Los Alamos:Part 1

From Wikinfo

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is a United States Department of Energy (DOE) laboratory, managed by the University of California located in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The Laboratory is one of the largest multidisciplinary institutions in the world. It is the largest institution and the largest employer in northern New Mexico with approximately 6,800 University of California employees plus approximately 2,800 contractor personnel. The annual budget is approximately $1.2 billion.

Approximately one-third of the Laboratory's technical staff members are physicists, one-fourth are engineers, one-sixth are chemists and materials scientists, and the remainder work in mathematics and computational science, biological science, geoscience, and other disciplines. Professional scientists and students also come to Los Alamos as visitors to participate in scientific projects. The staff collaborates with universities and industry in both basic and applied research to develop resources for the future.

http://www.lanl.gov

The Los Alamos National Laboratory also hosts the ArXiv.org e-print archive.

In 2003, dissatisfaction with scandals at the laboratory led the Department of Energy to open its contract with the University of California to bids from other vendors. Names that have been mentioned among those interested in bidding for the laboratory include private contractors such as Lockheed-Martin and other universities such as the University of Texas.

History

The Laboratory was founded in the midst of World War II as part of what is now called the Manhattan Project to provide nuclear weapons to help end the war.

In September 1942, the difficulties involved with conducting preliminary studies on nuclear weapons at universities scattered throughout the country indicated the need for a laboratory dedicated solely to that purpose. The need for it, however, was overshadowed by the demand for plants to produce uranium-235 and plutonium -- the fissile materials that would provide the nuclear explosives.

The Manhattan District

In the summer of 1942, Col. Leslie Groves was deputy to the chief of construction for the Army Corps of Engineers and had overseen construction of The Pentagon, the world's largest office building. Hoping for an overseas command, Groves objected when he was appointed to take charge of the weapons project. His objections were overruled and Groves resigned himself to leading a project he thought had little chance of succeeding.

The first thing he did was rechristen the project "The Manhattan District." The name evolved from the Corps of Engineers practice of naming districts after its headquarters' city (Marshall's headquarters were in New York City). At the same time, Groves was promoted to brigadier general, which gave him the rank thought necessary to deal with the senior scientists in the project. Within a week of his appointment, Groves had solved the Manhattan Project's most urgent problems. This forceful and effective manner was soon to become all too familiar to the atomic scientists.

Theoretical work on a nuclear weapon was well advanced by September 1942, but a complete understanding of bomb design required the measurement of a number of experimental constants related to the behavior of fast neutrons in various materials. Experiments to make these measurements at private research institutes and academic laboratories were hampered by security and by the difficulty of coordinating work in widely scattered locations. A central weapons laboratory was needed.

Groves and the Manhattan Engineer District had taken charge of the construction of production plants (at Oak Ridge and Hanford), but no provision had been made for a laboratory for bomb design.

File:Einstein oppenheimer.jpg
Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer

Robert Oppenheimer and John Manley took the problem to the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD). The occasion was a meeting of its section charged with the development of nuclear weapons, the S-1 Committee, at Bohemian Grove in northern California. The host was Ernest Lawrence, director of the University of California Radiation Laboratory. As a result of that meeting, Arthur Compton of the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, who was in charge of plutonium and bomb design work, called another meeting in Chicago. He invited Edwin McMillan, the co-discoverer of the first transuranium elements, neptunium and plutonium.

McMillan, who had been sent by Lawrence to organize work at the Naval Underwater Sound Laboratory at Point Loma, California, had also helped Lawrence organize the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Radiation Laboratory. Although named after Lawrence's laboratory in California, the MIT lab was to develop radar. Lawrence also had recruited the director, Lee DuBridge, who came from the cyclotron laboratory at the University of Rochester. Apparently, Lawrence intended to recruit the director for the new design laboratory as well.

In Chicago on Sept. 19, McMillan met with Oppenheimer, Manley, Enrico Fermi, Lawrence and Compton to plan the new laboratory. They decided that equipment would be purchased, leased or borrowed to set up a fast-neutron laboratory in a remote location where they would move the theoretical and experimental studies Oppenheimer and Manley had been overseeing.

The selection of a director for the new laboratory was made by Groves. The idea for a new laboratory was presented to him early in October and he took charge of it. Because the scientific nature of the new laboratory would require civilian rather than military leadership, Groves was determined to select someone who had sufficient prestige. Most of all, he wanted a Nobel Prize winner, which he equated to a general in the army of scientists.

Oppenheimer, who had led the weapons theoretical design project for some months, was another possibility. Groves was impressed with the theorist when they met in October 1942. Oppenheimer had built a strong school of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, and at that time, it was thought that the new laboratory would be chiefly concerned with theory. Groves, however, found little enthusiasm for Oppenheimer among OSRD scientists. But because most other scientists of comparable stature were tied up in other war projects, no one could suggest a better choice.

The Military Policy Committee that governed the Manhattan District also was unable to suggest an alternative. So, after several weeks, Groves decided on Oppenheimer.

Picking a site

Groves began a search throughout the western United States for a laboratory where theoretical and experimental nuclear weapons research could be coordinated. They initially thought of placing the laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, because most of the plants to make uranium-235 were planned for a site Groves had just acquired there - or in Chicago, where Compton's Metallurgical Laboratory was located. But Groves believed that the project required a more remote site. It would need a climate that permitted year-round construction, safety from enemy attack, transportation and access to power, water and fuel. It would also have to provide an adequate testing ground and, for reasons of safety and security, should be in a sparsely populated area. Despite this last requirement, Groves also hoped that it would have sufficient buildings to house a small research staff.

After considering a site near Los Angeles, which he rejected on security grounds, and one near Reno, Nev., which he found unsuitable because of winter snows, Groves told Maj. John Dudley of the Manhattan District staff to survey the West for potential sites. Elaborating on his criteria, Groves specified that the site had to be at least 200 miles from any ocean or any international boundary and in a natural bowl ringed by hills that could help secure the site and contain any accidental explosions. Dudley searched parts of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico. His first choice for the laboratory site was Oak City, Utah. But problems with removing the existing population meant that Dudley recommended his second choice, the town of Jemez Springs, N.M.

Dudley's immediate superior, Marshall, approved the area for a site study, which was conducted by members of the Albuquerque Office of the Corps of Engineers. Oppenheimer and the OSRD scientists, however, needed to approve the site. On Nov. 16, Oppenheimer flew to Albuquerque, where he joined Groves, Edwin McMillan and Dudley. Dudley showed them Jemez Springs, the site he had selected for the new weapons design laboratory. Oppenheimer took one look at the site and told Groves that it would not do.

While Dudley had been told to look for a site enclosed by hills, Oppenheimer wanted an expansive setting. While Dudley wanted good access roads, Oppenheimer only wanted one adequate to haul two heavy howitzers (that would be used to test methods of assembling critical materials) to the site. McMillan thought that there would not be room enough in the narrow valley for the laboratory he and Oppenheimer wanted, and Groves disliked the site as well. Groves asked Oppenheimer if he had a better idea. Oppenheimer proposed Los Alamos. Dudley had visited Los Alamos but thought it was unsuitable because the water supply was inadequate. Although he was unhappy with Oppenheimer's suggestion, Dudley drove the trio to Los Alamos.

Groves liked Los Alamos immediately, he saw that access to the mesa could easily be controlled by shutting off the main entry road, and the road could be widened to accommodate trucks and heavy machinery. Canyons surrounding the site could be used for explosives tests. As Dudley warned, the water supply was marginal, but Groves thought it might do for the 450 scientists and technicians he believed would be needed. Although Los Alamos had been selected as the site of the laboratory that would design nuclear weapons for the Manhattan Engineer District (MED), it was not until December 2, 1942, that Enrico Fermi and his group at the metallurgical laboratory at the University of Chicago achieved an experimental demonstration of a chain reaction.

Construction Begins

The Los Alamos Ranch School closed on Feb. 8, 1943. By that time, digging and trenching on the site had already begun, because Oppenheimer was concerned that a delay in the start of construction, which permitted the final class to finish its curriculum for the year, would postpone completion of the design of the atomic bomb. The Army also acquired other land for the site. Ninety per cent of this land, 54,000 acres of semiarid forest and grazing land, was already controlled by the federal government and easily transferred to the Manhattan Project. The remaining 8,900 acres was purchased in five separate sections. The total cost for all private land was $414,971 or about $4 million in 1993 dollars.

By early December, the M.M. Sundt Construction Co. of Tucson, Ariz., had been engaged to build the buildings surrounding Ashley Pond that would house the Laboratory. Robert Oppenheimer, Edwin McMillan and John Manley had supplied specifications for the new buildings that would supplement the 54 Ranch School buildings. To the existing buildings were added barracks, a mess hall, officers' quarters, an administration building, a theater, an infirmary, as well as apartments, a bachelor dormitory, laboratory technical buildings and utilities for civilian scientists. These were built with great urgency, and the plans were changed constantly both during and after December 1942 as Oppenheimer visited the architect-engineers on a bi-weekly basis to refine the plans.

For the Albuquerque Corps of Engineers, the project became known as the "Buck Rogers Project," because no one had any idea what was going on, having been told that it was to be a "heavy bombardment range," a claim made patently false by the plans.

McMillan and Oppenheimer's fellow theorists at the University of California, and Hugh Bradner and Manley at the University of Chicago, planned the equipment for the new laboratory at Los Alamos. McMillan's office at UC became the center of the planning effort. McMillan ordered the machine tools, the electronic components and other equipment he thought appropriate for a major nuclear physics laboratory, based on his experience at UC's Radiation Laboratory. The largest items were the accelerators. Oppenheimer, McMillan and Manley decided that electrostatic generators (Van de Graaff accelerators), a Cockcroft-Walton machine and a good cyclotron would be required to carry on the experimental measurements that would be transferred to Los Alamos from scattered research sites across the country.

Manley selected the University of Illinois' Cockcroft-Walton accelerator and two Van de Graaff accelerators at the University of Wisconsin: the "long tank," a 22-foot-long machine that could produce energies of up to 2.6 million electron-volts, and the "short tank," a 17-foot-long.

The original technical complex included an administrative building (T Building), which also housed the theoretical physics group and was connected by a walkway to the chemistry and physics laboratories (U and Z buildings). There were separate laboratories for the Van de Graaff and Cockcroft-Walton accelerators at either end of the U and Z buildings and shops (V building), a cryogenic laboratory and the cyclotron (buildings Y and X).

Recruiting the Scientists

In early 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer had to recruit a scientific staff for a purpose he could not disclose, at a place he could not specify, for a period he could not predict. Adding to these ambiguities was that of the status of the staff - Leslie Groves wanted a military laboratory where scientists served in uniform, a stipulation to which Oppenheimer originally agreed. Most of the scientists who had been recruited to work on defense projects, however, worked for universities under contract to the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) and they were reluctant to don uniforms.

Another difficulty arose from the fact that many nuclear physicists had already been absorbed by the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which was developing radar from the British ideas; the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, which was working on ways of producing and purifying the new element plutonium that was expected to be one of the nuclear explosives; and Ernest Lawrence's electromagnetic uranium isotope separation project at the University of California Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley.

In an early recruiting effort, Oppenheimer drafted the team led by Robert Wilson at Princeton that had been working on an electromagnetic isotope separation scheme called the isotron. This team was under the direction of Henry Smyth, a physics professor at Princeton. Lawrence, convinced that his calutron electromagnetic separation system would be more successful, had closed down the project freeing the Princeton scientists for Los Alamos.

By January 1943, of the men Oppenheimer had approached, only Robert Bacher, a Cornell physicist on leave to the MIT Radiation Laboratory, had agreed to come. Bacher and I.I. Rabi, originally from Columbia but on loan to the MIT Radiation Laboratory where he was serving as deputy director, met with Oppenheimer, Edwin McMillan, a physics professor at UC working at the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, and Luis Alvarez, a physics professor at UC on loan to the MIT Radiation Laboratory, in the Biltmore Hotel in New York City on Jan. 30, 1943, to discuss the problem.

Rabi and the others agreed that the Laboratory must demilitarize if the project were to be successful. They argued that military control would lead to friction, loss of morale and "more important, that in any issue in which we were instructed by our military superiors, the whole Laboratory would be forced to follow their instructions, and thus in effect lose its scientific autonomy."

Oppenheimer believed that "the solidarity of the physicists is such, that if these conditions are not met, we will not only fail to have the men from MIT with us, but that many men who have already planned to join the new laboratory will reconsider their commitments."

Groves and Conant were faced with an impasse. Groves would not entirely relinquish Army control, but a compromise was reached: Oppenheimer could tell potential staff that Los Alamos "would be concerned with the development and final manufacture of an instrument of war," including "certain experimental studies in science, engineering and ordnance." However, "at a later date large-scale experiments involving difficult ordnance procedures and the handling of highly dangerous material" would be involved, and this would be a turning point. "During the first period, the laboratory will be on a strictly civilian basis," it was agreed. However, "when the second division of the work is entered upon, which will not be earlier than Jan. 1, 1944, the scientific and engineering staff will be composed of commissioned officers." The ultimate authority over the laboratory would be the Military Policy Committee, composed of Vannevar Bush, head of OSRD; Conant; Groves; Rear Adm. William Purnell of the Pentagon's Joint Committee on New Weapons and Equipment; and Gen. Wilhelm Styer, chief of staff of the Army's services of supply.

Groves would represent the committee at Los Alamos, but Oppenheimer was responsible to Conant as well, and placed in charge of all scientific work as well as "the maintenance of secrecy by the civilian personnel under his control." The compromise mollified the scientists.

Bacher agreed to come and head the Experimental Physics Division of the laboratory until the laboratory was militarized. Rabi refused to leave the Radiation Laboratory but served as a consultant to the Los Alamos laboratory. Bethe came to head the Theoretical Division. Delayed by his work at Chicago, Fermi did not arrive until 1944, when he became head of the new Fermi (F) Division.

Armed with a letter signed by Groves and Conant, Oppenheimer crisscrossed the country adding to his team. To Serber, McMillan and the Berkeley theorists were added Emilio Segre and J.W. Kennedy and their experimental groups from the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory. Felix Bloch and Hans Staub and their group came from Stanford; Marshall Holloway and his group from Purdue University; Victor Weisskopf from the University of Rochester; Donald Kerst from the University of Illinois; and E.A. Long from Columbia University. Conant expedited the transfer of Edward Teller, Robert Christy, Darol Froman and Alvin Graves from the Metallurgical Laboratory at Columbia. Government research laboratories also contributed key personnel: Seth Neddermeyer came from the National Bureau of Standards and D.R. Inglis came from the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen, Md. Among those recruited from private laboratories were Edward Condon from Westinghouse Research Laboratories, Cyril Stanley Smith from the National Research Council and Charles Critchfield from the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Despite these successes, of the 33 physicists Oppenheimer set out to recruit, only 15 came to Los Alamos. John van Vleck, could not be pried loose from Harvard, despite the fact that Conant was its president. Franz Kurie of the UC Radiation Laboratory was not released by Lawrence. Carl Anderson and Wolfgang Panofsky of the California Institute of Technology were among others who could not be recruited.

Some refused to remain at Los Alamos. Felix Bloch resigned to work on radar; E.U. Condon, who came to Los Alamos to serve as Oppenheimer's deputy, resigned in disagreement with Groves's compartmentalization policy. None of these recruits would put on a uniform at Los Alamos, and although soldiers would play a role in its work, the laboratory was never militarized. Groves never raised the issue of converting the Laboratory to a military organization again.

Continued at Los Alamos:Part 2