Pandora's Keepers (11 page)

Lawrence immediately put his Rad Lab staff to work. A chemist at the Rad Lab, Glenn Seaborg, had recently hit upon the discovery
that neutrons absorbed by U-238 transformed uranium into a heavier element—plutonium—that also was fissionable by slow neutrons.
This was an accidental but important discovery, just like fission had been. Not only could plutonium be made in a chain-reacting
pile, but it was a different chemical element, not just another isotope of uranium, and could therefore be separated from
U-238 through a comparatively easier and less expensive process than U-235. Lawrence reasoned that plutonium might supplement
U-235 as a source for atomic bombs.

In the fall of 1941—a time when the war was going very badly for Hitler’s enemies—Lawrence instructed Rad Lab scientists to
convert the cyclotrons for use in the electromagnetic separation of U-235. It was an extremely slow, complicated, and expensive
way to produce fissionable material for a bomb. By February 1942 the Rad Lab had produced three samples of U-235 weighing
all of seventy-five micro-grams each. A microgram was a speck barely big enough for the eye to see, and each sample contained
only 30 percent “enriched” U-235. Lawrence had a long way to go—how was he going to separate
kilograms
of pure fissionable U-235? Lawrence had committed himself to the goal, however, and was absolutely determined to see it through.
“That was just the beginning,” he said with great assurance.
²¹
He told his contacts in Washington that the project should be expanded to bring in more scientists and to build the infrastructure
necessary to accomplish the task.

Driven by a determination that Hitler not get the bomb first, Lawrence drove himself and his staff relentlessly. He demanded
complete dedication to the task at hand. He worked long hours and expected others to do the same. When delays occurred or
things went wrong, he bawled people out unmercifully, though he never asked others to do anything he would not do himself
and he showed appreciation for results. He led by example and maintained his leadership through the intensity with which he
followed the isotope-separation work. He believed that if you wanted something to come true, you made it come true by pushing
like hell. Somehow a way could be found, and he had faith that he would get there. With such effort, he thought, nothing was
impossible.

Lawrence met the Rad Lab staff every morning at eight. People took pains to be already in their seats. The Maestro made a
grand and lordly appearance, stomping in, slowly striding the length of the room, pounding the floor with his feet. Beaming
at the assembled staff, he took his seat in a big red leather armchair facing sideways between a blackboard and the audience.
The thing to do, he would then announce, was
to get the job done
—he expected everyone to share his sense of urgency. Later in the day he would walk unannounced through the lab and query
people about their work. He did not say much. Often it was simply, “What are you doing? Why are you doing that?” If they answered
hesitantly or pessimistically, Lawrence frowned. If they went into detail, he looked impatient. Above all, he hated idleness;
there was an important job to be done and no time to waste in doing it. “The esprit has perked up considerably with everybody
conscious of the necessity to work like the devil,” wrote one Rad Lab staffer after a surprise visit by the director.
²²

The fast pace, constant work, and self-imposed stress took its toll on Lawrence. His full head of blond hair began to recede.
His thin, muscular face grew puffier and pastier. Once remarkably energetic, he now was slowed by frequent and severe colds
and a chronic backache. On those rare occasions when he went home early for an evening with his family, he usually tired after
a few minutes of hugging and tossing around his children. Neighborhood kids, used to congregating noisily at the sprawling
Lawrence home in the afternoon, frayed his taut nerves and were abruptly ordered out. He found it much more difficult to relax
than to wrestle with the atomic project.

Lawrence felt in his bones that an atomic bomb could be made. He was confident that America possessed the ability and resources
to do it. He insisted that prudence required stepping up research, if only because of what the Nazis might be doing. Szilard
and Teller had said much the same before, but as refugees they were not trusted by close-minded government bureaucrats. They
also lacked Lawrence’s dogged optimism.

But although Lawrence’s hard sell worked with many people, it did not with Vannevar Bush. A fit man of fifty-two, Bush was
a shrewd Yankee who was also an astute administrator with distinguished accomplishments: endless engineering patents, the
vice presidency of MIT until 1938, then direction of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, a premier research organization.
Now he was the scientific adviser to President Roosevelt, and in that capacity, head of the Office of Scientific Research
and Development (OSRD), which had been established by executive order (under the name National Defense Research Committee)
^*
on June 27, 1940, the day after the Nazis occupied Paris.

The mission of the OSRD, which had absorbed the Uranium Committee, was to mobilize the nation’s scientific resources and apply
them to national defense. This included support of research that would result in weapons applicable to the present war. To
Bush, the defense of the free world in the fall of 1941 was in such a perilous state that only research efforts likely to
yield quick results were worthy of serious consideration. He therefore thought physicists such as Lawrence should concentrate
their efforts on projects that promised results within a matter of months, or at most a year or two—like radar and sonar.
In Bush’s opinion, America could not afford to devote its limited scientific resources to an extravagant program of uncertain
success.

More significant than Lawrence’s prodding was the MAUD Committee Report, which a British scientific liaison officer passed
along to Bush on a visit to Washington in early October 1941. The report’s optimism about techniques for isotope separation
and the prospects for development of an atomic bomb diminished his skepticism at the same time that it increased his fear
of Germany’s success in exploiting fission. Bush took the MAUD Report to the White House on October ninth. He summarized its
conclusions for the president: that the explosive core of a fission bomb might weigh twenty-five pounds; that it might explode
with a force equivalent to nearly two thousand tons of TNT; that a vast industrial plant would be necessary to separate the
fissionable U-235; and that British scientists estimated the first bombs might be ready in two years. He emphasized that he
based his statements “primarily on calculation with some laboratory investigation, but not on a proved case,” and therefore
could not guarantee success.
²³

Roosevelt’s mood had changed considerably since Einstein’s letter two years earlier. The war felt much nearer and more nearly
inevitable for the United States in 1941 than it had in 1939. If the British were pursuing such a promising line of research,
it seemed quite possible that the Germans were, too. No president could assume anything less. Thus, FDR endorsed an American
atomic project and directed that consideration of policy—what might be done with a bomb, if it was made—be restricted to a
Top Policy Group consisting of Vice President Henry Wallace, Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Army Chief of Staff George Marshall,
Bush, and Bush’s OSRD deputy, James Conant, a noted chemist and president of Harvard University. Roosevelt emphasized the
importance of keeping knowledge of the project within the smallest possible circle, a theme he would stress again and again
throughout the war. Within the next few months the organization, the tempo, and the attitude of the American government toward
research on an atomic bomb would alter dramatically.

The United States was not yet committed to building an atomic bomb, but it was now committed to exploring whether one could
be built. With Roosevelt’s permission, Bush ordered a feasibility study and a timetable. What were the prospects of making
an atomic bomb? Could it be finished in time to help win the war? Should Washington fund an all-out effort when research funds
were limited and other projects of more immediate promise and effectiveness—such as radar and the proximity fuse—existed?
To answer these questions, Bush chose a senior American physicist with a Nobel Prize, excellent contacts, and long experience
on the national scientific scene named Arthur Compton.

Broad-shouldered and athletic with a thick mustache, deep-set gray eyes, and a strong chin, Compton was a professor of physics
at the University of Chicago. Principled and firm yet pragmatic, Compton fit neatly and easily into the project: he was popular
in scientific circles, he had an agreeable disposition, and he had powerful connections. Scion of a famous American scientific
family—his brother Karl was president of MIT—Compton was not policy-oriented like Bush but was trusted by high officials in
Washington whose background and upbringing was similar to his own: a midwestern childhood in a mid-western family with midwestern
Protestant beliefs. Compton moved easily in the world of the American Establishment.

As a boy, Compton had listened spellbound as his father described the discovery of a new chemical element that glowed with
brilliant luminosity: radium. What especially intrigued him was that radium was warm to the touch. Where did such heat—radioactivity—come
from? Could this heat be exploited for energy? Such questions stirred his imagination. When Compton was twelve, he sat on
the front porch one night. The winter air was crisp and clear as he watched pinpricks of starlight. He felt a sense of wonder
and sat up “all night, astonished, among the stars.”
²⁴
Soon he was spending every night in the backyard, searching the face of the moon with binoculars until he memorized its cratered
features. He bought a telescope with his savings and used it to view the moons of Jupiter. By putting a piece of welder’s
glass in front of the telescope, he even watched the sun. He began to feel a “strong emotional stirring,” as he later put
it, about science.
²⁵

Compton became a physicist and demonstrated his brilliance early in his career when he won a Nobel Prize in 1927 for his study
of X rays, following that up with pioneering work on cosmic rays in the 1930s. Compton’s bold experiments in the new field
of cosmic rays were carried out at high altitudes in the Himalaya, the Andes, and the Artic, and at the Equator. Travel to
far-flung corners of the globe taught the midwesterner that other people of other cultures and colors were just as human as
he. And it introduced him to such European physicists as Szilard, Fermi, and Bohr, whom he came to know well.

Compton visited Fermi at Columbia in October 1941 to gather firsthand information on neutron fission. He also heard from Lawrence,
who warned him that an atomic bomb “might well determine the outcome of the war.”
²⁶
Compton told Lawrence to make his case directly to Conant: the Harvard president and Lawrence both planned to be in Chicago
soon to attend celebrations honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the University of Chicago. The following
week the three met at Compton’s rambling home on Woodlawn Avenue a few blocks north of the campus. It was a crisp autumn evening.
With steaming cups of coffee, the three scientists gathered around the fireplace in the wood-paneled study. Lawrence reviewed
British calculations that a bomb could be made with just a few kilograms of fissionable material. He also mentioned his lab’s
discovery of plutonium, emphasizing that it fissioned like U-235 but could be chemically separated from U-238 much more easily.
He insisted that an atomic bomb could be made. No other physicist would stake his reputation on such an unproved assumption.
But Lawrence’s confidence was supreme; his enthusiasm swept away whatever doubts lingered—in Compton’s mind, at least.

Conant was still reluctant. A seasoned administrator and savvy player well schooled in the cautious bureaucratic ways of Washington,
Conant believed physicists should work on problems
certain
to be helpful because the country could not afford to waste limited resources on projects of questionable military value.
Looking at Lawrence, he said, “Ernest, you say you are convinced of the importance of these fission bombs. Are you ready to
devote the next several years of your life to getting them made?” “If you tell me this is my job,” Lawrence said without missing
a beat, “I’ll do it.” Conant asked Compton to examine the evidence and get a report to Bush as soon as possible. “If this
matter is as critically important as you men indicate,” Conant said, “we mustn’t lose a day.”
²⁷

Compton presented his report to Bush on November sixth. It was brief and to the point. He took the problem apart, examined
it thoroughly, and reached firm conclusions on all the subjects within his scientific competence. He endorsed the brilliant
insight of the Frisch-Peierls paper with the authority and depth of an American Nobel Prize winner—credentials that were indispensable
to the task of persuading official Washington. He reported that “
a fission bomb of superlatively destructive power will result from bringing quickly together a sufficient mass of element
U-235
” and that “
the separation of the isotopes of uranium can be done in the necessary amount.
” Compton also addressed the crucial issues of time and cost. Three to five years would be needed, he estimated, and several
hundred million dollars. His bottom line was this: atomic bombs could be made.
²⁸

Bush was impressed. He concluded that the possibility of a wartime bomb was strong enough that every effort must be made to
find out if it could be built. Bush knew how to get this done. He kept his memoranda short and cogent. He took no public credit
for getting things accomplished. He understood the bureaucracy and the military. And he knew how to persuade President Roosevelt.