Authors: Jennet Conant
… To those who loved me and helped me, all love and courage. I wanted to live and give and I got paralyzed somehow. I tried like hell to understand and couldn’t…. At least, I could take away the burden of a paralyzed soul from a fighting world. …
Oppie needed to be told, and Charlotte asked her husband if he would break the news. By the time Bob Serber got to Oppie’s office, he realized at once that he was too late. “I saw by his face that he had already heard. He was deeply grieved.” Tatlock’s untimely death was a sad coda to those idealistic days when she had first introduced Oppie to political activism and the principles of communism, and to many of the left-wing colleagues who were now listed in his FBI file as fellow travelers and possible collaborators. As Oppenheimer walked out of his office and headed for the silent wilderness, he must have mourned the loss of an old flame, and of a former innocence—both his and the country’s.
ELEVEN
The Big Shot
T
HE LAST MONTHS
of 1943 had brought a great rush of activity at Los Alamos with the much-anticipated arrival of the British Technical Mission. As if there were not enough to do already, Dorothy had to see to many of the preparations for the newcomers, who would need instructions, passes, housing, furnishings, and transport ready and waiting. It would also mean that there would be more mail, telegrams, phone calls, laboratory equipment, and lost luggage. Everything would be marked “Urgent” and required yesterday. While the authoritarian Groves was a great believer in the chain of command, Oppie was much more informal, and thought nothing of picking up the phone to make additional requests or last-minute suggestions himself. On top of this, Dorothy had to attend to all the regular business that naturally emanated from the Housing Office, daily dispatching all the new arrivals up to the mesa, along with two vans of furniture and at least one truckload of freight and laboratory equipment. Friends from the Hill stopped by to drop off packages bearing advertisements like “Send a Salami to Your Boy in the Army,” which she would promise to post. There were also all the security passes that needed to be collected from, or reissued to, traveling staff members. At any given moment, the project had enough people on the go that they kept at least one double berth reserved daily on both the east- and west-bound trains, and a drawing room twice a week.
Dorothy, now universally recognized as indispensable, operated on a grander scale from her humble command post than the Spanish viceroys who had occupied the adobe fortress centuries before. She was given an assistant to help answer her phone, which had been known to ring in over a hundred calls in a single day, and assigned her own small battalion of WAC couriers and uniformed drivers, anything she needed to get the job done. She marshaled her forces and prepared for the incoming. Because of the general lack of organization at Los Alamos, which was further compounded by wartime contingencies, nothing ever happened on schedule. Everything was flexible. The British mission’s arrival dates and the numbers expected changed from one hour to the next. Groves’ refusal to allow key project members to travel by air meant that the British had to come by train, and the Super Chief, which would be bringing them west after they changed trains in Chicago, was so chronically late that when it actually pulled into Lamy on time one afternoon no one was surprised to discover it was the previous day’s train. All Dorothy knew with any certainty was that roughly two dozen scientists would be coming from the United Kingdom in December, and that among them was someone who warranted all kinds of special attention and far more than the usual security protocol. Whoever it was, he must be a big shot.
The cooperation between the British and American scientists was an event of international significance and represented the culmination of two years of negotiations between Churchill and Roosevelt. In 1939 and 1940, when fission work in the United States was still moving at a snail’s pace, the British scientists were making considerable progress and were confident enough of atomic energy’s potential usefulness as an explosive weapon to impress both Lawrence and Oppenheimer during the Berkeley conference in the summer of ’42. With Groves’ approval, Oppenheimer had reciprocated by sending the British a report on the conference’s conclusions to Rudolf Peierls, the director of the British bomb project, which was code-named Tube Alloys. Peierls, a Dutch Jew, had been rescued by the Academic Assistance Committee and had joined the British effort. By then, the constant bombing and threat of invasion had forced Churchill to concede that they needed the United States’ help in researching and developing an atomic bomb if it were to be completed in time to help save their island from Nazi domination. The Americans, however, had remained wary and were reluctant to share classified military weapons and techniques. After the fall of France, the British, in a bold move, had sent a delegation headed by Sir Henry Tizard across the ocean to try to initiate the exchange of secret military and scientific research. In a series of meetings in Washington, D.C., and Tuxedo Park, New York, the British scientists had overwhelmed the suspicious American army and navy officers with tangible evidence of their crucial breakthrough in the field of radar, proving to their red-faced hosts that the United States was, as an astounded Vannevar Bush had reported to Conant, “five years behind on the detection of planes.” After that, the Americans and British entered into an unprecedented partnership to start a secret wartime radar laboratory to develop powerful new detection devices that would help England in its life-and-death struggle, and speed the day of victory.
But when it came time to pool their valuable atomic information, both countries played their cards close to the vest. The prime minister’s advisors were reluctant to surrender what they believed was the one thing that could continue to guarantee Britain’s status as the preeminent imperial power. The Americans, galvanized by the Pearl Harbor disaster, were happy for all the technical assistance the British could provide but, as soon as the project was poised to move from the research stage to large-scale production, became skittish about who would control the fruits of their collaboration. Talks between Churchill and Roosevelt had become increasingly tense as the two nations bickered over who would gain more military and diplomatic advantages in the postwar world, and it was another eight months before they resolved their differences. Finally, by the summer of ’43, Britain, realizing it was in no position to compete with the United States’ huge commitment of money and resources, agreed to the resumption of a “full and effective collaboration,” with the production plants based in the United States. In the fall, a Combined Policy Committee was established, and by late 1943, British atomic scientists began arriving in the United States and were assigned to the various Manhattan Project laboratories.
Earlier that fall, during his last visit to Los Alamos, Groves had briefed Oppenheimer on the select list of people whom he could expect at Los Alamos. The eminent British physicist Sir James Chadwick, discoverer of the neutron, would be leading the mission, which to Dorothy’s surprise contained only a handful of actual Englishmen and instead included German, Austrian, Swiss, and Polish scientists, all sporting brand-new British passports. “There were around twenty members,” Dorothy recalled, ticking off the list with her encyclopedic memory for names and faces: Otto Frisch, the nephew of Lise Meitner and one of the first to arrive; Rudolf Peierls; William Penney; Ernest Titterton; Philip Moon; James Tuck; Joseph Rotblat; Egon Bretscher; and Klaus Fuchs, to name a few.
One name on the list stood out from all the others: Niels Bohr. The Danish physicist was a living legend, and his narrow escape to Sweden in October had been the talk of the mesa for weeks afterward. The story had been told and retold: Bohr, despite being half Jewish, had defiantly remained in occupied Copenhagen, and on the day he learned that he had been slated for arrest by the Germans, he and his wife slipped away to the seaside. They hid in a gardener’s shed until nightfall, when the underground had arranged for a small fishing boat to take them across the sound to safety in Sweden. Just before leaving, Bohr received a tip that the following day all Jews and other “undesirables” were to be rounded up and deported. At great personal risk, he traveled immediately to Stockholm, which was thick with German spies, and campaigned relentlessly to help secure the asylum in Sweden of more than seven thousand Danish Jews.
After receiving a formal invitation to come to England from Lord Cherwell, Churchill’s scientific advisor, the fifty-eight-year-old physicist made the last leg of his trip huddled in the bay of a Mosquito bomber, losing consciousness during the flight when the plane climbed in altitude and he failed to hear the pilot’s instructions to put on his oxygen mask. Bohr remained in London for several weeks, where he was reunited with his son Aage, who along with another of Bohr’s sons had crossed into Sweden separately. Bohr was briefed by Chadwick on the progress of the secret Tube Alloys project and agreed to join the delegation that was being sent to America to help build the bomb. The British were delighted at the prospect of having the Danish Nobel laureate and his son as part of their team and considered this quite a feather in their cap. The Bohrs were to travel to America separately, and there was so much subterfuge and mystery attached to their plans that one member of the mission asked why “they hadn’t been packed and sent in a crate; it would have been so much simpler.”
By the time the British began trickling into Los Alamos in groups of twos and threes, there was already a frosty chill in the air. There was no room on Bathtub Row for the distinguished guests—even neighboring Snob Hollow was packed to overflowing—so they were apologetically informed that the bachelors would be put up in the Big House, but married scientists would have to make do with houses in the newer, less desirable part of town. Most had come on their own, though in some cases their families would follow later, so they easily accommodated themselves to dorm living. The British were impressed by the speed of the construction and watched in amazement as workmen laid a foundation of a few concrete blocks and then, using wooden planks nailed to a framework of timber, completed a new cabin in only a couple of days. While the Americans complained about the shoddy buildings, to the war-weary British, who had endured the blackouts and bombardments of wartime England, life at Los Alamos seemed safe and relatively comfortable. There was no nightly wail of the air-raid sirens and no waking up to find a well-known building had been reduced to an empty shell. Just the chance to eat fresh fruit and fried eggs after several years of wartime austerity was an unheard-of luxury.
For many of them, this was also their first introduction to the United States, and the dizzying altitude and dry climate could not have been more different from that of their soggy island. Otto Frisch, who arrived with the first contingent, thought that Los Alamos, with its alien landscape and eccentric inhabitants, was the most exceptional “small town” he had ever seen: “I had the pleasant notion that if I struck out on any evening in an arbitrary direction and knocked on the first door that I saw I would find interesting people inside, engaged in music making or in stimulating conversation.”
The British were also pleased and surprised to find themselves reunited with so many of their European cohorts at Los Alamos and, despite the fractious negotiations that preceded their coming, by the warm and collegial atmosphere that greeted them. Two old school buildings behind Fuller Lodge were renovated for their use, and they were quickly made to feel at home. Oppenheimer had originally planned to have Chadwick head up his own team at the laboratory, but the mission brought badly needed specialists in nuclear physics, electronics, and explosives, and he ended up plugging them into the existing divisions where they could do the most good. The hardest thing for them to adjust to was the distinguished American director’s informal style, which extended from the laboratory uniform of jeans and open-neck shirts to calling everyone by his first name. Oppenheimer apparently startled more than one proper Englishman by strolling over, his thumbs dangling from his big Mexican silver belt buckle, and greeting him with the words, “Welcome to Los Alamos, and who the devil are you?” But the new arrivals were very good sports, particularly during the first few meetings when, as Frisch recalled, it seemed that almost everyone answered to the name Bob.
The British scientists’ firsthand experience of war had a sobering effect on many of the young American scientists. Shortly after their arrival, Bill Penney, a British mathematician who was an expert on the effects of blast waves, gave a talk at one of the colloquiums on the damage caused by the German bombardment of England, and his cool recitation of the facts and figures left the audience in a shocked silence. “His presentation was in the scientific matter-of-fact style, with his usual brightly smiling face,” recalled Peierls, who was only able to stay at the site for a few days of conferences and meetings, but would be rejoining the mission later. “Many of the Americans had not been exposed to such a detailed and realistic discussion of casualties.” After that, his impressed American colleagues dubbed him “the smiling killer.” (Months later, people were stunned by the news that Penney’s wife was among those killed in one of the worst bombing raids on London.) The refugee scientists brought with them their personal experiences of exile and persecution, and the hardships and tragedies that followed. Rudolf Peierls and his Russian wife, Eugenia, had fled Austria for England, but had grown so afraid of the pummeling blitz and what would happen if the Nazis invaded that they had packed their two children, aged four and six, off to Canada. They had endured a separation of four long years and were finally reunited again in America, and Peierls was looking forward to their joining him on the Hill in the summer. Joseph Rotblat’s wife and family were missing in Poland, and he had no idea if they were alive or dead. (It was not until after the war that Rotblat learned she had been killed in Lublin.) There were no words for the overwhelming anger and sadness the Americans felt at hearing these stories, or the gnawing sense that time was working against them. The atomic weapon that could stop the death and destruction was still many months away from being a reality, and was new and unproven. The uncertainty and frustration were almost unbearable at times, but it made them all the more resolved to get on with the job and complete the awful task they had been assigned.