The Age of Radiance (28 page)

Mathematician Stanislaw Ulam:
“People I knew well began to vanish one after the other, without saying where. . . . Finally I learned that we were going to New Mexico, [so] I went to the library and borrowed the
Federal Writers’ Project Guide to New Mexico
. At the back of the book, in the slip of paper on which borrowers signed their names, I read the names of Joan Hinton, David Frisch, Joseph McKibben, and all the other people who had been mysteriously disappearing to hush-hush war jobs without saying where.” Hans Bethe:
“I went by train to a place called Lamy, New Mexico, which was the railroad station for Santa Fe. Later on, there was a story about some people who went to the railroad station in Princeton to buy tickets to Lamy, and the ticket seller told them, ‘Don’t go there. Twenty people have already gone there, and not one of them has ever come back.’ ”

In Lamy, the Super Chief streamliner stopped at a one-room adobe station
sitting hard by an empty road of tumbleweeds and an eternal hot, dry wind. Two scientists arrived, couldn’t find the deliberately inconspicuous Army Corps of Engineers offices at 109 East Palace Avenue they’d been told to report to, and had to call back to Met Lab: “Where the hell are we?” Civil engineer Joe Lehman:
“I drove right through the square and kept on going looking for the main part of town and I found myself out in the desert again. So I turned around and came back and finally pulled into a service station right off the square and asked where downtown Santa Fe was. The guy said, ‘This is it. You’re in it.’ ”

The scientists and engineers arrived to find a situation so primitive that the telephone network was a single line to the outside world shared by twelve parties, gnawed at by chipmunks, so static-filled a caller needed to shout to be heard, and unusable when it rained for fear of being electrocuted. The quality was so poor that at one point, the secretaries were once flummoxed by a call requesting eight extra-large trucks. It was actually for eight extra lunches.

It was, however, all that Oppie had said it would be.
“Here at Los Alamos,” one tough British physicist said, “I found a spirit of Athens, of Plato, of an ideal Republic.” Ed Teller:
“In spite of the difficulties, I (and many others) consider the wartime years at Los Alamos the most wonderful time in our lives.” Hans Bethe: “It was an unforgettable experience for all the members of the laboratory. There were other wartime laboratories of high achievement. . . . But I have never observed in any one of these other groups quite the spirit of belonging together, quite the urge to reminisce about the days of the laboratory, quite the feeling that this was really the great time of their lives. That this was true of Los Alamos was mainly due to Oppenheimer.” Dick Feynman:
“Oppenheimer was very patient. He paid attention to everybody’s problems. He worried about my wife, who had TB, and whether there would be a hospital out there, and everything. . . . He was a wonderful man.” Well, not everyone thought this was the great time, as Leslie Groves told his officers:
“At great expense, we have gathered on this mesa the largest collection of crackpots ever seen.”

They were all so young, and all so full of vim—not representing the grand old men of science, the average age of those at Los Alamos was twenty-seven. Many of the accompanying wives were upset to see all the bedding stamped
USED
, until it was explained that the organization running the compound was the United States Engineer Detachment. The water that came out of the tap could be accompanied by rust, algae, dirt, or worms, and sometimes
was so chlorinated that it dissolved the wives’ stockings. Regardless, in eighteen months the water supply was so thinning that cars could not be washed, lawns could not be watered, showers were supposed to last only a few minutes, and all were warned to “REPORT LEAKY FAUCETS IMMEDIATELY!” Men gave up shaving, and women made do with less laundry and shampooing by switching to overalls, and pulling their hair back into bandannas. Everyone joked that they all started looking like the pictures of the first down-on-their-luck Santa Fe prospectors, and if the base were open to the public, they would think it was all an operation run by and for cowboys. Bethe:
“The water supply had been built for the Los Alamos school, which had maybe fifty people, and there were several thousand of us. There just wasn’t any water. We got water delivered in trucks that had previously been used to transport gasoline, so the water generally tasted of gasoline.”

Tewa-speaking Indian women in deerskin boots, Hopi shawls, and glossy hair piled up or pigtailed were bused in to the mesa to work as maids, cooks, and nannies. One had a mother-in-law with a reputation as a good potter, and the secret spread; her talent and her connections made her a fortune in blackware.

Emilio Segrè sent a letter to his wife back in California and included a strand of his hair. She opened the letter, the hair was missing, and that was how the physicists discovered their mail was being read. A number of the émigrés were additionally unhappy to be surrounded by a razor-wire fence, which reminded them of Nazi prison camps. Junior physicist Richard Feynman discovered, however, that workers had put a hole in the Los Alamos fence as a shortcut, and he enjoyed exiting the property through that hole and then coming in through the security entrance, so the guards would always see him arriving, but never departing. The kids, too, discovered every hole the fence had to offer, as well as a treasure pile of toys to play with—lab equipment left out in the trash.

In November 1943, James Chadwick invited Otto Robert Frisch to join the thirty British scientists who would be going to America. Otto replied,
“I would like that very much,” and when it was explained that he would need to first become a British citizen, he said, “I would like that even more.” Chadwick then invited Lise Meitner from Sweden, and the discoverer of fission said,
“I will have nothing to do with a bomb.” Accompanied by Rudolf Peierls and Klaus Fuchs on December 3, 1943, the group of thirty found no available taxis in London and had to pay a hearse driver to take them to the wharves. When they then crossed the United States by rail and stopped in Richmond, Virginia, for a meal, Frisch became ecstatic at the sight of fruit stands
blooming with immense pyramids of oranges. He hadn’t seen an orange in three years. Arriving in New Mexico, they received the standard hello from Oppenheimer:
‘Welcome to Los Alamos. Who the devil are you?’ ”

Oppenheimer did everything he could to get his friend Isidor Rabi to join, but Rabi, like Meitner, refused, telling Oppenheimer that he did not want to make
“the culmination of three centuries of physics” a horrible weapon. He did not believe in bombs, feeling that they killed both the innocent and the guilty, and continued his work on radar at Columbia. He did, however, travel to the Los Alamos sporadically to offer advice as a visiting consultant, as did Einstein.

North-central New Mexico is today as green as any artificially irrigated desert in the world, but during World War II it was home to columbines, gentians, ponderosa, aspens, indifferent porcupines, tender marmot, determined badger, and fearless skunk. Ruth Marshak:
“Behind us lay the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, at sunset bathed in changing waves of colors—scarlets and lavenders. Below was the desert with its flatness broken by majestic palisades that seemed like the ruined cathedrals and palaces of some old, great, vanished race. Ahead was Los Alamos, and beyond the flat plateau on which it sat was its backdrop, the Jemez Mountain Range. Whenever things went wrong at Los Alamos, and there was never a day when they didn’t, we had this one consolation—we had a view.” Emilio Segrè:
“The Mesa was indented by deep canyons, which in time came to be occupied by special laboratories. The region was extraordinarily beautiful. This beauty was to have profound influence on many scientists who by inclination and long habit were sensitive to nature and could appreciate the noble countryside surrounding Los Alamos. The view of the mountains; the ever-bearing clouds in the sky; the colorful flowers blooming profusely from early spring to late autumn; the possibility of walking on interesting trails leading to fishing streams, skiing slopes, mineral beds, or Indian ruins. . . . Often at the end of a strenuous period of work one was completely exhausted, but the out-of-doors was always a source of renewed strength. Any number of spirited discussions were conducted during hikes in the beautiful and savage countryside.”

Back in May 1940, what would become the Manhattan Project had been handed a phenomenal twitch of luck. The Congo uranium mine that Szilard and Einstein had warned Roosevelt about had been discovered and managed by a Belgian corporation, the Union Minière du Haut Katanga. When Hitler came to power, Union Minière chief Edgar Sengier assumed the Nazis would have to take Belgium on their way to France, and he didn’t want his cobalt—a key ingredient in airplane engines—to fall into Fascist hands. Just
before his nation fell in May 1940, Sengier moved himself and his wife to a suite in New York’s Ambassador Hotel and renamed Union Minière the African Metals Corporation. Under the nose of the German occupation, he then shipped 1,250 tons of uranium—the whole of the mine’s on-hand inventory—out of the Congo and into a vegetable-oil plant storage facility operated by Archer Daniels Midland on Staten Island, New York, as suggested by the Joliot-Curies in Paris and Henry Tizard in Britain. For two years, Sengier worked to sell the whole of it to the American government for the war effort, but no one was interested . . . until September 18, 1942, when Leslie Groves signed an eighteen-year, four-hundred-tons-a-month contract with AMC, which ore would supply two-thirds of the enriched uranium for Hiroshima’s Little Boy and a substantial amount of the plutonium for Fat Man at Nagasaki. When the Belgians declared Congo independent in the 1960s, Union filled the mine with cement, but as of this writing illegal miners are digging away and exporting their ore through Zambia. The mine is known as Shinkolobwe, named after a fruit that has to be boiled before it can be eaten. If you try to eat some without letting it cool, you will get burned, and
shinkolobwe
is also the term for a man who is, like uranium, cool on the outside but boiling from anger within.

During the war, over a million people would know that the Manhattan Project existed; it was the job of the Counter-Intelligence Corps (known by their colleagues as the Creeps) to keep those people from knowing anything else. The cops created posters—
DON’T BE A BLABOTEUR
—and invented a code:

The Los Alamos physicists came to believe that their Creep bodyguards had remarkable powers.
“They had this notion that we could know whatever they were doing even if they didn’t tell us,” one agent was surprised to understand. Many of the scientists behaved erratically, even life-threateningly—notably Fermi, with his perilous driving skills—and the agents became
alarmed, since besides spying on their scientists, a key part of their assignment was to keep their charges alive until the Bomb was born.

Like all the rest of the Creeps, Fermi’s bodyguard and chauffeur, the Italian-speaking American, halfback-size lawyer John Baudino, filed weekly reports on his subject with army intelligence. To keep Fermi from talking about his work to others, Baudino got him to talk about it to him. So Fermi started saying that, “Soon Johnny will know so much about the project he will need a bodyguard, too.”

When agent Charles Campbell, who hated physics but pretended to like it as part of his job, mentioned to John von Neumann that he was too busy to study, von Neumann got upset: “It is my fault! You will come with me and together we will study theoretical physics in New Mexico!” FBI surveillance teams used walkie-talkies disguised as hearing aids, and any assembled together looked conspicuously like an outing of deaf people.

The same month that Los Alamos opened, the FBI suspended its surveillance of Oppenheimer at the insistence of the army. No more help was needed from the Feebs as the Creeps had placed agent Andrew Walker as Robert’s driver and bodyguard, had wiretapped his home and office, and read every piece of his mail before he did. By the summer of 1943, JRO was so sick of this relentless snooping that he thought he should quit.

The military police stationed outside the Oppenheimer house on Bathtub Row insisted on seeing everyone’s pass before letting him or her enter, including, repeatedly, Kitty Oppenheimer, who often forgot to take her pass with her when she left the house and made a huge fuss when the men interfered with her coming back. She got the detail canceled, however, when the sergeant in charge learned she was using the MPs to babysit the Oppenheimers’ son, Peter.

Phil Morrison’s wife, Emily:
“Kitty was a very strange woman. . . . She could be a very bewitching person, but she was someone to be wary of. . . . She would pick a pet, one of the wives, and be extraordinarily friendly with her, and then drop her for no reason. She had temporary favorites. That’s the way she was. She did it to one person after another.” Oppenheimer did nothing in the face of his wife’s caprices, even when she “threw a hate on Charlotte” Serber, whose husband was one of his closest friends.

When Elinor Pulitzer, newspaper heiress, married Los Alamos medical director Louis Hempelmann, she decided to throw a big dinner party on the mesa, but didn’t know that the high altitude meant longer roasting times. While all her guests waited for their food for hours, they drank and drank until Elinor developed a reputation as a spectacular hostess.

Single men and women lived in dormitories, where parties were marked by lab-created 200-proof rotgut ladled from reagent jars, Mexican vodka brought in from Santa Fe, and, if they were lucky, visiting consultant Isidor Rabi playing the comb. The marrieds dressed up and went square dancing; the singles gathered at the two PXs for hamburgers and the jukebox; there were group drives, horseback riding, fishing, mountain climbing, poker, amateur theatricals and concerts, golf, baseball, softball, basketball, and a women’s dorm that for a time became a brothel. So many young people trapped behind barbed wire led to a baby boom. When Groves realized that one-fifth of the married women on the base were pregnant, he insisted that Oppenheimer do something about it. But, as Kitty herself was expecting, there was little he could do, other than inspire mesa-wide sing-alongs: