Asking Cooksey to assemble the boys, Lansdale read them the same diary entries that had so shocked Conant.122 Subsequently upbraided a second time by Conant, Lawrence promised to tighten security measures at the Rad Lab. Lansdale, with Conant’s blessing, left on a similar mission to Compton’s Met Lab in mid-May.
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By that spring, the separation of uranium was progressing well enough on the 37-inch, Lawrence wrote Bush, that the OSRD chairman might have to make good on an earlier wager.123 There was now under way a friendly race between the Calutron and Fermi’s atomic pile as to which would produce the first material for a bomb.124 On May 23, 1942, Lawrence, determinedly upbeat, wrote to Conant that work was “proceeding somewhat faster than anticipated.” He asked for, and got, another $25,000 to make it to the end of June.125
Later that day, Ernest met in Washington with Conant and the S-1 section leaders to discuss construction of a pilot plant. An NDRC study had recently concluded that electromagnetic separation seemed the most promising method of enriching uranium; results from both gaseous diffusion and the centrifuge looked to be at least a year away. But Conant worried aloud that separating uranium by all known techniques would cost $500 million—and result in “quite a mess of machinery.”126
Ernest told the S-1 managers that a full-scale electromagnetic separation plant could be producing 100 grams of U-235 a day within a year. Reluctantly, Conant agreed to continue backing all four “horsemen.” But he recommended to Bush that $12 million be spent on an electromagnetic production plant, to be completed by September 1943.127 When the meeting adjourned that afternoon, Lawrence promptly flew back west with the good news.
On Tuesday evening, May 26, current flowed to the 184-inch for the first time. A few days later, the first C-shaped vacuum chamber was installed between the pole pieces of the giant magnet.128 Lawrence wrote to Bush in mid-June that the results justified a decision for a full-scale factory.129 Ernest wanted both the Calutron pilot plant and the scaled-up production facility to remain on the West Coast, under his direction. He had located a possible site for the production plant in the far northern corner of the state, near Shasta Dam, and was looking into having the university lease to the army a parcel of land in the hills back of the Rad Lab for the pilot plant.130
By the time he forwarded his own recommendations to Roosevelt on June 17, Bush agreed with Lawrence on the necessity to proceed promptly on all fronts. But he and Conant had already decided to put the army in charge of building the factories that would separate the uranium for the bomb. The president, too, acted with unusual dispatch, approving Bush’s plan on the same day by scrawling “OK. FDR” in blue pencil at the top of the page.
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To keep electromagnetic separation in the race and meet OSRD deadlines, Lawrence and Oppenheimer had begun recruiting young physics graduate students on campus for the S-1 Project. One of Oppie’s earlier acolytes, still in his midtwenties, was shocked upon returning to Berkeley that spring to find a “bunch of kids” doing war work at the Rad Lab.131
Competition for the jobs was brisk. The position of research physicist paid $150 a month—compared to the $65 a teaching assistant received—and included a draft deferment.
With the 184-inch already up and running, the greatest need was for theoretical physicists to perform calculations aimed at improving the efficiency of the Calutron. Not surprisingly, the best of the young theorists at Berkeley worked for Oppenheimer. Many shared not only their mentor’s passion for physics but likewise his affinity for progressive causes.132
One such student was Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, who arrived in Berkeley from Oklahoma in the late summer of 1940, a month before his nineteenth birthday. Big, extroverted, and cheerful, Lomanitz had been immediately swept up in the radical politics and bohemian culture of the place.133 He attended rallies opposing the deportation of labor leader Harry Bridges and joined the Student Workers Federation on campus. Moving into Barrington Hall, a dormitory on campus that attracted students with similarly left-wing views, Lomanitz met other kindred spirits. From Arthur Rosen, Rossi bought a 1927 Nash, biblically nicknamed “Hepzibaa,” for $25. Rosen’s brother, Alfred, was leader of Berkeley’s Young Communist League.134
Another physics grad student whom Lomanitz befriended was Joseph Weinberg, a New Yorker from the Lower East Side who came to Berkeley via the University of Wisconsin. Only three years older but far more worldly wise than Lomanitz, Weinberg was a graduate of City College, where he had also been a student activist. Like Rossi’s, Weinberg’s parents were Jews who had emigrated from Poland. Joe arrived on campus in spring 1939 with reportedly only the clothes on his back and a spare pair of shoes in a paper sack. By 1941, he was a teaching assistant in Oppenheimer’s undergraduate physics class.135
A friend to both men was David Bohm, who had graduated from Penn State in 1939 and shortly thereafter came west to work with Oppenheimer. After a frustrating year spent at Caltech, Bohm had followed Oppie north to Berkeley and, at his mentor’s instigation, joined the youthful group working at the lab.136
Unlike his fellows, Max Friedman arrived in Berkeley as a young man with means. Friedman had grown up in Los Angeles and graduated from UCLA. He drove a shiny new 1942 Pontiac dubbed “Lady Godiva,” one of the last made before the war shut down the production line. Despite his relative affluence, Friedman shared the political views of his peers. He subscribed to the Daily Worker and for a time was Lomanitz’s roommate at Barrington Hall. Like the other three, Friedman was a TA in the physics department when he was recruited to the Rab Lab by Oppenheimer in early 1942.137
Brought together by their common interest in physics and politics, the foursome—Lomanitz, Weinberg, Bohm, and Friedman—taught classes
