Pandora's Keepers (19 page)

Szilard also doubted that the pile would run out of control, but he brooded nonetheless and seemed withdrawn. That night he walked to Culver Hall, where a psychologist whom he knew often worked late. “Come to dinner with me,” Szilard said, and the psychologist, who enjoyed Szilard’s speculative conversations, accepted. Szilard had already eaten but would have a second dinner “just in case.” “Just in case what?” asked the psychologist. “In case an important experiment doesn’t succeed,” answered Szilard.
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December 2, 1942, dawned brutally cold. Ellis Avenue was strangely empty. Inside under the west stands of Stagg Field it was as cold as it was outside. Fermi put on his gray lab coat, which normally matched the color of his hazel eyes but now was black with graphite, entered the squash court, and went up to the balcony. Compton took his place next to Fermi. The balcony was now filled with control equipment glowing and radiating some grateful heat. It was unusually quiet in the vast, drafty room. Only the silhouettes of half a dozen physicists could be seen around the pile, which squatted black and menacing, watched by a roomful of hopeful and nervous eyes.

At 9:45
A.M.
Fermi ordered all but one of the control rods withdrawn from the pile. The last control rod would be withdrawn by measured increments. Everyone stopped talking; only Fermi’s voice could be heard in the silence. He instructed a young physicist to move it out halfway. The pile was still below critical mass. Fermi’s fingers moved quickly over his small slide rule as his eyes checked the monitoring equipment. As usual, he looked completely self-confident. He had thoroughly prepared every detail of the experiment and was going to make a good show of it. He wanted to demonstrate how completely he understood the process. He wanted to prove that his predictions were accurate. Not only was he going to a witness a new phenomenon, he was going to be its master. “Fermi was playing this like an orchestra leader,” said a young physicist who was there.
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He ordered the final control rod moved out another six inches. The tension in the room mounted as the Geiger counters registering neutrons from the pile began to click faster and faster, until their sound became a rattle. The physicists watched, fascinated, as the curve climbed steadily upward. Then the automatic control rod (which had been set for too low a neutron count) slammed back into the pile with a clang. “I’m hungry,” deadpanned Fermi. “Let’s go to lunch.”
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The other rods were inserted and the pile quieted down. He was drawing out the suspense like an accomplished showman.

At 2
P.M.
everyone gathered again in the squash court. This time a crowd stood on the balcony. Szilard and Compton watched Fermi standing above what looked like an ominous black beehive. One by one, on Fermi’s orders, the control rods were withdrawn, the counters clicking faster. The pile was alive with neutrons now. But it was not quite a chain reaction. Fermi ordered the control rod out another foot. He was enjoying himself tremendously. The pile was nearly critical. “This is going to do it!” Fermi announced. “Now it will become self-sustaining!”
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An eyewitness recalled:

At first you could hear the sound of the neutron counter, clickety-clack, clickety-clack. Then the clicks came more and more rapidly, and after a while they began to merge into a roar; the counter couldn’t follow anymore. That was the moment to switch to the chart recorder. But when the switch was made, everyone watched in the sudden silence the mounting deflection of the recorder’s pen. It was an awesome silence. Everyone realized the significance of that switch; we were in the high intensity regime and the counters were unable to cope with the situation anymore. Again and again, the scale of the recorder had to be changed to accommodate the neutron intensity which was increasing more and more rapidly. Suddenly Fermi raised his hand. “The pile has gone critical,” he announced. No one present had any doubt about it.
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If anything unpredictable was going to happen, now was the moment. The “suicide squad” waited nervously, ready to pour their liquid cadmium onto the pile. “Fermi was cool as a cucumber,” an eyewitness wrote in his diary that night, “much more so than his associates who were excited or a bit scared.”
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Fermi waited a long minute, then another, then another. When it seemed that the anxiety in the squash court had become too much to bear, he ordered the control rods back in. There was applause, but no one cheered. The excitement in that cold and shadowy room was felt and shared by everyone. Someone produced a bottle of Chianti in a straw basket and gave it to Fermi. He and the others sipped the Chianti from paper cups quietly in the midst of that dingy, gray-black room without a word or a toast. While many dreamed of releasing the power of the atom as a peaceful source of energy, everyone present knew that destruction was the ultimate aim of the experiment. No one gave expression to his thoughts and feelings, but each one knew the others too well not to sense what was in their minds.
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Compton left the squash court; walked down Ellis Avenue, through Hull Court, to his Eckart Hall office; and called Conant in Washington. “Jim,” he said, using coded language on an insecure telephone line, “you’ll be interested to know that the Italian navigator has just landed in the New World.” Conant’s voice betrayed his excitement. “Were the natives friendly?” he asked. “Everyone landed safe and happy,” replied Compton.
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The experiment brought to fruition years of theory and planning. Man had controlled the release of energy from the atomic nucleus for the first time, demonstrating dramatically that the chain reaction worked. An atomic bomb was no longer merely a theoretical possibility. Later that month President Roosevelt approved the expenditure of $400 million for uranium-separation plants and a plutonium-producing pile. At long last, Washington had decided to go all-out to build an atomic bomb.

Those present beneath the west stands of Stagg Field that cold December day had witnessed a moment of history. Many had cherished the hope that something ultimately would make a chain reaction impossible—if impossible for them, it would be impossible also for the Germans. Now what they dreaded was on the way to reality. “We began to say things to one another,” an eyewitness said, “but there were no words that could express adequately just what we felt.”
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Another eyewitness remembered:

For some time we had known that we were about to unlock a giant; still, we could not escape an eerie feeling when we knew we had actually done it. We felt as, I presume, everyone feels who has done something that he knows will have very far-reaching consequences which he cannot foresee…. Even though our hearts were by no means light when we sipped the wine around Fermi’s pile, our fears were undefined, like the vague apprehensions of a man who has done something bigger than he ever expected to.
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There was no sign of emotion on Fermi’s face. His expression was so calm, it was hard to believe. The experiment had worked—it was as simple as that in his mind. Fermi told everyone to go home and get some sleep. Tomorrow they would get on with the next step. He was the cool man of action.

Nearby, Szilard loitered silently, brooding about the past and the future. To him, Fermi’s calm reaction was unnerving.
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Szilard now knew that an atomic bomb could be built. As everyone filed from the squash court into the cold evening, he and Fermi found themselves standing alone. “I shook hands with Fermi,” Szilard remembered, “and I said I thought this day would go down as a black day in the history of mankind.”
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That night a young physicist named John Manley came home from the Met Lab visibly shaken. His wife, Kay, was already in bed. She sensed that something was preoccupying her husband. “John came in very quietly,” she remembered many years later. “I knew that he was concerned about something. Something was affecting his thinking very strongly. He looked at me and said, ‘The world will never be the same.’ That was part of his thinking from then on.”
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CHAPTER 5

Los Alamos

T
HE ROAD NORTH
from Santa Fe undulated gently for several miles along a string of hills and then opened out onto a valley floor more than seven thousand feet above sea level. On the west side of this valley road the land stretched out for miles to the gray, silver, and timber shades of the Jemez Mountains. In between, stunted brown tree-shrubs dotted the high desert land in countless tufts. At sunrise and sunset the wide valley was a spectrum of rich colors—the ever-shifting tans and purples of the desert—but sunrises and sunsets were just moments in the long days here where time and the land alike seemed almost infinite. On the east side of this valley road, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains stood bloodred in the distance, including majestic snowcapped North Truchas Peak, at 13,102 feet one of the highest in all of New Mexico. The air possessed that lucid clarity of the desert. In the wide-open country of the American Southwest, the eye could roll out to the distance and the soul could expand into the great spaces.

At just this point a smaller road crossed the valley floor to the west. It spanned the Rio Grande, only a muddy stream here, and then started a slow climb toward the peaks of the Jemez Mountains, some darkened with trees, some lightened by scree. Large lava beds were visible, and black escarpments. Then salmon-colored cliffs towered skyward. The empty foreground filled suddenly with swellings of mesas, and abruptly trees—slim piñon pines and stubby juniper cedars—appeared over the canyons and the mesas. The air cooled and smells sharpened. The road rose, curved, cut back, then continued up, the mesas gradually taking shape. As the road crested the edge of one mesa, five suddenly appeared, splayed out from the gigantic volcanic mountain mass of the Jemez Caldera like the fingers of a hand sifting the sands of time. In the mesas’ walls were a honeycomb of hollowed caves whose ceilings had been blackened by the smoke of long-ago fires. Etched into them were drawings of animals, birds, masked beings, dancing men, symbols of rain and sun.

The Pajarito Plateau opened like a huge fan from an arc of blue mountains. It was grooved by canyons that radiated out like the crudely drawn spokes of a wheel. The canyon walls rose through many-colored layers of hardened volcanic ash, rose and buff, like petrified waves. Some of the ridges between the canyons were narrow. Others were wide and flat, dotted with the mounds of pre-Columbian Indian villages and fields where Hispanic families cultivated beans in summer, returning in winter to their adobe homes along the Rio Grande. Atop one of the ridges of the Pajarito Plateau, where trees grew and the air smelled of pine needles, was the Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys. The school was named after the canyon that bordered the mesa to the south and was dotted with cottonwood trees (
los alamos
in Spanish) along the sandy trickle of its stream. All was quiet in this awesomely beautiful place. It was as far from the war-torn world as one could possibly be in September 1942.

That month General Groves, who had just taken charge of the Manhattan Project, decided to create a new laboratory where the widely scattered work on bomb theory and design could be brought together and the fissionable material produced at Oak Ridge and Hanford could be assembled. There was also the issue of security: if scientists were brought together in one place, it would be a lot easier to control their talking and movements. As leader of this new lab, Groves wanted someone with an intellect broad and quick enough to grasp a whole range of scientific problems, the imagination to suggest novel solutions to those problems, and the charisma to keep everyone working together as a team. He wanted someone who would get the “long-hairs” to deliver their “gadget” on time.

Groves needed someone with enough authority and prestige to attract the best people available, ride herd on them, and coordinate their work. None of the Nobel laureates in physics could be spared to administrate. Lawrence was an outstanding experimental physicist and had gained good administrative experience running the Rad Lab at Berkeley, but he was committed to the electromagnetic separation of U-235 at Oak Ridge and could not be spared. Compton was another obvious choice, but he was already doing more than his share running the Met Lab at Chicago. And it would be unthinkable in Groves’s mind to assign the most secret military program to a foreign-born “enemy alien” such as Fermi, who was badly needed in Chicago, anyway.