Oppie said that he had only learned for certain that Weinberg and Lomanitz were party members during his last trip to Berkeley. When Lansdale mentioned the name Haakon Chevalier, Oppenheimer responded that he would not be surprised if Chevalier were a member of the party, since he was “quite a Red.”
After two hours, the only additional names that Oppenheimer had offered Lansdale were those of Charlotte Serber—whom Oppie had previously identified as probably a Communist during the train ride with Groves—and Hannah Peters, a friend of Jean Tatlock’s and the wife of Bernard Peters, a Rad Lab physicist who had served on FAECT’s executive committee. Both women were already on Lansdale’s list.
There the investigation languished for almost two months. Lansdale told the FBI in late October that he believed Oppenheimer was telling the truth when he denied ever being a member of the Communist Party. He also thought Oppie sincere in his claim that he would not permit Communists to interfere with the bomb project.62 In private, however, Lansdale continued to pore over transcripts of Oppenheimer’s telephone calls between Berkeley and Los Alamos, hoping that the intermediary and his contacts might thereby be revealed.63
On his own, Pash began assembling a list of candidates for the unnamed professor.64 When one of the suspects on Pash’s list slipped his army shadow and boarded the Southern Pacific’s Daylight unescorted, Pash ordered the train stopped between San Francisco and Los Angeles, so that the agent—borrowing an army airplane—could catch up with his quarry. The outraged railroad lodged a formal protest with the Presidio.
On Thanksgiving Day 1943, Groves gave Pash a new assignment overseas, thereby removing the man who had been a persistent thorn in his side concerning Oppenheimer.65 Groves made Pash head of Project Alsos, a plan to gather scientific intelligence on the German bomb in countries occupied by the Nazis.66
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On Saturday, November 13, 1943, current flowed to the Alpha racetrack for the first time. Although tests had hinted that some problems remained with the Calutrons, Lawrence and Groves were nonplussed when multiple failures forced the shutdown of the machine almost immediately.67 The magnetic field had been so unexpectedly strong that it pulled vacuum tanks from their fittings and pipes from the walls. No sooner were the vacuum tanks secured than magnet coils shorted out because of water in the oil used to cool them. Not a single source produced a beam; not a speck of U-235 arrived at the receivers.
Groves’s reaction was surprisingly stoic. Believing that part of the problem with the Calutrons lay in incessant design changes, he ordered Rad Lab engineers to abandon any improvements that could not be put into effect before the end of 1944.68 Lawrence was characteristically optimistic, predicting that the technical problems would be solved quickly and the Calutrons soon producing U-235 at maximum capacity.
Ten days later, however, the Tennessee Eastman representative in Oak Ridge telephoned Berkeley with more bad news: the electrical, vacuum, and cooling systems for the Alpha racetracks had all developed problems.69 Work on the Calutrons came to a virtual halt, pending Lawrence’s visit at the end of the month.
Ernest arrived to discover that mere enthusiasm could do little to salvage the situation at Y-12—where the racetracks had been shut down by faulty welds, electrical shorts, and incompetent technicians.70 Unable to suggest a quick remedy, he left by train for a meeting of laboratory directors in Chicago.
Suffering painful muscle spasms in his back and a lingering sinus infection, Lawrence checked into the city’s Stevens Hotel. After first attending the lab directors’ meeting—he was carried into the room seated in a chair, rigid and grimacing—he telegraphed his brother for medical advice. A former Harvard classmate of John’s arranged for him to be admitted to the University of Chicago’s Billings Hospital.71
Stopping by the hospital on his way to Los Alamos from Boston, Luis Alvarez was shocked to find Lawrence prostrate and in poor spirits. Alvarez thought exhaustion and depression, not physical pain, the real cause of Ernest’s condition.72 Oppenheimer and Arthur Compton, also hoping to see Lawrence, were turned away by worried doctors. When treatments at the hospital failed to provide the expected relief, Ernest decided to go home to Berkeley rather than return to Tennessee.73
By mid-December, Lawrence was once again running the Coordinating Committee meetings, his back as well as his spirits recovered. Gradually, the problems with the Calutrons began to be solved. Stone and Webster installed filters to take moisture out of the transformer oil. Westinghouse announced that it had ironed out the kinks in the vacuum system. Allis-Chalmers agreed to remanufacture magnet coils that had shorted out because of insufficient space between the windings. Groves brought in a former civilian contractor to replace the army officer in charge of construction at the site.74
It was, nonetheless, clear to all that Eastman’s original plan to run Y-12 without help from the Rad Lab was no longer realistic. Lawrence launched a frenetic effort to recruit workers from the lab to go to Oak Ridge. Old-time cyclotroneers as well as new arrivals came to dread Ernest’s cheerful query, “How would you like to go to Tennessee?”75
On New Year’s Eve, Lawrence telephoned Oak Ridge. “All the boys that you would like to have are coming,” he promised the Eastman representative.76 The first contingent of nearly 100 recruits would begin arriving in a few days. Ernest delayed his own departure until mid-January, to coincide with the scheduled start-up of the second Alpha racetrack. After chairing one final meeting of the Coordinating Committee in Berkeley, Ernest announced that the group was being disbanded. It would be reorganized and hold its next meeting in Tennessee.
* * *
Even with Pash gone, the case of the mysterious professor and of his three still-anonymous contacts continued to prey on Groves, who had been recently reminded by Lansdale of Oppenheimer’s promise from the summer.
In
