Authors: Jennet Conant
The first Christmas on the mesa was hard on everyone, particularly the members of the new British contingent, as it was punctuated by thoughts of the hard times at home and families and relatives in harm’s way. But there was nothing to do but make the best of it, and people decorated their homes and threw holiday parties in an effort to make the season as festive as possible. There were many formal dinners, and to mark the occasion the men wore black tie and the women got dressed up in their finest evening clothes and carefully picked their away across boards laid along the side of the muddy roads so as not to ruin their shoes. The weather cooperated by blanketing Los Alamos in white, hiding the bulldozed fields and construction scars under deep drifts of snow. Foot-long icicles hung from the shingled water tower. The town resembled an old-fashioned Christmas card, with a thick frosting of powder transforming the lodge and rustic log cabins into gingerbread houses. Each evening, the sunset turned the snowcapped mountains in the distance a delicious pink, like mounds of strawberry ice cream. The air was cold, dry, and crisp. Apart from the occasional blizzard, the winter sky was cloudless, and the sun was hot on their faces. Everyone took up sledding and skiing, raiding the supply of old equipment left behind by the schoolboys. Ice skating became a favorite weekend activity. The skating pond was down in Los Alamos Canyon, and the soldiers built a shelter and bonfire pit, where people could warm their hands on bitter cold nights. The pond became a popular gathering spot and was crowded with families and courting couples on Sundays.
The army did its best to get into the holiday spirit, and one of the ubiquitous memorandums designated one hillside as an official “tree-hunting area.” Soldiers cut down Christmas trees of every size and shape for the laboratory personnel to choose from. A huge blue spruce was chopped down and erected in Fuller Lodge and strung with lights. Dorothy cornered the market on tinsel and trimmings at the Woolworth’s in Santa Fe and did her best to fill all the orders for ribbon, paper, and candles. She rushed parcels up to the Hill as soon as they arrived, loading them onto the buses. She asked local merchants to stock assorted seasonal delicacies she thought some of the foreign scientists might be missing, including good brandy and cigars. She advised a few ambitious physicists where they might hunt for wild turkeys and instructed more than one urban housewife on how to pluck and dress the birds for cooking. She also warned them to be sure to remove as much of the lead shot as they could or they would be in for a rude surprise at dinner. Two days before Christmas, Kitty called down and asked Dorothy to get her a big goose for their holiday meal. It was such short notice, that Dorothy practically turned the town upside down until she finally located one and had it sent straight up. She later grumbled that all she got for her trouble was Kitty’s complaint that it had “a crooked breast.”
On Christmas Eve, the community chorus piled into the back of an army truck and sang carols as they slowly drove around town. It was a strange and lovely Christmas, but the true cause for cheer that holiday season arrived in the person of Niels Bohr and with his son Aage, who quietly materialized on the mesa in late December. Security mandated that Bohr’s comings and goings be as stealthy as possible, so even the
Daily Bulletin
, which barraged them with announcements and orders, made no mention of their celebrated visitor. Oppenheimer had taken the added precaution of assigning both Bohrs, as well as Chadwick, pseudonyms in advance as, he wrote Groves, they would doubtless be receiving all kinds of important long-distance calls and mail, and “it would be preferable if such well known names were not put in circulation.” As soon as they set foot on American soil, Groves’ security force presented them their new identities: Niels Bohr became “Nicholas Baker,” and his son Aage was “Jim Baker.” Following the complicated instructions given to them before they left New York, the Bohrs/Bakers got off the train at the stop before Lamy, where they were met by an army car. They were then driven to an isolated stretch of road, transferred to another vehicle, and then whisked up to the site.
Bohr’s arrival at Los Alamos buoyed everyone’s spirits. He was famous as one of the fathers of quantum theory and had taught a whole generation of physicists how to change their way of thinking to accommodate the uncertainty principle and the dual particle-wave nature of matter. Many of the project members had studied with him and had made the pilgrimage to his Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen. But above all, he was the man who had first reported to American scientists the news of fission—that the Germans had produced an atomic fission which could lead to the vast release of atomic energy. It was, in effect, the warning shot in the arms race that had soon consumed physicists and changed their profession, and their lives, forever. He was not very old, but to them he seemed ancient, the great pioneer of quantum theory and the embodiment of wisdom. Caught like all of them in the grip of history, he had come to the desert to preside over the building of the first atomic bomb. Fresh from his frightening experience at the hands of the Nazis, Bohr, whose sad face seemed to have borne witness to a world of experience beyond that of most of the mesa’s young scientists, appeared to them as a kind of spiritual leader.
“Bohr at Los Alamos was marvelous,” Oppenheimer recalled in a lecture after the war. “He made the enterprise seem hopeful when many were not free of misgiving.” Bohr reenergized them with his passionate words about Hitler and reassured them that no one would succeed in enslaving Europe in the same way again. “He said nothing like that would ever happen again,” said Oppenheimer. “And his own high hope that the outcome would be good, and that in this the role of objectivity, the cooperation which he had experienced among scientists would play a helpful part; all this, all of us wanted very much to believe.”
“It was the first time we became aware of the sense in all these terrible things,” recalled Victor Weisskopf. “Because Bohr right away participated not only in the work, but in our discussions. Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution… . This we learned from him.”
As it turned out, Bohr had not escaped Europe empty-handed. He had brought with him a drawing that the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, a brilliant former protégé, had secretly passed to him after a troubling conversation about the military applications of atomic energy and the moral implications of doing such work. Afterward, Bohr suspected Heisenberg was on an elaborate fishing expedition and was attempting to find out what his famous mentor knew of the Allies’ progress in building a bomb. While no two accounts of their clandestine meeting agree, it ended on a bitter note, and Heisenberg left Bohr with more questions than answers. The biggest riddle of all was the drawing itself. Bohr could not be sure what he was looking at: Was it a sketch of an experimental heavy-water reactor the Nazis were working on, or was it misinformation meant to confuse the enemy? In any event, Bohr knew he had no choice but to alert the Allies of its existence, and he did so immediately after reaching London.
On New Year’s Eve day, Oppenheimer called a handful of senior staff to his office. When Serber got there, he found both Bohrs were present, as well as Bethe, Teller, and Weisskopf.
Oppie handed me a scrap of paper that looked like it had been carelessly ripped from a note pad. It bore a sketch, and he asked me what I thought the sketch represented. After a minute I handed it back and said it looked like a heavy water moderated nuclear reactor. He then told me Bohr had gotten it from Heisenberg. The question was whether it could be interpreted as a weapon. The Los Alamos experts gathered in that room all agreed that it was useless as an explosive.
Although Bohr had already raised the question with Groves, Oppenheimer promptly sent Groves a summary of the meeting, along with a memorandum prepared by Bethe and Teller.
Oppenheimer had first met Bohr at a particularly low point in his graduate studies and always credited the Danish laureate’s straightforward manner and simple kindness with helping him to stay the course and resolve “to try to learn the trade of being a theoretical physicist.” Dorothy could see that the sturdy, gray-haired theoreticians fatherly presence, with his slow, soft-spoken English, once again had a rallying effect. “He was the
master
scientist,” she said. “He was older than Oppie … and he was a person who could get everyone all together.” He was also modest and unassuming, and Oppie, who was amused by his code name, took to calling him Uncle Nick, and before long that was how he was affectionately known to everyone. “He was a genuine guru,” said Priscilla Greene. “He was practically the only person Oppie unreservedly admired.”
On one of Bohr’s first evenings at Los Alamos, the Oppenheimers had a big dinner party for him. Most of the senior scientists and their wives were invited, along with the Agnews, who were rather more junior, but lived about seventy-five yards from Oppie’s house so were often included. It started with Oppie’s dry martinis, which had their usual salutary effect, and everyone had a wonderful time. Bohr entertained everyone with the story of his arrival in the United States: how he and his son were hustled from the boat to the hotel in New York by a squad of FBI men, who hurried them through the lobby and straight up to their room with all their luggage, and how everyone collapsed in exhaustion and relief that the Danish physicist’s identity had not been discovered along the way. It was then that one of them noticed that written on the side of his suitcase in large black letters was
NIELS BOHR
.
At the end of the evening, Harold Agnew went to get his overcoat, found that it was gone, and went home without it. The next morning, he stopped by the Oppenheimers’ house to see if it had turned up. There was an unclaimed coat, but it was too small to be his. Oppie suggested he wait around and maybe his would turn up. “In a little while, along comes Bohr,” recalled Agnew. “His coat was dragging in the snow, his hands hidden by the long sleeves. ‘I think this isn’t my coat,’ he says, ‘because there are keys in the pocket, and I have no keys.’”
Bohr was not used to being on his own, without his devoted wife, Margrethe, to look after him, and often showed up in comically mismatched clothes. Once he came to work in the Tech Area with a rope tied around his waist to hold up his pants because he could not find a belt. There were many anecdotes about Bohr’s absentmindedness, though perhaps the best-known concerned an idea for a fruitful approach to an atomic bomb that had come to him just after the British scientists had first made him aware of their progress. Bohr had sent a cryptic telegram to England stating, in part, “
AND TELL MAUD RAY KENT
.” The British scientists, including Peierls and Frisch, were convinced that the urgent message was a code, or even an anagram, warning them of something, and they tried to crack it, coming up with strange misspelt solutions like “Radium taken,” which could have been pointing to the Nazis. When Bohr came to Los Alamos, one of the first things he was asked was the meaning of his mysterious cryptogram. It turned out that Maud Ray had been his children’s governess and she had lived in Kent, but as to the germ of an idea the line was meant to convey, that had slipped his mind.
Everyone on the mesa tried to take care of Bohr and took turns wining and dining him at night. Oppie and Kitty often took him to dinner at Miss Warner’s, where he struck up a friendship with the austere proprietress of the teahouse. “They recognized each other’s qualities immediately,” her goddaughter, Harriet “Peter” Miller, later recalled. “She always felt she had something to learn from him.” After the war, Bohr wrote of their special rapport, noting: “[Edith] had an intuitive understanding which was a bond between us.”
Bohr and his son Aage, a brilliant physicist in his own right who would earn his own Nobel, stayed for several weeks. Oppenheimer spent a lot of time with them and could always be seen walking with them between the Tech Area and Fuller Lodge. Both Bohrs were great hikers, and almost every afternoon they would go off on a long strenuous walk, sometimes accompanied by one or two other young physicists, while they would discuss a particularly thorny physics problem. Dorothy loved the way “Uncle Nick” looked in the silly, broad-brimmed straw hat he wore against the strong New Mexico sun, with his beloved pipe firmly planted in the corner of his mouth, always in need of lighting. Bohr also loved to ski, and she would never forget the sight of the legendary Dane expertly negotiating Sawyer’s Hill, the ski slope created by the Ranch School boys, which was only a short walk from the West Gate. He was not the least bit discouraged by the absence of a chair lift, and long after younger colleagues had called it quits, he could be seen energetically poling toward the top.
The Bohrs, like everyone on the Hill, were greatly heartened by the radio reports that the war was turning in their favor. At times the news was confusing, but Otto Frisch recalled that Bohr always listened closely and joked, “We must hear all the rumors before they are denied.” Bohr had not come to Los Alamos to contribute at a technical level so much as to serve as a sounding board and benefactor. He had come to America as a wise man, a scientist-statesman, to alert Roosevelt and his advisors to the perils of hoarding atomic “secrets.”
At the time, the dangers of the arms race he warned of sounded to the politicians like a distant threat compared with the far more pressing problem of winning the war. But his cautionary tone had a profound effect on Oppenheimer, as well as many other of the Los Alamos scientists, who were too caught up in their work to dwell on the ramifications of it all at the time but would later return to Bohr’s whispered admonishments and advice. He never had a single word of criticism for Oppenheimer or his upstart operation, and his faith and confidence that their work was progressing well left every one of the mesa scientists feeling decidedly more encouraged.
Bohr could not stay long, and on January 17, 1944, left for Washington and then London, where he was scheduled to meet with Churchill to relay his concerns about the postwar implications of the bomb and the frightening possibility of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. He promised to try to return as soon as possible, and Oppenheimer, writing to Groves on the day of the Danish physicist’s departure, made it clear that they would be most grateful for his continued collaboration: