The Oppenheimer Alternative Read online

  Oppie had settled on what he’d now been told was the “management by walking around” style: being seen to be seen, poking his head into this lab or that workshop all over the mesa to check on things—so neither Bethe nor Teller were surprised when he appeared in the doorway. Teller was hunched in a wooden chair. Bethe was taller anyway but as he stood near Teller’s desk he loomed over the Hungarian. “But they can’t possibly be right. Don’t you see, Edward—”

  “What’s up?” asked Oppie, leaning against the doorjamb. As always, he scanned the blackboards in any room he entered. Teller had created a chart labeled “Weapon Ideas,” with columns including “Yield” and “Delivery Method.” The final and most-powerful entry, Oppie noted, had its mode of delivery listed as “Backyard.” Ah: if that device had the yield specified, it would destroy all life on earth—so there’d be no need to transport it anywhere before use.

  Teller turned his steel-gray eyes toward Oppie. “Hans thinks my solar-fusion math is wrong,” he said in the same derisive tone he might have used to declaim a ridiculous notion such as “Hans thinks the world is flat.”

  Oppie turned to Bethe. Hans, not Edward, was the authority on solar fusion. In a pair of 1939 Physical Review papers, Bethe had analyzed the reactions by which hydrogen can be fused into helium, and he’d worked out the math for fusion via the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen cycle, which he’d concluded was the sun’s main way of producing energy. “This is Bethe’s field,” Oppie ventured.

  “Irrelevant,” snapped Teller; his accent was as thick as his massive eyebrows. “I’ve gone over and over the figures. There’s nothing wrong with my equations.”

  Oppie was getting irritated. From the very beginning of this project, Teller had insisted that the focus on a fission bomb was a mistake. At the initial gathering of the group Oppie had dubbed “the Luminaries” at Berkeley almost three years ago, in July 1942, Robert had begun by taking the scientists through the devastation wrought by what was, hitherto, the largest human-caused explosion ever: the 1917 Halifax disaster, which had occurred when a French munitions ship collided with a Norwegian vessel in waters near that Nova Scotia port city. The resulting explosion—equivalent to 2,900 tons of T.N.T.—killed 2,000 and injured 9,000 more. What they were hoping to build, Oppie had said, would be two or three times more powerful: a weapon so dreadful Hitler would surely immediately stand down as soon as its destructive potential was demonstrated—assuming that the Nazis didn’t build one of the damn things first.

  But that wasn’t enough for Teller. He had stood up before the others, who were in folding chairs arranged in a ragged circle on the top floor of Le Conte Hall, and declared, “A fission device is surely possible. Easy, in fact. But there are more interesting problems.”

  Oppie remembered leaning his seat back and taking a deep, calming breath of the summer air coming in through the open French doors that led to the balcony. He’d brought all those people to California to exchange ideas, but it had turned out to be akin to herding non-Schrödingerian cats; keeping such peripatetic minds focused took constant cajoling. “Such as?” he’d asked.

  “Enrico Fermi has this notion,” Teller said. “A fission weapon, trivial though it is, could be used to ignite deuterium, creating a fusion bomb. I’ve been doing the math.” He indicated sheets of paper in front of him. “If we used a fission bomb to ignite just twenty-six pounds of liquid heavy hydrogen, the resulting fusion explosion would be equivalent to millions of tons of T.N.T.”

  “Millions ...” repeated Bob Serber in his soft, lisping voice.

  “Exactly,” said Teller. “Forget reproducing this Halifax explosion—a trifle. Think of the Tunguska event!” In 1908, something exploded in an unpopulated part of central Siberia, flattening over half-a-million acres of forest. It was twenty years before the first Russian scientific expedition made it to the center of the devastation. They found no blast or impact crater, leading them to conclude that perhaps an in-falling meteor or comet had exploded just before hitting the ground. They estimated the force of the airburst had been between ten and thirty megatons—ten and thirty million tons of T.N.T.

  “Good God,” said Oppenheimer. “What good would such a thing possibly be? You could only use it for genocide.”

  “Our foe,” Teller had replied simply, “is a genocidist.” He’d looked around that seminar room. Teller was Jewish; so were Oppenheimer, Serber, Bethe, and several of the others who’d been present.

  “An atomic-fission bomb,” Teller had continued, “is straightforward; your grad students could make one. But a bomb based on nuclear fusion, capable of Tunguska-scale devastation? That is a challenge worthy of us.”

  Ever since then, Oppie had been indulging Teller, letting him work on the fusion-based bomb the Hungarian had dubbed “the super” while everybody else had been solely devoted to the more-tractable problem of creating a fission bomb. After they’d all moved here to Los Alamos, Oppie had also ignored the numerous complaints about Teller playing his grand piano—he’d refused to come to the mesa without it—late at night. As Oppie had said to one maddened housewife, “It’d be objectionable only if he didn’t play so well.”

  “Okay, you two,” said Robert, looking first at Teller then at Bethe. “Let’s keep the noise down, shall we? And, Hans, you’ve got important work to do.”

  Teller clearly got the slight. He detected slights even when they weren’t there; he never missed an actual one. Edward glared at Oppenheimer, but Robert was used to that by now. He headed on down the corridor, looking for the next fire to put out.

  Chapter 10

  A Faust of the twentieth century, [Oppenheimer] had sold his soul to the atom bomb.

  —Haakon Chevalier

  Another fatiguing day finally came to its close. Oppie, his duck-footed gait helping him keep his balance on the dirt roads, returned to his home on Bathtub Row. It was tiny compared with his place at One Eagle Hill, but, for all that, it now seemed vast, empty. His infant daughter was in a friend’s care, and neither Kitty nor his son Peter had been home for many days now.

  He supposed he should have foreseen Kitty’s need to flee. This time, at least, she’d lasted four months before bolting rather than just six weeks: that’s all she’d managed after their son had been born. He wondered if other women suffered such ... melancholy, he supposed it was, after giving birth. In any event, that first time, upon seeing that Kitty was overwhelmed, Robert had asked Haakon and Barb Chevalier to look after Peter for them while he spirited Kitty away to their Perro Caliente ranch. It had been two months before Kitty had been ready to return to Berkeley. With luck, that would be all she’d need this time, as well. Perhaps she’d be home tomorrow or by the weekend.

  He always hoped that when he opened the front door—never locked here on the mesa—that he’d see his family back within, but, no, tonight was no different than last night, or the one before, or the one before that.

  He missed the smell of cooking in the small kitchen Kitty had insisted be added to the place. He missed the zoom-zoom engine sounds Peter used to make as he pushed his toy trucks across the linoleum. And he missed the scent of Kitty’s endless string of Lucky Strikes, the sound of her chipping ice for her drinks, the sight of her—bantam, brisk, vital—swooping about the house, a dervish soused in gin.

  But all was quiet now, all empty. When Oppie moved, his footfalls echoed; when he sat, as now, there was nothing but silence so total that he could hear his heart beat.

  Heart; they called the nucleus the heart of the atom, but in an atomic nucleus there were only two kinds of particles: protons and neutrons. Oppie’s heart, though, consisted of at least three. First, there were the particles that drove him to lead, to control. Perhaps, he thought, that drive stemmed from a mortifying experience when he was fourteen. His parents had shipped him off to summer camp where the other boys, appalled by his prissiness, had stripped him bare, painted his dick and ass green, and lock
ed him overnight in the icehouse. If there was to be a hierarchy, he’d vowed, never again would he be at its bottom.

  Then there were the nucleons of ambition. His mind was unfettered, his interests myriad; as General Groves had observed, he could talk expertly about anything except sports, and do so in multiple languages. Yes, he didn’t have a Nobel, not yet, but if his team succeeded here—if the damn thing worked—glory and fame greater than any medal could confer would come to him.

  And, finally, there were the particles of ...

  What to call it?

  Regret? Longing?

  It was both and neither. Jean was irretrievably gone; the Bhagavad Gita, which Oppie had discovered in his twenties, may have told of endless cycles of reincarnation, but he no more believed in them than he did in Ptolemy’s planetary epicycles. Beautiful intellectual constructs, to be sure, but merely that. She existed no more, and nothing could change the past.

  And Kitty? Kitty, whom he’d married instead of Jean? Whom he’d built some sort of life with? Kitty, the woman he was expected to say out loud that he loved? What of her?

  She would return. Surely she would. She had to.

  Oppie sighed in the moonlit room. He smoked so many cigarettes even he got tired of them, so from time to time he switched to a pipe; he selected a straight-stemmed billiard one from his rack and lit it, the wooden match hissing in the quiet, walnut tobacco glowing red, the smoke lost in the darkness.

  Oppie had often thought about suicide and had come particularly close once—the event related to his time at Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory he’d told Jean about. There was a fundamental instability in his heart, his core, his nucleus; no slow neutrons were needed to perturb it. He was a genius, damn it all, a thundering intellect. But under pressure, he did, he had to admit, unfathomably stupid things.

  In the fall of 1925, Oppie’s tutor at the Cavendish had been Patrick Blackett, just seven years his senior, and, like Oppie, tall, thin, and refined, with an extraordinarily elongated head as if his chin had grown as a counterbalance to his heightening brain. Robert had had—he could admit this to himself if never to Jean or Kitty—a sexual attraction to the man. Oppie had been a poor experimentalist at the best of times, and when Blackett hovered over him, he found himself constantly flustered and forever dropping things; to this day, the sound of shattering glass terrified him.

  Eventually, his desire for Blackett and the man’s clucking disapproval at his ineptitude proved too much. He bought an apple from a greengrocer and—Oppie’s head shook as he recalled it—he slowly and carefully painted potassium cyanide on the skin, then left it on Blackett’s desk.

  Whether the fruit symbolized the stereotypical gift from pupil to teacher or a stymied offer of forbidden knowledge—the congress they’d never share—Oppie couldn’t say; once again, it was both and neither. Oppie had been late, he realized, to sexual awakening—and this, this, was not what he’d expected. It was bad enough to discover that he was as much animal as intellectual, driven by urges, but this urge could not be allowed to endure.

  And so, logically, necessarily, rationally, the best thing was to eliminate the temptation, to remove the object of his perverse affection.

  Fortunately, another student suspected the apple was poisoned, and Blackett was warned. Oppie’s father Julius begged Cambridge not to press criminal charges. The university finally relented on condition that Oppie come under the care of a psychiatrist. The doctor, Ernest Jones—yes, that Ernest Jones, the one he’d regaled Jean about on the night they’d met, the first English-speaking practitioner of Freudian psychoanalysis—had diagnosed him with dementia praecox; in the twenty years since, that term had been deprecated in favor of schizophrenia. Jones soon discharged Oppie as “a hopeless case,” adding that “further analysis would do more harm than good,” leaving Robert looking for his own answers in the Gita and other mystical Eastern texts.

  Despite his high price and posh office, Oppie doubted the accuracy of Jones’s diagnosis, but he knew that something had been and continued to be wrong with him. Still, with a force of will, he kept it all together, just as the strong nuclear force kept positively charged protons from exploding away from each other. That force was the most powerful known to physics; oh, yes, with a carefully orchestrated chain reaction, nuclei could be made to split, but even the mighty stars thought that too much work; they preferred to fuse smaller nuclei into larger ones—the strong force was not easily defeated.

  But Oppie’s force of will? That was growing ever more rickety. So much was pulling at him—pressure and pain; duty and sorrow. Everything depended on this lab, their work, him.

  He drew on his pipe and thought of gooseflesh and green paint, of broken beakers and poisoned apples, of Patrick Blackett and Jean Tatlock.

  At last, he made his way to his bedroom, undressed, lay down on the hard bed, and wrapped a cool sheet around his bony frame, a winding cloth for the dead.

  Chapter 11

  This is absolutely intolerable. We defeated Nazi armies, we occupied Berlin and Peenemünde, but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be more revolting and more inexcusable?

  —Joseph Stalin

  Wernher von Braun fiddled madly with the tuning controls on the wood-encased tabletop radio in his hotel room, high up in the Alps, trying to get the station back. His heart was pounding because of what he thought he’d heard a moment ago, but before he told the others he had to be sure. If he were wrong, a station playing a waltz would be proof enough; if he were right, then every broadcaster should be carrying the same story. The Bakelite knob spun under his thick fingers.

  Static.

  More static.

  And then: “— our glorious Führer fell this afternoon in Berlin, fighting to the last breath against the accursed Bolshevik hordes. Born in Austria on April twentieth, 1889, Adolf Hitler, the greatest leader the world has ever known, was just fifty-six ...”

  Wernher collapsed back onto the room’s sole chair, its pine seat creaking under his two hundred and fifty pounds. A broad-shouldered and beefy thirty-three-year-old, six feet with sandy hair and blue eyes, he looked more like an American footballer than the lead engineer of the Nazi rocket program—except for his recent injury. Wernher’s left arm, broken in two places during a car accident, was encased in a heavy cast, half raised, a stillborn Sieg Heil.

  Von Braun had met the Führer four times, the first in 1939 and the last just shy of two years ago, in July of ’43. He’d felt the man’s preternatural charisma; everyone who’d ever encountered him had. Wernher liked to think of himself as apolitical but he had worn the S.S. uniform as part of an equestrian unit with, if not fascist pride, at least a certain appreciation of its sexy black leather and metal fittings.

  That Hitler would die this year had been inevitable, whether as now, gloriously in battle, or later in front of an Allied firing squad. Many would grieve his passing but von Braun, ever the engineer, quickly turned his analytical mind to the problem at hand. He’d been sure the war was lost as far back as the beginning of January 1945, five months ago, and had called his rocketry team together then, baldly declaring that Germany would be defeated. Anywhere else in the Reich, before any other group, such a statement would have seen him sent to a concentration camp, if not executed, but his rocketeers were practical men, even if their heads were in the stars.

  Indeed, in March of last year, Wernher and two of his subordinates had drunk far too much wine at a party in the spa town of Zinnowitz, and Wernher had let his tongue flap about his growing belief, even then, that Germany was heading for overwhelming defeat. That had been damning enough, but he’d also revealed something else he normally kept to himself, loudly exclaiming “Ist mir scheißegal” —I don’t give a shit—about the military uses of rockets; his goal was manned space flight. Himmler’s agents arrested all three of them for putting far-off dreams ahead of war production, locking them up for
more than a week.

  But now that the Führer was dead, Wernher was sure the authoritarian regime would unravel quickly. Most Nazis had sworn allegiance to Hitler personally; many who yesterday would have called surrender treason today were doubtless preparing to do just that. Von Braun had no intention of letting him or his colleagues be imprisoned—what they knew was far too valuable. But to which of the triumphant countries should they entrust their precious heritage? Who among the victors deserved the gift of space travel?

  He’d already discussed this with his staff. They’d agreed that when the time came they would surrender as a unit, rather than let the Allies pick whom to employ—and whom to execute. They’d also agreed that they couldn’t stand the French (who could?); that the Soviets were animals; and that the British wouldn’t be able to afford anything as grandiose as a peacetime British Experimental Rocket Group. That left the Americans. Most of the rocketeers had never met a Yankee and what knowledge they had of their country came from movies—but the Germans knew a real devil here; one they didn’t know surely could be no worse.

  There was no American Prometheus—no brilliant scientist or engineer who had taken fire from the gods; it was conventional warfare, pure and simple, that had ground the Reich down, like bone crushed under an apothecary’s pestle. But there was a German Prometheus, and he—Herr Professor Doktor Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun—was it: his V-2 rockets traveled so fast they struck London before the roar of their engines could be heard there; a godlike fire indeed! And that power—the ability to make the most sophisticated rockets the world had ever seen—would be their deliverance.

  Wernher rose, the bedroom chair squeaking its relief, and headed down to the beer hall of Haus Ingeburg, the ski lodge on the German-Austrian border in which he and his coterie of a hundred and seventy men were hiding out. Weeks ago, they’d secreted their fourteen tons of papers and blueprints in a deserted mine shaft in the Harz mountains, lest the S.S. destroy them rather than allow the material to fall into enemy hands. Then they’d abandoned the Peenemünde Rocket Base, where they would have been sitting ducks for Allied bombers. Here, in the rarefied air of the Alps, along the winding road that was currently known as the Adolf Hitler Pass but surely would soon revert to its pre-war name of Oberjoch, they had been biding their time.