Los Alamos:Part 2

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Continued from Los Alamos:Part 1, see also Los Alamos:Part 3 and Los Alamos:Part 4

"Here's your damned organization chart"

The early arrivals were accommodated at the Big House. In March 1943, the new Manhattan Engineer District (MED) Laboratory created to design nuclear weapons was under construction near Ashley Pond in Los Alamos. Robert Oppenheimer had assembled the beginnings of a staff for the Laboratory.

Early that same month, Oppenheimer drove to Santa Fe from Berkeley. His principal theoretical assistant, Serber, followed a couple of days later. The housing wasn't ready, so the Army had rented a couple of ranches down in the valley, and most of the people stayed there.

Oppenheimer had to write out passes on ordinary stationery to get his staff past the construction site guards (only one Army lieutenant staffed the security office and the badges that would become ubiquitous were not yet available) and organize his administrative offices.

"Project Y," the code name for Los Alamos military headquarters, had been set up in the Bishop Building on East Palace Avenue in Santa Fe on Jan. 4, and an office had been provided for Oppenheimer in another Santa Fe building soon thereafter. Col. J.M. Harman, the military commander at Los Alamos, arrived on Jan. 16 and, with a staff of six officers, a few civilian experts, and Women's Army Corps secretaries and switchboard operators, planned to provide for the technical personnel. Their work, however, was left up to Oppenheimer.

Oppenheimer had neither the taste nor the inclination for organization. Manley said he had "bugged Oppie for I don't know how many months about an organization chart � who was going to be responsible for this and who was going to be responsible for that." Arriving at Oppenheimer's office in LeConte Hall, Manley found that Condon had finally persuaded Oppenheimer that it was necessary. "Here's your damned organization chart!" Oppenheimer exclaimed, throwing a piece of paper at Manley.

Oppenheimer assumed that he would head the theoretical division at Los Alamos as well as directing the Laboratory. Columbia's I.I. Rabi, convinced him that this would not do. Bacher, tapped by Oppenheimer to head the experimental physics division, also argued that Oppenheimer could not perform both jobs. Oppenheimer gave in and appointed Bethe to head the division.

Oppenheimer's estimate that only about 100 scientific staff would be required proved far too conservative. Still, there were only a score of research scientists in the first contingent that arrived in the middle of March.

The adaptation to New Mexico life was hard for both the staff and their families. Because they lived on ranches around Santa Fe, Laboratory families were often without adequate cooking and other facilities while they awaited completion of housing. The transportation to Los Alamos was haphazard. The road was poor and there were too few cars, none of which were in good condition. Eating facilities at the site were not yet in operation and box lunches had to be sent from Santa Fe. It was winter and sandwiches were not viewed with enthusiasm. The car that carried the lunches was inclined to break down. the working day was thus irregular and short, and night work impossible.

The hardships of these early pioneers at Los Alamos were only beginning. Working in a half-built laboratory, they faced the challenge of designing a weapon with nuclear materials yet to be made. The estimates of the amount of uranium-235 that would be required doubled about this time, which meant that the electromagnetic separation facilities planned for Oak Ridge would have to work nearly two months longer than had been planned.

Although the Los Alamos Ranch School in New Mexico provided some housing and office facilities, the new Los Alamos Laboratory required a whole new set of technical buildings as well as barracks, family housing and office space. And although Manhattan Engineer District commander Gen. Leslie Groves found the site ideal from the security point of view and the scientific director, J. Robert Oppenheimer of the University of California, Berkeley, found it idyllic as a retreat for scientists, those who had to build the Laboratory had great difficulty.

Located several thousand feet above the Rio Grande valley, far from sources of labor and construction materials, 40 miles from the nearest railroad, accessible only by inadequate roads, with insufficient water, no natural gas and a limited electrical supply, Los Alamos presented a real challenge to those who had to make the soldiers' and scientists' plans a reality.

The MED's site report, written in November 1942, predicted most of the problems. It was ignored, in the interests of time. Less than a week after it was written, Groves ordered the construction of barracks, a mess hall, officers' quarters, laboratory administration and technical buildings, a theater, an infirmary, apartments, utilities, streets and fencing. Some $26 million was spent on construction in Los Alamos during the war, approximately $200 million in today's dollars. Without a doubt, it would have been cheaper to build in almost any other location.

In January 1943, the estimated population of Los Alamos had risen to 1,500. By January 1944, it reached 3,500, and a year later it reached 5,700. Each new influx of personnel led to a new spate of construction. In the first phase, before the opening of the Laboratory in April 1943, the Sundt Co. of Tucson, Ariz., had built or remodeled 100 buildings. Sundt was selected by Col. Lyle Rosenberg, the Albuquerque district engineer for the Corps of Engineers, because it was well equipped to handle the task and had just completed Camp Luna at Las Vegas, N.M., and was free to take on the job. Because Sundt had its own plumbing, electrical, painting and transportation departments, security was more easily assured.

Construction began on Dec. 6 and was scheduled to be finished on March 15, 1943. Groves wanted 20 percent of the housing ready by Jan. 2, and the technical buildings ready by Feb. 1. Within two months, Sundt completed 54 percent of the construction.

Although they were quickly built, the Sundt houses were neither high quality or inexpensive. Col. John Dudley, who supervised the early construction for Groves, answered the question of "why did we put those horrible houses there?" this way: "An act of Congress had established a civilian housing agency that set up standards for housing in the United States to be built during the war years. It specified what would go on the inside. For instance, it specified showers, no bathtubs.' The manufacturers of bathtubs in the United States had ceased manufacturing bathtubs about 1942. So even if you tried to get them, they were hard to find." Those scientists and officers fortunate enough to be housed in the Ranch School buildings had the only such facilities in town; hence the name, "Bathtub Row."

Building a modern scientific laboratory presented greater problems. By the time the first scientists arrived on March 15, 3,000 construction workers had been at work for three months and had almost completed the administration building, five laboratories, a machine shop, a warehouse and a barracks. The work was far from perfect, and the morale of the workers, who had been building for three months without any idea of what they were working on, was low. They did not welcome the scientists/critics with enthusiasm.

During the first week of April 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer and the first staff members to arrive at Los Alamos set up experimental equipment, organized their work areas and moved into the newly completed and, in many cases, uncompleted facilities in the technical area. In the midst of these arrangements, Oppenheimer's assistant, Robert Serber, delivered a series of lectures summarizing what was then known about the design of nuclear weapons. This information included not only the early work that had been done at the University of California by theorists assigned to the electromagnetic separation project led by Ernest O. Lawrence in the Radiation Laboratory, but also the results of the work of a June 1942 conference held in Berkeley. At this conference, Oppenheimer, Serber, Hans Bethe from Cornell University's physics department, John Van Vleck from the University of Wisconsin's physics department, Edward Teller who was on leave from Washington University to the University of Chicago's metallurgical laboratory, Felix Bloch from Stanford University's physics department, Richard Tolman, the California Institute of Technology's dean of physical sciences, and Emil Konopinski from the University of Chicago had discussed the work of British and American theorists and the possibility of a "super" bomb conceived by Teller and Enrico Fermi.

During the nine months that elapsed between the summer conference at Berkeley and the opening of the laboratory, both theoretical and experimental work had gone forward at a variety of academic and non-profit laboratories, and it was to summarize the results of this work that Serber conducted his lectures. Serber made his summaries as terse as possible. At the end of each day, he met with Edward Condon, whom Oppenheimer had brought from the Westinghouse Research Laboratories to serve as associate director of the Laboratory, to write up the lectures and supplement them. The ultimate result was LA-1, "The Los Alamos Primer.

"It was not easy to lecture about the fundamentals of nuclear weapons design in a laboratory still under construction, with carpenters and plumbers in the immediate vicinity of the reading room of the Administration Building where the lectures were given. In his first lecture, Serber began, "The object of the project is to produce a practical military weapon in the form of a bomb in which the energy is released by a fast-neutron chain reaction in one or more of the materials known to show nuclear fission." Oppenheimer sent John Manley, the experimental physicist from the University of Illinois who had helped him organize Los Alamos, up to Serber with a note that he should use the word "gadget" instead of "bomb" because the workmen might overhear the lectures. The name stuck. Throughout the project, the device was known as a "gadget."

Serber's lectures made clear the challenges that faced the new laboratory. He concluded, "the immediate experimental program is largely concerned with measuring the neutron properties of various materials and with the ordnance problem. It is also necessary to start new studies on techniques for direct experimental determination of critical size and time scale, working with large but subcritical amounts of active material." This would require the use of particle accelerations that could produce fast neutrons like the Harvard cyclotron, Wisconsin Van de Graff and Illinois Cockcroft-Walton machines that Manley and University of California professor Edwin McMillan had acquired for the Laboratory, but which were, as yet, in pieces waiting reassembly.

The provision of large but subcritical amounts of active material awaited the completion of the uranium isotope separation plants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the production reactors at Hanford, Washington. To prepare this material for the experiments that would determine the critical sizes of a chain-reacting assembly and the times required for chain reaction, the chemistry and metallurgy staff of the Laboratory would also have to be augmented. The small group of theoretical and experimental physicists Oppenheimer and Manley had thought might suffice to design nuclear weapons would give way to a large, multidisciplinary organization.

University of California contract

The contract between the University of California and the Manhattan District of the Corps of Engineers (MED) to operate Project Y, Los Alamos Laboratory, was not signed until April 15, 1943, after the project was already under way. It was the first such contract between them. A rudimentary agreement was first laid out in a letter from Irwin Stewart on Jan. 23, 1943, and called for an Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) contract with the University of California for "certain investigations to be directed by Dr. J. R. Oppenheimer," at a cost of $150,000 covering the period Jan. 1, 1943, to July 31, 1943.

Such contracts had been the standard means of mobilizing university researchers to work in installations such as the radiation laboratory at the University of California, its namesake at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago's metallurgical laboratory.

Enter the MED. The decision to transfer work on the atomic bomb from the OSRD to the MED had been made by OSRD head Vannevar Bush and James Bryant Conant, Harvard University president and chairman of the S-1 committee (the committee that oversaw all phases of work on nuclear weapons) of the OSRD early in 1942, and the district was organized in the summer of that year to take charge of the developmental aspects of the project, especially the manufacture of Uranium 235 and plutonium. Gradually, the MED took over those contracts relating to the bomb.

On Feb. 13, 1943, Oppenheimer and Groves met with Underhill to negotiate a long-term contract to operate Los Alamos Laboratory. The fact that this occurred after the site, equipment and men for the project had been selected suggests that the contract was an afterthought.

Bringing in the University of California in 1943 made recruiting for the work of the Laboratory easier. Underhill, however, insisted on more UC involvement.

A letter of intent was drafted by the Army and signed by Underhill March 3, 1943. The detailed contract required five days to negotiate, from April 15 to April 20, 1943. Underhill succeeded in obtaining the conditions traditional in OSRD contracts. Because the work at Los Alamos had already started, Underhill and the Army gave up the attempt to include an agreement for negotiation with the Army in the contract, and although the main part of the contact was signed on April 20, the negotiation agreement was not added until a year later.

For reasons of security, UC had no representative at Los Alamos with authority comparable to Oppenheimer or the military commander. Only Oppenheimer, Lawrence, McMillan and other members of the University of California faculty recruited for "Project Y" understood the true implications of the work. Neither Underhill nor the regents were told the true purpose of the project. It was not until November of 1943 that Ernest Lawrence, the director of the University of California Radiation Laboratory who had helped to organize Los Alamos, came into Underhill's office, shut the door and asked: "You know what they're doing down in Los Alamos?" When Underhill confessed he did not, Lawrence told him that an atomic bomb was being designed there. Underhill was forbidden, however, to tell the regents.

To ensure UC control and protect the secrecy of Los Alamos, material for the Laboratory was routed through UC's purchasing office in Los Angeles, which shipped it on to Los Alamos, where Mitchell ran the procurement office. The purchasing office was organized March 16, 1943, and branch offices were set up in April 1943 in New York and Chicago to handle emergency requests. Eventually, some 300 UC employees staffed these offices, including 32 buyers and 22 expediters. They purchased approximately $400,000 worth of items (about 6,000) per month during the war.

The arrangement created difficulties and delays that did not diminish as the Laboratory expanded. Orders sent to the Los Angeles office had to be carefully written, because the employees of the purchasing office had no direct contact with the user groups at the Laboratory, no knowledge of its work and therefore could not understand its significance or urgency. Oppenheimer and his staff occasionally complained about inefficient and inexperienced buyers, but as these offices were seriously understaffed and deliberately kept ignorant of the purpose of their work, the inefficiency was probably inherent in the circumstances.

The University of California connection also helped stock the shelves of the Laboratory's library, which was organized and catalogued by Charlotte Serber, the wife of Robert Serber, the theorist who gave the first set of lectures at Los Alamos in April 1943. UC lent 1,200 books and 50 journals to start the library. New books were purchased through Los Angeles, which placed the orders through the library at the University of California. During the course of the war, the number of books rose to 3,000, journals to 160 and 1,500 microfilm reproductions were made.

Although the University of California was kept largely in ignorance about the nature of the project at Los Alamos until after the war, at which time it tried to terminate the contract, Lawrence, Sproul and Underhill finally agreed to continue to operate the Laboratory for the MED's successor, the Atomic Energy Commission, in 1947. The contract, although born in secrecy, was adequate to operate the Laboratory and to complete its wartime mission.

In May 1943, while their laboratories were still being equipped and constructed, scientists at Los Alamos planned the research program that would lead to the first atomic bombs. They were helped by consultants and a committee appointed by the Manhattan Engineer District's leadership to review their plans to ensure they would accomplish that goal.

After they had been acquainted with the state of the art by Robert Serber's lectures, the scientists met with I.I. Rabi of Columbia University, the deputy director of the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Enrico Fermi, also of Columbia, who had been detailed to work on nuclear reactors at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago; and Samuel K. Allison of the Metallurgical Laboratory.

In addition to these consultants, who later became heavily involved in the Laboratory's work, a review committee, known as the Lewis Committee, appointed by the commander of the Manhattan Engineer District, Gen. Leslie Groves, helped plan the program. Warren K. Lewis, a chemical engineer from MIT.; John H. Van Vleck, a theoretical physicist from Wisconsin who had participated in the June 1942 summer study at Berkeley and whose theoretical work led to the establishment of Los Alamos; chemist E. Bright Wilson from Harvard; engineer Edwin L. Rose, then director of research for the Jones and Lamson Machine company; and Richard Tolman, a California Institute of Technology physical chemist and the vice president of the National Defense Research Committee, were the members of the committee.

James Bryant Conant, chairman of the NDRC Committee charged with scientific oversight of the nuclear weapons program, persuaded Groves that such a review committee was necessary to ensure the soundness of the research program and assured him that scientists in university and industrial laboratories were accustomed to such review committees.

The Lewis Committee reported to Groves and Conant on May 10, 1943, endorsing much that had been presented in the Serber lectures - recorded in the "Los Alamos Primer" - but recommending that in addition to the basic research to determine the critical mass, efficiency and damage of the weapon, more ordnance and engineering work would be required to actually develop it. Engineering a weapon would more than double the personnel of the Laboratory, require local testing of weapon components and demand more liaison with the military services.

John Manley, the University of Illinois experimental physicist from the Metallurgical Laboratory who had overseen the original program, agreed: "We thought we could just go to the military and buy a gun that would blow a couple of pieces together fast enough to make an explosion. But fast enough turned out to be really very fast. On top of that, the whole business had to be carried by a B-29 and dropped as a ballistic missile, and the Navy or Army just don't make guns for those purposes. All of this put very stringent size and shape and weight requirements on a gun. The upshot was that for the most part the gun was designed and tested at Los Alamos.

The Lewis Committee was hardest on the University of California procurement operation. The business office, established in Los Angeles for security reasons, was following "unduly slow and cumbersome" procedures. This, the committee felt, could not be tolerated because the progress of the work and the morale at Los Alamos depended on an efficient procurement organization. As a result of its recommendations, procurement offices were set up in New York and Chicago to obtain supplies and equipment from the Midwest and the East.

Within the broad guidelines established by the Lewis Committee, Oppenheimer permitted his staff to proceed along a number of lines. For example, although the assembly of the nuclear materials, whether uranium-235 or plutonium, into a critical mass seemed most feasible by firing one fraction of it into another, Seth Neddermeyer, who had transferred to Los Alamos from the National Bureau of Standards along with Charles Critchfield and John Streib, heard of implosion in Serber's indoctrination lectures, and suggested that it might produce higher velocities than were available in the gun method. "There was a lot of skepticism," recalled Ed McMillan, an experimental physicist from the University of California Radiation Laboratory who had helped Manley to plan Los Alamos. "But Seth wanted to get on with the job and try it out. So without any particular official recognition from the laboratory he set up to do the early work on his own. He went to Bruceton, Pa., where the Bureau of Mines had an explosives research station, to learn something about explosions, and I went with him, as I was very interested in this idea. ... The first cylindrical implosions were done at Bruceton. � That was the birth of the experimental work on implosion, long before experimental work on the gun method."

Unlike the experimental research program, which required laboratories, accelerators and instruments, the theoretical program could begin immediately.

The experimental physicists, meantime, while waiting until their apparatus was ready, planned experiments to determine the average number of neutrons that would be produced in each fission of plutonium or uranium-235, the energy range of those neutrons, and the probability of fission by neutrons over a wide range of neutron energies. The probabilities that the neutrons might be captured or scattered rather than causing fission also had to be determined. They also planned to measure the scattering of neutrons in materials that might be used as tampers and to make a nuclear reactor using uranium-235 in water as a neutron source. They designed the instruments they would need for these jobs, which also would require time to make. The research program planned in May 1943 as a result of the Serber lectures and the Lewis Committee review was one of the most ambitious ever planned for a single laboratory. The addition of chemistry, metallurgy, and ordnance would only make it more challenging. It became clear that Los Alamos would have to be a special kind of place to accomplish its goal.

The research side of the Laboratory was organized in divisions that reflected traditional academic disciplines: theoretical physics under Hans Bethe of Cornell University; experimental physics under Robert Bacher, also of Cornell; and chemistry and metallurgy under Joseph Kennedy of UC Berkeley; and Cyril Stanley Smith of the American Brass Co.

The Theoretical Physics Division had been organized in March. Edward Teller, who had worked at George Washington University, Columbia University and as a physicist for the Manhattan Engineer District at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago before joining Oppenheimer's summer study of bomb design at the UC Berkeley in 1942, headed one group; Robert Serber, Oppenheimer's assistant at Berkeley in 1942 and 1943 after leaving the University of Illinois, another; Victor Weisskopf of the University of Rochester in New York, a third; and Richard Feynman of Princeton, a fourth. Donald A. Flanders of New York University came later in the summer of 1943 to form a computing group.

The Experimental Physics Division organized shortly thereafter included Robert R. Wilson of Princeton as head of the Cyclotron Group; John H. Williams of the University of Minnesota as head of the Electrostatic Generator Group; Manley as head of the D-D Source Group; Darol Froman, a professor at the University of Denver who had worked as a group leader at the Navy's Radio and Sound Laboratory in San Diego and as a research associate at the Metallurgical Laboratory, as head of the Electronic Group; and Emilio Segre' of the UC Radiation Laboratory as head of the Radioactivity Group. The first three groups had to await the completion of their accelerator laboratories. Segre' and his associates made preliminary measurements of spontaneous fission in uranium and plutonium at the Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley in April and May before transferring the work to Los Alamos. Froman's group was busy helping to equip the laboratories.

The Chemistry and Metallurgy Division, which was enlarged to purify the plutonium that would be produced in production reactors at the Hanford Engineering Works for use in the bomb, would require its own large dust-free laboratory. While that was being built, plutonium research at the Metallurgical Laboratory of the University of Chicago; the UC Berkeley's chemistry department; and Iowa State College would have to be coordinated. Charles A. Thomas of the Monsanto Chemical Co. visited the Laboratory in late May 1943 to discuss the position. He did not accept it until July. Brazier designed the new building with his advice.

The new Ordnance Division would be headed by Navy Capt. William S. Parsons, who did not arrive at Los Alamos until June, although he made a preliminary visit in May. The division, like all others at the Laboratory, was divided into groups, and the initial group leaders were all physicists from universities or civilian research bureaus: Edwin M. McMillan from UC's Radiation Laboratory; Kenneth T. Bainbridge of Harvard University's cyclotron laboratory, Robert B. Brode of UC Berkeley's physics department; and Charles L. Critchfield and S.H. Neddermeyer from the National Bureau of Standards. The whole organization was knit together with a governing board, including Hawkins; the division leaders; and other administrative staff heads. Oppenheimer intended it to be an advisory board, but it gradually became a policy-making body to assist in coordinating the scientific and engineering effort.

Oppenheimer also made use of a coordinating council, composed of division and group leaders, to communicate with staff members and exchange information and opinions. Oppenheimer rejected compartmentalization when he instituted the Laboratory colloquium in May 1943. Hans Bethe suggested the establishment of a weekly technical colloquium, and the governing board placed Teller in charge of the weekly meetings of the staff members. Groves objected that this was a major security hazard but Oppenheimer defended it as a tool that could enhance security by giving staff members a better understanding of the need for secrecy. Groves permitted it to maintain morale and unity among the staff, but forbade discussion of work at other laboratories and of production schedules.

Continued at Los Alamos:Part 3

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