Pandora's Keepers (17 page)

Compton initially put Oppenheimer to work under Gregory Breit, a University of Wisconsin theoretical physicist. Breit was
a good scientist but a poor administrator with a weak personality and an inordinate obsession with secrecy. He interpreted
his duties as “Coordinator of Rapid Rupture” by locking all documents he was given in a big safe and making sure that nobody
else had the combination or copies. Compton eased out Breit in May 1942 and named Oppenheimer his successor. It was the job
for which Oppenheimer had been born. “Under Oppenheimer,” Compton later wrote, “something really got done, and done at astonishing
speed.”
⁵⁸

The biggest obstacle to progress in Oppenheimer’s mind was the lack of coordination among physicists working on bomb design.
To fix this problem, Oppenheimer summoned the nation’s top theoretical physicists to Berkeley in July 1942 for a brainstorming
conference. Heading the list of those he invited was Hans Bethe. Bethe was a theoretical physicist who talked slowly and deliberately
but possessed immense intellectual strength and self-confidence. He reminded one of seeing an elephant run: what was astonishing
was the rate of progress of an apparently lumbering giant. He was famous for the quantity of food he ate, and in a way, that
was similar to his appetite for physical problems. For Bethe, problems existed to be solved—not worried about. And by knowing
what to do and where to go, he usually got there with remarkable speed and success.

Born in Strasbourg in 1906 when the Alsacian city was part of the German empire, Bethe was the son of a Prussian professor
of physiology and a Jewish mother who converted to Lutheranism before she married. Their only son, Hans, was brought up a
Lutheran, but religion did not interest him much. Hans was more interested in numbers. His godfather often asked him questions
about arithmetic. Once, when Hans was five years old, his godfather asked, “What is point five divided by two?” A few days
later Hans figured it out and ran across the street through thick traffic to tell him the answer.
⁵⁹

Before long, Bethe was astonishing his teachers with his ability to do long calculations in his head and to make big tables
of the powers of numbers. He loved algebra and calculus. Deciding to pursue a career in analytical mathematics, he enrolled
at the University of Frankfurt in 1924. There, a sympathetic professor counseled him to leave for a university that specialized
in theoretical physics. Bethe did so, and went to study with Arnold Sommerfeld at the University of Munich. Sommerfeld was
a great physics teacher—perhaps the greatest of the twentieth century—whose students included Heisen-berg and Wolfgang Pauli,
both future Nobel Prize winners.

Bethe was present one afternoon in the spring of 1931 when Sommerfeld entered his seminar room and immediately noticed his
students’ shocked silence. Curious as to what was wrong, Sommerfeld glanced toward the blackboard and saw scrawled in bold,
angry letters the words
Verdammte Juden
—“Damned Jews!”
⁶⁰
Such an expression of hatred in a German university—particularly toward someone of Sommerfeld’s stature—shocked Bethe.

Shortly after finishing his doctorate, Bethe took a job as lecturer in theoretical physics at the University of Tübingen.
Tübingen was a conservative Bavarian town near Stuttgart that seethed with the resentments that would soon bring Hitler to
power. It was a hotbed of the Nazi Party, and most of Bethe’s faculty colleagues were ultra-nationalists who fantasized about
restoring the German empire and railed against the unfair treatment it had received since World War I. Many of his students
wore brown shirts and swastika armbands. The night Hitler became chancellor, Nazis marched with torchlights through the city.

Bethe did not feel threatened by what was happening—at first. A month after the Nazis came to power, he told friends that
Hitler could never do all the things he proclaimed he would do in
Mein Kampf
. It was inconceivable. Bethe’s uneasiness grew, however, when he began hearing rumors about how prisoners were being treated
at nearby Dachau concentration camp. Bethe openly discussed these rumors with visiting American postdoctoral students. One
day the departmental handyman—a wise old man—approached him and whispered, “Child, don’t do that. Don’t talk so loud, because
there are Nazis here. You don’t want to go to Dachau.”
⁶¹

In the spring of 1933 the Nazis promulgated their Orwellian Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which
decreed that “civil servants of non-Aryan descent must retire.” Bethe did not think that the law applied to him—even though
his mother was Jewish—because he identified with his Protestant father and had been brought up a Lutheran. He felt safe until
one day a student called and said he had seen a story in the local newspaper listing Bethe among those to be dismissed. A
short time later Bethe received a curt, officious note informing him that he was fired.
⁶²

He left Nazi Germany, knowing that his life would never be the same. He took temporary posts at the Universities of Manchester
and Bristol in Britain, where he met Arthur Compton at a physics conference in London. Bethe never thought of emigrating to
the United States, but when Cornell University sought to strengthen its physics department by appointing him an assistant
professor—a post that held the possibility of tenure—he immediately accepted. After his ship docked in New York in January
1935, he spent a day walking the streets of Manhattan, marveling at the skyscrapers and the sidewalk bustle, listening to
conversations and trying to pick up the thread of American life. The energy of America amid the Depression lifted his spirits.
The next morning he took the train to Ithaca and gazed with astonishment at the open fields and dense forests west of the
Hudson River—it seemed such a big and empty country, full of promise.

The physics department at Cornell University and the community of Ithaca, New York, welcomed Bethe with open arms. They were
eager to get to know him and to learn about nuclear physics. He encountered no native anti-Semitism and very little professional
jealousy. He was treated as an equal—a new American, not a foreigner. “I felt at home almost immediately,” he said later with
much affection and appreciation. “I was one of the group, which I had not felt even in Germany.”
⁶³

Bethe found that he enjoyed far greater scope and opportunity as a physicist in America than he would have in Germany, even
without the Nazis. In Germany it was customary for a professor to lecture his class from an Olympian distance; in America
students asked questions whenever they wished, about whatever they wished. Bethe was unprepared for such informality and lack
of hierarchy at first, but he quickly grew to like and thrive on it. His straightforward demeanor and strong voice were well
suited to the American classroom. His decency and sense of humor made him popular in the faculty lounge and the lecture hall
alike.

Of course, there were some drawbacks. One in particular was the phenomenon of faculty meetings, a ritual of participatory
democracy that did not take place in highly authoritarian and centralized German universities. The first faculty meeting he
attended at Cornell in the fall of 1935 was held in a conference room that was overheated and was devoted almost entirely
to the question of whether there should be a vending machine in the basement of the physics department building. It went on
for hours.

Bethe came to love his adopted country as much as he hated what the Nazis had done to his native land. When he returned briefly
to Germany in the summer of 1936 to visit his parents, he bittersweetly realized that it was no longer home. Bethe expressed
his mixed feelings in a letter to his mentor Sommerfeld after the war. “For those of us who were expelled from our positions
in Germany,” he wrote bitterly, “it is not possible to forget.” More important than Bethe’s negative memories of Germany,
however, were his positive feelings about America:

It seems to me (already for many years) that I am much more at home in America than I ever was in Germany. As if I was born
in Germany only by mistake, and only came to my true homeland at age 28. The Americans (nearly all of them) are friendly,
not stiff or reserved, nor brusque (
gar ablehnend
), as most Germans. It is natural here to approach all other people in a friendly way. Professors and students relate in a
collegiate way without any artificially erected barrier. Scientific research is mostly cooperative, and one does not see competitive
jealousy between researchers anywhere. Politically most professors and students are liberal and reflect about the world outside—that
was a revelation to me, because in Germany it was customary to be reactionary (long before the Nazis) and to parrot the slogans
of the German National (
Deutschnationaler
) Party. In brief, I find it far more congenial to live with Americans than with my German
Volksgenossen
.

On top of that, America has treated me very well. I came here under circumstances which did not permit me to be very choosy.
In a very short time I had a full professorship, probably more quickly than I would have gotten it in Germany if Hitler had
not come. Although a fairly recent immigrant, I was allowed to participate in work and to have a prominent position…. Understand
what I love in America and that I owe America much gratitude (disregarding the fact that I like it here). Understand what
shadows lie between myself and Germany. And most of all understand… I am very grateful to you.
⁶⁴

Bethe eased his adjustment to America by befriending fellow refugee Edward Teller. When Bethe began courting Rose Ewald, the
daughter of a German physicist who had been one of Teller’s teachers, Teller and his wife, Mici, assumed the role of chaperones.
In the summer of 1937 the four of them made a driving trip across the country. Their first destination was Rocky Mountain
National Park in Colorado. From there, they drove to the Tetons in Wyoming, then on to Mount Rainier in Washington and Crater
Lake in Oregon before ending their journey at a physics conference in California. “It was a happy time for the Tellers and
for me,” recalled Bethe.
⁶⁵
Although they did not know it at the time, their warm friendship would later bend and break under the pressure of war and
politics.

Bethe’s first meeting with Robert Oppenheimer had not gone so well. Oppenheimer had cuttingly dismissed a paper that Bethe
presented at a conference in Germany in 1929. They remained in touch, however, and Bethe began to perceive depths of intellect
and culture in Oppenheimer that he had not noticed at first. At a physics meeting in Seattle in the summer of 1940, Oppenheimer
gave what Bethe considered a “beautifully eloquent speech” about the danger that Nazism posed to Western civilization. Afterward,
Bethe and Oppenheimer talked passionately about the threat posed by Hitler.
⁶⁶

After the fall of France, Bethe decided to help the West’s defense efforts by studying the penetration of armor plate by artillery
shells. His paper on the subject was so valuable that the army promptly classified it and gave him a security clearance. He
was then asked to help with radar, the most important science project of the war up to that time. In May 1942 he moved from
Cornell to MIT, where work on radar was being conducted in the greatest secrecy. Bethe was at MIT when Oppenheimer asked him
to come to Berkeley and work on the bomb. He initially turned Oppenheimer down, thinking the project was an “improbable boondoggle.”
⁶⁷
If a physicist wanted to help win the war, he thought, he should stick to something practical like radar. But after much
arm-twisting by Oppenheimer, he accepted the invitation to Berkeley. In the end, strong feelings about the Nazis and scientific
curiosity persuaded him. “The fission bomb had to be done,” he later said, “because the Germans were presumably doing it.”
⁶⁸

On the way to Berkeley, Bethe stopped for two days in Chicago, where Teller briefed him in detail on the work of the Met Lab.
Bethe learned for the first time of Fermi’s work on the pile, of plans for plutonium production, and of U-235 isotope separation.
Though Lawrence’s uranium-separation strategy struck him as an unbelievably expensive method using brute force, Bethe was
greatly impressed by the talent and creativity with which Fermi was working on a chain reaction. Teller continued the trip
west with him, and they joined Oppenheimer and a few other physicists in Berkeley in early July.

The purpose of the Berkeley conference was to determine whether an atomic bomb could actually be made. There were many questions
to be answered: How many neutrons were released with each fission of a uranium nucleus? How did neutrons from one fission
produce a secondary fission when they hit another uranium nucleus? Were there other fissionable materials besides uranium,
with higher yield? How was fissionable material assembled fast enough to produce an explosion? What happened during the explosion?
How could the explosive power be maximized? It was a demanding list.

The conferees met throughout July 1942 in Oppenheimer’s office on the third floor of LeConte Hall. Oppenheimer’s office had
French doors opening onto a balcony with a magnificent view looking down the eucalyptus-covered Berkeley hills, across San
Francisco Bay to the Golden Gate. The conferees met under what, for those days, were considered strict security arrangements.
The windows were covered in wire mesh, including the exit to the balcony, and the door was fitted with a special lock with
a single key that was given to Oppenheimer. Most of Berkeley’s students were away on vacation or military service that first
summer of the war, and the physicists had practically the whole campus to themselves.

Each scientist played his role. Oppenheimer posed penetrating questions. Teller threw off ideas like sparks. Bethe subjected
them all to exhaustive scrutiny. They sifted through report after report, filling the blackboards in Oppenheimer’s office
and LeConte Hall classrooms with calculations and diagrams. They had been thinking about the key problems, they knew the general
picture, but they had not yet pulled together all the pieces of the puzzle. Now they did. “We are up to our ears in every
kind of work,” Oppenheimer reported to another physicist during the conference.
⁶⁹