Big Science: Chapters 11–15

And within a week, recalled one of his students, he had filled his office blackboard in LeConte Hall with “a drawing—very bad, an execrable drawing—of a bomb.”

To another, he expanded on the theme with a sort of minatory thrill: “I think it really not too improbable that a ten cm cube of uranium deuteride . . . might very well blow itself to hell.”

The most abundant isotope, U-238, was harder to nudge toward fission than to move a recalcitrant donkey, and it responded only to fast, or highly energetic, neutrons.

The missive was duly placed in the hands of Alexander Sachs, a Russian-born economist with a scientific background and, more to the point, access to the White House inner circle as an advisor to FDR.

Sachs read FDR a digest of Einstein’s letter that he had prepared himself, in the hopes of reducing its abstruse science and circumlocutions into language the president would grasp quickly.

To Lawrence, however, the assignment seemed both inchoate and potentially overwhelming.

Thinking that the voluble Lawrence himself stood the best chance of communicating the urgency of the situation to Bush, Compton and Conant decided to send him to New York to make his pitch to the NDRC chairman in person.

Had Lawrence addressed the committee personally with his customary verve, he might well have convinced its members of the importance of the new discovery.

Fed up with the same phlegmatic American approach to fission’s military potential that had driven Szilard to distraction, Oliphant decided to make his case to the one man he thought would comprehend the MAUD Committee’s findings, and who had the standing to beat the American establishment over the head with them.

He delivered the MAUD conclusions with such conviction that Roosevelt agreed to launch without delay a comprehensive research program aimed at building the bomb.

Only the actual construction of a uranium separation plant was held in abeyance without a further order from the White House.

Lawrence responded to the summons by informing Compton, as a fait accompli, that he would be introducing a new participant to the technical roundtable: Robert Oppenheimer.

The question stopped Oppenheimer in his tracks, for, like every other habitue of the Rad Lab, he knew of Ernest’s ingrained suspicion of anything that smacked of politics.

The previous August, Lawrence had curtly rebuffed an invitation from Harold Urey to join with other American Nobel laureates in a “Federal Union of Democracies of the World”—a fairly innocuous anti-totalitarian “campaign from the standpoint of ideas,” in Urey’s description, “one that I believe is just as important as any aid which we can give for national defense on the physical side.”

Oppenheimer, in his predilection for action, had foolishly overlooked Lawrence’s mind-set.

Martin Kamen, who was supervising isotope production on the sixty-inch, was compensated for his high-pressure responsibilities with a government stipend of $5,000 a year, a “mind-boggling” sum for a scientist who previously had eked out a penurious existence grant to grant.

By 1933, he had received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of California at Los Angeles, which only a few years earlier had relocated from downtown Los Angeles to a bucolic new campus west of the city

Without Lawrence, there would be no Rad Lab—none of the teamwork that combined the disparate knowledge and skills of physicists, chemists, biologists, physicians, and engineers into a new paradigm of science.

The lab had been so blase about the radioisotopes produced at the Crocker Lab that it routinely sent some of them through the US Mail

but this sample would have to be treated with sedulous respect, handled at greater than arm’s length by personnel wearing lead gloves and goggles.

The scientists’ initial reaction to these increasingly draconian strictures was to treat them whimsically.

His specific reference was to a contretemps in August 1943 over Rossi Lomanitz, a twenty-one-year-old Rad Lab physicist who was valued as a protege by both Lawrence and Oppenheimer.

But this was tantamount to calling Lawrence’s bluff: at its current level of development, Ernest acknowledged, the calutron could produce enriched uranium fast but only in very small quantities.

The job of finalizing the purchase and launching the work had been assigned to the US Army Corps of Engineers, but the Corps dithered, deciding that until the S-l Committee settled on an enrichment technology, there was no need to acquire the site, much less get construction under way.

He spent the next few hours in a collegial discussion with Groves about the challenges facing the bomb designers.

Some of the boxes had broken open on the way, spilling hot uranium over the truck bed; Seaborg advised his assistants to wear rubber gloves to sweep up the detritus.

Lawrence's visceral feel for the mechanics and capabilities of the calutrons matched the mysterious affinity he had always shown for the cyclotrons.

Yet the Tennessee women outdid the Berkeley scientists in one crucial quality: patience. Once Y-12 was operational, their equanimity made them superb operators.

One time he gave a lengthy tour to a tall, stoop-shouldered man with a lugubrious expression on his long face, whom Lawrence introduced with unusual deference as “Dr. Nicholas Baker.”

Following his ill-fated endorsement of May-Johnson and his subsequent repudiation, Lawrence absented himself from the debate over domestic control.

Given the existential threat posed by a German bomb, few harbored any qualms about the Allies using theirs first.

For four dispiriting years, he had hectored government officials to place the program on the fast track.

To what extent Ernest Lawrence concurred with that baleful conclusion is not documented, for no notes by him have been found.

On August 9, in a moment of indiscretion following Nagasaki, he had confided to Karl Darrow that he had proposed a nonmilitary demonstration to the Interim Committee.

Darrow, who hoped to head off public backlash for the scientists’ complicity in the creation of a lethal new technology, leaped at the chance to disseminate an example of ambivalence at the summit of the scientific community.

Yet bonds of friendship, colleagueship, and shared travail in the bomb project made it difficult for Lawrence to dismiss Oppenheimer’s disquiet entirely.

Regent Jack Neylan, seeing that his protege was inclined to accept them all and that the flood of commitments was sapping Ernest’s health, stepped in as a buffer “to protect him from being marauded,” as he put it later.

McMillan and Alvarez returned from Los Alamos impatient to try out new approaches they had conceived to address that old bugaboo, the relativistic barrier to higher energies.

Throughout the visit, Ernest’s bonhomie worked overtime, but with a serious purpose

his goal was to inculcate the commissioners with an understanding of atomic energy’s potential for peaceable uses such as generating electricity, a field in which the Rad Lab expected to play a central role.