Pandora's Keepers (11 page)

Dear Wilfred:

You have been having a very anxious time recently, but let us hope the war clouds have passed and that we have ahead of us at least a decade of peace. I don’t think it absurd to believe it is possible that we have seen a turning point in history, that henceforth international disputes of great powers will be settled by peaceful negotiations and not by war.

Cordially,
Ernest
19

“I still think war is going to be avoided,” he wrote his parents on August 29, 1939, adding confidently: “All this discussion certainly must mean that Hitler is backing down.”
20
Three days later Nazi Germany invaded Poland and started World War II.

Oliphant and his British sponsors knew that if they could convince Lawrence of the feasibility of a bomb, Lawrence would grab hold of the idea and push it relentlessly in American scientific circles, while leaving the political ramifications to others. They thought Lawrence would get it done without asking too many questions. And although Lawrence was quite clearly a political naïf, they had chosen just the right man.

The relationship between Britain and America was growing closer when Oliphant traveled to Berkeley in late September 1941. Though still a nonbelligerent, the United States was far from neutral. Its sympathies lay with the hard-pressed British, who had survived a Nazi aerial blitz the previous summer. In the fall of 1940 the Roosevelt administration had transferred fifty destroyers to Britain in return for U.S. rights to build bases in British possessions in the Caribbean and the western Atlantic, and Congress had passed the first peacetime military draft in American history. In the spring of 1941 direct Lend-Lease aid to Britain began. The United States was edging toward war on the side of Britain.

On Sunday, September 21, 1941, Lawrence picked up Oliphant at the San Francisco train station in his car and drove up into the green hills above the Berkeley campus, where the magnet for his giant new 184-inch cyclotron was being erected on the summit of Charter Hill. It was a beautiful autumn day and far below, beyond the gardens and lawns of Berkeley, the bridges of San Francisco Bay shone in the sun. Lawrence’s driving petrified Oliphant. Pressing the accelerator to the floor and keeping his face turned toward his passenger, Lawrence threw the car forward in jerks and spasms, swaying from one side of the twisting dirt road to the other, cutting corners at full speed, paying no heed to other cars as they passed.

Nervously gripping the door handle, Oliphant told Lawrence about Frisch and Peierls’s calculation that a bomb could be made with just a few kilograms of U-235, and about the methods under study in Britain for separating the isotope from natural uranium. Lawrence was deeply impressed by the serious view of British scientists not only that atomic bombs were quite possible but that Nazi Germany might be working on the problem. He suggested the possibility of extracting U-235 through electromagnetic separation using his new 184-inch cyclotron. He began to describe to Oliphant a fantastic vision of gigantic laboratories and industrial complexes, armies of specially trained scientists and arsenals of newly invented tools and instruments, his voice rising with excitement. It was a contagious exuberance that overwhelmed doubt and drowned all sense of reality in a flood of buoyant optimism. When Lawrence was talking, it was impossible not to fall under the almost hypnotic spell of his enthusiasm—he even convinced himself. Here was something big enough, Oliphant thought, for Lawrence’s talents and ambition. That other physicists might find such a vision fantastic would only spur him to prove them wrong.

Lawrence immediately put his Rad Lab staff to work. A chemist at the Rad Lab, Glenn Seaborg, had recently hit upon the discovery that neutrons absorbed by U-238 transformed uranium into a heavier element—plutonium—that also was fissionable by slow neutrons. This was an accidental but important discovery, just like fission had been. Not only could plutonium be made in a chain-reacting pile, but it was a different chemical element, not just another isotope of uranium, and could therefore be separated from U-238 through a comparatively easier and less expensive process than U-235. Lawrence reasoned that plutonium might supplement U-235 as a source for atomic bombs.

In the fall of 1941—a time when the war was going very badly for Hitler’s enemies—Lawrence instructed Rad Lab scientists to convert the cyclotrons for use in the electromagnetic separation of U-235. It was an extremely slow, complicated, and expensive way to produce fissionable material for a bomb. By February 1942 the Rad Lab had produced three samples of U-235 weighing all of seventy-five micro-grams each. A microgram was a speck barely big enough for the eye to see, and each sample contained only 30 percent “enriched” U-235. Lawrence had a long way to go—how was he going to separate
kilograms
of pure fissionable U-235? Lawrence had committed himself to the goal, however, and was absolutely determined to see it through. “That was just the beginning,” he said with great assurance.
21
He told his contacts in Washington that the project should be expanded to bring in more scientists and to build the infrastructure necessary to accomplish the task.

Driven by a determination that Hitler not get the bomb first, Lawrence drove himself and his staff relentlessly. He demanded complete dedication to the task at hand. He worked long hours and expected others to do the same. When delays occurred or things went wrong, he bawled people out unmercifully, though he never asked others to do anything he would not do himself and he showed appreciation for results. He led by example and maintained his leadership through the intensity with which he followed the isotope-separation work. He believed that if you wanted something to come true, you made it come true by pushing like hell. Somehow a way could be found, and he had faith that he would get there. With such effort, he thought, nothing was impossible.

Lawrence met the Rad Lab staff every morning at eight. People took pains to be already in their seats. The Maestro made a grand and lordly appearance, stomping in, slowly striding the length of the room, pounding the floor with his feet. Beaming at the assembled staff, he took his seat in a big red leather armchair facing sideways between a blackboard and the audience. The thing to do, he would then announce, was
to get the job done
—he expected everyone to share his sense of urgency. Later in the day he would walk unannounced through the lab and query people about their work. He did not say much. Often it was simply, “What are you doing? Why are you doing that?” If they answered hesitantly or pessimistically, Lawrence frowned. If they went into detail, he looked impatient. Above all, he hated idleness; there was an important job to be done and no time to waste in doing it. “The esprit has perked up considerably with everybody conscious of the necessity to work like the devil,” wrote one Rad Lab staffer after a surprise visit by the director.
22

The fast pace, constant work, and self-imposed stress took its toll on Lawrence. His full head of blond hair began to recede. His thin, muscular face grew puffier and pastier. Once remarkably energetic, he now was slowed by frequent and severe colds and a chronic backache. On those rare occasions when he went home early for an evening with his family, he usually tired after a few minutes of hugging and tossing around his children. Neighborhood kids, used to congregating noisily at the sprawling Lawrence home in the afternoon, frayed his taut nerves and were abruptly ordered out. He found it much more difficult to relax than to wrestle with the atomic project.

Lawrence felt in his bones that an atomic bomb could be made. He was confident that America possessed the ability and resources to do it. He insisted that prudence required stepping up research, if only because of what the Nazis might be doing. Szilard and Teller had said much the same before, but as refugees they were not trusted by close-minded government bureaucrats. They also lacked Lawrence’s dogged optimism.

But although Lawrence’s hard sell worked with many people, it did not with Vannevar Bush. A fit man of fifty-two, Bush was a shrewd Yankee who was also an astute administrator with distinguished accomplishments: endless engineering patents, the vice presidency of MIT until 1938, then direction of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, a premier research organization. Now he was the scientific adviser to President Roosevelt, and in that capacity, head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), which had been established by executive order (under the name National Defense Research Committee)
^*
on June 27, 1940, the day after the Nazis occupied Paris.

The mission of the OSRD, which had absorbed the Uranium Committee, was to mobilize the nation’s scientific resources and apply them to national defense. This included support of research that would result in weapons applicable to the present war. To Bush, the defense of the free world in the fall of 1941 was in such a perilous state that only research efforts likely to yield quick results were worthy of serious consideration. He therefore thought physicists such as Lawrence should concentrate their efforts on projects that promised results within a matter of months, or at most a year or two—like radar and sonar. In Bush’s opinion, America could not afford to devote its limited scientific resources to an extravagant program of uncertain success.

More significant than Lawrence’s prodding was the MAUD Committee Report, which a British scientific liaison officer passed along to Bush on a visit to Washington in early October 1941. The report’s optimism about techniques for isotope separation and the prospects for development of an atomic bomb diminished his skepticism at the same time that it increased his fear of Germany’s success in exploiting fission. Bush took the MAUD Report to the White House on October ninth. He summarized its conclusions for the president: that the explosive core of a fission bomb might weigh twenty-five pounds; that it might explode with a force equivalent to nearly two thousand tons of TNT; that a vast industrial plant would be necessary to separate the fissionable U-235; and that British scientists estimated the first bombs might be ready in two years. He emphasized that he based his statements “primarily on calculation with some laboratory investigation, but not on a proved case,” and therefore could not guarantee success.
23

Roosevelt’s mood had changed considerably since Einstein’s letter two years earlier. The war felt much nearer and more nearly inevitable for the United States in 1941 than it had in 1939. If the British were pursuing such a promising line of research, it seemed quite possible that the Germans were, too. No president could assume anything less. Thus, FDR endorsed an American atomic project and directed that consideration of policy—what might be done with a bomb, if it was made—be restricted to a Top Policy Group consisting of Vice President Henry Wallace, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, Bush, and Bush’s OSRD deputy, James Conant, a noted chemist and president of Harvard University. Roosevelt emphasized the importance of keeping knowledge of the project within the smallest possible circle, a theme he would stress again and again throughout the war. Within the next few months the organization, the tempo, and the attitude of the American government toward research on an atomic bomb would alter dramatically.

The United States was not yet committed to building an atomic bomb, but it was now committed to exploring whether one could be built. With Roosevelt’s permission, Bush ordered a feasibility study and a timetable. What were the prospects of making an atomic bomb? Could it be finished in time to help win the war? Should Washington fund an all-out effort when research funds were limited and other projects of more immediate promise and effectiveness—such as radar and the proximity fuse—existed? To answer these questions, Bush chose a senior American physicist with a Nobel Prize, excellent contacts, and long experience on the national scientific scene named Arthur Compton.

Broad-shouldered and athletic with a thick mustache, deep-set gray eyes, and a strong chin, Compton was a professor of physics at the University of Chicago. Principled and firm yet pragmatic, Compton fit neatly and easily into the project: he was popular in scientific circles, he had an agreeable disposition, and he had powerful connections. Scion of a famous American scientific family—his brother Karl was president of MIT—Compton was not policy-oriented like Bush but was trusted by high officials in Washington whose background and upbringing was similar to his own: a midwestern childhood in a mid-western family with midwestern Protestant beliefs. Compton moved easily in the world of the American Establishment.

As a boy, Compton had listened spellbound as his father described the discovery of a new chemical element that glowed with brilliant luminosity: radium. What especially intrigued him was that radium was warm to the touch. Where did such heat—radioactivity—come from? Could this heat be exploited for energy? Such questions stirred his imagination. When Compton was twelve, he sat on the front porch one night. The winter air was crisp and clear as he watched pinpricks of starlight. He felt a sense of wonder and sat up “all night, astonished, among the stars.”
24
Soon he was spending every night in the backyard, searching the face of the moon with binoculars until he memorized its cratered features. He bought a telescope with his savings and used it to view the moons of Jupiter. By putting a piece of welder’s glass in front of the telescope, he even watched the sun. He began to feel a “strong emotional stirring,” as he later put it, about science.
25

Compton became a physicist and demonstrated his brilliance early in his career when he won a Nobel Prize in 1927 for his study of X rays, following that up with pioneering work on cosmic rays in the 1930s. Compton’s bold experiments in the new field of cosmic rays were carried out at high altitudes in the Himalaya, the Andes, and the Artic, and at the Equator. Travel to far-flung corners of the globe taught the midwesterner that other people of other cultures and colors were just as human as he. And it introduced him to such European physicists as Szilard, Fermi, and Bohr, whom he came to know well.