Pandora's Keepers (21 page)

The scientists at Los Alamos were young—their average age was only twenty-seven—and almost no one was older than forty.
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Oppenheimer, the lab’s director, was all of thirty-nine. They were inexperienced and starting from scratch, but they were
full of spirit. They worked most every night, but they still found time—and energy—to explore cave dwellings in nearby canyons,
ski, ride horses, mountain climb, and dance. Occasionally they visited Santa Fe on Saturday nights, but the city was terribly
crowded and the few bars were swarming with security agents from Army Intelligence, immediately recognizable by their snap-brimmed
felt hats and poorly fitting civilian clothes.

“Life is not at all hard on this ‘magic mesa,’” reported one young physicist. “The group is large enough so that people can
choose friends to their liking, and living conditions are entirely comfortable. Soon after arriving, I purchased a spirited
part-Morgan horse that is the love of my life. I have taken several pack trips and have just returned from deer hunting.”
²⁰
Singles sponsored dorm parties fueled by punch spiked with grain alcohol. Sometimes the liquor flowed too fast and the noise
lasted too long. One dormitory received this warning from army authorities:

It has come to the attention of this headquarters that parties held in your dormitory are getting slightly out of hand and
that on the morning after, your dayroom is littered with broken beer bottles and similar debris, fire hose is found unrolled
down the corridor, and other evidences of abuse of Government buildings and property appear.

This situation must be corrected at once, as abuse of Government property cannot be tolerated; and any further reports coming
to this headquarters will make it necessary to revoke the privilege of having parties in your dormitory.
²¹

Parties at Los Alamos were so intense because they were one of the few ways to relieve the pressure. “I’ve never drunk so
much as there,” recalled one wartime resident, “because you had to let off steam, you had to let off this feeling eating your
soul: ‘Oh God, are we doing right?’”
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The future Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, then in his early twenties, relieved the stress by playing bongo drums, challenging
censors with coded letters, and picking combination locks of safes containing classified documents. Scientists at Los Alamos
could not unburden their souls by bringing their doubts and complaints to outsiders; they had to remain either within themselves
or within the community.

Coexisting with this tension, however, was the pride of being part of a historic enterprise. “I have never seen such esprit
de corps in a scientific group,” wrote a physicist at the time.
²³
Here was a chance to show the world how powerful, important, and useful physics could be: Western civilization was threatened
by a fanatic barbarism, and it looked as though only science could save it. “There was this amazing feeling that what you
did was very important, that you damn well better do it right, and that everybody else around you was in the same fix,” said
one who was there.
²⁴
Oppenheimer voiced this feeling of excitement and purpose later when he wrote:

Almost everyone realized that this was a great undertaking. Almost everyone knew that if it were completed successfully and
rapidly enough, it might determine the outcome of the war. Almost everyone knew that it was an unparalleled opportunity to
bring to bear the basic knowledge and art of science for the benefit of his country. Almost everyone knew that this job, if
it were achieved, would be a part of history. This sense of excitement, of devotion and of patriotism in the end prevailed.
²⁵

It was hard to remain unaffected while working amid an astonishing array of scientific talent striving to harness a great
force of nature in a race with an evil regime. The interest of technical developments, the interplay of brilliant personalities,
the belief that the weapon they were making would decide the outcome of the war—all these things drew scientists deeply and
completely in what appeared to be a good, and urgent, cause. That perception, in turn, dampened a lot of personal frictions.
It would be hard to exaggerate the intensity of life at Los Alamos during the war. The whole thing lasted a little more than
two years, but these were years that shaped for life the people who were there. It was their great moment. But the moment
was always clouded by the awareness of the project’s purpose, and its possible consequences.

Everyone at Los Alamos felt Robert Oppenheimer’s presence. “When he walked into a room—boy, you knew he was there without
even looking up,” recalled one scientist.
²⁶
A slender figure in a close-fitting suit with a beaklike nose and close-cropped hair—he had cut it when he left Berkeley—he
habitually wore a wide-brimmed hat that exaggerated the gauntness of his face. His nervous energy and piercing blue eyes seemed
to take in everything at a glance. Early each morning, he left his home at 1967 Peach Street on “Bathtub Row” and walked to
his Tech Area office on the far side of Ashley Pond. From the moment he reached his office, Oppenheimer threw himself into
an endless round of progress reports, phone calls, and meetings. He paced constantly, smoking and coughing. When he spoke,
he spoke slowly and eloquently. The voice was educated and genteel, but when it told you to do something, you did it. He never
seemed in doubt. His mind was as sharp as a knife and his powers of concentration and understanding were phenomenal. “He was
so quick that he gave you an inferiority complex,” said a friend.
²⁷

Such leadership was not instantaneous. At first Oppenheimer strained to bring the new laboratory into existence. “Every time
I think about our problem a new headache appears,” he confided to a colleague just a few weeks into his new job; “we shall
certainly have our hands full.”
²⁸
Groves was accustomed to pushing subordinates, but Oppenheimer threw himself into his new role with such heedless intensity
that even Groves was afraid he might break. He applied his familiar talents—his quick and broad intellect, his personal charisma,
his thoughtfulness for others—to the problems of a large and multi-faceted project. And Oppenheimer learned fast. But the
most important factor was the change that seemed to have taken place in Oppenheimer’s personality. He showed a new determination
and clarity, as if iron had entered his soul. Soon he was overseeing activities on the Hill with a self-evident competence
and outward composure that almost everyone came to depend on.

Creating a new laboratory was stimulating work for Oppenheimer at first. Then an inevitable reaction set in; Oppenheimer realized
the enormity of the task and became discouraged. His wife, Kitty, struggled to settle into life on the Hill and began to drink
heavily. Time with his son, Peter, and daughter, Toni, born in December 1944, was limited to fleeting moments. He was kept
under constant surveillance, his home and office bugged by security officials who remained suspicious of him and who picked
over the details of his past. Brusquely dismissing others’ complaints about the opening of their mail, he told Teller, “What
are they griping about? I am not allowed to talk to my own brother.”
²⁹
In the summer of 1943 he confided to his close friend, theoretical physicist Robert Bacher, that he was going to give it
up. He felt overburdened by the many problems of the project and his difficulties with the security people. He felt overwhelmed—he
could not go through with it. “There isn’t anybody else who can do it,” Bacher told him.
³⁰

There wasn’t, and Oppenheimer knew it. Decades before, he had come to Los Alamos and found strength. Now, once again, he dug
deep and confronted and overcame his personal demons. Some sort of Rubicon had been crossed, and suddenly Oppenheimer was
all focus. Whenever a difficult problem arose, he helped to solve it. Whenever an experiment reached a critical stage, he
was there to watch it. He kept the various threads of the project in his mind, identified the critical issues, and made smart
judgments. He was attuned to every sight and sound and nuance. His supreme talent lay in judging the ideas of others, in knowing
which to back and which not to back. When tensions developed between personalities, as they inevitably did, he defused them
with a light hand. He put people at ease through his informality and his interest in personal as well as technical matters.
Oppenheimer was “one of them”—the fellow scientist who used persuasion rather than the boss who gave orders.

Occasionally, a side of Oppenheimer appeared—triggered by the pressure and the tension he lived with constantly—that close
acquaintances remembered from Berkeley. This Oppenheimer would alternate between encouraging someone with thoughtful, generous
words and wounding him with cutting remarks and intellectual superciliousness. On one occasion, he lashed out at a scientist
so suddenly that others in the room were stunned and embarrassed. “He was thoroughly entitled to [his intellectual arrogance]
because he really was a lot smarter than most of the people there,” said a witness to his verbal lashings, “but some people
were irritated by the fact that he made them feel that he knew it.”
³¹

Oppenheimer’s arrogance betrayed his underlying lack of confidence. It was not something most people sensed on the surface.
He exuded authority, seemed effortlessly good at everything, and was very charismatic. “He could charm the socks off of people,
even if he really didn’t like them that well,” one of his secretaries recalled.
³²
Yet it was all a fragile, frantic, uncertain act. Because he was plagued by inner doubts, Oppenheimer was skilled at sensing—and
targeting—the insecurities of others. And yet he perceived and manipulated not just people’s deepest fears but also their
desires, and this made him an effective leader. “I don’t think anybody ever believed he had it in him,” said his successor
at Los Alamos, director Norris Bradbury, “but he surely did.”
³³

*  *  *

Teller was eager to move to Los Alamos. The action was shifting there, and he wanted to be a part of it. He had, after all,
helped Oppenheimer organize Los Alamos, select and recruit its staff, and plan its work. Meanwhile, Teller sought to lift
the lid on his security clearance caused by the fact that his parents and other relatives were living in Nazi-occupied Hungary.
After finally receiving clearance for secret work, Teller, his wife, Mici, and their newborn son, Paul, arrived on the Hill.
^*
That Teller had been invited to Los Alamos was a tribute to his reputation and talents as a theoretical physicist. That he
was kept on at Los Alamos would be a tribute to the patience and forbearance of others.

Teller brought with him to Los Alamos a personal possession vital to his peace of mind: a Steinway baby concert grand piano
that Mici had bought for him at a Chicago hotel auction. The piano—affectionately called “the monster”—filled the living room
of the Tellers’ small apartment. It became the primary form of relaxation for Teller—and torment for his neighbors. Teller
would stay up late at night—until 3:00 in the morning—playing sonatas on the piano. Once he asked the wife of another physicist
who was an accomplished singer to accompany him. She agreed, flattered by Teller’s invitation. But flattery quickly turned
to disappointment. “I couldn’t sing with him,” she recalled, “because he drowned me out completely.”
³⁴

Watching him stir a huge mound of sugar into his coffee mug, Los Alamos scientists wondered how a man like Teller could be
so genuinely friendly and at the same time so ruthlessly self-absorbed. “Lovable and selfish,” concluded a perceptive observer.
³⁵
He could often be seen walking absentmindedly with his heavy, uneven gait (the result of a tramway accident in Munich in
the 1920s that had left him with an artificial left foot), his bushy eyebrows moving up and down as he pursued some new idea.
As he had always been, he was a gifted and imaginative physicist, with a mind capable of tackling immensely complicated problems,
but he was also a temperamental and argumentative man who aroused frustration and sometimes anger in others. He pursued his
ideas with a vain insistence that made him seem a prima donna to his colleagues and found it very difficult to work with people
who did not agree with him. Although he could be kind, humorous, and likable, he was also egotistical and unhappy playing
second fiddle to anyone. He “was not a team player,” said Hans Bethe. “That’s right I wasn’t,” Teller conceded years later.
He was devoted to physics, but also ambitious and hungry for recognition.
³⁶
Someone was free to sing, but he would bang his piano louder.

“Teller was brilliant but flighty,” said a physicist who worked with him at both the Met Lab and Los Alamos. “He would jump
from one idea to another. He did not systematically go through things.”
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Oppenheimer alluded to this quality of Teller’s when he told Groves that “there are a few people here whose interests are
exclusively ‘scientific’ in the sense that they will abandon any problem that appears to be soluble.”
³⁸
Teller particularly resented doing the tedious computational work involved in making an atomic bomb. He was bored by details,
especially if he thought they could be worked out by lesser minds than his own. Instead, he preferred the puzzle of a thermonuclear
bomb, and he insisted on working only on it. This exasperated and alienated those who viewed the atomic bomb as the number
one wartime priority.

For this reason, Oppenheimer, with I. I. Rabi’s encouragement, decided to give the job of Theoretical Division leader to Bethe
rather than Teller.
³⁹
Oppenheimer thought Bethe was more likely to get this crucial job done, and that mattered more than Teller’s feelings. Though
not as creative or imaginative as Teller, Bethe was far more adroit and effective at dealing with others. Oppenheimer also
thought Bethe’s logic and thoroughness would better serve the project at a stage when detailed calculations had to be carried
out and a good deal of administrative work was inevitable. “We had to sit down in our offices and actually work something
out,” said Bethe, “and this was against [Teller’s] style.”
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