Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (62 page)

From the time that Oppenheimer and Groves first discussed the possibility of a single laboratory in October 1942 until the time that scientists began arriving at Los Alamos in March 1943, there seems to have been an assumption, particularly on Oppenheimer’s part, that he himself would be appointed as its director. However, it is far from clear when the decision was made to appoint Oppenheimer as the head of this laboratory.
^fn46
He did not receive his formal letter of invitation to take up the post, signed by Conant and Groves, until February 1943, but the decision must have been taken at least a month or two before that. In
Now It Can Be Told
, Groves discusses the decision at some length, emphasising that, although Oppenheimer had headed the Berkeley study group, ‘neither Bush, Conant nor I felt that we were in any way committed to his appointment as director of Project Y’. Moreover, ‘no one with whom I talked showed any great enthusiasm about Oppenheimer as a possible director of the project’.

There were, as Groves makes clear, some very powerful reasons for that lack of enthusiasm. Not only had Oppenheimer never directed a laboratory of any kind before, but he had never directed
anything
. He ‘had had almost no administrative experience of any kind’, as Groves puts it. Also (and this point seems to have weighed particularly heavily on Groves’s mind), Oppenheimer, unlike the heads of the major laboratories associated with the Manhattan Project – Compton at Chicago, Urey at Columbia and Lawrence at Berkeley – did not have a Nobel Prize. He thus, says Groves, lacked ‘the prestige among his fellow scientists that I would have liked the project leader to possess’. Finally there was the problem that, as Groves puts it, Oppenheimer’s ‘background included much that was not to our liking by any means’. This last problem was to rumble on for some months
after
Oppenheimer’s appointment, with the security organisation (‘which was not yet under my complete control,’ Groves writes) unwilling to grant clearance to someone with so many links to important communists.

In his book, Groves seems to suggest that he appointed Oppenheimer, despite the many reasons not to, simply because ‘it became apparent that we were not going to find a better man’. Of the ‘better men’ he considered, Lawrence could not be spared from the electromagnetic project, Compton could not be spared from Chicago, and Urey, as a chemist rather than a physicist, was not qualified. There were, of course, other possibilities – Lawrence pushed hard for Groves to appoint Ed McMillan – but it is fairly clear that Groves
liked
Oppenheimer and believed strongly that he was the man for the job. When Oppenheimer was asked many years later to explain why Groves chose him, his reply illustrated why throughout his life he had struck people as arrogant. Groves, he said, ‘had a fatal weakness for good men’.

By 30 November 1942, when he wrote to Conant summarising the results of recent scientific work, Oppenheimer seemed already to regard himself as the de facto head of the new laboratory. He speaks of ‘the men we are after’, and warns Conant:

As it turned out, the men Oppenheimer was after included many of the top scientists in the country. To get them, as he was advised by both Isidor Rabi and the Cornell physicist Robert Bacher, he would have to drop the idea of the laboratory being a military establishment. The scientists he wanted and needed, they told him, would hardly be willing to join the army and conduct their research in uniform.

Having shelved that idea, Oppenheimer – clearly in as great a hurry as Groves to get the project moving – was able to recruit many of the people he wanted by the end of the year. In this he was helped enormously by Manley, who knew personally almost every physicist in the US working on fast-neutron research. As Manley remembers: ‘I was supposed to talk to people in the fast neutron groups at Princeton and Wisconsin and try to persuade them to come to Los Alamos.’ One problem with this was that Manley himself had never been to New Mexico and knew nothing about Los Alamos:

Despite his inability to find Los Alamos on the map, Manley did succeed in persuading most of the physicists he spoke to to join the project.

Equally important was his success in appropriating the machines that the experimentalists would need. From Wisconsin he obtained two Van de Graaff generators, from Harvard a cyclotron, and from Illinois his own Cockcroft–Walton accelerator. To make tracking these things more difficult, they were sent first to a medical officer in St Louis, Missouri, and from there to Los Alamos. The difficulty of getting the necessary equipment to the remote spot in the New Mexico mountains made Manley wonder ‘whether, if Oppenheimer had been an experimental physicist and known that experimental physics is really 90 per cent plumbing and you’ve
got
to have all that equipment and tools and so on, he would ever have agreed to start a laboratory in this isolated place’.

Much as he respected and grew to admire and like Oppenheimer, Manley was, especially to begin with, acutely conscious of Oppenheimer’s lack of experience of both laboratories and administration, and took a good deal of persuading that Oppenheimer was actually capable of administering a large laboratory. His doubts were increased by the fact that Oppenheimer seemed to take so little interest in how the laboratory might be organised. ‘I bugged Oppie for I don’t know how many months about an organization chart – who was going to be responsible for this and who was going to be responsible for that. But each time he would seem to be as unresponsive as an experimental physicist would think a theorist would be.’ Finally, in January 1943, Manley flew out to California and went to Oppenheimer’s office. As he pushed open the door he noticed that Edward Condon was there: ‘Oppie practically threw a piece of paper at me as I came in the door and said, “Here’s your damned organization chart.”’

The organisation described by the chart, which remained in place for the first year of the laboratory’s existence, divided the lab into four main sections: 1. Theoretical, which initially was to be led by Oppenheimer himself; 2. Experimental, headed by Robert Bacher; 3. Chemistry and Metallurgy, led by the Berkeley chemist Joseph Kennedy and the British-born metallurgist Cyril S. Smith; and 4. Ordnance, which would, in time (it took some months to find the right man for this job), be headed by William ‘Deak’ Parsons of the US navy. Each of these divisions (except the Theoretical Division, which was by far the smallest) was split into groups, so that, for example, the Experimental Division contained a ‘Cyclotron Group’, led by Robert Wilson, which was charged with (among other things) the crucial task of measuring the time it takes for neutrons to be emitted after fission. Manley himself was put in charge of the ‘D-D Group’, which had responsibility for determining by experiment which material (candidates included tungsten, carbon and beryllium) could best
be used as a ‘tamper’ to bounce escaping neutrons back into the fissioning uranium, thereby improving the bomb’s efficiency.

The reason Condon was in Oppenheimer’s office was that Oppenheimer had decided to appoint him as associate director of the laboratory. Oppenheimer’s first choice for that role was another old friend from his student days in Europe, Isidor Rabi, but Rabi could not be persuaded to accept the job. He had several reasons for not wanting to move to Los Alamos. First, his wife, Helen, was vehemently opposed to going there. Second, Rabi thought the project to build a fission bomb had only a fifty-fifty chance of success. And third, he considered the work he was then doing on radar to be a crucial contribution to the war effort. Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, he was, as he later wrote, ‘
strongly
opposed to bombing’, on the grounds that ‘You drop a bomb and it falls on the just and the unjust.’ Nevertheless, he was prepared to act as a consultant on the project, and came often to oversee developments and offer advice.

The first piece of advice Rabi offered was to make an important change to the organisation chart that Oppenheimer had drawn up. There was simply no way, Rabi urged (and Bacher seconded), that Oppenheimer could combine being director with being head of a division. Oppenheimer thus changed his mind and put Hans Bethe in charge of the Theoretical Division, a choice that was as obvious as it was excellent, but which offended Edward Teller, who felt that he should have got the job.

While Oppenheimer and Manley were arranging the Los Alamos laboratory, the Met Lab in Chicago achieved the first fundamentally important milestone in the pursuit of a fission bomb by creating the world’s first chain reaction. It happened on 2 December 1942, a very cold Chicago winter’s day. Fermi, knowing the time was right for the pile he had constructed to go critical, had gathered about twenty people in the rackets court at Stagg Field, and was conducting affairs with complete confidence that everything would go as planned. One of the people present was the physicist Herb Anderson, who remembers: ‘the sound of the neutron counter, clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Then the clicks came more and more rapidly, and after a while they began to merge into a roar . . . Suddenly Fermi raised his hand. “The pile has gone critical,” he announced.’ Compton, who had watched the momentous event, returned to his office and phoned Conant. ‘The Italian navigator has just landed in the New World,’ he told him.

Within a few weeks of this dramatic demonstration that a controlled nuclear reaction was possible – and the consequent realisation that plutonium could indeed be manufactured on an industrial scale – work started on two sites that together would constitute an almost unimaginably huge engineering project. In addition to the site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the Manhattan Project acquired a site at Hanford in the state of Washington,
which would be used for a series of plutonium-producing reactors, the prototype of which was quickly constructed at Oak Ridge. Immediately, the Army Engineering Corps began to supervise the building of houses, the construction of roads and the recruitment of workers. Each site would require tens of thousands of people. Within a few months, both Hanford and Oak Ridge would be fairly sizeable towns. In areas where the depression of the 1930s had led to large-scale unemployment, the prospect of well-paid work was extremely welcome and neither site had trouble finding the requisite workforce, even though the people thus hired were told nothing about the purpose of the work they were doing. It is one of the most extraordinary aspects of the Manhattan Project that the existence of an atomic-bomb building programme was successfully kept secret from the very people who worked on the plants that supplied the necessary fissionable material.

At its peak, the Manhattan Project employed more than 150,000 workers, the majority of whom worked at Oak Ridge or Hanford. They included more than 80,000 construction workers and about 68,000 operations and research personnel. Most of the latter were employed on dull, repetitive tasks that were necessary to keep the isotope separation plants and the reactors going. An excellent social history of the Manhattan Project,
Atomic Spaces
by Peter Bacon Hales, has attempted to convey what it was like to work at these sites. ‘New workers entering these factories,’ Hales writes, ‘found them to be confusing and sometimes terrifying warrens of piping, walls of analog dials, valves and knobs, marked with Bakelite labels in the arcane language of the engineer. The electromagnetic plant alone used close to 250,000 valves to control the materials coursing through 1,175 miles of piping.’

Most of the people employed to watch the dials and turn the valves and knobs were women. They were trained only in the skills required to do their specific job, which might be, for example, turning a knob when a dial they were watching moved too far to the left or to the right. What the dial was measuring and what the knob was controlling were kept secret from them and, while at work, they were not allowed to talk to their fellow employees, but only with their immediate superiors. Faced with almost any alternative, few people would have chosen to work under such conditions, but Groves did everything he could to ensure that, for many people, there was no alternative. He persuaded the Secretary of War, Robert Patterson, for example, to issue a directive to the US Employment Service, instructing it to ensure that in its offices near Oak Ridge and Hanford ‘workers must not be offered any other employment until after they have been rejected for employment on these projects’.

Most of the workers at these plants lived in rapidly built basic flats and houses that were constructed specially for them close to their places of
work. Shops, schools, post offices and even town halls were built to ensure that the workers had as few reasons as possible to venture outside the perimeters of the site in which they lived, and over time these sites became home to something close to the kind of communities one might find in any other American small town.

Meanwhile, by the end of December 1942, Oppenheimer was playing a leading role himself in the creation of a new town and a new community at Los Alamos. In a letter he wrote to Hans and Rose Bethe on 28 December, he discussed not physics or bombs, but such things as the salaries on offer to scientists willing to come to Los Alamos (20 per cent on top of what they were already earning), the arrangements under way for the management of the town, what kind of school education would be provided and by whom, how many hospitals there would be, what laundry facilities would exist, what kind of restaurants would be available, what recreation would be on offer, how mail would be collected and delivered and what the housing would be like. The man in charge of the construction and management of the town was Colonel J.M. Harmon, and, Oppenheimer told the Bethes, the best guarantee that the arrangements would be satisfactory ‘is in the great effort and generosity that Harmon and Groves have both brought to setting up this odd community and in their evident desire to make a real success of it’.