THE ROAD NORTH from Santa Fe undulated gently for several miles along a string of hills and then opened out onto a valley floor more than seven thousand feet above sea level. On the west side of this valley road the land stretched out for miles to the gray, silver, and timber shades of the Jemez Mountains. In between, stunted brown tree-shrubs dotted the high desert land in countless tufts. At sunrise and sunset the wide valley was a spectrum of rich colors—the ever-shifting tans and purples of the desert—but sunrises and sunsets were just moments in the long days here where time and the land alike seemed almost infinite. On the east side of this valley road, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains stood bloodred in the distance, including majestic snowcapped North Truchas Peak, at 13,102 feet one of the highest in all of New Mexico. The air possessed that lucid clarity of the desert. In the wide-open country of the American Southwest, the eye could roll out to the distance and the soul could expand into the great spaces.
At just this point a smaller road crossed the valley floor to the west. It spanned the Rio Grande, only a muddy stream here, and then started a slow climb toward the peaks of the Jemez Mountains, some darkened with trees, some lightened by scree. Large lava beds were visible, and black escarpments. Then salmon-colored cliffs towered skyward. The empty foreground filled suddenly with swellings of mesas, and abruptly trees—slim piñon pines and stubby juniper cedars—appeared over the canyons and the mesas. The air cooled and smells sharpened. The road rose, curved, cut back, then continued up, the mesas gradually taking shape. As the road crested the edge of one mesa, five suddenly appeared, splayed out from the gigantic volcanic mountain mass of the Jemez Caldera like the fingers of a hand sifting the sands of time. In the mesas’ walls were a honeycomb of hollowed caves whose ceilings had been blackened by the smoke of long-ago fires. Etched into them were drawings of animals, birds, masked beings, dancing men, symbols of rain and sun.
The Pajarito Plateau opened like a huge fan from an arc of blue mountains. It was grooved by canyons that radiated out like the crudely drawn spokes of a wheel. The canyon walls rose through many-colored layers of hardened volcanic ash, rose and buff, like petrified waves. Some of the ridges between the canyons were narrow. Others were wide and flat, dotted with the mounds of pre-Columbian Indian villages and fields where Hispanic families cultivated beans in summer, returning in winter to their adobe homes along the Rio Grande. Atop one of the ridges of the Pajarito Plateau, where trees grew and the air smelled of pine needles, was the Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys. The school was named after the canyon that bordered the mesa to the south and was dotted with cottonwood trees (los alamos in Spanish) along the sandy trickle of its stream. All was quiet in this awesomely beautiful place. It was as far from the war-torn world as one could possibly be in September 1942.
That month General Groves, who had just taken charge of the Manhattan Project, decided to create a new laboratory where the widely scattered work on bomb theory and design could be brought together and the fissionable material produced at Oak Ridge and Hanford could be assembled. There was also the issue of security: if scientists were brought together in one place, it would be a lot easier to control their talking and movements. As leader of this new lab, Groves wanted someone with an intellect broad and quick enough to grasp a whole range of scientific problems, the imagination to suggest novel solutions to those problems, and the charisma to keep everyone working together as a team. He wanted someone who would get the “long-hairs” to deliver their “gadget” on time.
Groves needed someone with enough authority and prestige to attract the best people available, ride herd on them, and coordinate their work. None of the Nobel laureates in physics could be spared to administrate. Lawrence was an outstanding experimental physicist and had gained good administrative experience running the Rad Lab at Berkeley, but he was committed to the electromagnetic separation of U-235 at Oak Ridge and could not be spared. Compton was another obvious choice, but he was already doing more than his share running the Met Lab at Chicago. And it would be unthinkable in Groves’s mind to assign the most secret military program to a foreign-born “enemy alien” such as Fermi, who was badly needed in Chicago, anyway.
In the absence of a more important figure, Groves chose Oppenheimer. They first met when Groves visited Berkeley on an inspection trip in early October 1942. Strangely enough, they hit it off well together right from the start. Oppenheimer was straightforward, did not act like a typical scientist, and seemed to be realistic about the importance of security, a matter of grave concern to the general. Oppenheimer, a persuasive talker and a consummate actor, convinced Groves that he was his man.
It was a most unorthodox choice. I. I. Rabi voiced the reaction of many physicists when he called it “a most improbable appointment. I was astonished.” 1 Oppenheimer had never managed anything bigger than a graduate seminar. He had no experience in organizing a large laboratory and had shown no predisposition for teamwork before. He was a theoretician, whereas the lab would be concerned primarily with experiments and engineering. He had no Nobel Prize to distinguish him—would other scientists follow his leadership? Then there was Oppenheimer’s left-wing past, which “included much that was not to our liking by any means,” as Groves later wrote. 2 Oppenheimer’s former fiancée, his wife, his brother, and his sister-in-law had all been members of the Communist Party—perhaps he himself had been, too. Neither Bush nor Conant was enthusiastic. Compton and Lawrence also had reservations about his capacity as an administrator. “Do you know a better man?” Groves asked them. 3
Yet while the conservative Groves found Oppenheimer politically naive, he found nothing in his security file to doubt Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the United States, even though War Department investigators had characterized him as “strongly communistic” and had reported his connection “with radical organizations for years on and off the campus of the University of California.” 4 Groves was so confident of his judgment that he personally ordered Oppenheimer’s clearance, overruling the objection of Army Intelligence officers on the grounds that Oppenheimer was “absolutely essential to the Project.” 5 His order caused consternation and resentment among project security officers, but Groves wanted Oppenheimer—who else was there?—and forced through his choice. (The security people never forgave him or Oppenheimer for that act and continued to harass the director at every opportunity.) Groves barely knew Oppenheimer, yet he sensed that this man of great charm and persuasiveness could somehow bring together very difficult personalities and get them to work as a team. Groves’s intuition told him that Oppenheimer was a man equipped not only with scientific insight but with strong character and a capacity for decision. That was what Groves wanted, that was what he needed. There was no time to lose. The atomic bomb was only an idea on paper, and he had to make it a reality.
It was a brilliant choice.
The general and the physicist quickly developed a good working relationship. They always addressed each other formally as “General Groves” and “Dr. Oppenheimer”—an indication of the constant if subdued contest between them, each admiring yet suspicious of the other’s abilities. Groves handled Oppenheimer with more respect and deference than he did any other project scientist. Oppenheimer, who could be cutting with other physicists, patiently answered every question the general asked. He had not expected to like Groves—the military culture, after all, was definitely not his cup of tea—yet he found himself grudgingly admiring the general. “Groves is a bastard,” he would say privately, “but he’s a straightforward one.” 6 They were an odd and improbable couple locked in a strange union that superseded quarrels and irritation—married, first and last, to the success of the project. They got along because each saw the other as the way to fulfill his ambition to achieve personal glory. “That combination made the thing work,” Rabi astutely observed. 7
Groves and Oppenheimer’s first task together was to choose a site for the bomb lab. Oppenheimer remembered the mesa of Los Alamos, where he had spent a happy summer riding horseback and camping. The characteristics that had made the location a place of glory to him—its remoteness and isolation, but also its spare, intense beauty—was especially important to the aesthete in Oppenheimer, who knew the quality of the scientists whom he hoped to attract there and believed they would respond to surroundings that stretched and enriched the spirit.
Oppenheimer proposed this “little gray home in the west” 8 to Groves, and together they drove up to the Ranch School in an unmarked car on November 16, 1942. They arrived there late in the afternoon. A light snow was falling. Despite the cold November wind, the boys were out on the playing fields in corduroy shorts. The founder of the school, Ashley Pond, was an enthusiastic advocate of the vigorous outdoor life and did not even believe in heated sleeping quarters. Oppenheimer and Groves remained outside the gates, taking in the fresh mountain air as they pored over maps and looked out over the surrounding countryside. Log houses and school buildings were scattered amid pastures and cropland. It was a lovely place, this clearing in the pine trees 8,500 feet above sea level. The flat green mesa, separated from the rest of the plateau by the vertical walls of two deep canyons, offered perfect isolation. After taking it all in, General Groves said simply, “This is the place.” 9
The only obstacle to his decision was A. J. Connell, the headmaster of the Los Alamos Ranch School, where forty-three wealthy boys had been sent, mostly from the East, to be educated and toughened up. When an army officer told the headmaster that the school had come to the end of its days and would be taken over, Connell replied, “You must be mistaken. The property is not for sale.” The boys were permitted to finish the school year, but that was it. By the time they left, in the early spring of 1943, MPs were already guarding the mesa. Connell retired to Santa Fe a broken man, where he died two years later. That is how the secret lab known as Site Y or the Hill came to be.
On March 16, 1943, Oppenheimer left California by train for New Mexico. He arrived in Santa Fe a few days later and took up residence at 109 East Palace Avenue in Santa Fe under the alias Mr. Bradley until Kitty and Peter joined him and together they moved up to the Hill in May. Oppenheimer’s plan was to build an atomic bomb there with just thirty other physicists. It would be a small community. They would live in the schoolmasters’ houses and eat at the main lodge. What labs were needed would be squeezed in between the canyon rim and the little pond that graced the front of the lodge. As the realities of the immense challenge set in, however, Oppenheimer would be forced to recruit more physicists, as well as mathematicians, chemists, metallurgists, ordnance experts, machinists—all sorts of personnel. By war’s end, Los Alamos would secretly employ more than four thousand civilian and two thousand military personnel.
Oppenheimer’s original estimate had been low because of inexperience and his lack of ability to understand the dimensions involved. He had foreseen a theoretical physics laboratory whose main function would be to determine the critical mass, ensure against predetonation in assembly, and perform the necessary subcritical experiments to test the theory. Oppenheimer had given little thought to the engineering aspects of a weapon, which would prove to be awesome.
The laboratory started out with nothing except the library books that the Ranch School boys had read and the equipment they had used to go horseback riding. The only link with the outside world was a hand-cranked Forest Service phone line. Water was scarce and electricity was intermittent. At the center of Los Alamos was Ashley Pond, named after the school’s founder. To its east stood Fuller Lodge, the main dining hall. Across an open field was the Big House, which served as a dormitory for arriving scientists. Between the main road and the mesa’s southern rim were the laboratories, dubbed the Tech Area, one- and two-story white clapboard and green sheetrock buildings scattered among tall ponderosa pines. The streets created were unpaved and unnamed.
The scientists who would work in the Tech Area had many questions to answer: How many neutrons were released each time a uranium nucleus fissioned? How were they absorbed or scattered? How did the neutrons from one fission produce a second fission when they hit another uranium nucleus? How was a critical amount of fissionable material assembled fast enough to create a powerful explosion? What would happen during the explosion? The questions sounded very academic, but this was no college campus: a fenced guarded by MPs surrounded the Tech Area, and special white badges were required for admission.
Oppenheimer knew the physicists he needed would not readily pass up work at established war projects such as radar at MIT, the proximity fuse at Johns Hopkins, or sonar at San Diego to come to this unknown site in the desert. They would come only if America’s top physicists were coming, too. So Oppenheimer recruited the stars first, and the others followed fast. Some he terrified by stressing the prospect of a Nazi atomic bomb. Others he attracted by his descriptions of the immense beauty of New Mexico. But to all he imparted the feeling of how exciting it would be to participate in the pioneering work. “He spoke with a kind of mystical earnestness that captured our imagination,” recalled one recruit. 10 By describing the projected work as crucial to the war effort and exerting a kind of “intellectual sex appeal,” 11 as another recruit put it, Oppenheimer managed to get almost everyone he wanted. “Oppenheimer was the best recruiter and salesman I’ve ever seen,” said one who eagerly bought his sales pitch. “He expressed his enthusiasm for the project, and aroused ours.” 12 The list of current and future stars was astonishing: Robert Bacher, Robert Christy, Richard Feynman, Donald Hornig, Edwin McMillan, Philip Morrison, Norman Ramsey, Emilio Segrè, Victor Weisskopf, and Robert Wilson, to name just a few.
If Oppenheimer needed additional ammunition in his recruiting effort, he had it in the form of a personal letter from President Roosevelt. Addressed to Oppenheimer but meant for everyone on the Hill, the letter conveyed FDR’s appreciation of the project’s urgency and the country’s thanks for the scientists’ labors:
Secret June 29, 1943
My dear Dr. Oppenheimer:
I have recently reviewed with Dr. Bush the highly important and secret program of research, development and manufacture with which you are familiar. I was very glad to hear of the excellent work which is being done in a number of places in this country under the immediate supervision of General L. R. Groves and the general direction of the Committee of which Dr. Bush is Chairman. The successful solution of the problem is of the utmost importance to the national safety, and I am confident that the work will be completed in as short a time as possible as the result of the wholehearted cooperation of all concerned.
I am writing to you as the leader of one group which is to play a vital role in the months ahead. I know that you and your colleagues are working on a hazardous matter under unusual circumstances. The fact that the outcome of your labors is of such great importance to the nation requires that this program be even more drastically guarded than other highly secret war developments. I have therefore given directions that eveiy precaution be taken to insure the security of your project and feel sure that those in charge will see that these orders are carried out. You are fully aware of the reasons why your own endeavors and those of your associates must be circumscribed by very special restrictions. Nevertheless, I wish you would express to the scientists assembled with you my deep appreciation of their willingness to undertake the tasks which lie before them in spite of the dangers and the personal sacrifices. I am sure we can rely on their continued wholehearted and unselfish labors. Whatever the enemy may be planning, American science will be equal to the challenge. With this thought in mind, I send this note of confidence and appreciation.
Though there are other important groups at work, I am writing only to you as the leader of the one which is operating under very special conditions, and to General Groves. While this letter is secret, the contents of it may be disclosed to your associates under a pledge of secrecy.
Very sincerely yours,
Franklin D. Roosevelt
13
Oppenheimer answered Roosevelt’s letter with these words:
July 9, 1943
Dear Mr. President:
Thank you for your generous letter of June 29th. You would be glad to know how greatly your good words of reassurance were appreciated by us. There will be many times in the months ahead when we shall remember them.
It is perhaps appropriate that I should in turn transmit to you the assurance that we as a group and as individual Americans are profoundly aware of our responsibility, for the security of our project as well as for its rapid and effective completion. It is a great source of encouragement to us that we have in this your support and understanding.
Very sincerely yours,
J. R. Oppenheimer
14
The few who were not moved by Roosevelt’s letter were moved by the advantages that scientists enjoyed at Los Alamos. They got everything they wanted; cost was unimportant. They were given top priority for scarce wartime materials. They interacted daily with the finest minds in the world. “I was twenty-three years old when I went up to the Hill and met people I never expected to meet,” recalled a veteran of Los Alamos. “I hadn’t even known that Niels Bohr was still alive, never mind that I might actually be sitting across the table from him. I was totally overwhelmed by all these people I had read about in textbooks.” 15 Yes, there would be isolation. But the professional intimacy would make up for it.
Oppenheimer hoped scientists would be inspired to excellence by the beauty of Los Alamos. For many, this happened during their first meal at Fuller Lodge. In the morning, through a picture window, the rugged chain of the Sangre de Cristos ran like a dark silhouette along the horizon. Then the sun rose over the ridgeline and the room suddenly filled with brilliant light. In the evening the ridgeline darkened from violet blue to crimson at sunset. The mountains, the bright clear air, the deep blue sky, the warm sunshine and cool wind, the wildflowers exploding with color in summer, the walks beneath shimmering aspen trees that turned brilliant yellow in autumn—all these things exhilarated and sustained scientists in their efforts. This was the world they hoped to save and understand, and it was breathtaking. They had only to open their hearts a little and the mesa breathed itself into them, sending them climbing in an elation to a height that no fear could reach.
The mesa was off-limits to outsiders, and armed guards patrolled the perimeter on horseback. Los Alamos did not appear on any map; its very name was classified. People were fingerprinted and photographed and lectured about the need for secrecy. They were forbidden to tell anyone the location of the project. They could travel only within a limited radius, and telephone calls were monitored. It was illegal to mail a letter except in authorized drops, and all mail was censored. Driver’s licenses and tax returns were made out to numbers rather than to names. Birth certificates for children born there listed simply “Box 1663, Sandoval County Rural.” The secrecy extended to occupations. Even words such as physicist and chemist were taboo; they were called “fizzlers” and “stinkers” instead. Everyone lived and worked behind a heavily guarded fence topped with three rows of barbed wire. The fence was a tangible barrier and a constant reminder of Los Alamos’s separation from the rest of the world and of the war that was somewhere out there.
Oppenheimer accepted the heavy security as a wartime necessity, but he adamantly refused to accept secrecy in one area: scientific discussion. Here, the normal security procedure of compartmentalization—limiting discussion to a “need to know” basis—was not followed, despite protests from Army Intelligence. Oppenheimer held weekly symposia on the pressing technical problems of the moment, inviting solutions not only from the groups working on the problems but from the important cross-fertilization of agile minds from other disciplines with novel approaches and solutions. Just as in fission itself, one small suggestion could set off a chain reaction of ideas at a rapid rate. This fostered a cooperative spirit that maintained high morale. It was also a major reason why the bomb was built in such a short time.
Although the army guarded and administered Los Alamos, the heart of the Tech Area was run by Oppenheimer for the University of California under a government contract. Scientists came to Los Alamos as civilians, sharing with the military one mission: to build an atomic bomb as fast as possible and, with it, end the war. The similarities between them began and ended there. The gulf between their two cultures was immense, the tension almost inevitable. While scientists resented army regimentation and restrictions, the military found it irritating to have to pander to eccentrics who did not behave according to regulations. Soon after things got under way, Groves came to Los Alamos and told his staff behind closed doors: “Your job won’t be easy. At great expense we have gathered here the largest collection of crackpots ever seen.” 16 On another occasion he told Arthur Compton, “Your scientists don’t have any discipline. You don’t know how to take orders and give orders.” 17 Groves could not appreciate the creative dimension of scientific work.
But ultimately Groves did not care what the scientists thought or said about him behind his back as long as project security was maintained and its mission was accomplished. He knew what he wanted: to maintain the project’s secrecy, to build an atomic bomb as fast as possible and win the war with it, to tell the British as little as necessary, and to tell the Russians absolutely nothing. He was not above misleading the scientists if he thought it was for the good of the project. One project scientist recalled that Groves would, for example, deliberately give Los Alamos excessively optimistic reports about what was being accomplished at Oak Ridge; likewise, he would give Oak Ridge excessively optimistic reports about how things were going at Los Alamos. In this way, he could make both groups work harder, since each group would think it was the bottleneck and therefore get things done faster. On the other hand, Groves was willing to stick his neck out for the scientists. They asked for tremendous amounts of expensive and difficult-to-obtain equipment, and if they made a convincing case to him, he was willing to go a very long way to get it. If the Manhattan Project failed, the man who would be the target, and victim, of subsequent congressional investigations into why $2 billion had been squandered on a useless project would be Groves, not them—and he knew it. 18
The scientists at Los Alamos were young—their average age was only twenty-seven—and almost no one was older than forty. 19 Oppenheimer, the lab’s director, was all of thirty-nine. They were inexperienced and starting from scratch, but they were full of spirit. They worked most every night, but they still found time—and energy—to explore cave dwellings in nearby canyons, ski, ride horses, mountain climb, and dance. Occasionally they visited Santa Fe on Saturday nights, but the city was terribly crowded and the few bars were swarming with security agents from Army Intelligence, immediately recognizable by their snap-brimmed felt hats and poorly fitting civilian clothes.
“Life is not at all hard on this ‘magic mesa,’” reported one young physicist. “The group is large enough so that people can choose friends to their liking, and living conditions are entirely comfortable. Soon after arriving, I purchased a spirited part-Morgan horse that is the love of my life. I have taken several pack trips and have just returned from deer hunting.” 20 Singles sponsored dorm parties fueled by punch spiked with grain alcohol. Sometimes the liquor flowed too fast and the noise lasted too long. One dormitory received this warning from army authorities:
It has come to the attention of this headquarters that parties held in your dormitory are getting slightly out of hand and that on the morning after, your dayroom is littered with broken beer bottles and similar debris, fire hose is found unrolled down the corridor, and other evidences of abuse of Government buildings and property appear.
This situation must be corrected at once, as abuse of Government property cannot be tolerated; and any further reports coming to this headquarters will make it necessary to revoke the privilege of having parties in your dormitory. 21
Parties at Los Alamos were so intense because they were one of the few ways to relieve the pressure. “I’ve never drunk so much as there,” recalled one wartime resident, “because you had to let off steam, you had to let off this feeling eating your soul: ‘Oh God, are we doing right?’” 22 The future Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, then in his early twenties, relieved the stress by playing bongo drums, challenging censors with coded letters, and picking combination locks of safes containing classified documents. Scientists at Los Alamos could not unburden their souls by bringing their doubts and complaints to outsiders; they had to remain either within themselves or within the community.
Coexisting with this tension, however, was the pride of being part of a historic enterprise. “I have never seen such esprit de corps in a scientific group,” wrote a physicist at the time. 23 Here was a chance to show the world how powerful, important, and useful physics could be: Western civilization was threatened by a fanatic barbarism, and it looked as though only science could save it. “There was this amazing feeling that what you did was very important, that you damn well better do it right, and that everybody else around you was in the same fix,” said one who was there. 24 Oppenheimer voiced this feeling of excitement and purpose later when he wrote:
Almost everyone realized that this was a great undertaking. Almost everyone knew that if it were completed successfully and rapidly enough, it might determine the outcome of the war. Almost everyone knew that it was an unparalleled opportunity to bring to bear the basic knowledge and art of science for the benefit of his country. Almost everyone knew that this job, if it were achieved, would be a part of history. This sense of excitement, of devotion and of patriotism in the end prevailed. 25
It was hard to remain unaffected while working amid an astonishing array of scientific talent striving to harness a great force of nature in a race with an evil regime. The interest of technical developments, the interplay of brilliant personalities, the belief that the weapon they were making would decide the outcome of the war—all these things drew scientists deeply and completely in what appeared to be a good, and urgent, cause. That perception, in turn, dampened a lot of personal frictions. It would be hard to exaggerate the intensity of life at Los Alamos during the war. The whole thing lasted a little more than two years, but these were years that shaped for life the people who were there. It was their great moment. But the moment was always clouded by the awareness of the project’s purpose, and its possible consequences.
Everyone at Los Alamos felt Robert Oppenheimer’s presence. “When he walked into a room—boy, you knew he was there without even looking up,” recalled one scientist. 26 A slender figure in a close-fitting suit with a beaklike nose and close-cropped hair—he had cut it when he left Berkeley—he habitually wore a wide-brimmed hat that exaggerated the gauntness of his face. His nervous energy and piercing blue eyes seemed to take in everything at a glance. Early each morning, he left his home at 1967 Peach Street on “Bathtub Row” and walked to his Tech Area office on the far side of Ashley Pond. From the moment he reached his office, Oppenheimer threw himself into an endless round of progress reports, phone calls, and meetings. He paced constantly, smoking and coughing. When he spoke, he spoke slowly and eloquently. The voice was educated and genteel, but when it told you to do something, you did it. He never seemed in doubt. His mind was as sharp as a knife and his powers of concentration and understanding were phenomenal. “He was so quick that he gave you an inferiority complex,” said a friend. 27
Such leadership was not instantaneous. At first Oppenheimer strained to bring the new laboratory into existence. “Every time I think about our problem a new headache appears,” he confided to a colleague just a few weeks into his new job; “we shall certainly have our hands full.” 28 Groves was accustomed to pushing subordinates, but Oppenheimer threw himself into his new role with such heedless intensity that even Groves was afraid he might break. He applied his familiar talents—his quick and broad intellect, his personal charisma, his thoughtfulness for others—to the problems of a large and multi-faceted project. And Oppenheimer learned fast. But the most important factor was the change that seemed to have taken place in Oppenheimer’s personality. He showed a new determination and clarity, as if iron had entered his soul. Soon he was overseeing activities on the Hill with a self-evident competence and outward composure that almost everyone came to depend on.
Creating a new laboratory was stimulating work for Oppenheimer at first. Then an inevitable reaction set in; Oppenheimer realized the enormity of the task and became discouraged. His wife, Kitty, struggled to settle into life on the Hill and began to drink heavily. Time with his son, Peter, and daughter, Toni, born in December 1944, was limited to fleeting moments. He was kept under constant surveillance, his home and office bugged by security officials who remained suspicious of him and who picked over the details of his past. Brusquely dismissing others’ complaints about the opening of their mail, he told Teller, “What are they griping about? I am not allowed to talk to my own brother.” 29 In the summer of 1943 he confided to his close friend, theoretical physicist Robert Bacher, that he was going to give it up. He felt overburdened by the many problems of the project and his difficulties with the security people. He felt overwhelmed—he could not go through with it. “There isn’t anybody else who can do it,” Bacher told him. 30
There wasn’t, and Oppenheimer knew it. Decades before, he had come to Los Alamos and found strength. Now, once again, he dug deep and confronted and overcame his personal demons. Some sort of Rubicon had been crossed, and suddenly Oppenheimer was all focus. Whenever a difficult problem arose, he helped to solve it. Whenever an experiment reached a critical stage, he was there to watch it. He kept the various threads of the project in his mind, identified the critical issues, and made smart judgments. He was attuned to every sight and sound and nuance. His supreme talent lay in judging the ideas of others, in knowing which to back and which not to back. When tensions developed between personalities, as they inevitably did, he defused them with a light hand. He put people at ease through his informality and his interest in personal as well as technical matters. Oppenheimer was “one of them”—the fellow scientist who used persuasion rather than the boss who gave orders.
Occasionally, a side of Oppenheimer appeared—triggered by the pressure and the tension he lived with constantly—that close acquaintances remembered from Berkeley. This Oppenheimer would alternate between encouraging someone with thoughtful, generous words and wounding him with cutting remarks and intellectual superciliousness. On one occasion, he lashed out at a scientist so suddenly that others in the room were stunned and embarrassed. “He was thoroughly entitled to [his intellectual arrogance] because he really was a lot smarter than most of the people there,” said a witness to his verbal lashings, “but some people were irritated by the fact that he made them feel that he knew it.” 31
Oppenheimer’s arrogance betrayed his underlying lack of confidence. It was not something most people sensed on the surface. He exuded authority, seemed effortlessly good at everything, and was very charismatic. “He could charm the socks off of people, even if he really didn’t like them that well,” one of his secretaries recalled. 32 Yet it was all a fragile, frantic, uncertain act. Because he was plagued by inner doubts, Oppenheimer was skilled at sensing—and targeting—the insecurities of others. And yet he perceived and manipulated not just people’s deepest fears but also their desires, and this made him an effective leader. “I don’t think anybody ever believed he had it in him,” said his successor at Los Alamos, director Norris Bradbury, “but he surely did.” 33
* * *
Teller was eager to move to Los Alamos. The action was shifting there, and he wanted to be a part of it. He had, after all, helped Oppenheimer organize Los Alamos, select and recruit its staff, and plan its work. Meanwhile, Teller sought to lift the lid on his security clearance caused by the fact that his parents and other relatives were living in Nazi-occupied Hungary. After finally receiving clearance for secret work, Teller, his wife, Mici, and their newborn son, Paul, arrived on the Hill. * That Teller had been invited to Los Alamos was a tribute to his reputation and talents as a theoretical physicist. That he was kept on at Los Alamos would be a tribute to the patience and forbearance of others.
Teller brought with him to Los Alamos a personal possession vital to his peace of mind: a Steinway baby concert grand piano that Mici had bought for him at a Chicago hotel auction. The piano—affectionately called “the monster”—filled the living room of the Tellers’ small apartment. It became the primary form of relaxation for Teller—and torment for his neighbors. Teller would stay up late at night—until 3:00 in the morning—playing sonatas on the piano. Once he asked the wife of another physicist who was an accomplished singer to accompany him. She agreed, flattered by Teller’s invitation. But flattery quickly turned to disappointment. “I couldn’t sing with him,” she recalled, “because he drowned me out completely.” 34
Watching him stir a huge mound of sugar into his coffee mug, Los Alamos scientists wondered how a man like Teller could be so genuinely friendly and at the same time so ruthlessly self-absorbed. “Lovable and selfish,” concluded a perceptive observer. 35 He could often be seen walking absentmindedly with his heavy, uneven gait (the result of a tramway accident in Munich in the 1920s that had left him with an artificial left foot), his bushy eyebrows moving up and down as he pursued some new idea. As he had always been, he was a gifted and imaginative physicist, with a mind capable of tackling immensely complicated problems, but he was also a temperamental and argumentative man who aroused frustration and sometimes anger in others. He pursued his ideas with a vain insistence that made him seem a prima donna to his colleagues and found it very difficult to work with people who did not agree with him. Although he could be kind, humorous, and likable, he was also egotistical and unhappy playing second fiddle to anyone. He “was not a team player,” said Hans Bethe. “That’s right I wasn’t,” Teller conceded years later. He was devoted to physics, but also ambitious and hungry for recognition. 36 Someone was free to sing, but he would bang his piano louder.
“Teller was brilliant but flighty,” said a physicist who worked with him at both the Met Lab and Los Alamos. “He would jump from one idea to another. He did not systematically go through things.” 37 Oppenheimer alluded to this quality of Teller’s when he told Groves that “there are a few people here whose interests are exclusively ‘scientific’ in the sense that they will abandon any problem that appears to be soluble.” 38 Teller particularly resented doing the tedious computational work involved in making an atomic bomb. He was bored by details, especially if he thought they could be worked out by lesser minds than his own. Instead, he preferred the puzzle of a thermonuclear bomb, and he insisted on working only on it. This exasperated and alienated those who viewed the atomic bomb as the number one wartime priority.
For this reason, Oppenheimer, with I. I. Rabi’s encouragement, decided to give the job of Theoretical Division leader to Bethe rather than Teller. 39 Oppenheimer thought Bethe was more likely to get this crucial job done, and that mattered more than Teller’s feelings. Though not as creative or imaginative as Teller, Bethe was far more adroit and effective at dealing with others. Oppenheimer also thought Bethe’s logic and thoroughness would better serve the project at a stage when detailed calculations had to be carried out and a good deal of administrative work was inevitable. “We had to sit down in our offices and actually work something out,” said Bethe, “and this was against [Teller’s] style.” 40
Teller bitterly resented Oppenheimer’s decision. “When [Oppenheimer] told Bethe and me that he had named Hans to head the division, I was a little hurt,” Teller wrote years later with considerable understatement. 41 A proud man with a strong belief in his own ability, Teller felt he ought to have been doing Bethe’s job—and would have done it much better. He had been part of the Manhattan Project longer than Bethe, and he considered himself intellectually superior. He considered Bethe a “brick-maker” physicist—thorough, meticulous, but unimaginative—while he considered himself a “bricklayer”—a synthesizer who understood the underlying structure of physics. “I was not happy about having him as my boss,” Teller later admitted. “[Bethe] and I did not work well together. He wanted me to work on calculations, while I wanted to continue not only on the hydrogen bomb, but on other novel subjects.” Teller brooded about being Bethe’s subordinate. The arrangement, Teller later wrote, “marked the beginning of the end of our friendship.” 42
Seeing that Teller was unhappy, Oppenheimer moved him out of Bethe’s division and gave him his own group, despite the manpower shortage. Oppenheimer also continued to meet with Teller weekly for an hour of freewheeling discussion—a remarkable concession, given the enormous demands on his time. And though he liked Teller personally, he came to find him inordinately vain and sensitive to slight. One evening, when Oppenheimer gave a party for a visiting British physicist, he inadvertently failed to invite the deputy of the British mission. Oppenheimer sought out the deputy the next day and apologized, adding: “There is an element of relief in this situation: it might have happened with Edward Teller.” 43 He also began belittling Teller in private. “In wartime he is an obstructionist,” Oppenheimer told one of his confidants, “and in peacetime he will be a promoter.” 44 Teller, for his part, focused much of his resentment toward Bethe on Oppenheimer, whom he began to view with coolness and even hostility.
When Bethe had first arrived in New Mexico, the arid landscape—like the work that lay ahead—frightened and intimidated him. Bethe kept imagining himself walking through the high desert without a drop of water. He coped with his anxiety by throwing himself into his work. The pressure he felt was tremendous. “I had the feeling of pushing a big load,” he confessed decades later, adding: “It was probably the most concentrated work I have done in my life.” 45
Bethe was equal to the task. Calm, cool, and thoughtful, he was a patient and effective leader who worked well with others. A tall and heavyset man, Bethe moved and spoke somewhat slowly, but behind his slow speech and movements lay a mind of formidable speed and power that earned him the affectionate nickname “the Battleship.” Solid, dependable, and well liked, Bethe was mature and wise in his dealings with people. “You never had any feeling that Hans was going to get upset and fly off the handle,” said a friend. “He didn’t hesitate to state his particular position on anything, but it was done in a calm and rational manner.” 46 His methodical and detail-oriented approach allowed him to face problems squarely, analyze them quietly, and plow straight through them.
Bethe was effective in his work in part because he was highly motivated politically. He understood through bitter personal experience just how evil and threatening were the Nazis. To him and other refugee physicists, they had to be defeated. “I went to beat Hitler,” he said of his decision to work at Los Alamos. He had no qualms about using the bomb against his native land. “We hoped very much to use it against Germany,” Bethe recalled, “and I entirely concurred with that, even though my father and his second wife were still there.” 47 A strong sense of teamwork, and the knowledge that their work was vital to the war effort, gave Bethe and his colleagues in the Theoretical Division a strong sense of mission. It kept them going ten hours a day, six days a week.
I.I. Rabi urged other physicists to move to Los Alamos, but Rabi himself never did, only visiting from time to time as a troubleshooter and a consultant—one of the few exceptions to Groves’s rigid policy of compartmentalization, which permitted each scientist to know only as much as necessary to do his job, thus restricting the exchange of information within and between project laboratories. Rabi always arrived on the Hill dressed immaculately in a suit topped with a hom-burg and swinging a large umbrella. “It hasn’t rained for months.” Oppenheimer and Bethe would smile to him in greeting. Then it would invariably begin to rain, Rabi would open his umbrella, and the other two would get soaking wet as they walked together to the Tech Area. Oppenheimer and Bethe took to calling Rabi the “Rainmaker from Hoboken.”
The Rainmaker from Hoboken was savvy, perceptive, and wise. “He was interested in everybody and could talk to anybody—I was very fond of him,” said a Los Alamos resident. 48 Careful and deliberate, he preferred to make his points with humor. “One listened to Rabi with great care,” said Rose Bethe, voicing a common opinion among those who knew him well, “because, even though he told you things as jokes, they were always serious.” 49 Rabi had a special instinct for dealing with people in extraordinary situations. He found it hard to suffer fools, and he could be blunt. But if there was something to be done, as Rabi said, “What choice do you have?” 50
From the beginning of Los Alamos to its end, Rabi appeared on the Hill when needed. His most important function at Los Alamos was his self-described role as Oppenheimer’s “fatherly adviser.” 51 Oppen-heimer was comfortable with Rabi and confided his troubles to him. Rabi listened patiently and offered useful advice. A youth spent in the streets had taught Rabi to be a shrewd judge of people and how to operate effectively in the world of power. He had administrative experience at the MIT radar lab; he had worked with the military; he understood organizations and how to move them—he had tough-minded wisdom. Oppenheimer did not want to formally structure Los Alamos at first. Rabi told him, “You have to have an organization. The laboratory has to be organized in divisions and the divisions into groups. Otherwise, nothing will ever come of it.” 52 Should the laboratory be put under military control? Rabi adamantly opposed the induction of scientists into the army. Oppenheimer listened.
Rabi counseled Oppenheimer discreetly, but he never hesitated to stand up to Oppenheimer’s intellectual bullying, which paradoxically had a calming effect on the Los Alamos director. Rabi also never hesitated to speak frankly and bluntly with Groves. When he learned about the housing that Groves planned for the Hill, he told the general, “You are treating these scientists as if they were privates in the Army. You should realize that there are fewer fellows of the American Physical Society than brigadiers [Groves’s rank] in the US Army.” 53 The housing arrangements were improved.
Offered the laboratory’s deputy directorship by Oppenheimer, Rabi turned it down, resisting the pressure of personal friendship and Oppenheimer’s considerable charm. Rabi did so because, as he explained to Oppenheimer, he did not want to make the atomic bomb “the culmination of three centuries of physics.” 54
All of them felt the pressure of the work. They knew the project involved tens of thousands of people at sites across the country. They knew it was enormously expensive. And “if we ever forgot any of this,” Hans Bethe remembered, “General Groves would tell us.” 55 Many had family and relatives in concentration camps. A Polish physicist did not know whether his wife and children, left behind in Poland, were dead or alive. A British physicist had lost his wife to a German bombing raid. The war came close even on the Hill when Teller listened to a radio broadcast on fighting in Hungary, and said somberly, “My family is there.” Anxiety and fear haunted them day and night. One physicist received a postcard from his brother in the fall of 1944, written from the front lines in Italy. Its complete message was “Hurry up!” The brother was killed in action that October. 56
A fear of success also existed among them, for they were building a weapon so horrible that its use, which seemed the logical culmination of their efforts, could not easily be distinguished from barbarism. It was necessary for them to fear that the Nazis were working toward the same end, for only this could ease their concerns about the destruc-tiveness of the bomb they were making—that and the hope that such a weapon might end war because nations couldn’t afford its cost in human lives. They often lay awake at night wondering, “Is this right?” Still, it never occurred to anyone to stop. In their minds, they were doing their duty—in some cases, for no other reason than it was their duty; in other cases, because they were unable to conceive of any other course or were, perhaps, afraid to think of any other course. It was not a matter of choice but necessity. This was the morality imposed by brute circumstance, by habit, by the unspoken social demand that most did not have the strength to refuse, or, often, to imagine refusing.
The reactions to such tensions varied. Some thought, “We’ve worked on this thing and let’s use it—that’s what it’s for—and see if we can’t get the war stopped.” 57 Some secretly hoped the technical difficulties would prove insurmountable. If it was impossible to develop an atomic bomb, there wouldn’t be any danger of the Nazis getting one either. Some of them hoped the war would end before the bomb could be finished. Some harbored moral qualms about the bomb, but many more were preoccupied by work or were lulled into unreflective self-importance by the weapon’s power. Gradually, as they became more deeply involved in the work, their misgivings began to fade—or were buried—and the tension of achievement took over and became the driving force, a kind of Faustian fascination about whether the bomb would really work. They had to achieve what they had set out to do. All of them sensed they were involved in something momentous, but they did not see clearly exactly what it was.
Each coped with these complicated feelings in his own way. Oppenheimer tried to relax at night behind the walls of his stone-and-timber cottage set behind a stand of poplars and spruces at the end of Bathtub Row. The furniture was Spanish rustic and rattan, an easy chair with a laurel pattern, serapes on the sofa, and black pueblo pottery on the fireplace mantel. A Picasso lithograph and pictures of the Hindu god Krishna hung on the walls. Oppenheimer drank a martini while Kitty sat nearby, her legs curled beneath her on a sofa, an ashtray in her lap. But the project was never far away; soldiers patrolled outside the house around the clock. His Native American housekeeper sensed the anxiety. “Dr. Oppenheimer was quiet…. He was worried. You could tell it by his face; it was down. Even his wife was worried. I sensed a lot of tension.” 58
Occasionally, Oppenheimer would drive down to a teahouse at Otowi Bridge over the Rio Grande that was run by Edith Warner, a quiet and reserved woman who lived as a neighbor to the Indians of nearby San Ildefonso Pueblo. He drew strength from the warmth that Warner radiated. Juniper wood burned in her adobe fireplace. Often there was the smell of bread that had just been taken from the oven and covered with a cloth on the table under the kitchen window. Black pottery plates stood upright on open shelves along one wall, with cups and saucers in terra-cotta colors from Mexico. Orange candles and red-and-black-striped Chimayo squares brightened the wall; a Navajo rug covered part of the rough floor.
There Oppenheimer drank tea and ate cake in a small room that looked through large windows toward the Sangre de Cristos. Warner, who observed these mountains daily, described what Oppenheimer saw:
Sometimes the light makes each range stand out, casting sharp shadows on the ones behind. Occasionally when the air is very clear, there is a strange and breath-taking shining light on the green aspen leaves. At evening the twilight may run quickly from the valley, shrouding almost at once the highest peaks. Or mauve and rose move slowly upward, turning to blood-red on the snow above. One morning they may be purple cardboard mountains sharpcut against the sky. On another they will have withdrawn into themselves. Sometimes I have watched ghost mountains with substance only in their dark outline. It seems then as if the mountains had gone down into their very roots, leaving an empty frame. 59
Caught up as he now was in the whirlpool of war, the furious plans to construct a deadly weapon, the impossible and often agonizing decisions that had to be weighed and implemented every day, often every moment, Oppenheimer had a particular need for tranquility and quiet reflection that these hours at Edith Warner’s teahouse filled. As one whose daily thoughts were involved with techniques of destruction, he found healing here for his divided spirit.
Teller, when burdens seemed greatest, would sit down at his concert grand piano and play the soothing sounds of Bach and Mozart. He gave occasional recitals in the Fuller Lodge dining hall. The room, with a running balcony and a massive stone fireplace at either end, had walls of honeyed pine and looked more like the dining room of a national park lodge than the army-camp messes where most of Los Alamos ate. The center of attention, Teller would beam with satisfaction. His technique was loose but his playing showed a lot of determination and feeling and musicality. Teller also delighted in simple pleasures. His favorite author was Lewis Carroll, and he read Carroll’s stories and poems to his son, Paul, long before the child could understand them. He could be as playful as his little boy when he narrated fairy tales on community radio station KRS—a deep voice with a Middle European accent telling bedtime stories. When he reached a funny passage, he let out a very loud, high-pitched giggle.
Bethe relieved the pressure by hiking nearly every Sunday in the nearby mountains, frequently climbing Lake Peak (12,500 feet) across the Rio Grande Valley in the Sangre de Cristos. At the top, through a fringe of cedars, spread an alpine meadow extravagantly carpeted with purple mariposa lilies. These hikes gave Bethe a chance to unburden himself by giving his body exercise and his mind a chance to wander. Others went on weekend camping and fishing trips, rock-gathering expeditions, pueblo visits, and other activities that relieved the tensions of the project and the weight of the moral justifications of bomb making. Some would ride the bus to Santa Fe and sit in the plaza in the center of town, drowsing in a sunny siesta, then dine at the La Fonda, an adobe hotel with exposed beams and wooden balconies. Others walked the quiet streets of old Santa Fe, peering over adobe walls that seemed to soak up the abundant sunshine into the romantic and exotic gardens within. Some found that they could never leave their work behind. They were missing something.
On December 30, 1943, an older man arrived on the Hill as a consultant to the British delegation. His security guards referred to him as “Mr. Nicholas Baker” but physicists instantly recognized “Mr. Baker” as Niels Bohr. Bohr’s long odyssey from Copenhagen to Los Alamos had begun in April 1940, when Germany invaded and occupied Denmark. Half Jewish, Bohr was put under surveillance and his phones were tapped. Secretly communicating with the Danish resistance, he urged his country’s leaders to fight Jewish deportations from Denmark, even as German troops patrolled the street in front of his institute.
In late September 1941, as German troops neared Moscow and looked poised to knock Russia out of the war, Bohr received a visit from Heisenberg. The two had once been very close—mentor and beloved protégé. Now Heisenberg was back as the leading scientist of a nation that seemed on the verge of conquering all of Europe. Bohr greeted his former student with careful politeness and invited him into his office at the institute. They busily avoided each other’s eyes as they began their conversation. Shy and arrogant, Heisenberg expressed his confidence that Germany would win the war but told Bohr that if the war lasted long enough it would be decided by atomic bombs, said that he was involved in such research for Nazi Germany, and had no doubt that it could be done. After the war, Heisenberg would claim that he was subtly hinting at moral qualms about building an atomic weapon in wartime and suggesting that physicists on both sides of the conflict should refuse to do so. But Bohr, fearful and shaken, did not see it that way. He later recalled that Heisenberg “gave no hint about efforts on the part of German scientists to prevent such a development.” 60 Visibly startled by what Heisenberg had said but trying to contain his deep fright, Bohr said nothing and suddenly cut short the conversation. Afterward, he confided to his family that Heisenberg had tried to pry information from him about fission and, by implication, the Allied atomic project. Hans Bethe was probably closest to the truth when he later remarked that “one talked with one set of assumptions and the other with a totally different set of assumptions.” 61 The meeting, however, unquestionably intensified Bohr’s suspicion, and fear, that the Nazis were racing toward an atomic bomb.
Two years later, in September 1943, Bohr learned from the Swedish ambassador in Copenhagen that deportation of Danish Jews would begin soon. The ambassador hinted that Bohr, whose mother was Jewish, would be arrested himself. Confirmation came the next morning from an informer at Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen who had seen orders for Bohr’s arrest and deportation. Late that afternoon, Bohr and his wife, Margrethe, walked to a seaside garden and hid in a gardener’s shed. They waited anxiously for nightfall. Then, at a prearranged time, they left the shed and crossed to the beach. From the beach a motorboat took them out to a fishing boat. Dodging German minefields, they crossed the choppy sound between Denmark and Sweden by moonlight.
When Bohr landed in Sweden, a Swedish officer was told to bring him to Stockholm and to attract no attention on the way. (The officer was too proud of having the famous Dane in his charge, so despite orders he stopped in many places for a drink, each time saying, “Do you know whom I am escorting to Stockholm…?” 62 ) When Bohr reached Stockholm the next day, he was put up in the home of a Danish diplomat and never went out alone. Britain moved its diplomatic pouch in and out of Sweden in a fast, unarmed bomber that flew at a high altitude to avoid German antiaircraft batteries along the coast of Norway. The plane’s bomb bay was fitted for a single passenger. Temporarily leaving his wife behind, Bohr boarded the plane for the flight to England on October sixth. Once in London, he learned from British scientists that fission research had progressed a great deal since his stay in Princeton four years earlier. An atomic bomb was being made at Los Alamos, the British were preparing to send a team there, and they wanted Bohr to join it.
Bohr agreed to join the British team at Los Alamos. When he reached the United States in December, his first stop was the sprawling U-235 separation plant at Oak Ridge. Seeing what he saw, and being one of the most farsighted of men, he had no doubt now that the atomic bomb would be built, and would be a presence in the world forever. Groves joined him afterward at the Met Lab, and together they boarded a train for Los Alamos. Bohr did most of the talking as their train hurtled south across the Plains and then west over the Rockies, Groves struggling all the while to understand Bohr’s mumbled words. When they finally reached Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was there to greet them. He noticed that Groves looked tired and irritated. He asked the general what the trouble was. “I’ve been listening to Bohr,” he grumbled. 63
Oppenheimer arranged a reception for Bohr at his home with other physicists. When Bohr spotted Teller, he said, “Didn’t I tell you that you could not make a nuclear explosive without turning the whole country into a huge factory? Now you have gone and done it.” 64 Bohr then related an account of his personal adventures, including his conversation two years earlier with Heisenberg. He said that Heisenberg and other talented German physicists were diligently working on a bomb. The thought of how far the Nazis might have come in the years since the discovery of fission was enough to make everyone at the reception shudder. Bohr also related what he knew about Nazi-occupied Europe to those who had left loved ones behind. The atmosphere was very somber.
The first question Bohr put to physicists at Los Alamos was: “Is it really big enough?”—was the atomic bomb they were building big enough to make future wars too destructive to be contemplated? Bohr made a clear distinction between the bomb’s wartime use, which he considered an all but inevitable military decision, and its political and diplomatic implications, which bore on the longer-range issues of world peace and security and relations among nations. “What role it [the bomb] may play in the present war,” Bohr wrote, was a question “quite apart” from the overriding concern: the need to avoid an atomic arms race. 65
Bohr’s thinking was shaped by two assumptions: first, the bomb’s destructiveness would be unprecedented and indiscriminate; and second, such a weapon could not be monopolized—sooner or later it would be developed by other nations—thus posing the frightful prospect of a nuclear arms race. Bohr had no doubt that scientists in the Soviet Union would also grasp the significance of the bomb and convey their understanding to Stalin just as scientists in the United States had conveyed their understanding to Roosevelt. He also believed that if statesmen could be made to see the military and political implications of atomic weapons, they would respond positively to international control. There were no historical precedents to guide them, he knew, but the threat of a nuclear-armed world was also unprecedented. If national security was not achieved by nations through international control of atomic energy, he concluded, they would inevitably indulge in an arms race that would plant the seeds of their own destruction. These ideas would become Bohr’s central preoccupation from 1943 until the end of the war. 66
Bohr spent many hours that winter discussing his ideas with Oppenheimer, who was deeply impressed. Bohr had articulated thoughts and sentiments that lay unformed and unexpressed in Oppenheimer’s own mind and conscience. Indeed, Oppenheimer was so taken by the depth and insight of Bohr’s thinking that he began to regard him as a kind of sage. One afternoon, as Oppenheimer and his assistant David Hawkins were escorting Bohr from the Tech Area back to his room at Fuller Lodge, they skirted Ashley Pond and Bohr tested the ice along the bank. “My God,” Oppenheimer whispered to Hawkins, “suppose he should slip? Suppose he should fall through? What would we all do then?” 67
Oppenheimer noticed that Bohr never seemed relaxed. He always had a sad expression on his face and looked as though he carried all of the cares of the world on his broad shoulders. In a very real sense he did, and he knew it. Bohr forced his colleagues to come to terms with what they were doing. He inspired them to begin their soul-searching—and to think about the future. Numerous Los Alamos physicists poured out their worry and guilt to him in private discussions that went on far into the night. He understood; he spoke the same language; he shared the responsibility. He did not need to remind them of the evils of Nazism or the horror of an atomic bomb in Hitler’s hands, but he did not shy away from the ethical and moral problems raised by building a weapon of mass destruction and the terrifying potential of a nuclear arms race.
Bohr spoke the bravest words in the most hesitant and gentle voice. He always seemed to look straight at his listener and his face was difficult to forget, with its eyes full of intelligence and sadness. He addressed matters squarely and frankly. Always the paradoxist, he continued to argue that every problem bore the seeds of its own solution. And here he believed that the atomic bomb could not only end this war but even end war as a means of settling disputes between nations. His thinking brought hope to others who wanted to believe that such a devastating weapon would make leaders see that future wars would be suicidal.
Bohr used hikes with other physicists in the mountains and canyons around Los Alamos to spread his message. As he had done during the train ride with Groves, he placed huge demands on his listener. He spoke very low and softly, often with a pipe clenched in his teeth. People closed in around Bohr to hear, but as they pressed near his voice fell further, until finally the listeners formed a straining, hushed knot around him. “He speaks, everyone listens,” was the saying on the Hill. “And you had to listen,” remembered a physicist who was there, “because he spoke in such a low voice that you couldn’t hear if you didn’t.” 68 “This is the keston,” Bohr would say. “What does ‘keston’ mean?” a frustrated listener would say. “Keston means question,” someone would finally realize. 69
Convinced that international control could be achieved only if the Soviet Union was told about the Manhattan Project before the bomb was a certainty and before the war was over—thus creating a postwar political climate of cooperation rather than confrontation—Bohr set out to convince President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to approach Stalin on this all-important subject. Bohr did not think technical details of the bomb should be revealed to the Russians; he simply thought that informing them of the bomb’s existence might open the way for some sort of international arms control agreement. He understood that such an initiative did not guarantee the Soviet Union’s postwar cooperation; but he also believed that its cooperation was unlikely, if not impossible, unless such an initiative was made. The timing, moreover, was crucial: the initiative had to be made before developments proceeded so far as to make an approach to the Russians appear more coercive than friendly.
Bohr contacted Roosevelt through Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a friend and adviser of FDR whom Bohr had befriended at the University of Oxford before the war. Frankfurter invited Bohr to lunch at the Supreme Court when Bohr returned to Washington in February 1944. There, in the privacy of Frankfurter’s chambers, Bohr presented his ideas. Frankfurter relayed them to the president in an Oval Office meeting at the end of the month. Roosevelt confronted a dilemma: on the one hand, to exclude Stalin from any official information about the bomb—even though FDR had been informed by Army Intelligence that the Soviet Union was already getting information about vital secrets through espionage—was bound to affect Soviet perceptions and thus the prospects for postwar cooperation; on the other hand, to continue to withhold such information might yield diplomatic leverage and military advantages vis-à-vis Russia after the war against Nazi Germany was over.
Whatever his thinking, Roosevelt left Frankfurter with the impression that he was “plainly impressed” by Frankfurter’s account of the matter. When Frankfurter had suggested that the solution to the problem of the atomic bomb might be more important than the plans for a United Nations, FDR had ostensibly agreed. Moreover, he had authorized Frankfurter to tell Bohr that he might inform “our friends in London that the President was most eager to explore the proper safeguards in relation to [the bomb].” Frankfurter also told Bohr that Roosevelt was “worried to death” about the bomb and was very eager for all the help he could get in dealing with this problem. 70
In April, Bohr traveled to Britain specifically to see Churchill. While waiting for an audience with the prime minister, he was sent a letter by a Russian physicist. After alerting British security officers, Bohr went to the Soviet embassy in London to pick up the letter, where a Soviet diplomat asked him what information he had about secret war work by American and British scientists. Bohr finessed the question by quickly changing the subject, but to Bohr the inquiry meant that the Soviets knew of the Manhattan Project and were probably working on a bomb of their own. This reinforced Bohr’s conviction that the only solution was international control.
Bohr finally won an appointment at 10 Downing Street on May 16, 1944. The meeting misfired from the start. Churchill was preoccupied, with D day only three weeks away. Bohr began by mumbling in his typically discursive way. Churchill grew impatient. Here was a scientist presuming to advise him about international affairs and naive enough to urge informing the Russians about the most secret Anglo-American project of the war. The prime minister curtly told him: “I cannot see what you are talking about. After all, this new bomb is just going to be bigger than our present bombs. It involves no difference in the principles of war. And as for any postwar problems, there are none that cannot be amicably settled between me and my friend, President Roosevelt.” Churchill preferred an Anglo-American monopoly of the bomb to postwar international control as a way to check Soviet adventurism and to preserve Britain’s influence in the world. Before he would tell Stalin anything about the bomb, he wanted some assurance of cooperation. To Bohr, that was putting the cart before the horse. As the meeting ended, Bohr, sensing failure, asked if he could send the prime minister a letter developing the points he wanted to make. “It will be an honor for me to receive a letter from you,” answered Churchill, but then added tartly, “But not about politics.” 71 “We did not speak the same language,” Bohr said ruefully afterward. 72
Churchill’s assumptions about the bomb and his expectations about the future were, of course, governed by his understanding of the past. He did not anticipate that the bomb would revolutionize international relations and he did not believe anything could be gained by surrendering the atomic monopoly he thought America and Britain would enjoy after the war. 73
Bohr returned to the United States less than a week after D day, buoyed by the thought that the war was entering its final phase but discouraged by his failure to persuade Churchill. He reported to Frankfurter on his dismal meeting with the prime minister and Frankfurter carried the news to Roosevelt, who expressed a willingness to see the Danish physicist again. The meeting was arranged for August twenty-sixth. FDR received Bohr in the Oval Office late that afternoon for an hour and a half of private talk. He welcomed Bohr with a big smile. Bohr sat down beside the president’s desk. In front of him windows framed a view of the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial. Roosevelt was warm, cordial, and amiably sympathetic, as usual.
The two men spoke in a frank and encouraging manner. Bohr told his son, Aage, after the meeting that Roosevelt agreed an approach to the Soviet Union had to be tried along the lines that Bohr suggested. The president said he was optimistic that such an approach would yield a “good result.” In his opinion, Stalin was enough of a realist to understand the bomb’s revolutionary importance and consequences. FDR also expressed confidence to Bohr that Churchill would come around to his view of things. The two leaders had disagreed before, he said, but they always resolved their differences in the end. Roosevelt told Bohr another meeting might be useful after he had talked with Churchill at the second Quebec Conference to be held the following month. 74
Bohr was hopeful as Roosevelt met Churchill in Quebec on September eleventh and the two leaders then traveled to the president’s estate along the Hudson River in upstate New York a week later to continue their talks more privately. High on their agenda was the Manhattan Project. Seated amid the brilliant foliage of a Hyde Park autumn, FDR and Churchill signed a secret agreement that codified their position on the bomb. The heart of their joint agreement said this:
The suggestion that the world should be informed regarding [the Manhattan Project] with a view to an international agreement regarding its control and use, is not accepted. The matter should continue to be regarded as of the utmost secrecy… Enquiries should be made regarding the activities of Professor Bohr and steps taken to ensure that he is responsible for no leakage of information, particularly to the Russians. 75
Roosevelt and Churchill had resolved to maintain the Anglo-American atomic monopoly—despite Bohr’s warning that it was a chimera—as a counter against Stalin’s postwar ambitions. The two leaders, unable to grasp the technical fact that fission was common knowledge among scientists throughout the world and that Japan, Germany, and Russia—like Britain—had not pursued a bomb because they lacked the resources in the middle of a war, could not conceive of forgoing an advantage they thought would assure the peace on terms they felt deep in their hearts were best for mankind. Their agreement may also have reflected their fear that Stalin’s mistrust would only be aroused if he were informed of the project’s existence and then did not receive detailed information about it. Whatever the reasons, Bohr was never invited to meet with either leader again. There would be no attempt at international control before the bomb became a reality. And at the very moment FDR and Churchill signed their secret agreement, a member of the British team at Los Alamos, Klaus Fuchs, was busy betraying many of the details of the bomb to Soviet agents. The hoped-for monopoly would not last long.