American Prometheus (32 page)

Oppenheimer had not anticipated this consideration and Kamen thought he seemed shaken by his interruption. The two-hour meeting broke up without the unanimous support Oppenheimer had expected. A couple of days later, he found Kamen and said, “Gee, I don’t know. Maybe I did the wrong thing.” He then explained, “I went to see Lawrence, and Lawrence blew a gasket.” Lawrence—whose politics had become increasingly conservative over the years—was incensed that a communist-backed union was trying to organize the people in his laboratory. When he demanded to know who was behind this, Oppenheimer insisted, “I can’t tell you who they are. They’ll have to come tell you themselves.” Lawrence was furious, not only because he was violently opposed to his physicists and chemists joining a union, but because the incident demonstrated that his old friend was still wasting his precious time on left-wing politics. Lawrence had repeatedly scolded Oppenheimer about his “leftwandering activities” but once again Oppie argued with his usual eloquence that scientists had a responsibility to help society’s “underdogs.”

No wonder Lawrence was annoyed. That autumn Lawrence was trying, unsuccessfully, to bring Oppenheimer aboard the bomb project. “If he would just stop these nonsensical things,” he complained to Kamen, “we could get him on the project, but it’s impossible to get the Army to accept him.”

OPPENHEIMER BACKED OFF from the union in the autumn of 1941, but the notion of organizing the scientists in the Rad Lab did not die. A little more than a year later, in early 1943, Rossi Lomanitz, Irving David Fox, David Bohm, Bernard Peters and Max Friedman, all Oppenheimer students, did join the union (FAECT Local 25). The usual motivations for forming a union were conspicuously absent. Lomanitz, for one, was making $150 a month at the Rad Lab—more than double his previous salary. No one had complaints about the working conditions; everyone in the lab was eager to put in as many hours as they could. “It seemed like a dramatic thing to do,” recalled Lomanitz. “It was kind of a thing of youth. . . . It was a ridiculous reason for forming a union.”

Friedman was persuaded by Lomanitz and Weinberg to be the organizer within the Radiation Laboratory. “It was a title, I never did anything,” he recalled. But he thought in principle it was a fine idea to form a union. “Partly we were afraid of what the atom bomb might be used for. That was part of it. And part of it was that we thought the scientists shouldn’t just be [working on the bomb project] without any voice in what happens to their effort.”

The union rapidly drew the attention of Army intelligence officers who had the Radiation Laboratory under surveillance, and in August 1943 the War Department was warned that several people inside the Radiation Laboratory were “active communists.” Joe Weinberg’s name was mentioned. An attached intelligence report stated that Local 25 of FAECT was “an organization known to be dominated and controlled by Communist Party members or Communist Party sympathizers.” Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson weighed in with a note to the president: “Unless this can be at once stopped, I think the situation is very alarming.” Soon afterwards, the CIO was formally asked by the Roosevelt Administration to stop its organizing drive at the Berkeley lab.

By 1943, however, Oppenheimer had long since turned his back on union organizing. He did so not because he had changed his political views but because he had come to the realization that unless he followed Lawrence’s advice he would not be allowed to work on a project that he believed might be necessary to defeat Nazi Germany. During their arguments in the autumn of 1941 over his union-organizing activities, Lawrence had told him that James B. Conant, the president of Harvard University, had rebuked him for having discussed fission calculations with Oppenheimer, who was not then officially in the bomb project.

In point of fact, Oppenheimer had been collaborating with Lawrence since early 1941, when Lawrence began using his cyclotron to develop an electromagnetic process for separating uranium isotope 235 (U-235), which might be necessary to create a nuclear explosion. Oppenheimer and many other scientists around the country were aware that a Uranium Committee had been authorized by President Roosevelt in October 1939 to coordinate research on fission. But by June 1941 many physicists began to fear that the German scientific community might easily be far more advanced in fission research. That autumn Lawrence, worried by the lack of progress toward a practical bomb project, wrote to Compton and insisted that Oppenheimer be included in a secret meeting scheduled for October 21, 1941, at General Electric’s laboratory in Schenectady, New York. “Oppenheimer has important new ideas,” Lawrence wrote. Knowing that Oppenheimer’s name was widely associated with radical politics, Lawrence wrote Compton an additional note, reassuring him: “I have a great deal of confidence in Oppenheimer.”

Oppie attended the meeting in Schenectady on October 21, and his calculations on the amount of U-235 necessary for an effective weapon were an essential part of the meeting’s final report to Washington. A hundred kilograms, he calculated, would be sufficient to produce an explosive chain reaction. The meeting, attended by Conant, Compton, Lawrence and a handful of others, had a profound effect on Oppenheimer. Disheartened by the war news—the Nazis were at that moment advancing on Moscow— Oppenheimer was anxious to help prepare America for the coming war. He envied those of his colleagues who had gone off to work on radar; “but it was not until my first connection with the rudimentary atomic-energy enterprise,” he later testified, “that I began to see any way in which I could be of direct use.”

A month later, Oppenheimer wrote a note to Lawrence assuring him that his union activities were over: “. . . there will be no further difficulties at any time with [the union]. . . . I have not spoken to everyone involved, but all those to whom I have spoken agree with us; so you can forget it.”

But though Oppenheimer ceased his union activities, that same autumn he couldn’t refrain from taking a strong public stand on a question of civil liberties. Across the continent, a New York politician, State Senator F. R. Coudert, Jr., was using his position as co-chair of New York’s Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate the Public Educational System to orchestrate a highly publicized witch-hunt against alleged subversives in New York City’s public universities. By September 1941, City College alone had dismissed twenty-eight staff members, some of whom were members of the New York branch of the Teachers’ Union—the same union to which Oppenheimer belonged in Berkeley. The American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom (ACDIF), to which Oppenheimer also belonged, published a statement condemning the dismissals. In response, Senator Coudert accused the ACDIF of having ties to communists, and a
New York Times
editorial lent support to Coudert’s attack.

Into this political thicket waded Oppenheimer with a strongly worded protest. His letter of October 13, 1941, was by stages polite in tone, witty, ironical and then cuttingly sarcastic. Oppenheimer reminded the senator that the Bill of Rights guaranteed not merely the right to hold any belief, however radical, but the right to express that belief in speech or in writing with “anonymity.” The activities, he wrote, of “teachers who were communists or communist sympathizers consisted precisely in meeting, speaking their views, and publishing them (often anonymously), in engaging, that is, in practices specifically protected by the Bill of Rights.” Concluding on a note of defiance, he observed that “it took your own statement, with its sanctimonious equivocations and its red baiting, to get me to believe that the stories of mixed cajolery, intimidation and arrogance on the part of the committee of which you are chairman, are in fact true.”

IN THE LATE 1930S, Robert Oppenheimer found himself in the center of things. And that’s where he wanted to be. “Everything that happened,” said Kamen, “you’d go to Oppenheimer, and tell him what it was and he would think about it and come up with an explanation. He was the official explainer.” And then, beginning in 1941, Oppenheimer had some reason to think that he was being kept out of the loop. “All of a sudden,” Kamen said, “nobody’s talking to him. He’s out of it. There’s something big going on over there, but he doesn’t know what it is. And so he was getting more and more frustrated and Lawrence is very worried because he feels that, after all, Oppenheimer can certainly figure out what’s going on, so the security is nonsense to keep him out of it. Better to have him in. And I imagine that’s what finally happened; they said it’s easier to monitor him if he’s inside the project than outside.”

On Saturday evening, December 6, 1941, Oppenheimer attended a fundraiser for veterans of the Spanish Civil War. He later testified that the next day, after hearing of the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he decided “that I had had about enough of the Spanish cause, and that there were other and more pressing crises in the world.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“The Coordinator of Rapid Rupture”

Now I could see at firsthand the tremendous intellectual power of Oppenheimer who was the unquestioned
leader of our group. . . . The intellectual experience was
unforgettable.

HANS BETHE

OPPENHEIMER’S STEADY AND OFTEN BRILLIANT contributions at the “uranium problem” meetings he was invited to attend were impressive. He was rapidly becoming indispensable. His politics aside, he was the perfect recruit for this scientific team. His comprehension of the issues was profound, his interpersonal skills were now finely honed, and his enthusiasm for the problems at hand was infectious. In less than a decade and a half, Oppenheimer had transformed himself through his work and his social life from an awkward scientific prodigy into a sophisticated and charismatic intellectual leader. It did not take long for those he worked with to be convinced that if the problems associated with building an atomic bomb were to be solved quickly, Oppie had to play an important role in the process.

Oppenheimer and many other physicists around the country had known as early as February 1939 that an atomic bomb was a real possibility. But arousing the government’s interest in the matter would take time. A month before war broke out in Europe (September 1, 1939), Leo Szilard had persuaded Albert Einstein to sign his name to a letter (written by Szilard) addressed to President Franklin Roosevelt. The letter warned the president “that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may be constructed.” He pointed out that “a single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.” Ominously, he suggested that the Germans might already be working on such a bomb: “I understand Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. . . .”

Upon receipt of Einstein’s letter, President Roosevelt established an ad hoc “Uranium Committee” headed by a physicist, Lyman C. Briggs. And then, for nearly two years, very little happened. But across the Atlantic Ocean, two German physicists living as refugees in Britain, Otto Frisch and Rudolph Peierls, persuaded the British wartime government that an atomic bomb project was a matter of real urgency. In the spring of 1941, a top-secret British group code-named the MAUD Committee produced a report on “The Use of Uranium for a Bomb.” It suggested that a bomb made from plutonium or uranium might be small enough to carry in existing aircraft— and that such a bomb might be constructed within two years. About the same time, in June 1941, the Roosevelt Administration created an Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) to marshal science for military purposes. The OSRD was chaired by Vannevar Bush, an engineer and MIT professor who was then president of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. Initially, Bush told President Roosevelt that the possibility of making an atomic bomb was “very remote.” But after reading the MAUD report, Bush changed his mind. Although the matter was still “highly abstruse,” he wrote Roosevelt on July 16, 1941, “one thing is certain: if such an explosion were made it would be thousands of times more powerful than existing explosives, and its use might be determining.”

Suddenly, things began to happen. Bush’s July memorandum persuaded Roosevelt to replace Briggs’ Uranium Committee with a high-powered group that would report directly to the White House. Code-named the S-1 Committee, this group included Bush, Harvard’s James Conant, War Secretary Henry Stimson, Chief of Staff George C. Marshall and Vice President Henry Wallace. These men believed that they were in a race against the Germans, a race that might easily determine the outcome of the war. Conant served as chairman of S-1, and together with Bush he now began to organize the government’s enormous resources to recruit scientists around the country to work on the bomb project.

In January 1942, Robert was elated to learn that he might be put in charge of fast-neutron research in Berkeley—work that he considered critical to the project. Oppenheimer “would be a tremendous asset in every way,” Lawrence had told Conant. “He combines a penetrating insight of the theoretical aspects of the whole program with solid common sense, which sometimes in certain directions seems to be lacking. . . .” So in May, Oppenheimer was formally appointed S-1’s director of fast-neutron research with the curious title Coordinator of Rapid Rupture. Almost immediately, he began to organize a highly secret summer seminar of top theoretical physicists whose job it was to outline a bare-bones design of an atomic bomb. Hans Bethe was first on his list of invitees. Now thirty-six years old, the German-born Bethe had fled Europe in 1935 and moved to Cornell University, where he became a professor of physics in 1937. So concerned was Oppenheimer to assure Bethe’s attendance that he enlisted Harvard’s senior theoretical physicist, John H. Van Vleck, to help recruit him. He told Van Vleck that the “essential point is to enlist Bethe’s interest, to impress on him the magnitude of the job we have to do.” Bethe was then working on military applications of radar, a project he viewed as far more practical than anything associated with nuclear physics. But he was eventually persuaded to spend the summer at Berkeley. So too was Edward Teller, a Hungarian-born physicist then teaching at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Also recruited were Oppenheimer’s Swiss physicist friends, Felix Bloch of Stanford University and Emil Konopinski of Indiana University. Oppenheimer also invited Robert Serber and several other former students. He called this outstanding group of physicists his “luminaries.”