Pandora's Keepers (13 page)

In south-central Washington State, the small town of Hanford sat in the midst of a vast area of sagebrush and sand, twenty miles north of Richland, bounded on three sides by a huge bend in the Columbia River. This unusual combination—large amounts of water flowing through sparsely peopled desert—made the site suitable for another prong of the Manhattan Project. The Columbia River would provide the enormous amount of water necessary to cool three gigantic piles to be built there for the production of plutonium, an alternative (and more easily obtained) source of fissionable material for the bomb. The isolated location—the population density was just 2.2 persons per square mile—would mitigate the effects of any accidental radioactive release and be easy to guard. In time, the Hanford facility would grow to more than 428,000 acres—500 square miles.
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To recruit a massive labor force of construction workers for the Hanford site at a time when every war industry in America was begging for manpower was an extraordinary task. The White House cabled regional employment offices, giving preference by direction of the president himself to the Hanford Engineering Works, as it was called, and authorizing them, if necessary, to draft workers from the aircraft industry. In some towns of the Northwest, clergymen were asked to promote Hanford from the pulpit. Veterans of many big public works projects—men who had helped construct huge dams and power plants—had never seen so many people working in the same place at the same time. Living in barracks and trailer camps, they created a massive, sprawling physical plant. The statistics were stunning: 540 structures, more than 600 miles of blacktop, 158 miles of track. Eventually, 132,000 workers (working 126 million man-hours) signed on—nearly as many as had labored to build the Panama Canal. Hanford soon became the fourth-largest city in the state of Washington. The ultimate price of Hanford would reach $358 million, or nearly $5 billion in 2004 dollars.
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Hanford’s three all-important piles—each one processed two hundred tons of uranium for two hundred days—produced the plutonium, but equally important were the chemical-separation plants that treated the uranium slugs irradiated in the piles. These slugs were so radioactive when they came out that they glowed.
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Three chemical-separation plants were built in isolated and heavily guarded desert areas south of nearby Gable Mountain. For safety reasons—the plutonium in the irradiated slugs was also highly radioactive—the plants were placed ten miles from the nearest pile and well apart from one another. No one wanted to discover an atomic blast by accident.

The separation plants were sinister-looking, windowless structures with walls eight feet thick—in effect, huge concrete coffins eight hundred feet long and eighty feet wide. Each contained an underground row of forty cells where the irradiated slugs were processed. The operating gallery that ran above the cell rows was a silent, deadly radioactive tunnel with glaring electric lamps, where no human being could survive. Because of plutonium’s deadly toxicity, metallurgists had to be specially trained to handle it. They wore rubber gloves, worked behind protective shielding, and manipulated the plutonium with long tongs. Not only was the air filtered and ventilated, but a microscopist was hired to analyze its dust. In these gargantuan coffin- like structures, workers operating remote-control machinery around the clock tortuously squeezed out plutonium in a concentration of about 250 parts per million, a half-pound radioactive pellet from every ton of irradiated uranium.

To build a bomb from materials that didn’t yet exist in measurable quantities, involving the commitment of an extraordinary range of human and material resources, in the midst of a global war—it was an improbable undertaking. Yet out of nothing would be created a vast industrial enterprise. Bohr’s prediction had not been far off the mark: before the war was over, the Manhattan Project would consume more than $2 billion, employ 500,000 people directly and indirectly, and mobilize vast material resources. The project exemplified human ingenuity and determination, an immense undertaking into which industrial power was harnessed at vast cost and extraordinary effort. There was something vitally American about the Manhattan Project: no other nation in a world at war had the time and money to attempt such a thing.

An all-out race to build an atomic bomb was now under way after a delay of more than two years. Scientists entered the race—against German scientists believed to have a two-year head start—convinced that the outcome of the war depended on their ability to recover lost time. For them, the bomb’s rapid development was the single most important necessity of the war. It was a matter of survival.

CHAPTER 4

The Met Lab

S
UNDAY, DECEMBER
7, 1941, found Arthur Compton on the morning train from Washington to New York. At the Wilmington, Delaware, station a passenger boarded his compartment and shouted nervously that the Japanese had attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, bringing America into the war at last. The news sent Compton into a reverie as the train left Wilmington and raced north across the lush pastureland of rural New Jersey. Compton could see the neo-Gothic towers of Princeton University off in the distance. There was the Graduate College, where he had lived, and the Palmer Physical Laboratory, where he had conducted experiments as a graduate student two decades before. How different those buildings now seemed to Compton. They were still outwardly peaceful ivory towers, but Compton knew that within their walls were active and creative minds working on an immensely destructive weapon that might decide the outcome of the war that America had just entered. He felt conflicted about his own work on an immensely destructive weapon because of a pacifist upbringing by his Mennonite mother. And yet he felt he had no other choice, especially now.

When Compton reached New York that afternoon, he took a taxi from Penn Station up to Columbia University, where he met with Rabi, Szilard, and Fermi to discuss producing plutonium in a chain-reacting pile. This was crucial because producing plutonium by bombarding uranium in a cyclotron—what had been done at the Rad Lab—was not a practical method: at Berkeley, a kilogram of uranium bombarded for a week produced less than a millionth of a gram of plutonium. At that rate, a yearlong bombardment might produce fifty micrograms (smaller than a single grain of sand); it would take 20,000 years to make a kilogram—much better than Bohr’s early estimate of 26,445 years to produce one gram, but still nowhere close to what was needed. No one knew exactly how much plutonium would be necessary for a bomb, but estimates ran to several kilograms. Szilard and Fermi expressed confidence that a chain-reacting uranium-graphite pile would be a feasible method of producing large amounts of plutonium.

Until the War Department took control of the Manhattan Project in the fall of 1942, Compton was the de facto leader. Project research was then under way at universities scattered across the country. Compton thought it all should be centralized in one location to avoid duplication, ease communication, and save precious time. He called a meeting in Chicago in late January 1942 to decide where. Compton had the flu, and ran the meeting from a sickbed in one of the spare bedrooms on the third floor of his house. Szilard and Lawrence were both there. “Each was arguing the merits of his own location,” Compton later wrote, “and every case was good. I presented the case for Chicago.”

First, Compton stressed that he already had the support of the University of Chicago. “We will turn the university inside out if necessary to help win this war,” its vice-president had told him.
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Second, more scientists were available in the Midwest than on the coasts, where universities had already been drained for other war work. Finally, Chicago was conveniently and centrally located for travel to other sites.

“You’ll never get a chain reaction going here,” scoffed Lawrence. “The whole tempo of the University of Chicago is too slow.” He argued in favor of moving everyone to Berkeley. Compton had known Lawrence since Lawrence was a graduate student at Chicago and Compton was chairman of its physics department and a dean; he had no intention of now becoming Lawrence’s subordinate. “We’ll have the chain reaction going here by the end of the year,” Compton bristled. Needing to make a decision, he announced that Chicago would be the site. The decision was logical. University administrators had promised unlimited support, which would be necessary—whole buildings would have to be turned over to researchers. Chicago’s location in the center of the country also made it a compromise relocation site for scientists on both coasts.
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Lawrence told Compton that plutonium would be highly radioactive and thus dangerous, but the chemical-separation work could be done. He promised to commit the Rad Lab’s best chemists to the job, perfecting the process in the lab and then applying it on an industrial scale at Hanford. Armed with this information, Compton laid out an ambitious timetable for Washington: “By July 1, 1942, to determine whether a chain reaction was possible. By January 1943, to achieve the first chain reaction. By January 1944, to extract [plutonium] from uranium. By January 1945, to have a bomb.”
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Szilard expressed his commitment to the project, rather than to a specific location. However, he opposed moving to the Midwest because he would be isolated from physicists on both coasts. Better, he thought, to center the effort in the East—or shift it to Berkeley. Additionally, Szilard said that Compton should pay particular heed to Fermi, who would have to “overcome his strong preference for Columbia.” “It would be obviously wrong,” he said, “to decide in favor of a place as long as Fermi had a strong objection.”
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But although Szilard preferred to stay in New York, he understood the importance of centralizing research work and admired Compton’s talents as an organizer and a leader. “Most people consider him as the only hope to bring order into the present mess,” Szilard had observed the month before. (If anything, he felt Compton was not aggressive enough. “Compton seems to be too modest to realize that he could carry this matter by the sheer weight of his personality,” Szilard wrote.)
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So Szilard would go to Chicago.

Having persuaded Szilard to move, Compton phoned Fermi and asked him to relocate to Chicago as well. Fermi was reluctant. He resented that he did not have full security clearance for war work because he was still a “registered enemy alien,” but now he was being asked to take a leading role in the country’s most secret military project. He told Compton that he liked Columbia and enjoyed his home in New Jersey. Yet his adopted country was now at war and Fermi wanted to prove his patriotism. He agreed to go.
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All-out work at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory began in February 1942. The primary purpose of the Met Lab was to achieve a chain reaction in order to test the feasibility of producing plutonium in an atomic pile. There was also the question of how to separate the plutonium once it was produced. Physicists and chemists exploring the properties of this strange element worked in Eckart and Ryerson Halls, three-story gray stone neo-Gothic buildings that stood side by side on the northeast corner of the University of Chicago quadrangle. Their cramped labs and offices were partly lighted by leaded-glass windows that shook against the bitter-cold winds of a midwestern winter.

The war was going very badly for the United States and its allies in early 1942. Nazi Germany controlled most of Europe and was threatening to take over Russia and North Africa. The bulk of the American Pacific Fleet lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor. Japan was continuing its onslaught in the Pacific. The Philippine capital of Manila had fallen, and American troops were retreating to the island of Corregidor. Japanese troops had made it as far as New Guinea and Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Not until the Battle of Midway, four months away, would the tide of the war in the Pacific at last begin to turn; the tide of war in Europe would not turn until the Battle of Stalingrad almost a year away.

The refugee physicists watched in horror as their homelands fell to the Axis like dominoes, and feared that America might be next. They felt a sense of impending doom. They were not alone. The atmosphere at the Met Lab was nervous and embattled. “We felt behind the Germans,” said a scientist who was there—in danger of losing the race for the bomb.
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Met Lab staff knew that Hahn, the discoverer of fission, had a two-year head start and that German engineering was the most respected in the world, especially when it came to arms; panzer tanks rolling across Europe in the blitzkrieg seemed unstoppable. The feeling of desperation was especially keen among the refugees, most of whom had studied in Germany, knew Germany as the prewar center of nuclear physics, and were inclined to give the Germans much credit for what they could do.