recommended his second choice: Jemez Springs, New Mexico, a deep canyon about forty miles northwest of Santa Fe on the western slope of the Jemez Mountains — “a lovely spot,” Oppenheimer thought in early November before he toured it, “and in every way satisfactory.”
When the newly appointed director arrived on November 16 to inspect the Jemez Springs location with Dudley and Edwin McMillan, who was helping start the laboratory, he changed his mind. The canyon felt confining; Oppenheimer knew the region's grand scenic vistas and decided he wanted a laboratory with a view. McMillan also remembers expressing “considerable reservations about this site”:
We were arguing [with Dudley] when General Groves showed up. This had been planned. He would come in sometime in the afternoon and receive our report. As soon as Groves saw the site he didn't like it; he said, “This will never do.”… At that point Oppenheimer spoke up and said “if you go on up the canyon you come out on top of the mesa and there's a boys' school there which might be a usable site.”
Oppenheimer proposed the boys' school site, grouses Dudley, “as though it was a brand new idea.” Dudley had already scouted the mesa twice, rejecting it because it failed to meet Groves' criteria. But a mesa is an inverted bowl, its perimeter similarly fencible. And the first requirement was to make the longhairs happy. “As I… knew the roads (or trails),” Dudley says sardonically, “… we drove directly there.”
“The school was called Los Alamos,” the daughter of its founder writes, “after the deep canyon which bordered the mesa to the south and which was groved with Cottonwood trees along the sandy trickle of its stream.” Ashley Pond, the founder, had been a sickly boarding-school boy sent West for his health, like Oppenheimer, who returned to New Mexico in later adulthood when his father died and left him with independent means. He opened the Los Alamos Ranch School on the 7,200-foot mesa in 1917. It was organized to invigorate pale scions, as Pond had been invigorated: boys slept on unheated porches of a chinked-log dormitory and wore shorts in winter snow; each was assigned a horse to ride and groom. It was, Emilio Segre writes, “beautiful and savage country”: the dark Jemez Mountains to the west that formed the higher rim of the Jemez Caldera, the slumped cone of the old volcano of which Los Alamos was eroded tuffa-ceous spill; precipitously down from the mesa eastward the valley of the Rio Grande, “hot and barren” except for the green meander of the river, writes Laura Fermi, with “sand, cacti, a few pifion trees hardly rising above the ground, and space, immense, transparent, with no fog or moisture”; farther east the wall of the Rocky Mountains as that range extends south into New Mexico to form the Sangre de Cristo, reversing hue from green to red progressively at sunset. “I remember arriving [at Los Alamos],” McMillan continues of that first inspection, “and it was late in the afternoon. There was a slight snow falling… It was cold and there were the boys and their masters out on the playing fields in shorts. I remarked that they really believed in hardening up the youth. As soon as Groves saw it, he said, in effect, ‘This is the place.’”
“My two great loves are physics and desert country,” Robert Oppenheimer had written a friend once; “it's a pity they can't be combined.” Now they would be.
Leo Szilard, urban man, habitud of hotel lobbies, took a different view of the location when he heard about it. “Nobody could think straight in a place like that,” he told his Met Lab colleagues. “Everybody who goes there will go crazy.” The Corps of Engineers' appraisal prepared on November 21 describes a large forested site thirty-five miles by road northwest of Santa Fe with no gas or oil lines, one one-wire Forest Service telephone, average annual precipitation of 18.53 inches and an annual range of temperatures from — 12° to 92 T. The land and improvements, including the boys' school with its sixty horses, two tractors, two trucks, fifty saddles, eight hundred cords of firewood, twenty-five tons of coal and sixteen hundred books, were worth $440,000. The school was willing to sell. The Manhattan Project acquired its scenic laboratory site.
Groves convinced the University of California to serve as contractor to operate the secret installation. Construction — of cheap, barracks-like buildings not intended to outlast the war, with coal-burning stoves and no sidewalks on which to escape the mire of spring and autumn mud — began almost immediately. “What we were trying to do,” writes John Manley, the University of Illinois physicist working with Oppenheimer then, “was build a new laboratory in the wilds of New Mexico with no initial equipment except the library of Horatio Alger books or whatever it was that those boys in the Ranch School read, and the pack equipment that they used going horseback riding, none of which helped us very much in getting neutron-producing accelerators.” Robert R. Wilson, a young Berkeley Ph.D. teaching at Princeton, went up to Harvard for Oppenheimer and negotiated with Percy Bridgman for the Harvard cyclotron; Wisconsin would contribute two Van de Graaffs; from other laboratories, including Berkeley and the University of Illinois, Manley scavenged other gear. In the meantime Oppenheimer crisscrossed the country recruiting:
The prospect of coming to Los Alamos aroused great misgivings. It was to be a military post; men were asked to sign up more or less for the duration; restrictions on travel and on the freedom of families to move about would be severe… The notion of disappearing into the New Mexico desert for an indeterminate period and under quasi-military auspices disturbed a good many scientists, and the families of many more. But there was another side to it. Almost everyone realized that this was a great undertaking. Almost everyone knew that if it were completed successfully and rapidly enough, it might determine the outcome of the war. Almost everyone knew that it was an unparalleled opportunity to bring to bear the basic knowledge and art of science for the benefit of his country. Almost everyone knew that this job, if it were achieved, would be a part of history. This sense of excitement, of devotion and of patriotism in the end prevailed. Most of those with whom I talked came to Los Alamos.
One of the most tough-minded, I.I. Rabi, did not. His reasons are revealing. He continued developing radar at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. “Oppenheimer wanted me to be the associate director,” he told an interviewer many years later. “I thought it over and turned him down. I said, ‘I'm very serious about this war. We could lose it with insufficient radar.’” The Columbia physicist thought radar more immediately important to the defense of his country than the distant prospect of an atomic bomb. Nor did he choose to work full time, he told Oppenheimer, to make “the culmination of three centuries of physics” a weapon of mass destruction. Oppenheimer responded that he would take “a different stand” if he thought the atomic bomb would serve as such a culmination. “To me it is primarily the development in time of war of a military weapon of some consequence.” Either Oppenheimer had not yet thought his way through to a more mil-lenarian view of the new weapon's implications or he chose to avoid discussing those implications with Rabi. He asked Rabi only to participate in an inaugural physics conference at Los Alamos in April 1943 and to help convince others, particularly Hans Bethe, to sign on. Eventually Rabi would come and go as a visiting consultant, one of the very few exceptions to Groves' compartmentalization and isolation rules.
Oppenheimer talked to the Bethes in Cambridge in snowy New England December; they questioned him at length about the life they would be asked to lead. Extracts from his letter of response sketch the invention of an instant community: “Laboratory… town… utilities, schools, hospitals… a sort of city manager… city engineer… teachers… M.P. camp… a laundry… two eating places… a recreation officer… libraries, pack trips, movies… bachelor apartments… a so-called Post Exchange… a vet… barbers and such like… a cantina where we can have beer and cokes and light lunches.” The Bethes' best guarantee of satisfaction, Oppenheimer concluded, “is in the great effort and generosity that… Groves [has] brought to setting up this odd community and in [Groves'] evident desire to make a real success of it. In general [he is] not interested in saving money, but… in saving critical materials, in cutting down personnel, and in doing nothing which would attract Congressional attention to our hi-jinks.” He chose not to mention the security arrangements, in the development of which he was participating: the perimeter fence, the pass controls, the virtual elimination of telephones (“Oppenheimer's idea was one telephone for himself,” says Dudley, “one for the post commander, and any volume business would go out over a teletype.”). By March Teller found Bethe taking “a very optimistic view, and there was no need whatever to persuade him to come.”
Teller felt underemployed in Chicago and was eager to move to the new laboratory. John Manley asked him to write a prospectus to help with recruiting, which Teller sent to Oppenheimer in early January. During the Berkeley summer study the two men had begun what another participant judged a “mental love affair.” Teller “liked and respected Oppie enormously. He kept wanting to talk about him with others who knew him, kept bringing up his name in conversation.” Bethe noticed then and later that despite their many outward differences Teller and Oppenheimer were “fundamentally… very similar. Teller had an extremely quick understanding of things, so did Oppenheimer… They were also somewhat alike in that their actual production, their scientific publications, did not
