109 East Palace (37 page)

Looking ahead to the next twelve months, Oppenheimer must have thought Groves’ estimates wildly optimistic. Given the time scale, and the slow rate of production of U-235, there was no point in even considering a test for the gun assembly. There was no way there would be enough U-235 to make that a possibility. They would simply have to trust that the gadget would work. Plutonium’s rate of production promised to be better, and given the fact that the implosion device was so novel, Oppenheimer felt they had to consider making a field test. They could expect enough plutonium to be available by the following summer to allow for a test detonation of a single implosion bomb. But Groves was leery of wasting the little fissile material they had. If the test was a bust, and there was no nuclear explosion, he stated flatly that he could not afford to lose all that plutonium in the chemical blast. “Oppenheimer and I were pleading with Groves that there had to be a test because the whole scheme was so uncertain,” recalled Kistiakowsky:

General Groves was very sensitive about what would happen to him after the war and whenever he didn’t like something, he’d say, “Think of me standing before a U.S. Senate committee after the war when it asks me: ‘General Groves, why did you spend this million or
that
million of dollars?’”

To cover their desperation, Kistiakowsky proposed building a large prophylactic, a 200-ton ellipsoidal steel tank with twelve-inch-thick walls, dubbed “Jumbo.” By testing the bomb inside the steel vessel, they hoped that if the weapon misfired, everything would remain contained, rather than being scattered over the countryside. Then, after the tank had cooled, it would be possible to salvage the plutonium for yet another test. If by some chance the weapon worked, the tank would be vaporized, but their job would be done. Oppenheimer had first written to Groves about a “sphere for proof firing” in March 1944 and, trying to sound confident about implosion, had stated “the probability that the reaction would not shatter the container is extremely small.” It is a measure of Groves’ own uncertainty that he went for the idea and gave the order for Jumbo to be built.

While the question of whether or not there should be field tests continued to be fiercely debated by the physicists on the Hill, Oppenheimer had to turn his attention to the problem of
where
such a test could be safely conducted. Beginning in early May, he organized a search team consisting of himself, Kenneth Bainbridge, who was in charge of developing the test site, Peer de Silva, and army major W. A. Stevens. They scoured maps of the area and visited several spots nearby where the land was relatively flat and isolated from any population centers, but still close enough to Los Alamos to facilitate the transportation of men and material. On their first scouting trip, they got caught in an unexpected snowstorm, and one of their trucks got stuck in the deep drifts. They had to dig it out and take a more circuitous route to San Luis and Estrella. They spent the next day exploring Star Lake, the center of an old coal region, and followed unmapped ranch trails past abandoned ranches too dry for farming and wind-beaten desert land. The front-wheel bearings of one of the vehicles finally gave out, and they had to leave it there and head back to Los Alamos. Bainbridge thought Oppenheimer was reluctant to see an end to their rugged three-day adventure, as he would not have time to participate in the subsequent site-hunting expeditions. “Oppenheimer had to return to more important duties, and could not again enjoy a trip into the open country which he loved.”

On a following trip, they borrowed a small, seven-seater C-45 and flew low over the parched rural countryside, inspecting hundreds of miles of the western United States. By August, after all the other possibilities had been eliminated on the grounds of inaccessibility, they were left with a ninety-mile stretch of sandy desert in central New Mexico known as the Jornada del Muerto, located some three hundred miles south of Los Alamos. It was a desolate, forbidding area, battered by high winds, devoid of water, and with temperatures reaching well over a hundred degrees in July and August. Not surprisingly, the early Spanish settlers dreaded crossing the empty, unyielding region, endowing it with a name that roughly translates as “Journey of Death.” The grim pioneer history added to the romantic aura of the site, and Oppenheimer, who was spending sleepless nights reading John Donne’s
Holy Sonnets
, was inspired to give it the code name “Trinity” after some lines from Sonnet XIV:

Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

The down-to-earth Bainbridge was less than enamored of the evocative name Oppenheimer had selected. Thinking more in terms of practicality than history, he dashed off a memo to Oppenheimer several months later requesting something more utilitarian:

I would greatly appreciate it if the Trinity Project could be designated Project T. At present, there are too many different designations. Muncy’s [business] office calls it A; Mitchell’s [procurement] office calls it project T but ships things to S-45…. By actual usage, people are talking of Project T, our passes are stamped T and I would like to see the project, for simplicity, called Project T.

As summer waned, the debate over to test or not to test became an increasingly hot issue at Los Alamos. Even so, work on the site was in full swing. Most of the Jornada was already in government hands and, since the First World War, had been used as a gunnery and bombing range. Groves arranged to acquire the northwest corner of the bombing range not far from Socorro, a small settlement at the northern end that no doubt took its name from the fact that it had offered the only “succor” or sustenance to the old Spanish wagon trains that ran into trouble in the desert. There were a few ranches scattered around the region, and their owners had been compensated by the government for their loss of housing and income. Not all of them had left yet, and their cattle and sheep still occasionally wandered past the
NO TRESPASSING
signs posted by the army. The government bribed the remaining ranchers to leave, though a few needed prodding, and the MPs fired holes into their water tanks to discourage both the two-legged and four-legged inhabitants from drifting back. There were a few small townships thirty to forty miles away, but they had become accustomed to hearing the sounds of distant explosions over the years. Other than that, the area was literally barren—empty. The army leased the McDonald brothers’ ranches and planned to renovate them for their use. Everything else would have to be trucked in and built from scratch. The roads were extremely primitive and would have to be improved to withstand the upcoming traffic, not to mention the transport of Jumbo from a stop along the El Paso-Albuquerque railroad line. The plans drawn up for the base camp called for housing for 160 military and civilian personnel. Trinity was going to be a tremendous field operation, and Groves ordered a hundred men from the Army Corps of Engineers to help with the construction.

The demands of the implosion work and Trinity site meant that once again Los Alamos was in desperate need of more manpower. Since late 1943, the military had begun bringing in SEDs, who were assisting in the endless work in the Tech Area. Now they were arriving by the busload. Most were students with some semblance of technical training—in chemistry, physics, or engineering—and served as laboratory grunts, doing everything and anything the scientists needed. In some cases, they were also promising young physics Ph.D.’s who were about to be drafted and whose professors thought they could probably serve their country better in a laboratory than in battle. In the beginning, they were crammed into barracks at the edge of town, as though the army was slightly ashamed of them and wanted to keep them as far away as possible from respectable folk.

The arrival of hundreds of very young, very raw male draftees altered the atmosphere on the mesa, lowered the average age of an already immature population, and proved to be another test of the community’s creativity and adaptability. To Dorothy, they looked like a bunch of scrawny college boys, and she took many of them under her wing. They were thankful not to be in the line of fire on foreign soil, and their youthful high spirits showed. One of the very first to arrive was Bill Hudgins, who had been a few years ahead of Kevin in school and whom she had often seen at the home of her close friend Eleanor Gregg, a cousin of John Gaw Meem’s. Hudgins had been enrolled in the engineering program at the University of New Mexico when he heard they were looking for qualified staff on a nearby army project. He was only eighteen, and green as could be when he walked into Dorothy’s office at 109 East Palace and inquired about “a job with the government project.” Panicked that there had been a breach in security, Dorothy nearly jumped down his throat. She interrogated him for more than an hour about what he had heard about the project, where he had heard it, whom he had heard it from, and how he came to have her office address. Only after she was satisfied that there had been no real harm done by the rumors did she relax and recover her usual equilibrium.

Afterward, feeling a little guilty about her rough treatment of the lad, she walked him through the application process and even attached a letter of recommendation. After he was accepted, she made a point of watching over him. “She mothered me whenever she could,” said Hudgins, laughing. “She definitely looked out for me. Whenever I got into any kind of trouble, I could just call her and she would straighten it out. She was definitely a good person to know.”

The SEDs were a breed apart from the post’s army soldiers, and their brief five weeks of basic training did little to whip them into tip-top military shape. Whenever Groves was visiting with some high brass from Washington, there would be a formal military review on the baseball field in front of the Big House, and the whole post was treated to the laughable spectacle of watching the youngsters try to parade. “It was pathetic,” said Hudgins, who worked as a technician in the Chemistry Division. “Here would be these people straggling in after pulling three straight shifts in the laboratory, just desperate for some sleep, and they would have to get up at dawn and line up for inspection. There were always a half dozen that couldn’t keep time to anything to save their lives and were tripping over their feet. You have to understand, they had come from all over. Some were straight off the farm or from small family businesses. This was all new to them.” After one visit, a general reportedly declared the detachment “a disgrace to the army.”

Hudgins complained to Dorothy about the exhausting hours and tough drills, and although she commiserated, it was out of her hands. Dorothy, like most of the laboratory staff, was patriotic without being particularly pro-army, and failed to see the need for all the spit-and-polish drill on their remote base. Like Oppenheimer, she also had a strong sense that they were all in this together, and the disparities between the civilian and military privileges troubled her. Peer de Silva, the post military intelligence officer, was also the SEDs commander, and he arbitrarily refused to allow the young married men to get their wives jobs at Los Alamos, so they too could be quartered on the site. Dorothy felt bad that they were unfairly separated from their families, and underpaid and unappreciated to boot. “She stuck up for us,” said Hudgins. “She was very informal and unpretentious, not a flag waver. She thought the army was giving us an awfully hard time.”

Some of the senior scientists, who had barely escaped being put in uniform themselves, took pity on the SEDs and intervened on their behalf. Kistiakowsky, who had hundreds of SEDs working in his division, became their leading champion. He complained that the young enlisted personnel only rated what army regulations stipulated as “the minimum comforts: minimum housing, minimum recreation, minimum food facilities. And this means,” Kistiakowsky continued, “40 square feet per man in the barracks, including part of the recreation area. Try to recreate yourself in that area.” Their commanding officer was old school and, in Kistiakowsky’s opinion, treated the junior technical personnel like pariahs. “Since he was not told, as many other military weren’t (nor the machinists, of course) what the purpose of Los Alamos was, he loudly described all of us as draft dodgers who were just escaping Army service and having fun here. He insisted the SEDs be awakened by reveille and be mustered daily to do calisthenics and keep the barracks in order and even wear caps and salute officers on the streets.” While this was traditional in the army, the SEDs were not regular army and were barred from going on to Officer Candidate School, which made the rigorous discipline all the more humiliating and unnecessary.

Kistiakowsky took up their cause with Oppenheimer, who as always worried about morale and argued with Groves to no avail. When Groves was next in Los Alamos, Kistiakowsky asked for permission to speak to him. Groves told him he could ride in his car with him as far as Albuquerque, and for the whole two-and-a-half-hour trip they argued about the SED problem. Kistiakowsky, getting nowhere with Groves, resorted to his “ultimate weapon,” going so far as to threaten to quit if the hard-working youngsters did not receive better treatment. “You know, General,” the imposing White Russian said, squarely facing Groves, “I didn’t ask to come here and what’s more you can’t keep me here. I am too old to be drafted,” he added, “and I’ll leave.” According to Kistiakowsky, Groves responded with “grunts and violent attacks on me for transgressing my authority as a civilian, and meddling in army affairs.” But shortly thereafter, the SEDs got a new CO, Major T. O. Palmer, and the reveille and calisthenics were quietly dropped. Kistiakowsky, who apart from that dispute got along well with Groves, suspected the general tolerated his interference because he saw him “as more manly than the effete physicists” because of his explosives work: “I was to him a kind of kindred spirit.”