Pandora's Keepers (9 page)

All of this sounded terribly exotic to the bureaucrats gathered around the table. The ordnance expert at the meeting, Lieutenant
Colonel Keith Adamson, an officer at the army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in northern Maryland, sneered at the idea of an atomic
bomb—it was sheer fantasy. The colonel told Szilard and Teller in no uncertain terms that he did not believe “all this junk
about complicated inventions.” “At Aberdeen,” he went on, ridiculing the physicists, “we have a goat tethered to a stick with
a ten-foot rope, and we have promised a big prize to anyone who can kill the goat with a death ray. Nobody has claimed the
prize yet.”
²³
Adamson then proceeded to lecture Szilard and Teller about scientific boondoggles in wartime. “He told us that it was naive
to believe that we could make a significant contribution to defense by creating a new weapon,” recalled Szilard. “He said
that if a new weapon is created, it usually takes two wars before one can know whether the weapon is any good or not. Then
he explained rather laboriously that in the end it is not weapons which win the wars, but the morale of the troops.”
²⁴

Teller listened to Adamson with mounting frustration and anger. He had studied in Germany for many years and understood their
military technology better than most—certainly better than the colonel. Finally he exploded. “If it is morale and not weapons
that wins wars,” Teller said, his voice rising as his accent thickened, “then why does the Army need such a large arms budget?
Perhaps its funding can be cut.” “All right, all right,” Adamson replied, “you’ll get your money.”
²⁵
The Uranium Committee authorized all of $6,000 to purchase graphite, though Szilard and Fermi would not actually receive
the money for several months. Briggs sent a report of the meeting to President Roosevelt on November first. He heard from
the White House on November seventeenth. The president had read the report and wanted to keep it on file. “On file” is where
it languished well into 1940.

Szilard and Teller left their meeting with the Uranium Committee frustrated and dejected. They felt trapped in a dilemma:
to determine whether a nuclear chain reaction could be the basis for the development of an atomic bomb required a thorough
scientific investigation; such an investigation required significant financial support, but the Uranium Committee would not
give such support without compelling evidence suggesting probable success. Since they could not guarantee that a bomb would
be available for wartime use, they could not attract the money for vital chain-reaction experiments. They felt as if they
were “swimming in syrup.”
²⁶

Months passed and nothing happened. Szilard’s frustration turned to anger. He decided to write a scientific paper about a
chain-reacting uranium-graphite pile and threaten to publish it unless the government promised to move on fission research.
The ploy worked. Within weeks of making his threat known, Columbia University received a grant of $6,000 for the purchase
of graphite.
²⁷
This allowed Szilard and Fermi to begin their experiments. They started by addressing two problems: the absorption rate of
graphite and its effectiveness in slowing down neutrons. They set up the graphite in a square column several feet thick. Then
they arranged lumps of uranium in a lattice configuration throughout the column, placed a neutron source inside the column,
and measured the neutron activity with Geiger counters. The results led Szilard and Fermi to conclude that a very large pile
would be needed to create and sustain a chain reaction. What is more, impurities commonly found in uranium and graphite would
have to be eliminated because these impurities hungrily absorbed neutrons. All of this meant that a chain-reacting uranium-graphite
pile would be very expensive in both materials and labor.

Meanwhile, Szilard traveled again to Princeton to see Einstein. They prepared a second letter for President Roosevelt that
emphasized the secret German uranium research underway at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, which they had learned about from
a Jewish chemist, Peter Debye, who had recently been expelled from the institute. This second Einstein letter also stressed
that Berlin had assumed direct responsibility for fission research and was stepping up its efforts to achieve a breakthrough.
²⁸
In March 1940 Sachs sent the letter to FDR, who ordered the White House to consult the Uranium Committee. Briggs and Adamson
cautiously said that nothing more should be done, pending the outcome of Fermi’s and Szilard’s work on neutron absorption
in graphite. Bureaucratic caution prevailed once again.

Meanwhile, security officials busily developed a mind-set of distrust toward Szilard, Teller, Fermi, and other refugee physicists
“of queer types and backgrounds.”
²⁹
Agents categorized them as “aliens,” or in the case of Fermi, who came from Italy—an Axis country—as an “enemy alien.” A
confidential report prepared by Army Intelligence in the summer of 1940 offered the following assessment of Fermi and Szilard:

(1) ENRICO FERMI. Department of Physics, Columbia University, New York City, is one of the most prominent scientists in the
world in the field of physics. He is especially noted for breaking down the atom. He has been in the United States for about
eighteen months. He is an Italian by birth and came here from Rome. He is supposed to have left Italy because of the fact
that his wife is Jewish. He has been a Nobel Prize winner. His associates like him personally and greatly admire his intellectual
ability. He is undoubtedly a Fascist. It is suggested that, before employing him on matters of a secret nature, a much more
careful investigation be made. Employment of this person on secret work is not recommended.

(2) MR. SZELARD. It is believed that this man’s name is SZILLARD. He is not on the staff of Columbia University, nor is he
connected with the Department of Physics in any official capacity. He is a Jewish refugee from Hungary. It is understood that
his family were wealthy merchants in Hungary and were able to come to the United States with most of their money. He is an
inventor, and is stated to be very pro-German, and to have remarked on many occasions that he thinks the Germans will win
the war. It is suggested that, before employing him on matters of a secret nature, a much more careful investigation be made.
Employment of this person on secret work is not recommended.
³⁰

Allegedly derived from “highly reliable” sources, the report was riddled with errors. To security investigators, Szilard and
Fermi were simply foreigners with strong accents, suspicious backgrounds, and a string of fanciful ideas. Briggs informed
Szilard and Fermi that the Uranium Committee had decided to limit further financial support of their research. The committee
was afraid that if it funded an expensive research endeavor that flopped, Szilard’s and Fermi’s foreign backgrounds would
prove a liability in case of a congressional inquiry.
³¹
The explanation Briggs gave them was that the possibility of a costly failure loomed too large. It seemed the American government
would never seriously embrace the possibility of building an atomic bomb.

I
F WASHINGTON FAILED
to perceive the importance of an atomic bomb early in the war, London did not. British scientists were furiously studying
the feasibility of a bomb, their motivation simple and urgent: to beat Hitler to the punch. This was crucial, for by mid-June
1940 France had fallen to the Nazis. Britain now stood alone, and many people feared that Germany would soon cross the English
Channel. The notion that Hitler was ahead in the atomic race had become so deep-rooted that it was treated as a certainty.
“We were told day in and day out that it was our duty to catch up with the Germans,” recalled a British physicist.
¹
In 1940 it was still difficult for Americans to think about the war, while it was the only concern for the British.

The principles of fission and a chain reaction were clear enough to British scientists by 1940. Far less clear to them was
the feasibility and expense of separating U-235 and constructing a weapon in time to be useful. Three questions overshadowed
all others: How could a sufficient amount of fissionable material be collected? How much material would constitute the critical
mass necessary to sustain a chain reaction? And how could the material be assembled rapidly enough so that it exploded, rather
than simply fizzled like a pile of gunpowder?

The advanced state of British efforts and the desperate need to work quickly combined to effectively override whatever bureaucratic
obstacles might normally have interfered with fission research. The imperative of survival concentrated British scientific
minds dramatically.

Two of them, refugees Rudolf Peierls and Otto Frisch—the latter for the second time playing a decisive role—got together in
early March 1940 to discuss the implications of fission. Peierls remembered: “I had a conversation with Frisch in the course
of which he asked, ‘Well, Bohr and Wheeler have made it quite clear that the fission is due to 235. What would happen if one
had a pure uranium 235 in a sufficient quantity? How much would you need? And if you got it, what would happen?’”
²

Frisch and Peierls came up with startling answers to these questions. Early estimates of the “critical mass,” the amount of
U-235 needed to start a chain reaction, had run to several tons—far too much for a deliverable weapon. But Frisch and Peierls
produced an estimate that only one kilogram (just over two pounds) of U-235 could create a critical mass that would explode
with a force equivalent to that of several thousand tons of dynamite. Eighty generations of neutrons would multiply in millionths
of a second, yielding temperatures as hot as the interior of the sun and as deadly in radiation, before the swelling explosion
separated the atoms of U-235 enough to stop the chain reaction.

“Our first reaction was to realize that this was no longer an academic exercise, but a highly practical problem, in spite
of the almost science-fiction nature of large-scale isotope separation,” Peierls recalled later. “Then it struck us that,
as the idea had come to us so easily, it was likely to have occurred to the Germans, and the thought of such a weapon in Nazi
hands was frightening.”
³
Something had to be done immediately. They decided to draw the attention of the authorities to this possibility and its implications.
In a three-page memorandum, they described their calculations and a practical mechanism for a bomb: making a U-235 sphere
in two parts “which are brought together when the explosion is wanted.” As soon as the hemispheres touched, the whole assembly
“would explode within a second or less.” The yield would be immense. Lethal radiation would be emitted on a large scale, against
which “effective protection is hardly possible.”
⁴

“I have often been asked,” Frisch wrote years afterward, “why I didn’t abandon the project there and then, saying nothing
to anybody. Why start on a project that, if it was successful, would end with the production of a weapon of unparalleled violence,
a weapon of mass destruction such as the world had never seen? The answer was very simple. We were at war, and the idea was
reasonably obvious; very probably some German scientists had had the same idea and were working on it.”
⁵

The Frisch-Peierls memorandum consisted of not more than a thousand words, but it was all there. They not only asked the right
questions, they also answered them. They made isotope separation sound simpler than it proved to be, and their estimate of
the quantity of U-235 needed was too low, but these errors only increased official attention to and acceptance of their analysis.
An atomic bomb had seemed like science fiction to government officials. Now it seemed
feasible
.
⁶

Otto Frisch was an Austrian, and Rudolf Peierls was a German. They should have been making their pioneering calculations at
the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. But instead they made them at the University of Birmingham, in England. The reason
for their relocation was simple: they were Jews.

British authorities referred their paper to a scientific committee code-named MAUD. Over the next fifteen months—through the
successive shocks of the invasion of Norway, the fall of France, the Battle of Britain, the London Blitz, the fall of Yugoslavia
and Greece, and the attack on the Soviet Union—the MAUD Committee carefully reviewed the two refugee physicists’ conclusions.
By the middle of 1941 their conclusions had persuaded London to undertake an atomic bomb program. The MAUD Committee recommended
“that this work be continued on the highest priority and on the increasing scale necessary to obtain the weapon in the shortest
possible time.”
⁷

The British government preferred to keep the whole project (and thus its control) in the United Kingdom, but it would require
an immense industrial effort. It was one thing to talk of separating U-235 isotopes on this scale, but a formidable job to
do it. The country was at war and was struggling to survive, which meant that its scientific talent and resources had to be
devoted to projects with immediate practical military value—like radar. Britain’s ally, America, on the other hand, was still
not in the war and possessed vast industrial resources. The British government decided to go ahead as fast as possible with
research, and then—if the work was promising—to persuade the United States to build a production plant for the bomb. London
understood what this would mean down the road: Washington, by contributing the majority of technical and industrial effort,
would effectively control the bomb. But London had little choice; such an effort in Britain was impossible because of the
strain on British resources and the danger to British project sites from German bombing. Hence, it was decided to lobby the
Americans.