The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

And it was a marvelous idea; it was really a pleasure for once to direct the work of these husky boys, canning uranium—just shoving it in—handling packs of 50 or 100 pounds with the same ease as another person would have handled three or four pounds.

A formal status report went off immediately from the Executive Committee to Bush. It predicted enough fissionable material for a test in eighteen months—by March 1944. It estimated that a 30-kilogram bomb of U235 “should have a destructive effect equivalent to the explosion of over 100,000 tons of TNT,” much more than the mere 2,000 tons estimated earlier. And it dramatically announced the Super:

fear we are in the soup.

Nichols told him about a recent and fortuitous discovery: some 1,250 tons of extraordinarily rich pitchblende—it was 65 percent uranium oxide—that the Union Minière had shipped to the United States in 1940 from its Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo to remove it beyond German reach. Frédéric Joliot and Henry Tizard had independently warned the Belgians of the German danger in 1939. The ore was stored in the open in two thousand steel drums at Port Richmond on Staten Island. The Belgians had been trying for six months to alert the U.S. government to its presence. On Friday, September 18, Groves sent Nichols to New York to buy it.

The same day Groves approved a directive that had been languishing on his predecessor’s desk throughout the summer for the acquisition of 52,000 acres of land along the Clinch River in eastern Tennessee. Site X, the Met Lab called it.

She records his sly self-mockery: “As he frequently said, he was amazed when he thought how modest he was.”1666

Compton, who describes himself as “one of those who must talk over important problems with his wife,” arranged uniquely to have Betty Compton cleared.

Laura Fermi found out, like many others, only at the end of the war.

One sharpening was good for 60 holes, about an hour’s work. Before they were through they would shape and finish 45,000 graphite bricks and drill 19,000 holes.

For once Compton made a quick decision: with control seemingly assured, he allowed Fermi to build CP-1 in the west stands. He chose not to inform the president of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, reasoning that he should not ask a lawyer to judge a matter of nuclear physics. “The only answer he could have given would have been—no. And this answer would have been wrong. So I assumed the responsibility myself.”

We tried charcoal fires in empty oil drums—too much smoke. Then we secured a number of ornamental, imitation log, gas-fired fireplaces. These were hooked up to the gas mains, but they gobbled up the oxygen and replaced it with fumes which burned the eyes. . . .1689 The University of Chicago came to the rescue. Years before, big league football had been banned from the campus; we found in an old locker a supply of raccoon fur coats. Thus, for a time we had the best dressed collegiate-style guards in the business.

I resisted great temptation to pull the final cadmium strip and be the first to make a pile chain react. However, Fermi had foreseen this temptation and extracted a promise from me to make the measurement, record the result, insert all cadmium rods, and lock them all in place.1690

The State Department had announced that morning that two million Jews had perished in Europe and five million more were in danger.

Its neutron intensity was then doubling every two minutes. Left uncontrolled for an hour and a half, that rate of increase would have carried it to a million kilowatts. Long before so extreme a runaway it would have killed anyone left in the room and melted down.

shook hands with Fermi and I said I thought this day would go down as a black day in the history of mankind.”

“Robert could make people feel they were fools,” Bethe says simply.

Significantly, he was least convoluted, most direct, least mannered, most natural living simply at his unadorned ranch in the Pecos Valley high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico.

“He had, after all, no experience in directing a large group of people.

at the time it seemed “a most improbable appointment. I was astonished.”

“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.”

Leo Szilard, urban man, habitué of hotel lobbies, took a different view of the location when he heard about it. “Nobody could think straight in a place like that,” he told his Met Lab colleagues. “Everybody who goes there will go crazy.”

“Several of the European-born were unhappy,” Laura Fermi notes, “because living inside a fenced area reminded them of concentration camps.”

Similarly confined but kept uninformed because Oppenheimer and Groves decided it so, the wives served harder time.

They dreamed further that by that same application they might forestall the next war, might even end war as a means of settling differences between nations. Which must in the long run have decisive consequences, one way or the other, for nationalism.

What had been subcritical because of its geometry would be squeezed critical far faster and more efficiently than any mere gun could fire.

“he turned to me and said, ‘I believe your people actually want to make a bomb.’ I remember his voice sounded surprised.”

“Morale” is here and elsewhere in the literature of air power a euphemism for the bombing of civilians.

night bombing and area bombing were the only tactics that paid a reasonable return in destruction at a reasonable price in lost aircraft and aircrew lives, then he would dedicate Bomber Command to perfecting those tactics and measure success not in factories rendered inoperative but in acres of cities flattened. Which is to say, area bombing was invented to give bombers targets they could hit.

INTENTION 4. To destroy HAMBURG.

Civilians had the misfortune to be the only victims left available.

“Then I just put it in my pocket and then into my suitcase,” Seaborg remembers.1838 He proceeded to Chicago unarmed.

With personal intervention on behalf of the principle of openness, which exposes crime as well as error to public view, Niels Bohr played a decisive part in the rescue of the Danish Jews.

(Ten years after the end of the war Szilard and Fermi won a joint patent for their invention of the nuclear reactor.)

this weapon will be so powerful that there can be no peace if it is simultaneously in the possession of any two powers unless these two powers are bound by an indissoluble political union . . . .

German development of radioactive warfare, another vision in a dark mirror, seemed to the leaders of the Manhattan Project to require countering by examination into parallel U.S. 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.1945

The race to the bomb, such as it was, ended for Germany on a mountain lake in Norway on a cold Sunday morning in February 1944.

In retrospect it is indistinguishable from heroism.

Roosevelt inserted the word ad lib:

I had had no time to prepare for it, and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant “Old Unconditional Surrender,” and the next thing I knew I had said it.1977

We recognize that there will be great resistance to this measure, but believe the hazards to the future of the world are sufficiently great to warrant this attempt.

It was clear also at Los Alamos that he was intellectually superior to us.”

“In an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did.

X Division managed more than 50,000 major machining operations on those castings in 1944 and 1945 without one explosive accident,

Ernest Lawrence’s monumental effort had succeeded; every gram of U235 in the one Little Boy that should be ready by mid-1945 would pass at least once through his calutrons.

May [be] Frankenstein or means for World Peace

That was a prescription for an arms race as soon as the Soviet Union took up the challenge. Arthur Compton immediately signed on. So did his brother Karl. Oppenheimer contented himself with a footnote about materials allocation.

He wanted to change the whole framework in which this problem would appear, early enough so that the problem would be altered by it.

The surprise of the morning was perhaps Marshall’s idea for an opening to Moscow: “He raised the question whether it might be desirable to invite two prominent Russian scientists to witness the [Trinity] test.”

the present view of the Committee was that the bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible;