Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (79 page)

This design – which, astonishingly, was arrived at in February 1945, just six months after the major reorganisation – was the outcome of observing innumerable detonations, requiring tens of thousands of charges. To supply these, the laboratory had its own workshop, which became in effect a factory, employing dozens of young men. These men, like most of the 600 extra people that Oppenheimer had estimated he needed, were ‘SEDs’, members of the US Army’s Special Engineering Detachment. ‘They were kids mostly,’ Kistiakowsky said, ‘with partial college education, but there were even a few PhDs.’ The SEDs had a difficult time at Los Alamos, where they worked the long hours of the scientists, while keeping up the disciplined and tightly structured life of soldiers. They lived not in the kind of houses or flats provided for the scientists, but in crowded barracks, within which they had just a tiny space of their own. ‘We had reveille at six,’ one of them recalled, ‘we had drill and exercises at six-thirty and the fatigues until eight a.m. – and sometimes, working on something in the workshops, we had not gotten to bed until two or three in the morning.’

Of course, with such a massive influx of personnel, it was inevitable that standards of security would decline. It was clearly impossible to watch the movements of every one of the hundreds of people who came to Los Alamos in the summer of 1944, and in any case it seems not to have occurred to Groves, de Silva or Lansdale that among the young men of the Special Engineering Detachment there might be some who would be willing to spy for the Soviet Union. And yet there was at least one such person, David Greenglass, whose willingness to pass information to the Soviets, though it may not have been very significant in increasing Soviet knowledge of the bomb, would turn out to have drastic consequences for his sister and her husband, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

Greenglass had studied mechanical engineering before, at the age of twenty-one, being inducted into the US army in 1943. He and his wife, Ruth, were at that time both members of the Communist Party. After working for a while at Oak Ridge, Greenglass was sent to Los Alamos in August 1944, as part of the Special Engineering Detachment. During his time at Oak Ridge, and for the first three months of working at Los Alamos, Greenglass did not know that he was working on the atomic-bomb project. At Los Alamos he was employed in the workshop making moulds for the shaped explosives that were needed for the implosion experiments. He had no idea what these ‘lenses’ were for, and no understanding of the implosion process of which they were such an essential part.

Greenglass learned that he was working on the atomic-bomb project in November 1944, when he was told by his wife, Ruth, who in turn had been told by the Rosenbergs. At the Rosenbergs’ expense, Ruth (who lived in New York) had gone to New Mexico to visit her husband, whom she had not seen since his transfer to Los Alamos. They spent a few days together in Albuquerque, where Ruth relayed the information to Greenglass. The Rosenbergs had been communists since the early 1930s, and Julius Rosenberg was the hub of a spy network that sought to gather information about secret military and industrial projects. Before she left New York, the Rosenbergs gave Ruth Greenglass a list of questions to ask her husband about the layout and the personnel at Los Alamos.

A few months later, in January 1945, David Greenglass came to New York on leave and provided the Rosenbergs with a description and a drawing of the lens moulds he was making. He also, then or later, provided the Rosenbergs with a rough, and presumably not very useful, drawing of the ‘Fat Man’ bomb. After Greenglass’s return to Los Alamos, Julius Rosenberg arranged for him to meet a Soviet contact periodically to pass on anything else he had managed to find out. That contact was none other than Harry Gold, the man Fuchs had been meeting to share information about gaseous diffusion. Indeed, it would be via the connections with
Fuchs and Gold that Greenglass, and therefore the Rosenbergs, were exposed as spies in 1950. At the Rosenbergs’ trial, Greenglass testified against his sister, leading her to be executed alongside her husband on 19 June 1953. Greenglass himself was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. In 1960, after serving ten years, he was released and rejoined his wife in New York. Nearly forty years later, he told a reporter from the
New York Times
that his testimony against his sister had been a lie told in order to protect his wife, who was never charged in connection with the affair.

The Greenglass affair clearly upset John Lansdale. Speaking in 1954, at Oppenheimer’s security hearing, he referred twice to ‘the inexcusable Greenglass case’. The word ‘inexcusable’ seems to have been chosen by Lansdale to refer not to Greenglass’s behaviour (though no doubt he would have thought it applicable to that), but to his own lapse in failing to catch Greenglass. ‘He is certainly an example of one we missed,’ he remarked ruefully. When he was asked to confirm that Oppenheimer had no responsibility for Greenglass ‘in any way, shape or form’, Lansdale replied: ‘I don’t believe so. I will take full responsibility for that one. That was the outstanding blunder of the century.’

Of course, from a security point of view, the much more serious espionage of Klaus Fuchs was a far bigger blunder, but in that case Lansdale could perhaps take some comfort from the fact that it was a blunder committed by the British security services rather than his own. Unknown to Lansdale, however, there had been at least one other ‘blunder’ committed by his own team, one that led to the Soviets acquiring much more useful information than they ever got from David Greenglass. Again it involved a young man brought to Los Alamos in 1944, though this time a fully fledged scientist rather than a relatively uninformed member of SED.

The man in question was Theodore Hall. Known as ‘Ted Hall’ for most of his life, he was the youngest child of a Russian Jewish family, the Holtzbergs, from New York. The change of name came when he was eleven, when his older brother, Ed, discovered that a Jewish name was a barrier to employment. A precociously brilliant boy, Ted won a place to study at the prestigious Townsend Harris High School. Already he had dreams of being a physicist. When his mother asked what he would like for his twelfth birthday, he told her he wanted
The Mysterious Universe
by James Jeans. In 1942, just before his seventeenth birthday, Hall, who had already spent two years at Queens College, transferred to Harvard. There his imagination was fired by a course on ‘Kinetic Theory and Statistical Mechanics’, given by Oppenheimer’s ex-student and collaborator Wendell Furry. The following year, still only eighteen, Hall took a postgraduate class on quantum mechanics and attracted the attention of its convenor, John H. van Vleck, one of the ‘luminaries’ who had taken
part in the pre-Los Alamos seminars at Berkeley in the summer of 1942. When Bush told van Vleck and Edwin Kemble, who was still at Harvard, that more bright physicists were needed for Los Alamos, Hall was one of those selected, becoming, in the New Year of 1944, the youngest scientist to work on the bomb project.

At first, Hall was assigned to work under Bruno Benedetto Rossi, measuring fission cross-sections using fast neutrons on the U-235 that was beginning to arrive from Oak Ridge. While he was working on this, in June 1944, Hall graduated
in absentia
from Harvard. Soon afterwards he was promoted to a new position as leader of a team making and testing equipment for the RaLa experiments. In particular, Hall and his team were making the ionisation chambers that would detect the gamma rays emitted from the radioactive lanthanum. ‘We were turning out ionization chambers like sausages,’ Hall later said. ‘It made me feel funny to blow up all those ionization chambers we had built so carefully. We would just destroy them and build some more.’

In October 1944, soon after his nineteenth birthday, Hall was given two weeks’ leave, which he spent in New York. While there, he decided to tell the Soviet Union about the work being done at Los Alamos. He was not recruited, nor was he bribed. His decision was made quite unilaterally and independently. When he tried to explain it later in life, he said: ‘It seemed to me that an American monopoly was dangerous and should be prevented.’ Hall’s method of contacting the Soviets was remarkable for its lack of guile. He simply walked into the offices of Amtorg, the Soviet import/export company, and told the first person he saw there, a man stacking boxes, that he had secret information he would like to share. The man put him in touch with Sergei Kurnakov, a writer and journalist who was also a low-ranking NKVD officer. When Hall met Kurnakov, he handed him a file that he had written containing a report on the activities at Los Alamos, which was subsequently sent to Moscow. By the time he returned to Los Alamos, Hall was officially a Soviet agent, with his own code-name: Mlad, an old Slavic word for ‘young’.

After his return to Los Alamos, Hall took part in several crucial RaLa experiments that culminated in a set of three, conducted in February 1945, which finally produced the smooth shock wave they had been looking for. The crucial step that made this possible was the invention by Luis Alvarez of an electric detonator that enabled all the shaped explosives to be detonated at exactly the same time. After repeating the successful experiment on 24 February, the design for ‘Fat Man’ was settled. ‘Now we have our bomb,’ Oppenheimer was heard to exclaim.

Almost as soon as the design was complete, Soviet agents received details of it. On 16 February 1945, Klaus Fuchs, who had been out of contact with the Soviets since his move from New York to Los Alamos in August 1944,
met Harry Gold in Boston, where Fuchs’s sister lived. The information Fuchs was able to hand Gold was wide-ranging, detailed and accurate; it covered the design of the bomb, the metallurgy of plutonium, Segrè’s results on spontaneous fission in plutonium and much more. However, because of the convoluted logistics of espionage, Fuchs’s report did not reach Moscow until April 1945, by which time the Soviets already had a report on the two types of bomb being developed at Los Alamos, less detailed than Fuchs’s, but no less accurate. The source of this information was almost certainly ‘Mlad’, with some additional details from David Greenglass.

When Lansdale spoke in 1954 of the Greenglass case as the ‘blunder of the century’, he would not have known anything about Hall’s more serious espionage. The FBI, on the other hand, knew about Hall from the same source that they knew about Fuchs, Gold and Greenglass: the Venona transcripts. Unlike Fuchs, Gold and Greenglass, however, Hall, when he was interviewed by the FBI, made no confession; he simply denied everything. Faced with the choice of attempting to prosecute Hall on the basis of Venona evidence – and therefore revealing to the outside world the existence of that evidence – or of keeping Venona a secret at the expense of letting Hall go free, the FBI chose not to prosecute. Hall was therefore able to pursue a successful career as a scientist, ending up as the director of a biological laboratory in Cambridge, England, where he lived from 1962 until his death from cancer in 1999. Towards the end of his life, when his role in Soviet espionage became widely known through the publication of the Venona transcripts, Hall made an unrepentant statement, declaring that: ‘in essence, from the perspective of my 71 years, I still think that brash youth [his earlier self] had the right end of the stick. I am no longer that person; but I am by no means ashamed of him.’

What Fuchs and Hall handed over to the Soviets in the spring of 1945 – the design of the plutonium implosion bomb – was arguably Oppenheimer’s greatest achievement. Not that he himself had designed it, but it was he who had planned and coordinated the remarkable effort required to produce the design; he who had led weekly meetings of scientists to bring problems out into the open; he who had been able to discuss the mathematics of implosion with Peierls, the merits of various explosive materials with Kistiakowsky, the implications of RaLa experiments with Rossi, the invention of electric detonators with Alvarez, and to oversee dozens of groups of scientists employing hundreds of SEDs on thousands of experiments. It was the birth of what is known today as ‘Big Science’.

The effort involved in leading and coordinating a scientific project on such an unprecedented scale was having a physically observable effect on Oppenheimer. In 1944, he was still only forty, but he looked at least ten years older. He had always been slender, but, by the end of the year,
his weight had dropped to 115 pounds (about eight stone) and he looked gaunt. He had been a heavy smoker for years, but now he was never without a cigarette or a pipe and his persistent, nasty cough got worse. He also drank too much, though in this respect he was outdone by Kitty, upon whom the strain seemed, if anything, to take an even greater toll.

As the wife of the director, Kitty was in a perfect position to be Los Alamos’s leading hostess, at the very centre of its social life. This was, however, a role she had absolutely no interest in filling. She and Oppenheimer gave parties, but they were infrequent and rather joyless affairs. While Deak Parsons’s wife, Martha, moved to fill the vacant position of social hub, Kitty became an increasingly isolated figure. ‘She didn’t get along very well with women,’ remarked Priscilla Duffield, Oppenheimer’s secretary, and her imperious manner and sharp tongue also alienated many men. Kitty was, Duffield said, ‘one of the few people I’ve ever heard men – and very nice men – call a bitch . . . She could be really mean. She could also cause trouble for you, so you had to be very careful.’

It is a view echoed by many, including Phil Morrison’s wife, Emily, who recalled that, though Kitty could be ‘very bewitching’, she was certainly ‘someone to be wary of’. Kitty would, Emily Morrison later said, adopt and reject people apparently at random, so that even those she treated well felt insecure in her friendship, watching her be mean to others and wondering whether they would be next to feel her spite. Of the people she suddenly turned on, one of the most difficult for Oppenheimer was Charlotte Serber, who, for some reason, Kitty suddenly stopped having anything to do with. ‘Everybody was aware of it, and it was very hurtful,’ remembered Shirley Barnett, the wife of the Oppenheimers’ paediatrician. ‘But Kitty was capable of that.’ Barnett herself was adopted by Kitty as a companion, because, she thought, ‘I was young and less threatening than the others.’ Kitty would take her shopping to Santa Fe or Albuquerque. ‘She always had a bottle of something with her when she was driving, and you could always tell when she was getting drunk because she would talk more freely.’ ‘She was fascinating,’ Barnett concluded, ‘but not very nice.’