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Although he was not part of the Scientific Panel, Edward Teller, too, was looking ahead to the future after the war.93 At Chicago, Teller’s friend and colleague Leo Szilard, recognizing that the Franck report had failed to make a dent upon the mind of official Washington, decided upon making his own last-minute appeal: a petition, addressed to the president, which urged that the atomic bomb not be used without warning against Japan.94 Szilard circulated his petition at the Met Lab and also sent copies to Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, where Teller brought the document to Oppenheimer’s attention. Oppie’s immediate response, Teller recalled, was that it was not the job of scientists to decide how the weapon was used.95
In a letter he wrote to Szilard, setting out his reasons for not signing the petition, Teller failed to mention Oppie’s argument, but instead implied that the efforts of his fellow Hungarian were too little, too late:
The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.… I should like to have the advice of all of you whether you think it is a crime to continue to work. But I feel that I should do the wrong thing if I tried to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we just helped it escape.96
As Teller alluded in his letter to Szilard, he was already at work on an even more fearsome weapon than the atomic bomb—the Super. For almost a year, Edward had been importuning Oppie and others to promise that they would remain at the lab until the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb had been decided, one way or the other. Teller himself had postponed a decision on whether to return to academe until he was sure of Oppenheimer’s answer.
In May, Teller had once more pestered the army to allow Maria Mayer to visit Los Alamos so that she might report in person on the progress of her opacity calculations. But Lansdale had denied the request.97 Oppenheimer finally brokered a compromise: Mayer could come to Los Alamos, but Teller had to keep her in the dark regarding opacity’s application to the Super.98
At Y-12, Lawrence’s boys were tipped off to the approaching end of the war by an urgent order from Washington, instructing them to shut down the Calutrons and ship all the uranium that could be collected from the receivers and the innards of the machines to Los Alamos.99 For the first time, the precious cargo was flown from Knoxville, Tennessee, to the tiny airport at Santa Fe. By then, every gram of the U-235 that would go into Little Boy had gone through Lawrence’s Calutrons at least once.100
A similar edict to Hanford signaled the impending test of the Fat Man device. Operators of the DuPont reactors at Hanford were also instructed to send the next shipment of “product” by air rather than overland.101 To Groves’s disappointment, problems with the molds for the explosive lenses had made it necessary to postpone the test of the implosion bomb; mid-July was now the expected date.102
Having finally embarked on a long-deferred vacation, Robert Underhill and his wife were just checking into Yosemite’s Awahnee Hotel when he received a priority telephone call at the reception desk from the army. The regents’ representative was on a train to Los Angeles the following day to sign a two-word amendment to Contract 36, approving the shipment of men “and materiel” to the Pacific. The change allowed the first bomb to be sent to Tinian, the island that would be the launching point for the atomic raids against Japan.103
In Berkeley on July 6, Lawrence received a cable from Oppenheimer at Clear Creek, the code name for telegrams originating in Los Alamos:
Any time after the 15th would be a good time for our fishing trip. Because we are not certain of the weather we may be delayed several days. As we do not have enough sleeping bags to go around we ask you please not to bring any friends with you. Let us know where in Albuquerque you can be reached.104
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Groves, Bush, and Conant flew west in the general’s C-47 five days later, for a last inspection of the laboratories and facilities that manufactured components of the bomb.105 The delegation arrived in Berkeley on the late afternoon of July 13, whereupon Lawrence took his guests out to dinner at Trader Vic’s. (The group ordered Ernest’s favorites: barbequed spareribs, fried rice, and several rounds of Mai Tais. Ernest paid the bill—$65.15—from the Loomis fund.)106
Later that evening, Ernest handed Groves a four-page letter that the general had requested at their previous meeting. It outlined Ernest’s postwar plans for the Rad Lab.107
From Oakland, Groves, Lawrence, and the rest of the entourage flew south to the Naval Ordnance Station at Inyokern in the California desert—where the explosive lenses for Fat Man were tested—and then on to Los Angeles, where the group visited Caltech. Arriving in Albuquerque on Sunday afternoon, July 15, Groves worried that spies might notice the number of world-renowned scientists gathering in the lobby of the Hilton hotel, and so ordered them dispersed to other lodgings.
Following dinner with Alvarez, in the early morning hours of Monday, July 16, Lawrence, Monsanto executive Charles Thomas, and New York Times reporter William Laurence crowded into an olive-drab Plymouth for the three-hour drive to Trinity site. Groves had made Laurence a kind of semiofficial chronicler of the bomb’s development.108
At Trinity, Ernest joined a clump of scientists gathering on Compania Hill, the VIP viewpoint located twenty miles northwest of the bomb on its tower. The
