Fifties (16 page)

The Super required immensely sophisticated mathematical equations. Years later, Andrei Sakharov came to America and met with his American counterparts. Jerome Weisner, the science adviser to both Eisenhower and Kennedy, asked how much help Klaus Fuchs’s espionage had been to the Soviets on the hydrogen bomb. Somewhat to his surprise, Sakharov retorted, “We got the same kind of help you did—it was all the wrong information.” In fact, the calculations on the Super remained wrong until the last minute. Teams of mathematicians, armed only with slide rules in those days, put in long, grueling hours under Ulam.

What the physicists working on the hydrogen bomb needed was a machine that would help them with the overwhelming amount of high-level computation. By chance, at that very moment a number of mathematicians were trying to transform the old-fashioned electric calculator into a machine for the modern world by equipping it with vacuum tubes in order to do high-speed, high-powered computing. Some people called the new invention a human brain; others called
it the computer. The early military computer, ENIAC, arrived too late to be used for the fission bomb (it did its first calculations of the Los Alamos lab in December 1945), but in the critical years of the fusion bomb, 1950–52, work on the early models had progressed far enough to be of considerable help. The leading theoretician of the computer, John von Neumann of Princeton, was a close friend of the leading scientists of Los Alamos. He was far ahead of anyone else in understanding the logic of the computer, what it could do, and how it could do it.

The key to the new technology was the coming of electronics. Radar represented the first important use of electronics during the war, and in the postwar years, there was to be nothing less than a revolution in the field, first with vacuum tubes and then with transistors. It was all about weight and speed. In the traditional electrical circuit there was a small metal switch, which had to be moved electrically. It was tiny and seemed to weigh virtually nothing. But compared to what was going to replace it—an electron—it was absurdly heavy. Because an electron weighed so much less, it could be moved far faster, at a speed, in the words of Tom Watson, Jr., of IBM, “close to the speed of light.” In the late forties, even the fastest electrical relay system in an IBM business machine could do only four additions per second, while the primitive new computer produced during the war could do some five thousand. The scientific and industrial implications were profound; in terms of technology, it was like going from the Wright brothers’ airplane to a mach-three jet.

Two young engineers, John Mauchly and Pres Eckert, created the first working computer, ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, at the Moore School of the University of Pennsylvania, primarily for the military and for the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, where it would chart ballistic trajectories. It was an awkward machine, taking up some 15,000 square feet. When Tom Watson, Jr., first visited ENIAC in 1945, he asked why it was so hot in the room. “Because we are sharing this space with 18,000 radio tubes,” Eckert replied. Eckert, then only thirty-one years old, was immensely confident that this was the machine of the future and that IBM’s electrically based machines were soon to be the dinosaurs of the computing world. At the time Watson did not believe him, though he was soon to change his mind.

Yet the true visionary of its potential was von Neumann. He had become interested in computers during the war. Already considered by many the most gifted mathematician of his generation, he
turned his attention completely to this new idea in midcareer. He had an obscene interest in this new machine, which would astronomically extend man’s mathematical capabilities, he wrote his friend Oswald Veblen in 1943. Because of this obsession, he speculated he would return from England “a better and impurer man.” In 1944 Herman Goldstine, who was representing the government on the ENIAC program, ran into von Neumann at Aberdeen and mentioned Mauchly’s and Eckert’s work. Goldstine was stunned by how much von Neumann already knew and how his mind seemed to race ahead, even in this brief and casual conversation, about what computers might do eventually.

He started to collaborate closely with Mauchly and Eckert on the successor machine—EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Arithmetic Calculator). As part of that work, he sat down one day and wrote out a 101-page paper on the theory of the use of the machine. His paper was so original and convincing that it became in effect the standard primer on the use of the computer. It also enraged Mauchly and Eckert, who believed that he was trying to take credit for their work. (Actually, von Neumann had written the paper rather casually, with no expectation that it would be published.)

Von Neumann was so talented that his colleagues joked that he was a Martian who did an exceptional job of posing as a humanoid with a heavy Hungarian accent. “It all came so easily for him and he was so far ahead of everyone else.” mused his friend Herman Goldstine, himself one of the early architects of computing, “that he was like Mozart. Or perhaps because he was so quick and liked to be everywhere, doing everything that was on the frontier of math, Cellini or Michelangelo.” At Los Alamos, it was universally recognized that if Johnny von Neumann said it would work, it would work. If Johnny said it wouldn’t work, it wouldn’t work.

Von Neumann had grown up in Budapest, a contemporary and schoolmate of Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner. Unlike Teller, who came from the same Jewish haute-bourgeois background, von Neumann was ebullient and witty. The anti-Semitism he encountered in his childhood and the eventual need to leave Hungary never darkened his vision as it did Teller’s. He had always been the best student, with the best grades; from the time he was ten, his mathematical ability was so obvious his teachers suggested to von Neumann’s father that his son be tutored. For the next eight years, he studied with a professor at the University of Budapest; by the time of his high school graduation, he had begun to collaborate with the professor on papers.

Herman Goldstine remembered a story that von Neumann, as a student, had attended a lecture by the legendary Hermann Weyl, who boasted that he could solve a difficult theorem in forty-five minutes. Weyl indeed solved it in forty-five minutes, but when he was finished, von Neumann stepped up and said, “Professor Weyl, may I show you something?” He had solved it in four lines. There might, Goldstine added, have been mathematicians of his generation who were as good, but there were none who were as fast.

His office, said a colleague, was like that of a dentist, with young mathematicians lined up to see von Neumann, hoping to get some help with the equations on which they were working. In one such case, von Neumann sat down and, without use of pencil or paper, solved the equation. A few nights later, von Neumann was at a concert when the same young man walked over; he explained sheepishly that he had been so dazzled by the performance that he had forgotten to write down the answer. Von Neumann reeled off the answer again. The young man thanked him and disappeared. Von Neumann turned to Herman Goldstine, who was with him, and said: “I just want you to know that that SOB is going to publish what I just gave him without a footnote referring to me.”

He was restless and quickly got bored. When he had friends over to dinner, he would often excuse himself to go into an adjoining room to work—though he’d still listen in on the conversation and comment when something interested him. His friends weren’t offended—they knew it was just Johnny being Johnny.

He was a man of immense charm who brought an old-world zest for life to the ascetic world of American science. He could remember endless jokes and stories, which he loved to trot out on all occasions. He could always summon the right limerick for the right person. He was sometimes rather bawdy, and he liked to play games at all times, particularly when he was in cars, where he would use the plates of oncoming cars to compute all sorts of mathematical possibilities. He liked to say, his closest friend and colleague Stan Ulam pointed out, that a mathematician did his best work at the age of twenty-five and then it was all downhill. When he first made that comment, von Neumann had just passed age twenty-five. Over the years, Ulam noted, von Neumann systematically extended the age limit on brilliance, always keeping it just below his then current age. It was, Ulam thought, part of von Neumann’s sense of irony and his ability to be self-effacing.

Like his old schoolmate Teller, he was politically conservative, a hard-liner as the Cold War developed, deeply suspicious of the
Soviets. He believed in the need to escalate the technology of America’s arms, first with the Super, and then later as a key figure in the planning of the ballistic-missile program. He disliked Oppenheimer, both personally—thinking him too prissy and self-righteous—and professionally—thinking him too left-wing and wrong on his attitude toward the Super. Yet later he would testify on behalf of Oppenheimer at his security hearings. He thought, in fact, that Oppenheimer was in the end badly treated by his government. Egalitarian societies like America, von Neumann told his colleague Herman Goldstine, are very cruel to truly gifted people: “In England they would have made him an Earl and if he wanted to, he could have gone around among his students with his penis hanging out, and everyone would have been charmed by his eccentricity.”

By 1946, Mauchly and Eckert decided to go into private enterprise, where they intended to build the next model to the UNIVAC, or Universal Automatic Computer. Von Neumann went to the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton, taking many of the most talented people who had worked on the earlier computers with him, including Goldstine. This denied Eckert and Mauchly the most brilliant theoretician of their time and many of their ablest people, and put a ceiling on what they might achieve.

At Princeton, von Neumann started trying to raise money to build his own computer. It was not easy. The great marriage between American science and American business was still to come. The obvious company to take the lead was IBM, an electrical business machine company. But Tom Watson, Sr., the dominant figure in the company, believed that the electronic revolution would not touch his business. He was, Tom Watson, Jr., later wrote, “like the king who sees a revolution going on in the country next door to his own, yet is astounded when his own subjects get restless. He didn’t realize that a new era had begun. IBM was the classic company with tunnel vision because of its success.” It was in danger, the younger Watson noted, of being like the railroad industry missing the air travel revolution and the movie industry missing the television revolution.

Still, von Neumann, absolutely confident of his course, plunged ahead. He scrambled with somewhat limited success to raise the money from the Institute and other sources to fund his project. By 1950 he felt the growing pressure, particularly from Los Alamos, and from other parts of the defense industry, for more computing power. The race to finish the Institute computer paralleled the race to do the Super calculations. The IAS computer was dedicated in June 1952, and it was to become the most important model of its time, the
forerunner of not just the IBM 701, that company’s first venture into computing, but also the JOHNNIAC, the Rand Corporation’s first computer, affectionately named after von Neumann himself. Years later, after his company somewhat belatedly rose to the challenge of the computer age, Tom Watson, Jr., spoke of how the Cold War had made IBM the undisputed king of the computer business; what was equally true was that the Cold War made the computer a mandatory technology.

The computers that were soon to come would have made the calculations for the Super easy. As it was, they remained an immense problem. Mathematician Stan Ulam was not particularly happy about bringing a fusion bomb into the world, but he was fatalistic about it: If it proved doable, he believed, then sooner or later it would be done, which to his mind diminished the moral anguish. By February 1950, Ulam was convinced that Teller’s earlier estimates on the amount of tritium needed were off. Ulam tried calculations with more tritium, but again the bomb did not seem to work. He found dealing with Teller increasingly difficult, and he became irritated by Teller’s reluctance to accept the fact that his calculations were off.

In April 1950, Ulam went to Princeton to talk with von Neumann and Fermi about the math. Oppenheimer joined them and seemed, Ulam thought, to be somewhat pleased that they were having some serious problems. At one point, when von Neumann pointed out yet another error in the calculations, Oppenheimer winked at Ulam. That helped convince Ulam that some of Oppie’s objections to the Super were, subconsciously at least, a matter of ego—those of the man who had started a revolution with the atomic bomb witnessing the arrival of an even more powerful revolution. Their discussions in Princeton seemed to indicate that they had to increase the amount of tritium in the theoretical design.

As difficulties persisted, Teller became more and more difficult. The atmosphere at Los Alamos was tense and hostile: Teller isolated himself, and Norris Bradbury, who had succeeded Oppenheimer as head of the laboratory, became furious as success continued to elude them. Hans Bethe, who still managed to get on with Teller better than most, had always thought his colleague had a tendency toward depression, but he had never seen him this badly off—so forlorn that he couldn’t even participate in scientific give-and-take at meetings but instead would leave and go back to his room to be alone. The clock was ticking and the first important test, called Greenhouse, was imminent. All Teller could say when people pressured him was that they had to have lots of tests, lots of tests. Discussions with him were
not so likely to be discussions as bitter arguments. Ironically, at the same time, he was complaining to officials in Washington that Conant, Oppenheimer, and others were undermining his efforts by creating an antagonistic attitude in the scientific community. Yet to his scientific peers it was obvious that the project was failing because Teller’s numbers did not work.