bombs but “very much less so against super bombs.” He could not yet offer detailed plans for the peaceful use of thermonuclear explosives. “But I consider it a certainty that the super bomb will allow us to extend our power over natural phenomena far beyond anything we can at present imagine.”
He filed his dissent as he prepared to depart Los Alamos. Teller was not one to fight for lost causes. He might have stayed, but the first team was leaving. His wife was expecting their second child. He packed his grand piano and moved to a professorship at the University of Chicago to do physics with Enrico Fermi. For a few years he would find security in family and teaching and research.
General Leslie R. Groves traveled to Los Alamos in mid-October to present a certificate of appreciation to the laboratory from the Secretary of War. “Under a brilliant New Mexico sky,” Alice Kimball Smith remembers, “virtually the entire population of the mesa assembled for the outdoor ceremony” on October 16, Oppenheimer's last day as director. He still thought he would return to California and to teaching, but accepting the certificate he struck the theme that would occupy the next full decade of his life:
It is our hope that in years to come we may look at this scroll, and all that it signifies, with pride.
Today that pride must be tempered with a profound concern. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.
The peoples of the world must unite, or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them, in other times, of other wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some, misled by a false sense of human history, who hold that they will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that. By our works we are committed, committed to a world united, before the common peril, in law, and in humanity.
Besides the certificate the men and women of Los Alamos each received a memento that day: a sterling- silver pin the size of a dime stamped with a large letter
I.I. Rabi returned to Columbia University, Eugene Wigner to Princeton, Luis Alvarez, Glenn Seaborg and Emilio Segre to Berkeley, George Kistiakowsky to Harvard. Victor Weisskopf went to MIT. Stanislaw Ulam briefly and unhappily tried UCLA, then came back to Los Alamos. James Chadwick and most of the British Mission returned to Great Britain with pockets full of secrets. In September the British had given a formal farewell party for their friends on the Hill, the Brobdingnagian log cabin of Fuller Lodge jammed with men in black tie and even white tie and tails and women in long gowns not completely aired of mothballs. Genia Peierls had cooked buckets of thick soup; steak and kidney pie was served on paper plates; Winifred Moon supplied several hundred paper cartons of trifle, a dessert which she swore she would never look upon again without nausea. The Oppenheimers and the Peierlses sat at high table above the fray (the Chadwicks had not come out from Washington) and the convivial and sometimes bibulous James Tuck served as toastmaster. After dinner, Ber-nice Brode notes, the British staged an original pantomime based on
Good Uncle Winnie had sent his Babes to join forces with Good Uncle Franklin, to out-wit Bad Uncles Adolf and Benito. All that befell the children on their hazardous journey to the Unknown Desert was acted out by the entire Mission… The end, the grand finale was a re-enacting of the [Trinity] test, with [a stepladder for] a high tower from which a pail of stuff was overturned making flashes and bangs and clatters for several minutes. This was not entirely comprehensible to many of the women, but made a tremendous hit with the men, particularly some of the details of the bangs. It was indeed a real smash hit.
Later they cleared the floor and danced, as they had danced so many Saturday nights in that strange wilderness retreat through the long years of war.
Niels Bohr, resettled in the Carlsberg House of Honor in Copenhagen, wrote Oppenheimer on November 9:
I was very sorry that I should not see you again before my return to Denmark, but, due to difficulties in arranging passage for Margrethe and me, we could not, as we had intended to, return to U.S.A. before the secret of the project was lifted, and then it was thought advisable that I no longer postponed my return to Denmark.
I need not say how often Aage and I think of all the kindness you and Kitty showed us in these last eventful years, where your understanding and sympathy have meant so much to me, and how closely I feel connected with you in the hope that the great accomplishment may contribute decisively to bringing about harmonious relationships between nations…
I trust that the whole matter is developing in a favorable way.
It was not, as Bohr knew; there was loud talk in the United States of an atomic “secret” that America would keep and protect. How little might be secret was revealed that autumn and early winter in a series of reports of Soviet stirrings in the field. The War Department learned in the middle of September, writes the historian Herbert Feis, “that the Soviet authorities were compelling the commanders of the Czechoslovak Army to give orders that all German plans, parts, models and formulas regarding the use of atomic energy, rocket weapons, and radar be turned over to them. Russian infantry and technical troops occupied Jachimov… and St. Joachimstal, the town and the factory — the only place in central Europe where at this time uranium was being produced.” The old mine from the residues of which Martin Klaproth had first isolated the heavy gray metal he named uranium, the mine young Robert Oppenheimer had explored on a walking tour in 1921, had fallen into Soviet hands.
An attache at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow warned on December 24 that “the U.S.S.R. is out to get the atomic bomb. This has been officially stated. The meager evidence available indicates that great efforts are being made and that super-priority will be given to the enterprise.” At home was incomprehension, Herbert York remembers: “To most… of us, Russia was as mysterious and remote as the other side of the moon and not much more productive when it came to really new ideas or inventions. A common joke of the time said that the Russians could not surreptitiously introduce nuclear bombs in suitcases into the United States because they had not yet been able to perfect a suitcase.” But if American leaders did not believe the Soviet Union could soon achieve an atomic bomb, what it would do otherwise and what were its motives had become a matter of intense debate within the U.S. government.
Tragically, that debate obscured the deeper issue then confronting the world for the first time in history. Robert Oppenheimer had testified before Congress; he had begun to work his way into the corridors of power; now, on a stormy Friday night at the beginning of November 1945, he stepped forward to examine the nuclear dilemma publicly. Freed from the constraints of the Los Alamos directorship he spoke to five hundred members of the Association of Los Alamos Scientists, a new political organization, crowded into the larger movie theater on the Hill. An unrevised transcript preserves his words much as his listeners heard them; thunder above the mesa orchestrated his bare reconnaissance. It framed anew the prospects Bohr had revealed and denned limitations and opportunities that have persisted into the present.
“I should like to talk tonight — if some of you have long memories perhaps you will regard it as justified — as a fellow scientist,” Oppenheimer began with humor, “and at least as a fellow worrier about the fix we are in.” Involved, he thought, were “issues which are quite simple and quite deep.” One of those issues for him was
