American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

OPPENHEIMER BACKED OFF from the union in the autumn of 1941, but the notion of organizing the scientists in the Rad Lab did not die. A little more than a year later, in early 1943, Rossi Lomanitz, Irving David Fox, David Bohm, Bernard Peters and Max Friedman, all Oppenheimer students, did join the union (FAECT Local 25). The usual motivations for forming a union were conspicuously absent. Lomanitz, for one, was making $150 a month at the Rad Lab—more than double his previous salary. No one had complaints about the working conditions; everyone in the lab was eager to put in as many hours as they could. “It seemed like a dramatic thing to do,” recalled Lomanitz. “It was kind of a thing of youth. . . . It was a ridiculous reason for forming a union.” Friedman was persuaded by Lomanitz and Weinberg to be the organizer within the Radiation Laboratory. “It was a title, I never did anything,” he recalled. But he thought in principle it was a fine idea to form a union. “Partly we were afraid of what the atom bomb might be used for. That was part of it. And part of it was that we thought the scientists shouldn’t just be [working on the bomb project] without any voice in what happens to their effort.”