The Plutonium Files (10 page)

Except for these three men, the TBI experiments involved sick people. Although they provided the Met Lab doctors with needed information, many questions about radiation remained:

That was Stone, writing in 1947, when answers to those questions were still not known.
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At about the same time that the Met Lab’s Health Division was formed, government officials and scientists involved in the bomb-building effort decided it was time to bring in someone aggressive to oversee the entire project. The Army’s Corps of Engineers had been chosen to build the production facilities. But Colonel James C. Marshall, who was supervising the bomb project, was inclined to move cautiously. With the growing wartime demand for recruits and raw materials, the whole effort was in danger of foundering.

On September 17, 1942, Leslie Groves, a tall, pear-shaped Army general who had overseen the construction of the new Pentagon building in Washington, was appointed to head the project. Groves, a West Point graduate, had been desperately hoping for an overseas assignment and was bitterly disappointed by the appointment. But the general, like Arthur Compton, was a minister’s son who had been schooled in the importance of duty. He swallowed his disappointment and got to work the next day.

Groves was a brilliant administrator who was accustomed to working long hours and handling huge budgets. He had the ability to quickly grasp situations and was willing to make decisions based on incomplete information. Unfortunately, he also had an enormous ego, an abrasive and tactless personality, and a predilection for humiliating people. Although he developed a fairly good working relationship with the company engineers and scientists who were brought into the project from Du Pont, Union Carbide, and Eastman Kodak, his relationship with the Met Lab scientists deteriorated quickly. He considered them “prima donnas”
and “crackpots.” To Groves, Leo Szilard—a man who wouldn’t flush his own toilet because he considered it maid’s work—was one of the worst offenders.
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Groves often used one of his aides, Colonel Kenneth Nichols, as a go-between with Arthur Compton and the Chicago scientists. He told an interviewer in 1967, “I suspected that Compton liked Colonel Nichols more than he did me.
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Primarily because Colonel Nichols had a Ph.D. and looked very scholarly and still does, everything done with Compton was generally done through Colonel Nichols; that is, anything that was difficult. That didn’t mean that I didn’t see a lot of Compton. But if there was anything that was particularly touchy, I always had Nichols do it.”

Groves said in his memoirs that soon after he was assigned to the project he realized that he would need a scientist to coordinate the actual design, construction, and testing of the weapon. Because the other scientists who might be suitable candidates for the job were already engaged in other facets of the bomb project, he selected J. Robert Oppenheimer. “It must have been a bitter blow to Compton to have his project pulled away from him, especially after the major success of the chain reaction at Chicago,” Leona Marshall Libby, the young scientist at the Met Lab, speculated.
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“One should remember, in dealing with the Department of Defense, that they are trained to be killers. Especially in wartime, it is almost their duty to leave a trail of bodies behind. In a sense, Compton was a body along Groves’ trail.”

Groves also decided to establish a new laboratory to design and construct the bomb in New Mexico. An isolated state, it was nevertheless accessible by train, plane, and automobile. The choice could not have pleased Oppenheimer more. He had spent summers as a youth in the Sangre de Cristos, one of the southernmost ranges of the Rocky Mountains, and had grown to love the blues and grays of the desert. Although the two labs would physically look very different, their functions were actually quite similar: The Met Lab’s job was to achieve a controlled chain reaction; Los Alamos’s mission would be to produce an uncontrolled chain reaction.

In November of 1942, General Groves, Major John Dudley, a Manhattan District officer, Oppenheimer, and Edwin McMillan, who was helping to organize the new lab, arrived in Albuquerque and began driving in a northwesterly direction toward Jemez Springs, one of the proposed sites. Although Jemez Springs was lovely and had plenty of water, it was hemmed in by tall canyon walls. Oppenheimer felt it might have a “depressing effect” on laboratory workers; Groves gave it a thumbs-down
because there was no room to expand.
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Oppenheimer then suggested that they drive over the mountains and take a look at the Los Alamos Ranch School, a private school for boys. When they arrived, it was snowing lightly and the surrounding mountains were vague as clouds. The general immediately endorsed the site for numerous reasons, including its remoteness. “The geographically enforced isolation of the people working there lessened the ever-present danger of their inadvertently diffusing secret information among social or professional friends outside.”
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Oppenheimer was also satisfied. “My two great loves are physics and desert country,” he once confided to a friend.
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As soon as the owners agreed to sell the boys’ school, the Manhattan Project began making plans for the new lab. It would be located on a high plateau near the lip of the Jemez caldera, a huge, collapsed volcano. To the west were the Jemez Mountains; to the east, the blue, slumping line of the Sangre de Cristos; below, the muddy curl of the Rio Grande. Dominating everything was a 360-degree sky and the desert light, harsh as a camera flash at noontime, luminous in the gathering dusk.

Oppenheimer quickly began assembling his team. As in Chicago, the physicists and chemists were recruited first. Then came the medical doctors. Oppenheimer wanted John Lawrence, Ernest Lawrence’s brother, to oversee the health and safety aspects of Los Alamos, but Lawrence was already working on high-altitude studies for the Air Force.
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He suggested that Oppy look up Louis Hempelmann in St. Louis. Oppenheimer went to St. Louis and talked with Hempelmann. Impressed by the young physician’s quiet intelligence, he offered him a job.

Ever the pragmatist, Hempelmann decided to do some sleuthing around before he committed himself. He went to Chicago and talked to Robert Stone and his colleagues. They assured Hempelmann his duties would be rather simple; his main task would probably consist of taking blood counts from fifty to sixty people who might be at risk.
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Hempelmann then took a westbound train to New Mexico to have a closer look. Oppenheimer, who had arrived in Los Alamos with a few staff members on March 15, 1943, picked Hempelmann up in Santa Fe. Up the canyon they went, following a primitive road that the Corps of Engineers was trying to make passable for the heavy trucks that would soon be arriving with cyclotrons, accelerators, tons of steel, and miles of piping. Until enough housing could be built, the scientists lived at nearby ranches and dined on box lunches brought in from Santa Fe.
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Often they were forced to go hungry because the automobiles carrying the food broke down or had flats on the rough roads.

The lab was little more than a military post. The crude living conditions and barbed-wire fences may have given Hempelmann some pause, but he nevertheless agreed to take the job. He returned to St. Louis and packed up his belongings. He and his wife, Elinor, arrived in Los Alamos in April of 1943.

While Hempelmann was setting up his small office, Allied forces were winning key victories in the Pacific and in Eastern Europe.
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During the first week of April, more than one hundred bombers had swarmed over an outlying area of Paris, France, raining destruction on a Nazi-controlled Renault factory. General Douglas MacArthur reported another devastating assault on the Japanese fleet near New Guinea. And a furious air battle had raged in Tunisia between Nazi dive-bombers and American Spitfires as General George Patton’s troops hurried toward a rendezvous with the British Army.

Louis Hempelmann’s first year at Los Alamos was uneventful and unhurried. He split the work with another doctor named James Nolan, a gynecologist who was an old friend and classmate. Nolan oversaw the small post hospital. Hempelmann was in charge of protecting the workers from the radiation hazards. As in Chicago, that meant establishing “safe tolerance levels” for exposure to radiation, monitoring workers, and carrying out blood tests.

Hempelmann had a small staff—himself, four to five blood technicians, and a part-time secretary. One of his employees was Laura Fermi, the beautiful wife of Enrico Fermi. The Fermis, like other scientists, moved to Los Alamos as work at the Met Lab slowed down and the pace in New Mexico increased. Laura Fermi was struck by Hempelmann’s shyness. In a memoir, she remembered, “He was my first paying boss … and we both acted shy.
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His embarrassment showed in his easy blushing, which made him look little older than a schoolboy.”

Behind Hempelmann’s boyish demeanor, however, was the mind of a shrewd administrator who quickly recognized that radioactive contamination drifting off site might provoke possible lawsuits and create public relations problems down the road for Los Alamos. He fumed when his advice wasn’t taken and chafed under the yoke of the plodding bureaucracy.

That first year was so leisurely that Hempelmann undoubtedly had time to explore the remote country that lay outside the laboratory’s fences. Many of the Manhattan Project scientists, particularly those raised and educated in Europe, were stunned when they got off the train at the little station near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The intoxicating light,
the buoyant air, and the high elevation combined to produce a momentary vertigo. The vast distances glittered like the bottom of an ancient sea and blue mountains floated on the edges of the horizon. Here the skin of the world felt so thin it seemed that a bigger reality was about to break through. As they looked out upon the vastness, the thoughtful among them no doubt contemplated their own mortality and the fearsome weapon they had come to build.

In the winter the scientists and their wives organized ski trips across snow so light and powdery it seemed artificial. During those cold winter months, when the earth lay barren and the planet was tilted farthest from the sun, the New Mexico skies grew soft, filled with feathery clouds the color of mangos and tangerines. As the sun dipped below the horizon, the mountains east of the lab turned a luminous rose color. It was that extraordinary color which had prompted the Spanish settlers to name them the Sangre de Cristos, or blood of Christ.

In the summer the scientists hiked into the mountains or picked their way on horseback through forests and canyons filled with fantastic stone shapes. This was wild country, intimidating and lonely, country one had to acquire a taste for. “Nobody could think straight in a place like that,” the urbane Leo Szilard predicted.
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“Everybody who goes there will go crazy.” But once the brilliant landscape had permanently imprinted itself on their minds, some scientists yearned ever after to stand on ground that seemed to offer a vision of the four corners of the earth. Many never left. Others, such as Louis Hempelmann, bought second homes in New Mexico.

Hymer Friedell, a reserve officer for several years, was still working for Robert Stone in California when Pearl Harbor was bombed. Day after day he waited to be called up for active duty, but the orders never materialized. Friedell soon learned he had been put on an “essential list” by the dean of the medical school. Just thirty-one and feeling obligated to enlist in the military, Friedell told UCSF officials he must be removed from the list or he would resign. Sometime in the late summer of 1942, he got what he later described as “rather odd orders.” He was inducted into the Army at the Presideo in San Francisco and then instructed to don civilian clothes and report to a Captain Craftan at 5125 University Avenue in Chicago.
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The address was the Met Lab, where his boss, Robert Stone, had begun to visit periodically. Friedell was immediately told to continue on to the Manhattan Engineer District offices in New York
City. When he arrived, he learned that the Army had plans to create its own medical program.

Friedell was the first Army doctor assigned to the Manhattan Project. After his trip to New York, he returned to the Met Lab, where he served as a liaison between the Army and the laboratory and helped out with medical tasks. One of his patients was Edward Teller. “He thinks I’m the world’s greatest doctor—because I can recognize a hernia the size of my fist,” he once said.

Friedell was eventually transferred to Oak Ridge, which in mid-1943 became the new headquarters of the Manhattan Engineer District, or MED, as it was often referred to in documents. Soon after that, Colonel Nichols named him the executive officer of the Manhattan Project’s newly established Medical Section.
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General Groves liked Friedell but felt he was too inexperienced to head the section. “You’re too young for this racket,” Friedell quoted the general as saying.
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Groves had first wanted Robert Stone for the job. During a train trip to Chicago in early 1943, the general spent several hours trying to convince Stone to enlist in the Army so that he could supervise all of the Manhattan Project’s medical programs. But Stone wasn’t interested. In a letter to Arthur Compton, he explained, “General Groves was not entirely satisfied but agreed with me that he would not push the Army appointment, especially since this would mean a very great financial sacrifice on my part with no greater ability to serve the country.”
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