The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

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

Only very rarely does an animal living under natural conditions in the wild die of old age.

the Germans themselves were paralyzed with cynicism, one of the uglier effects on morals of losing a major war.

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.”

Bohr was an exceptional athlete.

Who knew?

Only wholeness leads to clarity, And truth lies in the abyss.

Planck solved the radiation problem by proposing that the vibrating particles can only radiate at certain energies. The permitted energies would be determined by a new number—“a universal constant,” he says, “which I called h. Since it had the dimension of action (energy X time), I gave it the name, elementary quantum of action.”278 (Quantum is the neuter form of the Latin word quantus, meaning “how great.”) Only those limited and finite energies could appear which were whole-number multiples of hv: of the frequency ν times Planck’s h. Planck calculated h to be a very small number, close to the modern value of 6.63 × 10−27 erg-seconds. Universal h soon acquired its modern name: Planck’s constant.

Genius

“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.’ ”

He apologized similarly for his tentative, rambling habit of speech: “I try not to speak more clearly than I think.”

The first subway on the European continent was dug not in Paris or Berlin but in Budapest.

Joachimsthaler, the name for the new coins, shortened to thaler, became “dollar” in English before 1600. Thereby the U.S. dollar descends from the silver of Joachimsthal.

The Joachimsthal mines, ancient and cavernous, shored with smoky timbers, offered up other unusual ores, including a black, pitchy, heavy, nodular mineral descriptively named pitchblende.

Eight years previously Sir William Herschel, the German-born English astronomer, had discovered a new planet and named it Uranus after the earliest supreme god of Greek mythology, son and husband of Gaea, father of Titans and Cyclopes, whose son Chronus with Gaea’s help castrated him and from whose wounded blood, falling then on Earth, the three vengeful Furies sprang. To honor Herschel’s discovery Klaproth named his new metal uranium.

It was from Joachimsthal pitchblende residues that Marie and Pierre Curie laboriously separated the first samples of the new elements they named radium and polonium.

“Not only do wars create incredible suffering, but they engender deep hatreds that can last for generations.”

Twice as many Americans became physicists in the dozen years between 1920 and 1932 as had in the previous sixty.

Bohr responded: “But if anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows that he has not understood the first thing about them.”

“And Bohr asked, at the end, ‘Is this really crazy enough?

The Lateran Councils of 1179 and 1215 made the baleful conflict visible by denying Jews authority over Christians, denying them Christian servants, relegating moneylending to Jews by forbidding it to Christians, forbidding Christians lodging in Jewish quarters and thus officially sanctioning the establishment of ghettos and, most onerously, requiring every Jew to wear a distinguishing badge—frequently, on local authority, the yellow Magen David that the Nazis later restored.

“I have seen dictatorship in Russia,” he told them. “In Germany it just couldn’t happen.”

Lesson. Just saying.

The new law abruptly stripped a quarter of the physicists of Germany, including eleven who had earned or would earn Nobel Prizes, of their positions and their livelihood.

The University of Berlin and the University of Frankfurt each lost a third of its faculty.

If the thickness is larger than the critical value . . . I can produce an explosion. As if to mark in some distant inhuman ledger the end of one age and the beginning of another, Marie Sklodowska Curie, born in Warsaw, Poland, on November 7, 1867, died that day of Szilard’s filing, July 4, 1934, in Savoy.

What a coincidence.

He spoke Italian.871 ‘C.i.f.’ meant ‘con intuito formidable,’ ‘with formidable intuition.’

The SS arrested some thirty thousand Jewish men—“especially rich ones,” its order had specified—and

They had discovered the reason no elements beyond uranium exist naturally in the world: the two forces working against each other in the nucleus eventually cancel each other out.

Frisch would calculate later that the energy from each bursting uranium nucleus would be sufficient to make a visible grain of sand visibly jump. In each mere gram of uranium there are about 2.5 × 1021 atoms, an absurdly large number, 25 followed by twenty zeros: 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000.

He even found time on the day of the occupation to worry about the large gold Nobel Prize medals that Max von Laue and James Franck had given him for safekeeping.1290 Exporting gold from Germany was a serious criminal offense and their names were engraved on the medals.1291, 1292 George de Hevesy devised an effective solution—literally: he dissolved the medals separately in acid. As solutions of black liquid in unmarked jars they sat out the war innocently on a laboratory shelf. Afterward the Nobel Foundation recast them and returned them to their owners.

Bohr. What a guy.

liable to counter anti-semitic remarks by retorting “When your ancestors were still living in the trees mine were already forging cheques!”

The man who conceived and planned the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet, had few illusions about the ultimate success of a war against the United States. He had studied at Harvard and served as a naval attaché in Washington and knew America’s strength. But if war had to come he meant “to give a fatal blow to the enemy fleet” when it was least expected, at the outset. By that act he hoped he could win his country six months to a year during which it might establish its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and dig in.

the plainsong of American speech.

Plainsong?

Hitler was plainly not delighted with the possibility that the earth under his rule might be transformed into a glowing star.

‘No matter what you do with the rest of your life, nothing will be as important to the future of the World as your work on this Project right now.’ ”

Oppenheimer recognized the habit without diagnosing it in a letter to his younger brother Frank: “But it is not easy—at least it is not easy for me—to be quite free of the desire to browbeat somebody or something.”1715 He called the behavior “beastliness.” It did not win him friends.

“My two great loves are physics and desert country,” Robert Oppenheimer had written a friend once; “it’s a pity they can’t be combined.”

Just wait.

By then it was understood that a bomb would necessitate locating, mining and processing hundreds of tons of uranium ore and that U235 separation would require a tenth of the annual Japanese electrical capacity and half the nation’s copper output.

Having a massive economy can be handy.

For security reasons, these were called by the Air Force representatives the ‘Thin Man’ and the ‘Fat Man,’ respectively; the Air Force officers tried to make their phone conversations sound as though they were modifying a plane to carry Roosevelt (the Thin Man) and Churchill (the Fat Man). . . .

The new town, planned initially for thirteen thousand workers, took its name from its location lining a long section of the northwesternmost valley: Oak Ridge.

Form ions of a vaporous uranium compound and start them moving at one side of a vacuum tank permeated by a strong magnetic field and the moving ions as they curved around would separate into two beams. Lighter U235 atoms would follow a narrower arc than heavier U238 atoms; across a four-foot semicircle the separation might be about three-tenths of an inch. Set a collecting pocket at the point where the U235 ion beam separately arrived and you could catch the ions.

To separate 100 grams—about 4 ounces—of U235 per day, Lawrence estimated in the autumn of 1942, would require some 2,000 4-foot calutron tanks set among thousands of tons of magnets.

(The seal material that eventually served at Oak Ridge came into its own after the war under the brand name Teflon.)

Groves learned how deep were Szilard’s roots in the evolution of atomic energy research and perhaps also that men he considered vital to the project—Fermi, Teller, Wigner—were Szilard colleagues of long standing and would have to be taken into account.

The surveillance of an innocent but eccentric man makes gumshoe comedy. Szilard traveled to Washington on June 20, 1943, and in preparation for the visit an Army counterintelligence agent reviewed his file: The surveillance reports indicate that Subject is of Jewish extraction, has a fondness for delicacies and frequently makes purchases in delicatessen stores, usually eats his breakfast in drug stores and other meals in restaurants, walks a great deal when he cannot secure a taxi, usually is shaved in a barber shop, speaks occasionally in a foreign tongue, and associates mostly with people of Jewish extraction.1929 He is inclined to be rather absent minded and eccentric, and will start out a door, turn around and come back, go out on the street without his coat or hat and frequently looks up and down the street as if he were watching for someone or did not know for sure where he wanted to go.

The possibility of using radioactive material bred in a nuclear reactor as a weapon of war had been mentioned by Arthur Compton’s National Academy of Sciences committee in 1941. German development of such a weapon began worrying the scientists at the Met Lab late in 1942, on the assumption that Germany might be a year or more ahead of the United States in pile development.

There is no better evidence anywhere in the record of the increasing bloody-mindedness of the Second World War than that Robert Oppenheimer, a man who professed at various times in his life to be dedicated to Ahimsa (“the Sanscrit word that means doing no harm or hurt,” he explains) could write with enthusiasm of preparations for the mass poisoning of as many as five hundred thousand human beings.

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.

Bohr, who used to say that accuracy and clarity were complementary (and so a short statement could never be precise), was not easy to hear,

“The greatest amphibious assault ever attempted,” Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, called that invasion of Europe across the English Channel with an initial force of 156,000 British, Canadian and American soldiers supported by 1,200 warships, 1,500 tanks and 12,000 aircraft.

Still amazed, every time...

speck of U235 stuck to an operator’s coveralls was well worth searching out with a Geiger counter and retrieving delicately with tweezers.

Polonium, element 84 on the periodic table, was a strange metal. Marie and Pierre Curie had isolated it by hand from pitchblende residues (at backbreaking concentrations of a tenth of a milligram per ton of ore) in 1898 and named it in honor of Marie Curie’s native Poland.