Nuclear Physics: Tales of the Bomb

The Double Helix, James Watson’s personalized account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, the master molecule of life, had one important side effect. It shocked many scientists into the realization that they are public figures—and fair game for biographers, critics and even gossip columnists. Last week the point was driven home again by the publication of another gossipy book, Lawrence and Oppenheimer, in which Author Nuel Pharr Davis calls the roll of America’s nuclear greats. He judges them not only as scientists, but also as human beings. Some do not fare too well.

Davis, a University of Illinois English professor, tries to weave the story of the A-bomb around the friendship and eventual falling out of America’s two most influential wartime scientists-Ernest Lawrence, who won a Nobel Prize for his invention of the cyclotron, and Julius Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the team of scientists that developed the bomb. The literary device does not quite work. Oppenheimer, after death as in life, dominates the scene; he provides the point, but Lawrence does not emerge as a man big enough to supply the counterpoint. Still,

Author Davis’ seven years of research and some 100 interviews were not spent in vain. His book not only adds rich anecdotal material to the already familiar Oppenheimer lore, but brings alive lesser-known atomic scientists and places them in perspective.

Burned-out Beam. While paying tribute to Lawrence’s inventive genius and leadership, Davis details his failings, which were considerable. Although Stanley Livingston, graduate student at Berkeley, devised two of the beam-focusing techniques that enabled Lawrence to build the first of the big atom smashers, Lawrence failed to mention Livingston in his patent application and generally avoided crediting him for his work. When Livingston complained, Lawrence coldly suggested that if he felt dissatisfied he was free to drop out of the cyclotron project.

With characteristic optimism and consummate salesmanship, Lawrence raised funds and began building a 100 million-volt cyclotron in 1940, despite warnings by theoretical physicists that complex relativistic considerations would make it unworkable. World War II halted the project and saved Lawrence from great embarrassment. But the postwar years brought another. Putting his prestige and influence in Washington to work, Lawrence overcame the objections of other scientists and won approval for the construction of a monstrous proton accelerator for converting nonfissionable uranium 238 into fission able plutonium, which could be used in nuclear weapons. This time, after three years and huge expenditures, Lawrence completed the accelerator. But to his chagrin, it produced an effective beam of protons for only two hours, then burned out and never could be used again.

Death Wish. Other names usually mentioned only as footnotes in stories about the A-bomb suddenly acquire personality in Lawrence and Oppenheimer. While wiser and more experienced scientists at a Los Alamos meeting discussed a gun-and-bullet technique for igniting the Abomb, tall, bony Seth Neddermeyer sat quietly, visualizing uranium spheres squeezed like oranges. Finally, he spoke up haltingly for the principle of implosion, understanding it instinctively but expressing it so clumsily that he made little impression on anyone—except Oppenheimer, who encouraged him to devise what finally became an efficient triggering mechanism for nuclear weapons.

And there was Louis Slotin, a morose Canadian with an apparent death wish, who conducted tests of critical assemblies by poking curved segments of uranium or plutonium together with a screwdriver while eying his Geiger counter and neutron monitor. One day in 1946, nudging segments of a Bikini test bomb a little too close, he suddenly saw a blue ionization glow in the room—the sign of a dangerously radioactive reaction. He threw his body over the segments until everyone else in the room could hurry out. Although the others lived, Slotin achieved his death wish. He died in agony nine days later, of radiation poisoning.

Ferocious Energy. Davis, for all his attention to the others is continually drawn back to the enigmatic, mesmerizing personality of Oppenheimer. He describes a young scientist so lost in the abstractions of physics that he once drove an automobile up the courthouse steps of a Western town, a man so unworldly that he had no radio, did not read newspapers and first heard about the 1929 stock-market crash months after it happened.

Jarred into political consciousness in the middle ’30s by the ravages of the Depression on his students and the rise of Nazi Germany, Oppenheimer became too suddenly a social activist, naively lending his support to Communist as well as liberal causes. By the time the U.S. entered World War II, however, Oppenheimer had become disenchanted with Communism. Called upon to head the Los Alamos atom-bomb laboratory after a brilliant teaching career at Berkeley, he turned to his new assignment with ferocious energy, wasting away to 116 Ibs., but performing what even his enemies admit was a “magnificent” job in producing a workable bomb.

After the war, Oppenheimer remained an adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission and argued fruitlessly against the creation of the H-bomb, insisting that it would only stimulate the Russians into building one too. In the hysterical climate of the early 1950s, his anti-H-bomb stand and his well-known earlier association with Communists led to the lifting of his security clearance. In the celebrated 1954 hearing that followed, the AEC refused to reinstate his clearance but made it clear that it was not questioning his loyalty, only his veracity, conduct and associations.

The decision against Oppenheimer was probably influenced most by H-Bomb Innovator Edward Teller, whom Author Davis might profitably have substituted for Lawrence as Oppenheimer’s chief antagonist. Misunderstandings between the two physicists were often personal as well as political. While giving a chalk talk on thermonuclear reactions at Los Alamos, Teller turned white with shock when Oppenheimer gently interrupted to tell him that he had forgotten the square of the velocity of light in his equations, introducing a huge error in his results. Later, Teller was able to make a comment far more devastating to Oppenheimer. Asked at the 1954 loyalty hearing if he believed Oppenheimer to be a security risk, Teller said: “I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.” Scorned for his betrayal by fellow scientists, Teller wept and protested: “I am not a heel!”

Chagrined and humiliated, Oppenheimer retreated back to his job at Princeton as director of the Institute for Advanced Study. Little was heard from him again until 1963, when President Johnson made partial amends by presenting him with the AEC’s $50,000 Enrico Fermi Award. “I think it just possible, Mr. President,” said Oppenheimer, visibly moved, “that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today.” Ironically enough, Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance was never reinstated, and the father of the atomic bomb—and the obvious hero of Lawrence and Oppenheimer—remained cut off from U.S. nuclear secrets until his death last year.