The Oppenheimer Alternative Read online

  “But we are scientists. Not policy makers or politicians. We’ve no claim to special competence in solving military or political problems.”

  “Of course we have special competence! We are learned men, we are thinkers! And, practically alone of all the peoples of the world, we have devoted our thoughts, day in and day out, for years now to the question of atomic bombs.”

  “To the technical questions of—”

  “Not all of us have had our heads buried in equations. You know that. Bohr, myself, many others have been deeply contemplating the ethical and political ramifications of this ... this monster we’ve unleashed.”

  Oppie lifted his hands slightly. “All I want is to see the war in the Pacific over in the shortest possible time.”

  “The war could end today, tomorrow—as soon as the bomb is ready—with a demonstration, as I said in my letter. Show the Japanese; invite a contingent to a remote area. Let them see what the bomb can do.”

  “And if it’s a dud?”

  “The uranium-gun design can’t fail; you know that. The physics is—”

  “Solid, yes. But still, there’s a chance ...”

  “A chance!” Leo threw up arms in disgust. “Bah! When the time comes, you will play ball, Robert. You have become like them” —the special sneer reserved for Groves and his ilk. “You want your ‘big bang.’ You want to use the bomb on a city; you want the whole world to know what you’ve accomplished.”

  The words stung. Two years ago, Enrico Fermi, visiting Los Alamos from the Met Lab, had said to Oppie, “My God, I think your people here actually want to make a bomb!”

  “It’s not like that, Leo.”

  “No? What is it like, then?”

  “The bomb can end the war decisively and quickly. If we don’t use it, there will have to be an Allied invasion of Japan, with huge casualties on both sides.” Oppie had been hearing that daily from Groves and others ever since the fall of Berlin—and the Japanese were fighting on in every jungle hellhole with an insane tenacity, down to the last man.

  “Your horizon is too short, Robert—much too short. Japan is finished regardless. You know that; everyone knows that. But if the bomb is used, it’ll start a stone rolling that’ll gather enough poison moss to kill us all.”

  “No one spends two billion dollars making something not to be used.”

  “Two billion? And here I thought the going rate was thirty pieces of silver.”

  Oppie placed his hands flat against his desktop and took a deep breath. When he felt he could speak again in an even tone, he rose, ending the meeting. “Give my regards to the others back in Chicago.”

  Chapter 13

  Kitty was a schemer. If Kitty wanted anything she would always get it. I remember one time when she got it into her head to do a Ph.D. and the way she cozied up to this poor little dean of the biological sciences was shameful. She never did the Ph.D. It was just another of her whims. She was a phony. All her political convictions were phony, all her ideas were borrowed. Honestly, she’s one of the few really evil people I’ve known in my life.

  —Jackie Oppenheimer (Robert’s sister-in-law)

  Oppie strode along, the brim of his hat shielding his eyes from the June New Mexico sun. General Groves had ordered a new billboard put up here on the Hill. “Whose son will die in the last minutes of the war?” it asked, with a picture of dead American soldiers strewn upon a battlefield, and, beneath, in larger type, the exhortation “Minutes count!”

  Oppie made eye contact with each person he passed—scientist, soldier, servant, spouse—and nodded or smiled. It was a key part of keeping this vast machine well lubricated. When they’d begun here, the responses had always been in kind, but frayed nerves, exhaustion, and foul moods were pervasive now. The excitement of the early days had turned out not to be self-sustaining; rather, it had fizzled as weeks stretched into years. Oppie had been here for twenty-seven months; many others had passed their second anniversaries as well.

  Kitty was still gone. She had left—no, not him, never him, but the mesa—ten weeks ago, declaring she simply had to get away. She’d fled to her parents’ house near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, taking their son Peter, now nearly four, with her. But she hadn’t taken her namesake Katherine, their daughter, just four months old then. Oppie didn’t approve of the child being named for her mother. He always told people his own first initial stood for nothing because being called Julius after his father was likewise a violation of Jewish tradition; you don’t give the name of one still living to another. But Kitty had asked this of him, and, as with so much else, including their marriage, he found himself incapable of denying her. But he had taken to referring to the infant as “Tyke,” and his wife had soon followed suit. Still, Robert, the director, the boss, the man at the center whose letters and phone calls were monitored, would not give the security people the satisfaction of hearing him asking, begging, Kitty to return.

  “Groves will never let you go for any appreciable length of time,” Oppie had said when Kitty had blind-sided him by announcing her plan to depart. The general was now allowing civilians to take leave for the odd weekend, or occasionally even a week, but more was unheard of. “By the time you get to Pittsburgh, you’ll have to just turn around and come back here.”

  Kitty was on the couch, legs crossed, dark hair unkempt. “Dick says I can go for as long as I like.”

  Dick. For God’s sake, even he didn’t call the general by that name. Oppie came to wonder if such familiarity had something to do with her earning an unlimited furlough—but Groves was as strait-laced as they came. Perhaps he’d simply decided life would be easier for a lot of people if the frenetic—and fermented—Kitty weren’t here for a while, or maybe he felt security would be better with one less ex-Commie around.

  “He’s letting you go?” Oppie had repeated then, struggling to make sense of it all.

  “That’s right.”

  “To stay with your mother?”

  “With both my parents.”

  “Your mother, whose cousin is Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel?”

  “I don’t interact with people I’m not supposed to.”

  And there she was: Jean, tossed into the conversation without even having to be named. Dead fifteen months now but omnipresent here, in the house she’d never visited on Bathtub Row, spicing his dreams each night while tainting his every conversation with Kitty.

  “When will you be back?” Oppie had asked.

  She’d looked out the window into the darkness. “When I’m at peace or the world is,” she had replied. “Whichever comes first.”

  So far, neither had occurred. He locked the door to his office and headed out into the June twilight with Venus, the goddess of love, low on the horizon.

  Oppie couldn’t take care of an infant on his own and run this vast lab, and so the camp’s pediatrician had suggested a solution. As Oppie continued his walk home, leaving the T-Section laboratories and heading to the Sundt apartments, the incongruity of there being a person with that specialty here hit him. Ten or so new babies appeared each month, much to the chagrin of General Groves, who had asked Oppie if he could do something to restrain matters. Robert had replied that his duties as scientific director may have included rapid rupture but there was nothing he could do about naked rapture—or its consequences; birth control wasn’t part of his job.

  And neither was being, in effect, a single parent. The pediatrician proposed that Pat, the twenty-four-year-old wife of physicist Rubby Sherr, should look after Tyke until Kitty returned, and so the baby had moved into the Sherrs’s home. Pat and Rubby had a four-year-old daughter of their own and Pat was expecting again. She’d also lost a little boy this past winter, and the pediatrician thought that having another infant to care for would cheer her up. That made no sense to Oppie—atoms were fungible but surely babies were not—but the conceit served his ends and so he’d
decided not to question it.

  Robert made a point of stopping by the Sherr apartment twice a week. Homes weren’t fungible either, even if all the ones in this part of the base had been hastily thrown together from the same blueprint. Pat had done what she could to make hers distinctive, with red-and-yellow throw rugs bought from the Pueblo Indians in Santa Fe, a bouquet of mariposa lilies in a glass vase on a small wooden table, and a few framed Audubon prints; Rubby was an avid bird watcher.

  “Well, look who’s here,” Pat said as she opened the apartment door after he’d knocked, in a tone that implied she felt it had been too long since his last visit. She was wearing a loose yellow blouse and beige slacks.

  Oppie gestured toward the tiny kitchen. “Dinner smells good.”

  “You should stay,” Pat replied. “You’re skin and bones.”

  Oppie was down to an admittedly skeletal hundred and fifteen pounds; Pat certainly wasn’t the first to comment on his weight loss. Groves had declared that he’d become scrawny, a term Robert hadn’t thought was in the general’s vocabulary, and Bob Serber had lisped the word “emaciated” in reference to him last week. Meanwhile, his secretary had scolded him for living on tobacco and gin. Months now without Kitty, a year and a half since Jean had taken her own life, and, yes, the war in the Pacific still to be won and the weight of that on his shoulders. Just today, he’d received by military courier minutes of the most-recent meeting he’d attended of the Interim Committee, concluding: “The bomb should be used against Japan as soon as possible.”

  And Los Alamos—his purview!—was the bottleneck: “as soon as possible” meant as soon as Oppie’s boys finished their job. There was no time for anything but the work that needed doing. “I’m sure it’ll be delicious,” he said to Pat, “but no, thank you. I’ll be heading back to my office shortly.”

  Oppie had chaired the Target Committee meetings, assembling the list of Japanese cities suitable for bombing. Groves had only attended the first session—although his deputy, Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, came as his eyes and ears to the others—but Oppie had heard that Groves was livid that Secretary of War Henry Stimson had just vetoed the Committee’s top choice, Kyoto. Stimson and his wife had visited Japan’s ancient and beautiful former capital in 1926 and considered it too spiritually important to the Japanese to be obliterated. For his part, Oppie didn’t care what cities were bombed; they were all just names on a map to him. But he did care about not being the holdup.

  Pat invited him to sit on the couch, and he did so, air escaping from him in an audible sigh.

  “Coffee, at least?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “You don’t look it. Oppie, what happens to all of this if you get sick?”

  Robert lifted his shoulders. His superior, Groves, and Oppie’s designated successor, Deak Parsons, would do their best to push through to the end, but they didn’t know a tenth of what they needed to. It didn’t all come together in the T-Section labs; it came together in Oppie’s mind. “I’m fine,” he said again.

  She looked dubious but took the chair opposite him and had a sip from a mug that had been sitting next to the vase.

  “I want to thank you,” Oppie said, as he did on every visit, “for doing this for us.”

  Pat opened her mouth to say something, closed it, then, apparently deciding she did want to ask the question, opened it again: “Any idea when Mrs. Oppenheimer will be back?”

  “Soon,” he replied and then, shrugging, added, “I imagine.”

  She shifted in her chair. Oppie had seen that expression on many a face here: a job needed doing and one’s personal feelings had to be set aside; even the civilians had to soldier on. He looked out the east-facing window. This building was casting a lengthy shadow, and a blazing ball of light, like a second sun, reflected back at him from a neighbor’s windowpane. He could no more discuss the work he was doing with Pat than he could with his own wife, but chitchat was fine. “Did you hear Truman on the radio today?” he asked. “Honestly, I don’t know how he’s going to fill FDR’s shoes. He simply—”

  “Oppie?” A hint of reproof in the two syllables. He turned back to face her, his eyebrows lifted. “Don’t you want to see your daughter? She’s growing so fast.”

  He worked on opening his fourth Chesterfield pack of the day. “Yeah,” he said, surprised by the question. “Sure.”

  Pat stood again and returned moments later carrying the little girl, clearly ready for a nap, wrapped in one of those blankets that had caused so much fuss early on: stamped upon it in bold, black letters was “USED.” Oppie had lost a day and a half calming outraged wives, explaining to each in turn that it was an acronym for United States Engineer Detachment.

  Pat proffered the child, who had brown eyes like her mother, and Oppie took her, adjusting his posture to better accommodate his burden. Although the little girl didn’t put up a fuss, she turned her head to look back at Pat. There was a small clock on the same table that held Pat’s coffee cup and the wildflowers. Oppie dutifully watched the second hand click through sixty increments, bouncing his knee on every fifth one, then moved to give the child back to Pat. She shook her head slightly but did indeed take Tyke, stroking the girl’s thin hair soothingly.

  “You seem to love her a lot,” Oppie ventured.

  “I love all children,” Pat said, “but this one’s a perfect angel. And when you take care of a baby, whether it’s your own or someone else’s, it becomes a big part of your life, you know?”

  “Would you like to adopt her?”

  Pat’s mouth dropped open and her hand stopped moving mid-stroke, only resuming its comforting action when Tyke mewled a protest.

  “Well?” prodded Oppie.

  “Of course not. Dear God.”

  “But you’re so good with her.”

  “Jesus, Robert. She has two perfectly good parents already. Why would you even ask such a thing?”

  Perfectly good? One physically absent; the other ... Oppie looked out the window again and took a long drag on his cigarette. “Because I can’t love her.”

  Pat got up and carried the baby to the next room, putting her in her crib to sleep—and maybe to keep the child from hearing any more of her father’s words. When she returned, she sat again.

  “Robert.” He turned, and she went on. “It’s ... I mean, I can understand. You’re so busy, so wrapped up in—in everything. And you have all of us to take care of, not just your daughter. But—look, I know Dr. Barnett thought this arrangement would be good all around, but if you’d just spend a little more time with Katherine, I’m sure you’d become attached to her.”

  She didn’t understand; she couldn’t understand. Sickly and unathletic, Oppie hadn’t had any real friends as a child; he never learned how to relate to a child. And, besides, when you do become attached to someone, they just—

  He shook his head, dispelling that thought. “I’m not the ‘attached’ kind.”

  “Oh, Robert. Robert, Robert.” Her frown was deep. “Have you discussed this with Mrs. Oppenheimer?”

  “No. I felt it prudent to feel you out first. Every child deserves what you and Rubby have managed to make here, amidst all this madness: a loving home. We can’t provide that.”

  “I’m sorry.” She touched her own protruding belly. “Soon it’s going to be too crowded and ...” She trailed off, and Oppie sensed that she’d decided no excuses were necessary, a supposition confirmed when she shook her head and said a final word: “No.”

  “Well, then.” Oppie, weary to the core of his being, rose from the couch. “I need to get back to work.”

  Chapter 14

  Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht!

  —Albert Einstein

  Edward Teller was convinced his solar-fusion equations were correct—and that the same process he’d detected in the sun could be used to make his proposed super bomb. He st
ill refused to believe Hans Bethe, who was adamant that Teller was wrong about how the sun fused atoms heavier than lithium. And even though Oppie’s own pre-war research on neutron cores made him an expert on stellar physics, the smug Hungarian wouldn’t believe him, either.

  Exasperated, Oppie had finally gotten Teller to leave a copy of his solar-fusion equations with him and he’d sent them by military courier to the one person even the irascible Edward couldn’t gainsay: the genius that, with the passing of Freud six years ago, was the only living scientist who was a household name, the Grand Old Man of Physics himself, Albert Einstein.

  Teller told Oppie he was confident that Einstein would see his brilliance. “If Leo could confound Einstein, surely I can,” Teller had said, folding arms across his wide chest; Teller had long known Szilard, a fellow Martian.

  Oppie had made a little shrug; over the years they’d all heard Leo repeatedly recount, with great relish, the two times he’d astounded Einstein. Early in 1922, Szilard had approached Einstein after a seminar to say he’d figured out how to account for the random motion of thermal equilibrium within the framework of the original pre-atomic form of phenomenological theory. Einstein had replied, “That’s impossible. This is something that cannot be done.” But the famed professor had heard Szilard out and soon became convinced Leo was right. When Szilard had handed in his impromptu paper on this topic—startling his supervisor, as it wasn’t at all what Leo had agreed to research—it was deemed so original that it was accepted the next morning as his Ph.D. thesis.

  Even more remarkable had been when Szilard and Eugene Wigner—old Pineapple Head himself—had gone to see Einstein at his two-story cottage on Long Island in July 1939. They’d outlined their belief that uranium, properly bombarded by neutrons, would split, releasing spectacular energy that could be used in a devastating bomb. “Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht,” Einstein had said, according to Leo. I never thought of that!

  Oppie was irritated enough by Teller’s insistence on pursuing fusion; he’d be damned if Edward would pursue it incorrectly. He spent plenty of time babying him as it was, letting Edward come to his office for a private meeting every week. One-on-one time with the scientific director was almost as big a status symbol as was the division-head title that Teller so resented having gone to Bethe.