At an elevation of 7,200 feet, the mesa had a commanding vista of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east and was sufficiently isolated to satisfy Groves’s concern with security. Although Indian reservations surrounded the land, they were at a far enough remove to avoid interference from Ickes.
The army began negotiations to purchase the land less than a week later; the Ranch School had never fully recovered from the depression, and the owners were eager to sell. A headquarters office for the project was rented on East Palace Avenue in Santa Fe, thirty miles to the southeast. A week later, Oppenheimer and McMillan returned with Lawrence to show him the proposed location of the new laboratory. “Lawrence was pleased by the site, and so, again, were we,” Oppenheimer reported to Groves.61
Lawrence and McMillan also accompanied Oppenheimer on a cross-country recruiting drive for the new lab a few days later. In Washington, the three pressed Bush and Conant to release scientists from the government-funded laboratories at MIT and San Diego so that they could go to New Mexico.62
The remoteness of the site and Groves’s strict security restrictions imposed unique burdens upon the recruiters. Because the army wanted to protect the identity of scientists working at the lab, there would be neither banks nor a post office at Los Alamos. Except for occasional forays to Santa Fe and the nearby Indian ruins, residents remained essentially prisoners behind the wire. (Los Alamos, Teller would observe, “gave one a new appreciation of grass and strangers.”) But Oppenheimer found potential recruits worried less about the isolation and secrecy than about the army’s domination of the project.
Initially, Oppie had not questioned Groves’s decision to make the laboratory a military installation. Groves justified the move on the grounds that work at the lab would be inherently dangerous. (Unmentioned was the fact that such an arrangement also promised to make discipline easier—and would allow the general to court-martial anyone who violated his edicts.)
Early in 1943, Oppenheimer would even report to the Presidio for a physical examination, the first step toward receiving an army commission as a lieutenant colonel, the highest rank that Groves could obtain for a laboratory director. Groves instructed the officer who accompanied Oppie to advise the doctors that they were not to flunk the subject because of any physical or psychological infirmity. The examiners declared Oppenheimer eleven pounds underweight but otherwise fit for duty. Afterward, Oppie was measured for a uniform.63
However, avuncular advice from two senior physicists—Isidor Rabi, then at MIT’s Rad Lab, and Caltech’s Robert Bacher—persuaded Oppenheimer that he should insist upon “scientific autonomy” for Los Alamos. Reluctantly, Groves backed down.64 With the army willing to cede at least some authority to civilians, the pace of recruiting picked up.65
Oppie surprised all by submitting a detailed organization chart in mid-December 1942. The lab was to have four main components: Bethe would head the Theoretical, or “T,” Division. Bacher was in charge of Experimental Physics. Chemistry and Metallurgy would be in the hands of two men: Cyril Smith, a metallurgist then working for the NDRC in Washington, and Joseph Kennedy, the young Berkeley chemist who had predicted to Lansdale that no nation would have enough uranium to build a bomb during the war. The Ordnance Division, which would actually assemble the bomb, was to be headed by a navy captain, William “Deke” Parsons.66
John Manley, a University of Washington physicist originally assigned to help Oppenheimer at Chicago, became Oppie’s right-hand man for planning and staffing the New Mexico lab. Asked to calculate the total number of buildings that would be required, Manley had simply added up the space committed thus far to atomic research at universities around the country; he estimated that about two dozen scientists would need offices.67 Oppenheimer, looking ahead, ordered the buildings enlarged to allow for expansion and added a cryogenics laboratory to the blueprints, for research on the Super.68
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As late as the end of 1942, exactly who or what would administer Los Alamos for the army had yet to be decided. But Chicago’s Met Lab and the Rad Lab at MIT had established the precedent of university-run, federally funded laboratories for defense work in the wartime emergency. Oppenheimer suggested Caltech or Harvard as possible candidates to run the new lab in the desert.69
Groves, too, recognized, albeit grudgingly, that an affiliation with academe offered the best chance of attracting the “prima donnas” that he hoped would join the project. But New Mexico contained no university of a size or stature equal to the job, and Oppenheimer—nursing his own unspoken grievances—refused to make the case for his adopted alma mater.
Lawrence showed no such reticence. As Berkeley’s biggest booster, he had already begun urging Sproul and the university’s comptroller to bid on the army contract.70
The university’s representatives in these negotiations was Robert Underhill, a short, stocky, determined man with a salt-and-pepper crew-cut. Underhill would later describe his charter from Sproul as “to see to it that the University didn’t lose any money.”71 A 1915 graduate of Berkeley’s College of Commerce, Underhill had been an accountant at a paint company before joining the university. By 1933 he was secretary-treasurer to the regents. As deputy chairman of a university committee created on the eve of the war to handle secret defense contracts, Underhill knew better than to ask questions.
Even so, he hit a brick wall with Oppenheimer and Groves, who refused even to divulge the name of the state that the secret laboratory would be located in—saying only that it was in “the Rocky Mountain area.” (The general relented after Underhill explained that the university’s insurance carrier would refuse to write an indemnification policy without such information.)
Underhill found Oppenheimer similarly tight-lipped when
