Authors: Brian Van DeMark
In the absence of a more important figure, Groves chose Oppenheimer. They first met when Groves visited Berkeley on an inspection trip in early October 1942. Strangely enough, they hit it off well together right from the start. Oppenheimer was straightforward, did not act like a typical scientist, and seemed to be realistic about the importance of security, a matter of grave concern to the general. Oppenheimer, a persuasive talker and a consummate actor, convinced Groves that he was his man.
It was a most unorthodox choice. I. I. Rabi voiced the reaction of many physicists when he called it “a most improbable appointment. I was astonished.”
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Oppenheimer had never managed anything bigger than a graduate seminar. He had no experience in organizing a large laboratory and had shown no predisposition for teamwork before. He was a theoretician, whereas the lab would be concerned primarily with experiments and engineering. He had no Nobel Prize to distinguish him—would other scientists follow his leadership? Then there was Oppenheimer’s left-wing past, which “included much that was not to our liking by any means,” as Groves later wrote.
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Oppenheimer’s former fiancée, his wife, his brother, and his sister-in-law had all been members of the Communist Party—perhaps he himself had been, too. Neither Bush nor Conant was enthusiastic. Compton and Lawrence also had reservations about his capacity as an administrator. “Do you know a better man?” Groves asked them.
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Yet while the conservative Groves found Oppenheimer politically naive, he found nothing in his security file to doubt Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the United States, even though War Department investigators had characterized him as “strongly communistic” and had reported his connection “with radical organizations for years on and off the campus of the University of California.”
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Groves was so confident of his judgment that he personally ordered Oppenheimer’s clearance, overruling the objection of Army Intelligence officers on the grounds that Oppenheimer was “absolutely essential to the Project.”
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His order caused consternation and resentment among project security officers, but Groves wanted Oppenheimer—who else
was
there?—and forced through his choice. (The security people never forgave him or Oppenheimer for that act and continued to harass the director at every opportunity.) Groves barely knew Oppenheimer, yet he sensed that this man of great charm and persuasiveness could somehow bring together very difficult personalities and get them to work as a team. Groves’s intuition told him that Oppenheimer was a man equipped not only with scientific insight but with strong character and a capacity for decision. That was what Groves wanted, that was what he needed. There was no time to lose. The atomic bomb was only an idea on paper, and he had to make it a reality.
It was a brilliant choice.
The general and the physicist quickly developed a good working relationship. They always addressed each other formally as “General Groves” and “Dr. Oppenheimer”—an indication of the constant if subdued contest between them, each admiring yet suspicious of the other’s abilities. Groves handled Oppenheimer with more respect and deference than he did any other project scientist. Oppenheimer, who could be cutting with other physicists, patiently answered every question the general asked. He had not expected to like Groves—the military culture, after all, was definitely not his cup of tea—yet he found himself grudgingly admiring the general. “Groves is a bastard,” he would say privately, “but he’s a straightforward one.”
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They were an odd and improbable couple locked in a strange union that superseded quarrels and irritation—married, first and last, to the success of the project. They got along because each saw the other as the way to fulfill his ambition to achieve personal glory. “That combination made the thing work,” Rabi astutely observed.
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Groves and Oppenheimer’s first task together was to choose a site for the bomb lab. Oppenheimer remembered the mesa of Los Alamos, where he had spent a happy summer riding horseback and camping. The characteristics that had made the location a place of glory to him—its remoteness and isolation, but also its spare, intense beauty—was especially important to the aesthete in Oppenheimer, who knew the quality of the scientists whom he hoped to attract there and believed they would respond to surroundings that stretched and enriched the spirit.
Oppenheimer proposed this “little gray home in the west”
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to Groves, and together they drove up to the Ranch School in an unmarked car on November 16, 1942. They arrived there late in the afternoon. A light snow was falling. Despite the cold November wind, the boys were out on the playing fields in corduroy shorts. The founder of the school, Ashley Pond, was an enthusiastic advocate of the vigorous outdoor life and did not even believe in heated sleeping quarters. Oppenheimer and Groves remained outside the gates, taking in the fresh mountain air as they pored over maps and looked out over the surrounding countryside. Log houses and school buildings were scattered amid pastures and cropland. It was a lovely place, this clearing in the pine trees 8,500 feet above sea level. The flat green mesa, separated from the rest of the plateau by the vertical walls of two deep canyons, offered perfect isolation. After taking it all in, General Groves said simply, “This is the place.”
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The only obstacle to his decision was A. J. Connell, the headmaster of the Los Alamos Ranch School, where forty-three wealthy boys had been sent, mostly from the East, to be educated and toughened up. When an army officer told the headmaster that the school had come to the end of its days and would be taken over, Connell replied, “You must be mistaken. The property is not for sale.” The boys were permitted to finish the school year, but that was it. By the time they left, in the early spring of 1943, MPs were already guarding the mesa. Connell retired to Santa Fe a broken man, where he died two years later. That is how the secret lab known as Site Y or the Hill came to be.
On March 16, 1943, Oppenheimer left California by train for New Mexico. He arrived in Santa Fe a few days later and took up residence at 109 East Palace Avenue in Santa Fe under the alias Mr. Bradley until Kitty and Peter joined him and together they moved up to the Hill in May. Oppenheimer’s plan was to build an atomic bomb there with just thirty other physicists. It would be a small community. They would live in the schoolmasters’ houses and eat at the main lodge. What labs were needed would be squeezed in between the canyon rim and the little pond that graced the front of the lodge. As the realities of the immense challenge set in, however, Oppenheimer would be forced to recruit more physicists, as well as mathematicians, chemists, metallurgists, ordnance experts, machinists—all sorts of personnel. By war’s end, Los Alamos would secretly employ more than four thousand civilian and two thousand military personnel.
Oppenheimer’s original estimate had been low because of inexperience and his lack of ability to understand the dimensions involved. He had foreseen a theoretical physics laboratory whose main function would be to determine the critical mass, ensure against predetonation in assembly, and perform the necessary subcritical experiments to test the theory. Oppenheimer had given little thought to the engineering aspects of a weapon, which would prove to be awesome.
The laboratory started out with nothing except the library books that the Ranch School boys had read and the equipment they had used to go horseback riding. The only link with the outside world was a hand-cranked Forest Service phone line. Water was scarce and electricity was intermittent. At the center of Los Alamos was Ashley Pond, named after the school’s founder. To its east stood Fuller Lodge, the main dining hall. Across an open field was the Big House, which served as a dormitory for arriving scientists. Between the main road and the mesa’s southern rim were the laboratories, dubbed the Tech Area, one- and two-story white clapboard and green sheetrock buildings scattered among tall ponderosa pines. The streets created were unpaved and unnamed.
The scientists who would work in the Tech Area had many questions to answer: How many neutrons were released each time a uranium nucleus fissioned? How were they absorbed or scattered? How did the neutrons from one fission produce a second fission when they hit another uranium nucleus? How was a critical amount of fissionable material assembled fast enough to create a powerful explosion? What would happen during the explosion? The questions sounded very academic, but this was no college campus: a fenced guarded by MPs surrounded the Tech Area, and special white badges were required for admission.
Oppenheimer knew the physicists he needed would not readily pass up work at established war projects such as radar at MIT, the proximity fuse at Johns Hopkins, or sonar at San Diego to come to this unknown site in the desert. They would come only if America’s top physicists were coming, too. So Oppenheimer recruited the stars first, and the others followed fast. Some he terrified by stressing the prospect of a Nazi atomic bomb. Others he attracted by his descriptions of the immense beauty of New Mexico. But to all he imparted the feeling of how exciting it would be to participate in the pioneering work. “He spoke with a kind of mystical earnestness that captured our imagination,” recalled one recruit.
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By describing the projected work as crucial to the war effort and exerting a kind of “intellectual sex appeal,”
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as another recruit put it, Oppenheimer managed to get almost everyone he wanted. “Oppenheimer was the best recruiter and salesman I’ve ever seen,” said one who eagerly bought his sales pitch. “He expressed his enthusiasm for the project, and aroused ours.”
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The list of current and future stars was astonishing: Robert Bacher, Robert Christy, Richard Feynman, Donald Hornig, Edwin McMillan, Philip Morrison, Norman Ramsey, Emilio Segrè, Victor Weisskopf, and Robert Wilson, to name just a few.
If Oppenheimer needed additional ammunition in his recruiting effort, he had it in the form of a personal letter from President Roosevelt. Addressed to Oppenheimer but meant for everyone on the Hill, the letter conveyed FDR’s appreciation of the project’s urgency and the country’s thanks for the scientists’ labors:
Secret June 29, 1943
My dear Dr. Oppenheimer:
I have recently reviewed with Dr. Bush the highly important and secret program of research, development and manufacture with which you are familiar. I was very glad to hear of the excellent work which is being done in a number of places in this country under the immediate supervision of General L. R. Groves and the general direction of the Committee of which Dr. Bush is Chairman. The successful solution of the problem is of the utmost importance to the national safety, and I am confident that the work will be completed in as short a time as possible as the result of the wholehearted cooperation of all concerned
.
I am writing to you as the leader of one group which is to play a vital role in the months ahead. I know that you and your colleagues are working on a hazardous matter under unusual circumstances. The fact that the outcome of your labors is of such great importance to the nation requires that this program be even more drastically guarded than other highly secret war developments. I have therefore given directions that eveiy precaution be taken to insure the security of your project and feel sure that those in charge will see that these orders are carried out. You are fully aware of the reasons why your own endeavors and those of your associates must be circumscribed by very special restrictions. Nevertheless, I wish you would express to the scientists assembled with you my deep appreciation of their willingness to undertake the tasks which lie before them in spite of the dangers and the personal sacrifices. I am sure we can rely on their continued wholehearted and unselfish labors. Whatever the enemy may be planning, American science will be equal to the challenge. With this thought in mind, I send this note of confidence and appreciation.
Though there are other important groups at work, I am writing only to you as the leader of the one which is operating under very special conditions, and to General Groves. While this letter is secret, the contents of it may be disclosed to your associates under a pledge of secrecy.
Very sincerely yours,
Franklin D. Roosevelt
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Oppenheimer answered Roosevelt’s letter with these words:
July 9, 1943
Dear Mr. President:
Thank you for your generous letter of June 29th. You would be glad to know how greatly your good words of reassurance were appreciated by us. There will be many times in the months ahead when we shall remember them.
It is perhaps appropriate that I should in turn transmit to you the assurance that we as a group and as individual Americans are profoundly aware of our responsibility, for the security of our project as well as for its rapid and effective completion. It is a great source of encouragement to us that we have in this your support and understanding.