Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (75 page)

When, almost as soon as he arrived in England, he was brought up to speed by Chadwick on the progress that had been made in designing and building a bomb, Bohr was disconcerted to discover how little thought had been devoted, either in England or in the United States, to the political implications the bomb would have for the post-war world. On his second night in England Bohr dined with Sir John Anderson (later Lord Waverley), who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Cabinet minister responsible for Tube Alloys. Anderson was unusual among politicians in having a reasonably good grasp of the science behind the bomb, having studied science at the University of Leipzig, where he wrote his dissertation on the chemistry of uranium. Oppenheimer had a great deal of respect for Anderson, whom he described as ‘a conservative, dour and remarkably sweet man, who was very congenial in his spirit to Bohr and was a good friend to him’. It was Anderson who invited Bohr to join the Tube Alloys project and then to go to Los Alamos as a member of the British mission.

Because of the universal esteem in which he was held, Bohr, though in many ways a simple and unassuming man, was given access to people at the very top of the social and political order. While he was in Washington, before he went to Los Alamos, a reception in his honour was held at the Danish embassy, at which he was able to renew his acquaintance with Felix Frankfurter, a Supreme Court associate and a close personal friend of the President. Though there was little opportunity on this occasion for extended discussion, Frankfurter invited Bohr to have lunch with him the next time he was in Washington.

When he left Los Alamos at the end of January 1944, Bohr went to Washington to take up this invitation. By this time he had thought very seriously about the post-war situation and had had what he regarded as a revelation about the ‘complementarity’ of atomic bombs – a revelation as important, he believed, as his earlier epiphany regarding the complementarity of subatomic particles. Just as electrons are at one and the same
time waves and particles, so, Bohr now believed, atomic bombs were at one and the same time the greatest danger to mankind and the greatest boon. Atomic bombs could put an end to civilisation and human life itself, or, precisely because of that, they could bring an end to war. What was needed, Bohr felt, was a spirit of cooperation and, above all,
openness.
If the power of atomic bombs was made clear to everybody, Bohr reasoned, there would be at least the possibility of cooperation and therefore the possibility that this terrible weapon could turn out, because of its very terribleness, to be the best thing mankind had ever invented.

Bohr’s view was therefore the exact opposite of the policy that the US had adopted ever since the discovery of fission. Where that policy had been based on the attempt to prevent the Soviets from acquiring the ‘secret’ of the bomb, Bohr believed that the best thing would be to consult the Soviet Union about the dangers to humanity posed by the development of such powerful weapons, and to treat the problem of controlling such weapons as one that demanded international cooperation rather than competition. In this way, he believed, those weapons would force upon the countries of the world a fundamental change in international relations, one that would make war itself obsolete.

Astonishingly, Frankfurter was sympathetic to Bohr’s ideas and, even more astonishingly, thought President Roosevelt would be responsive to them. He thus offered to arrange a meeting between Bohr and Roosevelt. In a private memorandum he wrote about a year later, Frankfurter says that, when he mentioned Bohr’s ideas to Roosevelt, the President ‘shared the hope that the project might bring about a turning point in history’. The atomic bomb, Roosevelt told Frankfurter, ‘worried him to death’, and he ‘was very eager for all the help he could have in dealing with the problem’. He was therefore keen to meet Bohr, but, he said, he would not discuss this crucially important issue behind the back of his ally Winston Churchill, and so, before he met Bohr, he wanted Bohr to meet Churchill.

At the beginning of April 1944, therefore, Bohr, accompanied by Aage, flew to London for a meeting with Churchill. Shortly before, Anderson had written a memorandum for Churchill outlining Bohr’s ideas and recommending that the Soviet Union be informed about ‘this devastating weapon’. He went on to propose that it be invited ‘to collaborate with us in preparing a scheme for international control’. On his copy of the memorandum Churchill had written beside the word ‘collaborate’ the uncompromising reaction: ‘On no account’.

Churchill kept Bohr waiting for over a month and did not see him until 16 May. In the meantime, Bohr received via the Soviet embassy an invitation to go to the Soviet Union, ‘where everything will be done to give you and your family a shelter and where we now have all the
necessary conditions for carrying on scientific work’. He was also told by a Soviet official that they knew he had been in America and was asked directly what information he had received about the war work of American scientists, a question to which Bohr responded with bland generalities.

After his warm reception by Anderson and Frankfurter, Bohr’s meeting with Churchill was a bitter disappointment. The meeting lasted a bare thirty minutes, most of which was taken up with Churchill’s vehement dismissal of the idea of sharing information about the bomb with the Soviet Union. Bohr left the meeting under no doubt that his ‘revelation’ would, if Churchill had anything to do with it, have no influence whatsoever on shaping Allied policy in the post-war period. This rebuff was something about which he remained angry for the rest of his life. ‘It was perfectly absurd to believe that the Russians cannot do what others can,’ he later said. ‘There never was any secret about nuclear energy.’ Churchill, for his part, dismissed Bohr from his mind – remarking to Frederick Lindemann (now Lord Cherwell), who had accompanied Bohr to Downing Street: ‘I did not like the man when you showed him to me, with his hair all over his head’ – and turned his attention back to the preparations for D-Day.

These landings took place on 6 June 1944, and by the time Bohr left England an Allied force of several hundred thousand men was advancing through France. Back in Washington, he was urged by Frankfurter to put his ideas down in writing in the form of a memorandum for the President. This led to a meeting with Roosevelt in August, in which Roosevelt expressed sympathy for Bohr’s ideas and suggested that Churchill could be won round. After Roosevelt and Churchill met in September, however, the opposite happened: Roosevelt came round to Churchill’s view on the matter, the two of them agreeing not only that ‘the suggestion that the world should be informed regarding tube alloys, with a view to international agreement regarding its control and use, is not accepted’, but also that: ‘Enquiries should be made regarding the activities of Professor Bohr and steps taken to ensure that he is responsible for no leakage of information particularly to the Russians.’

‘The President and I are much worried about Professor Bohr,’ Churchill wrote to Cherwell on 20 September, citing as grounds for concern Bohr’s unauthorised discussions with Frankfurter and his contacts with the Soviet Union. ‘It seems to me,’ Churchill declared, ‘Bohr ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near the edge of mortal crimes.’ In the event, Churchill was dissuaded from actually locking Bohr up, but that was the end of Bohr’s personal contacts with the leaders of the Western world. After recounting this story in his lectures on Bohr, Oppenheimer remarks: ‘This was not funny, it was terrible and it shows how very wise men, dealing with very great men, can be very wrong.’

By the autumn of 1944, when Churchill and Roosevelt were agreeing to dismiss any notion of sharing the ‘secret’ of the atomic bomb, it was becoming increasingly clear to the Allies that the Nazis, though fully aware of the potential military use of nuclear fission, had achieved only very limited progress towards building a bomb. In February 1944, the Alsos mission had returned to Washington from Italy, where they had been able to do little but wait for the Allies to break through the German lines. After the landings at Anzio in January, the Allied forces had met with determined resistance at Monte Cassino, preventing them from advancing into Rome. When the Germans were finally defeated at Monte Cassino in May, however, the Alsos mission returned to Italy, and Colonel Pash was able to enter Rome with the victorious Allied forces on 5 June.

After questioning the leading physicists left in Italy and finding that they knew next to nothing about the German atomic-bomb programme, Pash and his team switched to France, where they followed the advance of the massive force that had landed on D-Day. In August 1944, following the liberation of Paris, Alsos was able to interrogate Frédéric Joliot-Curie, who told them at least
something
they did not already know, namely that the German programme was probably led by Kurt Diebner. Then, finally, in November 1944, after Strasbourg was taken by the Allies, Pash and Goudsmit, after reading through files taken from Weizäcker’s office, had pretty conclusive proof that the Germans had not so far managed to construct a working nuclear reactor, and that they had no serious programme to build an atomic bomb.

The knowledge that there was no danger at all of the Nazis building an atomic bomb before the Allies did not have the effect that one might have expected. Most of the scientists who had been recruited to Los Alamos had been persuaded to work on the project because of the awful possibility of losing the race against the Nazis. Now that it was clear there was no such possibility, did that not call into question the whole rationale of the Allied bomb project? In fact, only one person left the project after the discovery of the rudimentary state of the Nazi bomb effort. That man was Joseph Rotblat, a Polish Jew who had done pioneering work on nuclear fission at the University of Warsaw, after which he was offered a fellowship at Liverpool to work with Chadwick. He arrived in Liverpool in the summer of 1939, having left his wife in Poland because she was too ill to travel. The intention was that she would follow him to England, but after the Nazi invasion of Poland she was unable to leave the country and he was unable to return. He never saw her again.

Feeling deeply the anxiety aroused by the prospect of the Nazis being first to develop the atomic bomb, Rotblat was an enthusiastic participant in the British Tube Alloys project and was happy to go with the British mission to Los Alamos. In March 1944, however, when he had been at
Los Alamos for just two months, he received what he later described as a ‘disagreeable shock’, when, at a dinner party given by the Chadwicks, he heard Groves say: ‘You realise of course that the main purpose of this project is to subdue the Russkies.’ ‘Until then,’ Rotblat said, ‘I had thought that our work was to prevent a Nazi victory, and now I was told that the weapon we were preparing was intended for use against the people who were making extreme sacrifices for that very aim.’ On 8 December 1944, very soon after it had been established beyond all reasonable doubt that there was no danger either of the Nazis winning the war or of them developing the bomb, Rotblat left the Manhattan Project. Despite efforts by the FBI to show that he had been a Soviet spy, he went on to have an outstanding career as a physicist. Feeling betrayed by the use of the atomic bomb against the Japanese, Rotblat devoted himself for the rest of his life to the cause of nuclear disarmament, his contribution to which was recognised by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.

Astonishingly, Rotblat was the only person ever to leave the Manhattan Project on grounds of conscience. Why? A clue, perhaps, is contained in Fermi’s remark, when, during a visit to Los Alamos, he exclaimed to Oppenheimer: ‘I believe your people actually
want
to make a bomb.’ Though most of them had originally been motivated by the thought of the Nazis getting there first, after a while at Los Alamos they simply wanted to see the project through to a successful conclusion. This, I think, cannot be understood without taking into account just
how
successful Oppenheimer was as the director of the Los Alamos laboratory.

When scientists were asked to recall their time at Los Alamos, one thing that is repeated over and over again is how inspirational Oppenheimer was. His influence went beyond that of a laboratory director; he was seen as the leader of an entire community – a community that was somehow purer, more noble,
better
than the world from which it was so conspicuously and effectively cut off. For his book on Oppenheimer and Lawrence, Nuel Pharr Davis collected a series of eulogies of Oppenheimer from those who had worked with him on the bomb. Among them was the British scientist James Tuck, who captured the prevailing mood of the place when he described Los Alamos as ‘the most exclusive club in the world’, where ‘I found a spirit of Athens, of Plato, of an ideal republic’:

True, Oppenheimer had never managed a laboratory (or anything) before, and as a physicist he was as purely theoretical as it is possible to be. And yet, in a way that amazed and impressed everybody who knew him, his entire life up to that point – his early interest in minerals, his determinedly wide-ranging education at Harvard, his absorption in the literature and art of America, France, England, Germany, Italy and Holland, his mastery of several European languages, his omnivorous devouring of all aspects of theoretical physics and his close following of major developments in experimental physics – turned out to be the perfect preparation for the task he had been set. He was the ideal man to lead Los Alamos, considered not just as a laboratory, but also as a new kind of city, one with far more than the normal proportion of extremely clever people and one, moreover, devoted to the accomplishing of a single, extraordinarily demanding task.