Marshall Rosenbluth (left) and Ted Taylor (right) with memorial plaque to Frederic de Hoffmann at General Atomic (now General Atomics) headquarters, La Jolla, California, November 1999.
"I wanted to do something about the hydrogen bomb and nobody else wanted to," complains Edward Teller, remembering the postwar years at Los Alamos, before the explosion of "Joe 1," the first Soviet A-bomb in August of 1949. "Bradbury practically forbade me to work on it. And the one man who wanted to do it more than I was Freddy de Hoffmann."
Frederic de Hoffmann, a Viennese student in his last year of physics at Harvard, arrived at Lamy, New Mexico, the railhead for Los Alamos, aboard the Santa Fe Super Chief just after Christmas of 1943. He was nineteen years old, unusual even for Los Alamos, which was "in the hands of youngsters," as Francoise Ulam, then twenty-five, recalls. He was immediately interviewed by Edward Teller, the Super Chief himself.
"That nuclear fission could theoretically be turned into a nuclear explosive was known to me from my physical chemistry courses at Harvard," de Hoffmann wrote. "That there was indeed such a project to do so took me by complete surprise."[49] He worked on a wide range of problems in Hans Bethe's theoretical division, including the first criticality experiments, performed with a device known as the Dragon. A cylindrical slug of uranium hydride, dropped by hand through a uranium hydride ring, would go super-critical for a fraction of a second. This was equivalent to suddenly pulling all the control rods out of a nuclear reactor, or tickling the tail of an atomic bomb. The Dragon produced, for an instant, the kind of near-disaster that reactor engineers would soon go into business trying to prevent. Later in the war, de Hoffmann s group made critical mass measurements on mocked-up bomb assemblies, approximating spherical configurations by surrounding a 6.2-kg sphere of plutonium 239 with cubes of neutron-reflecting tamper material set in place by hand. De Hoffmann's friend Harry Daghlian received a lethal dose of radiation, on August 21, 1945, as a result of accidentally assembling a critical mass. "We had a rule not to work alone at night and furthermore always to add the last uranium brick from the side," said de Hoffmann. "Harry Daghlian was alone at night and added the fatal brick from the top when it slipped from his hand."[50]
It was de Hoffmann who performed the initial computations for Edward Teller on the feasibility of the Super bomb. He also calculated the ballistic trajectories for "Fat Man" and "Little Boy," the first two airdropped atomic bombs. "Making the bomb tables for Hiroshima and Nagasaki is etched so strongly in my mind because it really brought me to the reality of the end use of our scientific and technical experimentation."[51] When de Hoffmann returned to Los Alamos in early 1949, he worked with Teller on the Super full time. "Even before the Soviet explosion he felt that the hydrogen bomb must be our main task," explained Teller. "Now he acted like a man who has been freed from a terrible restriction."[52]
When the Teller-Ulam invention surfaced, Ulam and Teller coauthored a report. "What we wrote up was really qualitative," says Teller. "I gave the quantitative detail to Freddy de Hoffmann. In a very short time, in a week, he wrote it up, and put it in under my name alone." De Hoffmann became Teller's protégé and general factotum, acting as his official deputy during the years 1949-1951. "I remember one flight back to Los Alamos from an American Physical Society conference in Los Angeles, where Teller and I were on the same plane," Ted Taylor recalls. "Then the plane landed in Phoenix with engine trouble. We spent six or eight hours there talking quite freely about bombs and so on. And then we got on the plane and he had called Freddy, who drove to Albuquerque and met the plane in the middle of the night." At General Atomic, de Hoffmann established a motor pool, with visitors of any importance being assigned a car and driver during their stay. "I think one of the reasons Freddy used to make such a big point about drivers," Ted speculates, "is that he had been a driver himself."
After leaving Los Alamos, de Hoffmann collaborated with Hans Bethe and Sylvan Schweber at Cornell on a now classic text, Mesons and Fields, completed his Ph.D., and eventually became chairman of the Committee of Senior Reviewers of the AEC. He helped to enforce AEC security rules, deciding what nuclear information should be kept secret and what information, such as the design of commercial reactors, could safely be revealed. When the United Nations held the first Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva in summer 1955, de Hoffmann was one of an international team of scientific secretaries assigned to determine, in advance of the official conference, not only what information would be exchanged, but how to distribute public credit for efforts that had been conducted in secrecy so far. The role of international diplomat suited de Hoffmann well. As an undergraduate at Harvard he had founded an organization called the United Nations Council that "invited big wheels to come down from New York and give a talk," according to classmate Ralph Stahl, who joined General Atomic in 1956. "Fred would go down to the railroad station and meet the guest and take him out to dinner and then introduce him. It was a wonderful way to get to meet really important people."
The Geneva conference was the first meeting between nuclear scientists from East and West. Although the details of civilian reactor design would not be declassified by the AEC until June of 1956, the foundations of a new industry were established and an international community among nuclear scientists was formed. Fission power plants were already being planned, and it was widely assumed that something like the Teller-Ulain invention would soon precipitate an advance from fission to fusion power as dramatic as the recent leap from fission to fusion bombs. Controlled fusion, classified under the code name "Project Sherwood," appeared closer in 1955 than it does today.
Big business was watching General Dynamics, with close to $1 billion in sales, was the largest defense contractor in the United States. Its Electric Boat Division in Groton, Connecticut, was building nuclear submarines and its Convair Astronautics Division in San Diego was building Atlas ICBMs. The chairman of General Dynamics, John Jay Hopkins, believed it was time to enter the nuclear energy business and asked Edward Teller for advice. Teller answered: "Frederic de Hoffmann." Hopkins gave de Hoffmann $10 million to start things up. "We are establishing here a timeless institution, a thing of the mind and spirit, devoted to Man's progress," he proclaimed at the founding of de Hoffmann's laboratory in 1956.
"Freddy de Hoffmann was Napoleonic by nature," explains Brian Dunne. "He studied Napoleon's life as a boy. He had this dream, this vision, but it was driven by grandiosity. Those kinds of fevers are catching things." Not only did he "have the AEC in his pocket," a prerequisite to getting reactor designs licensed for commercial use, he understood and was able to transcend the factions that had divided the nuclear weapons community since the end of World War II. "You've got the Livermore gang and you've got the Los Alamos gang, two different cultures," says Dunne. "Acolytes of Teller, disciples of Bethe. They are different tribes, warring tribes. Teller and Freddy de Hoffmann had this relationship that was separate from the tribal wars."
General Atomic was founded on July 18, 1955 De Hoffmann began assembling the nucleus of his staff, beginning with physicist Ed Creutz, who had worked on the first homogeneous-fuel reactor, the "water boiler," at Los Alamos, and conducted the first full-scale high-explosive test of an implosion assembly, the day before the Alamogordo test. After the war, Creutz was giving a talk on reactor physics and needed to give a rough estimate of how many neutrons are released at each fission of a uranium nucleus, a number still classified at the time. Knowing the value was more than 2 and less than 3, he said 2.5, precisely the value that was supposed to be kept unknown. Creutz was soon visited by de Hoffmann, who notified him, politely, that he had violated security rules. The next time Creutz heard from de Hoffmann it was to offer him a job. "He asked me if I would care to join him in the creation of a new atomic energy company," says Creutz. "I said, 'That would be fun but would cost millions of dollars.' He said, 'We have ten million. Now we need to recruit the best people in the business to do the job right.' "[53]
They also needed a name. "I suggested a couple of things, like 'useful atoms' or something like that, something silly," remembers Creutz. "De Hoffmann said, 'No. I've got a better idea. We'll call it General Atomic.' " Money was no obstacle. "Somebody said de Hoffmann was a man who knew every millionaire in the world," continues Creutz. "That's probably a slight exaggeration. He knew an awful lot of rich and influential people, and John Jay Hopkins—the father of General Dynamics—was very fond of Fred, and had a lot of contacts. So Fred was very good at not only going to people and getting money but going to people and getting them to go to people to get money."
De Hoffmann and Hopkins flew around the United States looking at potential laboratory sites, courted by local politicians wherever they went. They distilled the prospects down to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the East and either Monterey or San Diego in the West. Mayor Charles C. Dail of San Diego, already home to Convair, held the winning hand: vacant "pueblo land" remaining from the original Spanish grant to the Pueblo of San Diego in 1791. The boundaries extended from the Pacific Ocean inland to where Interstate 805 is today and northward up the coast past La Jolla to Del Mar. Large areas remained unencumbered in 1956. "Because the early city fathers were inclined to dispose of it too easily (North Island was sold for a barrel of whiskey), the city charter of 1889 contained a provision that no pueblo land be sold until 1930," it was reported in announcing a plebiscite on whether to grant General Atomic a laboratory site. "The 1931 charter contained a provision that no pueblo land north of the San Diego River could be sold without a council ordinance and majority approval of the voters. Proposition H authorizes sale and conveyance of 320 acres of pueblo land to General Atomic for a nuclear research center on the east side of highway 101 half a mile north of La Jolla Junction. It requires majority approval."[54] The measure passed by a margin of more than 6 to 1.
General Atomic—now General Atomics—occupies some of the most expensive real estate in the United States. The nearby oceanfront bluffs and canyons, south of another 1,000 acres of Pueblo land that became Torrey Pines State Park, are now rimmed with multimillion-dollar homes. De Hoffmann's was one of the first. The University of California at San Diego, immediately south of General Atomic, has expanded to fill the land it was later granted. A checkerboard of pharmaceutical companies, research institutes, medical clinics, and the odd brokerage firm has saturated the landscape far into the desert inland.
In 1956 the Torrey Pines mesa was largely untouched. La Jolla was a quiet retirement enclave, and to the north, between the outpost of Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the horse-racing track at Del Mar, there was little development except an abandoned World War II military staging base and the occasional gas station as Highway 101 meandered its way, pre-interstate, up the coast. "Mayor Dail, Fred, Hopkins, and I visited the land, which was then a cow pasture," recalls Creutz. "Stepping carefully we walked around the mesa, and in the distance was the dome of Palomar observatory. We pointed this out to Hopkins, who said, not as another person might, 'Oh, we can see the dome,' but, 'Oh, they can see us.' "[55]
Within two years de Hoffmann transformed the site into a Xanadu. "If science is to flourish," he said in reviewing the successes of Los Alamos, "conditions for men in their twenties should be made as ideal as possible."[56] During the Manhattan Project, he noted, "the distinction between pure science and application was nonexistent."[57] At General Atomic, theoreticians, experimentalists, and technicians worked in close proximity, while academic traditions such as weekly colloquia, visiting fellowships, and peer-reviewed publications coexisted with an aggressive patent department and glossy annual reports. Guest speakers as far removed from nuclear physics as Margaret Mead were brought in to give talks.
The architects hired to design the laboratory, says Creutz, "came up with what they called a 'campus plan': here's the physics building, here's a street, here's the chemistry building. I don't want that. I had seen unfortunate divisions separating the contributions by various disciplines on some university campuses. I want the chemistry building and the physics building to be the same building. I don't want people to feel they are separate entities if we're working together on new ideas, so I came up with the circular plan, with the library in the center." The library was encompassed by a large, 3/4-of-a-circle building, appearing from above like Saturn with a bite taken out of its rings. Satellite laboratories were distributed elsewhere about the site.
By June of 1958 there were four laboratory buildings, a prototype reactor capable of pulses up to 1,500 megawatts, a 32 million electron-volt linear accelerator, a critical assembly building, and a 48,000-square-foot administration building, flanked by a garden featuring a 250-foot-long ornamental lagoon. A year later there were 250,000 square feet of buildings, housing some 100 individual laboratories, and another 100,000 square feet of laboratories were being built. By 1960 there were 700 technical people on staff, more than 100 with Ph.D.s.
The site also included a health club, medical facility, tennis courts, swimming pool, and cafeteria. "It was a fabulously plush time at General Atomic in those days," says Kedar (Bud) Pyatt, a young physicist who arrived in 1959. "It was really due to Freddy's attitude. He sold John Jay Hopkins on the idea, give him ten years and enough money and he would—I loved the speech he always gave—'bring the sun down to the earth.' Freddy's attitude was: give me a room full of theoretical physicists and I'll conquer the world. He told Ted and Lothar Nordheim, 'Here's the money to support the hiring of ten young theorists per year. You don't have to have a project for them to work on, just hire ten young theorists.' I took the job and came there and asked what was I supposed to do. And Ted's comment was, 'Why don't you read for a while and think of something you can do that's creative.' It was Nirvana on earth for a physicist."
"Freddy de Hoffmann was my first encounter with the world of Big Business," remembers Freeman. "He was a first-rate physicist who also just had a good head for business. I had never before met anybody with the authority to make decisions so quickly and with so little fuss."[58] Most of General Atomic's staff had worked on big projects during the recent war. Technical and political obstacles were seen as challenges to be overcome. If specialized tools or facilities were needed they were either purchased or they were built. Nothing, except the construction of nuclear explosives—a province that belonged to Los Alamos, Livermore, and Sandia National Laboratories—was out of bounds. According to David Weiss, who joined General Atomic in 1959 when it appeared that test versions of Orion might soon be launched, de Hoffmann "wanted to build the whole thing himself, like in a nineteenth-century shipyard, where you had your own foundry to make castings for all the metal parts.
Marshall
Rosenbluth (left) and Ted Taylor (right) with memorial plaque to
Frederic de
Hoffmann at General Atomic (now General Atomics) headquarters, La
Jolla,
California, November 1999.
"Freddy behaved as king of the realm," explains Ted. "He could do whatever he wanted, and that meant that things could happen fast. Something new would turn up in Orion, and within minutes of the time Freddy was told about it, he would go get somebody to do something constructive about it, like setting up meetings with people in Washington." His access to the highest levels of government, industry, and academia was unmatched.
"De Hoffmann loved to collect Nobel laureates. It was almost like collecting butterflies," says Brian Dunne. He also collected patents. "Every year Freddy de Hoffmann would go before the board of General Dynamics, and he'd walk in and lay down a string of patents in front of these General Dynamics directors, and they would think this was the coming wealth of the future, and they'd give him the money"
Despite the initial emphasis on peaceful atoms a large share of General Atomics cash flow came from weapons-related contracts with the AEC and the Department of Defense. Besides possible military applications of Orion, and the recurring problem of producing tritium for thermonuclear weapons, there was a classified ship reactor program and a series of small self-contained reactors to supply electricity for surveillance platforms in space. The Air Force Special Weapons Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, administered the Orion contract for ARPA and kept the money flowing to General Atomic for other projects including Project Defender (ballistic missile defense), Casaba-Howitzer (directed-energy weapons), TREES (Transient Radiation Effects on Electronic Systems), and a whole series of weapons-effects studies that sometimes came close to infringing on weapon design. "Where do you draw the line between effects and design?" asks Burt Freeman. "We got our hands slapped a bit, on that. The effects are design-dependent. And the weapon designer, not having any concern about effects, stops at a place where he feels that his job is done. Now, the effects person wants to pick them up, but there's a gray area in between, in time or space, where the one has to start and the other stop."
No one except Freddy de Hoffmann could get away with hiring some of the leading talent away from the two national weapons laboratories, to work on a project involving large numbers of bombs, without drawing fire from the AEC. At General Atomic, AEC security procedures were visible but unobtrusive. "Anything involving bomb data had to be in special safes and under much more physical protection than ordinary military secrets," Freeman remembers. "There was one building called the H building—it's the shape of an H—and that's where everything was. It had the appropriate guards, but once you had the badge and the guards knew who you were it was easy enough to get in and out. But there were rules, for instance if we brought in a visitor we couldn't let him go to the bathroom by himself."
Air Force physicists, Air Force officers, and Air Force generals made regular visits to General Atomic, and always came away impressed. "They were in awe when they came out here," remembers Brian Dunne. "A lot of it was Freddy with his round buildings and swimming pools and tennis courts. They had never seen a facility of that kind—and the quality of people that he attracted. Air Force Colonel Don Prickett, a physicist and one of the AFSWC project officers responsible for Project Orion, attended the briefing on Project Orion at General Atomic with General Thomas Power of the Strategic Air Command, who made the statement that "whoever controls Orion will control the world." Prickett remembers General Power's enthusiasm for Orion, and the dinner that followed the briefing. "It was the last abalone I ever had."
Without Frederic de Hoffmann and General Atomic, Project Orion would never have had a chance. "When you look back on the architecture—the buildings and the way it's put together—somebody put a lot of money in," says physicist Bill Vulliet, who came to General Atomic from Convair in July of 1958. "And for a long time after they got the buildings, there was still a lot of money flowing in there. And it's my guess—just a guess—that it was the bomb, and the end of the war, that allowed this to last such a long time. And physicists were closer to God than anybody else."