manageable.”
Chadwick had also made further cross-section measurements. He was already a sober man; when he saw the new numbers a more intense sobriety seized him. He described the change in 1969 in an interview:
I remember the spring of 1941 to this day. I realized then that a nuclear bomb was not only possible — it was inevitable. Sooner or later these ideas could not be peculiar to us. Everybody would think about them before long, and some country would put them into action. And I had nobody to talk to. You see, the chief people in the laboratory were Frisch and [Polish experimental physicist Joseph] Rotblat. However high my opinion of them was, they were not citizens of this country, and the others were quite young boys. And there was nobody to talk to about it. I had many sleepless nights. But 1 did realize how very very serious it could be. And I had then to start taking sleeping pills. It was the only remedy. I've never stopped since then. It's 28 years, and I don't think I've missed a single night in all those 28 years.
12
A Communication from Britain
James Bryant Conant traveled to London in the winter of 1941 to open a liaison office between the British government and the National Defense Research Council. Conant was the first American scientist of administrative rank to visit the beleaguered nation following the ad hoc exchanges of the Tizard Mission and he came to count the trip “the most extraordinary experience of my life.” “I was hailed as a messenger of hope,” he writes in his autobiography. “I saw a stouthearted population under bombardment. I saw an unflinching government with its back against the wall. Almost every hour I saw or heard something that made me proud to be a member of the human race.”
The Harvard president, who would be forty-seven late in March, was welcomed not only because of his university affiliation or his distinction as a member of the NDRC. He had been an outspoken opponent of American isolationism during the long months of the phony war and was therefore welcomed especially as a sign — with only the Prime Minister dissenting. Churchill was less than delighted at the prospect of lunching with the president of Harvard. “What shall I talk to him about?” he was heard to ask. “He thought you would be an old man with a white beard, exuding learning and academic formality,” Brendon Bracken, Churchill's aide, told Conant afterward. But braced by the American's belligerently pro-British views and put at ease by the tweed suit he chose to wear, the Prime Minister eventually warmed over lunch in the bomb-shelter basement at 10 Downing Street, proffering a Churchillian monologue during which he repeated one of his choicer recent coinages: “Give us the tools, and we will finish the job.”
In 1920, at twenty-seven, when Conant was courting the woman he would marry — she was the only child of the Nobel laureate Harvard chemist T. W. Richards, a pioneer in measuring atomic weights — he had shared hopes for a grand future with her that coming from a less able man might have sounded absurd. “I said that I had three ambitions. The first was to become the leading organic chemist in the United States; after that I would like to be president of Harvard; and after that, a Cabinet member, perhaps Secretary of the Interior.” Those may not seem conjoint ambitions, but Conant managed a version of each in turn. He was born of a Massachusetts family that had resided in the state since 1623. After Roxbury Latin and Harvard College he had taken a double Ph.D. under his future father-in-law in organic and physical chemistry. He emerged from the Great War with the rank of major for his work in poison-gas research at Edgewood. In his autobiography, written late in life, he justified his participation:
I did not see in 1917, and do not see in 1968, why tearing a man's guts out by a high-explosive shell is to be preferred to maiming him by attacking his lungs or skin. All war is immoral. Logically, the 100 percent pacifist has the only impregnable position. Once that is abandoned, as it is when a nation becomes a belligerent, one can talk sensibly only in terms of the violation of agreements about the way war is conducted, or the consequences of a certain tactic or weapon.
Like Vannevar Bush, Conant was a patriot who believed in the application of advanced technology to war.
“Conant achieved an international reputation in both natural products chemistry and in physical-organic chemistry,” writes the Ukrainian-born Harvard chemist George B. Kistiakowsky. Natural products include chlorophyll and hemoglobin and Conant contributed to the unraveling of both those vital molecules. His studies also helped generalize the concept of acids and bases, a concept now considered fundamental. If not the leading American organic chemist of his day, he ranked among the leaders. When Caltech tried to lure him away with a large research budget Harvard topped the offer and refused to let him go.
Number two on Conant's youthful list, the presidency of his alma mater, he won in 1933. He told the members of the Harvard Corporation who approached him that he didn't want the job, which was apparently a prerequisite, but would serve if elected. He was forty at the time of his election. He created the modern Harvard of eminent scholarship and pub-lish-or-perish, up-or-out.
Conant's third ambition achieved approximate fulfillment after the war in high, though less than cabinet-rank, appointment; his long span of voluntary government service began with the NDRC.
In England in the late winter of 1941 he met with the leaders of the British government, had an audience with the King, picked up an honorary degree at Cambridge and walked the Backs afterward to see the crocuses in bloom, made room for the NDRC mission among hostile U.S. military and naval attaches, lunched with Churchill again. His mission in Britain was diplomatic rather than technical. He discussed gas warfare and explosives manufacture but was unable to share in the intense exchange of information on radar because he knew very little about electronics. But although he was familiar with the work on uranium and it fell within his official NDRC responsibilities, secrecy and his “strong belief in the ‘need to know’ principle” kept Conant from learning what the British had learned about the possibility of a bomb.
He met a “French scientist” at Oxford, probably Hans von Halban, who complained of inaction on uranium- heavy water research. “Since his complaints were clearly ‘out of channels,’ I quickly terminated the conversation and forgot the incident.” That reaction was understandable: Conant could hardly know what security arrangements the British might have made with the Free French. But he also shied from Lindemann. They were lunching alone at a London club. “He introduced the subject of the study of the fission of uranium atoms. I reacted by repeating the doubts I had expressed and heard expressed at NDRC meetings.” Lindemann brushed them aside and pounced:
“You have left out of consideration,” said [Lindemann), “the possibility of the construction of a bomb of enormous power.” “How would that be possible?” I asked. “By first separating uranium 235,” he said, “and then arranging for the two portions of the element to be brought together suddenly so that the resulting mass would spontaneously undergo a self-sustaining reaction.”
Remarkably, the chairman of the chemistry and explosives division of the NDRC adds that, as late as March 1941, “this was the first I had heard about even the remote possibility of a bomb.” Nor did he pursue the matter. “I assumed, quite correctly, that if and when Bush wished to be in touch with the atomic energy work in England, he would do so through channels involving Briggs.” No wonder the Hungarian conspirers continued to tear their hair.
Then for the first time a ranking American physicist joined the debate whose voice could not be ignored. Even before Seaborg and Segre confirmed the fissibility of plutonium, Ernest Lawrence had measured the prevailing American skepticism and conservatism against the increasing enthusiasm of his British friends and responded with characteristic fervor. Ralph H. Fowler, Ernest Rutherford's widower son-in-law, had visited Berkeley during the 1930s and attended picnics and weekend parties with the inventor of the cyclotron. Fowler was British scientific liaison officer in Washington now and from that close vantage he urged Lawrence to get involved. So did Mark
