Authors: Jennet Conant
In the end, the rocket rumor never took. The foursome made several more forays to the Blue Ribbon Bar over the next two months, but those outings proved no more successful. On one of their last outings, Charlotte attempted to spread false stories about the project at a Santa Fe beauty parlor, while John Manley worked the patrons at the local barber shop. They came away feeling embarrassed and decided to retire as counterespionage agents. While the army was never too happy about it, probably the most enduring rumor about Los Alamos, no doubt prompted by Dorothy’s scavenging scarce baby clothes and cribs for new mothers on the Hill, was that it was a home for pregnant WACs.
By August, people had relaxed and let down their guard a little. “The Santa Feans soon became accustomed to the queer ways of the scientists,” wrote Dorothy. “They claimed they could spot them from a great distance.” Laboratory personnel were permitted one day a month to do their shopping, and they streamed into town on weekends to hunt for luxuries like stockings and whiskey, which were always in short supply, and to fill up on Mexican food and take part in the local festivals. On Sundays, several couples would share their monthly government-issued C-coupons to buy gas, which was rationed during the war, and organize picnic outings to the Valle Grande, Jemez River, or Rio Frijoles, where there was good hiking and fishing and they could go for a dip in the river if the water level was high enough. Dorothy’s office, adjacent to the shady courtyard bordered by tall hollyhocks and zinnias, was a busy hub of activity for project members and their families on their prized visits to civilization. Dogs were tied outside. Babies napped in strollers under the huge elm tree outside her door while their parents dashed around doing errands. Bachelors loitered by her desk and asked her advice on their love lives or on the best place to eat or to buy turquoise trinkets and cheap silver.
Dorothy invited them all to make her office their headquarters, a place where they could leave parcels, meet friends, or just stop by for a chat. “She had an air of handling people easily,” wrote Bernice Brode, who was married to the physicist Robert Brode. “Only later did I come to know the serious difficulties she avoided for us all”:
She was very lovely, with shining hair and dressed in blue tweed to match her eyes. She had a quiet grace in the midst of all the hubbub. She was a hostess rather than a chargé d’affaires…. So 109 East Palace, and Dorothy, our only link with Santa Fe, became our private, secret club in the capital of New Mexico. There we could talk and make plans and have no fear of being overheard.
Dorothy gradually became more accustomed to dealing with her important charges and grew bolder within the secure confines of her office. She flirted with the handsome physicists and, between a wink and a nod, cultivated a breezy familiarity that endeared her to one and all. This was clever company after all, and with the world in such a terrible state, and the work so unrelentingly serious, she felt the least she could do was provide witty conversation and a spot of relief. In an unguarded moment, she might even be so forward as to blithely violate the security injunctions that regulated their every move and communication, and to tempt them to follow suit. It was a game they all played, and it made the long hours easier and their hearts lighter. “If there was no stranger around and I was feeling very wicked,” she wrote, “I would glance in all directions, examine the empty air, raise an eyebrow and whisper tensely, blowing through my teeth like a suppressed wind instrument, ‘Are you a phhh ht?’ And the young man would nod, and we would say no more, but smoulder within with shared excitement.”
EIGHT
Lost Almost
A
FTER THE CHAOS
of the first few months, life at Los Alamos eased into a more predictable, deliberate pace. The summer sun was hot, and the sky, porcelain blue with white clouds hugging the mountains, as in a postcard. The Jemez hills were topped with skullcaps of pale green, creating the illusion of grass, though they were really only the thick carpet of pine trees. The mud had dried to a fine brown dust that coated everything and which the trucks and cars kicked up into great choking clouds as they tore through town. The deafening grind of construction had quieted, if only sporadically. Ashley Pond sparkled in the sunshine, and for the first time since the scientists and their families had arrived, a certain harmony and beauty returned to the mesa. Little girls played hopscotch in front of their houses, boys played ball in the dirt road, and everywhere you looked there were people on bicycles.
Oppenheimer, who enjoyed the rarified setting more than most, was at pains to point out the advantages of their splendid isolation. Sunburned as a native and clad in his uniform of blue jeans, checked shirt, and silver-studded New Mexican belt, Oppie urged everyone to get off the post on Sundays, their one day off, and wander out into the silent wilderness of aspens, blue spruce, and ponderosas. The hills were full of old trails established by generations of schoolboys, shady and sweet with the smell of pine. Oppie encouraged people to buy horses, and asked Dorothy to recommend some reputable local horse dealers. The army also had saddle ponies that could be rented by the hour, and provided stables and corrals for a small fee. A number of the scientists were skilled alpinists and shared Oppie’s romantic fascination with the mountains. The metallurgist Cyril Smith took to hiking up and down Lake Peak (12,500 feet), as did Fermi and Bethe, who claimed they did some of their best thinking that way. People took to calling Los Alamos “ShangriLa,” a joking reference to the idyllic city hidden in the mountains of Tibet featured in James Hilton’s popular novel
Lost Horizon
, which more than a few scientists had read before dropping out of sight themselves. They could not help but see their own community as a similar kind of social experiment, a separate culture, obscured from view, whose very existence was vigorously denied, which would either flourish or founder cut off from the outside world.
Down below, in the real world, the slaughter in the Pacific continued unabated. The victory at Midway that had been so heartening in June 1942 seemed like a distant memory. Though the German Wehrmacht was driving deep into Russia, it had been checked in the desert. Rommel had been stopped at the border of Egypt. The Italian campaign had begun. Allied bombs rained on Sicily, and the invasion of the European mainland seemed inevitable. The possibility that one of the three Axis powers might fall was cause for hope. President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill declared that the only terms the Allies would accept were those of “unconditional surrender.”
The Los Alamos participants were starved for uncensored news on their mountaintop. Newcomers were thoroughly debriefed, and senior scientists returning from meetings in Washington or Chicago would find themselves surrounded at dinner at Fuller Lodge and inundated with questions. Almost everyone got
The New York Times
and devoured
The Denver Post
. People always fought over the local Santa Fe papers while waiting in line at the PX because there were never enough to go around. Dorothy scrounged all the extra copies she could and sent them up. She knew that many of her friends on the Hill were émigrés who had escaped Nazi persecution in their own countries. “Many had families and relatives still in Europe, living in poverty, concentration camps, subject to starvation or vicious death,” she recalled. “Anxiety and fear for their people haunted them day and night.”
Bad news from the front cast a shadow across the entire mesa. At the same time, a victorious battle could be counted on to put the junior military personnel in a particularly foul temper. It was widely known that they had all applied for overseas service and were “burned to the ground,” as Smitty Carlisle put it, to find themselves stranded in the desert and missing all the excitement. One of the earliest bits of mesa lore had to do with a WAC who had never been farther west than Albany, New York. Just as the Hill bus rounded the highest point of the ascent and the jagged Jemez Mountains peeked out, she fainted dead away, though whether from amazement or sheer disappointment no one knew. Back in April 1943, when the first of the recently organized WAC detachments was ordered off the train in Lamy, Dorothy had had her hands full coping with the outpouring of grief and fury. “Of all the incoming personnel the WACs and some of the soldiers were at the lowest ebb in this office,” she wrote. “They had not been told what was going to happen to them”:
One WAC told me she was not allowed to tell her closest buddy she was going overseas, and was whisked out of her bed at two A.M. and sent silently on her way. When the train ran west and stopped at Lamy she thought it was all a big mistake; the sand and piñon trees didn’t look like any ocean she had ever seen. The nightmare continued when she walked into the old mud building which had nothing marine about it and was told she had forty-five miles yet to go farther into that “beat up old land.” Many WACs were tearful in those early days, not that they weren’t good soldiers, but the shock was too much for them.
Quite a few she ushered still weeping into army cars and sent up to the Hill. For weeks afterward, they could be seen moping around the mesa and were unnecessarily surly behind the checkout counters of the Commissary. Soldiers, who arrived with no further orders than Santa Fe, were also frustrated to learn they would be sitting out the war holed up in the desert. They did not even try to hide their contempt for the scientists, disdainfully referred to as “longhairs,” they had been assigned to babysit. To them, Los Alamos was an interminable limbo—“Lost Almost,” in the words of one dejected GI.
Theirs was a community turned powerfully in on itself, ironically in ways that, a century earlier, would have been true of people isolated by long weeks of travel from the rest of the world and forced to make what amounted to a civilization of their own. In this case, however, they were not inventing their own culture, so much as being asked to accommodate to the most unusual and arbitrary of arrangements, and discontent festered despite the magnificent surroundings. Segrè never failed to be impressed by the view, but it did nothing to ease his doubts about their internment. The mess hall in Fuller Lodge had a porch that opened onto the lawn, and he often stood there after meals silently contemplating the Sangre de Cristos, dominated by Truchas Peak, and miles and miles of the Rio Grande Valley. One afternoon after admiring the vista with Rabi, Segrè observed that in all likelihood, “after ten years of looking at it, we would have had enough of the view.” Reminded of the comment by Rabi years later, Segrè said that it revealed “what we thought about the possible duration of our enterprise and of the war.”
“It’s hard to believe we could be unhappy in such a beautiful, gorgeous part of the world, but we hated it so,” said Shirley Barnett. “All we could think about was home, what we missed—New England green. It was difficult because we did not know how long we were going to be there, we didn’t know how long the war was going to go on, and it had been going on a long time. There were times when all I wanted to do was pull down the shade and never see another mountain again. It was hard not to feel trapped.”
The altitude and isolation worked on everyone’s nerves. Los Alamos ran on bells, military-style: the first whistle blew at 7
A.M.
, summoning the scientists to work in an hour’s time. For a population that was not used to obedience as a way of life, the shrill sirens only seemed to magnify the immense pressure of impossible deadlines and heavy responsibilities. Oppenheimer, who had never been known to keep regular hours at Berkeley, was now the first to arrive in the morning and often stayed in his office long after everyone else had left for the day. Sam Allison, an experimental physicist who temporarily shared an office with him when he first came to the site from Chicago, said his one ambition was to be already sitting at his desk when Oppie walked through the door.
The laboratory personnel were keenly aware of Oppenheimer’s nervous, chain-smoking presence, and his sense of urgency and determination drove them to extend themselves as never before. When security, following Groves’ orders, locked up the equipment each evening following the five o’clock siren, the physicists took to sawing off the padlocks on the stockroom doors, and stayed at the lab and worked into the night. They set up army cots and snatched a few hours sleep in their offices, not stopping to go home at all. The men were consumed with the grim task of beating the Germans to the draw in the development of a diabolically powerful weapon, and the even grimmer prospect of what their failure might mean. First and foremost on their minds was the idea, as Conant emphatically put it on one of his periodic visits to the site, that “whoever gets this first will win the war.”
The heady experience of coming together on the mesa to create a unique scientific enterprise had given way to the harsh reality of everything that had to be accomplished. Above all, recalled Manley, the knowledge that the German scientists had a head start was a constant hand at their backs, a reminder of the need to push ahead and notch some progress:
Just before Los Alamos really got going, the last measurements on how much uranium 235 might be needed for a weapon had increased over the previous low estimate by almost a factor of 2; it was about 5 kilograms in absolute amounts. These 5 kilograms meant nearly two months extra production for each weapon from the electromagnetic separator which had been authorized at a hundred grams a day. Since we had no idea where the Germans were in this whole business—whether they had isotope separation plants going, whether they had a chain reaction going and were making plutonium, or were almost ready to drop bombs—these two months could mean we’d lose. However, there was a chance we could recover some of this apparent loss. Maybe, if we were really clever and got an extremely good material we could get back most of that factor of 2 that we had just lost. We were playing that kind of game continually.