The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Taken as a story of human achievement, and human blindness, the discoveries in the sciences are among the great epics. Robert Oppenheimer

In an enterprise such as the building of the atomic bomb the difference between ideas, hopes, suggestions and theoretical calculations, and solid numbers based on measurement, is paramount. All the committees, the politicking and the plans would have come to naught if a few unpredictable nuclear cross sections had been different from what they are by a factor of two. Emilio Segrè

It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them. Robert Oppenheimer

It is still an unending source of surprise for me to see how a few scribbles on a blackboard or on a sheet of paper could change the course of human affairs. Stanislaw Ulam

The German aristocracy retreated from view, and intellectuals, film stars and journalists took its place; the major annual social event in the city where an imperial palace stood empty was the Press Ball, sponsored by the Berlin Press Club, which drew as many as six thousand guests.25, 26

This just goes to show that if you want to succeed in this world you don’t have to be much cleverer than other people, you just have to be one day earlier.”

Apprentices learned three broad criteria of scientific judgment.

The first criterion was plausibility. That would eliminate crackpots

The second criterion was scientific value, a composite consisting of equal parts accuracy, importance to the entire system of whatever branch of science the idea belonged to, and intrinsic interest.

The third criterion was originality. Patent examiners assess an invention for originality according to the degree of surprise the invention produces in specialists familiar with the art.

Scientists judged new theories and new discoveries similarly. Plausibility and scientific value measured an idea’s quality by the standards of orthodoxy; orig...

The atom’s time was at hand. The great surprises in basic science in the nineteenth century came in chemistry. The great surprises in basic science in the first half of the twentieth century would come in physics.

Ratiocination—that is the technical term for what the licentiate does, the term for what the young Bohr did as well—is a defense mechanism against anxiety. Thought spirals, panicky and compulsive. Doubt doubles and redoubles, paralyzing action, emptying out the world. The mechanism is infinitely regressive because once the victim knows the trick, he can doubt anything, even doubt itself. Philosophically the phenomenon could be interesting, but as a practical matter ratiocination is a way of stalling. If work is never finished, its quality cannot be judged. The trouble is that stalling postpones the confrontation and adds that guilt to the burden. Anxiety increases; the mechanism accelerates its spiraling flights; the self feels as if it will fragment; the multiplying “I” dramatizes the feeling of impending breakup. At that point madness reveals its horrors; the image that recurred in Bohr’s conversation and writing throughout his life was the licentiate’s “bottomless abyss.”229 We are “suspended in language,” Bohr liked to say, evoking that abyss; and one of his favorite quotations was two lines from Schiller:230 Nur die Fülle führt zur Klarheit,231 Und im Abgrund wohnt die Wahrheit Only wholeness leads to clarity, And truth lies in the abyss. But it was not in Møller that Bohr found solid footing. He needed more than a novel, however apposite, for that. He needed what we all need for sanity: he needed love and work.

Kierkegaard notoriously suffered from a proliferation of identities and doubts. The doubling of consciousness is a central theme in Kierkegaard’s work, as it was in Møller’s before him. It would even seem to be a hazard of long standing among the Danes. The Danish word for despair, Fortvivlelse, carries lodged at its heart the morpheme tvi, which means “two” and signifies the doubling of consciousness.237 Tvivl in Danish means “doubt”; Tvivlesyg means “skepticism”; Tvetydighed, “ambiguity.” The self watching itself is indeed a commonplace of puritanism, closely akin to the Christian conscience.

Bohr was different in another regard as well; he was easily the most talented of all Rutherford’s many students—and Rutherford trained no fewer than eleven Nobel Prize winners during his life, an unsurpassed record.264, 265

“Bohr characteristically avoids such a word as ‘principle,’ ” says Rosenfeld; “he prefers to speak of ‘point of view’ or, better still, ‘argument,’ i.e. line of reasoning; likewise, he rarely mentions the ‘laws of nature,’ but rather refers to ‘regularities of the phenomena.’ ”285 Bohr was not displaying false humility with his choice of terms; he was reminding himself and his colleagues that physics is not a grand philosophical system of authoritarian command but simply a way, in his favorite phrase, of “asking questions of Nature.”286 He apologized similarly for his tentative, rambling habit of speech: “I try not to speak more clearly than I think.”287

Bohr had found a solution to the spiraling flights of doubt by stepping out of what Kierkegaard called “the fairyland of the imagination” and back into the real world.289 In the real world material objects endure; their atoms cannot, then, ordinarily be unstable. In the real world cause and effect sometimes seem to limit our freedom, but at other times we know we choose. In the real world it is meaningless to doubt existence; the doubt itself demonstrates the existence of the doubter. Much of the difficulty was language, that slippery medium in which Bohr saw us inextricably suspended. “It is wrong,” he told his colleagues repeatedly, “to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is”—which is the territory classical physics had claimed for itself. “Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”290

Bohr, for his part, supple pragmatist and democrat that he was, never an absolutist, heard once too often about Einstein’s personal insight into the gambling habits of the Deity. He scolded his distinguished colleague finally in Einstein’s own terms. God does not throw dice? “Nor is it our business to prescribe to God how He should run the world.”502

I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought of as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.631

The statement implicitly criticizes the Jews of Germany, whose “undignified assimilationist cravings and strivings,” Einstein wrote elsewhere, had “always . . . annoyed” him.641 Blumenfeld propounded a radical, post-assimilatory Zionism and had taught him well. A decade later Hannah Arendt would write that “in a society on the whole hostile to Jews . . . it is possible to assimilate only by assimilating to anti-Semitism also.”642 Einstein specialized in driving assumptions to their logical conclusions: clearly he had arrived at a similar understanding of the “Jewish question.”

The sun shines in the wide windows of Hitler’s cell at Landsberg.649 Boyish in lederhosen, he remembers that he was blinded by mustard gas below Ypres.650 He wrote a poem during the war, a poem out of a dream, before he took shrapnel in the thigh on the Somme, before Ypres: I often go on bitter nights651 To Wotan’s oak in the quiet glade With dark powers to weave a union— The runic letters the moon makes with its magic spell And all who are full of impudence during the day Are made small by the magic formula!

“Kuhnwald was a mysterious and shrewd man, very Austrian, with sideburns like Franz Josef. He agreed at once that there would be a great expulsion. He said that when it happened, the French would pray for the victims, the British would organize their rescue, and the Americans would pay for it.”709

July 4, 1934, in Savoy. Einstein’s was the best eulogy: “Marie Curie is,” he said, “of all celebrated beings, the only one whom fame has not corrupted.”806

Szilard reminisces wryly, “established me as a nuclear physicist, not in the eyes of Cambridge, but in the eyes of Oxford. [Szilard had in fact applied to Rutherford that spring to work at the Cavendish and Rutherford had turned him down.] I had never done work in nuclear physics before, but Oxford considered me an expert. . . . Cambridge . . . would never had made that mistake. For them I was just an upstart who might make all sorts of observations, but these observations could not be regarded as discoveries until they had been repeated at Cambridge and confirmed.”808, 809

DTM

Department of Terrestrial Magnetism @ APO- Atomic Physics Observatory @ Carnegie, Washington DC

Although none of us spoke much about it to the authorities [during this early period]—they considered us dreamers enough as it was—we did hope for another effect of the development of atomic weapons in addition to the warding off of imminent disaster. We realized that, should atomic weapons be developed, no two nations would be able to live in peace with each other unless their military forces were controlled by a common higher authority. We expected that these controls, if they were effective enough to abolish atomic warfare, would be effective enough to abolish also all other forms of war. This hope was almost as strong a spur to our endeavors as was our fear of becoming the victims of the enemy’s atomic bombings.

Personally I think there is no doubt that sub-atomic energy is available all around us, and that one day man will release and control its almost infinite power. We cannot prevent him from doing so and can only hope that he will not use it exclusively in blowing up his next door neighbor.

National Defense Research Committee

Lawrence’s and McMillan’s priorities are a measure of the priorities of American science in late 1940. Peacetime cyclotrons and radar for air defense came first before superbombs. With a different perspective on the matter, James Chadwick at Liverpool was so uncharacteristically incensed by the publication of the McMillan-Abelson paper reporting element 93 that he asked for, and got, an official protest through the British Embassy. An attache was duly dispatched to Berkeley to scold Ernest Lawrence, the 1939 Nobel laureate in physics, for giving away secrets to the Germans in perilous times.

uranyl nitrate hexahydrate (UNH),

mega-electronvolt(s).

The Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) was an agency of the United States federal government created to coordinate scientific research for military purposes during World War II. Arrangements were made for its creation during May 1941, and it was created formally by Executive Order 8807 on June 28, 1941.[1][2] It superseded the work of the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), was given almost unlimited access to funding and resources, and was directed by Vannevar Bush, who reported only to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Corps of Engineers,

Churchill had negotiated the renewed collaboration at Quebec in August: It is agreed between us First, that we will never use this agency against each other. Secondly, that we will not use it against third parties without each other’s consent. Thirdly, that we will not either of us communicate any information about Tube Alloys to third parties except by mutual consent.

Here two texts of the postwar lecture diverge; both versions illuminate Oppenheimer’s state of mind in 1944 as he remembered it. In unedited transcript he said Bohr “made the enterprise which looked so macabre seem hopeful”; edited, that sentence became: “He made the enterprise seem hopeful, when many were not free of misgiving.”1988, 1989

Weisskopf supplies another: In Los Alamos we were working on something which is perhaps the most questionable, the most problematic thing a scientist can be faced with. At that time physics, our beloved science, was pushed into the most cruel part of reality and we had to live it through. We were, most of us at least, young and somewhat inexperienced in human affairs, I would say. But suddenly in the midst of it, Bohr appeared in Los Alamos.1991 It was the first time we became aware of the sense in all these terrible things, because Bohr right away participated not only in the work, but in our discussions. Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. . . . This we learned from him.

had thus become aware of X—aware, that is, that there was such a thing as X and of its significance.” Since Frankfurter knew Bohr’s field he assumed X was the reason for Bohr’s visit: And so . . . I made a very oblique reference to X so that if I was right in my assumption that Professor Bohr was sharing in it, he would know that I knew something about it. . . . He likewise replied in an innocent remote way, but it soon became clear to both of us that two such persons, who had been so long and so deeply preoccupied with the menace of Hitlerism and who were so deeply engaged in the common cause, could talk about the implications of X without either of us making any disclosure to the other. Eminent jurist and eminent physicist thus easily dispatched that modest obstacle.

When I suggested to him that the solution of this problem might be more important than all the schemes for a world organization, he agreed and authorized me to tell Professor Bohr that he, Bohr, might tell our friends in London that the President was most eager to explore the proper safeguards in relation to X. Much controversy surrounds this meeting, because Roosevelt later implicitly repudiated it. Why, if the President was worried to death about the postwar implications of the bomb, did he entrust a mission to the British to so informal an arrangement? He had not even met Niels Bohr. An answer to this question would answer a more substantive question: whether Roosevelt was in fact interested in exploring ideas of international control or whether he was already committed to perpetuating an Anglo-American monopoly (the Quebec Agreement implied commitment, and he had recently discussed cornering the world uranium and thorium markets with Groves and Bush).

Bohr’s revelation of the complementarity of the bomb was far more fundamental than this contemporary political question. But the contemporary political question was an aspect of the larger issue and partly obscured it from view. The bomb was opportunity and threat and would always be opportunity and threat—that was the peculiar, paradoxical hopefulness. But political conditions would necessarily differ before and after it was deployed.

B thereafter told a little about

Footnote- “The Counsellor . . . the occupation”: “Conversation between B and Counsellor Zinchenko at the Soviet Embassy in London on April 20th, 1944, at 5 p.m.” JRO Papers, Box 34. (Note- JRO is Oppenheimer)

Quickly changing the subject. But for Bohr the blunt question and Kapitza’s invitation to come to Moscow were enough to indicate that the Soviets had at least an inkling of the bomb project and might be working on their own. Which meant there was very little time left to convince them that a secret arms race had not already begun. He carried that urgency with him when he was called with Cherwell, finally, on May 16, to 10 Downing Street.

scientist should thus try to intervene in world politics, but it was hoped that Churchill, who possessed such imagination and who had often shown such great vision, would be inspired by the new prospects.”2007 Niels Bohr cherished that hope. His British friends had not prepared him. “One of the blackest comedies of the war,” C. P. Snow characterizes the disastrous confrontation.2008

Bohr got only the bare thirty minutes of his scheduled appointment, most of which Churchill had monopolized. “As he was leaving,” Aage Bohr concludes, “my father asked for permission to write Churchill, whereupon the latter answered, ‘It will be an honour for me to receive a letter from you,’ adding, ‘but not about politics!’”2011 “We did not speak the same language,” Bohr said afterward.2012 His son found him “somewhat downcast.”2013 He was angrier than that; in his seventy-second year, still stinging, he told an old friend: “It was terrible that no one over there”—England and America both—“had worked on the solution of the problems that would arise when it became possible to release nuclear energy; they were completely unprepared.”2014 And further, “It was perfectly absurd to believe that the Russians cannot do what others can. . . . There never was any secret about nuclear energy.”

“He had always had a naive faith in ‘secrets,’ ” concludes C. P. Snow. “He had been told by the best authorities that this ‘secret’ wasn’t keepable and that the Soviets would soon have the bomb themselves. Perhaps, with one of his surges of romantic optimism, he deluded himself into not believing it. He was only too conscious that British power, and his own, was now just a vestige. So long as the Americans and British had the bomb in sole possession, he could feel that that power hadn’t altogether slipped away. It is a sad story.”2017

Bohr did not spell out these opportunities. He even seemed to step back from offering advice: “The responsibility for handling the situation rests, of course, with the statesmen alone. The scientists who are brought into confidence can only offer the statesmen all such information about technical matters as may be of importance for their decisions.”

All happening pre- post D-Day

Late in life Bohr explained the starting point of his revelation in a single phrase. “We are in a completely new situation that cannot be resolved by war,” he confided to a friend.2023 He had already grasped that fundamental point when he arrived at Los Alamos in 1943 and told Oppenheimer that nothing like Hitler’s attempt to enslave Europe would ever happen again. “First of all,” Oppenheimer confirms, “[Bohr] was clear that if it worked, this development was going to bring an enormous change in the situation of the world, in the whole situation of war and the tolerability of war.”2024

“It appeared to me,” Bohr wrote in 1950 of his lonely wartime initiative, “that the very necessity of a concerted effort to forestall such ominous threats to civilization would offer quite unique opportunities to bridge international divergencies.”2026 That, in a single sentence, was the revelation of the complementarity of the bomb.

“What it would mean,” he told him, “if the whole picture of social conditions in every country were open for judgment and comparison, need hardly be enlarged upon.”2030 The great and deep difficulty that contained within itself its own solution was not, finally, the bomb. It was the inequality of men and nations. The bomb in its ultimate manifestation, nuclear holocaust, would eliminate that inequality by destroying rich and poor, democratic and totalitarian alike in one final apocalypse. It followed complementarily that the opening up of the world necessary to prevent (or reverse) an arms race would also progressively expose and alleviate inequality, but in the direction of life, not death: Within any community it is only possible for the citizens to strive together for common welfare on the basis of public knowledge of the general conditions of the country. Likewise, real co-operation between nations on problems of common concern presupposes free access to all information of importance for their relations. Any argument for upholding barriers of information and intercourse, based on concern for national ideals or interests, must be weighed against the beneficial effects of common enlightenment and the relieved tension resulting from such openness.2031 That statement, from an open letter Bohr wrote to the United Nations in 1950, is preceded by another, a vision of a world evolved to the relative harmony of the nations of Scandinavia that once confronted each other and the ...

Find Bohr’s 1950 open letter to UN?

Such an effort would begin with the United States, Bohr suggested to Roosevelt in the summer of 1944, because the United States had achieved clear advantage: “The present situation would seem to offer a most favourable opportunity for an early initiative from the side which by good fortune has achieved a lead in the efforts of mastering mighty forces of nature hitherto beyond human reach.” Concessions would demonstrate goodwill; “indeed, it would appear that only when the question is taken up . . . of what concessions the various powers are prepared to make as their contribution to an adequate control arrangement, [will it] be possible for any one of the partners to assure themselves of the sincerity of the intentions of the others.”2034

No essence was ever expressed more expensively from the substance of the world with the possible exception of the human soul.