CHAPTER EIGHT

THE MANHATTAN PROJECT

1941-12-8 FDR SPEECH TO JOINT SESSION OF CONGRESS

PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT: Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the empire of Japan.

AT THE TIME OF THE Pearl Harbor attack, nuclear fission research in the United States was a leisurely, poorly funded and loosely coordinated enterprise. British scientists, working with refugees from Nazi Germany, Austria and Hungary, had taken the lead, doing most of the early research. But that changed with America’s entry into the war. Over the next year the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers organized America’s disparate research efforts into a single program. Fission research for the plutonium bomb was consolidated at the University of Chicago in a program code-named “The Metallurgical Lab.” As a result, Enrico and Laura Fermi were forced to relocate to Chicago.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, thousands of individuals of Italian, German and Japanese ancestry were detained as potentially dangerous “enemy aliens.” For Laura and Enrico Fermi, the new classification brought new rules, new restrictions. They were required to obtain permission from the local United States Attorney before leaving their community. They could not own a shortwave radio, camera or binoculars or live in a building with other enemy aliens.

In April 1942, permission in hand, Enrico boarded the “Twentieth Century Limited” at New York City’s Union Station and headed west. His wife and children would join him at the end of the school year. Officials at the independent agency overseeing wartime scientific research had balked at including Fermi because of his “enemy alien” status, but his fellow physicists insisted. He would soon prove invaluable. A brilliant problem-solver with an informal, patient manner, he was well-liked and an excellent team-builder. 67

While Fermi settled in, Glenn Seaborg, one of the Berkeley scientists who’d discovered plutonium, and his colleague Isadore Perlman, boarded “The City of San Francisco” for the two-day train trip east to Chicago. There they would join Fermi who was already at work building another reactor. When they arrived, the weather was dark and gloomy, as was their mood. 68

“The day Iz and I got off the train in Chicago,” Seaborg later wrote, “we had little reason to believe America would win. In fact, the evidence pointed the other way . . . German engineering was the most respected in the world, especially when it came to arms. Those Panzers rolling across Europe in the blitzkrieg seemed unstoppable . . . We were fighting for survival, pure and simple.” 69

Fear of a German victory was ever present, and the bad news kept coming. In the summer of ’42, word spread via the international scientific grapevine that Werner Heisenberg had been named director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, Germany’s center for atomic research. The concerns his American friends had before the war, now seemed fully justified. They could only conclude that Heisenberg had sold out to the Nazis, that he had agreed to build an atom bomb. 70 Heisenberg, it seemed, was no longer Hitler’s chief atomic theorist; he was the de facto leader of Hitler’s atomic bomb program.

From that moment, America’s race to beat Hitler to the bomb became personal. The enemy now had a name and a face. He was a brilliant, arrogant adversary, fiercely loyal to his country. He was the personification of German scientific superiority. And he had a two-year head start. “Everyone was terrified that the Germans were ahead of us,” says physicist Leona Marshall Libby. “That was a persistent . . . fear fed by . . . the fact that our leaders knew those people in Germany and had gone to school with them.” 71

Forty-five-year-old Leslie Groves, a hard-charging Corps of Engineers brigadier general, would run America’s newly organized atomic bomb program, now called The Manhattan Project. The son of an army chaplain, fourth in his class at West Point, he was a skilled manager with a history of tackling large projects, including the construction of the Pentagon. Often impatient and abrasive, he didn’t seem to care how many people he had to offend to get the job done. 72

Fermi and his Chicago colleagues chafed at surrendering control of their nuclear fission research. They had spent months debating the best way to cool nuclear reactors—using water or helium. Groves gave them just five days to make up their minds. He was “the biggest son-of-a-bitch I ever met in my life,” said one Groves subordinate, “but also one of the most capable individuals.” 73

Groves would spend the next three years pushing, prodding, cajoling and bullying government officials, corporate CEOs and pretty much anyone who got in his way, turning what had been an ivory-tower, slow-paced academic exercise into a crash $26 billion (adjusted for inflation) military-run campaign. To stand any chance of beating the Germans, Groves calculated he would have to deliver the first bomb no later than summer of 1945.

Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves

(Digital Photo Archive, Department of Energy (DOE), courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives)

GENERAL GROVES MET THE future scientific director of The Manhattan Project, Julius Robert Oppenheimer, on his initial inspection tour of Project research facilities. Groves liked what he saw in the 38-year-old U.C. Berkeley physics professor. “He’s a real genius,” he told an interviewer. “He can talk to you about anything you bring up . . . except sports.” 74 Groves invited him to come to Chicago, where he joined the general onboard the New York-bound “Twentieth Century Limited.” Hours of discussion in Groves’ private compartment sealed the deal.

A tall, gaunt, chain-smoking intellectual, Oppenheimer was the son of a wealthy textile importer, a German-born Jew who had immigrated to the United States in 1888 when he was seventeen years old. Oppenheimer was undeniably brilliant, but he had never managed anything larger than a university seminar, and his leftist politics raised legitimate concerns that he might pass atomic secrets to the Soviets. As he himself admitted, “he had donated money to every Communist-front organization on the West coast.” 75 He had never been a party member, but his wife Kitty, brother, sister-in-law and former fiancée had all been members. Kitty had, in fact, been married to one of the Communist Party’s American leaders. 76

Even before Oppenheimer’s name surfaced in connection with the Manhattan Project, he had come to the attention of the FBI, which was investigating suspected Soviet espionage at Berkeley’s radiation lab. After he became a candidate for the Los Alamos position, the FBI passed his file to Colonel Boris Pash, the San Francisco area chief for Army Counter-Intelligence. 77 The son of a Russian émigré, Pash had fought against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution. He was a zealous, some said fanatical, anti-Communist. And he vehemently opposed Oppenheimer’s appointment.

Oppenheimer’s political past troubled General Groves as well, but he prided himself on his ability to judge people. He knew that Oppenheimer and Kitty were ambitious, that Oppenheimer yearned for a Nobel Prize, but would probably never get one. Physicists generally do their best work when they’re in their twenties. At 38, Oppenheimer was over the hill. 78 If he succeeded, the atom bomb would bring him something even more prestigious, a place in world history. Groves trusted that would be sufficient to ensure Oppenheimer’s loyalty.

He made the appointment over Pash’s objection, but Pash never let up. He kept Oppenheimer under constant surveillance. He tapped his phone, opened his mail, hired counterintelligence agents to be his driver and bodyguard and repeatedly interrogated him. Oppenheimer cooperated with every request, but no matter what he did, he could not convince Pash of his loyalty.

With Oppenheimer in place, the battle lines were drawn. Oppenheimer would lead the Allies; Heisenberg, the Germans. Now bitter enemies, the two had a good deal in common. They were both university professors, theoretical physicists, about the same age. Both came from privileged, educated families. (Heisenberg’s father was a professor of medieval and modern Greek studies.) Both had been investigated by the state as subversives: Oppenheimer, for supporting Communists; Heisenberg, for defending “Jewish science”. And both owed their exoneration to friends in high places: Oppenheimer, to General Groves; Heisenberg, to SS Commander Heinrich Himmler.