Pandora's Keepers (19 page)

If anything unpredictable was going to happen, now was the moment. The “suicide squad” waited nervously, ready to pour their
liquid cadmium onto the pile. “Fermi was cool as a cucumber,” an eyewitness wrote in his diary that night, “much more so than
his associates who were excited or a bit scared.”
⁸³
Fermi waited a long minute, then another, then another. When it seemed that the anxiety in the squash court had become too
much to bear, he ordered the control rods back in. There was applause, but no one cheered. The excitement in that cold and
shadowy room was felt and shared by everyone. Someone produced a bottle of Chianti in a straw basket and gave it to Fermi.
He and the others sipped the Chianti from paper cups quietly in the midst of that dingy, gray-black room without a word or
a toast. While many dreamed of releasing the power of the atom as a peaceful source of energy, everyone present knew that
destruction was the ultimate aim of the experiment. No one gave expression to his thoughts and feelings, but each one knew
the others too well not to sense what was in their minds.
⁸⁴

Compton left the squash court; walked down Ellis Avenue, through Hull Court, to his Eckart Hall office; and called Conant
in Washington. “Jim,” he said, using coded language on an insecure telephone line, “you’ll be interested to know that the
Italian navigator has just landed in the New World.” Conant’s voice betrayed his excitement. “Were the natives friendly?”
he asked. “Everyone landed safe and happy,” replied Compton.
⁸⁵

The experiment brought to fruition years of theory and planning. Man had controlled the release of energy from the atomic
nucleus for the first time, demonstrating dramatically that the chain reaction worked. An atomic bomb was no longer merely
a theoretical possibility. Later that month President Roosevelt approved the expenditure of $400 million for uranium-separation
plants and a plutonium-producing pile. At long last, Washington had decided to go all-out to build an atomic bomb.

Those present beneath the west stands of Stagg Field that cold December day had witnessed a moment of history. Many had cherished
the hope that something ultimately would make a chain reaction impossible—if impossible for them, it would be impossible also
for the Germans. Now what they dreaded was on the way to reality. “We began to say things to one another,” an eyewitness said,
“but there were no words that could express adequately just what we felt.”
⁸⁶
Another eyewitness remembered:

For some time we had known that we were about to unlock a giant; still, we could not escape an eerie feeling when we knew
we had actually done it. We felt as, I presume, everyone feels who has done something that he knows will have very far-reaching
consequences which he cannot foresee…. Even though our hearts were by no means light when we sipped the wine around Fermi’s
pile, our fears were undefined, like the vague apprehensions of a man who has done something bigger than he ever expected
to.
⁸⁷

There was no sign of emotion on Fermi’s face. His expression was so calm, it was hard to believe. The experiment had worked—it
was as simple as that in his mind. Fermi told everyone to go home and get some sleep. Tomorrow they would get on with the
next step. He was the cool man of action.

Nearby, Szilard loitered silently, brooding about the past and the future. To him, Fermi’s calm reaction was unnerving.
⁸⁸
Szilard now knew that an atomic bomb could be built. As everyone filed from the squash court into the cold evening, he and
Fermi found themselves standing alone. “I shook hands with Fermi,” Szilard remembered, “and I said I thought this day would
go down as a black day in the history of mankind.”
⁸⁹

That night a young physicist named John Manley came home from the Met Lab visibly shaken. His wife, Kay, was already in bed.
She sensed that something was preoccupying her husband. “John came in very quietly,” she remembered many years later. “I knew
that he was concerned about something. Something was affecting his thinking very strongly. He looked at me and said, ‘The
world will never be the same.’ That was part of his thinking from then on.”
⁹⁰

T
HE ROAD NORTH
from Santa Fe undulated gently for several miles along a string of hills and then opened out onto a valley floor more than
seven thousand feet above sea level. On the west side of this valley road the land stretched out for miles to the gray, silver,
and timber shades of the Jemez Mountains. In between, stunted brown tree-shrubs dotted the high desert land in countless tufts.
At sunrise and sunset the wide valley was a spectrum of rich colors—the ever-shifting tans and purples of the desert—but sunrises
and sunsets were just moments in the long days here where time and the land alike seemed almost infinite. On the east side
of this valley road, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains stood bloodred in the distance, including majestic snowcapped North Truchas
Peak, at 13,102 feet one of the highest in all of New Mexico. The air possessed that lucid clarity of the desert. In the wide-open
country of the American Southwest, the eye could roll out to the distance and the soul could expand into the great spaces.

At just this point a smaller road crossed the valley floor to the west. It spanned the Rio Grande, only a muddy stream here,
and then started a slow climb toward the peaks of the Jemez Mountains, some darkened with trees, some lightened by scree.
Large lava beds were visible, and black escarpments. Then salmon-colored cliffs towered skyward. The empty foreground filled
suddenly with swellings of mesas, and abruptly trees—slim piñon pines and stubby juniper cedars—appeared over the canyons
and the mesas. The air cooled and smells sharpened. The road rose, curved, cut back, then continued up, the mesas gradually
taking shape. As the road crested the edge of one mesa, five suddenly appeared, splayed out from the gigantic volcanic mountain
mass of the Jemez Caldera like the fingers of a hand sifting the sands of time. In the mesas’ walls were a honeycomb of hollowed
caves whose ceilings had been blackened by the smoke of long-ago fires. Etched into them were drawings of animals, birds,
masked beings, dancing men, symbols of rain and sun.

The Pajarito Plateau opened like a huge fan from an arc of blue mountains. It was grooved by canyons that radiated out like
the crudely drawn spokes of a wheel. The canyon walls rose through many-colored layers of hardened volcanic ash, rose and
buff, like petrified waves. Some of the ridges between the canyons were narrow. Others were wide and flat, dotted with the
mounds of pre-Columbian Indian villages and fields where Hispanic families cultivated beans in summer, returning in winter
to their adobe homes along the Rio Grande. Atop one of the ridges of the Pajarito Plateau, where trees grew and the air smelled
of pine needles, was the Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys. The school was named after the canyon that bordered the mesa to
the south and was dotted with cottonwood trees (
los alamos
in Spanish) along the sandy trickle of its stream. All was quiet in this awesomely beautiful place. It was as far from the
war-torn world as one could possibly be in September 1942.

That month General Groves, who had just taken charge of the Manhattan Project, decided to create a new laboratory where the
widely scattered work on bomb theory and design could be brought together and the fissionable material produced at Oak Ridge
and Hanford could be assembled. There was also the issue of security: if scientists were brought together in one place, it
would be a lot easier to control their talking and movements. As leader of this new lab, Groves wanted someone with an intellect
broad and quick enough to grasp a whole range of scientific problems, the imagination to suggest novel solutions to those
problems, and the charisma to keep everyone working together as a team. He wanted someone who would get the “long-hairs” to
deliver their “gadget” on time.

Groves needed someone with enough authority and prestige to attract the best people available, ride herd on them, and coordinate
their work. None of the Nobel laureates in physics could be spared to administrate. Lawrence was an outstanding experimental
physicist and had gained good administrative experience running the Rad Lab at Berkeley, but he was committed to the electromagnetic
separation of U-235 at Oak Ridge and could not be spared. Compton was another obvious choice, but he was already doing more
than his share running the Met Lab at Chicago. And it would be unthinkable in Groves’s mind to assign the most secret military
program to a foreign-born “enemy alien” such as Fermi, who was badly needed in Chicago, anyway.

In the absence of a more important figure, Groves chose Oppenheimer. They first met when Groves visited Berkeley on an inspection
trip in early October 1942. Strangely enough, they hit it off well together right from the start. Oppenheimer was straightforward,
did not act like a typical scientist, and seemed to be realistic about the importance of security, a matter of grave concern
to the general. Oppenheimer, a persuasive talker and a consummate actor, convinced Groves that he was his man.

It was a most unorthodox choice. I. I. Rabi voiced the reaction of many physicists when he called it “a most improbable appointment.
I was astonished.”
¹
Oppenheimer had never managed anything bigger than a graduate seminar. He had no experience in organizing a large laboratory
and had shown no predisposition for teamwork before. He was a theoretician, whereas the lab would be concerned primarily with
experiments and engineering. He had no Nobel Prize to distinguish him—would other scientists follow his leadership? Then there
was Oppenheimer’s left-wing past, which “included much that was not to our liking by any means,” as Groves later wrote.
²
Oppenheimer’s former fiancée, his wife, his brother, and his sister-in-law had all been members of the Communist Party—perhaps
he himself had been, too. Neither Bush nor Conant was enthusiastic. Compton and Lawrence also had reservations about his capacity
as an administrator. “Do you know a better man?” Groves asked them.
³

Yet while the conservative Groves found Oppenheimer politically naive, he found nothing in his security file to doubt Oppenheimer’s
loyalty to the United States, even though War Department investigators had characterized him as “strongly communistic” and
had reported his connection “with radical organizations for years on and off the campus of the University of California.”
⁴
Groves was so confident of his judgment that he personally ordered Oppenheimer’s clearance, overruling the objection of Army
Intelligence officers on the grounds that Oppenheimer was “absolutely essential to the Project.”
⁵
His order caused consternation and resentment among project security officers, but Groves wanted Oppenheimer—who else
was
there?—and forced through his choice. (The security people never forgave him or Oppenheimer for that act and continued to
harass the director at every opportunity.) Groves barely knew Oppenheimer, yet he sensed that this man of great charm and
persuasiveness could somehow bring together very difficult personalities and get them to work as a team. Groves’s intuition
told him that Oppenheimer was a man equipped not only with scientific insight but with strong character and a capacity for
decision. That was what Groves wanted, that was what he needed. There was no time to lose. The atomic bomb was only an idea
on paper, and he had to make it a reality.

It was a brilliant choice.

The general and the physicist quickly developed a good working relationship. They always addressed each other formally as
“General Groves” and “Dr. Oppenheimer”—an indication of the constant if subdued contest between them, each admiring yet suspicious
of the other’s abilities. Groves handled Oppenheimer with more respect and deference than he did any other project scientist.
Oppenheimer, who could be cutting with other physicists, patiently answered every question the general asked. He had not expected
to like Groves—the military culture, after all, was definitely not his cup of tea—yet he found himself grudgingly admiring
the general. “Groves is a bastard,” he would say privately, “but he’s a straightforward one.”
⁶
They were an odd and improbable couple locked in a strange union that superseded quarrels and irritation—married, first and
last, to the success of the project. They got along because each saw the other as the way to fulfill his ambition to achieve
personal glory. “That combination made the thing work,” Rabi astutely observed.
⁷

Groves and Oppenheimer’s first task together was to choose a site for the bomb lab. Oppenheimer remembered the mesa of Los
Alamos, where he had spent a happy summer riding horseback and camping. The characteristics that had made the location a place
of glory to him—its remoteness and isolation, but also its spare, intense beauty—was especially important to the aesthete
in Oppenheimer, who knew the quality of the scientists whom he hoped to attract there and believed they would respond to surroundings
that stretched and enriched the spirit.