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I am about the leading theoretician in America. That does not mean the best. Wigner is certainly better and Oppenheimer and Teller probably just as good. But I do more and talk more and that counts too.
—Hans Bethe, in a letter to his mother
As the months wore on, Oppie struggled to keep his emotions private. He was in charge here; everyone looked to him. When he saw Jean’s face in one of the clouds above the mesa, in the swirl of grain on a desktop, in the dreams that came as he tossed and turned each night, he kept the sadness to himself.
Days bonded into weeks, weeks fused into months, his sorrow, and maybe even his guilt, lessening slowly, but he knew both were asymptotes: they would continue to abate infinitely but could never fully disappear. Still, here, fifteen months after Jean’s passing, he was functioning, and functioning, surely, was the best one could hope for. And so today he did what he usually did, walking down the corridors of the laboratory section, enclosed by its own additional fence; even the MPs were forbidden entrance. There were always sounds here: equipment chugging, pumps whirring, typewriters clattering, and a welter of voices with accents drawn from across two continents.
And one of those voices—deep, rumbling—came to Oppie louder than the rest. “No, I have not made a mistake!”
The accent was Hungarian, and the voice was that of Edward Teller; it was coming out of the open door to Teller’s office, just ahead.
As Oppie closed the distance, he heard Hans Bethe striving for a soothing, reasonable tone. “Well, you were wrong about the sky possibly catching fire.” In 1942, Teller had suggested that a single blast of a fusion bomb, or even a fission one, might ignite all the hydrogen in the oceans or all the nitrogen in the atmosphere, destroying the world. The then-nascent atomic-bomb effort was almost halted after that, but Bethe had shown that Teller had underestimated the radiative-cooling effects that would prevent such catastrophes.
“One error in three years!” exclaimed Teller. “These figures are correct.” Teller and Bethe had collaborated on a theory of projectile shock-wave propagation before the war, but Teller was miffed with Oppie for having appointed the sturdy Strasbourgian as head of the Theoretical Division instead of him. Bethe laughed easily at himself and others, while Teller brooded and held grudges.
Oppie had settled on what he’d now been told was the “management by walking around” style: being seen to be seen, poking his head into this lab or that workshop all over the mesa to check on things—so neither Bethe nor Teller were surprised when he appeared in the doorway. Teller was hunched in a wooden chair. Bethe was taller anyway but as he stood near Teller’s desk he loomed over the Hungarian. “But they can’t possibly be right. Don’t you see, Edward—”
“What’s up?” asked Oppie, leaning against the doorjamb. As always, he scanned the blackboards in any room he entered. Teller had created a chart labeled “Weapon Ideas,” with columns including “Yield” and “Delivery Method.” The final and most-powerful entry, Oppie noted, had its mode of delivery listed as “Backyard.” Ah: if that device had the yield specified, it would destroy all life on earth—so there’d be no need to transport it anywhere before use.
Teller turned his steel-gray eyes toward Oppie. “Hans thinks my solar-fusion math is wrong,” he said in the same derisive tone he might have used to declaim a ridiculous notion such as “Hans thinks the world is flat.”
Oppie turned to Bethe. Hans, not Edward, was the authority on solar fusion. In a pair of 1939 Physical Review papers, Bethe had analyzed the reactions by which hydrogen can be fused into helium, and he’d worked out the math for fusion via the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle, which he’d concluded was the sun’s main way of producing energy. “This is Bethe’s field,” Oppie ventured.
“Irrelevant,” snapped Teller; his accent was as thick as his massive eyebrows. “I’ve gone over and over the figures. There’s nothing wrong with my equations.”
Oppie was getting irritated. From the very beginning of this project, Teller had insisted that the focus on a fission bomb was a mistake. At the initial gathering of the group Oppie had dubbed “the Luminaries” at Berkeley almost three years ago, in July 1942, Robert had begun by taking the scientists through the devastation wrought by what was, hitherto, the largest human-caused explosion ever: the 1917 Halifax disaster, which had occurred when a French munitions ship collided with a Norwegian vessel in waters near that Nova Scotia port city. The resulting explosion—equivalent to 2,900 tons of T.N.T.—killed 2,000 and injured 9,000 more. What they were hoping to build, Oppie had said, would be two or three times more powerful: a weapon so dreadful Hitler would surely immediately stand down as soon as its destructive potential was demonstrated—assuming that the Nazis didn’t build one of the damn things first.
But that wasn’t enough for Teller. He had stood up before the others, who were in folding chairs arranged in a ragged circle on the top floor of Le Conte Hall, and declared, “A fission device is surely possible. Easy, in fact. But there are more interesting problems.”
Oppie remembered leaning his seat back and taking a deep, calming breath of the summer air coming in through the open French doors that led to the balcony. He’d brought all those people to California to exchange ideas, but it had turned out to be akin to herding non-Schrödingerian cats; keeping such peripatetic minds focused took constant cajoling. “Such as?” he’d asked.
“Enrico Fermi has this notion,” Teller said. “A fission weapon, trivial though it is, could be used to ignite deuterium, creating a fusion bomb. I’ve been doing the math.” He indicated sheets of paper in front of him. “If we used a fission bomb to ignite just twenty-six pounds of liquid heavy hydrogen, the resulting fusion explosion would be equivalent to millions of tons of T.N.T.”
“Millions ...” repeated Bob Serber in his soft, lisping voice.
“Exactly,” said Teller. “Forget reproducing this Halifax explosion—a trifle. Think of the Tunguska event!” In 1908, something exploded in an unpopulated part of central Siberia, flattening over half-a-million acres of forest. It was twenty years before the first Russian scientific expedition made it to the center of the devastation. They found no blast or impact crater, leading them to conclude that perhaps an in-falling meteor or comet had exploded just before hitting the ground. They estimated the force of the airburst had been between ten and thirty megatons—ten and thirty million tons of T.N.T.
“Good God,” said Oppenheimer. “What good would such a thing possibly be? You could only use it for genocide.”
“Our foe,” Teller had replied simply, “is a genocidist.” He’d looked around that seminar room. Teller was Jewish; so were Oppenheimer, Serber, Bethe, and several of the others who’d been present.
“An atomic-fission bomb,” Teller had continued, “is straightforward; your grad students could make one. But a bomb based on nuclear fusion, capable of Tunguska-scale devastation? That is a challenge worthy of us.”
Ever since then, Oppie had been indulging Teller, letting him work on the fusion-based bomb the Hungarian had dubbed “the super” while everybody else had been solely devoted to the more-tractable problem of creating a fission bomb. After they’d all moved here to Los Alamos, Oppie had also ignored the numerous complaints about Teller playing his grand piano—he’d refused to come to the mesa without it—late at night. As Oppie had said to one maddened housewife, “It’d be objectionable only if he didn’t play so well.”
“Okay, you two,” said Robert, looking first at Teller then at Bethe. “Let’s keep the noise down, shall we? And, Hans, you’ve got important work to do.”
Teller clearly got the slight. He detected slights even when they weren’t there; he never missed an actual one. Edward glared at Oppenheimer, but Robert was used to that by now. He headed on down the corridor, looking for the next fire to put out.