Science: Atomic Doldrums

The atom bomb ended the war and changed the world. What did the monster do to the men who had fathered it?

Last week, more than six months after the first bomb flattened Hiroshima, the scientists who made it possible were a bewildered, frustrated group of men, many of them not knowing what to do, many unhappy in what they were doing, nearly all of them worried about the future. Almost to a man they had walked out on the Army-run Manhattan Project and its boss, paunchy Major General Leslie R. Groves, whom most of the scientists regarded as a blustering, tactless, fanatically secretive militarist.

The scientists had hoped to return to the ivory towers of pure and free research. Few had succeeded. The bomb had smashed their cloistered world as flat as Hiroshima. Disconsolately, sometimes angrily, they wandered about the ruins.

In pre-bomb days, the world of higher physics had been small and contentedly isolated, inhabited by men who were completely international-minded. There were no frontiers between the scientists, no secrets among them. World War II had changed all that, and brought the scientists face to face with power politics.

Not all U.S. scientists had yet adjusted themselves to this overwhelming change. Before the bomb, few of them had taken the slightest interest in politics. Now they were deeply, and unhappily, in the fray.

The Politicians. Most articulate of the new politicians was Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, ex-chief of the great Los Alamos Laboratory, now in Washington as atom-adviser to the State Department. He spends most of his time conferring with Government agencies. Betweentimes, he spreads his earnest, unminced views. Says he: “If Los Alamos could become a laboratory for peace, in which all nations would participate, from which all men could benefit, we would all be working there.”

Another active politician was Harold Clayton Urey, Nobel Prizewinner and discoverer of heavy water. From headquarters in Chicago, he made lobbying forays to Washington, delivered speeches, organized U.S. scientists. Said he: “Men are going where they can work with less heckling, where they don’t have to go through armed guards, where they can get reports on work that bears on their work.”

Shock-haired, 45-year-old Sam Allison, director of the new Institute of Nuclear Studies, said that the Manhattan Project had ruined him by turning him from a good research worker into a bureaucrat. Said he: “Scientists want to publish their work so that it will do the most good for mankind. The Army wants to pay us to produce things, and keep quiet.”

Allison’s coworker, Italian-born, Nobel-Prizeman Enrico Fermi, was in the same fix. Of him a colleague said: “He’s a tougher character and good at saying no. He refused to do administrative work. He doesn’t have a phone and refused to have a secretary. General Groves hates my guts. But he hates Fermi’s guts worse.”

Big-nosed, Hungarian-born Edward Teller had just returned to Chicago from the Los Alamos Laboratory. The situation there, said Teller, was “catastrophic.” Only a handful of scientists remained, and they would leave too unless the Army made drastic changes. The bomb had certainly upset his life, he said. “All of a sudden I found myself changed to a person who criticized everything.”

Leading non-politician was broad-browed Ernest O. Lawrence, Nobel Prizewinner and inventor of the cyclotron, who was doggedly keeping his mouth shut. Probable reason: his Berkeley, Calif, laboratory was still too closely connected with the Army.

Scientific Lobby. Most profoundly changed by the Manhattan Project were the younger scientists. Many had won big reputations in the hectic work of bombmaking. They had also gained intense political consciousness.

Their top organization, the Federation of American Scientists, had its Washington headquarters in a white-painted, fifth-floor attic on K Street. The capital had seen many strange lobbies, but never one stranger than this. The young scientists were almost broke. Nine out of ten had never cast a vote. But they had been near the bomb; they knew what it could do. Though inexperienced and naively ignorant of politics, they hoped to tell everybody in the Government what an atomic war would mean.

Chairman of the Federation is short, bespectacled William C. (“Willie”) Higinbotham, 35, onetime student at Cornell University. Fired by the urgency of his task, he worked 70 hours a week. His sidekick, Dr. John Simpson, 29, was in London trying to organize a world federation of scientists. Older colleagues watched them with pessimistic sympathy.

Crossed Fingers. Meanwhile, U.S. atomic science, instead of speeding ahead under the mighty stimulus of atomic energy, was in the doldrums. Said Dr. Joseph W. Kennedy of St. Louis’ Washington University: “I don’t know what I will do. The Army has told us we can do nothing connected with the bomb.” But the Army, as yet, had not told anyone what subjects were and were not “connected.”

Others besides Dr. Kennedy suffered from the same uncertainty. Until Congress, the Army’s boss, came to some decisions about atomic energy, they did not know what they dared touch.

Nevertheless, some hopeful plans & projects were already afoot. Dr. Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge, who bossed the New Mexico bomb test, was back at Harvard and had managed to find a house to live in. Harvard was building him a $400,000, 90-inch cyclotron to replace the 42-inch model still held at Los Alamos. Harvard’s neighbor, M.I.T., was planning a 150,000,000-volt “synchroton.” The University of California hoped to have its 184-inch, 4,000-ton cyclotron in operation by the end of the year.

While the great gadgets were abuilding, scientists began work on subjects they hoped were innocent: cosmic rays, mathematical computations, the search for new principles and subatomic particles. As they worked, they listened for Army thunder and kept their fingers crossed.