were on the right track. That was very important, because among the people mobilized for the work in this field, not all were confident of the positive results of our efforts.” Golovin and Smirnov characterize the scientists’ predicament more bluntly. “Everyone understood that if the bomb didn't explode, the whole team would be in trouble.”
While the Soviets started up their first reactor, the United States was shutting reactors down. The three production reactors at Hanford had sickened with what came to be called “Wigner's disease” (after the Hungarian- born theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner, who designed the reactors and predicted the effect): graphite bombarded intensely with neutrons stored the acquired energy by rearranging its crystal lattices, which caused it to swell and occlude the reactor fuel-element channels. The US produced plutonium in the Hanford reactors, of course, but a more immediately critical concern was the polonium it also bred in the reactors for bomb initiators. Polonium210 loses half its radioactivity every 138.3 days; if the Hanford piles broke down and polonium production ceased, the atomic bombs in the nation's small stockpile would become unreliable within a year. DuPont, which operated Hanford until September 1946, when General Electric took over, cut one reactor back to 80 percent of rated power and shut down and unloaded a second; standbying one reactor would stop its Wigner's disease infection from progressing and offer an emergency capability for polonium production if the other two reactors failed.
The cutback had an immediate effect on bomb production. Los Alamos had planned to begin manufacturing forty Mark IV levitated composite cores in August 1946 at the rate of two per week. Associate Director Darol Froman had not checked with Hanford in framing that plan. When he did so, he discovered “that this rate of production could be maintained only for about 13 weeks. Thereafter we would be limited by Hanford production to less than one Mark IV unit per week… I would suggest that the schedule be revised to a production of one Mark IV and
Kurchatov learned of Hanford's problems with Wigner's disease; in the December 31, 1946, espionage gloss where he reported reviewing “an American work on the superbomb” he also reported reviewing material concerning “certain particularities of the operation of the nuclear piles at Hanford”; like the superbomb report, he found the Hanford information to be “probably true and of great interest for our work in this country.” Evidently someone at Hanford was on the Soviet payroll.
Core production was not the only problem Los Alamos faced as the dust settled at Bikini. Bradbury reminded Groves in August 1946 that “the presence of a stockpile of all weapon components does not insure a state of readiness. The absence at the present time of an organization capable of assembling an atomic weapon on short notice must be regarded as the most serious stockpile deficiency. In a state of declared national emergency, practically every component now short could be produced at its maximum rate in a time shorter than an assembly crew could be collected and trained from personnel now scattered.” The military was interested in building a small arsenal of Little Boy uranium guns for tactical use destroying bunkerlike submarine pens, but the scattering of personnel had also expunged Los Alamos's working knowledge of Little Boy manufacture: “All personnel involved in this activity have left the Project,” Bradbury cautioned Groves, “and the ‘know-how’ for this weapon will have to be completely relearned.” (“The uranium gun was a very, very rugged beast,” remembers Los Alamos engineer Jacob Wechsler. “That thing with some velocity on it could go through huge amounts of concrete. All you needed to do was put good enough detents on it so that it didn't try to inertially assemble. You could use it for other things but it was really designed to be a sub pen penetrator carried by torpedo bomber, to come in there and send that thing sailing right on in. And give off, what was it, 15 kilotons?”) Los Alamos also had problems with initiator production.
The availability of housing no less than fissionable materials paced the revitalization of the lab. During the war, the Army had thrown up temporary construction; to attract and hold staff, Los Alamos needed more than flimsy fourplex apartments with tin showers and coal furnaces. Bradbury was building a new technical area and a new residential section of prefabricated housing up on the beautiful but inaccessible mesa, but “authorization of new hires,” writes Raemer Schreiber, “was frequently delayed pending a housing vacancy.” Housing set the pace of Los Alamos technical programs for years to come, a mundane fact of life that congressional and military nuclear- stockpile enthusiasts found it convenient to ignore.
The lab had to refocus its program from its narrow wartime goals, Schreiber explains. “What was really new was the stockpiling of bombs and the recognition that hardware produced by the laboratory would have to survive long-term storage and be ‘GI-proof’ when handled under field conditions. Whereas the Little Boy and the Fat Man had been meticulously built from selected parts by the people who helped create them, stockpiled weapons had to work reliably under much less ideal circumstances. Thus the laboratory found itself entering into a relatively unexplored field of interchangeability of parts, quality control, environmental testing, preparation of specifications, production of manuals and training of personnel.” Schreiber helped train groups of young Army, Navy and AAF officers who billeted at Los Alamos for six months at a time attending lectures on nuclear physics, observing weapons R&D and learning to assemble atomic bombs in the Ice House — a real ice house from Los Alamos Ranch School days when the school cut ice from Ashley Pond. “It was a substantial stone building,” Schreiber recalls, “so it was equipped with a vault door and used for our nuclear assembly laboratory.”
Burdened with these challenges, Los Alamos had only limited time for Super research, Bradbury noted in November 1946: “Since the program for such a weapon would involve a laboratory fully as extensive as Los Alamos at the peak of its [wartime] activity, and would require as well large developments in other portions of the Manhattan District, the interest of the laboratory [has been] restricted to determining the feasibility of the weapon and to research and theoretical calculations bearing towards this end.” Calculations on Teller's Alarm Clock design turned out to be “not very promising” according to Hans Befhe, and were set aside at the year's end.
After long and often acrimonious debate, mounted in part by a remarkable lobby of former Manhattan Project scientists led by Leo Szilard, Congress passed an Atomic Energy Act that Truman signed on August 1, 1946. The act was based on a bill introduced by Brien McMahon, a florid, fleshy pol of Irish descent who believed in good tailoring and good staffing. Attorney James R. Newman had helped write McMahon's bill; irreverent physicist Edward Condon, who would direct the National Bureau of Standards, had been an adviser. “I remember a famous occasion,” Condon told an interviewer once, “— this was just before the [1945] Christmas holidays, and McMahon was going to take his gorgeous beautiful blonde wife down to Bermuda for a vacation and lie on the sand and get sun. And I of course had… very little knowledge of Washington, except high school civics which is a very deceptive subject. So I was surprised at James Newman, because he says, ‘Now, listen, God damn it, Brien, we're going to carry on a national publicity campaign about this bill and how wonderful it is, and so for Christ's sake be sure you read it while you're down at Bermuda. Because when you get back to Washington, people will expect you to know what's in it. Because you wrote it, see?’ So McMahon said he would, but I don't think he did, because he never was very familiar with the specifics… He gradually got familiar with it.” On his return, McMahon told the Senate that the atomic bomb was the greatest event since the birth of Christ.
The act Truman signed nationalized all aspects of atomic-energy development, much as the Acheson- Lilienthal Report would have internationalized such development; Newman and co-author Byron Miller called the new authority frankly “an island of socialism in the midst of a free enterprise economy.” Most uniquely, the act provided civilian control of atomic energy through a board of five appointed commissioners rather than military control. Senator Arthur Vandenberg had preserved military influence with an amendment establishing a Military Liaison Committee to the new Atomic Energy Commission; Congress kept a connection through a requirement that the new commission inform it in a timely manner of its deliberations. A new congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, drawing members from both the House and the Senate, acquired unique responsibilities for overseeing the AEC's activities. McMahon, a Democrat, became the JCAE minority leader in a Republican Congress; conservative Republican Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa served as the committee's first chairman. (“He's a nice fellow,” Vandenberg characterized Hickenlooper, “a very nice fellow. He thinks he and he alone stands between the security of the nation and disaster.”) The act authorized a General Advisory Committee of scientists appointed by the President to provide the AEC commissioners with technical guidance.
Truman nominated David Lilienthal, the TVA chairman, to head the AEC; Lewis Strauss, the wealthy investment banker and reserve Navy admiral who had proposed the Bikini series, would be a commissioner, as would physicist and former Los Alamos Gadget Division director Robert Bacher. The General Advisory Committee would include James Bryant Conant, Enrico Fermi, I. I. Rabi, metallurgist Cyril Smith, plutonium discoverer Glenn Sea-borg and Robert Oppenheimer. At the opening of the first GAC meeting, on January 3, 1947, before the former
