109 East Palace

ALSO BY JENNET CONANT

Tuxedo Park:
A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science
That Changed the Course of World War II

SIMON & SCHUSTER
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Copyright © 2005 by Jennet Conant
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

S
IMON
& S
CHUSTER
and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Conant, Jennet.

109 East Palace : Robert Oppenheimer and the secret city of Los Alamos / Jennet Conant.
p.   cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory—History.  2. Manhattan Project (U.S.)—History.  3. Atomic bomb—United States—History.  4. McKibbin, Dorothy Scarritt, 1897-1985.  5. Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 1904-1967.  6. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory—Biography.  7. Manhattan Project (U.S.)—Biography.  8. Physicists—Biography.  I. Title.
QC773.A1C66   2005   623.4′5119′0973—dc22   2005042497

ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8542-8
ISBN-10: 1-4165-8542-7

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For Grandpa

CONTENTS

Preface

ONE:
  
Charmed

TWO:
  
A Most Improbable Choice

THREE:
  
The Bluest Eyes I’ve Ever Seen

FOUR:
  
Cowboy Boots and All

FIVE:
  
The Gatekeeper

SIX:
  
The Professor and the General

SEVEN:
  
Summer Camp

EIGHT:
  
Lost Almost

NINE:
  
Welcome Distractions

TEN:
  
Nothing Dangerous

ELEVEN:
  
The Big Shot

TWELVE:
  
Baby Boom

THIRTEEN:
  
Summer Lightning

FOURTEEN:
  
A Bad Case of the Jitters

FIFTEEN:
  
Playing with Fire

SIXTEEN:
  
A Dirty Trick

SEVENTEEN:
  
Everything Was Different

EIGHTEEN:
  
A Rain of Ruin

NINETEEN:
  
By Our Works We Are Committed

TWENTY:
  
Elysian Dreamer

TWENTY-ONE:
  
Scorpions in a Bottle

TWENTY-TWO:
  
Fallout

Author’s Note on Sources

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgments

They won't believe you, when the time comes

that this can be told.

It is more fantastic than Jules Verne.

—J
AMES
B. C
ONANT
TO THE
N
EW
Y
ORK
T
IMES'
W
ILLIAM
L. L
AURENCE
IN SPRING 1945

PREFACE

For as long as I can remember, my grandfather James B. Conant kept a memento of Los Alamos on the desk in his study. It was a sample of trinitite, fused sand from the crater in the desert floor formed by the first explosion of an atomic bomb at the Trinity test site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. It had been embedded in Lucite for safekeeping, but I was often warned not to play with it as a child because it was still “hot” and emitted enough low-level radiation to set a Geiger counter madly clicking. The rock was a potent talisman from my grandfather’s past—a tumultuous time during which he took on the secret assignment of investigating the feasibility of designing and building a nuclear weapon for use in the war against Germany. He ultimately became the administrator of the Manhattan Project and the classified Los Alamos bomb laboratory, located on a remote mountaintop in New Mexico. After the successive bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought World War II to a swift and decisive end, he emerged as one of the country’s great scientific leaders in the eyes of some, and as a mass murderer to others, responsible for helping to create the most diabolical weapon in the history of the world and for recommending its use against Japan.

Los Alamos was the chief morality tale of my childhood, as intrinsic, formative, and fraught as the most morbid of Mother Goose nursery rhymes are to other children. Like most good stories, it featured a cast of heroes and villains; only they changed depending on who was telling the tale. My white-haired, bespectacled grandfather, a lean, austere Yankee mellowed by age and made approachable by the twinkle in his eyes, never expressed regret over his role in World War II. I loved him, and I would listen raptly to the stories of those urgent, exciting days, when the army often dispatched a special military plane to retrieve him from the isolated cabin in Randolph, New Hampshire, at the foot of the Presidential Range, which was for more than three decades our family’s summer home. Blue Cottage, as the house was known, was so far removed from the nearest town, and communication so uncertain, that the army was forced to run a special phone line down the dirt road to ensure they could reach him in an emergency. When the scientists who were his old friends would come to visit, they would reminisce about their pioneer days at Los Alamos, where the most brilliant, sophisticated men in the world attempted to do nuclear physics while cooking on Bunsen burners and camping out. In their company, my grandfather would relax his guard, and hearing their laughter and stories of absurd mix-ups, near misses, and desperate last-minute saves, I found it impossible not to come away with the impression that despite the pressure and grim purpose, theirs had been the adventure of a lifetime.