber stood before a small, rickety blackboard on wheels and tried to make himself heard above the banging of hammers and the carpenters’ loud footsteps overhead. “The object of the project,” he began, “is to produce a practical military weapon in the form of a bomb in which the energy is released by a fast neutron chain reaction in one or more of the materials known to show nuclear fission….”

  At first, Serber seemed like an odd choice to lead the conference. He was a slight, mild-mannered, almost puckish character, who spoke softly and with a pronounced lisp. A few minutes into his first talk, Oppenheimer had to dispatch Manley to go up front and tell him to please stop using the word “bomb” and substitute the term “gadget” instead. Serber was not a riveting speaker, but he held their attention despite the chaotic surroundings. At one point, an electrician’s foot came through the ceiling, accompanied by a shower of sawdust, leaving a good-sized hole. It was not clear how the workman had breached Groves’ awesome security, but had he been a spy, they all agreed he would have been treated to an earful. By the time Serber was finished, he had delivered five brilliant lectures, an hour or so each, summarizing what the project was about and the existing state of knowledge about the bomb. The tutorials became instant classics. Before Condon left, he compiled them, and mimeographed copies of Los Alamos Report Number 1: The Los Alamos Primer subsequently became required reading for every new physicist who joined the project. “He wasn’t much of a speaker,” one participant recalled. “But for ammunition he had everything Oppenheimer’s theoretical group had uncovered during the last year. He knew it all cold and that was all he cared about.”

  While the lectures were proceeding, Oppenheimer began calling in the senior scientists one by one and informing them that, in order to facilitate the work, he was organizing the laboratory into divisions, each with overall responsibility for a number of subdivisions, or groups. Rabi had advised him that the MIT Rad Lab’s structure had worked exceptionally well and that implementing it at Los Alamos would help create a sense of mission and camaraderie. Oppenheimer organized his staff accordingly around the various parts of the project: theoretical physics, experimental physics, chemistry, metallurgy, and ordnance. They would investigate two proposals for the bomb’s design: the most straightforward was the gun-assembly method for the U-235 bomb, which involved firing a subcritical mass of fissionable material, in this case uranium, into a second subcritical mass of fissionable material, producing a supercritical mass, the chain reaction leading to an atomic explosion. The other method, the plutonium gun, was trickier, because theoretically the chain reaction of plutonium would be much faster, so consequently the gun would have to be much faster or it would predetonate. How much faster would have to be explored. Both assemblies would be investigated posthaste, although the uranium bomb was to be given priority.

  Groves came in for much derision when he proposed what Teller later called “a very stupid way of assembly” for the plutonium weapon, which the scientists made fun of behind his back. But Oppenheimer always maintained that anyone from the lowliest employee could be the source of a good suggestion, and in the end Groves’ absurd proposal planted the seed of an idea in someone in the audience. Later on, just as Serber was winding up his last lecture, a tall, gangly physicist named Seth Neddermeyer stood up and announced that he believed implosion was the way to go, by directing a blast of high explosives inward toward a quantity of fissionable material causing it to reach critical mass and detonate. While he faced considerable skepticism from Bethe, Fermi, and others, Neddermeyers stubborn championing of this means of assembly led Oppenheimer to reluctantly assign him to convene an experimental study group on implosion. It was one more thing that would now have to be looked into, and they had little time and few resources. Neddermeyer later recalled thinking that Oppenheimer looked tired, and that the burden of responsibility for the success of the bomb project, for picking “the things that will work,” was weighing heavily on his thin shoulders.
/>   Rabi had also advised Oppenheimer that, saddled with all the duties of being scientific director, he could not also be responsible for heading the Theoretical Division. Rabi proposed Hans Bethe for the job, and Oppie agreed. When Teller learned that Oppenheimer had made Bethe head of the T Division, and Serber his group leader, he was furious. Oppenheimer had known full well that Teller would feel snubbed, but his primary responsibility was to keep everyone on track and the work progressing as quickly as possible. Teller persisted in talking about his own ideas and introducing obstacles in an effort to control the project and move it in a different direction.

  One immediate benefit of the new laboratory structure was that it fell to Bethe to inform the intractable physicist that he was being further sidelined. He suggested to Teller that since he was interested in alternate ways the bomb could be made to work, he should go off and pursue fission calculations with his own small group, including his idea for a fusion weapon. Teller immediately protested, in part because he realized the task might take so long it would prevent him from making any real contribution to the atomic bomb. He had forced their hand with his consistent refusal to cooperate and in the end had to accede to their request that he work outside the Theoretical Division. While Teller never stopped raising questions and challenging ideas at meetings, Oppenheimer had effectively removed him from the main thrust of the activity at Los Alamos. He had brought the major source of disruption on the mesa into line, but at the cost of losing a first-rate mind. Oppenheimer made every effort to placate the brooding Hungarian by meeting with him privately, but after a while he told Greene to limit his audiences with Teller to once a week.

  As soon as the opening session was over, Groves moved to clamp down on the scientists’ freedom to discuss problems relating to different divisions of the project. He was alarmed by some of the free-wheeling exchanges he had heard during the first few weeks and strove to have the different sites strictly compartmentalized and to limit open discussion of the bomb. For the most part, Oppenheimer and Groves did not have serious disagreements about how to run the project, but in this area their agendas came into sharp conflict. “Groves wanted to partition everything,” recalled Bethe. “He wanted each group to work by itself and no other group should know about it.” Oppenheimer vehemently opposed any compartmentalization, arguing that progress was only made through interaction, that science was not possible without discussion, cross-fertilization, and collaboration. Groves only agreed after Conant, Rabi, Bacher, and much of the senior laboratory staff took the same line.