The Oppenheimer Alternative Read online

  The moment he entered the beer hall, pungent with smoke and schnitzel, Dieter Huzel, an electrical engineer a year younger than von Braun, caught him by his good arm. “Mein Gott,” he said, eyes wide. His face was drained of color as he pointed to the hall’s radio, which had been turned off but must have recently been on. “Mein Gott.”

  “We have to move fast,” Wernher said. “Where’s Dornberger?”

  Huzel pointed to a booth, and Wernher made his way over. Although von Braun was the (more-or-less) civilian head of the rocketry program, the top man was Major General Walter Dornberger, who had personally recruited Wernher despite others’ misgivings. Von Braun had successfully maneuvered Dornberger to choose Peenemünde, a place dear to his family, as the site of the rocket works. Still, they did clash from time to time, with Wernher interested in die schöne Wissenschaft—the beautiful science—of rocketry whereas the general was obsessively focused on building weapons.

  Dornberger, his thin comb-over no more defense against baldness than the German ground forces had proven to be against the implacable Russian troops, had his head bent; he was apparently staring at the green painted wood of the tabletop. “General,” Wernher said softly.

  The older man, a veteran of both world wars who had seen the Fatherland fall twice now, slowly looked up. It seemed to take a while for his gray eyes to focus. “Yes?”

  “It’s time. There’s no choice.”

  Wernher had expected a protest, but the fight had gone out of Dornberger; he looked deflated, a study in concavities. “No,” the general said. “No, there isn’t, is there?” He moved to get up but, apparently discovering he lacked the strength just then to do so, instead gestured for von Braun to sit opposite him. Wernher did that, laying his heavy cast on the table, bright white covering green, the same color scheme they’d all seen on the springtime Alps these past weeks.

  “I know you get intelligence reports ...” Wernher said softly.

  Dornberger nodded but said nothing.

  “And ...” prodded von Braun. “There must be something useful, no?”

  Dornberger made a visible effort to focus, to rally. “Yes,” he said at last. “A unit of American soldiers has set up a base at the bottom of this mountain.”

  “Which side of the mountain?”

  “The Austrian.”

  Wernher nodded. “Tomorrow, then?”

  “Ja,” said the General softly, looking down at the painted wood once more. “Morgen.”

  Wernher rose. Across the room, Dieter Huzel had moved to the piano bench. He started to play the Deutschlandlied. Others gathered around, including, Wernher saw, his own younger brother, Magnus. He went over to join the group, and Magnus asked Huzel to go back to the beginning. He did so, and Magnus, who had a choirboy’s warbling alto, sang: “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, Über alles in der Welt ...”

  Germany, thought Wernher, would never be above all again, but he, or someone else, riding one of his rockets, would soon indeed be above all in the world.

  He didn’t join in even though he knew that for him, as for the rest of them, it would be the last opportunity ever to sing that song.

  #

  Sometimes it’s the simplest things that make the biggest impression. Wernher von Braun had enjoyed every bite of the sumptuous meal the Allied soldiers had prepared for him and his men now that they were all down at the base of the mountain, but once that meal was over, he found himself reaching for the bread again—a loaf of a whiteness to rival the mountain snows. It had been—Gott!—four years since he’d tasted white bread. He slathered butter on a slice and took a bite. After the hardtack of war-time privation, this was heavenly; even he would have admitted just now that there really hadn’t been a greater invention than sliced bread, at least not when it was of such perfect hue and texture and softness, the crust yielding easily, the center practically melting on the tongue.

  Two dozen of his senior men sat around the table, enjoying beer, wine, coffee, and cigars. But all eyes were on his brother Magnus.

  “And then what?” prodded Wernher.

  Magnus raised a pint of beer to his lips, wiped off the foam mustache, and continued. “I’d tied a white handkerchief—thank you, Dieter!—to the bike’s handlebars. It’s a long way down to the foot of the mountain, but I was able to coast almost all the way; you, dear brother, never could have made the trip with your arm like that. Anyway, there’s never an enemy soldier around when you want one! I looked and looked. Plenty of pretty girls; what they say about the Alpine air is true. And some dairy farmers, and a local boy who wanted to know where I’d gotten the bicycle. And then, at last, there he was, just wandering down the street.” Magnus pointed at one of the three Americans who were also at the table.

  He must have understood some German because he said, “Yes, that was me!”

  “Ja, that was him. A private from the 44th American infantry division. I rode closer, lifting my hands up off the handlebars, and called out in English, ‘My name is Magnus von Braun!’”

  The private, apparently recognizing where Magnus was in the story, joined in, shouting the rest: “‘My brother invented the V-2! We wish to surrender!’”

  The private and Magnus both laughed, and Wernher, his cast resting on the linen tablecloth, shook his head; even he hadn’t expected it to be that simple. “And that was it?”

  “Well,” said Magnus, “the private had never heard of me, or even you, brother, but the V-2? That he had heard of.”

  A Bavarian barmaid came by with fresh steins. Wernher downed the last of his previous drink in order to snare one of the new ones. “My friend here,” said Magnus, indicating the private, “didn’t speak much German, and I had only so much English. It took a bit but—”

  “Tell me you said, ‘We come in peace,’” quipped Dieter Huzel, who had enjoyed borrowing Wernher’s copies of the American magazine Astounding Stories before the war.

  Magnus laughed. “Not quite, but I got the gist across, and the private led me—I walked my bike beside him—to the camp, where a colonel was available. His accent was so thick—or mine was, I guess, from his point of view—that we had trouble communicating ...”

  “All the while the rest of us were shitting bricks waiting for word!” Dieter said.

  “I was as quick as I could be,” said Magnus, “without, you know, being inhospitable.” He raised his beer. “Naturally, we had to drink on it before the colonel drove me back up the mountain.”

  The colonel was at the head of the long table: a red-haired middle-aged man perhaps of Irish stock, with freckles. “We had a list,” he said in English, and Magnus did his best to translate for the rocketeers. “We called it the Black List—all the top Germans our science and engineering specialists wanted to talk to.” He nodded affably at Wernher. “Of course, your name was at the top of it.”

  Magnus went on. “The colonel had told me they weren’t set up for so many prisoners of war, and it was clear we wanted to be with them; we weren’t going to run off. So why not let us enjoy this place’s hospitality until it’s time to leave?” This place was a sprawling Bavarian mansion in the market town of Reutte that had been commandeered by the American infantry.

  Wernher raised his stein in a salute to the colonel. “Danke schön.”

  The colonel briefly frowned as if searching his memory for some appropriate German to reply with, then he made a little shrug, conceding that what he’d come up with wasn’t exactly the right thing, but would do in a pinch: “Guten Tag.”

  Wernher smiled. It was indeed.

  The colonel switched back to English again, and Magnus translated: “He says, ‘I had my doubts, of course. The name von Braun I knew, but I’d expected some weak-looking gray-haired egghead, not—” he gestured, encompassing both Wernher’s youth and physique “—Li’l Abner here.’”

  Laughter erupted when Magnus finish
ed conveying this to his colleagues; their Wernher was indeed both a Wunderkind and an Übermensch.

  “Of course,” said the colonel, “others are on their way here to take charge of all of you. I can’t say what reception you’ll get, but for now ...”

  When Magnus finished the translation, Wernher nodded and reached for another white slice of heaven. For now, at least, he wouldn’t worry about what the future held.

  Chapter 12

  For me, Hitler was the personification of evil and the primary justification for the atomic-bomb work. Now that the bomb could not be used against the Nazis, doubts arose. Those doubts, even if they do not appear in official reports, were discussed in many private conversations.

  —Emilio Segrè, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics

  Blood of Christ.

  Perhaps an odd thought for a Jew, Oppie reflected, but, then again, he wasn’t much of a Jew. But he was a polyglot, and although the name of the mountains to the east was just a mellifluous phrase to many of those he’d brought here, Oppie couldn’t think of Sangre de Cristo without its attached meaning.

  He knew the debate surrounding the naming of this sub-range of the Rockies. Yes, it might have been to acknowledge the reddish hue the peaks often took at sunrise, or later at sunset, but Oppie preferred the story that “Sangre de Cristo” were the final words uttered near here by a Catholic priest mortally wounded by Apaches.

  Germany was a largely Christian country—damn near exclusively so, after the Nazi slaughter—and so Oppie had long imagined that when the atomic bomb was finally dropped on one of its cities, many who didn’t die instantly would pass on while mumbling some similar invocation. The German version was instantly in his consciousness: Blut von Christus.

  But that wasn’t going to happen now; there would be no atomic-fission fireball over the Fatherland. Hitler and his mistress had committed suicide two days ago, on April 30, 1945.

  Oppie’s strength, he knew, was in making connections, but the image of Jean dead in her bathtub that came back yet again was one he could have done without at this moment. He tipped his head, the brim of his hat momentarily eclipsing the jagged mountains, as he tamped down that memory. Other notions, though, weren’t so easily banished.

  They had failed.

  He had failed.

  As young Richard Feynman had said last night, “Damn it, Oppie, Hitler was evil personified. He was the whole fucking point. You told us—everybody told us—that what we were doing here was the key to defeating the Nazis.”

  But, in the end, conventional troops pressing in on Berlin—and maybe, Oppie mused, Hitler having learned of Mussolini’s corpse being strung up by its ankles and stoned and spat upon by those who had suffered under his regime—had moved Der Führer to accomplish with a single bullet what Oppie’s multi-million-dollar gadget was supposed to do: end the war in Europe.

  Feynman wasn’t wrong, and he was hardly the only Manhattan Project scientist questioning whether they should continue. Leo Szilard in Chicago was telling everyone that there was no need now to go on with bomb development, and although General Groves hated the pear-shaped Hungarian, Oppie was fond of—and, more importantly, respected—Leo.

  But if they did continue their work, the target now would be Japan, not Germany. Oppie knew Germany well from his years at Göttingen studying under Max Born, but he didn’t know Japan or its language at all except to say that there were few Christians there. If the bomb were dropped on Tokyo or Kyoto, no one would invoke the blood of Christ as their lives ended. But suddenly, overnight, the notion of killing Germans—in some ways an altruistic venture for Americans, who, after all, had little direct stake in the European theater—had shifted to killing Japanese, an act that had more than a whiff about it of being revenge for Pearl Harbor. Hardly what a graduate of New York’s Ethical Culture School should be striving for. “Deed before creed” indeed!

  Yes, the Pacific war was brutal and, yes, it needed to be finished as quickly as possible; American boys were dying over there every single day. But there was no hint that the Japs might have an atomic-bomb program of their own and so no reason to counter it with one of ours.

  Oppie took another long look at the Sangre de Cristo mountains then turned and started walking back toward Site Y, the random alphabetic assignment suddenly seeming appropriate: a road with a fork in it—and they were now heading along a new path. His early-morning shadow stretched across the mesa in front of him, long and dark.

  #

  Later that May, Oppie traveled to Virginia for the first gathering of what Secretary of War Henry Stimson had dubbed “the Interim Committee,” a nice, non-threatening name for the group that would advise Harry S. Truman—who, as vice president, had been blissfully unaware of the Manhattan Project until he was sworn in a month ago as FDR’s successor—about the first use of atomic weapons.

  Leo Szilard of the Chicago Met Lab had gotten wind of the fact that Oppie was out East, although he probably didn’t know why; still, he insisted on a meeting. Robert obliged; he had the use of a small office with sickly yellow walls at the War Department when he was in town. He told Szilard to take the train there; Leo did so, and an MP escorted him to the appropriate room when he arrived.

  Szilard had a way of wearing his trench coat unbuttoned that suggested a cape; there was a theatricality to him that some found gauche, but Robert rather enjoyed. As he took off the coat, Leo said, “Did you not get my letter? I wrote you!”

  Oppie had indeed received the typed missive back at Los Alamos. Szilard had droned on about his concern that “if a race in the production of atomic bombs should become unavoidable, the prospects of this country cannot be expected to be good,” adding, “I doubt whether it is wise to show our hand by using atomic bombs against Japan.”

  Oppie nodded. “I did, yes.”

  “You did not reply.”

  There had been no point in signing anything that defined a position except when he had to in official reports for those above him—Groves, Vannevar Bush, Stimson, or the president himself. “I have little time for correspondence.”

  Szilard harrumphed, sat himself down on the unpadded wooden chair opposite Robert, and waved away some of the smoke in the air. “Urey, Bartky, and I saw some character called Jimmy Byrnes two days ago. Einstein wrote a letter for us, and—”

  Oppie cocked his head. “Did he, just?”

  “Well, all right, I wrote it, but Albert signed it. And it was enough to get us an appointment to see the new president, this Truman. But when we arrived, they fobbed us off with a—a backwoodsman!” Oppie had heard that Byrnes was about to be appointed Secretary of State, but it wasn’t his place to leak that to Szilard. “Still,” continued Leo, “I tried to make him understand that it would be morally reprehensible to use the bomb against Japanese cities.” He shook his head. “But he knew nothing of morals, this man. He said using the bomb now would make the Russians more manageable after the war. I told him it wasn’t savvy to prod the Soviet bear thus. But he had been listening to Groves—Groves!—who had told him that it would take the Russians twenty years to build their own bomb.”

  “Oh, it won’t be that long,” Oppie replied, making a diligent effort to exhale smoke away from Szilard.

  “No, no, no, of course not! But that fool Groves had told him there was no uranium in Russia. First, how would he know—how would anyone know, a country that big? And, second, there is uranium in Czechoslovakia! No, I said, if we provoke them, the Soviets will be sure to have the bomb before this decade is out.”

  “What did Mr. Byrnes say to that?”

  “He dared tell me I should think of Hungary, saying I should not want the Russians to occupy my homeland forever. Hungary? Robert, I am thinking of the whole world! The post-war environment in which we all live ... or die.”

  Oppie looked at him for a long moment. “The atomic bomb is shit,” he said flatly.

/>   Szilard’s dark hair was combed back from his wide forehead; his eyebrows climbed toward his hairline. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, put it this way: it’s a weapon with no military significance. It will make a big bang—a very big bang—but it’s not a weapon that’ll be useful in war.”

  “How can you say such a thing?”

  Oppie waved his empty hand as he sought a comparison. “It’s like the gas warfare of the Great War: once people saw how ... how unconscionable its use was, they outlawed it. But no one bans the theoretical, only the practical. Surely you can see once we use the bomb against Japan, the Russians will get the point.”

  “Absolutely they will get the point—they will get the point only too well.”

  Oppenheimer didn’t like the sarcastic tone. “What do you mean by that?”

  “They will feel threatened, don’t you see? Us having such a bomb is one thing, and, yes, since we cannot keep that fact a secret, we should tell the Russians. That will gall them but it won’t galvanize them. But the fact that we are willing to use such a bomb against people? This will trigger an atomic arms race, mark my words.”

  “Well, you know I’m on a committee here.”

  “Yes, yes. You, Fermi, Compton, and Lawrence as the scientific contingent. Pointedly, not me or anyone else who will strongly speak against—”

  “We’re not puppets, Leo.”

  “No, no, no. I didn’t mean—”