Pandora's Keepers (10 page)

As part of its lobbying effort, the British government dispatched an Australian physicist working at the University of Birmingham
with Frisch and Peierls named Mark Oliphant across the Atlantic in the late summer of 1941 to proselytize for an atomic bomb.
His mission was to stir American physicists to action. “If Congress knew the true history of the atomic energy project,” Leo
Szilard said modestly after the war, “I have no doubt but that it would create a special medal to be given to meddling foreigners
for distinguished services, and Dr. Oliphant would be the first to receive one.”
⁸
Oliphant was a blunt, forceful, and persuasive man who was chosen by the British government to seek out one American physicist
in particular, a striver of immense self-confidence and practical genius named Ernest Lawrence.

A tall, broad-shouldered man with slicked-back strawberry blond hair atop a boyish face colored by pale blue eyes set behind
rimless glasses, Lawrence was a talented gadgeteer and charming yet shrewd promoter from the prairie heartland of America.
There was something enormously vital in his movements, in the energetic way he walked and talked. He moved so quickly that
he always seemed to be on the run. He was not a brilliant physicist, but he loved to build great big powerful machines, and
his enormous drive got them built.

Born in South Dakota in 1901, Lawrence inherited his drive from his father, Carl, a small-town Babbitt who built a big house,
became a leading citizen, and constantly kept his eye out for the main chance. His son showed a similar knack from the time
he was in college at the University of South Dakota. He was so enthusiastic and persuasive in his request to the dean of students
for funds to buy radio equipment that the dean gave him the money on the spot and urged him to take up the study of physics.
He told Lawrence about another country boy named Ernest from New Zealand (Rutherford), who had won the Nobel Prize for his
insights into atomic structure. What adventure could equal that of searching for nature’s secrets? he said, firing the young
man’s imagination. Who knew what might be discovered next?

After college Lawrence attended graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he came into contact with Arthur Compton,
and later moved to Yale. He developed beautiful technique as an experimenter, with not only remarkable physical intuition
but also the confidence to believe in his instincts. While at Yale, he invented the “cyclotron,” an atom smasher that provided
an entirely new way of studying the nucleus. His first cyclotron was a bellows-shaped glass instrument just four inches wide
and covered with red sealing wax against vacuum leaks. It worked by accelerating electrically charged particles in a magnetic
field and then aiming them at a target. The subatomic pieces that broke off on impact provided clues to the internal structure
of the atom. The cyclotron quickly earned Lawrence what he wanted most: publicly acknowledged success. He became the boy wonder
of American science.

The University of California, Berkeley, which sought to build up its physics department, wooed Lawrence from Yale by offering
him tenure, graduate students, and opportunity for rapid advancement—uncommon perquisites for a fresh-faced academic at an
Ivy League university. Lawrence moved to Berkeley in 1928, settling into an office on the second floor of LeConte Hall, the
physics building. He set up shop in an old wooden building next to LeConte Hall that he saved from demolition, renamed the
Radiation Laboratory, and made his personal fiefdom.

The instruments in the “Rad Lab” were first-class, but almost nothing else was. The centerpiece was a twenty-seven-inch cyclotron—twenty-seven
inches for the size of the poles of its eighty-ton electromagnet. The electromagnet was massive, twelve feet high and twelve
feet long in its semicircular arch. Inside the arch, set on its side, was a metal spool shaped like an enormous barbell. From
the narrow neck of the spool spread out a web of wires and cables. Here the particles were accelerated and the targets set.
The building was so full of static electricity that one could light up an electric bulb by touching it to any metal surface.
⁹

Before Lawrence, there had been a proud tradition that a physicist conducted research only with personal tools. The cyclotron
required a big team. This was all part of Lawrence’s plan. His approach was to assemble teams devoted not only to solving
specific problems but to applying discoveries across disciplines. By teaming up physicists, chemists, biologists, physicians,
and engineers, he increased his odds of producing the practical applications that would bring him the fame and funding he
wanted.
¹⁰

The Rad Lab was an exciting place for an experimental physicist. Lawrence had a tremendous enthusiasm for the work, an enthusiasm
that was very infectious. Everyone wore a wraparound apron with a sash tied in front—it was a kind of badge that showed you
were “in.” Everyone knew it was one of the most outstanding physics laboratories in the world. They felt a sense of adventure
and participation in an important activity with important people—especially Ernest Lawrence, whom they affectionately called
“the Maestro.” Occasionally Lawrence would don an apron himself and work alongside everyone else. When he did, things went
a little faster, his focus on the acquisition of physical data, not on what the data meant.

Operating independently of the physics department, Lawrence was a scientific entrepreneur who had shrewd business sense and
was skilled at raising money for his laboratory. Measured against the standards of later years, the money he raised was small,
but it was an astronomical sum for science during the Depression, especially for what was then considered an esoteric field.
Introducing the big-machine approach to science, he became a sovereign in his own realm.

He also put Berkeley on the map. Lawrence knew he had arrived when he was invited to the prestigious Solvay Conference on
Physics, held in Brussels in October 1933, the only American so honored. Other invitees included such giants of physics as
Einstein, Bohr, and Fermi. By the mid-1930s Lawrence was the youngest full professor at Berkeley, with an army of graduate
students. Berkeley’s chancellor, Robert Sproul, exaggerated only a little when he quipped, “I don’t know whether I’m running
a university with a cyclotron attached to it or a cyclotron with a university attached to it.”

The boyish, clean-cut Lawrence was an exceptional salesman and handler of people. He instinctively knew how to make a good
impression—particularly on those he sought to flatter—and was scrupulously polite, even to those he did not particularly like.
As he worked a room like a master politician, foundation officers and industrialists found him hard to resist. His presence
and salesmanship grew out of an inexhaustible energy and optimism that impressed everyone who met him.

Underneath the charming smiles and friendly backslaps, however, lurked an intense, driven man who clenched his jaw and had
little time for “nonsense.” When he lost his cool, a vein in his left temple bulged out—it became a warning sign to everyone.
¹¹
Assertive and at times overbearing, he identified personally and passionately with the Rad Lab. It was
his
laboratory—he had created it from scratch—and he ran it with an iron fist. “This was Lawrence’s domain,” said Philip Abelson,
one of his graduate students. “He was number one. He was running the show.”
¹²
Lawrence was omnipresent, demanding, and dominating. He hung a huge microphone from the lab’s ceiling so that he could talk
to the staff from his office—and listen to them. Some staffers found him overbearing and pompous—“a man with an inflated ego.”
¹³
During midmorning coffee breaks, Lawrence used a fine china cup and silver spoon, while everyone else made do with thick
porcelain mugs. At the end of the break, the cup and spoon went into a locked drawer conspicuously marked
RESERVED FOR THE DIRECTOR.
¹⁴
His cyclotrons cost loads of money to construct and operate, yet the staff who ran them had to make do with small salaries
and no benefits such as medical insurance.

Lawrence was quintessentially American—he believed anyone could do anything if he just put his mind to it. “Keep your nose
to the grindstone, there’s nothing more interesting than physics,” he often said.
¹⁵
He chose his staff carefully, preferring uncomplicated people willing to work long hours. Laziness was not tolerated. “He
wouldn’t hesitate to bawl you out or tell you [that you] were doing things wrong,” recalled Edwin McMillan, whose years in
the Rad Lab eventually won him a Nobel Prize. “The greatest sin was not working hard enough. That was a worse sin than doing
something badly.”
¹⁶
He dropped in to the Rad Lab at odd hours of the night—often dressed in black tie after a dinner party at Sproul’s house—just
to see how things were going. He also kept a radio by his bedside at home tuned to the cyclotron frequency to know that it
was running. If it was not, he would get on the phone and bark, “What the hell’s the matter? Having coffee, or were you out
for a beer?”
¹⁷

As the administrative and fund-raising burden increased, Lawrence grew distant from the day-to-day work of the Rad Lab. He
was often away in New York, where his main financial supporters were located. These trips occupied more time than necessary,
since he insisted on going by train—he would have nothing to do with airplanes. In spare moments he hosted friends at favorite
restaurants like DiBiasi’s in Albany and played tennis to win. His family and friends worried that he wouldn’t be able to
keep up the frenzied pace and that one day his health would suffer. But Lawrence was not the worrying type.

By the late 1930s Lawrence had made himself and his Rad Lab world-famous. MIT’s president wrote him: “I believe [the Rad Lab]
to be the most interesting and important scientific work now going on anywhere in the world.”
¹⁸
In Russia, cyclotrons were called “Lawrences.” When a model cyclotron was set up at the Golden Gate International Exposition
on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay in 1939, Lawrence spoke about it on a national radio hookup with a showmanship worthy
of P. T. Barnum. That same year he won the coveted Nobel Prize in physics.

Lawrence was sarcastic and impatient with Berkeley colleagues who explored schemes for alleviating the lot of humanity. Political
issues did not excite or engage him. His view of international affairs was even more naive and simplistic. Like the vast majority
of Americans during the isolationist 1930s, he thought Europe’s “shenanigans” should be ignored because they were not America’s
business. In October 1938 he wrote to Wilfred Mann, a British physicist who had done research at the Rad Lab, commenting on—among
other things—the recent Munich Conference, where Britain and France had sacrificed Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany on the altar
of appeasement:

Dear Wilfred:

You have been having a very anxious time recently, but let us hope the war clouds have passed and that we have ahead of us
at least a decade of peace. I don’t think it absurd to believe it is possible that we have seen a turning point in history,
that henceforth international disputes of great powers will be settled by peaceful negotiations and not by war.

Cordially,
Ernest
¹⁹

“I still think war is going to be avoided,” he wrote his parents on August 29, 1939, adding confidently: “All this discussion
certainly must mean that Hitler is backing down.”
²⁰
Three days later Nazi Germany invaded Poland and started World War II.

Oliphant and his British sponsors knew that if they could convince Lawrence of the feasibility of a bomb, Lawrence would grab
hold of the idea and push it relentlessly in American scientific circles, while leaving the political ramifications to others.
They thought Lawrence would get it done without asking too many questions. And although Lawrence was quite clearly a political
naïf, they had chosen just the right man.

The relationship between Britain and America was growing closer when Oliphant traveled to Berkeley in late September 1941.
Though still a nonbelligerent, the United States was far from neutral. Its sympathies lay with the hard-pressed British, who
had survived a Nazi aerial blitz the previous summer. In the fall of 1940 the Roosevelt administration had transferred fifty
destroyers to Britain in return for U.S. rights to build bases in British possessions in the Caribbean and the western Atlantic,
and Congress had passed the first peacetime military draft in American history. In the spring of 1941 direct Lend-Lease aid
to Britain began. The United States was edging toward war on the side of Britain.

On Sunday, September 21, 1941, Lawrence picked up Oliphant at the San Francisco train station in his car and drove up into
the green hills above the Berkeley campus, where the magnet for his giant new 184-inch cyclotron was being erected on the
summit of Charter Hill. It was a beautiful autumn day and far below, beyond the gardens and lawns of Berkeley, the bridges
of San Francisco Bay shone in the sun. Lawrence’s driving petrified Oliphant. Pressing the accelerator to the floor and keeping
his face turned toward his passenger, Lawrence threw the car forward in jerks and spasms, swaying from one side of the twisting
dirt road to the other, cutting corners at full speed, paying no heed to other cars as they passed.

Nervously gripping the door handle, Oliphant told Lawrence about Frisch and Peierls’s calculation that a bomb could be made
with just a few kilograms of U-235, and about the methods under study in Britain for separating the isotope from natural uranium.
Lawrence was deeply impressed by the serious view of British scientists not only that atomic bombs were quite possible but
that Nazi Germany might be working on the problem. He suggested the possibility of extracting U-235 through electromagnetic
separation using his new 184-inch cyclotron. He began to describe to Oliphant a fantastic vision of gigantic laboratories
and industrial complexes, armies of specially trained scientists and arsenals of newly invented tools and instruments, his
voice rising with excitement. It was a contagious exuberance that overwhelmed doubt and drowned all sense of reality in a
flood of buoyant optimism. When Lawrence was talking, it was impossible not to fall under the almost hypnotic spell of his
enthusiasm—he even convinced himself. Here was something big enough, Oliphant thought, for Lawrence’s talents and ambition.
That other physicists might find such a vision fantastic would only spur him to prove them wrong.