going to Los Alamos: Frisch, Rudolf Peierls, William G. Penney, George Placzek, P. B. Moon, James L. Tuck, Egon Bretscher and Klaus Fuchs among others. Chadwick would join them, as would the hydrodyna-micist Geoffrey Taylor.
Akers maneuvered around the transport shortage by loading them for the Liverpool pier in black mortuary limousines; a hearse for the luggage completed the cortege. On the
I wandered out into the streets. There I was greeted by a completely incredible spectacle: fruit stalls with pyramids of oranges, illuminated by bright acetylene flares! After England's blackout, and not having seen an orange for a couple of years, that sight was enough to send me into hysterical laughter.
Groves in Washington lectured them on security. A succession of trains delivered them into a fantastic landscape — Frisch and another man in December, the larger group early in 1944 — and there in the bright sunlight of a pine-shouldered mesa was Robert Oppenheimer smoking a pipe and shading his close-cropped military haircut with a pork-pie hat: “Welcome to Los Alamos, and who the devil are you?”
They were Churchill's flying wedge. The bomb had been theirs to begin with as much as anybody's, but more immediate urgencies had demanded their attention and now they were couriers sent along to help build it and then to bring it home. America was giving the bomb away to another sovereign state, proliferating. Churchill had negotiated the renewed collaboration at Quebec in August:
It is agreed between us
First, that we will never use this agency against each other.
Secondly, that we will not use it against third parties without each other's consent.
Thirdly, that we will not either of us communicate any information about Tube Alloys to third parties except by mutual consent.
Niels Bohr and his son Aage followed next as consultant to the Tube Alloys directorate and junior scientific officer, respectively; the British were paying their salaries. Groves' security men met father and son at dockside, assigned them cover names — Nicholas and James Baker — and spirited them off to a hotel, there to discover niels bohr stenciled bold and black on the Danish laureate's luggage. At Los Alamos, warmly welcomed, Nicholas and James Baker became Uncle Nick and Jim.
The first order of business was Heisenberg's drawing of a heavy-water reactor, which Bohr had previously revealed to Groves. Oppenheimer convened a conference of experts on the last day of 1943 to see if they could find any new reason to believe a pile might serve as a weapon. “It was clearly a drawing of a reactor,” Bethe recalled after the war, “but when we saw it our conclusion was that these Germans were totally crazy — did they want to throw a reactor down on London?” That was not Heisenberg's purpose, but Bohr wanted to be sure. Bethe and Teller prepared the consequent report, “Explosion of an inhomogeneous uranium-heavy water pile.” It found that such an explosion “will liberate energies which are probably smaller, and certainly not much larger, than those obtainable by the explosion of an equal mass of TNT.”
If Heisenberg's drawing told the physicists anything it ought to have told them that the Germans were far behind; it depicted sheets of uranium rather than lumps, an inefficient arrangement Heisenberg had clung to for a time even when his colleagues had argued the advantages of a three-dimensional lattice. Samuel Goudsmit, a Dutch physicist in America who would soon lead a front-line Manhattan Project intelligence mission into Germany, remembers a more convoluted conclusion: “At that time we thought this meant simply that they had succeeded in keeping their real aims secret, even from a scientist as wise as Bohr.”
Oppenheimer appreciated the salutary effect of Bohr's presence. “Bohr at Los Alamos was marvelous,” he told an audience of scientists after the war. “He took a very lively technical interest… But his real function, I think for almost all of us, was not the technical one.” Here two texts of the postwar lecture diverge; both versions illuminate Oppenheimer's state of mind in 1944 as he remembered it. In unedited transcript he said Bohr “made the enterprise which looked so macabre seem hopeful”; edited, that sentence became: “He made the enterprise seem hopeful, when many were not free of misgiving.”
How Bohr did so Oppenheimer and even Bohr had work to explain. Oppenheimer outlines an explanation in his lecture:
Bohr spoke with contempt of Hitler, who with a few hundred tanks and planes had tried to enslave Europe for a millennium. He said nothing like that would ever happen again; and his own high hope that the outcome would be good, and that in this the role of objectivity, the cooperation which he had experienced among scientists would play a helpful part; all this, all of us wanted very much to believe.
“He said nothing like that would ever happen again” is a key; Austrian emigre theoretician Victor Weisskopf supplies another:
In Los Alamos we were working on something which is perhaps the most questionable, the most problematic thing a scientist can be faced with. At that time physics, our beloved science, was pushed into the most cruel part of reality and we had to live it through. We were, most of us at least, young and somewhat inexperienced in human affairs, I would say. But suddenly in the midst of it, Bohr appeared in Los Alamos.
It was the first time we became aware of the sense in all these terrible things, because Bohr right away participated not only in the work, but in our discussions. Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution… This we learned from him.
“They didn't need my help in making the atom bomb,” Bohr later told a friend. He was there to another purpose. He had left his wife and children and work and traveled in loneliness to America for the same reason he had hurried to Stockholm in a dark time to see the King: to bear witness, to clarify, to win change, finally to rescue. His revelation — which was equivalent, as Oppenheimer said, to his revelation when he learned of Rutherford's discovery of the nucleus — was a vision of the complementarity of the bomb. In London and at Los Alamos Bohr was working out its revolutionary consequences. He meant now to communicate his revelation to the heads of state who might act on it: to Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill first of all.
In December, before he first went out to Los Alamos, at a small reception at the Danish Embassy in Washington where he and Aage lived when they visited that city, Bohr had renewed his acquaintance with Supreme Court Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter. The justice was short, crackling, bright, Vienna-born, an agnostic Zionist Jew, an ardent patriot, a close friend of Franklin Roosevelt and one of the President's longtime advisers. Bohr had met him in England in 1933 in connection with the rescue of the emigre academics; when Bohr visited Washington in 1939, the year Frankfurter was elevated to the Court, the two men developed what Frankfurter calls a “warm friendly relation.” The December tea offered no opportunity to talk privately, but on his way out Frankfurter proposed to invite Bohr to lunch in chambers at the Supreme Court. He already understood that something was up.
The justice was three years older than the physicist, born in 1882, the same year as Roosevelt. He had emigrated to the United States with his family in 1894, grown up on New York's Lower East Side, graduated at nineteen from the City College of New York and made a brilliant showing at Harvard Law. He worked for Henry Stimson when Stimson was U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, before the Great War, and in Washington when Stimson served as Secretary of War the first time, under William Howard Taft. Harvard invited Frankfurter to a professorship at its law school in 1914. He held that post until Roosevelt appointed him to the Supreme Court, but he was intensely active politically across those academic years, a one-man recruiting agency for the New Deal, a loyal friend who supported Roosevelt's ill-advised 1937 scheme to pack the Court to overwhelm its conservative resistance to his innovative legislation.
After Bohr returned to Washington from Los Alamos, in mid-February, the two men kept their appointment for lunch. Both left wartime memoranda describing the meeting. “We talked about the recent events in Denmark,” Frankfurter writes, “the probable course of the war, the state of England… our certainty of German defeat and what
