The involvement was apparently immediate and intense.
Probably with his wife's encouragement, but certainly with his own growing good sense, Oppenheimer began to jettison political commitments that had come to seem parochial. “I went to a big Spanish relief party the night before Pearl Harbor,” he testifies in example, “and the next day, as we heard the news of the outbreak of war, I decided that I had had about enough of the Spanish cause, and that there were other and more pressing crises in the world.” He was willing similarly to abandon the American Association of Scientific Workers at Lawrence's insistence in order to help, as he supposed, to beat the Nazis to the atomic bomb.
By then, says Bethe, though Oppenheimer had been a poor teacher when he began, pitching quantum theory well above his students' untrained range, he had “created the greatest school of theoretical physics that the United States has ever known.” Bethe's explanation for that evolution reveals the seedbed of Oppenheimer's later administrative leadership:
Probably the most important ingredient he brought to his teaching was his exquisite taste. He always knew what were the important problems, as shown by his choice of subjects. He truly lived with those problems, struggling for a solution, and he communicated his concern to his group… He was interested in everything, and in one afternoon [he and his students] might discuss quantum electrodynamics, cosmic rays, electron pair production and nuclear physics.
During the same period Oppenheimer's clumsiness with experiment evolved to appreciation and he consciously mastered experimental work — hands off. “He began to observe, not manipulate,” a former student notes. “He learned to see the apparatus and to get a feeling of its experimental limitations. He grasped the underlying physics and had the best memory I know of. He could always see how far any particular experiment would go. When you couldn't carry it any farther, you could count on him to understand and to be thinking about the next thing you might want to try.”
It remained for Oppenheimer to learn to control his “beastliness” and submerge his mannerisms. But he was always a quick study. Significantly, he was least convoluted, most direct, least mannered, most natural living simply at his unadorned ranch in the Pecos Valley high in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico.
Oppenheimer first met General Leslie R. Groves when Groves came to Berkeley from Chicago on his initial inspection tour early in October 1942. They attended a luncheon given by the president of the university; afterward they talked. Oppenheimer had already discussed the need for a fast-neutron laboratory at the Met Lab technical council meeting on September 29. He envisioned more responsibilities for that laboratory than basic fission studies, as he testified after the war:
I became convinced, as did others, that a major change was called for in the work on the bomb itself. We needed a central laboratory devoted wholly to this purpose, where people could talk freely with each other, where theoretical ideas and experimental findings could affect each other, where the waste and frustration and error of the many compartmentalized experimental studies could be eliminated, where we could begin to come to grips with chemical, metallurgical, engineering, and ordnance problems that had so far received no consideration.
Memory compresses the laboratory's evolution here, however; Oppenheimer is not likely to have discussed eliminating Groves' cherished com-partmentalization at their first meeting. To the contrary, he goes on to say, the two men first considered making the laboratory “a military establishment in which key personnel would be commissioned as officers,” and he carried the idea far enough before he left Berkeley to visit a nearby military post to begin the process of commissioning.
Groves remembers that his “original impression gained from our first conversation in Berkeley” was that a central laboratory was a good idea; he felt strongly that “the work [of bomb design] should be started at once in order that one part of our operation, at any rate, could progress at what I hoped would be a comfortable pace.” His immediate concern was leadership; he believed that the right man at the helm could sail even the most ungovernable boat. Ernest Lawrence would have been Groves' first choice, but the general doubted if anyone else could make electromagnetic isotope separation work. Compton had his hands full in Chicago. Harold Urey was a chemist. “Outside the project there may have been other suitable people, but they were all fully occupied on essential work, and none of those suggested appeared to be the equal of Oppenheimer.” Groves had already sized up his man.
“It was not obvious that Oppenheimer would be [the new laboratory's] director,” Bethe notes. “He had, after all, no experience in directing a large group of people. The laboratory would be devoted primarily to experiment and to engineering, and Oppenheimer was a theorist.” Worse — in the eyes of the project leaders, Nobel laureates all — he had no Nobel Prize to distinguish him. There was also what Groves calls the “snag” of Oppenheimer's left-wing background, which “included much that was not to our liking by any means.” Groves had not yet wrested control of Manhattan Project security from Army counterintelligence, and that organization adamantly refused to clear someone whose former fiancee, wife, brother and sister-in-law had all been members of the Communist Party once and perhaps, gone underground, still were.
The general wanted Oppenheimer anyway. “He's a genius,” Groves told an interviewer off the record immediately after the war. “A real genius. While Lawrence is very bright he's not a genius, just a good hard worker. Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn't know about. He doesn't know anything about sports.”
Groves proposed Oppenheimer's name to the Military Policy Committee. It balked. “After much discussion I asked each member to give me the name of a man who would be a better choice. In a few weeks it became apparent that we were not going to find a better man; so Oppenheimer was asked to undertake the task.” The physicist demurred later that he was chosen “by default. The truth is that the obvious people were already taken and that the Project had a bad name.” Rabi would come to think that “it was a real stroke of genius on the part of General Groves, who was not generally considered to be a genius, to have appointed him,” but at the time it seemed “a most improbable appointment. I was astonished.” Groves on his way from Chicago to New York asked Oppenheimer on October 15, 1942, to ride on the train with him as far as Detroit to discuss the appointment. The two men met with Vannevar Bush in Washington on October 19. That long meeting was apparently decisive. Security questions would have to wait.
The next problem was where to locate the new laboratory. Already at his first meeting with Oppenheimer in Berkeley, Groves had stressed the need for isolation; however much or little the scientists who gathered at the new center would be allowed to talk to each other, the general intended to divide them away from the populace. “For this reason,” Oppenheimer wrote his Illinois colleague John H. Manley in mid-October, “some rather far reaching geographical change in plans seems to be in the cards.” (In the same letter Oppenheimer proposed “starting] now on a policy of absolutely unscrupulous recruiting of anyone we can lay hands on.” He wanted the best he could get, and soon asked Groves for the likes of Bethe, Segre, Serber and Teller.)
Site Y, as the hypothetical laboratory was initially called, needed good transportation, an adequate supply of water, a local labor force and a moderate climate for year-round construction and for experiment conducted outdoors. In his memoirs Groves lists safety as the primary reason he insisted on isolation — “so that nearby communities would not be adversely affected by any unforeseen results from our activities” — but the high steel fence topped with triple strands of barbed wire that eventually surrounded the laboratory was clearly not designed to confine explosions. Groves was in the midst of selecting sites for Manhattan Project production centers; the difference between his criteria for those locations and his criteria for Site Y was that at the bomb-design laboratory “we were faced with the necessity of importing a group of highly talented specialists, some of whom would be prima donnas, and of keeping them satisfied with their working and living conditions.” If that in fact was Groves' intention, it was one of the few wartime goals he failed to achieve.
The general assigned the task of identifying a suitable location for the laboratory to Major John H. Dudley of the Manhattan Engineer District. Groves gave Dudley criteria more specific than satisfying prima donnas: room for 265 people, location at least two hundred miles from any international boundary but west of the Mississippi, some existing facilities, a natural bowl with the hills nearby that shaped the bowl so that fences might be strung on top and guarded. Traveling by air, rail, auto, jeep and horse through most of the American Southwest, Dudley found the perfect place: Oak City, Utah, “a delightful little oasis in south central Utah.” But to claim it the Army would have had to evict several dozen families and remove a large area of farmland from production. Dudley thereupon
