Before the Fallout Read online

  After sampling other leading centers of European theoretical research, Oppenheimer had come home at last. Ten American universities were eager to secure him, and he eventually signed concurrent contracts with two of them: the eight-year-old California Institute of Technology at Pasadena, Cal-tech, where he agreed to teach in the summer, and Berkeley, where he was to teach in autumn and winter. The twenty-five-year-old Oppenheimer loved fast cars but was, he confessed, "a vile driver" who could "scare friends out of all sanity by wheeling corners at seventy." Unsurprisingly, therefore, when he reached Pasadena after a marathon journey across the States, he had his arm in a sling and his clothes stained with battery acid—the results of a car accident en route.

  Oppenheimer had chosen Caltech because he believed its blend of theorists and experimentalists would be good for him—"I would learn, there would be criticism." His reasons for selecting Berkeley were a little different. Despite possessing Lawrence's unrivaled experimental facilities, the faculty was weak on the theoretical side, with no one versed in quantum mechanics. Oppenheimer intended to do most of his teaching at Berkeley to remedy these deficiencies and to establish a theoretical and interpretative group to complement Lawrence's work. In the autumn Oppenheimer arrived at Berkeley ready to begin teaching, fresh from vacationing at the ranch he had just leased in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico. He had named it Perro Caliente at the suggestion of a friend. The words perro caliente are the Spanish translation of the raucous cry of joy—"hot dog!"—he had uttered when he learned the ranch was available. The red, raw beauty of the desert stirred him. He often told friends, "I have two loves, physics and the desert. It troubles me that I don't see any way to bring them together."

  J. Robert Oppenheimer (left) and Ernest Lawrence

  Oppenheimer hit it off at once with Lawrence, just three years his senior, admiring his "unbelievable vitality and love of life. "They socialized and womanized together, drinking Oppenheimer's famous frozen martinis from glasses rimmed with lime juice and honey, and eating his specialty, the spicy Indonesian dish nasi goreng, soon nicknamed "nasty gory" by Oppenheimer's Berkeley friends. They also went riding. Photographs of the two men show Lawrence, tall, sturdy, smiling. Oppenheimer, with a frizz of dark hair, his slighter frame clad in heeled Mexican boots and tight jeans, and a quizzical yet dreamy expression, resembles a young Bob Dylan.

  Lawrence the experimentalist and Oppenheimer the theoretician got on well intellectually as well as socially. They attended weekly seminars for theoreticians and experimentalists, where Oppenheimer amazed everyone with his ability to assimilate new ideas, his extraordinary memory, and the fact that he "knew more experimental physics than even the experimental physicists did." He relished the new horizons opened up by the neutron and the development of powerful machines to probe the nucleus. In 1932 he wrote to his brother, Frank, "We are busy studying nuclei and neutrons and disintegrations; trying to make some peace between the inadequate theory and the absurd revolutionary experiments."

  Just as Oppenheimer had hoped, atomic physics was no longer Europe's exclusive preserve. On a visit to Berkeley in 1933, John Cockcroft was startled to find it run more like a factory than a laboratory: "The experimenters were divided into shifts: maintenance shifts and experimenters. When a leak or fault developed in the cyclotron the maintenance crew rushed forward to plug the leaks . . . and fixed the fault when the operating shifts rushed in again." It was far removed from the small-scale, expense-conscious academic world of the Cavendish and a warning that the Cavendish might soon be outclassed.

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  The discoveries of 1932 also gave a fillip to Russian atomic physics. Abram Joffe, who had brought Peter Kapitza to England in 1921, had continued to keep abreast of developments in the West. By the early 1930s he was presiding over the Leningrad Physicotechnical Institute—known as "Fiztekh" and the crucible of Soviet physics. Joffe also encouraged Western scientists to study and lecture in Russia. However, until 1932, the only serious nuclear work had been research into cosmic rays. This soon changed. Before the year was out, Soviet scientists had replicated Cockcroft and Walton's experiments. Also in that year, inspired by reports of Lawrence's work, the Radium Institute in Leningrad began building Europe's first cyclotron, while Joffe set up a dedicated nuclear physics group. He soon had thirty scientists working in four laboratories. Igor Kurchatov, who would later direct the Soviet nuclear program, was sufficiently excited by the new science to divert from his study of the behavior of crystals in magnetic fields to head the new group.

  With this surge of interest, Peter Kapitza's absence was increasingly noted, and regretted, by the Soviet authorities. He had retained his Soviet citizenship and made annual visits home at the invitation of the Kremlin. He was a Russian patriot and happy to advise the Soviet government on science and technology in pursuit of Joseph Stalin's goal of "catching up and overtaking the technology of the developed advanced capitalist countries." But he had no inclination to return to a place where living conditions were so tough. He would not have enjoyed the conditions faced by one young scientist at Joffe's institute who found himself sharing a freezing dormitory with eight others and with rats trying to chew at his ears. Kapitza wrote to his mother that life without gas, electricity, water, and apparatus would be simply impossible. Furthermore, in 1930 Rutherford had persuaded the Royal Society and others to give thirty thousand pounds to fund a new laboratory for Kapitza to run.

  Kapitza bridged two worlds and took a sly pleasure in doing so. On one occasion he is said to have invited the senior Soviet politician Nikolay Bukharin to dinner with Rutherford solely for the pleasure of being able to make the introduction, "Comrade Bukharin—Lord Rutherford." Kapitza was elected a member of the Royal Society—a highly unusual honor for a foreigner—and was apparently interested in other prizes of the British establishment. After Rutherford was ennobled, he inquired whether a foreigner could be given a peerage. As it turned out, however, Stalin had other plans for him.

  In fact, life was about to change for many members of the international scientific community. Much that had been taken for granted for so long—openness, the freedom to travel and exchange ideas, the right to pursue science without a thought of politics—was about to come under attack. Robert Op­penheimer was one of the few to sense the challenges ahead, writing bleakly but perceptively that "the world in which we shall live these next thirty years will be a pretty restless and tormented place. I do not think there will be much of a compromise possible between being of it, and being not of it."

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  The restlessness divined by Oppenheimer was already evident in Japan, which during the 1920s had seen increasing prosperity, much of it prompted by technological change. Developments in Hiroshima were typical. Though many citizens had continued to make their livings in traditional ways—harvesting and drying sardines, cultivating nori (the seaweed which they dried in sheets and used to wrap their sticky rice), growing hemp for ropes and fishing nets and making geta (wooden sandals secured to the foot with thongs)—new industries had grown rapidly. These included manufacturing rayon, rolling tobacco for cigars, and canning food—especially beef boiled in soy sauce for the military commissariats based in the city. The pick of Hiroshima's manufactured goods were displayed in the green-domed Prefectural Products Exhibition Hall, which was one of the city's favorite landmarks. Constructed in 1915 to the design of the Czech architect Jan Letzel, it fronted the river near the Aioi Bridge.*

  Rising wealth had brought many benefits. Hiroshima had become an academic center, with one of the only two higher schools of education in Japan. It was also known for sport: baseball, rowing, and track events flourished, and Japan's first Olympic gold medalist, Mikio Oda, who triumphed in the triple jump at the 1928 games in Amsterdam, came from the city. A new entertainment district—Shintenchi, meaning, literally, "New World"—was built, which by its peak in the late 1920s had more than 1 20 shops, music halls, theaters, and cinemas. Visitors could attend per
formances ranging from musical comedy to silent samurai movies. Sunday was the day for going to the cinema, and shortages of daytime electricity did not spoil the fun; the projectionist simply hand-cranked the film past a large gas lamp.

  "Modern boys and girls"—as those who espoused Western dress and habits were called—played billiards or had their pictures taken, posed cigarette in hand and dressed in the latest Western fashions, in one of the many photographic studios or just sat and chatted in cafes. Huge billboards gaudily promoted everything from Lion brand toothpaste to scented hair oil. By night elegant electric lanterns fashioned to resemble lilies of the valley cast a glamorous glow. Photographs of the period reveal a relaxed and prosperous ambience in Hiroshima and other leading cities.

  However, the political mood was changing. On Christmas Day 1926a new emperor, the twenty-five-year-old Hirohito, had succeeded to the Japanese imperial throne. The name he chose for his reign was Showa—"illustrious peace"—but the reality would be different. His yearlong enthronement festivities were celebrated with enthusiasm in Hiroshima as well as in the rest of the country. Reverence for the emperor and a desire to separate his divine person from human contact led to the disinfection of cars and trains in which he was to travel and to the requirement for his people not to look at him but to cast down their eyes in his presence. The celebrations reinforced a growing cult of the emperor.

  Modern buildings and streetcars in Hiroshima

  The early 1930s brought an economic downturn. Turmoil among politicians led to the increasing involvement of the military in the running of all aspects of Japanese life and, at their behest, a further emphasis on the emperor both as a divine religious figure and as the head of a strong and united nation requiring and receiving his subjects' unquestioning loyalty and obedience. In September 1931 the Japanese military fabricated a crisis—"the Manchurian incident"—as a pretext for their occupation of that much-disputed Chinese province in which Japan had substantial commercial interests and from which it obtained many scarce primary resources. They installed the last emperor of China, Pu Yi, as the puppet emperor of their client state, which they named Manchukuo. When the League of Nations condemned their actions, the Japanese left the league.

  In 1932 right-wing officers murdered both the Japanese prime minister and finance minister because they would not follow sufficiently militaristic policies. In the wake of the murders Japan abandoned any kind of party system, and the military's influence increased further. The cinemas in Hiroshima's Shintenchi district showed a film called Japan in the National Emergency. The script underlined a growing policy against westernization, and a return to the old values: "In the past we have just followed the western trend without thinking about it . . . as a result, Japanese pride has faded away. . . . Today we are lucky to see the revival of the Japanese spirit throughout the nation." The film disparagingly depicted two westernized young people, in particular a "modern girl" who smokes, dances, and dares to ask a dignified middle-aged gentleman who accidentally steps on her toe in the street to apologize. He refuses, snorting, "This is Japan." The message was strong: Women should return home, forget Western fashions and behavior, and the Japanese public in general should reject Western mores and glory in Japan's unique superiority.

  *Frederic Joliot was sensitive to suggestions that their choice, highly unusual at the time, reflected a desire to retain the fame of the Curie name or anv subordinate status for him.

  * Trinity is one of Cambridge's most famous colleges and the one in which Lord Byron famously kept a bear in his rooms.

  * Drinking a few glasses of heavy water would not be lethal, but the replacement of more than one third of the hydrogen in the human body's fluids by deuterium would be fatal.

  *Hiroshima was also a leading producer of the hair extensions used by many women to create the traditional and luxuriant bunkin takashimada hairstyle. By 1922, 70 percent of Japan's hair extensions were manufactured in Hiroshima.

  SIX

  PERSECUTION AND PURGE

  ONE NIGHT, Werner Heisenberg had a half-waking "vision." As he later wrote in his memoirs, he saw a Munich street "bathed in a reddish, increasingly intense and uncanny glow. Crowds of people with scarlet and black-red-and-white flags were streaming from the Victory Gate toward the university fountains and the air was filled with noise and uproar. Suddenly, just in front of me a machine gun began to cough. I tried to jump to safety and woke up." It was an amalgam of the anarchic scenes he had witnessed as a boy in the Munich of 1919 and of the new, organized National Socialist violence erupting onto Germany's streets. By 1930 even once moderate and conservative German newspapers were hailing Adolf Hitler as the savior of a Germany deep in financial stagnation. Radical groups of the right and left were fighting in the slums and breaking up each other's meetings.

  Perhaps to forget such things, in January 1933 Heisenberg invited some old friends on a skiing holiday in Bavaria, which, he recalled, was "long remembered by all of us as a beautiful but painful farewell to the 'golden age' of atomic physics." The friends included Niels Bohr and Bohr's son, Christian, as well as Carl-Friedrich von Weizsacker, whom Heisenberg had known since the latter was fourteen. They had met in 1927 in Copenhagen, where von Weizsacker's father, later the second most senior official in Hitler's foreign office, was Germany's representative in Denmark. The young Carl had read articles by Heisenberg and engineered a meeting with him. Heisenberg, at that time studying under Bohr, was kind to the quiet, academic, awestruck boy and inspired him to become a physicist. Von Weizsacker became not only Heisenberg's assistant but one of his closest confidants.

  The Bohrs arrived at the local railway station after dark, so Heisenberg and von Weizsacker went to meet them. Guiding his guests back up the mountain to the sleeping hut, Heisenberg was peering ahead in the lantern light when he noticed that the snow seemed unusually powdery. Then "something very odd happened—I suddenly had the feeling that I was swimming. I completely lost control of my movements, and then something pressed on me so violently from all sides that, for a moment, I stopped breathing." The avalanche had not covered his head, and he managed to free his arms. Looking around, he realized he was the only one to have been swept away and had been lucky to survive. Heisenberg and his friends spent their days skiing and talking physics, trying to forget the "world full of political trouble" below the snowline.

  Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg

  One of the first signs of those troubles was the racial laws passed on 7 April 1933, soon after Hitler's installation as Germany's new chancellor. The "Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service" banned "non-Aryans"—anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent—from working for the state, and it included the universities as government institutions. There were a few exceptions: Jewish people appointed before the First World War or who had fought or lost fathers or sons at the front.

  The Nobel laureate James Franck had served in the war but refused the "privilege" of remaining in his post. On 17 April he resigned his position at Gottingen, protesting, "We Germans of Jewish descent are being treated as aliens and enemies of the Fatherland." Max Born, who could also have claimed exemption, departed quietly but bitterly, writing, "All I had built up in Got­tingen during twelve years' hard work was shattered." He went for a walk in the woods "in despair, brooding on how to save my family." Fritz Haber, the man who, as Franck's wartime boss, had masterminded Germany's chemical warfare strategy in the First World War and was a German patriot through and through, also refused his exemption, resigning after being ordered to purge his institute of other "non-Aryans."

  Viewed as a Jewish stronghold, physics attracted special virulence. Two Nobel Prize winners, physicists Johannes Stark and Philipp Lenard, spearheaded the attack. As early as the 1920s they had set themselves up as figureheads of true "German physics," denouncing the "Jewish physics" of Einstein. Stark had been fired from the University of Wiirzburg for breaching the rules of the Nobel foundation by using his prize money to buy himself a chin
a factory, but had convinced himself that Jews were responsible for his fall.

  Stark and Lenard also attacked the "Jewish-minded" Aryans who took their inspiration from quantum mechanics and relativity. In particular they launched a very personal crusade against Heisenberg for his espousal of "Jewish science" and for being a "Jewish pawn." In November 1933, when news broke that he had won the Nobel Prize for Physics, Nazi thugs threatened to disrupt his lecture the following day. In 1935, when it seemed likely that Heisenberg would replace his former teacher at Munich University, Arnold Sommerfeld, who was retiring, Stark objected. He denounced Heisenberg as the "spirit of Einstein's spirit," deploring that he was "to be rewarded with a call to a chair."

  Two years later, Stark used the much-feared official weekly SS journal Das Schwarze Korps to brand Heisenberg "a White Jew"—one of the "representatives of Judaism in German spiritual life who must all be eliminated just as the Jews themselves." With the SS taking an ever-closer interest in him, Heisenberg's mother, who had known Heinrich Himmler's mother since childhood, begged Frau Himmler to intercede, and, somewhat grudgingly, she agreed. However, Heisenberg remained under investigation and was summoned several times to the Gestapo's notorious headquarters in Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin for questioning. He was interrogated in a cellar with, as he recalled, an "ugly inscription" painted on one of the walls: "Breathe deeply and quietly." Finally, in July 1938, Himmler wrote to Heisenberg that there would be no more attacks. On the same day Himmler also wrote to Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Gestapo, that Heisenberg was too valuable to liquidate. Notwithstanding Himmler's apparent blessing, Heisenberg was still not appointed to Munich University. Instead, a former assistant of Stark's was given Sommerfeld's physics chair. He was, in Som­merfeld's view, a "complete idiot."