Remarkably, neither Sproul nor Underhill had been told the purpose of the secret enterprise that they were being asked to run in the far-off desert.*73 When Berkeley’s business manager complained to Groves in January that he had yet to see “the scratch of a pen—one written word” on the subject, Groves asked Stimson to personally reassure Sproul as to the project’s importance.74 (Sproul drolly assured Conant, in reply, that he had “no doubt as to which project is first and foremost, even if I were not reminded frequently by its distinguished director.” But he was, Sproul protested, already doing everything he could for Ernest Lawrence: “Indeed, I have done enough so that there is some conflict in the minds of the faculty in general as to whether I am administering a University or a Radiation Laboratory.”)75
Spurred on by Lawrence, Sproul and Underhill agreed to take the leap into the void. On February 1, 1943, Sproul initialed a $150,000, six-month contract between the university and the government “for certain investigations to be directed by Dr. J. R. Oppenheimer.”76 The single-page document specified that details of the contract would be worked out later.77
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With plans for Oppenheimer’s desert laboratory in place, the other crucial part of the Manhattan Project—obtaining the fissionable material for the bomb—had hit a major snag near the end of 1942.
In November, a British scientist casually mentioned to Conant over lunch that naturally occurring impurities in plutonium might cause it to fission spontaneously, making it unusable in a weapon. Seaborg had, in fact, pointed out this very problem to Oppenheimer weeks earlier. But it came as sudden and unexpected news to Conant and Groves.
Most worrisome of all was the fact that the warning had come from a British scientist. Groves feared that Lawrence’s optimism might have subtly infected the entire U.S. project, causing other potentially fatal flaws to be overlooked. The fact that Fermi was building the world’s first nuclear reactor in a heavily populated part of Chicago undoubtedly added to this concern.78
Lingering doubts and a pessimistic report by DuPont—the contractor chosen to build the plutonium production reactors at Hanford, in Washington State—prompted Groves to order a reappraisal of the entire S-1 Project that fall. He and Conant picked a five-man committee, chaired by MIT chemical engineer Warren Lewis, to review the status of Urey’s gaseous diffusion project at Columbia, Lawrence’s Calutrons, and Fermi’s atomic pile. Lewis’s committee arrived in Berkeley for an inspection visit on November 28.
Lawrence worried most about the reaction of DuPont’s representative on the panel, engineer Crawford Greenewalt. Since “Greenie” was the man responsible for the negative report on Hanford, Ernest was eager to make a good impression.79
Lawrence had long since abandoned taking lab visitors to DiBiasi’s, the cheap Italian eatery in Albany, in favor of Trader Vic’s, an ersatz-Polynesian restaurant in downtown Oakland whose owner had become a friend.80 “Vics” was famous for its Mai Tais—potent rum drinks served in tall glasses topped by paper umbrellas. Ernest’s favorite table was on a raised platform near the bar, underneath a painting of a hula dancer. Dinner that night for the Lewis Committee followed a full-day tour of the Rad Lab and its one-sixteenth-scale model of a production Alpha Calutron. But Lawrence’s hospitality failed to make a dent with Greenewalt, who showed a flinty indifference to Ernest’s trademark bonhomie.
What bothered Greenewalt most was Lawrence’s incessant talk about future plans for even bigger machines. Greenewalt glimpsed in the prototype Calutron the “mess of machinery” that Conant feared, but without results. Oppenheimer, tagging along on the tour, had tried at one point to rein-in Lawrence’s jaunty enthusiasm. “So as a result of Oppenheimer holding Lawrence down, we finally got a view of what they had actually done,” Greenewalt wrote in his diary that night.81 The poker-faced engineer and the rest of Lewis’s committee returned to Chicago in time to witness the successful start-up of Fermi’s atomic pile.
Lewis submitted his report to the Military Policy Committee in early December. He recommended giving priority to gaseous diffusion and Fermi’s plutonium-producing reactor. But the report cast a baleful eye upon electromagnetic separation, and Lewis dismissed Lawrence’s Calutrons as unlikely to produce enough U-235 in time to be useful in the war.82
Conant and Groves simply ignored Lewis’s advice. On December 10, 1942, the Military Policy Committee approved plans to build Lawrence’s proposed 100-gram-a-day separation facility.
At Berkeley, the atomic bomb project had meanwhile outgrown Donner Laboratory, so Lawrence and his Rad Lab colleagues moved into the New Classroom Building nearby.83 A campus policeman was stationed at the door, and Ernest’s red leather chair was ceremoniously transferred from LeConte library to his new office on the second floor. Two days before Christmas, Lawrence presided over a first meeting with Groves and contractor representatives concerning construction of a planned 500-tank Alpha Calutron at Y-12, the army’s code name for the electromagnetic separation plant in Tennessee’s Bear Creek Valley.84
The Alpha Calutron design was frozen at year’s end. Groves notified Stone and Webster that he expected the inaugural racetrack to be operating by the summer. The army had recently picked Tennessee Eastman Corporation to run the production plant, and employees of the company were already beginning to arrive in Bear Valley. Wallace Reynolds, the Rad Lab’s business manager, opened one office at Oak Ridge and another near the contractor’s headquarters in Boston to coordinate work on the Calutrons. In mid-February 1943, Stone and Webster broke ground for the first racetrack before the construction drawings had even been approved.85
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On March 16, Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer left Berkeley for Santa Fe by train, bound for Los Alamos. Their son, Peter, a toddler not yet two, would follow with his nurse a few days later. In the weeks before, Oppenheimer had been saying his
