Pandora's Keepers (23 page)

Bethe relieved the pressure by hiking nearly every Sunday in the nearby mountains, frequently climbing Lake Peak (12,500 feet)
across the Rio Grande Valley in the Sangre de Cristos. At the top, through a fringe of cedars, spread an alpine meadow extravagantly
carpeted with purple mariposa lilies. These hikes gave Bethe a chance to unburden himself by giving his body exercise and
his mind a chance to wander. Others went on weekend camping and fishing trips, rock-gathering expeditions, pueblo visits,
and other activities that relieved the tensions of the project and the weight of the moral justifications of bomb making.
Some would ride the bus to Santa Fe and sit in the plaza in the center of town, drowsing in a sunny siesta, then dine at the
La Fonda, an adobe hotel with exposed beams and wooden balconies. Others walked the quiet streets of old Santa Fe, peering
over adobe walls that seemed to soak up the abundant sunshine into the romantic and exotic gardens within. Some found that
they could never leave their work behind. They were missing something.

On December 30, 1943, an older man arrived on the Hill as a consultant to the British delegation. His security guards referred
to him as “Mr. Nicholas Baker” but physicists instantly recognized “Mr. Baker” as Niels Bohr. Bohr’s long odyssey from Copenhagen
to Los Alamos had begun in April 1940, when Germany invaded and occupied Denmark. Half Jewish, Bohr was put under surveillance
and his phones were tapped. Secretly communicating with the Danish resistance, he urged his country’s leaders to fight Jewish
deportations from Denmark, even as German troops patrolled the street in front of his institute.

In late September 1941, as German troops neared Moscow and looked poised to knock Russia out of the war, Bohr received a visit
from Heisenberg. The two had once been very close—mentor and beloved protégé. Now Heisenberg was back as the leading scientist
of a nation that seemed on the verge of conquering all of Europe. Bohr greeted his former student with careful politeness
and invited him into his office at the institute. They busily avoided each other’s eyes as they began their conversation.
Shy and arrogant, Heisenberg expressed his confidence that Germany would win the war but told Bohr that if the war lasted
long enough it would be decided by atomic bombs, said that he was involved in such research for Nazi Germany, and had no doubt
that it could be done. After the war, Heisenberg would claim that he was subtly hinting at moral qualms about building an
atomic weapon in wartime and suggesting that physicists on both sides of the conflict should refuse to do so. But Bohr, fearful
and shaken, did not see it that way. He later recalled that Heisenberg “gave no hint about efforts on the part of German scientists
to prevent such a development.”
⁶⁰
Visibly startled by what Heisenberg had said but trying to contain his deep fright, Bohr said nothing and suddenly cut short
the conversation. Afterward, he confided to his family that Heisenberg had tried to pry information from him about fission
and, by implication, the Allied atomic project. Hans Bethe was probably closest to the truth when he later remarked that “one
talked with one set of assumptions and the other with a totally different set of assumptions.”
⁶¹
The meeting, however, unquestionably intensified Bohr’s suspicion, and fear, that the Nazis were racing toward an atomic
bomb.

Two years later, in September 1943, Bohr learned from the Swedish ambassador in Copenhagen that deportation of Danish Jews
would begin soon. The ambassador hinted that Bohr, whose mother was Jewish, would be arrested himself. Confirmation came the
next morning from an informer at Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen who had seen orders for Bohr’s arrest and deportation.
Late that afternoon, Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, walked to a seaside garden and hid in a gardener’s shed. They waited anxiously
for nightfall. Then, at a prearranged time, they left the shed and crossed to the beach. From the beach a motorboat took them
out to a fishing boat. Dodging German minefields, they crossed the choppy sound between Denmark and Sweden by moonlight.

When Bohr landed in Sweden, a Swedish officer was told to bring him to Stockholm and to attract no attention on the way. (The
officer was too proud of having the famous Dane in his charge, so despite orders he stopped in many places for a drink, each
time saying, “Do you know whom I am escorting to Stockholm…?”
⁶²
) When Bohr reached Stockholm the next day, he was put up in the home of a Danish diplomat and never went out alone. Britain
moved its diplomatic pouch in and out of Sweden in a fast, unarmed bomber that flew at a high altitude to avoid German antiaircraft
batteries along the coast of Norway. The plane’s bomb bay was fitted for a single passenger. Temporarily leaving his wife
behind, Bohr boarded the plane for the flight to England on October sixth. Once in London, he learned from British scientists
that fission research had progressed a great deal since his stay in Princeton four years earlier. An atomic bomb was being
made at Los Alamos, the British were preparing to send a team there, and they wanted Bohr to join it.

Bohr agreed to join the British team at Los Alamos. When he reached the United States in December, his first stop was the
sprawling U-235 separation plant at Oak Ridge. Seeing what he saw, and being one of the most farsighted of men, he had no
doubt now that the atomic bomb would be built, and would be a presence in the world forever. Groves joined him afterward at
the Met Lab, and together they boarded a train for Los Alamos. Bohr did most of the talking as their train hurtled south across
the Plains and then west over the Rockies, Groves struggling all the while to understand Bohr’s mumbled words. When they finally
reached Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was there to greet them. He noticed that Groves looked tired and irritated. He asked the general
what the trouble was. “I’ve been listening to Bohr,” he grumbled.
⁶³

Oppenheimer arranged a reception for Bohr at his home with other physicists. When Bohr spotted Teller, he said, “Didn’t I
tell you that you could not make a nuclear explosive without turning the whole country into a huge factory? Now you have gone
and done it.”
⁶⁴
Bohr then related an account of his personal adventures, including his conversation two years earlier with Heisenberg. He
said that Heisenberg and other talented German physicists were diligently working on a bomb. The thought of how far the Nazis
might have come in the years since the discovery of fission was enough to make everyone at the reception shudder. Bohr also
related what he knew about Nazi-occupied Europe to those who had left loved ones behind. The atmosphere was very somber.

The first question Bohr put to physicists at Los Alamos was: “Is it really big enough?”—was the atomic bomb they were building
big enough to make future wars too destructive to be contemplated? Bohr made a clear distinction between the bomb’s wartime
use, which he considered an all but inevitable military decision, and its political and diplomatic implications, which bore
on the longer-range issues of world peace and security and relations among nations. “What role it [the bomb] may play in the
present war,” Bohr wrote, was a question “quite apart” from the overriding concern: the need to avoid an atomic arms race.
⁶⁵

Bohr’s thinking was shaped by two assumptions: first, the bomb’s destructiveness would be unprecedented and indiscriminate;
and second, such a weapon could not be monopolized—sooner or later it would be developed by other nations—thus posing the
frightful prospect of a nuclear arms race. Bohr had no doubt that scientists in the Soviet Union would also grasp the significance
of the bomb and convey their understanding to Stalin just as scientists in the United States had conveyed their understanding
to Roosevelt. He also believed that if statesmen could be made to see the military and political implications of atomic weapons,
they would respond positively to international control. There were no historical precedents to guide them, he knew, but the
threat of a nuclear-armed world was also unprecedented. If national security was not achieved by nations through international
control of atomic energy, he concluded, they would inevitably indulge in an arms race that would plant the seeds of their
own destruction. These ideas would become Bohr’s central preoccupation from 1943 until the end of the war.
⁶⁶

Bohr spent many hours that winter discussing his ideas with Oppenheimer, who was deeply impressed. Bohr had articulated thoughts
and sentiments that lay unformed and unexpressed in Oppenheimer’s own mind and conscience. Indeed, Oppenheimer was so taken
by the depth and insight of Bohr’s thinking that he began to regard him as a kind of sage. One afternoon, as Oppenheimer and
his assistant David Hawkins were escorting Bohr from the Tech Area back to his room at Fuller Lodge, they skirted Ashley Pond
and Bohr tested the ice along the bank. “My God,” Oppenheimer whispered to Hawkins, “suppose he should slip? Suppose he should
fall through? What would we all do then?”
⁶⁷

Oppenheimer noticed that Bohr never seemed relaxed. He always had a sad expression on his face and looked as though he carried
all of the cares of the world on his broad shoulders. In a very real sense he did, and he knew it. Bohr forced his colleagues
to come to terms with what they were doing. He inspired them to begin their soul-searching—and to think about the future.
Numerous Los Alamos physicists poured out their worry and guilt to him in private discussions that went on far into the night.
He understood; he spoke the same language; he shared the responsibility. He did not need to remind them of the evils of Nazism
or the horror of an atomic bomb in Hitler’s hands, but he did not shy away from the ethical and moral problems raised by building
a weapon of mass destruction and the terrifying potential of a nuclear arms race.

Bohr spoke the bravest words in the most hesitant and gentle voice. He always seemed to look straight at his listener and
his face was difficult to forget, with its eyes full of intelligence and sadness. He addressed matters squarely and frankly.
Always the paradoxist, he continued to argue that every problem bore the seeds of its own solution. And here he believed that
the atomic bomb could not only end this war but even end war as a means of settling disputes between nations. His thinking
brought hope to others who wanted to believe that such a devastating weapon would make leaders see that future wars would
be suicidal.

Bohr used hikes with other physicists in the mountains and canyons around Los Alamos to spread his message. As he had done
during the train ride with Groves, he placed huge demands on his listener. He spoke very low and softly, often with a pipe
clenched in his teeth. People closed in around Bohr to hear, but as they pressed near his voice fell further, until finally
the listeners formed a straining, hushed knot around him. “He speaks, everyone listens,” was the saying on the Hill. “And
you had to listen,” remembered a physicist who was there, “because he spoke in such a low voice that you couldn’t hear if
you didn’t.”
⁶⁸
“This is the keston,” Bohr would say. “What does ‘keston’ mean?” a frustrated listener would say. “Keston means question,”
someone would finally realize.
⁶⁹

Convinced that international control could be achieved only if the Soviet Union was told about the Manhattan Project before
the bomb was a certainty and before the war was over—thus creating a postwar political climate of cooperation rather than
confrontation—Bohr set out to convince President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to approach Stalin
on this all-important subject. Bohr did not think technical details of the bomb should be revealed to the Russians; he simply
thought that informing them of the bomb’s existence might open the way for some sort of international arms control agreement.
He understood that such an initiative did not guarantee the Soviet Union’s postwar cooperation; but he also believed that
its cooperation was unlikely, if not impossible, unless such an initiative was made. The timing, moreover, was crucial: the
initiative had to be made before developments proceeded so far as to make an approach to the Russians appear more coercive
than friendly.

Bohr contacted Roosevelt through Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a friend and adviser of FDR whom Bohr had befriended
at the University of Oxford before the war. Frankfurter invited Bohr to lunch at the Supreme Court when Bohr returned to Washington
in February 1944. There, in the privacy of Frankfurter’s chambers, Bohr presented his ideas. Frankfurter relayed them to the
president in an Oval Office meeting at the end of the month. Roosevelt confronted a dilemma: on the one hand, to exclude Stalin
from any official information about the bomb—even though FDR had been informed by Army Intelligence that the Soviet Union
was already getting information about vital secrets through espionage—was bound to affect Soviet perceptions and thus the
prospects for postwar cooperation; on the other hand, to continue to withhold such information might yield diplomatic leverage
and military advantages vis-à-vis Russia after the war against Nazi Germany was over.

Whatever his thinking, Roosevelt left Frankfurter with the impression that he was “plainly impressed” by Frankfurter’s account
of the matter. When Frankfurter had suggested that the solution to the problem of the atomic bomb might be more important
than the plans for a United Nations, FDR had ostensibly agreed. Moreover, he had authorized Frankfurter to tell Bohr that
he might inform “our friends in London that the President was most eager to explore the proper safeguards in relation to [the
bomb].” Frankfurter also told Bohr that Roosevelt was “worried to death” about the bomb and was very eager for all the help
he could get in dealing with this problem.
⁷⁰

In April, Bohr traveled to Britain specifically to see Churchill. While waiting for an audience with the prime minister, he
was sent a letter by a Russian physicist. After alerting British security officers, Bohr went to the Soviet embassy in London
to pick up the letter, where a Soviet diplomat asked him what information he had about secret war work by American and British
scientists. Bohr finessed the question by quickly changing the subject, but to Bohr the inquiry meant that the Soviets knew
of the Manhattan Project and were probably working on a bomb of their own. This reinforced Bohr’s conviction that the only
solution was international control.