Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (80 page)

Jackie Oppenheimer, who came to Los Alamos in early 1945, when Frank was transferred there from Oak Ridge, recalled her own unhappy experiences of Kitty and her drinking:

Making Kitty’s life more difficult, and driving her deeper into alcoholism, was the birth of her daughter, Katherine. ‘Toni’, as she would be known throughout her life, was born on 7 December 1944, right in the middle of the most intense period of Oppenheimer’s time as director. This was when the search for a workable implosion design was at its most feverish, and before it was known that it would end successfully. It was when Oppenheimer was at his busiest and most anxious, and, though the baby was publicly heralded as a source of great delight and an endless stream of visitors came to the hospital specially to see her and to share (what was assumed to be) the Oppenheimers’ joy, the truth was, at that point in their lives, the responsibility of looking after a baby was the very last thing either Kitty or Robert Oppenheimer wanted.

Jackie Oppenheimer was shocked when she arrived at Los Alamos to discover that, after Toni’s birth, Kitty ‘would go off on a shopping trip for days to Albuquerque or even to the West Coast and leave the children in the hands of a maid’. Even more shocking to some was the fact that in April 1945, when Toni was just four months old, Kitty left Los Alamos for Pittsburgh, taking Peter, now nearly four years old, with her, but leaving baby Toni in the hands of a friend called Pat Sherr, who had recently had a miscarriage. She would not return for three and a half months, during which time Oppenheimer, fantastically busy, showed little inclination to spend much time with his daughter. ‘It was all very strange,’ Sherr later said. ‘He would come and sit and chat with me, but he wouldn’t ask to see the baby.’ Then, one day, shortly before Kitty’s return, Oppenheimer asked Sherr if she would like to adopt Toni. ‘Of course not,’ Sherr replied. Why would he even ask such a thing? ‘Because,’ said Oppenheimer, ‘I can’t love her.’

Poor little Toni arrived at a bad time, her first six months coinciding with the preparations for perhaps the most momentous scientific experiment in history: the test of the implosion bomb. The decision to conduct a full-scale test of an implosion bomb had been made back in March 1944, a month or so before it was finally established that implosion was the only hope for a plutonium bomb. Implosion was such a complicated and as yet little-understood process that it was felt such a test would be necessary. Responsibility for organising the test was given to E-9, a specially created group of the Engineering Division, which after the massive reorganisation of the late summer of 1944 became ‘X-2 Development, Engineering, Tests’, part of Kistiakowsky’s Explosives Division. The group leader was Kenneth Bainbridge.

In March 1945, X-2 was dissolved and Bainbridge was put in charge of what by then had acquired the name ‘Trinity Project’. When Oppenheimer was asked many years later about the name ‘Trinity’, he gave characteristically evasive answers. In 1962, Groves himself asked
Oppenheimer about it, suggesting that perhaps the name was chosen because it would be inconspicuous in an area where a lot of rivers and peaks were called ‘Trinity’. In his reply, Oppenheimer rejected that suggestion. ‘Why I chose the name,’ he told Groves, ‘is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne,
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written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation’:

‘That still does not make a Trinity,’ Oppenheimer acknowledged, ‘but in another, better known devotional poem
^fn56
Donne opens, “Batter my heart, three person’d God”; beyond this, I have no clues whatever.’

These allusions to Donne suggest that Oppenheimer chose the name in memory of Jean Tatlock, who loved Donne’s poetry, but it also seems possible that the name occurred to Oppenheimer in memory of the ‘pygmy triumvirate’, the ‘great troika’ of which he had been a part during his first trip to New Mexico. After all, the site chosen for the Trinity test, the Jornada del Muerto region north-west of Alamogordo, was not very far from areas of New Mexico – Roswell and Albuquerque, in particular – associated with that group, especially with Paul Horgan, the man who had coined those names.

The decision to use the Jornada del Muerto was made in September 1944, after which the US army took steps to secure an area occupying more than 400 square miles for the use of the test. On this site a base camp was constructed, which was ready by the end of December 1944. This then became home to a detachment of military police led by Lieutenant H.C. Bush.

With the successful conclusion of the implosion research in February 1945, Groves announced that the design of ‘Fat Man’ was frozen. That job was finished. The following month, Oppenheimer created a new division, the Trinity Project Division, made up chiefly of scientists from the Research Division, which would have responsibility for the coming test in Jornada del Muerto. The division leader was Kenneth Bainbridge. Despite all the work that had been done on the metallurgy of plutonium, the energy release of fission using fast neutrons, and so on, there was little consensus on exactly how big the blast would be when the Fat Man bomb went off. Some were still sceptical that it would work at all, while among those who expected
some kind of explosion the estimates of the energy yield, in terms of equivalent amounts of TNT, varied from 200 to 10,000 tons.

As Bainbridge was beginning the preparations for the Trinity test, the world outside Los Alamos was changing quickly and drastically. Hitler’s Third Reich was collapsing rapidly, under assault from the east by the Russians, from the west by the Allies, and from the air by the most relentless and deadly bombing campaign the world had ever seen. In February 1945 the historic city of Dresden was reduced to a smoking ruin when nearly 4,000 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices were dropped on it by more than 1,000 British and American heavy bombers. About 25,000 people were killed and more or less the entire city was destroyed. Berlin, too, came under heavy bombardment, and by April Russian tanks were approaching the city.

On 12 April 1945, on the brink of victory over the Germans, President Roosevelt suddenly died of a brain haemorrhage. At Los Alamos, three days later, a memorial service was held in a cinema, at which Oppenheimer, as Philip Morrison later put it, ‘spoke very quietly for two or three minutes out of his heart and ours’. The memorial address that Oppenheimer gave on that occasion has subsequently been published, revealing its eloquence to be tinged with a slightly histrionic note that was perhaps in keeping with the mood of his audience. ‘We have been living through years of great evil,’ Oppenheimer said, ‘and of great terror.’

He ended with reflections on a quotation from the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.’

Just over two weeks after Roosevelt’s death, Hitler too was dead, having shot himself in his bunker under Berlin on finally accepting that the war was lost. A week later, on 8 May 1945, the Germans offered their unconditional surrender.

At Los Alamos, the defeat of Germany did not in any way diminish the sense of urgency with which the newly established Trinity Project Division set about its task of organising the test of the plutonium bomb. Before attempting the full test, it was decided that a kind of dress rehearsal should be conducted, using 100 tons of TNT. The point of this was to calibrate and test the equipment that would be used for the real thing. This rehearsal took place on the morning of 7 May 1945. The TNT, stacked on a platform on top of a 20-foot tower, was exploded and measurements taken of the blast effect, the shock waves and the damage to equipment.

By this time, it was clear to everybody – as it had long been clear to Groves, if not to Oppenheimer – that, if the bomb was going to be used, it would be used against the Japanese. Already B-29 bombers had inflicted on Japan a bombing campaign even more intense and more deadly than that unleashed upon Germany, with the cities of Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe bearing the brunt of the attacks. The fire-bombing of Tokyo on 9 and 10 March, during which nearly 2,000 tons of incendiary bombs were dropped, setting large parts of the city ablaze and killing around 100,000 people, was at the time the most destructive air raid ever witnessed.

Yet, however deadly the attacks, they seemed to produce little diminution in the will to fight among the Japanese people, and it seemed clear that, if Japan were to be defeated, it would have to be, like Germany, invaded by an enormous land army. In his autobiography,
Now It Can Be Told
, Groves draws attention to the plans drawn up by the US military during 1945 for an invasion of Japan, and the potentially colossal US casualties those plans predicted. Back in the summer of 1944, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had adopted a strategy for the invasion of Japan that envisaged an assault on Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, on 1 October 1945, with the final push into Tokyo taking place three months later. This basic plan was confirmed as Allied strategy in April 1945, when it was estimated that thirty-six divisions – more than 1.5 million men – would be required, and, Groves adds darkly, ‘it was recognised that casualties would be heavy’. On 25 May 1945, recalibrated orders were given to the heads of the three armed forces to prepare the invasion of Kyushu, starting that November.

Meanwhile, Groves was hoping that the Manhattan Project would make such an invasion unnecessary, thereby providing an adequate response to the question Groves feared more than any other: what had the American people got from the $2 billion they had spent on the development of the
atomic bomb? For Groves, the question that needed to be addressed was not
whether
to drop the bomb on Japan, but on which Japanese city or cities it should be dropped. On 10 and 11 May, Oppenheimer hosted at Los Alamos meetings of the newly constituted Target Committee, which established criteria for the selection of targets. The minutes of these meetings have now been published and provide a chillingly matter-of-fact record of the way those present contemplated, with apparent calm, the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the destruction of sites of great historic and religious importance. The four targets recommended by the meeting were, in order: 1. Kyoto, 2. Hiroshima, 3. Yokohama and 4. Kokura Arsenal. The first two of these were rated AA. Of the first, the minutes comment: ‘From the psychological point of view there is the advantage that Kyoto is an intellectual center for Japan and the people there are more apt to appreciate the significance of such a weapon as the gadget.’ Hiroshima, it is remarked, ‘is a good radar target and it is such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged’. ‘There are adjacent hills which are likely to produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage.’ The influence of Bohr is discernible when, under the heading of ‘Psychological Factors in Target Selection’, it is noted that, as well as ‘obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan’, they should also aim at ‘making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released’.

Oppenheimer was also appointed, together with Fermi, Lawrence and Arthur Compton, as a member of the Scientific Advisory Panel to the War Department’s Interim Committee, which had the task of planning post-war atomic policy. At a meeting of this committee on 31 May 1945, the minutes reveal that the committee’s chairman, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, ‘expressed the view, a view shared by General Marshall, that this project should not be considered simply in terms of military weapons, but as a new relationship of man to the universe’. What Stimson meant by this, apparently, was that:

Later in the meeting this theme was picked up by Oppenheimer, who took the opportunity to present Bohr’s vision of openness. He is recorded as arguing: