72. Childs (1968), 263.
73. Among the brothers’ early guinea pigs were Oppie and Joe Hamilton. Alvarez (1987), 63.
74. Molly Lawrence interview (1992).
75. Childs (1968), 249.
76. Ibid., 250.
77. The boat had been built by Luis Alvarez’s uncle. Alvarez (1987), 62; Molly Lawrence interview (1992).
78. Gunda Lawrence to Elmer Seubert, n.d. (c. May 1939), folder 39, carton 10, EOL.
79. Alvarez (1970), 270–71; author interview with Patricia Durbin, Berkeley, Calif., Aug. 11, 1994.
80. Childs (1968), 278, 283; Davis (1968), 76–77; transcript of interview with John Lawrence, Bancroft Library.
81. Alvarez (1987), 44.
82. Ibid., transcript of telephone conversation between EOL and C. D. Shane, Nov. 12, 1945, folder 16, carton 1, EOL.
83. Segrè (1993), 112, 118, 215.
84. Ibid., 128–29.
85. Ibid., 135, 138.
86. Ibid., 136, 158; Raymond Birge, “History of the Physics Department, University of California, Berkeley” (unpublished manuscript, in Bancroft Library, n.d.), vol. 5, chap. 18, 4–10.
87. Author interview with Martin Kamen, Santa Barbara, Calif., March 12, 1997.
88. Kamen (1986), 132.
89. Heilbron, Seidel, and Wheaton (1981), 20.
90. Davis (1968), 69; author interview with Edward Lofgren, Berkeley, Calif., Jan. 22, 1998.
91. Childs (1968), 273, 280–81.
92. Alvarez (1987), 74–75.
93. Rhodes (1986), 348.
94. Lawrence to Fermi, Feb. 7, 1939, folder 15, carton 7, EOL.
95. Childs (1968), 297.
96. Heilbron and Seidel (1989), 445–46.
97. Quoted in ibid., 444.
98. Smith and Weiner (1980), 208–9.
2: A Practical Philosopher’s Stone
1. Lawrence to parents, Aug. 29, 1939, folder 39, carton 10, EOL.
2. Szilard, Wigner, and Teller already knew each other, having grown up in Budapest, where Edward and Leo attended the Minta (Model) gymnasium. Stanley Blumberg and Gwinn Owens, Energy and Conflict: The Life and Times of Edward Teller (Putnam, 1976), 14–15; Rhodes (1986), 14–15.
3. Edward Teller, Energy from Heaven and Earth (Freeman, 1979), 145.
4. “Almost eighty years later, I still feel the discouragement of that moment,” Teller wrote in his memoirs. Teller: Edward Teller with Judith Shoolery, Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (Perseus Press, 2001), 32, 65; Edward Teller and Allen Brown, The Legacy of Hiroshima (Doubleday, 1962), 7–10; Blumberg and Owens (1976), 42–88; author interviews: Edward Teller, Los Alamos, N. Mex., July 7, 1993, and Milton Plesset, Pasadena, Calif., Mar. 15, 1988.
5. Szilard and Teller: Teller (1979), 141–43; Edward Teller, Better a Shield Than a Sword: Perspectives on Defense and Technology (Free Press, 1987), 46–47; William Lanouette, Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb (Scribners, 1992), 182–87.
6. Teller (1987), 48–49.
7. Spencer Weart and Gertrude W. Szilard, eds., Leo Szilard: His Version of the Facts (MIT Press, 1978), vol. 2, 84; author interview with I. I. Rabi, New York, N.Y., Oct. 26, 1984.
8. Transcript of interview with Edwin McMillan, Bancroft Library; transcript of interview with Robert Oppenheimer, box 2, Childs papers.
9. Notes by George Harrison, n.d., folder 14, carton 3, EOL; Lawrence to Bush, Oct. 12, 1939, Lawrence folder, box 64, Vannevar Bush papers, Library of Congress.
10. Vannevar Bush: G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (Free Press, 1997), 23–38; transcript of interview with Vannevar Bush, reel 1, 178, Vannevar Bush papers, MIT.
11. Confidential memo, Sproul to L. A. Nichols, “Radiation Laboratory, EOL” folder, box 39, Robert Sproul papers, Bancroft Library.
12. Lawrence to Bush, Nov. 9, 1939, Lawrence folder, box 64, Bush papers, Library of Congress.
13. Childs (1968), 295–96.
14. Heilbron and Seidel (1989), 488.
15. Childs (1968), 298.
16. Heilbron and Seidel (1989), 478.
17. Childs (1968), 299.
18. Heilbron and Seidel (1989), 480.
19. R. W. Wood to Lawrence, Nov. 13, 1939, folder 37, carton 24, EOL.
20. Transcript of Vannevar Bush interview, reel 6, 366, Bush papers, MIT.
21. Childs (1968), 300–301.
22. Loomis: Alvarez (1987), 78–81; Robert Buderi, The Invention That Changed the World (Simon and Schuster, 1996), 38–39; “Alfred Lee Loomis: Amateur of the Sciences,” Fortune, Mar. 1946, 132–69.
23. The setting was perfect for a murder mystery and in fact became one later that year, in a novel written by James Conant’s brother-in-law, who had worked at Loomis’s lab. Willard Rich, Brain Waves and Death (Scribner, 1940); James Hershberg, James B. Conant: Harvard to Hiroshima and the Making of the Nuclear Age (Knopf, 1993), 137–38.
24. Author interview with Eleanor Davisson, Pacific Grove, Calif., Aug. 22, 1992.
25. Childs (1968), 300–301.
26. Serber (1998), 46.
27. Smith and Weiner (1980), 211; San Francisco field report, Sept. 22, 1941, vol. 1, Steve Nelson file, no. 100–16847, FBI Reading Room (FBI).
28. Oppenheimer did not vote in a presidential election until 1936. “Tell me, what has politics to do with truth, goodness and beauty?” he asked one of his students in those days. Smith and Weiner (1980), 195.
29. R. Oppenheimer to F. Oppenheimer, supplemental folder, box 294, JRO.
30. Jenkins, 24; author interview with Phillip Morrison, Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 17, 2000. Informed of Tatlock’s suicide in 1944 by an army security agent, Oppenheimer wept. “He then went on at considerable length about the depth of his emotion for Jean, saying there was really no one to whom he could speak.” My thanks to Marilyn de Silva for a copy of the outline of her husband’s unfinished book about Oppenheimer.
31. Tatlock: Jenkins (1991), 21–23; ITMOJRO, 4, 8, 153; Stephen Schwartz, From West to East: California and the Making of the American Mind (Free Press, 1998), 378–80; Goodchild (1980), 30–32; Phillip Stern, The Oppenheimer Case: Security on Trial (Harper and Row, 1969), 15–16; author interview with Robert Serber (1992).
32. A 1944 FBI report listed Addis as “active in 27 Communist Front organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area during the last ten years.” Addis: San Francisco field report, May 17, 1944, sec. 4, FAECT file, no. 61–723, FBI; Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel, The Venona Secrets: Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors (Regnery, 2000), 266.
33. “E. told me of O[ppenheimer] having last summer gone East.… Is better read than most party members. A phenomenal fellow, quite obviously,” Chevalier wrote in his diary in 1937. “Our friendship was initiated by a common wish to participate in an activity that seemed to us to hold out the greatest hope for the future, which is to say the
