Authors: Brian Van DeMark
Offered the laboratory’s deputy directorship by Oppenheimer, Rabi turned it down, resisting the pressure of personal friendship and Oppenheimer’s considerable charm. Rabi did so because, as he explained to Oppenheimer, he did not want to make the atomic bomb “the culmination of three centuries of physics.”
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All of them felt the pressure of the work. They knew the project involved tens of thousands of people at sites across the country. They knew it was enormously expensive. And “if we ever forgot any of this,” Hans Bethe remembered, “General Groves would tell us.”
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Many had family and relatives in concentration camps. A Polish physicist did not know whether his wife and children, left behind in Poland, were dead or alive. A British physicist had lost his wife to a German bombing raid. The war came close even on the Hill when Teller listened to a radio broadcast on fighting in Hungary, and said somberly, “My family is there.” Anxiety and fear haunted them day and night. One physicist received a postcard from his brother in the fall of 1944, written from the front lines in Italy. Its complete message was “Hurry up!” The brother was killed in action that October.
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A fear of success also existed among them, for they were building a weapon so horrible that its use, which seemed the logical culmination of their efforts, could not easily be distinguished from barbarism. It was necessary for them to fear that the Nazis were working toward the same end, for only this could ease their concerns about the destruc-tiveness of the bomb they were making—that and the hope that such a weapon might end war because nations couldn’t afford its cost in human lives. They often lay awake at night wondering, “Is this right?” Still, it never occurred to anyone to stop. In their minds, they were doing their duty—in some cases, for no other reason than it was their duty; in other cases, because they were unable to conceive of any other course or were, perhaps, afraid to think of any other course. It was not a matter of choice but necessity. This was the morality imposed by brute circumstance, by habit, by the unspoken social demand that most did not have the strength to refuse, or, often, to imagine refusing.
The reactions to such tensions varied. Some thought, “We’ve worked on this thing and let’s use it—that’s what it’s for—and see if we can’t get the war stopped.”
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Some secretly hoped the technical difficulties would prove insurmountable. If it
was
impossible to develop an atomic bomb, there wouldn’t be any danger of the Nazis getting one either. Some of them hoped the war would end before the bomb could be finished. Some harbored moral qualms about the bomb, but many more were preoccupied by work or were lulled into unreflective self-importance by the weapon’s power. Gradually, as they became more deeply involved in the work, their misgivings began to fade—or were buried—and the tension of achievement took over and became the driving force, a kind of Faustian fascination about whether the bomb would really work. They had to achieve what they had set out to do. All of them sensed they were involved in something momentous, but they did not see clearly exactly what it was.
Each coped with these complicated feelings in his own way. Oppenheimer tried to relax at night behind the walls of his stone-and-timber cottage set behind a stand of poplars and spruces at the end of Bathtub Row. The furniture was Spanish rustic and rattan, an easy chair with a laurel pattern, serapes on the sofa, and black pueblo pottery on the fireplace mantel. A Picasso lithograph and pictures of the Hindu god Krishna hung on the walls. Oppenheimer drank a martini while Kitty sat nearby, her legs curled beneath her on a sofa, an ashtray in her lap. But the project was never far away; soldiers patrolled outside the house around the clock. His Native American housekeeper sensed the anxiety. “Dr. Oppenheimer was quiet…. He was worried. You could tell it by his face; it was down. Even his wife was worried. I sensed a lot of tension.”
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Occasionally, Oppenheimer would drive down to a teahouse at Otowi Bridge over the Rio Grande that was run by Edith Warner, a quiet and reserved woman who lived as a neighbor to the Indians of nearby San Ildefonso Pueblo. He drew strength from the warmth that Warner radiated. Juniper wood burned in her adobe fireplace. Often there was the smell of bread that had just been taken from the oven and covered with a cloth on the table under the kitchen window. Black pottery plates stood upright on open shelves along one wall, with cups and saucers in terra-cotta colors from Mexico. Orange candles and red-and-black-striped Chimayo squares brightened the wall; a Navajo rug covered part of the rough floor.
There Oppenheimer drank tea and ate cake in a small room that looked through large windows toward the Sangre de Cristos. Warner, who observed these mountains daily, described what Oppenheimer saw:
Sometimes the light makes each range stand out, casting sharp shadows on the ones behind. Occasionally when the air is very clear, there is a strange and breath-taking shining light on the green aspen leaves. At evening the twilight may run quickly from the valley, shrouding almost at once the highest peaks. Or mauve and rose move slowly upward, turning to blood-red on the snow above. One morning they may be purple cardboard mountains sharpcut against the sky. On another they will have withdrawn into themselves. Sometimes I have watched ghost mountains with substance only in their dark outline. It seems then as if the mountains had gone down into their very roots, leaving an empty frame.
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Caught up as he now was in the whirlpool of war, the furious plans to construct a deadly weapon, the impossible and often agonizing decisions that had to be weighed and implemented every day, often every moment, Oppenheimer had a particular need for tranquility and quiet reflection that these hours at Edith Warner’s teahouse filled. As one whose daily thoughts were involved with techniques of destruction, he found healing here for his divided spirit.
Teller, when burdens seemed greatest, would sit down at his concert grand piano and play the soothing sounds of Bach and Mozart. He gave occasional recitals in the Fuller Lodge dining hall. The room, with a running balcony and a massive stone fireplace at either end, had walls of honeyed pine and looked more like the dining room of a national park lodge than the army-camp messes where most of Los Alamos ate. The center of attention, Teller would beam with satisfaction. His technique was loose but his playing showed a lot of determination and feeling and musicality. Teller also delighted in simple pleasures. His favorite author was Lewis Carroll, and he read Carroll’s stories and poems to his son, Paul, long before the child could understand them. He could be as playful as his little boy when he narrated fairy tales on community radio station KRS—a deep voice with a Middle European accent telling bedtime stories. When he reached a funny passage, he let out a very loud, high-pitched giggle.
Bethe relieved the pressure by hiking nearly every Sunday in the nearby mountains, frequently climbing Lake Peak (12,500 feet) across the Rio Grande Valley in the Sangre de Cristos. At the top, through a fringe of cedars, spread an alpine meadow extravagantly carpeted with purple mariposa lilies. These hikes gave Bethe a chance to unburden himself by giving his body exercise and his mind a chance to wander. Others went on weekend camping and fishing trips, rock-gathering expeditions, pueblo visits, and other activities that relieved the tensions of the project and the weight of the moral justifications of bomb making. Some would ride the bus to Santa Fe and sit in the plaza in the center of town, drowsing in a sunny siesta, then dine at the La Fonda, an adobe hotel with exposed beams and wooden balconies. Others walked the quiet streets of old Santa Fe, peering over adobe walls that seemed to soak up the abundant sunshine into the romantic and exotic gardens within. Some found that they could never leave their work behind. They were missing something.
On December 30, 1943, an older man arrived on the Hill as a consultant to the British delegation. His security guards referred to him as “Mr. Nicholas Baker” but physicists instantly recognized “Mr. Baker” as Niels Bohr. Bohr’s long odyssey from Copenhagen to Los Alamos had begun in April 1940, when Germany invaded and occupied Denmark. Half Jewish, Bohr was put under surveillance and his phones were tapped. Secretly communicating with the Danish resistance, he urged his country’s leaders to fight Jewish deportations from Denmark, even as German troops patrolled the street in front of his institute.
In late September 1941, as German troops neared Moscow and looked poised to knock Russia out of the war, Bohr received a visit from Heisenberg. The two had once been very close—mentor and beloved protégé. Now Heisenberg was back as the leading scientist of a nation that seemed on the verge of conquering all of Europe. Bohr greeted his former student with careful politeness and invited him into his office at the institute. They busily avoided each other’s eyes as they began their conversation. Shy and arrogant, Heisenberg expressed his confidence that Germany would win the war but told Bohr that if the war lasted long enough it would be decided by atomic bombs, said that he was involved in such research for Nazi Germany, and had no doubt that it could be done. After the war, Heisenberg would claim that he was subtly hinting at moral qualms about building an atomic weapon in wartime and suggesting that physicists on both sides of the conflict should refuse to do so. But Bohr, fearful and shaken, did not see it that way. He later recalled that Heisenberg “gave no hint about efforts on the part of German scientists to prevent such a development.”
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Visibly startled by what Heisenberg had said but trying to contain his deep fright, Bohr said nothing and suddenly cut short the conversation. Afterward, he confided to his family that Heisenberg had tried to pry information from him about fission and, by implication, the Allied atomic project. Hans Bethe was probably closest to the truth when he later remarked that “one talked with one set of assumptions and the other with a totally different set of assumptions.”
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The meeting, however, unquestionably intensified Bohr’s suspicion, and fear, that the Nazis were racing toward an atomic bomb.
Two years later, in September 1943, Bohr learned from the Swedish ambassador in Copenhagen that deportation of Danish Jews would begin soon. The ambassador hinted that Bohr, whose mother was Jewish, would be arrested himself. Confirmation came the next morning from an informer at Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen who had seen orders for Bohr’s arrest and deportation. Late that afternoon, Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, walked to a seaside garden and hid in a gardener’s shed. They waited anxiously for nightfall. Then, at a prearranged time, they left the shed and crossed to the beach. From the beach a motorboat took them out to a fishing boat. Dodging German minefields, they crossed the choppy sound between Denmark and Sweden by moonlight.
When Bohr landed in Sweden, a Swedish officer was told to bring him to Stockholm and to attract no attention on the way. (The officer was too proud of having the famous Dane in his charge, so despite orders he stopped in many places for a drink, each time saying, “Do you know whom I am escorting to Stockholm…?”
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) When Bohr reached Stockholm the next day, he was put up in the home of a Danish diplomat and never went out alone. Britain moved its diplomatic pouch in and out of Sweden in a fast, unarmed bomber that flew at a high altitude to avoid German antiaircraft batteries along the coast of Norway. The plane’s bomb bay was fitted for a single passenger. Temporarily leaving his wife behind, Bohr boarded the plane for the flight to England on October sixth. Once in London, he learned from British scientists that fission research had progressed a great deal since his stay in Princeton four years earlier. An atomic bomb was being made at Los Alamos, the British were preparing to send a team there, and they wanted Bohr to join it.
Bohr agreed to join the British team at Los Alamos. When he reached the United States in December, his first stop was the sprawling U-235 separation plant at Oak Ridge. Seeing what he saw, and being one of the most farsighted of men, he had no doubt now that the atomic bomb would be built, and would be a presence in the world forever. Groves joined him afterward at the Met Lab, and together they boarded a train for Los Alamos. Bohr did most of the talking as their train hurtled south across the Plains and then west over the Rockies, Groves struggling all the while to understand Bohr’s mumbled words. When they finally reached Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was there to greet them. He noticed that Groves looked tired and irritated. He asked the general what the trouble was. “I’ve been listening to Bohr,” he grumbled.
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Oppenheimer arranged a reception for Bohr at his home with other physicists. When Bohr spotted Teller, he said, “Didn’t I tell you that you could not make a nuclear explosive without turning the whole country into a huge factory? Now you have gone and done it.”
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Bohr then related an account of his personal adventures, including his conversation two years earlier with Heisenberg. He said that Heisenberg and other talented German physicists were diligently working on a bomb. The thought of how far the Nazis might have come in the years since the discovery of fission was enough to make everyone at the reception shudder. Bohr also related what he knew about Nazi-occupied Europe to those who had left loved ones behind. The atmosphere was very somber.
The first question Bohr put to physicists at Los Alamos was: “Is it really big enough?”—was the atomic bomb they were building big enough to make future wars too destructive to be contemplated? Bohr made a clear distinction between the bomb’s wartime use, which he considered an all but inevitable military decision, and its political and diplomatic implications, which bore on the longer-range issues of world peace and security and relations among nations. “What role it [the bomb] may play in the present war,” Bohr wrote, was a question “quite apart” from the overriding concern: the need to avoid an atomic arms race.
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