the view and gasp for breath.”
Equally strenuous excursions went out to area landmarks. Genia Peierls and Bernice Brode determined to find the Stone Lions, prehistoric lifesized twin effigies of crouching mountain lions carved in tuff, reported beside a ruined pueblo on a distant mesa. They gathered up a carload of Navy ensigns and another of young bachelors from the British mission and drove within ten miles of their goal, then set out walking, Genia Peierls leading the way in tennis shoes without socks: “Best for stones, best for bunions.” Lunch at two in the afternoon by a cool canyon stream encouraged the weary ensigns to drop anchor, but Mrs. Peierls had cowed the young British mission men from similar protest. “OK, we proceed to Stone Lions without U. S. Navy. All aboard.” More hiking, crossing desert country from mesa to mesa, the Rio Grande below. The American woman was impressed with the Stone Lions; not so the Russian. “House cats only, my dear, not well made and maybe not even old.” “On the way back,” Bernice Brode recalls, “the young men… looked out over the wide expanse of the desert region and the ribbon of water shining in the setting sun. One of them, dark and slim, wearing tortoise shell rimmed glasses, spoke in his soft voice with a slight German accent. T have not seen New York, nor Chicago, but I have seen the Stone Lions.’ He smiled pleasantly as we walked on. His name was Klaus Fuchs.” Penny-in-the-slot Fuchs, Genia Peierls nicknamed him, because the quiet, hardworking emigre theoretician only spoke when spoken to.
On a hike through Frijoles Canyon with the Fermis, Niels Bohr stopped to admire a skunk, an animal unknown to Europeans, but it chose not to instruct the vigorous Dane in the pungency of its defenses. Bears sometimes appeared on the trails, prompting warnings in the daily bulletin: “Remember that these are not tame bears like those in Yellowstone Park.” A family cat turned up with a suppurating jaw; the Hill's Army veterinarian recognized the bone necrosis as a sign of radiation poisoning from Tech Area contamination and kept the animal alive to observe its unusual symptomatology, about which not much was yet known. Its tongue swelled and its hair fell out in patches; its heartsick owner eventually asked that the animal be destroyed.
A low-power radio station began broadcasting to Hill residents on Christmas Eve, 1943, drawing on several fine collections of classical records, including Oppenheimer's; the few New Mexicans beyond the Hill who could receive the station's signals were puzzled that announcers never introduced live performers by their last names. The “Otto” who occasionally played classical piano selections was Otto Frisch. A golf course opened in June 1944. Men and women fielded baseball, softball and basketball teams. The Army divided up the old Ranch School truck garden east of Fuller Lodge into victory-gardening plots but had no water to spare for irrigation.
Life was rougher for construction workers, machinists, soldiers and WAC's: minimal barracks, jerrybuilt dormitories, muddy trailer courts. Hillbilly construction families invited once in the interest of authenticity to the square dancing at the mess hall arrived drunk and nearly caused a riot; thereafter a man in uniform guarded the door. Hans Bethe recalls that one wild machinist late in the war, when the laboratory took what help it could find, slit a fellow worker's throat “from cover to cover.” The Indians from San Ildefonso and other pueblos and ranches in the area lived better for their work on the Hill as cleaning women and maintenance men. The hand-coiled black pottery of Maria Martinez soon graced many Los Alamos apartments.
In winter a pall of coal smoke hung over the mesa. The men the Army assigned to service the apartment furnaces stoked them so hot that apartment walls sometimes sizzled. Los Alamos sat high and dry surrounded by pine forests, and fire worried everyone. The main machine shop in the Tech Area caught fire one night early in 1945; Eleanor Jette remembers watching her husband Eric, Metal Reduction group leader in the Chemistry and Metallurgy Division, standing with Oppenheimer and the Hill commanding officer on the fire escape of the administration building grimly overseeing the firefighters. “Jesus,” she heard someone say, “let's be thankful it isn't D building. That place is as hot as seven million dollars. Every time it gets too hot for them to work, they slap on another coat of paint.” Her husband worked in D building; she did not know he worked with plutonium but understood that “hot” meant radioactive. “Damn,” he told her when she asked. “You mustn't be upset. We're so careful it's fantastic.” A fire in the plutonium-handling areas would be a major disaster; after the machine-shop fire Groves ordered a fireproof plutonium works built with steel walls and a steel roof and filtering systems for both incoming and outgoing air.
Robert Oppenheimer oversaw all this activity with self-evident competence and an outward composure that almost everyone came to depend upon. “Oppenheimer was probably the best lab director I have ever seen,” Teller repeats, “because of the great mobility of his mind, because of his successful effort to know about practically everything important invented in the laboratory, and also because of his unusual psychological insight into other people which, in the company of physicists, was very much the exception.” “He knew and understood everything that went on in the laboratory,” Bethe concurs, “whether it was chemistry or theoretical physics or machine shop. He could keep it all in his head and coordinate it. It was clear also at Los Alamos that he was intellectually superior to us.” The Theoretical Division leader elaborates:
He understood immediately when he heard anything, and fitted it into the general scheme of things and drew the right conclusions. There was just nobody else in that laboratory who came even close to him. In his knowledge. There was human warmth as well. Everybody certainly had the impression that Oppenheimer cared what each particular person was doing. In talking to someone he made it clear that that person's work was important for the success of the whole project. I don't remember any occasion at Los Alamos in which he was nasty to any person, whereas before and after the war he was often that way. At Los Alamos he didn't make anybody feel inferior, not anybody.
Yet Oppenheimer felt inferior himself, had always felt for the actions of his life, as he confessed many years afterward, “a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong.” At Los Alamos for the first time he seems to have found alleviation of that loathing. He may have discovered there a process of self-analysis anchored in complementarity that served him more comprehensively later in his life: “In an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did. And I needed what they saw, and needed them.” Certainly he found the more traditional alleviation of losing himself in work.
Whatever his burden of morale and work in those years, Oppenheimer also carried his full share of private pain. He was kept under constant surveillance, his movements monitored and his rooms and telephones bugged; strangers observed his most intimate hours. His home life cannot have been happy. Kitty Oppenheimer responded to the stress of living at isolated Los Alamos by drinking heavily; eventually Martha Parsons, the admiral's daughter, took over the duties of social leadership on the Hill. Army security officers hounded the director of the central laboratory of the nation's most important secret war project mercilessly; at least one of them, Peer de Silva, was convinced Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy. They interrogated him frequently, fishing for the names of people he knew or believed to be members of the Communist Party, hoping to trip him up. He invented circumstances and volunteered the names of friends to protect his own, indiscretions that would return in time to haunt him.
During the first Los Alamos summer he heard from Jean Tatlock, the unhappy woman he had loved before he met his wife. Loyally, even though she had been and still might be a Communist and he knew himself to be spied upon, he went to her; an FBI document coldly summarizes a security man's peepshow version of that meeting:
On June 14, 1943, Oppenheimer traveled via Key Railway from Berkeley to San Francisco on the evening of June 14, 1943, where he was met by Jean Tatlock who kissed him. They dined at the Xochimilcho Cafe, 787 Broadway, San Francisco, then proceeded at 10:50 P.M. to 1405 Montgomery Street and entered a top floor apartment. Subsequently, the lights were extinguished and Oppenheimer was not observed until 8:30 A.M. next day when he and Jean Tatlock left the building together.
In January 1944 Jean Tatlock committed suicide. “I wanted to five and to give and I got paralyzed somehow,” her suicide note said. It was a paralysis of the spirit Oppenheimer seemingly had to resist in himself.
Planning began in March 1944 for a full-scale test of an implosion weapon. Sometime between March and October Oppenheimer proposed a code name for that test. The first man-made nuclear explosion would be a historic event and its designation therefore a name that history might remember. Oppenheimer coded the test and the test site Trinity. Groves wrote him in 1962 to find out why, speculating that he chose the name because it is common to rivers and peaks in the American West and would be inconspicuous.
