Pandora's Keepers (13 page)

To build a bomb from materials that didn’t yet exist in measurable quantities, involving the commitment of an extraordinary
range of human and material resources, in the midst of a global war—it was an improbable undertaking. Yet out of nothing would
be created a vast industrial enterprise. Bohr’s prediction had not been far off the mark: before the war was over, the Manhattan
Project would consume more than $2 billion, employ 500,000 people directly and indirectly, and mobilize vast material resources.
The project exemplified human ingenuity and determination, an immense undertaking into which industrial power was harnessed
at vast cost and extraordinary effort. There was something vitally American about the Manhattan Project: no other nation in
a world at war had the time and money to attempt such a thing.

An all-out race to build an atomic bomb was now under way after a delay of more than two years. Scientists entered the race—against
German scientists believed to have a two-year head start—convinced that the outcome of the war depended on their ability to
recover lost time. For them, the bomb’s rapid development was the single most important necessity of the war. It was a matter
of survival.

S
UNDAY, DECEMBER
7, 1941, found Arthur Compton on the morning train from Washington to New York. At the Wilmington, Delaware, station a passenger
boarded his compartment and shouted nervously that the Japanese had attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, bringing
America into the war at last. The news sent Compton into a reverie as the train left Wilmington and raced north across the
lush pastureland of rural New Jersey. Compton could see the neo-Gothic towers of Princeton University off in the distance.
There was the Graduate College, where he had lived, and the Palmer Physical Laboratory, where he had conducted experiments
as a graduate student two decades before. How different those buildings now seemed to Compton. They were still outwardly peaceful
ivory towers, but Compton knew that within their walls were active and creative minds working on an immensely destructive
weapon that might decide the outcome of the war that America had just entered. He felt conflicted about his own work on an
immensely destructive weapon because of a pacifist upbringing by his Mennonite mother. And yet he felt he had no other choice,
especially now.

When Compton reached New York that afternoon, he took a taxi from Penn Station up to Columbia University, where he met with
Rabi, Szilard, and Fermi to discuss producing plutonium in a chain-reacting pile. This was crucial because producing plutonium
by bombarding uranium in a cyclotron—what had been done at the Rad Lab—was not a practical method: at Berkeley, a kilogram
of uranium bombarded for a week produced less than a millionth of a gram of plutonium. At that rate, a yearlong bombardment
might produce fifty micrograms (smaller than a single grain of sand); it would take 20,000 years to make a kilogram—much better
than Bohr’s early estimate of 26,445 years to produce one gram, but still nowhere close to what was needed. No one knew exactly
how much plutonium would be necessary for a bomb, but estimates ran to several kilograms. Szilard and Fermi expressed confidence
that a chain-reacting uranium-graphite pile would be a feasible method of producing large amounts of plutonium.

Until the War Department took control of the Manhattan Project in the fall of 1942, Compton was the de facto leader. Project
research was then under way at universities scattered across the country. Compton thought it all should be centralized in
one location to avoid duplication, ease communication, and save precious time. He called a meeting in Chicago in late January
1942 to decide where. Compton had the flu, and ran the meeting from a sickbed in one of the spare bedrooms on the third floor
of his house. Szilard and Lawrence were both there. “Each was arguing the merits of his own location,” Compton later wrote,
“and every case was good. I presented the case for Chicago.”

First, Compton stressed that he already had the support of the University of Chicago. “We will turn the university inside
out if necessary to help win this war,” its vice-president had told him.
¹
Second, more scientists were available in the Midwest than on the coasts, where universities had already been drained for
other war work. Finally, Chicago was conveniently and centrally located for travel to other sites.

“You’ll never get a chain reaction going here,” scoffed Lawrence. “The whole tempo of the University of Chicago is too slow.”
He argued in favor of moving everyone to Berkeley. Compton had known Lawrence since Lawrence was a graduate student at Chicago
and Compton was chairman of its physics department and a dean; he had no intention of now becoming Lawrence’s subordinate.
“We’ll have the chain reaction going here by the end of the year,” Compton bristled. Needing to make a decision, he announced
that Chicago would be the site. The decision was logical. University administrators had promised unlimited support, which
would be necessary—whole buildings would have to be turned over to researchers. Chicago’s location in the center of the country
also made it a compromise relocation site for scientists on both coasts.
²

Lawrence told Compton that plutonium would be highly radioactive and thus dangerous, but the chemical-separation work could
be done. He promised to commit the Rad Lab’s best chemists to the job, perfecting the process in the lab and then applying
it on an industrial scale at Hanford. Armed with this information, Compton laid out an ambitious timetable for Washington:
“By July 1, 1942, to determine whether a chain reaction was possible. By January 1943, to achieve the first chain reaction.
By January 1944, to extract [plutonium] from uranium. By January 1945, to have a bomb.”
³

Szilard expressed his commitment to the project, rather than to a specific location. However, he opposed moving to the Midwest
because he would be isolated from physicists on both coasts. Better, he thought, to center the effort in the East—or shift
it to Berkeley. Additionally, Szilard said that Compton should pay particular heed to Fermi, who would have to “overcome his
strong preference for Columbia.” “It would be obviously wrong,” he said, “to decide in favor of a place as long as Fermi had
a strong objection.”
⁴

But although Szilard preferred to stay in New York, he understood the importance of centralizing research work and admired
Compton’s talents as an organizer and a leader. “Most people consider him as the only hope to bring order into the present
mess,” Szilard had observed the month before. (If anything, he felt Compton was not aggressive enough. “Compton seems to be
too modest to realize that he could carry this matter by the sheer weight of his personality,” Szilard wrote.)
⁵
So Szilard would go to Chicago.

Having persuaded Szilard to move, Compton phoned Fermi and asked him to relocate to Chicago as well. Fermi was reluctant.
He resented that he did not have full security clearance for war work because he was still a “registered enemy alien,” but
now he was being asked to take a leading role in the country’s most secret military project. He told Compton that he liked
Columbia and enjoyed his home in New Jersey. Yet his adopted country was now at war and Fermi wanted to prove his patriotism.
He agreed to go.
⁶

All-out work at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory began in February 1942. The primary purpose of the Met
Lab was to achieve a chain reaction in order to test the feasibility of producing plutonium in an atomic pile. There was also
the question of how to separate the plutonium once it was produced. Physicists and chemists exploring the properties of this
strange element worked in Eckart and Ryerson Halls, three-story gray stone neo-Gothic buildings that stood side by side on
the northeast corner of the University of Chicago quadrangle. Their cramped labs and offices were partly lighted by leaded-glass
windows that shook against the bitter-cold winds of a midwestern winter.

The war was going very badly for the United States and its allies in early 1942. Nazi Germany controlled most of Europe and
was threatening to take over Russia and North Africa. The bulk of the American Pacific Fleet lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
Japan was continuing its onslaught in the Pacific. The Philippine capital of Manila had fallen, and American troops were retreating
to the island of Corregidor. Japanese troops had made it as far as New Guinea and Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Not until the
Battle of Midway, four months away, would the tide of the war in the Pacific at last begin to turn; the tide of war in Europe
would not turn until the Battle of Stalingrad almost a year away.

The refugee physicists watched in horror as their homelands fell to the Axis like dominoes, and feared that America might
be next. They felt a sense of impending doom. They were not alone. The atmosphere at the Met Lab was nervous and embattled.
“We felt behind the Germans,” said a scientist who was there—in danger of losing the race for the bomb.
⁷
Met Lab staff knew that Hahn, the discoverer of fission, had a two-year head start and that German engineering was the most
respected in the world, especially when it came to arms; panzer tanks rolling across Europe in the blitzkrieg seemed unstoppable.
The feeling of desperation was especially keen among the refugees, most of whom had studied in Germany, knew Germany as the
prewar center of nuclear physics, and were inclined to give the Germans much credit for what they could do.

Compton tried to calm the refugees’ anxiety, but he was less successful than Fermi, who was one of them yet still managed
to joke that the Nazis could not fight a war and build an atomic bomb at the same time. Despite this bravado, Fermi privately
began to think about what country he and his family should escape to next if America fell to the Nazis. Another leading refugee
scientist balked at being fingerprinted by security officials at the Met Lab. “If the Germans win, they’ll use these prints
to track us down and kill us all!” he nervously protested.
⁸

Few things focus the mind like the bark of a bloodhound. There was the constant fear that with one small error—one lost day—the
scientists might awaken one morning to read the news that Nazi Germany had unleashed a powerful new bomb. “The feeling was
that we were a small group of people with a terribly important mission,” recalled a physicist at Chicago. “If we failed, the
United States and its allies might come into terrible harm. We were afraid.”
⁹
They worked long hours without complaint, putting in a full day and then returning to the Met Lab in the evening after dinner,
six days a week. Every day, every moment, counted.

Heavy security heightened the stress. “I am determined to have secrecy observed to the utmost,” Compton told lab personnel.
“We are at war.”
¹⁰
Anyone mentioning the word
uranium
or
plutonium
received a stare and a warning. Each newcomer to the Met Lab was shown a film that darkly depicted the ominous consequences
of negligence and carelessness. A list was passed around at each meeting where new information was revealed, and every scientist
signed his name, with the date, showing that he had attended. (One refugee scientist hesitated to sign, fearing that the lists
would fall into the hands of the Nazis if America lost the war.) Posters shouting
DON’T BE A BLABOTEUR
were plastered everywhere.

On the outside, Chicago looked like any university. But if anyone entered Eckart or Ryerson Hall, he was quickly confronted
by armed guards who asked what business he had being there. There were security passes, papers marked
TOP SECRET
, and an unlimited budget. Spending during the first six months of 1942 reached $590,000 for materials and $618,000 for salaries—enormous
sums for physicists accustomed before the war to conducting research on a few thousand dollars per year. “Within a year,”
said one Met Lab physicist, “I was ordering a million dollars’ worth of material at a time without a qualm.”
¹¹
In March 1942 there were only 45 people at the Met Lab, including secretaries. By June there were 1,250. At its peak six
months later, the Met Lab employed 2,000 people.

Arthur Compton was an effective leader of the Met Lab, steady and imperturbable. He could be irritable, but he had great resources
of temperament and knew that this was too serious a time to let irritability flash. His door was always open. He tracked problems
carefully. He trusted refugees at a time when many in Washington did not. He understood personalities and egos: how to accommodate
them, how to assuage them when they clashed, how to mold them into an effective team. He also realized that scientists needed
freedom to exercise their imagination. He understood their strengths and weaknesses and treated them with sensitivity. He
combined skill in research with finesse in administration.