What had started out less than a year before as an experiment with the 37-inch was about to be scaled-up to an installation the size of several football fields in rural eastern Tennessee. Lawrence’s latest plan called for ganging a series of ninety-six 4-foot-square vacuum tanks together between the poles of individual electromagnets arranged in an oval “racetrack.” There would be two racetracks per building, each one consuming 100 times the electrical power used by the 184-inch. A total of twenty racetracks were thought necessary to reach the target 100-grams-a-day of enriched uranium. Lawrence called his machine the “Alpha Calutron,” hinting that he was thinking ahead to more efficient and even bigger versions. In fact, he was already at work on a modification dubbed “Alpha II.”34
When the Berkeley meeting wound up that afternoon, Lawrence and Oppenheimer drove the S-1 Committee and army representatives to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive men’s club located on the Russian River some 60 miles north of San Francisco. (Ernest had become a member through a social friend, Rowan Gaither, a wealthy attorney and financier in the city.)35 In discussions held at the rustic lodge nestled among giant redwoods, Ernest conceded that the Calutrons would eventually be surpassed by other separation methods that were less laborious and less costly. But, for the present, his electromagnetic process offered the only means of obtaining the uranium necessary for a bomb.36
* * *
A few days later, Army Lieutenant General Brehon Somervell picked a rotund forty-six-year-old colonel—the army’s deputy chief of construction—to head the newly created Manhattan Project.37 Having recently overseen construction of the Pentagon, Leslie Groves had been looking forward to an overseas billet when he was handed the post. As a consolation, Somervell granted Groves’s single request, promoting him to the rank of brigadier general.
Groves’s aide-de-camp was Kenneth Nichols, a lieutenant colonel in the corps with a Ph.D. in hydraulic engineering from the University of Iowa. Both men were West Point graduates; Nichols had been assigned to the bomb project in the spring. Twelve years earlier, Nichols had served under Groves in the same battalion in Nicaragua, where the corps was surveying sites for a new inter-ocean canal.38
In a meeting at OSRD headquarters near the end of the month, Bush warned Groves that security in the S-1 Project was lax, and that the University of California was a particular concern.39 He suggested that Groves get the details from John Lansdale. (Bush subsequently discovered that Groves had an agent following him around. “You take steps to see that it doesn’t happen again,” he scolded the general.)40
Hoping to limit knowledge of the bomb project to as few people as possible, Groves instructed Conant’s traveling gumshoe to create a special counterintelligence organization—what Lansdale later called “a box within a box”—that would operate outside G-2 and the army’s chain of command. For the purpose, Groves gave Lansdale a letter authorizing him to pick a single officer at each of the army’s defense commands throughout the country. That individual would report only to Lansdale, while Lansdale would report only to Groves.41 Armed with the letter, the new head of security for the Manhattan Project packed for another trip to the West Coast.
In the job barely two weeks, Groves was already a man in a hurry. He left his first meeting with the newly appointed Military Policy Committee to catch a southbound train for an inspection tour of Oak Ridge and other project sites.42
On October 8, 1942, Lawrence picked up Groves at the Naval Air Station in Alameda and drove him to the Rad Lab for a personal tour of the prototype Calutron, still under construction.43 In his own office at LeConte, Oppie briefed the general on the theoretical work done thus far on the Super.44 Oppenheimer also told Groves that the project needed a dedicated laboratory, located apart from the MED’s production facilities, for the scientists who would build the bomb.45
Groves had recently come to the same conclusion. In fact, he had already picked a name for the place: Site Y. Groves had come to Berkeley with the thought of asking Lawrence to head the new lab. But he now changed his mind.46 Ernest urged Groves to pick Ed McMillan for director. (Lawrence may even have told his brother-in-law that he had the job.)47 Groves had met the quiet, somewhat diffident McMillan the previous month at the Met Lab.48 Whatever impression McMillan had made then, Groves by the end of his Berkeley visit was considering Oppenheimer for the role.
A week later, Groves telephoned Oppie, asking that he join him in Chicago. On October 15, Oppenheimer crowded into a small compartment on the Twentieth Century Limited with Groves, Nichols, and a third army officer to discuss the new laboratory. As the train traveled east between Chicago and Detroit, Groves asked Oppenheimer to be the new lab’s director.
Lansdale had already alerted the general to the earlier problems in clearing Oppie, and Groves would later claim to have personally read Oppenheimer’s FBI file. Nothing he saw in the bureau’s dossier caused him to change his mind. To Groves, moreover, Oppenheimer’s difficulties with security probably seemed safely in the past.
Less than a month earlier, on September 20, the Investigations Division at the Presidio had closed its file on Oppenheimer after one of its agents interviewed Birge, who praised his colleague as “one of the two greatest World’s physicist-mathematicians.”49 As before, no final decision was made on Oppenheimer’s clearance, but the army recommended that he be kept under surveillance.
Before settling on Oppie, Groves had also asked others for their views. Ernest was reportedly amazed and upset that the army would choose a theoretician rather than an experimentalist for the job. “He couldn’t run a hamburger stand” was the summary assessment of another of Oppenheimer’s Berkeley colleagues.50 Compton, too, expressed reservations about Oppie’s administrative ability. “No one with whom I talked showed any great enthusiasm about Oppenheimer as a possible director,” Groves later wrote, with admirable understatement.
But the general was confident
