Diana Preston - Before the Fallout

At Hanford the uncertainties were the same. According to Teller, the plutonium-producing reactors were built in under eighteen months “on the basis of a theory proposed by physicists that no engineer had thoroughly checked.” In April 1943 Du Pont began work on three industrial-scale reactor piles based on a design developed by Eugene Wigner using graphite as a moderator. For safety’s sake, they were constructed six miles apart. Each reactor was a giant block, forty-six feet wide, forty-six feet high, and forty feet deep. Inside was a thirty-six-foot-high stack of one hundred thousand graphite blocks, encased in six thousand tons of cast iron and steel. The uranium fuel, sealed in eight-inch-long aluminum cylinders and then assembled into batches, was pushed through tubes running from the front to the back of the pile, irradiated, and then discharged ready for reprocessing to retrieve the plutonium produced by the controlled fission it had undergone. This reprocessing, using chemicals to dissolve the uranium and extract, concentrate, and purify the plutonium, was the most hazardous part of the operation and was carried out in windowless separation plants built in isolation more than ten miles away.

Hanford itself, with some twenty thousand construction workers, had swiftly developed the feel of a Wild West frontier town. “There was nothing to do after work except fight,” exaggerated one physicist, if only slightly, “with the result that occasionally bodies were found in garbage cans the next morning…. It was a tough town.” There was also racial segregation. The site administrators bowed to local sentiment and provided separate accommodations and amenities for black workers. At Oak Ridge, local Tennessee law decreed that the twenty-five thousand construction workers had to be segregated.

From the very start Oppenheimer justified Groves’s selection of him as director of Los Alamos. He showed himself to be a disciplined, inspirational leader with breadth of vision and a facility to appreciate, assimilate, and analyze issues and then to make the right decision. Hans Bethe praised him in the following terms: “A physicist like Fermi would delight in solution of a single problem; I admired him to idolatry, but there is another type of mind which is equally needed. Oppenheimer… worked at physics mainly because he found physics the best way to do philosophy. This undoubtedly had something to do with the magnificent way he led Los Alamos.” Above all, Oppenheimer inspired trust in his team.

Groves was also impressed with Oppenheimer’s unemotional objectivity. In 1943 James Conant was asked to lead a study into the prospects for developing radiological weapons. Learning of the project, Oppenheimer told Groves that he and Fermi had been discussing a scheme of their own to pollute German food supplies with a lethally radioactive fission by-product: beta-strontium. Groves’s response was apparently enthusiastic, but Oppenheimer wrote coolly to Fermi that the idea was probably not worth pursuing “unless we can poison food sufficient to kill a half a million men.”

However, there was one area where he and Groves did not agree. To protect security, Groves wanted a system of “compartmentalization.” The aim, as he later wrote, was that “each man should know everything he needed to know to do his job and nothing else.” The system worked in the industrial environment of Hanford and Oak Ridge. It was, however, anathema to scientists used to a free exchange of ideas. Groves particularly disapproved of the colloquia that Oppen­heimer asked Teller to organize and at which scientists discussed their respective progress and problems. From a scientific perspective they were creative and valuable exercises, producing cross-specialization synergy. From a security perspective they were, Groves believed, highly dangerous. However, as Teller later recalled, Oppenheimer “fought hard for an open exchange so that everyone could contribute, and he won.”

Most of the Manhattan Project scientists considered Groves’s attitude toward security obsessive, even childish. The Fermis were amused by the personal protection rules he established for Enrico at the Met Lab in Chicago. Laura Fermi considered that they would have done credit to the nervous mother of a teenage girl: “Enrico was not to walk by himself in the evening, nor was he to drive without escort.” The pile that had gone critical in December 1942 to cheers and sips of Chianti had been moved to the newly built Argonne Laboratory some twenty miles away. By mid-1943 Fermi was driving there almost daily but, at Groves’s insistence, he was always acompanied by his powerfully built bodyguard, who looked “as if he had sufficient strength to wring the neck of any evil-minded spy or saboteur.”

Groves’s fears about spies and espionage would, however, be vindicated after the war, when the extent of spying at Los Alamos was revealed. Groves would rightly claim that the Soviet spy David Greenglass, recruited to Los Alamos as a machinist, passed information to the Russians to which he should never have had access. Greenglass was, in fact, the brother of Ethel Rosen­berg, whom he would later denounce, with her husband, Julius, as responsible for his acts. They were executed for spying in 1953.

Groves would also bitterly recall the spying activities of Klaus Fuchs at Los Alamos, but for those he would blame the British.

THE ARRIVAL OF A TEAM of British scientists in the United States in the autumn of 1943 to work on the bomb project was the result of the three-page Quebec Agreement, signed on 19 August 1943. After snubbing the American offer of partnership in 1941, the British had found themselves increasingly marginalized, in part because the United States believed it no longer needed Britain. By the end of October 1942 Henry Stimson had felt confident enough to advise the president that the United States should proceed “for the present without sharing anything more than we could help.” However, it was also a security issue. In May 1942 Britain and the Soviet Union had signed a twenty-year mutual assistance treaty—the Cripps-Molotov Agreement—and several weeks later a specific scientific exchange agreement. Groves was convinced that information about the bomb project would inevitably reach the Soviet Union and had been doing what he could to restrict the flow of information to the British.

Churchill pressed Roosevelt, first at the Casablanca conference in January 1943 and then in Quebec, for a greater role for Britain. To Groves’s dismay, the president yielded. The treaty provided for the two countries to pool their nuclear research but crucially stipulated that neither country would pass information to a third party without the other’s consent. It also provided that neither country would deploy the atomic bomb without the other’s agreement.

The British were now so eager to collaborate that, even before the treaty was formally signed, James Chadwick, Rudolf Peierls, Franz Simon, and Mark Oliphant were on their way to the United States aboard the Pan American flying-boat service from Ireland. It was a far more luxurious trip than the usual form of wartime transatlantic transport experienced by British scientists—flying in a bomber. [30] Passengers on the bomber spent the sixteen-hour flight in the bomb bay, lying in the freezing cold on a rough mattress resting on the bomb doors. They had to wear full flying gear, including oxygen mask, helmet, and parachute. It was impossible to read because the plane was blacked out. Sometimes people lost their head in the cold, noisy darkness. Oliphant recalled a man who, thrashing about in a panic, inflated his life jacket and passed out. As Oliphant struggled to help him, the rip cord of the man’s parachute caught on something, filling the bay with rippling silk.