Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (61 page)

That man was Colonel Leslie Groves, a large and indomitable figure, who stood six feet tall and weighed about eighteen stone (252 pounds). Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth D. Nichols, who served under him for many
years, called him ‘the biggest sonovabitch I’ve ever met in my life, but also one of the most capable individuals’. Groves had recently undertaken successfully the demanding task of supervising the construction of the Pentagon, which, impressively, he completed well within the budget he had been allocated. For this, and other reasons, he had a reputation for being a man who got things done. On 17 September 1942, he was in Washington, testifying to the Military Affairs Committee, when he met General Somervell, who told him: ‘The Secretary of War has selected you for a very important assignment.’

Groves was not particularly happy about this appointment, even though Somervell told him that if he did it correctly, ‘it will win the war’. Groves wanted to get out of Washington and into battle, commanding soldiers, not directing civilian scientists. The silver lining offered to him was that, as reward for taking on the job, he would be promoted to brigadier general. The project of which General Groves (as everybody henceforth called him) was now in overall charge had already been christened the ‘Manhattan Project’ by his predecessor, Colonel Marshall, who worked out of an office in Manhattan. Even though Groves had his office in Washington rather than Manhattan, he kept this previous name for the project, its misleading connotations considered by him to be an asset.

From the very beginning, Groves ran the project with a characteristic determination to get the job done and let nothing and nobody stand in his way. With a confidence and speed that inspired both admiration and fear, he took several decisive steps in the first few days of his appointment. On his first day in command, he sent Nichols to buy 1,250 tons of uranium ore from the Belgians, who had been trying to interest the US government in it for the previous six months. The next day, he persuaded (‘bullied’ is probably the word) the civilian head of the War Production Board to give the Manhattan Project a top-priority AAA rating, which meant that he would not have to compete with any other war project for funds and resources. The same day, he acquired for the project a plot of land in Tennessee that extended over 50,000 acres. It was called Oak Ridge and would serve as the site for the industrial plants that would be required to produce the enriched uranium needed for the bomb.

As yet, however, it had not been decided exactly what plants would be built at Oak Ridge. Having been briefed by Bush on the work of the S-1 committee, Groves decided to visit every major site involved in the project. He began with the Westinghouse Research Laboratory in Pittsburgh and the University of Virginia, which were responsible for the development of the centrifuge method of isotope separation. At both places, Groves was horrified to learn how little had been achieved and in what a leisurely manner the work was being conducted. Though it would become in modern times the main method of enriching uranium,
the centrifuge method was, on Groves’s orders, abandoned by the Manhattan Project.

Groves next went to New York to visit Columbia, where Harold Urey and his colleague John Dunning were working on the gaseous-diffusion method. There, Groves discovered that the
theory
of gaseous diffusion was developing nicely, but it had not been used to produce even a speck of U-235, nor did it look at all likely that it could be used on an industrial scale for a long time.

On 5 October, Groves went to Chicago, where he was shown the pile of graphite that was being amassed for the nuclear reactor, and where he attended a meeting of the scientists working at the Met Lab. It was an impressive group that included no fewer than three Nobel laureates (Compton, Fermi and Franck), as well as Szilard, Wigner and about a dozen others. However, the meeting was tense; the scientists, especially Szilard, were suspicious of the military, and Groves was contemptuous of what he regarded as the arrogance and impracticality of the theorists. At the end of the meeting, Groves told the scientists that, though he did not have a PhD, he had ten years of formal education after he left college, so ‘That would be the equivalent of about two PhDs, wouldn’t it?’ There was an embarrassed silence, and then Groves left. ‘You see what I told you?’ Szilard exclaimed after Groves had gone. ‘How can you work with people like that?’

After Chicago, Groves travelled to Berkeley to meet Lawrence and see the Calutron, which Lawrence demonstrated with all the winning, boyish enthusiasm that had served him so well and landed him so many prizes and so much research funding in the past. Groves, however, was not especially impressed with the machinery or especially charmed by Lawrence’s breezy optimism. Rather, he saw in Lawrence the same frustrating failure to see the project in industrial, rather than academic, terms that he had seen everywhere else. Groves wanted someone to start talking about getting
pounds
, not micrograms, of enriched uranium. Instead of which, Lawrence, having shown Groves the magnificence of the 184-inch Calutron, was forced to admit, when asked how much uranium he had separated so far: ‘Well, actually, we don’t get any sizeable separation at all. I mean, not yet. This is still experimental, you see . . .’

Oppenheimer’s first meeting with Groves took place on 8 October 1942 at a lunch hosted by Robert Sproul, President of Berkeley. In some ways, the meeting is reminiscent of the moment in 1926 when, as an unknown, twenty-two-year-old graduate student at Cambridge, Oppenheimer had been introduced to Max Born, then the leading theorist in the emerging field of quantum mechanics. At that meeting Oppenheimer had seemed to cast a spell over Born, a spell that resulted in an invitation to come to Göttingen, the very centre of research into quantum mechanics, where
he was treated as if he in some way had superiority over Born. Similarly, when he met Groves, Oppenheimer was, compared to the people Groves had already met, a relatively junior member of the project. He was not, like Compton, Fermi, Franck and Lawrence, a Nobel Prize-winner; nor was he, like Szilard, Teller and Wigner, an originator of the atomic-bomb project. Moreover, he seemed, in his love of French poetry, his absorption in the literature of Hinduism and his resolutely
theoretical
approach to physics, the very personification of the remote academic whom Groves had come to despise.

And yet, on meeting the thirty-eight-year-old Oppenheimer, Groves was immediately won over, feeling that here, at last, was someone who could see and understand the
real
problems that the project faced. A clue to Oppenheimer’s success with both Born and Groves perhaps lies in a remark Haakon Chevalier once made about him: ‘He was always, without seeming effort, aware of, and responsive to, everyone in the room, and was constantly anticipating unspoken wishes.’

Certainly, Oppenheimer seems to have had an unerring sense of what Groves wished to hear. In his own account of the history of the Manhattan Project,
Now It Can Be Told
, Groves says remarkably little about his first meeting with Oppenheimer, and nothing at all about his own first impressions. He says only that at this first meeting they ‘discussed at some length the results of his study and the methods by which he had reached his conclusions’. From this, it is impossible to say why Groves took such a liking to Oppenheimer, but in the autobiographical statement that Oppenheimer prepared for his security case in 1954, one begins to realise what Groves might have seen in him. Remembering the period immediately after the meeting of ‘luminaries’ at Berkeley in July 1942, Oppenheimer writes:

He also says that, when Groves assumed control of the project, ‘I discussed with him the need for an atomic bomb laboratory’, and reveals
that he, at least, was happy with the idea of ‘making it a Military Establishment in which key personnel would be commissioned as officers’, even to the extent of taking the first steps towards joining the army himself.

If
this
is what Groves meant by ‘the results of his study and the methods by which he had reached his conclusions’, then one can see why he liked what he heard so much. From the other scientists he had been met with either condescension and hostility or a resolute determination to impress and appear upbeat. Now here was a scientist talking Groves’s language and echoing his own thoughts and frustrations, expressing the dissatisfaction that he himself had felt about the pace of the work being carried out, and emphasising the need for a major change in the organisation, for more central control, in order to get the project moving more quickly. All this, one imagines, was music to Groves’s ears.

So impressed was Groves that a week later, while he was again visiting Chicago, he asked Oppenheimer to join him in order to discuss his idea of a central laboratory. Then, when the time came for Groves to leave for New York, he asked Oppenheimer to accompany him on the journey. So it was that Oppenheimer and Groves, together with Kenneth Nichols and Colonel Marshall – all four of them squeezed into a tiny compartment on a train – discussed how and where the bomb laboratory might be created. From this conversation the idea of a single laboratory was developed, now envisaged as a place, preferably in a remote location away from prying eyes and ears, where all the scientists working on the design and production of the bomb – rather than on chain reactions, methods of isotope separation, and the like – could be gathered together. There, under the watchful control and guidance of the military, the scientists could pursue their work, while sharing with each other (but not with anybody else) their ideas and information.

Before he set off for Chicago, Oppenheimer wrote to John Manley, the experimental physicist who had been appointed as his assistant, telling him that Groves had seemed ‘convinced of the necessity for proceeding immediately with the construction of the laboratory and the reorganization of our work’. He also advised him that ‘some far reaching geographical change in plans seems to be on the cards’, since Groves had apparently gone off his original idea of placing the laboratory at Oak Ridge (in fact, Oppenheimer had talked him out of it, on the grounds that the laboratory should not be envisaged as a mere appendage of the isotope-separation plant).

Manley, who was a specialist in neutron physics, had worked with Fermi and Szilard at Columbia before taking up a position at the University of Illinois in 1937. Since January 1942 he had been a member of the Met Lab at Chicago, where he remained after his appointment as Oppenheimer’s
assistant in fast-neutron research. ‘I let myself be persuaded to join Oppenheimer with some misgivings,’ he later recalled. ‘I had only briefly met him. I had given a colloquium in Berkeley a year or two before and I was somewhat frightened of his evident erudition and his lack of interest in mundane affairs.’

To Manley’s surprise, he and Oppenheimer got on well. While Oppenheimer and his team at Berkeley made calculations, Manley’s task was to supply them with measurements taken from experiments using the particle accelerators at no fewer than nine universities. ‘I can’t tell you how
difficult
those experiments were,’ Manley wrote. ‘The amounts of material to work with were infinitesimal . . . just practically invisible quantities.’ Particularly frustrating was the problem of liaising with the various centres of research, which was the main factor in persuading Oppenheimer and Manley of the need for a single laboratory.

In a subsequent letter written after his train ride to New York with Groves, Oppenheimer told Manley that Groves had been out west and that ‘the question of site is well along toward settlement’. Evidently, by this time (the first week of November 1942), Oppenheimer had managed to steer Groves’s thoughts about the location of the laboratory towards the countryside that Oppenheimer knew and loved best: the mountains of northern New Mexico. ‘It is a lovely spot,’ Oppenheimer told Manley, ‘and in every way satisfactory, and the only points which now have to be settled are whether the human and legal aspects of the necessary evacuations make insuperable difficulties.’ The delicate nature of one of these difficulties is perhaps indicated at the end of the letter, where he reveals that he is not sending a copy of it to Compton. He would, he wrote, be happy if Manley told Compton ‘anything about the developments in physics that you think he would like to hear’. But, he implored: ‘Don’t tell him about the laboratory.’ As he grew closer to Groves, as the theoretical subgroup of S-1 that he headed acquired a greater and greater role, and as the plans for a central laboratory seemed more and more likely to succeed, Oppenheimer surely guessed that Compton’s position as the head of the scientific aspect of the Manhattan Project was likely to be short-lived. If the plan for a central laboratory went ahead and Oppenheimer were placed in charge of that laboratory, then, instead of Oppenheimer working as a consultant for a project headed by Compton, Compton would, in effect, be working for a project led by Oppenheimer.

On 16 November, Oppenheimer, together with Ed McMillan and Colonel Dudley, visited Jemez Springs, New Mexico. In the afternoon they were joined by Groves, who, confirming the view that Oppenheimer and McMillan had already come to, pronounced abruptly as soon as he arrived: ‘This will never do.’ The canyon was too deep, its walls too steep to consider as a suitable spot for a major programme of building.
Oppenheimer then suggested as an alternative a boys’ school on the east side of the Jemez range that was built on a flat mesa: the Los Alamos Ranch School. ‘As soon as Groves saw it,’ McMillan later recalled, ‘he said, in effect, “This is the place.”’ On 7 December 1942, the school was issued with a formal notice of eviction, and it closed the following February. A month after that, the first scientists arrived at what was, by then, a bomb laboratory. Officially, it was now called ‘Project Y’.
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