Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (56 page)

‘Electrified’ was hardly a word that one could have used at this time to describe the Advisory Committee on Uranium, which President Roosevelt had set up in October 1939 under the chairmanship of the government scientist Lyman Briggs, a man more noted for caution than for dynamism. After its first meeting a report had been sent to the President, recommending that Fermi and Szilard be provided with the pure graphite and uranium they needed to investigate the possibility of a controlled chain reaction, and advising the President such a chain reaction might be useful as a ‘source of power in submarines’. After reading the report, Roosevelt said he wanted to keep it on file. In the summer of 1940, the uranium committee was absorbed into the newly formed National Defense Research Council (NDRC), headed by James Conant of Harvard and Vannevar Bush of the Carnegie Institution. Briggs was kept on as head of the fission project, but he now reported to Conant.

Meanwhile, the war effort in Britain was revitalised in May by the election of Winston Churchill. The following month, with the fall of France, Britain saw itself as standing alone in resisting the menace of Nazi Germany, and a renewed determination to succeed in that resistance was felt across the entire country. G.P. Thomson’s committee was not immune to that sense of determination. In June it renamed itself the ‘MAUD Committee’ after an apparently enigmatic telegram from Lise Meitner to an English friend, which read: ‘
MET NIELS AND MARGRETHE RECENTLY BOTH WELL BUT UNHAPPY ABOUT EVENTS PLEASE INFORM COCKCROFT AND MAUD RAY KENT
.’ The message was sent to Cockcroft, who thought ‘Maud Ray Kent’ must be an anagram for ‘Radium Taken’, confirming suspicions that the Germans were taking radium from laboratories in occupied countries. Later, they discovered that Maud Ray was the name of a woman who lived in Kent.

In December 1940, the MAUD Committee received a report from Franz Simon, another émigré German physicist working in Britain, concerning the estimated cost of a plant capable of separating one kilogram
of uranium-235 from natural uranium. The cost of such a plant, Simon said, would be about £5 million. The following February, Conant flew to London to establish communication between his committee and the British government. He was impressed by what he saw; it was, he said, ‘the most extraordinary experience of my life’.

Remarkably, it was in London that Conant, the man to whom the head of the US fission research project now reported, first heard about the possibility of using fission to create an atomic bomb. The subject came up in conversation with Frederick Lindemann, Winston Churchill’s scientific advisor, with whom Conant had lunch at a London club. According to Conant’s later recollection, Lindemann ‘introduced the subject of the study of fission of uranium atoms’.

Conant did not press the subject, since ‘this was entirely an unofficial and private communication and represented a highly speculative scheme’, but the fact remained that, when he returned to the US, there was now at least one person involved in the American uranium research project who understood that a fission bomb was not a remote possibility.

Meanwhile, Ernest Lawrence was becoming increasingly exasperated by the lack of urgency shown by Briggs’s uranium committee and took every opportunity to let his feelings be known to anyone with any influence at Washington. When Conant, soon after his trip to Britain, went to Berkeley to give a paper, Lawrence took the chance to urge him to ‘light a fire under the Briggs committee’. Briggs came under further pressure when Kenneth Bainbridge, a nuclear physicist from Harvard, followed Conant to Britain and was invited to attend a meeting of the MAUD Committee. There Bainbridge discovered in detail what Conant had heard in passing: that the British had ‘a very good idea of the critical
mass and assembly’ and that they thought an atomic weapon could be made in three years.

Bainbridge’s report led Vannevar Bush to appoint a new committee to take ‘an energetic but dispassionate review of the entire situation’. Lawrence was asked to serve on this committee and Arthur Compton was chosen as its head. The review was completed quickly and the committee’s report delivered on 17 May 1941. Unlike the Frisch–Peierls memorandum, Compton’s report did not emphasise the importance of fast-neutron fission, and played down the possibility of an atomic bomb. Its central focus was the importance of Fermi’s experiment to produce a chain reaction in natural uranium.

The report led to further agonisingly slow progress and the establishment of yet another bureaucratic organisation: the Office of Scientific Research and Development, with Bush as its director, answerable only to the President. The key word here is ‘development’. This committee had authority not only to initiate research, but also to employ engineers and technicians to actually
produce
things. Bush’s move upwards left Conant in sole charge of the NDRC.

In yet another effort to get things moving in the US, the British MAUD Committee invited Charles Lauritsen, then in England working for the NDRC, to attend its meeting of 2 July 1941 to hear the committee’s draft final report, drawn up by G.P. Thomson. Lauritsen listened, took notes and a week later reported the MAUD findings to Bush. The report concluded that it would be possible to make a uranium bomb with twenty-five pounds of uranium-235, which would cost about £5 million to produce. In spite of this very large cost, the report considered ‘that the destructive effect, both material and moral, is so great that every effort should be made to produce bombs of this kind’. With this report in hand, Conant later said, it became clear to both him and to Bush that ‘a major push along the lines outlined was in order’.

In order, perhaps, but – to the increasing dismay of the British – still not in effect. At the end of August, Mark Oliphant flew to the US to see what was happening. ‘If Congress knew the true history of the atomic-energy project,’ Leo Szilard once said, ‘I have no doubt but that it would create a special medal to be given to meddling foreigners for distinguished services, and Dr Oliphant would be the first to receive one.’ In Washington, Oliphant called on Briggs and was ‘amazed and distressed’ to find that ‘this inarticulate and unimpressive man’ had put the MAUD Committee’s reports in a safe, without showing them to the other members of the uranium committee. As soon as he could, he met with the uranium committee and, to the shock of some of them, spelled out the possibilities of using fission to make an explosive. It was the first time some of the committee had heard the word ‘bomb’ used in this context. One of its
members, Samuel Allison, later recalled: ‘I thought we were making a power source for submarines.’

From Washington, Oliphant flew to California to meet Lawrence, who, he had reason to believe, had a greater sense of urgency about the project than prevailed among the government scientists. On 21 September 1941, Lawrence drove Oliphant up ‘Cyclotron Hill’ to see the site of the still-to-be-built 184-inch cyclotron. When they returned to Lawrence’s office, they were joined by Oppenheimer. Assuming that Oppenheimer was privy to the official secrets that he and Lawrence had been discussing, Oliphant continued to talk about the MAUD report, about the optimism that the British scientists had expressed concerning the possibility of building an atomic bomb, and about the cooperation between Britain and the States on the research and development of the bomb. Noting that Lawrence had begun to look extremely uncomfortable, and registering the shocked expression on Oppenheimer’s face, Oliphant realised that he had just revealed to Oppenheimer for the first time the existence of a project to build an atomic bomb. Clearing his throat, Oppenheimer suggested to Oliphant that it might be advisable not to continue this conversation, since he was not involved with the project. ‘But that’s terrible,’ replied Oliphant. ‘We need you.’

By thus passing this information on to him, Oliphant may possibly have guaranteed that Oppenheimer
would
become involved in the project. For, even if it had not been decided that Oppenheimer’s theoretical skills would be invaluable to the project, he now knew too much to be left out.

^fn41
Take the fifty-six protons of barium from the ninety-two of uranium, and you are left with thirty-six, the atomic number of krypton.

^fn42
While most people in California anglicised it to ‘Oppie’, Chevalier insisted on keeping to the Dutch original of the nickname.

^fn43
See
here
.

AFTER HE HAD
let slip to Oppenheimer the Allies’ most important and most closely guarded military secret, Oliphant returned to Washington, leaving a written summary of the MAUD report’s findings with Lawrence. In Washington, Lawrence had arranged for Oliphant to meet Bush and Conant, but from both Oliphant received a rather frosty reception. Adopting a somewhat stricter approach to official secrets than had prevailed in California, neither Bush nor Conant would admit to knowing anything about the MAUD report and both gave Oliphant the cold shoulder. To Bush, Conant dismissed Oliphant’s information as ‘gossip among nuclear physicists on forbidden subjects’, and remarked testily: ‘Oliphant’s behaviour does not help the cause of secrecy.’

The encounter between Oliphant and Bush and Conant reveals a fundamental difference between the priorities of Britain and the United States at this time. For the British, maintaining strict secrecy was of secondary importance to the crucial task of building an atomic bomb before the Germans, who, they had reason to believe, were pressing ahead with their own atomic-weapons programme.

From the perspective of the US, things looked rather different. America was not yet at war with Germany, nor was the Soviet Union yet its ally. Indeed, in so far as the Americans regarded themselves as being at war in the autumn of 1941, it was a war of espionage
against
the Soviet Union. The truly breathtaking extent of Soviet espionage – industrial, scientific and military – during this period would not become fully apparent until many years after the war, but the US authorities already knew enough to be certain that the Russian embassy in Washington and the consulates in New York and San Francisco were operating as centres of a major spying operation. Using an elaborate system of ‘legals’ and ‘illegals’ – the former operating under their own names, the latter working under cover of false names and disguises – and
employing a mixture of people working through the American Communist Party and others working directly for the Soviet Union, a vast amount of information was being collected from manufacturing companies, universities, military bases and government offices and sent via official cables to Moscow.

In Britain, the Soviet espionage operation had been, and continued to be throughout the war, extraordinarily effective. The ‘Cambridge Five’ – Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Kim Philby and John Cairncross – alone were responsible for the handing over to Moscow of a substantial number of top British military secrets. Partly, no doubt, because of their status as accepted members of the British social and educational elite, they were, with only minimal security checks, appointed to the kind of positions that gave them access to the Allies’ most closely guarded documents (Blunt, Cairncross and Philby worked for British intelligence, while Maclean and, intermittently, Burgess were employed by the Foreign Office). Through Cairncross, for example, the Soviets received, just a week or so after the final meeting of the MAUD Committee, a full account of that meeting and a copy of its final report.

Neither Britain nor the US knew about the activities of these five until after the war. They were exposed by an operation that the US had put into place precisely because of their suspicions of the Soviets. This was the so-called ‘Venona’ project, in accordance with which the US telegraph companies were instructed to keep a copy of every cable sent from the US to Moscow. These messages, hundreds of thousands of them, were preserved and studied and, after many of them had been decoded, provided the US authorities with a detailed picture of the astonishing extent and success of Soviet espionage.

The decoding, however, could not be done in time to prevent most of the espionage that occurred during the war, and the US had to rely chiefly on the counter-intelligence efforts of the FBI. While the British lacked the manpower, and to some extent the will, to do very much about Soviet espionage, the US could afford to invest the vast sums it took to employ several thousand FBI agents to try to prevent
their
secrets from being handed over to Moscow.

Because the FBI knew that the American Communist Party played a key role in the information-gathering efforts of the Soviets, they naturally centred their counter-intelligence effort on Communist Party members and people close to them. Thus it was that, while Oliphant was eagerly revealing to Oppenheimer the secret of the British and the American atomic-bomb projects, the FBI were keeping a file on him.

At this time, though the FBI regarded Oppenheimer as suspicious, they did not treat the surveillance of him as a particularly high priority.
They may have kept a file on him, but they did not – as they did with people identified as senior figures in the Soviet espionage network – have him followed, bug his phone or install microphones in his house. And, in fact, the file they opened on him in March 1941 contained, six months later, very little. It recorded: 1. his attendance at Chevalier’s home at a meeting in December 1940, at which Isaac Folkoff and William Schneiderman were also present; 2. Folkoff’s reference to him as ‘the big shot’; 3. his subscription to the Communist Party newspaper,
People’s World
; and 4. his membership of several Communist front organisations. And that was about it. It was more than enough to persuade J. Edgar Hoover that Oppenheimer needed to be watched, but it fell a long way short of suggesting that he was engaged in any kind of espionage. Of course, before his meeting with Oliphant, Oppenheimer, even if he had wanted to hand over secret information to the Soviets, would have been unable to do so, since he did not have access to any secrets. In the months after that meeting and, indirectly at least, as a result of that meeting, that was to change drastically.