The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

“Looks like a race,” Conant noted for his history file on January 6, 1945, “to see whether a fat man or a thin man will be dropped first and whether the month will be July, August or September.”

Robert Oppenheimer oversaw all this activity with self-evident competence and an outward composure that almost everyone came to depend upon. “Oppenheimer was probably the best lab director I have ever seen,” Teller repeats, “because of the great mobility of his mind, because of his successful effort to know about practically everything important invented in the laboratory, and also because of his unusual psychological insight into other people which, in the company of physicists, was very much the exception.”2143 “He knew and understood everything that went on in the laboratory,” Bethe concurs, “whether it was chemistry or theoretical physics or machine shop. He could keep it all in his head and coordinate it. It was clear also at Los Alamos that he was intellectually superior to us.”2144 The Theoretical Division leader elaborates: He understood immediately when he heard anything, and fitted it into the general scheme of things and drew the right conclusions. There was just nobody else in that laboratory who came even close to him. In his knowledge. There was human warmth as well. Everybody certainly had the impression that Oppenheimer cared what each particular person was doing. In talking to someone he made it clear that that person’s work was important for the success of the whole project. I don’t remember any occasion at Los Alamos in which he was nasty to any person, whereas before and after the war he was often that way. At Los Alamos he didn’t make anybody feel infe...

In January 1944 Jean Tatlock committed suicide. “I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow,” her suicide note said.2149 It was a paralysis of the spirit Oppenheimer seemingly had to resist in himself.

Planning began in March 1944 for a full-scale test of an implosion weapon. Sometime between March and October Oppenheimer proposed a code name for that test.2150 The first man-made nuclear explosion would be a historic event and its designation therefore a name that history might remember. Oppenheimer coded the test and the test site Trinity. Groves wrote him in 1962 to find out why, speculating that he chose the name because it is common to rivers and peaks in the American West and would be inconspicuous. “I did suggest it,” Oppenheimer responded, “but not on [that] ground. . . .2151 Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation: As West and East In all flatt Maps—and I am one—are one, So death doth touch the Resurrection.” The poem was Donne’s “Hymne to God My God, in My Sicknesse,” and among its subtleties it construes a complementarity that parallels the complementarity of the bomb that Bohr had recently revealed to Oppenheimer. (“Bohr was deeply in this,” Bethe testifies, “and this was his real interest, and Bohr had long conversations with Oppenheimer which brought Oppenheimer into this at a very early stage. Oppenheimer was very much indoctrinated by Bohr’s ideas of international control.”2152) That dying leads to death but might also lead to resurrection—as the bomb for Bohr and Oppenheimer was a weapon of death that might also end...

healed the split: cf. Dyson (1979), p. 81ff, esp. Kitty Oppenheimer’s choice of George Herbert’s “The Collar” as “a poem . . . that she found particularly appropriate to describe how Robert had appeared to himself.” “The Collar” works complementarities similar to Donne’s. The Collar BY GEORGE HERBERT I struck the board, and cried, "No more; I will abroad! What? shall I ever sigh and pine? My lines and life are free, free as the road, Loose as the wind, as large as store. Shall I be still in suit? Have I no harvest but a thorn To let me blood, and not restore What I have lost with cordial fruit? Sure there was wine Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn Before my tears did drown it. Is the year only lost to me? Have I no bays to crown it, No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted? All wasted? Not so, my heart; but there is fruit, And thou hast hands. Recover all thy sigh-blown age On double pleasures: leave thy cold dispute Of what is fit and not. Forsake thy cage, Thy rope of sands, Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee Good cable, to enforce and draw, And be thy law, While thou didst wink and wouldst not see. Away! take heed; I will abroad. Call in thy death's-head there; tie up thy fears; He that forbears To suit and serve his need Deserves his load." But as I raved and grew more fierce and wild At every word, Methought I heard one calling, Child! And I replied My Lord. The Collar" is a poem by Welsh poet George Herbert published in 1633, and is a part of a collection of poems within Herbert's book The Temple. The poem depicts a man who is experiencing a loss of faith and feelings of anger over the commitment he has made to God.

Oppenheimer did not doubt that he would be remembered to some degree, and reviled, as the man who led the work of bringing to mankind for the first time in its history the means of its own destruction.2154 He cherished the complementary compensation of knowing that the hard riddle the bomb would pose had two answers, two outcomes, one of them transcendent. Such understanding justified the work at Los Alamos if anything did, and the work in turn healed the split between self and overweening conscience that hurt him.2155 He had long recognized the possibility of such a convalescence and evoked it explicitly in the epistle on discipline he wrote his brother Frank in 1932 that concluded in Pauline measure: “Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude; for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.”2156 At Los Alamos, if only for a time, he located that detachment in duties to men and to the commonwealth that Bohr was teaching him to believe might be worthy, not macabre. He was not the first man to find himself in war.

We have been living through years of great evil, and of great terror. Roosevelt has been our President, our Commander-in-Chief and, in an old and unperverted sense, our leader. All over the world men have looked to him for guidance, and have seen symbolized in him their hope that the evils of this time would not be repeated; that the terrible sacrifices which have been made, and those that are still to be made, would lead to a world more fit for human habitation. . . . In the Hindu scripture, in the Bhagavad-Gita, it says, “Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.” The faith of Roosevelt is one that is shared by millions of men and women in every country of the world. For this reason it is possible to maintain the hope, for this reason it is right that we should dedicate ourselves to the hope, that his good works will not have ended with his death.

call off an investigation into unaccounted millions of dollars in defense-plant construction on Stimson’s word alone gives some measure of the quality of the Secretary’s reputation. Stimson was seventy-seven years old when Truman assumed the Presidency. He could remember stories his great-grandmother told him of her childhood talks with George Washington. He had

Had a long talk with my able and conniving Secretary of State. My but he has a keen mind! And he is an honest man. But all country politicians are alike. They are sure all other politicians are circuitous in their dealings. When they are told the straight truth, unvarnished, it is never believed—an asset sometimes.2278

Supreme Commander listened quietly for a time, thanked everyone for trying and dictated his own unadorned report: The mission of this Allied force was fulfilled at 0241, local time, May 7th, 1945.2306 Better to be brief, better than resounding phrases. Twenty million Soviet soldiers and civilians died of privation or in battle in the Second World War. Eight million British and Europeans died or were killed and another five million Germans. The Nazis murdered six million Jews in ghettos and concentration camps. Manmade death had ended thirty-nine million human lives prematurely; for the second time in half a century Europe had become a charnel house.2307

George Herbert’s “The Collar”