lay ahead. Professor Bohr never remotely hinted the purpose of his visit to this country.”
Fortunately Frankfurter had heard about the project he called X. He says he heard from “some distinguished American scientists,” but he certainly heard from a distraught young Met Lab scientist who had penetrated all the way to Frankfurter and Eleanor Roosevelt in 1943 with complaints about Du Pont. “I had thus become aware of X — aware, that is, that there was such a thing as X and of its significance.” Since Frankfurter knew Bohr's field he assumed X was the reason for Bohr's visit:
And so… I made a very oblique reference to X so that if I was right in my assumption that Professor Bohr was sharing in it, he would know that I knew something about it… He likewise replied in an innocent remote way, but it soon became clear to both of us that two such persons, who had been so long and so deeply preoccupied with the menace of Hitlerism and who were so deeply engaged in the common cause, could talk about the implications of X without either of us making any disclosure to the other.
Eminent jurist and eminent physicist thus easily dispatched that modest obstacle.
“Professor Bohr then expressed to me,” Frankfurter goes on, “his conviction that X might be one of the greatest boons to mankind or might become the greatest disaster… and he made it clear to me that there was not a soul in this country with whom he could or did talk about these things except Lord Halifax [the British ambassador] and Sir Ronald Campbell [a British representative on the Anglo-American Combined Policy Committee].” Bohr picks up the narrative in third-person voice: “On hearing this F said that, knowing President Roosevelt, he was confident that the President would be very responsive to such ideas as B outlined.”
Bohr had found his go-between. “B met F again one of the last days of March,” Bohr records in his wartime memorandum, “and learned that in the meantime F had had occasion to speak with the President and that the President shared the hope that the project might bring about a turning point in history.” Frankfurter describes his meeting with Roosevelt:
On this particular occasion I was with the President for about an hour and a half and practically all of it was consumed by this subject. He told me the whole thing “worried him to death” (I remember the phrase vividly), and he was very eager for all of the help he could have in dealing with the problem. He said he would like to see Professor Bohr and asked me whether I would arrange it. When I suggested to him that the solution of this problem might be more important than all the schemes for a world organization, he agreed and authorized me to tell Professor Bohr that he, Bohr, might tell our friends in London that the President was most eager to explore the proper safeguards in relation to X.
Much controversy surrounds this meeting, because Roosevelt later implicitly repudiated it. Why, if the President was worried to death about the postwar implications of the bomb, did he entrust a mission to the British to so informal an arrangement? He had not even met Niels Bohr. An answer to this question would answer a more substantive question: whether Roosevelt was in fact interested in exploring ideas of international control or whether he was already committed to perpetuating an Anglo-American monopoly (the Quebec Agreement implied commitment, and he had recently discussed cornering the world uranium and thorium markets with Groves and Bush).
Why did Roosevelt entrust so important a mission to Bohr? In fact, the commission worked the other way around: Bohr had come to the United States representing the British, representing at least Sir John Anderson, who had encouraged his visit as much to promote discussing the issues Bohr had raised as to bolster the British Los Alamos mission. If the commission was informal it was no more so than any number of other back-channel arrangements between the British and the Americans. Roosevelt simply responded to what he took to be a British approach. He seems to have assumed — correctly — that British statesmen around Churchill were using Bohr to communicate to the President ideas about wartime and postwar arrangements to which Churchill was not yet committed. He responded candidly with loyalty to his British counterpart, Bohr adds: “F also informed B that as soon as the question had been brought up, the President had said it was a matter for Prime Minister Churchill and himself to find the best ways of handling the project to the benefit of all mankind, and that he should heartily welcome any suggestion to this purpose from the Prime Minister.” The President would be happy to discuss new ideas for postwar relations, but the British would first have to convince the P.M.; Roosevelt would not deal behind Churchill's back. Frankfurter implies this understanding: “I wrote out such a formula for Bohr to take to London — a communication to Sir John Anderson, who was apparently Bohr's connecting link with the British government.”
Complicating Bohr's discussions, in March and later, was the question of what to do about the USSR. Bohr considered the question in the following perspective. Tell the Soviet Union soon, before the first bombs were nearly built, that a bomb project was under way, and the confidence might lead to negotiations on postwar arms control. Let the Soviet Union discover the information on its own, build the bombs and drop them, oppose the Soviets at the end of the war with an Anglo-American nuclear monopoly, and the likeliest outcome was a nuclear arms race.
Bohr's revelation of the complementarity of the bomb was far more fundamental than this contemporary political question. But the contemporary political question was an aspect of the larger issue and partly obscured it from view. The bomb was opportunity and threat and would always be opportunity and threat — that was the peculiar, paradoxical hopefulness. But political conditions would necessarily differ before and after it was deployed.
At the end of March 1944, Bohr seemingly had a mandate from the President of the United States to talk to the Prime Minister of Great Britain. The British in whom Bohr had been confiding were properly impressed. “Halifax considered this development to be so important,” writes Aage Bohr, “that he thought my father should go to London immediately.” Father and son crossed the Atlantic again, this time by military aircraft, in early April.
Anderson had been working to soften Churchill up. The tall, dark Chancellor of the Exchequer, whom Oppenheimer describes as a “conservative, dour, remarkably sweet man,” sent the Prime Minister a long memorandum on March 21. He suggested opening Tube Alloys to wider discussion within the British government. Echoing Bohr, he saw the possibility of international proliferation of nuclear weapons after the war. He thought the only alternative to a vicious arms race was international agreement. He proposed “communicating to the Russians in the near future the bare fact that we expected, by a given date, to have this devastating weapon; and… inviting them to collaborate with us in preparing a scheme for international control.”
Churchill circled “collaborate” and wrote in the margin: “on no account.”
When Bohr arrived Anderson wrote the Prime Minister again, going over the same arguments but adding that he now believed Roosevelt was attending the subject and would welcome discussion. He even supplied a draft message Churchill might send to initiate an exchange. The response was equally waspish: “I do not think any such telegram is necessary nor do I wish to widen the circle who are informed.”
Churchill was in no mood to see Bohr; the Danish laureate cooled his heels for weeks. While he waited he heard from the Soviets. Peter Kapitza had written Bohr shortly after the Bohrs escaped from Denmark — the letter found its way from Stockholm to the Soviet Embassy in London — “to let you know that you will be welcome to the Soviet Union where everything will be done to give you and your family a shelter and where we now have all the necessary conditions for carrying on scientific work.” After alerting the Tube Alloys security officer Bohr went to the embassy in Kensington Gardens to collect the letter; on his return he reported his conversation with the embassy's counsellor. Amid much talk about the greatness of Russian science and how few friends Russia had counted before the war was the heart of the matter:
The Counsellor then said that he knew that B had recently been to America, and B said that he had received from the journey many encouraging expressions of the wish for international cultural co-operation and that he hoped soon to come to Russia also. The Counsellor next asked what information B had received about the work of American scientists during the war, and B answered that the American scientists, just like the Russian and the British, had surely made very large contributions to the war effort which would no doubt be of great importance for an appreciation of science everywhere after the war. B thereafter told a little about the situation in Denmark during the occupation.
Quickly changing the subject. But for Bohr the blunt question and Ka-pitza's invitation to come to Moscow were enough to indicate that the Soviets had at least an inkling of the bomb project and might be working on their
