In Japan both the Army Air Force and the Imperial Navy had moved separately since 1941 to promote atomic bomb research. The Riken, Yoshio Nishina's prestigious Tokyo laboratory, primarily served the Army, exploring the theoretical possibilities of U235 separation by way of the gaseous barrier diffusion, gaseous thermal diffusion, electromagnetic and centrifuge processes. In the spring of 1942 the Navy committed itself to developing nuclear power for propulsion:
The study of nuclear physics is a national project. Research in this field is continuing on a broad scale in the United States, which has recently obtained the services of a number of Jewish scientists, and considerable progress has been made. The objective is the creation of tremendous amounts of energy through nuclear fission. Should this research prove successful, it would provide a stupendous and dependable source of power which could be used to activate ships and other large pieces of machinery. Although it is not expected that nuclear energy will be realized in the near future, the possibility of it must not be ignored. The Imperial Navy, accordingly, hereby affirms its determination to foster and assist studies in this field.
Soon after that nonviolent affirmation, however, the Naval Technological Research Institute appointed a secret committee of leading Japanese scientists — corresponding to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences committee — to meet monthly to follow research progress until it could report decisively for or against a Japanese atomic bomb. The committee included Nishina, who was forthwith elected chairman. An elderly appointee was Hantaro Nagaoka, whose Saturnian atomic model had nearly anticipated Ernest Rutherford's planetary model in the early years of the century.
The Navy committee met first on July 8 with the Navy's chief technical officers at an officers' club at Shiba Park in Tokyo. It noted that the United States was probably working on a bomb and agreed that whether and how soon Japan could produce such a weapon was as yet uncertain. To the task of answering those questions the Navy appropriated 2,000 yen, about $4,700, somewhat less than the Uranium Committee had summoned from the U.S. Treasury at Edward Teller's request at the beginning of the American program in 1939.
Nishina hardly participated in the Navy committee meetings. The fact that he was already working for the Army probably constrained him; the two services, both of which were responsible directly to the Emperor without detour through the civilian government, operated far more independently than their American counterparts and were increasingly bitter rivals. Nishina was coming to conclusions of his own, however, and at the end of 1942, when the Navy committee began to report discouragement, he met privately with a young cosmic-ray physicist in his laboratory, Tadashi Takeuchi, told his young colleague he meant to carry forward isotope separation studies and asked him to help. Takeuchi agreed.
Between December 1942 and March 1943 the Navy committee organized a ten-session physics colloquium to work through to a decision. By then it was understood that a bomb would necessitate locating, mining and processing hundreds of tons of uranium ore and that U235 separation would require a tenth of the annual Japanese electrical capacity and half the nation's copper output. The colloquium concluded that while an atomic bomb was certainly possible, Japan might need ten years to build one. The scientists believed that neither Germany nor the United States had sufficient spare industrial capacity to produce atomic bombs in time to be of use in the war.
After the final March 6 meeting the Navy representative at the colloquium reported discouragement: “The best minds of Japan, studying the subject from the point of view of their respective fields of endeavor as well as from that of national defense, came to a conclusion that can only be regarded as correct. The more they considered and discussed the problem, the more pessimistic became the atmosphere of the meeting.” As a result the Navy dissolved the committee and asked its members to devote themselves to more immediately valuable research, particularly radar.
Nishina continued isotope studies for the Army, deciding on March 19 to focus on thermal diffusion as the only practical separation technology at a time of increasing national shortages. He spoke to his staff of processing several hundred tons of uranium after first building laboratory-scale diffusion apparatus. He envisioned a major program run in parallel, as the Manhattan Project was beginning to be, with weapon design and development proceeding simultaneously with U235 production.
Meanwhile a different branch of the Navy, the Fleet Administration Center, sponsored a new project in atomic bomb development at the University of Kyoto, where Tokutaro Hagiwara had made his startling early prediction of the possibility of a thermonuclear explosive. The university won support in 1943 to the extent of 600,000 yen — nearly $1.5 million — much of which it budgeted to build a cyclotron.
Robert Oppenheimer moved to Santa Fe with a small team of aides on March 15, 1943, brisk early spring. Scientists and their families arrived by automobile and train during the next four weeks. Not much was ready on the mesa, which they began to call the Hill. Groves wanted no breaches of security in the lobbies of Santa Fe hotels; the Army commandeered guest ranches in the area for quarters suitably remote and bought up Santa Fe's feeble stock of used cars and jitneys to serve as transportation through ruts and mud up and down the terrifying unbarricaded dirt switchback of the mesa access road. After flat tires and mirings, hours could be short on the Hill. Box lunches assembled in Santa Fe gave cold comfort when the delivery truck made it through.
The hardships only mattered because they slowed the work. Oppenheimer had sold it as work that would end the war to end all wars and his people believed him. The unit of measurement for wasted hours was therefore human Uves. Construction crews unwilling to vary the specifications of a laboratory door or hang an unauthorized shelf initially bore the brunt of the scientists' impatience. John Manley remembers inspecting the chemistry and physics building. It needed a basement at one end for an accelerator and a solid foundation at the other end for the two Van de Graaffs — which end for which was unimportant. Rather than adjust the construction plans for terrain the contractor had drilled the basement from solid rock and used the rock debris as fill for the foundation. “This was my introduction to the Army Engineers.”
Fuller Lodge, a Ranch School hall elegantly assembled of monumental hand-hewn logs, was kept to serve as a dining room and guest house. The pond south of the lodge — predictably named Ashley Pond after the Ranch School's founder — offered winter ice-skating and summer canoeing and the easeful harmonic wakes of swimming ducks. The engineers preserved the stone icehouse beside the pond that the school had used to store winter cuttings of ice and the row of tree-shaded faculty residences northeast of the lodge. Across the dirt main road that divided the mesa south of the pond the Tech Area went up in a style the Army called modified mobilization: plain one-story buildings Uke elongated barracks with clapboard sides and shingled roofs. T Building would house Oppenheimer and his staff and the Theoretical Physics Division; behind T, connected by a covered walkway, would be the much longer chemistry and physics building with its Van de Graaffs; behind that the laboratory shops. Farther south near the rim of the mesa above Los Alamos canyon contractors would hammer up a cryogenics laboratory and the building that would shelter Harvard's cyclotron. West and north of the Tech Area the first two- story, four-unit family apartments, painted drab green, urbanized last year's pastures and fields; more apartments, and dormitories for the unmarried, would follow.
At the beginning of April Oppenheimer assembled the scientific staff — “about thirty persons” at that point of the hundred scientists initially hired, says Emilio Segre, who was one among them — for a series of introductory lectures. Robert Serber, thin and shy, delivered the lectures with authority despite the distraction of a lisp; they summed up the conclusions of the Berkeley summer study and incorporated the experimental fast-fission work of the past year. Edward U. Condon, the crew-cut, Alamogordo-born theoretician from Westinghouse whom Oppenheimer had chosen for associate director, revised his notes of Serber's lectures into the new laboratory's first report, a document called the
Serber's lectures startled the chemists and experimental physicists whom compartmentalization had kept in the dark; the scientists' euphoria at finally learning in detail what they had only previously guessed or heard hinted measures the extent to which secrecy had contorted their emotional commitment to the work. Now, following the lead of their mentors — their average age was twenty-five; Oppenheimer, Bethe, Teller, McMillan, Bacher, Segre and Condon were older men — they could apply themselves at last with devotion. In that heady new freedom they seldom noticed the barbed wire. Similarly confined but kept uninformed because Oppenheimer and Groves decided it so, the wives served harder time.
“The object of the project,” Condon summarizes what Serber told the scientists, “is to produce a
