The Age of Radiance (29 page)

The General’s in a stew

He trusted you and you

He thought you’d be scientific

Instead you’re just prolific

And what is he to do?

When a study was published linking a decrease in male fertility with long, hot baths, copies were immediately forwarded to Groves in the hopes of getting more tubs. But all the new children led in turn to an outpouring of social effects: a newspaper, library, barbershop, radio broadcast, church services, golf course, baseball field, and, on a military site, a democratically elected town council. Family life brought civilization to the desert, and a real sense of community to Los Alamos.

Naval officer Deke Parsons: “You know, usually on a military post the commander is the social arbiter and top dog. It’s really sort of hard for the military here because everybody looks down on them.” Good news from the fronts would cheer the civilians and dispirit the junior military, who felt gypped at being stationed in the desert and missing out on the action. Later in the war, when men arrived with ribbons from Anzio, though, they were clearly grateful to be stationed at the peaceable mesa.

In March 1943, Hans Bethe was at MIT’s Rad Lab working on radar, after escaping from Germany through London:
“Though I had an excellent time with my colleagues and my friends in England, it was clear there that I was a foreigner and would remain a foreigner. In America, people made me feel at once that I was going to be an American—that maybe I was one already. I felt that Germany was much stranger than America—that it was
a weird country. It was clear that according to the laws, I could not hold a university position, because two of my grandparents were Jewish. The first I heard about this directly was when one of my two Ph.D. students in Tübingen wrote me a letter saying, ‘I read in the papers that you have been dismissed. Tell me, what shall I do?’ What should he do? I had not heard of my dismissal, but it had been published in the papers.”

To help with the war effort, in 1941 Bethe had produced a theory of armor penetration, which was published by Philadelphia’s Frankford Arsenal as confidential, meaning Bethe himself wasn’t allowed to read it. Two years later, he got the call from Oppenheimer and agreed to come to Los Alamos. On the way, Bethe passed through Chicago, picked up Ed Teller, and visited Enrico Fermi. By April, Teller’s wife, Mici, and two-month-old son, Paul, arrived, with a Steinway concert grand acquired from a hotel sale and a Bendix automatic washer. The Hungarian physicist played his remarkable instrument at all hours of the day and night, which alternately enthralled and irritated his neighbors. Teller described himself as “choleric”—tending to anger—and when he played Mozart, it was always fortissimo.

Ed Teller:
“The Army routinely leveled every bush and tree within two hundred feet of a building site before beginning construction, thereby destroying whatever attractiveness the immediate surroundings had. Yet, throughout the war, our apartment building had a pretty stand of pines growing between us and the Canyon. On the morning the bulldozers appeared to level the area near our apartment as part of the next construction project, my wife had spread a blanket under the trees and settled herself, Paul, his diapers and bottles, and a picnic lunch on it. The young soldier responsible for the bulldozer asked her politely to move; she, just as politely, refused. He leveled the rest of the surroundings and returned to ask again—to no avail. Finally the soldier went to Gen. Groves for advice. ‘Leave the trees,’ Groves grumbled on hearing about the situation.”

With a face like an abdominal muscle foreshadowed by a prow of beetle brows, Hungarian Quartet member Edward Teller would, over the decades, become the Dr. Strangelove of this history and the Saruman of this real-life
Lord of the Rings
, with a fairly distinct personality: “Fermi once told me with hardly a trace of a smile that I was the only monomaniac he knew with several manias. My grandson, my son, and my editor-collaborator all claim that the film character
ET
and I have more in common than our initials.” In 1928, Teller fell on the street, and a trolley ran over his foot, leaving him with a lifelong limp and a lifelong friend and nemesis, Hans Bethe, who visited him in the hospital. In the 1930s, Ed got a grant to study in Rome
after Fermi “wrote an official letter to the Hungarian government. He called me a great physicist (which I certainly was not), asked for the privilege of collaborating with me (which could hardly have been a privilege for him considering my ignorance of his area of study), and expressed the hope that some means could be found by the Hungarian government to make my stay possible. . . . I do not believe that as a total stranger I have ever been more warmly welcomed.”

Edward Teller had helped Oppie organize Los Alamos and recruit, but then became notably upset when the sparkling Bethe was named head of the Theoretical Division, as Bethe himself admitted:
“Teller had worked on the bomb project almost from the day of its inception and considered himself, quite rightly, as having seniority over everyone then at Los Alamos, including Oppenheimer.” Teller didn’t like working under Bethe, didn’t like military secrecy, didn’t like collaborating, and didn’t like the lack of support for his thermonuclear fusion design, the Super. Still, at that time, he was a true Oppenheimer acolyte. Ed Teller:
“Throughout the ten years, Oppie knew in detail what was going on in every part of the Laboratory. . . . He knew how to organize, cajole, humor, soothe feelings—how to lead powerfully without seeming to do so. He was an exemplar of dedication, a hero who never lost his humanness. Disappointing him somehow carried with it a sense of wrongdoing. Los Alamos’ amazing success grew out of the brilliance, enthusiasm and charisma with which Oppenheimer led it.” Yet, after one outrageous incident with the prima donna Teller and his obsession with fusion over fission, Robert said to Charles Critchfield,
“God protect us from the enemy without and the Hungarians within.”

In August of 1944, the Fermis were told that they, too, would be joining the exodus to Site Y in New Mexico’s Pecos Valley, with J. Robert Oppenheimer himself visiting them in Chicago to explain what it was like, and what they could expect. Enrico would be heading up the F division, the
F
standing for “Fermi,” which would be a team of freelance troubleshooters, including Herb Anderson and Ed Teller—getting Teller out from under Bethe—working on any advanced problems as required. Laura remembered Oppenheimer’s saying that all his friends called him Oppie and they should, too. “He made it all sound just wonderful.” Oppenheimer:
“Fermi was simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active.” In turn, Enrico said that Robert had a remarkable talent for appearing far more knowledgeable about a given topic than he actually was.

At the last minute in getting the family ready to head west, Enrico was
called away to oversee the final building of his next-generation piles in Hanford, Washington, so Laura and the children had to go on without him. But when they arrived at Lamy in August 1944, Laura hadn’t been told of her alias, “Mrs. Farmer,” and so kept telling the WAC driver sent to meet them that, though she wasn’t as important as this Mrs. Farmer, maybe she could get a ride in the car since the VIP hadn’t shown up.

When Enrico then arrived in September, he and Laura turned down the school faculty cottage that had been set aside for them to take an ordinary apartment, to make a statement about the castes forming in the mesa. Physicist Bob Wilson’s wife, Jane:
“Below her, she had Rudolf and Gennia Peierls. They were very good friends, but Mrs. Peierls had a very loud and piercing voice, and her voice came wafting up through the floorboards—her laughter, too. Actually, the first time I met Laura, she was with Gennia Peierls, they were good friends, and I noted in my diary that every time Gennia spoke (and Gennia was a person of many words) Laura visibly shuddered. . . . I was somewhat surprised, having known Enrico off and on for quite a while, to find, after this ebullient, extroverted man, this very serious, shy, reticent woman. I think Enrico prided himself on being matter-of-fact and pragmatic, and Laura was unabashedly idealistic. . . . [She would say,] ‘We wanted to become genuine Americans.’ I don’t think her American dream was the Mercedes in the garage or the mansion in the suburbs; it really was the Jeffersonian ideal. . . . In Italy, this lady had been blessed with two maids; she had been raised in a wealthy household where the maids did the housework, her mother picked out her clothes, and she didn’t know anything about money. Even when she married Enrico, on a salary of $90 a month, she had a maid. Then here she was at Los Alamos, with amenities few and far between, which Chadwick had characterized as ‘pigging it,’ and we had famous water shortages always, incredible dust, and limited supplies. As for maids, she was lucky to have an Indian maid a couple hours, several times a week. Even under those circumstances, she had one dinner party after another, with good food, and really, it was remarkable. I think she liked it.”

Mici Teller took Enrico Fermi for his first ride on a horse, and
“he told the horse in a firm voice, ‘I am the boss.’ It worked.”

Emilio Segrè:
“I required a special small laboratory for measuring spontaneous fission, the like of which I have never seen before or since. It was in a log cabin that had been occupied by a ranger and was located in a secluded valley a few miles from Los Alamos. It could be reached only by a Jeep trail that passed through fields of purple and yellow asters and the canyon whose
walls were marked with Indian carvings. On this trail we once found a large rattlesnake. The cabin laboratory, in a grove protected by huge broadleaf trees, occupied one of the most picturesque settings one could dream of. Fermi was very fond of the site and visited us there several times.”

T
he great secret that made America the leader in nuclear warfare and gave it an atomic monopoly for many years took place far, far away from the glories of New Mexico. Though the scientists and engineers of that desert paradise engineered the method of uranium and plutonium bombs and ensured their place in history, America’s real nuclear breakthrough was taking place in Godzilla-size buildings in the hollows of Tennessee and the inland gulches of Washington State. Not every nation in the world has an atomic stockpile because, though it is simple enough to make a bomb, it is not so easy to fashion weapons-grade fissile fuel in the form of plutonium or highly enriched uranium (HEU)—the isotope U-235. That was America’s great “atomic secret”—the secret that kept others from developing their own nuclear arsenals—the making of plutonium from reactors and enriched uranium by separating U-235 from U-238, using the 2 percent difference of their weights.

Jim Conant was told he needed to pick between three methods of isolating U-235 (gas, electromagnetic, or centrifuge), or of building a nuclear reactor to generate plutonium. He chose all four, the U-235 done at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the plutonium at Oak Ridge, in the Chicago suburb of Argonne, and at Hanford, Washington.

Fermi’s squash-court reactor, now called Chicago Pile-1, was dismantled and reassembled at Red Gate Woods in February 1943—the spot in the Argonne Forest twenty-five miles southwest of Chicago where it was supposed to have been built in the first place. Now known as Chicago Pile-2, it was still overseen by Fermi and produced plutonium for Los Alamos. After the war, her descendants at Argonne would be the research vessels for modern-day reactors and the power plants of nuclear submarines.

In one corner at Columbia, Harold Urey (Enrico and Laura’s Leonia neighbor) and a team of chemists combined natural uranium with fluorine to produce a uranium gas—uranium hexafluoride—which they centrifuged to separate out the U-235. Months of trials determined that making this centrifuge process work at an industrial level would mean fifty thousand one-meter-rotor machines operating continuously at state-of-the-art speeds to produce a kilo a day. That plan was abandoned; the technology has since so evolved that Urey-style centrifuges are now the most common method
of producing HEU; but at the same time that one Urey-Columbia team was working on centrifuges, another was developing diffusion, which used membrane-fine filters to separate the lighter U-235 from 238. It worked, but barely, as the uranium hexafluoride needed to be diffused again and again to produce even a tiny amount of isotope—through thousands of membranes, known as cascades, requiring plants of hundreds of acres in size, with bicycles and cars driven inside to get from pipe to pipe.

Starting around the year 1900, an Elza, Tennessee, prophet named John Hendrix proselytized to his neighbors that the Bear Creek Valley—their four little hamlets of tobacco, corn, and coal in the Cumberland Mountains by the Clinch River forty miles west of Knoxville—
“someday will be filled with great buildings and factories, and they will help toward winning the greatest war that ever will be.” When in 1942 FDR held a secret meeting with congressional leaders to discuss the Manhattan Project’s finances, he asked them to put aside petty local concerns to ensure victory. Senate Appropriations chair and senior senator from Tennessee Kenneth McKellar replied,
“Mr. President, I agree that the future of our civilization may depend on the success of this project. Where in Tennessee are we going to build it?” Soon after, the Army Corps of Engineers requisitioned all fifty-nine thousand acres of Bear Creek Valley, with a court order for three thousand to vacate their homes. Groves built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the world’s biggest building, the U-shaped K-25, finished in the last months of 1943, which cost $500 million and employed twelve thousand to diffuse fissile uranium with the Urey cascade method. Physicist James Mahaffey rhapsodized, “The sight of the inside of the K-25 building, with its clean and orderly maze of gleaming nickel plumbing [the hexafluoride would immediately corrode any other metal] seeming to extend forever and disappearing into the haze at semi-infinite distance, was beautiful.” After the war, the sealant developed for the cascades’ pumps appeared in American home kitchens, where it was known as Teflon.