The Age of Radiance (23 page)

In July 1940, the army asked the FBI for its opinion on whether Einstein should receive a security clearance. J. Edgar Hoover replied with a collection of incorrect information, scurrilous letters, and half-truths that concluded the physicist was an “extreme radical” who had written for Communist journals. The navy cleared Einstein anyway, but the army would not. He was not asked to join the Manhattan Project, not officially told of it, and as a devout pacifist had no interest in being involved in any case. However, when Harold Urey’s gaseous diffusion producing uranium-235 at Columbia ran into trouble, Bush asked for Einstein’s help, and he worked up a chemical process he would recommend. Any more involvement, though, would require a security clearance, and Bush knew enough not even to ask. Security would continue to be a menace throughout the history of the Manhattan Project, and the great irony in all this was summed up by biographer William Lanouette: “The only secrets worth protecting were in the minds of the very scientists the authorities wanted to exclude.”

As the federal government was now supporting Fermi and Szilard, the
army had them investigated to see if they were loyal enough to work on defense projects. Intelligence officers reported that Fermi was
“undoubtedly a Fascist” and Szilard “very pro-German, and to have remarked on many occasions that he thinks the Germans will win the war,” and concluded for each, “Employment of this person on secret work is not recommended.” On August 22, the War Department forwarded a copy to J. Edgar Hoover, asking that the FBI “verify their loyalty to the United States.” Neither department could uncover any real anti-American evidence, though, so the two physicists were allowed to keep working, for the time being.

Enrico, Laura, the children, and their maid then left the King’s Crown for an apartment on Riverside and 116th Street, with Laura’s fears about a cultural chasm seemingly confirmed daily. Nella barely got into Horace Mann School after failing a question on the entry intelligence test about skunks since, in Europe, there are no skunks. Laura had terrible difficulties with her English—every time she tried to buy something over the phone, something else arrived instead—and the other Italians she met in New York came from Naples or Sicily, with dialects so different from Rome’s that they were incomprehensible.

Enrico did not believe in renting, but no houses or apartments were for sale near Columbia. During a visit with Harold Urey in Leonia, New Jersey, Urey—the chemistry laureate who would engineer one of America’s “atomic secrets,” a breakthrough in separating fissionable uranium-235 to fuel the Manhattan Project’s nuclear weapons—couldn’t stop praising the wonders of the Palisades. Four months later, Fermi bought a house nearby, with a big yard and a pond for the kids, and a wet basement. He had repeatedly told Laura how he couldn’t wait for the chance to return to tending the soil, the work of his forefathers, but apparently this yearning did not include the horticulture of New Jersey—when Laura asked Harold to come help her get rid of her crabgrass, he told her there was a problem, as her entire lawn was crabgrass. Enrico did fall madly in love with American gadgets, so much so that, for her first New Jersey Christmas, Laura got from her husband a garbage can whose lid raised with a foot lever. She never forgot the thoughtfulness of that gift.

After decades of being a physicist’s wife, Laura decided that Enrico was unusual among his peers as he
“oscillated between theoretical and experimental physics, conveniently adapting to changing needs. Whenever there seems to be no chance for an interesting experiment, Enrico withdraws to his office and fills sheet upon sheet with calculations. . . . But as soon as he gets an idea for a piece of experimental research or whenever a new
apparatus is being devised and completed, he lets his paper become covered with dust and spends all his time in the laboratory.” Graduate student Leona Woods remembered a favorite Fermi bit of humor:
“He frequently said, he was amazed when he thought how modest he was.”

In July 1941, Fermi and Walter Zinn begin experimenting with materials to slow down the neutrons and produce enough fission to start a chain reaction, the factor known as k. If k > 1, uranium’s neutrons will keep splitting nuclei, producing more free-ranging neutrons, and a chain reaction will sustain; if k < 1, it will not. For civilians, that atomic power and thermonuclear bombs are based on k > 1 is Greek . . . but not knowing the mathematics of physics means we are deaf to the real music of the spheres.

With the navy-supplied thirty tons of graphite and uranium finally at hand, Fermi had to figure out how to engineer chain-reaction test runs at Schermerhorn Hall. These first experiments included the sprinting technique refined in Rome. Herb Anderson:
“Cartons of carefully wrapped graphite bricks began to arrive at the Pupin laboratory until 1
¹
/
₂
tons had come, enough for the experiment. . . . We stacked the graphite bricks into a neat pile. We cut narrow slots in some of the bricks for the rhodium foil detection we wanted to insert, and soon we were ready to make measurements. The radioactivity induced in rhodium by slow neutrons has a quite short half-life, 44 seconds. The Geiger counter had to be separated from the neutron source and was installed in Fermi’s office some distance down the hall from the room with the graphite pile. . . . To get the rhodium foil under the Geiger counter in the allotted 20 seconds took coordination and some fast legwork. The division of labor was typical. I removed the source on signal; Fermi, stopwatch in hand, grabbed the rhodium and raced down the hall at top speed. He had just enough time to place the foil carefully into position, close the lead shield and, at the prescribed moment, start the count.”

Enrico Fermi:
“Physicists on the seventh floor of Pupin laboratories started looking like coal miners and the wives to whom these physicists came back tired at night were wondering what was happening. . . . What was happening was that in those days we were trying to learn something about the absorption properties of graphite, because perhaps graphite was no good. So, we built columns of graphite, maybe 4 feet on the side or something like that, maybe 10 feet high. It was the first time an apparatus in physics, and these graphite columns were apparatus, was so big you could climb on top of it—and you had to climb on top of it. Well, cyclotrons were the same way too, but anyway that was the first time when I started climbing on top of my
equipment because it was just too tall—I’m not a tall man. . . . Graphite is a black substance, as you probably know. So is uranium oxide. And to handle many tons of both make people very black. In fact it requires even strong people. And so, well, we were reasonably strong, but I mean we were, after all, thinkers. So Dean Pegram again looked around and said that seems to be a job a little beyond your feeble strength, but there is a football squad at Columbia that contains a dozen or so of very husky boys who take jobs by the hour just to carry them through college. Why don’t you hire them? And it was a marvelous idea; it was really a pleasure for once to direct the work of these husky boys, canning uranium—just shoving it in—handling packs of 50 or 100 pounds with the same ease as another person would’ve handled 3 or 4 pounds. In passing these cans fumes of all sorts of colors, mostly black, would go in the air.” Physicist Jay Orear: “The workers by the end of the day turned from white to black. There is a scene of Fermi wearing goggles and stripped to the waist machining a block of graphite and creating a black cloud that rises up and hits him in the face. It was typical of Fermi to participate in all phases of an experiment—even the dirty parts. It is easy to understand why his machinists especially praised him.”

After a lunch in September of 1941, Fermi offhandedly told Edward Teller that he wasn’t sure why the Americans had chosen to pursue fission bombs, since the temperatures of an atomic bomb might be over 400 million degrees C, meaning it could fuse hydrogen with helium—the same process that creates starlight. If that proved to be correct, a bomb made from fusion would be three times stronger than a fission device, but much, much cheaper to produce. Teller was so inspired by this offhand, innocuous comment that he spent the ensuing decades trying to design what he called “the Super”—a thermonuclear fusion weapon, the hydrogen bomb.

After sending a memo to the president in November 1941 that
“within a few years the use of bombs such as described here, or something similar using uranium fission, may determine military superiority. Adequate care for our national defense seems to demand urgent development of this program,” Bush’s team decided that “urgent development” meant a two-to-three-year program at a cost of $133 million. But at the first meeting to plan a nuclear future in Schenectady, the science was so new that the attending physicists couldn’t give a sincere estimate of either time or cost (when German physicists did something similar in a meeting with Nazi military chiefs, the generals judged them too incompetent to be trusted). As the atomic project’s finances then mushroomed into the heavens, Bush discovered that he could no longer sneak the money through the War Department’s “discretionary”
account. The only Pentagon department with a flexible enough financial structure and a grand enough budget to support what would in time be called the Manhattan Project was the Army Corps of Engineers.

By December 1941, Szilard and Anderson had found seven possible sites for the first nuclear reactor—which they code-named “the egg boiling experiment”—including a Yonkers golf course, and a New Jersey hangar for blimps. That same month, physicist Arthur Holly Compton, who’d won his Nobel for studying the scattering of X-rays’ radiant energy by free electrons, was named director of American nuclear research—under Conant, who was in turn under Bush—and he consolidated the various efforts at Princeton, Berkeley, and Columbia into one department at his own University of Chicago. In line with American thinking that dreary names are good for security—think Manhattan Engineer District versus the Virus House—Compton named his uranium program the Metallurgical Laboratory, or Met Lab. The one secret Laura Fermi knew about her husband’s new employer was that no metallurgists were working at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory.

Physicist Isabella Karle remembered the dangers of the Met Lab’s soda dispenser,
“a style of machine that dropped a paper cup, which was then filled with carbonated water and Coca-Cola syrup. The man who came to service the machine at our lunch time forgot to bring his hose for filling the syrup reservoir. He walked into the neighboring laboratory where wet chemistry was being performed and borrowed a rubber hose from an aspirator, filled the reservoir with the syrup, returned the hose and left. Some time after lunch a technician was carrying an alpha counter and noticed the meter went off the scale as he passed by the Coke machine. By the next day, the Coke machine was replaced with one that dispensed bottles rather than liquids. We never did know how many, if any, employees drank the radioactive Coca-Cola.”

By now, the dangers of Röntgen rays had been known for nearly forty years, but radioactive science remained as perilous as it was for the Curies. George Cowan:
“My supervisor at the Met Lab was Herbert Anderson, Fermi’s right-hand man. He required a neutron source to measure reactivity of the Fermi pile. Neutron sources were usually made with a mixture of radium and beryllium. The alpha particles emitted by radium hit the beryllium and made neutrons. The sources were prepared by drying a solution of radium on beryllium metal powder and sealing the mixture in a leak-proof brass capsule. I was coached on what to do and sent to New York carrying
beryllium powder, a brass capsule, and a gamma survey meter to make sure that once the capsule was soldered shut, it didn’t leak radioactive radon. We didn’t know it at the time, but the danger posed by the beryllium was greater than the potential damage from radiation. Herb Anderson eventually died of berylliosis, a lung disease caused by breathing beryllium or beryllium oxide. I traveled by train to New York and took a cab to a big building on Sixth Avenue that housed the offices of Radium Chemical Company. I brought a portable survey meter with me that measured gamma radiation. It started to register when I entered the building. It went berserk when I checked out the primitive chemical hood I was directed to use to make the neutron source. Out of a mixture of curiosity and alarm I took the elevator to the rooftop. Air from the hood was discharged there. Even by the low standards we used at that time, the roof was unacceptably radioactive. I spent two days at the Radium Chemical Company making and checking the neutron source. I was anxious to leave as soon as possible. I later found that the owners of the company operated under a different name in New Jersey, where they employed young women to paint luminous watch dials with radium loaded brushes which they tipped with their mouths.” In 1989, the Environmental Protection Agency inspected the abandoned Radium Chemical Company’s site in New York City and discovered radiation levels so high that in the most contaminated parts of the building a person could exceed the yearly occupational exposure limit after only one hour.

Another Chicago Met Lab employee was Leo Szilard, who had the title of chief physicist and an annual salary of $6,600. Before, Leo had consorted with Albert Einstein to get this whole megillah going; now, he was just another worker-bee scientist given a series of assignments. Szilard was hardly the kind of employee bosses adore—in years to come, he would develop a serious enemy in Brigadier General Leslie Groves—but beyond his distinct lack of social graces, he did himself no favors with higher-ups when he started politically organizing his colleagues as early as September 21, 1942, with a startling series of brilliant premonitions. This was the birth of Szilard’s antinuclear activism, which he would pursue for the rest of his life, even though, if anyone birthed the Atomic Age, it was Szilard:

These lines are primarily addressed to those with whom I have shared for years the knowledge that it is within our power to construct atomic bombs. What the existence of these bombs will mean we all know. It will bring disaster upon the world if the Germans are ready before we
are. It may bring disaster upon the world even if we anticipate them and win the war, but lose the peace that will follow.