Pandora's Keepers (22 page)

Teller bitterly resented Oppenheimer’s decision. “When [Oppenheimer] told Bethe and me that he had named Hans to head the
division, I was a little hurt,” Teller wrote years later with considerable understatement.
⁴¹
A proud man with a strong belief in his own ability, Teller felt he ought to have been doing Bethe’s job—and would have done
it much better. He had been part of the Manhattan Project longer than Bethe, and he considered himself intellectually superior.
He considered Bethe a “brick-maker” physicist—thorough, meticulous, but unimaginative—while he considered himself a “bricklayer”—a
synthesizer who understood the underlying structure of physics. “I was not happy about having him as my boss,” Teller later
admitted. “[Bethe] and I did not work well together. He wanted me to work on calculations, while I wanted to continue not
only on the hydrogen bomb, but on other novel subjects.” Teller brooded about being Bethe’s subordinate. The arrangement,
Teller later wrote, “marked the beginning of the end of our friendship.”
⁴²

Seeing that Teller was unhappy, Oppenheimer moved him out of Bethe’s division and gave him his own group, despite the manpower
shortage. Oppenheimer also continued to meet with Teller weekly for an hour of freewheeling discussion—a remarkable concession,
given the enormous demands on his time. And though he liked Teller personally, he came to find him inordinately vain and sensitive
to slight. One evening, when Oppenheimer gave a party for a visiting British physicist, he inadvertently failed to invite
the deputy of the British mission. Oppenheimer sought out the deputy the next day and apologized, adding: “There is an element
of relief in this situation: it might have happened with Edward Teller.”
⁴³
He also began belittling Teller in private. “In wartime he is an obstructionist,” Oppenheimer told one of his confidants,
“and in peacetime he will be a promoter.”
⁴⁴
Teller, for his part, focused much of his resentment toward Bethe on Oppenheimer, whom he began to view with coolness and
even hostility.

When Bethe had first arrived in New Mexico, the arid landscape—like the work that lay ahead—frightened and intimidated him.
Bethe kept imagining himself walking through the high desert without a drop of water. He coped with his anxiety by throwing
himself into his work. The pressure he felt was tremendous. “I had the feeling of pushing a big load,” he confessed decades
later, adding: “It was probably the most concentrated work I have done in my life.”
⁴⁵

Bethe was equal to the task. Calm, cool, and thoughtful, he was a patient and effective leader who worked well with others.
A tall and heavyset man, Bethe moved and spoke somewhat slowly, but behind his slow speech and movements lay a mind of formidable
speed and power that earned him the affectionate nickname “the Battleship.” Solid, dependable, and well liked, Bethe was mature
and wise in his dealings with people. “You never had any feeling that Hans was going to get upset and fly off the handle,”
said a friend. “He didn’t hesitate to state his particular position on anything, but it was done in a calm and rational manner.”
⁴⁶
His methodical and detail-oriented approach allowed him to face problems squarely, analyze them quietly, and plow straight
through them.

Bethe was effective in his work in part because he was highly motivated politically. He understood through bitter personal
experience just how evil and threatening were the Nazis. To him and other refugee physicists, they
had
to be defeated. “I went to beat Hitler,” he said of his decision to work at Los Alamos. He had no qualms about using the
bomb against his native land. “We hoped very much to use it against Germany,” Bethe recalled, “and I entirely concurred with
that, even though my father and his second wife were still there.”
⁴⁷
A strong sense of teamwork, and the knowledge that their work was vital to the war effort, gave Bethe and his colleagues
in the Theoretical Division a strong sense of mission. It kept them going ten hours a day, six days a week.

I.I. Rabi urged other physicists to move to Los Alamos, but Rabi himself never did, only visiting from time to time as a troubleshooter
and a consultant—one of the few exceptions to Groves’s rigid policy of compartmentalization, which permitted each scientist
to know only as much as necessary to do his job, thus restricting the exchange of information within and between project laboratories.
Rabi always arrived on the Hill dressed immaculately in a suit topped with a hom-burg and swinging a large umbrella. “It hasn’t
rained for months.” Oppenheimer and Bethe would smile to him in greeting. Then it would invariably begin to rain, Rabi would
open his umbrella, and the other two would get soaking wet as they walked together to the Tech Area. Oppenheimer and Bethe
took to calling Rabi the “Rainmaker from Hoboken.”

The Rainmaker from Hoboken was savvy, perceptive, and wise. “He was interested in everybody and could talk to anybody—I was
very fond of him,” said a Los Alamos resident.
⁴⁸
Careful and deliberate, he preferred to make his points with humor. “One listened to Rabi with great care,” said Rose Bethe,
voicing a common opinion among those who knew him well, “because, even though he told you things as jokes, they were always
serious.”
⁴⁹
Rabi had a special instinct for dealing with people in extraordinary situations. He found it hard to suffer fools, and he
could be blunt. But if there was something to be done, as Rabi said, “What choice do you have?”
⁵⁰

From the beginning of Los Alamos to its end, Rabi appeared on the Hill when needed. His most important function at Los Alamos
was his self-described role as Oppenheimer’s “fatherly adviser.”
⁵¹
Oppen-heimer was comfortable with Rabi and confided his troubles to him. Rabi listened patiently and offered useful advice.
A youth spent in the streets had taught Rabi to be a shrewd judge of people and how to operate effectively in the world of
power. He had administrative experience at the MIT radar lab; he had worked with the military; he understood organizations
and how to move them—he had tough-minded wisdom. Oppenheimer did not want to formally structure Los Alamos at first. Rabi
told him, “You have to have an organization. The laboratory has to be organized in divisions and the divisions into groups.
Otherwise, nothing will ever come of it.”
⁵²
Should the laboratory be put under military control? Rabi adamantly opposed the induction of scientists into the army. Oppenheimer
listened.

Rabi counseled Oppenheimer discreetly, but he never hesitated to stand up to Oppenheimer’s intellectual bullying, which paradoxically
had a calming effect on the Los Alamos director. Rabi also never hesitated to speak frankly and bluntly with Groves. When
he learned about the housing that Groves planned for the Hill, he told the general, “You are treating these scientists as
if they were privates in the Army. You should realize that there are fewer fellows of the American Physical Society than brigadiers
[Groves’s rank] in the US Army.”
⁵³
The housing arrangements were improved.

Offered the laboratory’s deputy directorship by Oppenheimer, Rabi turned it down, resisting the pressure of personal friendship
and Oppenheimer’s considerable charm. Rabi did so because, as he explained to Oppenheimer, he did not want to make the atomic
bomb “the culmination of three centuries of physics.”
⁵⁴

All of them felt the pressure of the work. They knew the project involved tens of thousands of people at sites across the
country. They knew it was enormously expensive. And “if we ever forgot any of this,” Hans Bethe remembered, “General Groves
would tell us.”
⁵⁵
Many had family and relatives in concentration camps. A Polish physicist did not know whether his wife and children, left
behind in Poland, were dead or alive. A British physicist had lost his wife to a German bombing raid. The war came close even
on the Hill when Teller listened to a radio broadcast on fighting in Hungary, and said somberly, “My family is there.” Anxiety
and fear haunted them day and night. One physicist received a postcard from his brother in the fall of 1944, written from
the front lines in Italy. Its complete message was “Hurry up!” The brother was killed in action that October.
⁵⁶

A fear of success also existed among them, for they were building a weapon so horrible that its use, which seemed the logical
culmination of their efforts, could not easily be distinguished from barbarism. It was necessary for them to fear that the
Nazis were working toward the same end, for only this could ease their concerns about the destruc-tiveness of the bomb they
were making—that and the hope that such a weapon might end war because nations couldn’t afford its cost in human lives. They
often lay awake at night wondering, “Is this right?” Still, it never occurred to anyone to stop. In their minds, they were
doing their duty—in some cases, for no other reason than it was their duty; in other cases, because they were unable to conceive
of any other course or were, perhaps, afraid to think of any other course. It was not a matter of choice but necessity. This
was the morality imposed by brute circumstance, by habit, by the unspoken social demand that most did not have the strength
to refuse, or, often, to imagine refusing.

The reactions to such tensions varied. Some thought, “We’ve worked on this thing and let’s use it—that’s what it’s for—and
see if we can’t get the war stopped.”
⁵⁷
Some secretly hoped the technical difficulties would prove insurmountable. If it
was
impossible to develop an atomic bomb, there wouldn’t be any danger of the Nazis getting one either. Some of them hoped the
war would end before the bomb could be finished. Some harbored moral qualms about the bomb, but many more were preoccupied
by work or were lulled into unreflective self-importance by the weapon’s power. Gradually, as they became more deeply involved
in the work, their misgivings began to fade—or were buried—and the tension of achievement took over and became the driving
force, a kind of Faustian fascination about whether the bomb would really work. They had to achieve what they had set out
to do. All of them sensed they were involved in something momentous, but they did not see clearly exactly what it was.

Each coped with these complicated feelings in his own way. Oppenheimer tried to relax at night behind the walls of his stone-and-timber
cottage set behind a stand of poplars and spruces at the end of Bathtub Row. The furniture was Spanish rustic and rattan,
an easy chair with a laurel pattern, serapes on the sofa, and black pueblo pottery on the fireplace mantel. A Picasso lithograph
and pictures of the Hindu god Krishna hung on the walls. Oppenheimer drank a martini while Kitty sat nearby, her legs curled
beneath her on a sofa, an ashtray in her lap. But the project was never far away; soldiers patrolled outside the house around
the clock. His Native American housekeeper sensed the anxiety. “Dr. Oppenheimer was quiet…. He was worried. You could tell
it by his face; it was down. Even his wife was worried. I sensed a lot of tension.”
⁵⁸

Occasionally, Oppenheimer would drive down to a teahouse at Otowi Bridge over the Rio Grande that was run by Edith Warner,
a quiet and reserved woman who lived as a neighbor to the Indians of nearby San Ildefonso Pueblo. He drew strength from the
warmth that Warner radiated. Juniper wood burned in her adobe fireplace. Often there was the smell of bread that had just
been taken from the oven and covered with a cloth on the table under the kitchen window. Black pottery plates stood upright
on open shelves along one wall, with cups and saucers in terra-cotta colors from Mexico. Orange candles and red-and-black-striped
Chimayo squares brightened the wall; a Navajo rug covered part of the rough floor.

There Oppenheimer drank tea and ate cake in a small room that looked through large windows toward the Sangre de Cristos. Warner,
who observed these mountains daily, described what Oppenheimer saw:

Sometimes the light makes each range stand out, casting sharp shadows on the ones behind. Occasionally when the air is very
clear, there is a strange and breath-taking shining light on the green aspen leaves. At evening the twilight may run quickly
from the valley, shrouding almost at once the highest peaks. Or mauve and rose move slowly upward, turning to blood-red on
the snow above. One morning they may be purple cardboard mountains sharpcut against the sky. On another they will have withdrawn
into themselves. Sometimes I have watched ghost mountains with substance only in their dark outline. It seems then as if the
mountains had gone down into their very roots, leaving an empty frame.
⁵⁹

Caught up as he now was in the whirlpool of war, the furious plans to construct a deadly weapon, the impossible and often
agonizing decisions that had to be weighed and implemented every day, often every moment, Oppenheimer had a particular need
for tranquility and quiet reflection that these hours at Edith Warner’s teahouse filled. As one whose daily thoughts were
involved with techniques of destruction, he found healing here for his divided spirit.

Teller, when burdens seemed greatest, would sit down at his concert grand piano and play the soothing sounds of Bach and Mozart.
He gave occasional recitals in the Fuller Lodge dining hall. The room, with a running balcony and a massive stone fireplace
at either end, had walls of honeyed pine and looked more like the dining room of a national park lodge than the army-camp
messes where most of Los Alamos ate. The center of attention, Teller would beam with satisfaction. His technique was loose
but his playing showed a lot of determination and feeling and musicality. Teller also delighted in simple pleasures. His favorite
author was Lewis Carroll, and he read Carroll’s stories and poems to his son, Paul, long before the child could understand
them. He could be as playful as his little boy when he narrated fairy tales on community radio station KRS—a deep voice with
a Middle European accent telling bedtime stories. When he reached a funny passage, he let out a very loud, high-pitched giggle.