On the afternoon of 7 June 1941, Laura d’Oriano was sitting in the cross-country bus from Toulouse to Mont-de-Marsan. It was a hot day, and the bus was heading through vineyards and fields of grain towards the sun, which was already low in the western sky. All the vehicle’s sliding windows were open and the curtains fluttered in the breeze. Laura, wearing a headscarf, was reading a book. In the luggage net above her was a small travelling bag; she had left her handsome but conspicuous old suitcase in Marseille.
The driver eyed her in his rear-view mirror. He may well have taken her for a war widow from Toulouse going to see her husband’s family about his will, or a primary schoolteacher visiting her parents in the country and passing the time with some Verlaine or Stendhal.
If policemen had boarded the bus and conducted a spot check, Laura would have produced her new identity card from her handbag and identified herself as Louise Fremont, French citizen resident in Paris, born Marseille, 27 September 1912. Marital status: single. Height: 5 ft 3 ins. Occupation: singer and dancer. Meanwhile, she would have studiously avoided looking at her travelling bag, sewn into the lining of which were 7,000 francs in small notes and an assortment of ration cards.
The bus, which was quite full when it left Toulouse, had gradually emptied; now that it was nearing the restricted coastal zone, Laura was the only remaining passenger. The driver, having formed his own picture of her, had ceased to take any notice of her. At the last stop but two before the demarcation line, a wine-growing village named Aire-sur-l’Adour, she got out and found herself in a narrow main street lined with closed shops between which small side streets led off to right and left. Further on, church bells were ringing for Mass. The cobblestones were still warm from the afternoon sun.
When the bus drove off, a gaunt old peasant with a red nose and a chin frosted with grey stubble waved to her from the other side of the street. He hailed her loudly and delightedly as ‘ma petite Louise’, as if she were his favourite niece or a granddaughter, then crossed the street, gripped Laura by the shoulders and kissed her firmly on both cheeks. Taking her bag, he put an arm round her and quickly shepherded her down a side street that terminated in a farm track leading out into a vineyard.
Parked in the vineyard was a red tractor. The peasant settled himself behind the wheel and Laura scrambled on to the small seat over the right rear wheel. They drove to the far side of the vineyard, whence another farm track led to another vineyard, and another, and another. Laura and the peasant spent two hours lurching and juddering westwards across the vineyards of Aquitaine until they had crossed the demarcation line and disappeared into a sparse pine forest that extended for dozens of sandy, marshy kilometres to the Atlantic Ocean and up to the Gironde.
The following afternoon, with hair tousled and shoes badly scuffed, Laura turned up in Bordeaux on her own. She went for a preliminary walk in the city centre, bought herself some new shoes and had her hair done, then drank a coffee in a pavement café. When evening came she made her way to Madame Blanc’s boarding house at No. 4 Rue du Quai Bourgeois, the address of which she had noted on a slip of paper. This establishment was situated on the banks of the Garonne, not far from the harbour. Some rooms were still vacant and the prices were low. There were a lot of vacant rooms in Bordeaux now that the refugees had fled from the advancing Wehrmacht.
Laura gave her first performance at a café called Le Singe Dansant the following Saturday. She wore her old Cossack costume, showed her garter and sang Bayushki Bayu, and the sailors in the audience duly burst into tears. The only difference between this and earlier performances was that the sailors wore Italian naval uniform because they belonged to the crews of the 32 submarines based under German command in Bordeaux harbour, which were preparing to take part in the Battle of the Atlantic. They had to be back on board their submarines by midnight, so none of them was waiting for Laura when she left the café by the back door and emerged into the street at half past twelve.
For all that, her task proved to be simple – pure puppetry. It was so easy, it would have saddened Laura if she hadn’t felt so relieved about it. All she had to do the next day was give herself a hint of Slav cheekbones in her make-up mirror and drape the Cossack jacket around her shoulders, and the Italian sailors recognised her as she strolled past the harbour entrance on her Sunday walk.
She didn’t even have to sway her hips to turn the youngsters’ heads. It was quite enough for her to pause on the Quai du Sénégal and put a cigarette between her lips. When she felt in her handbag for some matches, a whole bevy of them dashed over to light it for her and show off in various ways, and when she thanked them in flawless Italian, wiggled her fingers at them over her shoulder as she walked on, said a casual arrivederci and flashed her white teeth, their delight knew no bounds.
It was all so predictable: a game as old as time, but Laura played it because it suited her purpose. From that Sunday onwards she was treated as a celebrity by the Italian submariners. If she ordered a Martini in a pavement café, it was automatically paid for. If she was carrying shopping bags, an admirer always volunteered to carry them back to the Rue du Quai Bourgeois for her. And if she sat down on a park bench in the Botanical Gardens with her Stendhal or Verlaine, someone always asked if he might join her for a moment.
So Laura got into conversation with the submariners. Again and again she had to admit that she wasn’t a genuine Cossack in real life, but a respectable schoolmaster’s daughter from Marseille, and that her name wasn’t really Anoushka but Louise – Loulou to her friends – and that she spoke such good Italian because her mother was Italian. And when she abruptly changed the subject and asked the submariners whether life underwater was hard, they would all draw a deep breath and start talking.
They told her of the heat on board, and the stale air, and the ominous silence when the submarine turned off its electric motors and lay on the seabed amid centuries-old wrecks, compelled to lie doggo for days in order to elude the enemy hydrophone operators. They told her of the unspeakable bliss of surfacing, when they could once more stand on deck in the fresh air, faces spattered with spray, and of their malign jubilation when they landed a direct hit and 10,000 tons of enemy shipping went down with all hands.
It was all very simple. The sailors ran off at the mouth all by themselves, and it would never have occurred to any of them that Laura had been interrogating them. The fact was, she seldom if ever asked a question, merely encouraged her companions to go on by uttering sporadic exclamations of surprise and admiration – against which, like all men, they were defenceless. So they talked and talked. They told Laura how one got a submarine to submerge and surface, and where the air to breathe came from, and where the bunks for the crew were situated. They told her how many submarines were lying in the harbour basin – only 32 at present, but not all in a combat-ready condition, and Italian boats only, no German – and they told her the names of the boats in which they had already served.
On a few occasions it so happened that a submarine would be entering or leaving harbour while Laura and a male companion were sitting near the harbour entrance. Then she would get him to point out the conning tower and entry hatch, take note of the ballast tanks along the sides and the retractable anti-aircraft gun on the deck, memorise its calibre and greet all she was told with a polite nod of interest. But when she suggested a tour of the closely guarded submarine base, her companions regretfully shook their heads and begged her pardon in phrases learnt by heart. Top secret. Walls have ears. A submarine’s most potent and important weapon is its invisibility. A submarine whose location or course the enemy knows in advance is as good as lost.
Laura memorised everything, and in the evening she made notes in her room. Two or three times a week she wrote letters to a friend in Toulouse whom she had never met. That was the extent of her duties. On Saturday nights she sang her Cossack songs at the Singe Dansant, and on Sundays she took a bus to the sea, to Lacanau or Cap Ferret, and went for long, lonely walks across the dunes. That summer in Aquitaine was long and peaceful. The war was far away and the weather fine, and a cool sea breeze was always blowing inland. When a sailor recognised Laura at the bus stop on her way back to Bordeaux, she sometimes accepted his invitation to a plate of moules frites.
But out at sea the war still raged. Whole fleets of vessels were sunk and tens of thousands of young sailors sent to a watery grave. It is conceivable that some of the latter had been companions of Laura’s, for an exceptionally large number of Bordeaux-based Italian submarines failed to return from patrol that summer of 1941.
The Glauco sailed for the Mediterranean on 24 June, was attacked in the Strait of Gibraltar three days later and sank west of Tangier. Out of a crew of 50, 8 were drowned and 42 taken prisoner.
On 4 July the Michaele Bianchi set off on a mission, objective unknown, but was sunk in the Gironde estuary with all 60 men on board.
The Maggiore Baracca was sunk off Gibraltar on 8 September. Of her crew, 28 drowned and 32 were taken prisoner.
The Guglielmo Marconi sailed early in October 1941. For unknown reasons she sank off the coast of Portugal with all 60 crew members on board.
In October, Aquitaine was suddenly assailed by autumnal storms and weeks of rain. Laura quit her engagement at the Singe Dansant and took leave of her landlady. Then, carrying her suitcase, she made her way southwards into the great pine forest. The peasant was doubtless waiting for her on the other side next day, complete with red tractor.
Although the Italian submarine flotilla based at Bordeaux continued to go out on as many patrols as before, it sustained no more losses in the months that followed.
Having been built in theory, the atom bomb had now to be built in practice.
Felix Bloch had had no contact with his physicist friends in Germany since the beginning of the war, but he had undoubtedly read in the paper that Heisenberg and von Weizsäcker were working on a uranium machine in Berlin. He may also have learnt that, during their last visit to Niels Bohr in Copenhagen, they had spoken of the imminence of victory and the biological necessity for war. He may furthermore have known that von Weizsäcker had filed a patent for a plutonium bomb in Berlin, and that the German armed forces were amassing as much uranium as possible during their depredations in Europe. At latest since Pearl Harbor and at the very latest since Stalingrad, it had been obvious to any rational person that Germany resembled a chess player with two rooks fewer on the board than their opponent; but it was equally clear that an atom bomb would bring the two rooks back into play. And possibly a queen as well.
Such was the situation when, on a spring day in 1943, Robert Oppenheimer came to Palo Alto and asked Felix Bloch to dispense with a summer vacation on the beach and accompany him into the New Mexico desert, there to work on building an atom bomb at a secret location not marked on any map. Not just for the summer but for the rest of the year and an indefinite period thereafter.
We do not know what Bloch’s immediate response was, nor whether Oppenheimer made his request at the university or at home on Emerson Road, nor whether the meeting took place in the morning, afternoon or evening. We do not know if Bloch’s wife Lore was present, or whether the twins were already asleep or still awake. We do not know if the conversation took place on the veranda or inside the house, or if they went for a walk to avoid unwelcome eavesdroppers.
We do not know, either, if it was a short or a long conversation, a brief man-to-man dialogue or a passionate debate between two scholars arguing about the root purpose of their science. We know nothing about this conversation, which must have been the weightiest and most momentous in Felix’s life because it required him to find an answer – yes or no? – to the question of whether his conscience would permit him, in the service of liberty, humanity and world peace, not only to reflect on the most terrible killing machine in human history but actually to build it; and whether – yes or no? – a European Jew like himself was entitled or even obliged to combat the Nazis’ genocide by all available means including the manufacture of a weapon of mass destruction whose egalitarian efficiency would surpass that of Fritz Haber’s poison gas many times over.
We know nothing about this question of conscience because Felix Bloch devoted not a word to it anywhere in his writings, which comprise many thousands of pages. None of his carefully filed essays, letters and memoranda, which he bequeathed to Stanford Library for the benefit of posterity, contains a word about the atom bomb. The subject is so thoroughly avoided – one is tempted to assume that every relevant scrap of paper was carefully removed – that there is no mention even of Oppenheimer’s name, although ‘Oppie’ was for ten years his closest friend and scientific confidant.
What mattered most about their conversation can, for all that, be definitely ascertained: first, that it actually took place, and, second, that Felix Bloch answered both questions of conscience in the affirmative. If he wondered aloud whether three centuries of research into physics were really to culminate in the building of an atomic bomb, Oppenheimer would have dismissed his misgivings by remarking that, setting aside any philosophical arguments, all that mattered in the current geostrategic situation was who got the bomb first: Hitler or the United States.
This conversation, or something like it, must have taken place, because early in summer 1943 – possibly at the end of June, when the summer vacation began – Lore and Felix Bloch packed their bags and set off for the New Mexico desert with their twin daughters, who were then two-and-a-half years old.
For security reasons, Oppenheimer had instructed Bloch not to buy tickets all the way through to Santa Fe, but to change at Bakersfield, Albuquerque and Lamy and buy new tickets there en route. The journey took 44 hours in all, and it was not until late on the morning of the third day that Felix Bloch and his family arrived in the old capital of New Mexico.
At that time Santa Fe was still a peaceful little Spanish town from way back. In the main square, old trees shaded cast-iron park benches on which men of all ages took their siesta at all times of the day. Little groups of dark-haired young women with crimson lips and colourful dresses paraded around the obelisk in the middle of the park, shyly on the lookout for potential admirers. Cars were a rarity, and horses and mules were tethered outside the La Fonda Hotel. Children played on the steps of St Francis Cathedral, and Indian women seated on the veranda of the governor’s palace with gaudy shawls swathing the babies on their backs offered pottery and jewellery for sale.
In summer 1943 the sleepy town was invaded by an unusual number of strangers. Mostly pale-faced urbanites from the north, few of them could speak Spanish and many spoke English with European accents. Many came on their own but some were couples with children, and they brought with them, in addition to their suitcases, curious items such as brooms, buckets, mirrors, pot plants and baby buggies.
Waiting for these newcomers every morning on East Palace Avenue was an old school bus inscribed ‘US Army’ in bright red lettering. A brawny GI helped the ladies to load their household goods and amiably permitted them to order him around. When everything had been safely stowed on board, he heaved himself in behind the wheel, secured the door handle to the dashboard with a length of string, engaged first gear and drove off.
The bus was reserved for Robert Oppenheimer’s guests, over 1,000 of whom made the two-hour trip to Los Alamos in the early summer of 1943. Most of them were physicists and their families, but there were also chemists, explosives and ballistics experts, biologists, precision engineers, electrical engineers and metallurgists. The red dirt road ran north-west, past lilac rocks and ochre crags, to the former boarding school for boys at Los Alamos, which stood on the lip of a huge, extinct volcano 2,300 metres above sea level. Visible in the distance were the southernmost foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Range and, nearer at hand, the ominous black basalt shape of the Black Mesa table mountain. There were Indian pueblos among the rocks. Many were ruined and deserted, others still inhabited. Here and there, red peppers were suspended from the mud walls to dry, and yellow, blue, white and black maize cobs lay in the sun-baked yards.
The road crossed a narrow timber bridge spanning the red waters of the Rio Grande before climbing steeply past flowering cacti and rattlesnakes that wriggled off into the desert sagebrush. Coming suddenly into view around a bend, huge, roaring US Army bulldozers shrouded in clouds of dust gnawed away at the lilac rocks and ochre crags to level the road for heavy traffic.
The bus toiled uphill for an eternity. When it reached the lip of the crater, the road led straight on to Los Alamos, which had within a few weeks lost all resemblance to a boys’ boarding school and grown into a small, hutted town housing 1,000 inhabitants and enclosed within a radius of six kilometres by a continuous barbed-wire fence. There were two gates, one in the east and one in the west, each forming a roadblock manned by military policemen armed with submachine guns. They checked the passengers and peered silently into the bus. Then a sergeant gave the signal to drive on.
Oppenheimer was waiting to welcome the new arrivals when the bus pulled up outside the former school. He slapped the men on the back and asked their wives how the journey had gone, said ‘Yes … yes, yes … yes … ’ and lit cigarettes all round, then beckoned to some soldiers, who picked up the newcomers’ luggage and allocated them their accommodation.
Felix and Lore Bloch were housed not far from the water tower in Apartment House T124, a rapidly erected timber building painted lime-green and containing four flats. The kitchens were equipped with soot-stained wood-burning stoves from army stocks, the bedrooms with camp beds. The coverlets and sheets were emblazoned in black with the acronym ‘USED’, which stood for ‘United States Engineer Detachment’.
The Blochs were not lonely in Los Alamos. The walls were thin and their neighbours were old friends. Living next door to them on the ground floor was Edward Teller, Felix’s erstwhile tea-maker in the Leipzig ping pong cellar, who had alarmed the secret summer seminar at Berkeley with his vision of a global conflagration. Billetted upstairs was Robert Brode, whom Felix had got to know as a student in Göttingen and later as a member of the ‘Monday Evening Journal Club’ at Berkeley. Living nearby were Robert Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe, and, somewhat further away, the Zurich physicist Hans Staub and the mathematician John von Neumann, with whom Felix had studied at the ETH.
Most of them were accompanied by their wives, many by their children, and they all realised that by working in Los Alamos they had become privy to a state secret of the first order and would have to remain so until the war ended. Their average age was 29. Hardly any of them were over 40, and the birthrate at Los Alamos was far above the national average throughout the war years. Oppenheimer, Bloch, Serber and Bethe were among the oldest, at least until the arrival of Enrico Fermi and Niels Bohr.
They had all come to work; Los Alamos had no pensioners or invalids, idlers, artists or speculators, ne’er-do-wells, parasites or pickpockets, malingerers, legacy hunters or shirkers. When the sirens wailed at seven am, the men hurried to the laboratories situated in closely guarded areas on the outskirts of the settlement. The children went to school or were taken to a crèche, the women worked in administrative offices, canteens, libraries or schools. A summer camp atmosphere prevailed.
More experts arrived daily, as did army trucks transporting heavy equipment from the furthest corners of the United States. In July 1943 alone, the four biggest and most efficient particle accelerators in the world arrived in Los Alamos and were installed in specially-built huts on concrete foundations laid for the purpose.
Felix Bloch was working with Edward Teller and John von Neumann on a detonating mechanism in which the radioactive isotope was shaped like a hollow sphere and compressed very quickly by implosion so as to attain the critical mass required to trigger a complete chain reaction without premature detonation. Their task was to theoretically ascertain and experimentally prove that this was possible. Calculating the pressure waves travelling inwards from all directions proved to be extremely difficult, mathematically speaking. In the absence of electronic calculators, it took several weeks.
Once the calculations had been completed, the experimental proof followed. Felix and his friends made small bombs out of hollow metal spheres surrounded by explosives, took them down into a steep-sided canyon and placed them on a thick, ferroconcrete slab. They then withdrew to a specially constructed gun emplacement and put their fingers in their ears.
When the thunderous echoes had died away and the smoke had cleared, they emerged and gathered up the fragments of the metal spheres. The earliest experiments were discouraging. The spheres had not been evenly compressed but reduced to fragments of the most unpredictable shape.
So the men returned to their laboratory, laid aside the spheres and designed tubular bombs in the hope that this would reduce the countervailing pressure waves by one dimension.
At six pm the sirens signalled knocking-off time and everyone went home. In the evenings the inhabitants of Los Alamos met for cocktails in the former boys’ school. Being academics, they were accustomed to social life in university cities. There were few forms of entertainment in the New Mexico desert, so they organised an endless succession of concerts, film shows, amateur dramatics and dances. Dances were sometimes performed for the scientists by Indians who worked for them by day as furnacemen, manual labourers or domestic servants. On one occasion a group of theatre-mad physicists staged Arsenic and Old Lace with Oppenheimer playing the first corpse in the window seat and Edward Teller the second. At midnight everyone made their way home along the gloomy, unlit dirt roads. When the moon was shining, the pines cast dark shadows.
Silence reigned at night in Los Alamos, whose residents slept protected by the barbed-wire fence surrounding the settlement. Soldiers noiselessly patrolled the perimeter and coyotes howled in the distance. From time to time a shot would ring out. On nights like this Felix Bloch lay awake for a long time, wondering how he had found himself letting off miniature bombs in remote ravines, like a schoolboy. It astonished him that he, who had once aspired to do something peaceful and militarily useless in life, should have wound up behind barbed wire. He sometimes wondered what the barbed wire was protecting, Los Alamos from the world or the world from Los Alamos.
His neighbour Edward Teller, too, was often awake until late at night. It was his habit to spend the small hours playing the Steinway grand his wife had bought at a hotel auction in Chicago and somehow contrived to transport to Los Alamos. A brilliant and enthusiastic pianist, Teller was forever playing Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12 in the autumn of 1943. Its strains must have penetrated the thin walls of Apartment House T124 and emerged into the nocturnal hush of the surrounding plateau, audible as far away as the hills and the dark canyons in which the Indians’ deserted old pueblos slept their millennial sleep.