Read Online 109 East Palace by Jennet Conant - Free Book Online Page B

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    In a bold move, or a moment of unguarded honesty, Oppenheimer had confided to Groves in an earlier meeting that he was less than happy with the progress of the scattered small groups assigned to work on the bomb project. Forced to work under the constraints of “compartmentalization,” which mandated that every group work on a need-to-know basis with only a handful of senior people being fully informed, and which he knew to be Groves’ particular innovation, “the little laboratories suffered from their isolation.” Oppie expanded on his earlier complaint, arguing that work was being duplicated, the physicists were confused about what was being done elsewhere and had no sense of direction or hope. Looking to the future, communication between the projects would be extremely difficult. They could not relay classified material over the telephone, and teletype was tricky. As the bomb work accelerated, it would necessitate constant travel for all the project leaders that would be inevitably delaying. Oppenheimer was also afraid that morale would suffer over the long haul if the scientists were walled off from one another and not permitted to know the magnitude of what they were working on.
    Few people knew how to argue their case as winningly as Oppie, and he now employed those skills to his full advantage. Aware by now that Groves was not sympathetic to amorphous pleas for free and open scientific discourse, he carefully anchored his argument to more practical concerns. Appealing directly to Groves’ obsession with security, Oppie proposed that all the research be consolidated in a single laboratory, located in an isolated region, where the scientists could converse freely among themselves and secrecy could still be maintained. Oppenheimer argued that if they picked a site that was smaller than Lawrence’s operation at Oak Ridge, in Tennessee, where large numbers of workers came and went every day, and was far removed from any population center, the lab could be completely protected from outsiders and enemy spies.
    Groves was quick to recognize the merits of Oppie’s plan. The idea of rounding up the troublesome scientists and keeping them in one guarded camp had a logic he understood. It was a compromise, but one Groves could live with and make work. If he could not keep the scientists from talking to one another, then at least he could make sure they did not talk to anyone else. He dispatched Lieutenant Colonel John H. Dudley to conduct a preliminary investigation of possible sites for this central facility. Now, with the question of where the lab would be located well on the way to being settled, all that was left to do was pick the right man to run it. Compton had the right background, but could not be spared from the Met Lab in Chicago and its important work on chain reactions and fast neutrons. And although Compton had appointed Oppenheimer to head the design and fabrication phase of the project, Groves did not feel committed to him, especially since “no one with whom [he] talked showed any great enthusiasm about Oppenheimer as a possible director.”
    Despite Oppenheimer’s technical competence and delicate handling of the prickly egos at the Berkeley seminar, it is doubtful that he would have been chosen to head the bomb project had Ernest Lawrence been available. Not only was Lawrence a Nobel laureate who was highly regarded by both his peers and the Washington establishment, he was the country’s foremost experimental physicist, with a long record of success at building large machines. Groves had immediately hit it off with the enthusiastic, down-to-earth Lawrence, and he certainly would have been Groves’ first choice had it not been for the fact that Lawrence was desperately needed to oversee the magnetic separation process at Oak Ridge that was to produce the uranium 235 for the atomic bomb. They could not risk distracting Lawrence or upsetting the Oak Ridge operation in any way. It is also