Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

Routinely working fourteen hours a day, Groves reviewed all the scientific work currently under way and visited all the key laboratories. He was particularly concerned about the work on plutonium development—in his view “an even greater venture into the unknown than the first voyage of Columbus.” In October 1942 he arrived on the neo-Gothic campus of the University of Chicago, where, in early 1942, Arthur Compton had relocated research directly related to making plutonium for the bomb. The focus of this work was to achieve the chain reaction needed to create plutonium. The project, led by Enrico Fermi, who had moved from Columbia, was being undertaken in the so-called Metallurgical Laboratory, or “Met Lab,” a name chosen—like the British “Tube Alloys” and the German “Virus House”—to deter the curious.

Despite such measures, word of the Manhattan Project inevitably spread among the relatively small scientific community. In the autumn of 1942 Philip Morrison, a young physics instructor at the University of Illinois, was visiting Chicago at Thanksgiving and called on fellow physicist Robert Christy, who had studied with him at Berkeley. As Morrison later wrote, Christy asked, “‘Do you know what we’re doing here?’” Morrison “admitted that it was easy to guess: this must be the hidden uranium project to which so many others had gone. ‘Yes,’ he said, in his familiar style of calm speech, ‘we are making bombs.’” Within weeks Morrison too had moved to Chicago to join him.

Groves, who would have been horrified at such casual conversations about classified topics, joined the Met Lab scientists at one of their meetings to quiz them “about the plutonium process, and the anticipated explosive power of an atomic bomb, as well as of the amount of fissionable material that a single bomb would require.” He was shocked by their answer to the latter. He had expected their estimate to be accurate “within twenty-five or fifty per cent.” Instead, “they quite blandly replied that they thought it was correct within a factor of ten…. while I had known that we were proceeding in the dark, this conversation brought it home to me with the impact of a pile driver.” Groves accepted reluctantly that they could not yet be more precise, but, as he later wrote, uncertainty about this critical aspect would plague the project until, in 194£, they could at last test a bomb.

Groves nevertheless left Chicago somewhat reassured about plutonium. What he had heard from the scientists convinced him that it offered “the greatest chances for success in producing bomb material.” Although the process was “extremely difficult and completely unnprecedented,” it seemed to Groves more feasible than trying to extract U-235 from U-238, where success depended on the scientists’ skill in separating materials with what he thought were “almost infinitesimal differences in their physical properties.” At the same time, with characteristic common sense, he decided to try all routes.

The meeting had been important in another respect. It drew battle lines between the army and the scientists that would endure until the project’s end. Groves was well aware “that scientists didn’t like me.” His characteristic response was “Who cares?” He was determined to assert his authority and show that, despite his lack of scientific background, he would not allow science or scientists to overawe him. He was fond of saying that “atomic physics is not an occult science.” As a result, he made the scientists a speech that did him few favors: “There is one thing I want to emphasize. You may know that I don’t have a Ph.D…. But let me tell you that I had ten years of formal education after I entered college. Ten years in which I just studied. I didn’t have to make a living or give time to teaching. I just studied. That would be the equivalent of about two Ph.D.s, wouldn’t it?” This crass self-advertisement left many of the scientists dismayed that such a man was in charge of their work. As they came to know him better, some would revise that opinion, but a common view of Groves as a bully and a boor had been born.

Groves, in turn, had formed a fairly poor view of the Met Lab scientists, later writing that “the unique array of scientific talent that had been collected there was imbued with an active dislike for any supervision imposed upon them and a genuine disbelief in the need for any outside assistance.” To an extent he was right. Leo Szilard, who had moved from Columbia to Chicago with Fermi, was among those who felt it would be impossible to work with such a man and said so. Groves, in turn, had no intention of working with Szilard if he could help it. Their brief meeting had convinced him that the Hungarian was an interfering know-it-all of possibly dubious loyalty. He tried to persuade Henry Stimson to lock Szilard up for the duration of the war as an enemy alien. Stimson refused on the grounds that such an act would infringe the Constitution. Groves later wrote that this was the reply he had expected but that it had been worth a try. In fact, Szilard would remain a thorn in Groves’s side throughout the project.

According to some accounts, within days, Groves had also alienated Ernest Lawrence. At their first meeting at Berkeley, he warned the Nobel Prize winner that he had better do a good job since his reputation depended on it. Lawrence replied, “My reputation is already made. It is yours that depends on the outcome of the Manhattan Project.”

Everything Groves saw and heard in these early months convinced him that the project was an enormously bigger undertaking than he had previously thought. This, in a sense, cheered him up. One of his objections to taking responsibility for the bomb program had been its apparently small scale compared to engineering projects he had directed. Groves decided, in the interests of efficiency and simplicity, to appoint the Du Pont company to take charge of the engineering, construction, and operation of the industrial-scale plutonium plants that would have to be built. Although Bush and Conant were content, Groves knew that he would face a battle with the scientists about industrial involvement.

The Du Pont company was not initially enthusiastic either. Their senior executives pointed out that their expertise was chemistry, not physics, and that “they were incompetent to render any opinion except that the entire project seemed beyond human capability.” Groves required all his guile and energy to win their agreement. He clinched it by appealing to their patriotism and their purse. The president, he assured them, considered the project to be of the utmost national urgency, and provision would be made to protect the company against financial loss. There would also be a government fund to compensate any employee injured because of “the entirely unpredictable and unprecedented hazards involved.” As Groves later wrote, the fate of the luminous dial painters of the 1920s who had licked radium-tainted brushes had not been forgotten.

While final negotiations with Du Pont were still under way, news came of a great scientific breakthrough at the Met Lab in Chicago. On 2 December 1942, Arthur Compton telephoned James Conant with the news that “the Italian Navigator [Fermi] has reached the New World.” When Conant asked, “How did he find the natives?” Compton replied, “Very friendly.” What this actually meant was that Enrico Fermi had achieved the world’s first self-sustaining chain reaction. The nuclear pile he had built at a cost of one million dollars in a squash court under the west stands of the disused university football stadium had gone critical.

It was a formidable achievement. Over four weeks, Fermi and his students had positioned fifty-six tons of uranium and uranium oxide between black graphite bricks, creating a great layer cake measuring twenty feet high and twenty-five feet wide. As they sought to achieve the self-sustaining reaction, Fermi and his team progressively removed from the reactor a series of control rods, allowing more and more neutrons to be released from the uranium. By 11:35. a.m. on 2 December, the counters were clicking rapidly, but then, with a loud clap, the mechanisms designed to ensure safety slammed the control rods back home. As Fermi later recalled, “The safety point had been set too low.” It seemed a good time to go to lunch.