hot night and composed another apology the next day: “I have had serious anxieties,” he confided, “that [the memorandum] may not correspond to your expectations and perhaps not at all be suited for the purpose.” Frankfurter had the good sense to recognize the document's merit — it is still the only comprehensive and realistic charter for a postnuclear world — and about a week later told Bohr he had handed it to the President. Bohr and his son left Washington soon after, on a Friday in mid-July, to work at Los Alamos, understanding that Roosevelt would arrange a meeting in good time.
That time came in August as the President prepared to meet the Prime Minister in Quebec. Bohr returned to the U.S. capital; “on August 26th at 5 p.m.,” he writes, “B was received by the President in the White House in a completely private manner.” Roosevelt “was very cordial and in excellent spirits,” says Aage Bohr, as well he might have been after the rapid advances of the Allied armies across Europe. He had read Bohr's memorandum; he “most kindly gave B an opportunity to explain his views and spoke in a very frank and encouraging manner about the hopes he himself entertained.” FDR liked to charm; he charmed Bohr with stories, Aage Bohr recounts:
Roosevelt agreed that an approach to the Soviet Union of the kind suggested must be tried, and said that he had the best hopes that such a step would achieve a favourable result. In his opinion Stalin was enough of a realist to understand the revolutionary importance of this scientific and technical advance and the consequences it implied. Roosevelt described in this connection the impression he had received of Stalin at the meeting in Teheran, and also related humorous anecdotes of his discussion and debates with Churchill and Stalin. He mentioned that he had heard how the negotiations with Churchill in London had gone, but added that the latter had often reacted in this way at the first instance. However, Roosevelt said, he and Churchill always managed to reach agreement, and he thought that Churchill would eventually come around to sharing his point of view in this matter. He would discuss the problems with Churchill at their forthcoming meeting and hoped to see my father soon afterwards.
The interview lasted an hour and a half. To Robert Oppenheimer in 1948 Bohr reported a more specific commitment from the President: he “left with Professor Bohr the impression,” Oppenheimer writes, “that, after discussion with the Prime Minister, he might well ask [Bohr] to undertake an exploratory mission to the Soviet Union.”
“It is hardly necessary to mention the encouragement and gratitude my father felt after his talk with Roosevelt,” Aage Bohr goes on; “these were days filled with the greatest optimism and expectation.” Bohr saw Frankfurter in Boston and told him about the meeting. Frankfurter suggested Bohr restate his case in a thank-you note, which Bohr managed to compress into one long page by September 7. Frankfurter passed it to Roosevelt's aide. Bohr settled in eagerly to wait.
The two heads of state saved their Tube Alloy discussions for the end of the conference, late September, when they retreated to Roosevelt's estate in the Hudson Valley at Hyde Park. “This was another piece of black comedy,” writes C. P. Snow. “.. Roosevelt surrendered without struggle to Churchill's view of Bohr.” The result was a secret aide-memoire, obviously of Churchill's composition, that misrepresented Bohr's proposals, repudiated them and recorded for the first time the Anglo-American position on the new weapon's first use:
The suggestion that the world should be informed regarding tube alloys, with a view to an international agreement regarding its control and use, is not accepted. The matter should continue to be regarded as of the utmost secrecy; but when a “bomb” is finally available, it might perhaps, after mature consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender.
2. Full collaboration between the United States and the British Government in developing tube alloys for military and commercial purposes should continue after the defeat of Japan unless and until terminated by joint agreement.
3. Enquiries should be made regarding the activities of Professor Bohr and steps taken to ensure that he is responsible for no leakage of information particularly to the Russians.
The next day, September 20, Churchill wrote Cherwell in high dudgeon:
The President and I are much worried about Professor Bohr. How did he come into this business? He is a great advocate of publicity. He made an unauthorized disclosure to Chief Justice
Anderson, Halifax and Cherwell all defended Bohr to Churchill after the Hyde Park outburst, as did Bush and Conant to FDR. The Danish laureate was not confined. But neither was he invited to meet again with the President of the United States. There would be no exploratory mission to the USSR.
How much the world lost that September is immeasurable. The complementarity of the bomb, its mingled promise and threat, would not be canceled by the decisions of heads of state; their frail authority extends not nearly so far. Nuclear fission and thermonuclear fusion are not acts of Parliament; they are levers embedded deeply in the physical world, discovered because it was possible to discover them, beyond the power of men to patent or to hoard.
Edward Teller had arrived at Los Alamos in the April of its founding in 1943 prepared to participate fully in its work. He was then thirty-five years old, dark, with bushy, mobile black eyebrows and a heavy, uneven step; “youthful,” Stanislaw Ulam remembers, “always intense, visibly ambitious, and harboring a smouldering passion for achievement in physics. He was a warm person and clearly desired friendship with other physicists.” Teller's son Paul, his first child, had been born in February. The Tellers had shipped to the primitive New Mexico mesa two machines they considered vital to their peace of mind, a Steinway concert grand piano Mici Teller had bought for her husband for two hundred dollars at a Chicago hotel sale and a new Bendix automatic washer. They were assigned an apartment; the Steinway nearly filled the living room.
Teller had striven on behalf of nuclear energy since Bohr's first public announcement of the discovery of fission in Washington in 1939. He had helped Robert Oppenheimer organize Los Alamos and recruit its staff. He expected to contribute to the planning of the new laboratory's program and he did. “It was essential that the whole laboratory agree on one or a very few major lines of development,” writes Hans Bethe, “and that all else be considered of low priority. Teller took an active part in the decision on what were to be the major lines… A distribution of work among the members of the Theoretical Division was agreed upon in a meeting of all scientists of the division and Teller again had a major voice.”
But Teller had received no concomitant administrative appointment that April, and the omission aggrieved him. He was qualified to lead the Theoretical Division; Oppenheimer appointed Hans Bethe instead. He was qualified to lead a division devoted to work toward a thermonuclear fusion weapon, a Super, but no such division was established. The laboratory had decided at its opening conference, and the Lewis committee had affirmed in May, that thermonuclear research should be restricted largely to theoretical studies and held to distant second priority behind fission: an atomic bomb, since it would trigger any thermonuclear arrangement, necessarily came first; there was a war on and manpower was limited.
“That I was named to head the [Theoretical] division,” Bethe comments, “was a severe blow to Teller, who had worked on the bomb project almost from the day of its inception and considered himself, quite rightly, as having seniority over everyone then at Los Alamos, including Oppenheimer.” Bethe believed he was chosen because his “more plodding but steadier approach to life and science would serve the project better at that stage of its development, where decisions had to be adhered to and detailed calculations had to be carried through, and where, therefore, a good deal of administrative work was inevitable.” Teller saw his old friend's steadier approach differently: “Bethe was given the job to organize the effort and, in my opinion, in which I may well have been wrong, he overorganized it. It was much too much of a military organization, a line organization.” On the other hand, Teller has repeatedly praised Oppenheimer's direction of Los Alamos, direction which included Bethe's appointment and ratified Bethe's decisions:
