2023-08-06 04:19:58
Oppenheimer and several of his scientists in an atomic bomb test very close to Los Alamos, the city created to contain the Manhattan Project
It was a special place, something that never happened once more in history. Someone, in a very wrong calculation, believed that it would be a limited scientific facility, with half a dozen specialists, some technicians and a few soldiers to provide security. Soon enough, reality set in. They needed homes, highly complex laboratories (some of which have not yet been invented), supply sheds, schools, pantries, hospitals, a nursery, libraries, and even places for recreation. Near the end of World War II, four thousand scientists and two thousand soldiers lived.
Los Alamos was the city where the atomic bomb was designed and built, the headquarters of the Manhattan Project. A place that in less than two years went from being a lost school on the edge of an uninhabited canyon, to a small city where the most important military secret in history was kept.
It was an experience that has no parallel in contemporary history. A city that was created from nothing and in which the average age was 25 years. Never have so many (future) Nobel Prize winners lived together for so long. It must have been the greatest concentration of genius and IQ in history. It was also one of the places where secrecy, tension, persecution and dissatisfaction always hovered overhead, they had a physical and even overwhelming presence.
So unusual was the situation that in her memoirs of those two years at Los Alamos, Bernice Brode, wife of a physicist and who did technical work for the Manhattan Project, wrote: “We had no invalids, no in-laws, no unemployment, no idle rich, nor poor. It was a community very different from the others. Isolated and in a mad race to reach an objective: the creation of the atomic bomb.
When the United States launched the creation of the atomic bomb, it chose two leaders for the project. One military, Gen. Leslie Groves; the other, the chief scientist, Robert Oppenheimer, a man in his late 40s, wiry, focused, brilliant, mystifying, ambitious, and charismatic.
The first thing they had to determine was the place where they would work. Someone proposed New Mexico. It seemed like a good idea. It was secluded, they might work without being disturbed and especially without attracting attention, without being observed or discovered.
They went to visit Jemez Springs. They scrapped it. Oppenheimer proposed a nearby site, less than 60 kilometers from there. He knew the area very well. He had spent many years of his childhood and adolescence hiking and riding through the mountains and canyons. Upon arriving at Los Álamos, the military chief, General Groves agreed and they decided that they would settle there. They were more than 2,500 meters high, the accesses were not easy and they were surrounded by majestic mountains.
Before the definitive confirmation there were some doubts. The proposal to settle in a building at the University of Chicago gained traction. The arguments seemed consistent. Chicago was a city to which any of the potential candidates would move, the scientific facilities were impeccable, there were vast libraries, supplies would not be a problem, and it would be very easy to find the necessary operators and technicians: glassblowers, engineers, those who They fixed and manipulated the equipment.
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Robert Oppenheimer and Gen. Leslie Groves were the heads of the Manhattan Project. One was in charge of logistics and security; the other from the scientific part (Photo by Keystone/Getty Images)
But the argument of national security prevailed: the secret might not be leaked, nobody should know what was going on, what was the true purpose of the Manhattan Project.
Oppenheimer had to go out all over the United States to recruit the best scientists, among whom were, for example, Enrico Fermi and a very young Richard Feynman. There were few who agreed to move to the middle of nowhere. And much less alone. Oppenheimer had to fight another battle: to convince the authorities that if the physicists and chemists might not travel and settle with their families, they might not summon the best. Los Alamos, little by little, became a community.
Houses had to be built and services provided. The houses were very simple, frugal. The bachelors lived in barracks or in small rooms. Families had houses with two or three rooms. There were also more than two hundred caravans or motor homes. The furniture was the same for everyone. There were (almost) no telephones: communications were very limited. The telephone lines were very few and were in the office of the main directors. The correspondence was opened and reviewed. Nothing that happened there might leak out. They feared that someone would pass coded information to the Nazis or the Soviets. The perimeter of the place was closed with walls and barbed wire.
Richard Feynman, enfant terrible, in the spirit of having fun, maintained encrypted correspondence with his wife (who was admitted to a nearby hospital recovering from tuberculosis) with a false code invented by them, only to mislead the investigators who read each one of them. his letters. One followingnoon he discovered a hole in a wire fence and found a way to disturb. He would go out the front door, waving to the guards, and go through the hole. He repeated the operation several times until he drove the guards crazy, who asked the authorities to punish him.
The place was not luxurious; sometimes it wasn’t even comfortable. Isolation made everything worse. It was a spartan atmosphere. Sometimes, due to the distance, it took too long for some goods to arrive. Or due to restrictions in times of war there was no electricity or water. The food, at times, was not varied or of great quality. The best thing, many of those who lived there agree, was the beauty of the landscape, although in winter the snow made everything difficult.
The tasks to make the place work were many, as well as the necessary materials both to fulfill the scientific purpose and to ensure the development of daily life.
Those who knew him before assumed that Robert Oppenheimer did not have the skills to carry out such an undertaking. No one doubted his intelligence or his technical capacity, but leadership, empathy, and organization were needed that he had not demonstrated. He was too eccentric and unconcerned with the mundane.
In their extraordinary Pulitzer-winning biography, American Prometheus (Debate), Kai Bird and Edward Sherwin show how Oppenheimer’s transformation took place into a trusted and admired leader. Capable of worrying regarding a minimum technical detail or that the child of an employee has adequate medical care.
That metamorphosis included adapting to tight times, pressures (and not transferring them to their employees) and managing a huge budget (they had underestimated their estimates so much that they had calculated, during the first year, an investment of $300,000 that in the end became at 7 million dollars). He also had to deal with the intrusions of military power and the paranoia of Soviet infiltration.
It was a new situation for him and for any major scientist, the reverse of what they were used to. In their daily work they were almost never in a rush, rushed by deadlines even though their budget was always very low. In Los Alamos it was the other way around: time was tight, deadlines were tight, but the money and resources available to them were almost infinite.
American Prometheus is an exceptional biography that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize at the time and was the basis for the Christopher Nolan film
In a short time they had everything they needed. Laboratories, machinery, operators, libraries. The technical area came to have 37 buildings and even a plutonium purification plant.
Among the scientists who were summoned there were two positions. Some decided not to participate because they did not want the culmination of 300 years of physics to be a weapon of mass destruction. Oppenheimer expressed the other side: they had to develop a relevant military weapon to stop the Nazis.
The always latent fear was that the Nazis, who had begun research two years before the Americans, developed the atomic bomb before them. One of the plans that the Americans managed was to kidnap Heinsenberg, the brilliant physicist who headed the Nazi project (another alternative plan to the atomic bomb was proposed by Enrico Fermi: poison the Germans’ food with radioactive products and kill 500,000 in a short time). lapse).
Physicists worked all day. Oppenheimer decided that the laboratories would be open 24 hours a day. No one kept schedule. There were no clocks on the walls of the facility. The military despaired of not being able to keep track of who showed up and who didn’t, how long they worked, or even when they would arrive at the lab. It was not until the end of 1944, when thousands were already working, that Oppenheimer accepted that shifts be controlled.
The clash between men of science and the military were frequent. The martial mentality of the generals did not understand the free spirit of the scientists and their ways. At first, Oppenheimer, moved by patriotism and by the somewhat childish pride of wearing a uniform, wanted all scientists to wear military suits; he did it himself for a while. His colleagues refused and the idea was scrapped.
However, the real problem was the lack of freedom of the scientists and the permanent suspicions of being double agents, of someone passing information to the Soviets. The interrogations were constant, the correspondence was violated, they might not speak to anyone who did not live in Los Alamos. Another principle imposed by the military command was the compartmentalization of information: initially few physicists knew what the final project was. But the passionate conversations between them, the exchange of ideas and knowledge, were essential to advance. Without permission, they organized weekly conferences in which they updated themselves with the advances and provided solutions and raised technical objections. The most brilliant minds of their time locked up thinking regarding the same subject: what for others would have been an ideal situation was cause for consternation for the North American commanders. There were also problems because some left important papers on their work tables at the end of the day and that might be taken advantage of by a spy who transmitted the information.
Oppenheimer used to say that he wasn’t worried regarding letting people know what they were doing: it was too complex for one man to transmit (and also for the other side to understand). The real risk, he said, was in them knowing all the resources they were devoting and the quality of the physicists working with him. If that was known, anyone would have deduced that the matter was serious.
The situation was dual. On the one hand, the oppression of distance and isolation. On the other, the intellectual effervescence of that brotherhood of geniuses pushing the limits of science, almost forgetting all ethical discussions during the development of the bomb. Some later Nobel Prize winner wrote that in Los Alamos “he found the spirit of Athens, of Plato, of the ideal Republic.” He also defined it as a golden age.
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Kattie Oppenheimer and her two children at leisure, a few years following the atomic bomb was dropped. Oppenheimer’s wife suffered severe depression from the rigid and monotonous pace of life in Los Alamos (Getty)
It wasn’t all work. There was a cinema, theater performances in which they acted themselves and even a radio. On Saturdays there were parties with lots of drinks and dancing. Sundays were the days for excursions into the mountains, either on foot or on horseback. Every once in a while, every few weeks, they would go out in small groups to shop in Santa Fe, a nearby city.
Lois Hempelmann, a pioneer in radiology and one of the Los Alamos scientists, recounted in her memoirs: “At first, we all had a great time, but over time things got tense and people got tired, nervous and irritable, it wasn’t so much fun anymore. We did everything together. Coworkers were your party buddies. They invited you to eat and you didn’t feel like it, nor was there anything else to do. So if they went out, they saw your car at the door, the lights in the living room on. They knew you had stayed at home. Everything was known there.”
In the first year there were more than 80 births at Los Alamos. There wasn’t much to do. Groves, Bird and Sherwin say in Promoteo Americano, did not like this proliferation of babies and it was with the claim to Oppenheimer that he replied that among his various functions was not that of inspector of the birth rate.
Kitty, his wife, also became pregnant with a girl they named Katherine.
Several of the scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project. among them are Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller (Photo by Fox Photos/Getty Images)
Life in Los Alamos was difficult for women. Very few were hired as scientists. There were several who were dedicated to cooking, cleaning and workshop tasks. The wives of the scientists, many of them university students, had to settle for part-time positions (someone had to take care of the children) as assistants, secretaries, technicians or to record data. Loneliness, the lack of opportunities for growth, and even the lack of options for socializing and distraction took a toll on her spirits. Excess martinis, puerperium, boredom, and depression were the most common consequences.
Kitty, Oppenheimer’s wife, had a deep depression. She had to ask permission to leave Los Alamos a few months following giving birth to Katherine. He went to her mother’s. The baby was left in the care of a family that had recently lost a pregnancy. She was with them for months. Oppenheimer rarely visited her. One day he proposed that they adopt her. The woman refused, told her that the girl had two of her parents, that she might continue taking care of her, but that the girl needed her parents. Oppenheimer said that he felt she was a stranger, that he felt incapable of loving her. The woman argued that many parents build the bond with closeness, with coexistence. “I’m not one to create links,” Oppenheimer replied.
Currently in Los Álamos there is a highly complex laboratory. Until the end of the Cold War he devoted himself to the development of sophisticated and powerful weapons. In recent decades he has specialized in security, nanotechnology, space exploration, medicine, nuclear fusion, and renewable energy.
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