Recently, several television dramas have examined the personalities and events of the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, and interest in this watershed project has grown markedly. The recent seven-hour BBC production is perhaps the best of the offerings, but even there, historical inaccuracies and skewed perspectives are abundantly present. The readers of General Groves’s own account are to be complimented for choosing to learn directly from one of the major participants. History in some ways resembles the relativity principle in science. What is observed depends on the observer. Only when the perspective of the observer is known can proper corrections be made.
General Groves was, perhaps above all else, a most straightforward man. He said what he thought with little consideration for the effect his opinions might have on others. Deviousness was totally foreign to his nature. Vannevar Bush, the head of all scientific wartime projects, interviewed General Groves prior to his appointment to the Los Alamos project. Bush suggested to the office of the Secretary of State that Groves might lack sufficient tact for such a sensitive role. It is typical of Groves that he has reported this opinion in his book.
The general was a direct man of practical action. His strengths included not only enormous dedication and a great capacity for work, but also an unconcerned approach to complicated problems. He very often managed to ignore complexity and arrive at a result which, if not ideal, at least worked. Groves was also incredibly versatile, a quality required for such an unprecedented job as organizing the enterprise that led to the first atomic bomb. He had to worry both about the diffusion of uranium hexafluoride molecules and about the problems faced by the wives in Los Alamos. (As Groves mentions, contrary to local gossip, Los Alamos was not an establishment for the care of pregnant WACs). He organized the intelligence effort to determine the Nazi prospects of building an atomic weapon of their own, and he influenced, perhaps not in the right way, the decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima.
For Groves, the Manhattan Project seemed a minor assignment, less significant than the construction of the Pentagon. He was deeply disappointed at being given the job of supervising the development of an atomic weapon since it deprived him of combat duty. He started with, and partially retained, thorough doubts about the feasibility of the project. Yet in convincing the leaders at DuPont that they should participate, he appeared totally confident in order to overcome the incredulity of those overly sane chemical engineers. I would ascribe his behavior in this case less to a lack of openness than to his unwavering sense of duty as an Army officer.
Groves, as history records, was eminently successful as the military director of the Los Alamos Lab. Perhaps his most outstanding decision was the choice of J. Robert Oppenheimer to administer the scientific work at the laboratory. In the fantastic story of the atomic bomb, this less obvious, less remembered but no less vital story of the highly effective cooperation between two individuals, poles apart in every way, remains unique.
Oppie clearly saw the importance of the project and envisioned the new age that would arise from the old. While Oppie resembled General Groves in the intensity of his effort and dedication, his gentle demeanor, social grace — even his physique — showed a marked contrast to the General’s. But the greatest difference between the two men lay in the complexity of their personalities. Oppenheimer was so extraordinarily complicated and clever that he could mask these qualities with an appearance of simplicity. Groves’s astuteness is most clearly demonstrated in that, despite opposition from the military security division whose value and function he supported and even overestimated, he selected Oppenheimer as scientific director. The contrast and cooperation of Groves and Oppenheimer is the most striking human story in the “Manhattan Project.”
Much of my life has been spent in laboratories of similar size and complexity to the Los Alamos Laboratory. I have known many directors intimately. For a short time, I was even a director myself. I know of no one whose work begins to compare in excellence with that of Oppenheimer’s.
Oppie knew in detail the research going on in every part of the laboratory, and was as excellent at analyzing human problems as the countless technical ones. Of the more than 10,000 people who eventually came to work at Los Alamos, Oppie knew several hundred intimately, by which I mean that he understood their relationships with one another, and what made them tick. He knew how to lead without seeming to do so. His charismatic dedication had a profound effect on the successful and rapid completion of the atomic bomb.
Some of Oppenheimer’s qualities come through in the recent BBC production. However, General Groves, in this television drama, is rather inadequately presented. (Even his girth was underestimated.) Obviously no one with so little intelligence, as the General Groves presented by the BBC, could have met the massive responsibilities of providing shelter, equipment, and materials with so little delay and impediment to the project. I must confess, however, that between 1943 and 1945 General Groves could have won almost any popularity contest in which the scientific community at Los Alamos voted.
I remember a meeting early in 1943 at which Oppie announced a revision in security clearance procedures, made necessary by the fact that so many of us could not be cleared under the usual regulations. The new rules called for us to clear one another by vouching for our good intentions and backgrounds. Someone piped up, “Does that mean that clearance will be based on our scientific good names?” Oppie responded, “Grove doesn’t believe we have any other.” We laughed. General Groves, or “His Nibs” as we called him, could hardly have been completely unaware of Oppie’s and our attitudes. He chose to disregard them.
No one should be surprised that a group of independent scientists found General Groves and his regulations irritating. Secrecy runs contrary to the deepest inclinations of every scientist; we were willing to make sacrifices, even when they seemed ludicrous, because of the war. But military regulations affected every detail of our lives and, worse, they were worded as if we lacked the common sense of a five-year old. I recall a directive issued in early 1945 during the only serious water shortage at Los Alamos. The order did not carry General Groves’s signature, but we all attributed it to him. It detailed the ways in which the shortage would be met and concluded with the memorable sentence: “Residents will not use showers except in case of emergency.”
Adopting the attitude that General Groves, rather than we ourselves, lacked native intelligence helped to decrease our frustration. If we failed to appreciate him, his recognition of us was similarly lacking. Although Groves made the following statement almost a decade after the Los Alamos years, he conveyed these feelings fully during the time that we were together.
We (the military leaders at Los Alamos) came up through kindergarten with them (the scientists). While they could put elaborate equations on the board, which we might not be able to follow in their entirety, when it came to what was so and what was probably so, we knew just about as much as they did. So when I say that we were responsible for the scientific decisions, I am not saying that we were extremely able nuclear physicists, because actually we were not. We were what might be termed ‘thoroughly practical nuclear physicists.’1
Earlier in the same discussion, Groves referred to the three possible states of plutonium as “solid, gas or electric.” Clearly we spoke different languages. Yet, in reading his book, I was struck by his comment that, since the weather forecasters at the Trinity test had failed to predict the rain that was falling, “I soon excused them. After that it was necessary for me to make my own weather predictions —a field in which I had nothing more than very general knowledge.” As in other complicated issues, General Groves made the right decision.
My contact with General Groves during the Los Alamos period was very limited. I remember only one incident with clarity. One of my jobs at Los Alamos was to assure the safety conditions in the gas diffusion plant. The main hazard was that in advanced stages of separating U235 and U238, contamination with water or some other substance might cause the diffusing gases to solidify, at which point an unwanted chain reaction might result. This part of my job took me from time to time to New York, and one morning (at 4:00 a.m. Los Alamos time) I woke to hear the General’s voice at the other end of my telephone, instructing me to go to his Washington office immediately.
The emergency, I discovered, was a chemical explosion at a gas diffusion plant on the East Coast; Groves wanted to question me about the possibility of serious malfunction in our separation process. After a preliminary discussion, Groves assembled a group of his staff at a long table. I sat on his right and was kept wide awake by a barrage of hypothetical questions while the General slouched, with eyes closed, seemingly half asleep. Periodically, he would open both eyes, look me square in the face and state, “But after all, Professor, this is only theory.”
Toward the beginning of the third hour of this inquisition, a colonel at the end of the table asked if it were not possible that all the U235 atoms might assemble at one end of the apparatus by pure chance, and thereby cause a nuclear explosion. “Of course,” I answered, “this is a possibility, but it is as probable as that all the air molecules in the room will assemble under the table, causing us all to suffocate.”
Groves immediately sat up and said, “But Doctor, you did say this is possible.” Conant intervened with, “What Dr. Teller intends to say is that such an assembly is really quite impossible.” From this moment on, General Groves treated me with exquisite politeness. Apparently, I had passed his test as to whether or not I could be trusted.
Neither through contact nor through rumor did I ever learn of Grove’s sense of humor. Yet in reading his book, I discovered not only that he was quite sufficiently endowed with one but that he could laugh at himself. He tells the story of a search on a wall-sized map for a small town in Germany, which was finally located two feet above the floor. Secretary Stimson, his aide, a Chief of Staff, and Groves then all got down almost on their hands and knees, “gazing at this point barely off the floor,” at which time, continues his account, a photographer “might well have caught one of World War IPs more interesting photographs.” Groves would surely have stood out in the picture, a fact the reader might miss, but which Groves in telling the story clearly appreciated.
A measure of his resourcefulness can be illustrated by a story involving Ernest Lawrence. About 1943, General Groves, visiting the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory which was separating U235 by electromagnetic means, attempted to spur Lawrence on by saying to him, “Your reputation is at stake here.” Later over a nice rum drink, Lawrence said to him, “You know, General, my reputation has been made, but yours is at stake here.” Groves did not respond. However, a couple of years later, Groves in addressing a group at Los Alamos commented: “When all of this is over, you will go back to your universities, regardless of the outcome, but my reputation is at stake here.”
I did not begin seriously to examine the validity of my wartime impression of Groves until four years later, and then only because of an unusual conversation. In September, 1949, I was in England discussing possible safety measures for the introduction of commercial nuclear-generated electricity with our British counterparts. Toward the end of my visit, Sir James Chadwick, who had headed the wartime British scientific delegation to Los Alamos, invited me to dinner at his home in Caius College. Sir James was well-known in the scientific community for his taciturn nature, but his wife was a charming conversationalist. She drew me out about our mutual friends and acquaintances from Los Alamos, and eventually inquired about General Groves. My response, I am afraid, reflected an unflattering opinion of him.
At that point, a miracle occurred. Sir James, who had spoken perhaps twenty words that evening, became talkative to the point of being almost uninterruptible. He told me most emphatically and repeatedly that the atomic bomb project would never have succeeded without General Groves. I pointed out how often Groves had made plain his dislike of the British. Sir James brushed aside my comment. That made no difference. What was important, Sir James went on, was that Groves understood the overriding importance of the project better than some of the leading American scientists. Without Groves, he said, the scientists could never have built the bomb.
I have rarely seen anyone —even an ordinarily effusive talker —so insistent on making his point. However, Sir James’s tirade carried no trace of reproach for my inappropriate remark about General Groves. At the end of the evening, my host walked me back to my inn. On parting, he told me to remember what he had said as I might “have need of it.”
Shortly after this evening, I was back in the United States and gained some new information. It then dawned on me that during our conversation Chadwick probably had known what I had just learned: the Soviets had exploded an atomic bomb. Chadwick knew that American scientists, who had less direct an experience with World War II than their British colleagues, many of whose homes and families were in peril, had not realized the urgency and importance of the atomic bomb project. General Groves, on the other hand, having considered military matters throughout his career, knew exactly what it meant to be inadequately defended. In the struggle against totalitarian military might in the ensuing years, the awareness of the overriding importance of defense has rested with men who, like Groves, understand that only strength can counter an adversary determined to enforce his goals by physical force.
General Groves’s book deals with a period which precedes the memories of most of the present generation. In the intervening years, the world has changed so much it is hardly recognizable in terms of the past. Today, national security and technology have become inseparable. Yet the gulf between the military establishment and the scientific community is as great as ever. General Groves was one of the pioneers who, with difficulty but ultimate success, managed to throw a bridge across the abyss.
I do not see much hope for the survival of our democratic form of government if we cannot rebuild that bridge made by General Groves and J. Robert Oppenheimer. We must find ways to encourage mutual understanding and significant collaboration between those who defend their nation with their lives and those who can contribute the ideas to make that defense successful. Only by such cooperation can we hope that freedom will survive, that peace will be preserved.
—EDWARD TELLER
Stanford, California
December, 1982
1 In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Transcript of Hearing before Personnel Security Board, U.S. Government Printing Office (Washington, D.C., 1954), p. 164 (emphasis added).