“You are very kind, sir. I’ll phone Oppy and tell him we are coming.”
IV
The road followed the valley of the Rio Grande, which in its early stages flows south. For the most part it flows through canyons, and the road runs along the edge. Presently it was Highway 85, and then they made better time. A wild and lonely country; Fairchild said that the United States was fortunate in having great spaces in which dangerous modern experiments could be carried out. At Alamagordo there was an air-bombing range, with thirty or forty miles of unbroken desolate country. It was in the remote northern part of this that the all-important test was to be made.
The barriers were down now, and the eager young scientist talked freely. He told about himself; he still considered himself a student, but now he was learning by doing. The need for persons who understood modern physics was so extreme that you could have a job the moment you were fit for it, and you could have promotion as fast as you could equip yourself for new duties. Fairchild had been a pupil of Oppy at the California Institute of Technology, and he adored his teacher, calling him the greatest man in the world—then correcting it to say perhaps the second greatest, Lanny’s friend Einstein being number one. Time would decide between them, for the elder sage was nearing seventy, while the younger was only forty-one.
The pupil described Los Alamos, an extraordinary shrine of science, the most secret place in the world, the place where the most deadly force in the world was being created and controlled. It was the force that made the heat and light which the sun had been scattering for millions of years and would continue to scatter for millions more; the force that created all the uncountable suns in uncountable nebulae through a billion light years of space. For the first time on this earth this force had been harnessed and would be put to use—and all in a space of five or six years. It was as if that amount of time had been allowed between the discovery of fire and the building of a great steam locomotive.
The “stuff” came from two enormous plants, a different kind from each. The Clinton Engineer Works near Knoxville, Tennessee, covered nearly a hundred square miles and had more than four hundred and twenty-five industrial buildings, some of them more than two miles long. Mostly they were low, flat structures of brick or tile or corrugated asbestos, without windows. Near by was the city of Oak Ridge—code name “Dogpatch”—with about seventy-five thousand population, and both this and Clinton had been built in less than three years. The plant made a uranium isotope, U-235, by a minute and delicate process known as “electromagnetic separation.” Electrically charged particles of uranium were fired through a powerful electromagnet in a curving course; the lighter particles were bent more than the heavier and were caught separately. This had been done on a minute scale in laboratories, but never on a scale above milligrams until the Clinton plant had gone to work.
The other plant extended for twenty miles along the Columbia River in the State of Washington. It was known as the Hanford Engineer Works, and covered more than six hundred square miles of gray sand and sagebrush. Scattered over it were long, windowless concrete structures, many of them in the form of rectangles the size of several city blocks. Near by was a new town for seventeen thousand workers. Here was located a huge “uranium pile,” in which atomic processes transformed part of the uranium into the newly discovered element known as plutonium, this too being fissionable. No one knew which would make the more powerful bomb, if any.
It was to Los Alamos that all the stuff came, and they worked over the problem of how to control it, how to shape it into a bomb, how to keep the bomb from going off too soon, and how to make it go off when they so desired. They had determined that there was a critical size for a nuclear chain reaction; too much of the stuff and it would go off spontaneously; too little of the stuff and it wouldn’t go off at all. Ordinary methods of detonation had no relation to this nuclear material; what you had to do was to release some neutrons into the stuff—these neutrons, having no electrical charge, would penetrate the uranium nuclei and knock out other neutrons which in turn would do the same. How fast the chain reaction would be, a minute fraction of a second, was something that had been determined by mathematical formulas only.
They were dealing with the deadliest material known, and had to do their work behind thick lead shields, and handle the stuff with long tools specially contrived. Everybody wore electroscopes that would tell instantly if they were getting too heavy a dose of radiation. Oppy was the boss of all this—Oppy, the man with the chain-reaction brain, the boy who had given his teachers the answers before they had had time to formulate their questions! Oppy trusted his mathematics, those “beautiful, wonderful regularities” which had ravished his youthful mind. Calm and serene, Oppy drove this furious atomic blast; it couldn’t exactly be said that he was performing the Almighty’s orders, but he certainly was riding in the whirlwind and directing the storm. From the beginning he had been given everything he asked for, and everything had top priority; he had been free to take up the telephone and call for a cyclotron that cost a million dollars. He and his fellow scientists had caused the expenditure of two billions, upon the basis of their nebulous theories and hopes. Now, in this lonely and baking desert of Southern New Mexico, they were going to put it to the touch and win or lose it all.
V
It was a long drive, more than three hundred miles altogether. Lanny related stories about the German scientists he had helped to intern and question; Fairchild talked about life in this secret Utopia in which he had spent the past year. It was a comfortable life, for the Army saw to everything, heat, light, water, even food and recreation. There were huge cafeterias where you could get a wide choice, and there were movies and dances, and any sort of concerts, shows, and games you chose to get up; also there were hunting and fishing.
But your mail was censored and your telephone conversations listened in on, and you were restricted to an area with Taos, Santa Fe, and Albuquerque at the corners. If you went elsewhere it had to be on business for the project, and you couldn’t let anybody know you were in town, not even the members of your family. Your children could go to school inside the project, but if they went to boarding school outside they couldn’t come back. This was hard on families, and on friends who couldn’t know anything about your affairs but a post-office box. In Berkeley, where Oppy had taught, the report was that he had been arrested as a German spy.
The scientists were a secret society, a consecrated order, which included no fewer than ten Nobel Prize winners. Among themselves they spoke a code, so that workingmen or others who overheard them wouldn’t pick up hints. Codes were made up on the spur of the moment, and it took alertness to follow a conversation. Special codes would be made up for trips and for communications by telegraph or phone. Men with famous names changed them; Lawrence was Larson, Fermi was Farmer, Compton was Comas, the Danish Niels Bohr was Nicholas Baker, called “Nick” by everybody. General Groves had been “GG,” but that seemed too obvious; a clerk had misread it as 99, and now that was his name. All these men would be at the scene of the test, and Lanny made mental notes about them.
He also listened attentively to statements about the nuclear processes, and his old knowledge began to come back. He was able to form some idea of the developments that had taken place in four years; that much of the war had been a century of ordinary time. He could compare what he learned now with what he had heard from Salzmann and Plötzen, from Bothe and Hahn and Heisenberg and Weizsäcker. The Germans had been back in the Dark Ages so far as nuclear physics was concerned. All the rest of the world except Canada and Britain would stay there until America chose to lift the curtain.
VI
They came to the Alamagordo reservation, an area so big that the rocks and sand and cactus and sagebrush seemed to go on forever. As you approached the test site there were the same security proceedings to be gone through. Lanny’s pass was OK, but that didn’t keep his car from being searched, including the engine, and he was fingerprinted again;
this test site was even more top secret than Los Alamos.
They drove in for some miles, and there were a couple of small buildings and many Army tents, having to do not with the air base but with the test; it was known as the Base Camp. The physicists had come here, traveling separately, and if they had met one another on a train they had carefully refrained from giving any sign of recognition. A few of them were middle-aged, but most were young, for in the department of nuclear physics it was possible to become world-famous in your twenties. The field was open, and all you had to do was to take one step farther into the dark chamber where nature’s mysteries had been mysteriously hidden.
There were Army and Navy officers also, and specially chosen enlisted men who did the hard work. The Army’s Security officer took the son of Budd-Erling aside, not to put him through another grilling, for they respected the clearance from Los Alamos, but to inform him as to the regulations and administer a solemn oath that he would speak no word about what he had seen here until the story was officially released; then, if he wrote anything about it, he must submit a copy to the Army in advance. Lanny had made all sorts of promises and kept them, but this was the first time he had had to swear.
Lanny’s host was Oppy, a very much preoccupied man. He said, “We are taking you in on Einstein’s say-so, Mr. Budd; make yourself at home.” The scientist had kind blue eyes and wavy dark hair, which he seldom let grow long. He was about Lanny’s height but weighed only a hundred and fifteen pounds at the moment—no doubt he had forgotten many a meal. His shoulders were stooped and his manner intense and nervous, for he was approaching the crisis of all his labors. He had a chain-lightning mind that could run all around other men’s; he could evolve long equations and remember them forever, and all that had come easily. But for the past three or four years he had been doing a job far more difficult from his point of view, the managing of an enormous undertaking, and the guiding and reconciling of a great number of men, some of whom were prima donnas and all of whom had their own fountain-heads of ideas.
Robert Oppenheimer was the son of German-Jewish parents who had come to New York and made a modest fortune. All his life he had had all the money he wanted, and what he had wanted was a marvelous education, which he received at the Ethical Culture School, then at Harvard, Cambridge, and Göttingen. He was still a student, he liked to say, and was getting education from everybody who could teach him. He lectured at a breakneck pace, and there were only a few people in the world who could understand him; his pupils tried, and at least they could imitate his peculiar mannerisms: wearing blue shirts, smoking cigarettes endlessly, running their fingers nervously through their hair while they talked. Oppy spoke with quick excited gestures, and when he could get to a blackboard he soon had it covered with a maze of mystical symbols.
Just now he was like a man balanced on a tightrope over an abyss. A terrible moment: some miles out there in the desert was an old ranch-house, where a crew of highly trained men were engaged in putting the parts of the bomb together. They were under the direction of a Cornell physics professor, Dr. Bacher, who was Goudsmit’s “first Ph.D.” These parts had been made in different places and brought here in well-guarded caravans. Never before had the parts been joined; never before had there been an atomic bomb in this world. The parts had been machined to the ten-thousandth of an inch, and now the damn thing was stuck; it wouldn’t go together and it wouldn’t come apart; if it blew up, that would be the end of the Cornell professor and all his trained crew, and of all the labors and hopes of the ten Nobel Prize winners and their hundreds of assistants. Indeed, it would have been the end of the entire bomb project.
Oppy would go to the phone every few minutes and call the ranch-house while the others held their breath. Then he would grunt and light another cigarette and start his stoop-shouldered pacing of the floor. That went on for a while, and then at the phone a smile broke over his face, and he said, “That’s fine!” and reported to the company, “They’ve got it.” So it was possible to breathe again.
VII
The most dangerous job was done, but there were many other preparations to be made, and the finale was set for three days later, before dawn. Ten or twelve miles out in the desert a steel tower had been erected, and Lanny drove Fairchild and a couple of other late arrivals out to see it. A drive over the desert road, and there was the tall tower on which the bomb was to be hung. The best—or should one say the worst?—results were to be expected from an explosion in the air, and in military use the weapon was to be used with a special timing device so that it would explode in the air. Men were busily hanging instruments on the tower, by which it was hoped to record the various effects of the explosion. The scientists disagreed widely as to the force the explosion would develop; they guessed all the way from two hundred and fifty tons to twenty thousand tons of TNT. On the latter basis, a hundred and twenty-five such bombs would have equaled the damage done by the two-and-a-half-million tons dropped by all the Allied air forces over Europe. On the chance that the instruments on the tower would be destroyed, others were being placed at intervals on the floor of the desert.
From the conversation Lanny could guess that there was a trigger device which shot one section of the U-235 in between two other sections, thus bringing the whole to a size beyond the critical. The explosion would go off with the speed of light, and it was a question whether the whole amount of the stuff would react or whether it would be blown apart and scattered in fragments. Many uncertainties for these learned gentlemen. One and all, they felt that their reputations were at stake; one and all, they were going to be shown to the world either as miracle men or as the world’s most costly bunglers.
When they learned that the new arrival had been with Goudsmit, they stopped work for a few minutes to question him. Not one of them had been abroad during the war, and apparently none of them had seen the reports. They were surprised to know how completely the Germans had failed in their efforts at atomic fission on a large scale. The story of poor old Lenard was good for a round of chuckles. These men of the free world all shared a loathing of fantastic creatures such as Osenberg and Sievers whom the Nazis had set up as directors of the great physical laboratories of the Fatherland.
Oppy no longer had to pace the floor; he joined these groups and revealed himself as a genial person. He seemed sure that the test was going to succeed; but many of the others had grave doubts; they were sure their formulas were right, but what the formulas indicated was too colossal, too awful, for the mind to face. They discussed the consequences of the release of atomic energy, the greatest step in the whole history of science. Many were troubled in conscience because the first use of this colossal power had to be for the destruction of life. All agreed that, properly used, it would make man the master of the physical world. Once this power was harnessed to industry, production would become for practical purposes unlimited, and poverty could be banished from the earth.
Lanny brought up the subject whenever he found a chance and collected the opinions of many of these wise gentlemen. He didn’t say what use he expected to make of the ideas, but he got the men to talking about the subject of war and what steps mankind would have to take to end it. One and all, they said that this discovery, if it proved to be real, would make war impossible; an atomic war would end only with the destruction of civilization as we knew it. More than one man said, “I am hoping the thing may fail, and that an explosive chain reaction may be proved impossible. Mankind is not far enough advanced, politically or morally, to be entrusted with such a weapon.”
What Oppy said was, “We shall have to educate the people. We scientists have hidden ourselves in our laboratories and forgotten the rest of the world. Now we have to come out and take part in politics, and make both the politicians and the public realize what this discovery means, in happiness if it is used wisely, and in misery if it is used evilly.”
VIII
On Saturday, the 14th of July, the bomb was raised to the top of the steel tower and h
ung there. That dangerous job was witnessed only by the men who performed it. The test was set for four o’clock on Monday morning, and on Sunday night few slept soundly. Lanny lay on his Army cot in a tent he shared with young Fairchild; he wasn’t sure if his tentmate was asleep, so he lay still, his mind roaming over a score of different aspects of the world-shaking event he hoped to witness. Even if the bomb did not explode, even if a sudden and violent chain reaction proved impossible, still there could be no doubt that the world was on the threshold of a new age of power. First fire, then steam, then electricity, then the internal-combustion engine, and now the nuclear chain reaction.
Only two and a half years had passed since Roosevelt had confided to his P.A. the fact that the first atomic pile had been put into successful operation. Roosevelt hadn’t said where or how; but here Lanny had heard the story of how Professor Compton of the University of Chicago had set up a laboratory in the squash court, under the stands of the football stadium, and there had managed to solve this most difficult problem. It was undoubtedly the most deadly contraption ever born of the brain of man. Bars of uranium oxide and of pure uranium were placed with spaces between them, so that bars of graphite could be slid in. Six tons of specially purified graphite were provided; and you didn’t just poke those bars in by hand, you had hooks operated by machines, with the operators staying behind heavy lead shields. Rods of cadmium, a metal which strongly absorbs the neutrons, could be moved in and out of the pile to control the chain reaction.
The design of the pile was computed from the results of small-scale experiments, and no one knew how accurate these were. Therefore, blocks of cadmium were suspended from the ceiling and could be dropped into the pile at once, in case the reaction threatened to get out of control. At this time they did not know enough to be sure that they would not blow up a few blocks of the city of Chicago. So said Fermi, the Italian who was here under the name of Farmer; he was the man who had first proposed the chain-reaction idea, three years earlier, and had tried it out with a microscopic quantity of U-235. In those happy days it had been the custom of scientists to publish their discoveries at once, and Fermi had set the whole world of physics to speculating and experimenting with this force that was the parent of all the heat, light, and motion in the world.