The First War of Physics (35 page)

Much of the trouble was, of course, created by the concentration-camp environment that civilian scientists and their wives now found themselves contending with. Aside from the fence around the entire facility, with its guarded gates, the Technical Area within the compound was also fenced and guarded. Only scientists and their assistants bearing white badges were allowed passage into the Tech Area. The oppressive atmosphere was fought with impressive quantities of alcohol, and humour. A new public address system was inaugurated with repeated paging for ‘Werner Heisenberg, Werner Heisenberg’. This went on for two days before the operator was advised that she’d fallen victim to a prankster.

Feynman fought his own small battles against the obsessive security. He and his wife Arline, in hospital in Albuquerque with tuberculosis, would write coded letters to each other in an attempt to defeat the censor. Even the mention of censorship was censored. As Feynman later explained:

So finally they sent me a note that said: ‘Please inform your wife not to mention censorship in her letters.’ So I start my letter: ‘I have been instructed to inform you not to mention censorship in your letters.’
Phoom, phoooom
, it comes right back! So I write, ‘I have been instructed to inform my wife not to mention censorship. How the heck am I going to do it?’

Feynman learned to pick locks and crack safes. Physicists and mathematicians would tend to set the combinations of their safes using easily recalled mathematical constants such as the base of natural logarithms,
e
, or the value of π. He would open his colleagues’ safes and leave them notes. On discovering that workmen had made a hole in the fence around Los Alamos to avoid having to walk around to the gate, Feynman used it to confuse the security guard by repeatedly coming in through the gate, without ever being seen going out. His exploits would be the subject of endless anecdotes told at the many parties hosted by the Oppenheimers, fuelled by Robert’s legendary (and lethal) vodka martinis.

Apparently, nobody had thought to suggest that one consequence of the security-friendly isolation of Los Alamos and the relatively limited access to entertainment would be a baby boom. Oppenheimer could only plead to Groves that population control was not one of his duties. This was rather shamefaced pleading, however, as Kitty was now pregnant with their second child.

Teller had observed Oppenheimer’s persuasive approach in action during the summer school at Berkeley the previous year, and had relished it. But a series of personal disappointments had by now dramatically changed Teller’s perspective. He had grown to resent Oppenheimer’s politicking. This resentment grew into confrontation.

Confrontation

Teller had gone to Los Alamos in April 1943 on the assumption that he would be responsible for leading a major stream of activity that would include work on the Super, the thermonuclear bomb. Oppenheimer’s organisation chart had featured a Theoretical Division which Oppenheimer had initially thought to lead himself, until persuaded otherwise by Rabi. Teller had been involved in the American effort from its inception with Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt in August 1939. In his own mind this made him one of the most senior physicists at Los Alamos. He might have therefore assumed he would be the logical choice to head the Theoretical Division but, at Rabi’s suggestion, Oppenheimer had appointed Bethe.

In May 1943 a review of the priorities for the work programme at Los Alamos had concluded that, although work on the Super should continue at the laboratory, this was secondary to the work on fission weapons and should be restricted to theoretical study only. A further review in February 1944 concluded that the Super would need to be based on tritium, a substance that could be produced only in the large-scale nuclear reactors under construction at Hanford. But the priority at Hanford was to make plutonium, not tritium. Work on the Super could continue only so long as it did not interfere with the main programme. Teller sensed that he was being sidelined.

He tended to dismiss the theoretical physics of nuclear fission as yesterday’s problem, already solved in principle. The technical difficulties associated with actually making a working bomb was not something that he felt should detain his intellect.

The Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam had been brought to Los Alamos from the University of Wisconsin to join Teller’s group in the winter of 1943. Teller had immediately put him to work on the theory of the Super. Von Neumann subsequently directed Ulam to work on the hydrodynamics of implosion. Here the theoretical principles were relatively straightforward, but the Shockwave calculations were extremely difficult. Ulam advocated a ‘brute force’ approach, crunching the numbers by machine computation and approaching a solution by trial and error.

When Bethe asked Teller to work on these calculations, Teller felt insulted. This was mind-numbing, hit-and-miss theory of the kind that Teller felt less qualified than others to carry out. He suspected that the calculations were so difficult that the work would not be completed in time to make any meaningful contribution to the construction of the fission bomb. Teller refused. ‘Although Hans did not criticise me directly,’ Teller later wrote, ‘I knew he was angry.’ Teller had, in effect, resigned from the division.

Oppenheimer moved quickly to placate him and thereby keep him at Los Alamos.
⁶
Despite the tremendous pressures on his own time, Oppenheimer offered to allow Teller and his group to continue working on theoretical aspects of the Super which they would review together once a week. Oppenheimer felt he had little choice: he valued Teller’s input too much.

Although Bethe was an extremely competent theorist, he still needed the support of other able physicists to handle the volume of work. With Teller’s attentions diverted away from priority work on fission weapons, Oppenheimer now scrambled to find a replacement.

Black comedy

Bohr took his concerns about the complementarity of the bomb to Felix Frankfurter, a friend from 1933, now a Supreme Court Justice and adviser to Roosevelt. Bohr did not speak openly of the Manhattan Project, but Frankfurter was aware that a large-scale project of some kind was under way. They found they could talk relatively freely about the implications of the programme without being explicit about its details, or even acknowledging that they were talking about a bomb. Bohr explained that with few exceptions, there was nobody he could talk to about his fears for the future. Frankfurter felt that Roosevelt would offer a sympathetic ear and agreed to raise the matter with the President.

Roosevelt’s reaction to Frankfurter’s intervention is clouded in controversy. According to Frankfurter, Roosevelt shared Bohr’s concerns and agreed to a proposal that Bohr should discuss them further with Churchill. If true, it is hard to comprehend why Roosevelt would give Bohr, whom he had never met, a mandate for such an important mission, with potentially profound implications for post-war policy on atomic weapons. Roosevelt later denied he had given any such mandate. On the other hand, Roosevelt may have assumed that Bohr was already acting as an unofficial spokesman for the British.

Anderson, Bohr’s principal link with the British administration, was also busily working behind the scenes to broach the subject of a post-war arms race with Churchill. Anderson was keen to pursue a policy of openness with the Soviet Union, advising them of the existence of the bomb and inviting them to collaborate on arms control. Churchill, however, was unyielding. Collaboration with the Soviet Union was, for him, simply out of the question.

Bohr and Cherwell met Churchill at Downing Street on 16 May 1944. C.P. Snow later called this meeting’one of the blackest comedies of the war’. Churchill had no appetite for this discussion. He was in a bad mood, preoccupied with the plans for the impending Allied invasion of Normandy, set for the following month. He just failed to see the point: ‘I cannot see what you are talking about’, he said, scolding both Bohr and Cherwell as though they were schoolboys. ‘After all this new bomb is just going to be bigger than our present bombs. It involves no difference in the principles of war. And as for any post-war problems there are none that cannot be amicably settled between me and my friend, President Roosevelt.’

Bohr foresaw what Churchill could not, or would not. The principles of war were indeed about to change. ‘We are in a completely new situation that cannot be resolved by war’, Bohr claimed, to anyone who would listen. As Bohr persisted in his efforts to address the issues, Churchill became more and more entrenched in his views.

Churchill had a misplaced faith in secrets. ‘He was only too conscious,’ wrote C.P. Snow, ‘that British power, and his own, was now just a vestige. So long as the Americans and the British had the bomb in sole possession, he could feel that that power hadn’t altogether slipped away. It is a sad story.’

The bomb was a secret that couldn’t be kept. Klaus Fuchs was working to make sure of that.

¹
The OSS was disbanded after the war, its functions split between the War and State Departments. The secret intelligence and counter-espionage branches were eventually to form the nucleus of the new Central Intelligence Agency in 1947.

²
In a memorandum dated 5 March 1944, the FBI claimed that Oppenheimer had confessed that Chevalier had approached only one physicist: his brother, Frank Oppenheimer. This seems very unlikely, however. See Bird and Sherwin, p. 248.

³
The autopsy revealed only a faint trace of chloral hydrate, uncorroborated by other evidence.

⁴
The suspicious circumstances of her death have led some observers, including Jean’s brother Hugh Acock, to speculate that she might have been assassinated.

⁵
Strolling over to a group of Italian physicists, which included Fermi and Segrè, Groves insisted that they should talk in English rather than their native ‘Hungarian’.

⁶
Oppenheimer was selective about who he chose to defend, however. When Edward Condon fell into dispute with Groves over compartmentalisation, Oppenheimer chose not to support him and Condon left the programme. The theoretician Felix Bloch, who had been one of Oppenheimer’s ‘luminaries’ at the summer school, became disenchanted with the regime and also left Los Alamos around this time. Oppenheimer let him go, and Teller saw him off.

Chapter 12

MORTAL CRIMES

February–December 1944

W
hen Fuchs arrived in New York he checked first into the Taft Hotel near Times Square before relocating to the Barbizon Hotel. He spent Christmas 1943 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his sister Kristel, her husband Robert Heineman, and their two children. When many of the fifteen scientists of the British delegation assigned to work on gaseous diffusion returned to Britain after a few months, Fuchs moved once more, this time into a rented apartment on West 77th Street.

After war-threatened Birmingham, New York was a materially much more pleasant experience. Food was rationed in America but this was not as restrictive as in Britain. Restaurants were packed with native New Yorkers, tourists and servicemen. Theatres and concert halls experienced brisk business. Not that Fuchs had much time for recreation.

On a cold Saturday afternoon in early February 1944 he walked along Henry Street, in Manhattan’s lower East Side. If anyone had paid him any attention, they might have noted some fairly odd behaviour. Following the instructions he had received from Sonja, he walked along the street carrying a tennis ball. Outside the Henry Street Settlement House he was approached by a short, dark, rather portly American with thinning hair and thick eyeglasses. The man was wearing gloves and, again somewhat incongruously, carrying a second pair of gloves in his hand. This was Fuchs’ recognition signal.

‘Can you tell me the way to Grand Central Station?’ the man asked.

They exchanged a couple of meaningless remarks. The proper codes had been given and received. ‘Raymond?’ Fuchs asked.

Raymond had heard nothing of the Allied atomic bomb programme. As they walked on down the street, Fuchs filled in the background about atomic fission, isotope separation and the work on gaseous diffusion. Fuchs did not yet have any documents to pass on. They made arrangements for their next meeting.