Blank Spots on the Map Page 9

  The promise of science and the promise of democracy were, in the minds of progressive scientists like Bohr, quite the same thing. The principles of scientific inquiry—shared, observable phenomena; the application of reason; and a community of rational thinkers—suggested the principles of liberal democracy, a point made by Giambattista Vico in 1708 when he argued that whoever “intends a career in public life, whether in the courts, the senate, or the pulpit,” should “master the art of topics and defend both sides of a controversy, be it on nature, man, or politics, in a freer and brighter style of expression, so he can learn to draw on those arguments which are most probable and have the greatest degree of verisimilitude.” Meaning, the ideals of science were the same ideals that one should strive toward in civic life. These notions quickly helped form the political philosophies of Enlightenment political thinkers and gave rise to notions of civil rights and equality. These ideals, in turn, inspired the American Revolution.

  Thus, for Bohr, there was much at stake in the idea of introducing secrecy into science. On one hand, there was the very real chance that fission research conducted in the public sphere might encourage the Nazis to undertake their own nuclear weapons program. On the other, conducting science in secret would be a deep betrayal—not only of the most fundamental of scientific conventions, but a betrayal of the polis itself; conducting science in secret meant turning reason into a weapon. The question that evening at Princeton was this: Did the ideals of science and democracy have to be betrayed in the face of Nazism? And if they were betrayed, would the ideals eventually come back, or would that betrayal remain permanent?

  As the Princeton meeting ground past midnight and into the cold early hours of the East Coast winter, Bohr, unable to convince his colleagues they should preserve the openness that characterized their field, finally skirted the issue. The whole conversation was moot, he concluded. Separating U-235, the uranium isotope required to sustain a chain reaction, in any quantity suitable for a weapon was simply too much effort. The largest plant capable of separating U-235 from U-238 would take ten days working twenty-four hours a day to separate one thousand-millionth of a gram. Working at that maximum speed, it would take 26,445 years to produce a single gram of U-235. Such an undertaking would be nearly impossible given the resource restrictions in a time of war. According to Edward Teller, Bohr claimed that “it could never be done unless you turn the United States into one huge factory.”

  The next month, Bohr returned to Copenhagen. Europe was on the brink of destruction. Hitler was threatening Poland. It was only a matter of time before the German Panzer columns rumbled into Bohr’s homeland. His colleagues resolutely opposed Bohr’s return to Europe, pointing out that the physicist could have almost any academic appointment in the United States that he wanted if only he were to stay. But the elder physicist refused. Bohr felt compelled to return to Europe, to maintain his institute, and to continue helping other scientists escape from the Nazis’ ever-growing sphere of domination. For many scientists still in Europe, Bohr’s institute was the only means of escape.

  Back in Copenhagen, Bohr continued to accept fleeing refugees through the institute, often putting them up in his own home when they arrived in Copenhagen, and used his influence with the Swedish royal family to arrange for refugees to find sanctuary in Sweden. In April of 1940, the Nazis invaded Denmark and the small country capitulated to overwhelming Nazi force with little resistance. Bohr began destroying records of the refugees he’d helped flee Germany and other occupied countries lest they fall into Hitler’s hands. Once again, Bohr’s American colleagues sent him a flood of cables imploring him to leave Denmark for the relative safety of the United States. Once again, Bohr refused, convinced that his presence in Denmark was needed to resist the Nazi occupation. In late August of 1943, the Danish government resigned rather than accept the latest round of Nazi demands, and the Germans declared martial law throughout the country. Arrests increased. People disappeared. Within a few weeks, Bohr learned the Nazis planned to intern all “undesirable aliens”—Jewish refugees who’d found asylum in Denmark. On September 29, Bohr was told of his own impending arrest. That night, with his family, Bohr fled Denmark in a small motorboat bound for the Swedish coast. Upon his arrival, Bohr immediately used his influence to arrange for the reception of thousands of Jewish refugees who would soon be fleeing Denmark. Over the next few weeks, six thousand Jews were able to find sanctuary in Sweden, crossing from Denmark in clandestine nightly evacuations. On October 6, an unarmed British Mosquito bomber landed in Stockholm to smuggle the physicist out of the country. Bohr crept into the plane’s empty bomb bay and escaped to Britain.

  In Britain, Bohr, who had been out of the loop while in Denmark, learned of the Manhattan Project—the effort to build an atomic bomb—the project Bohr had so recently dismissed as un-feasible. After two months in Britain, the physicist boarded a ship bound for the United States, accompanied by his son Aage. When the ship arrived in New York, a group of Army security officers received him. The Secret Service had prepared for the physicist’s arrival. Bohr’s very presence in the United States could signal an American interest in developing nuclear weapons. The physicist was compelled to go undercover. It began with his name. When Bohr set foot on American soil, he became “Nicolas Baker,” a sterile identity. His existence became a state secret.

  This led to inevitable mishaps: While buying a suit in Washington, “Nicolas Baker” mistakenly left his watch in the shop, a watch engraved with his proper name. When his son Aage went to retrieve it, the younger Bohr explained that he was Mr. Baker, an assistant to Niels Bohr. Realizing that the shop owner didn’t believe the story, Aage suggested that they call the Danish foreign minister’s office. A secretary at the legation explained that they had no record of a “Mr. Baker,” and that Bohr’s assistant also held the name Bohr. Aage was forced to explain that he and his father were using the name “Baker” while traveling in the United States. The shopkeeper handed over the watch with a stern reprimand: “In the U.S.A. it is against the law to use a false name.”

  After finishing their business in Washington, the Bohrs set out for a secret site in New Mexico that Manhattan Project insiders knew simply as “Y.” General Leslie Groves, the Army’s director of the Manhattan Project, joined Bohr for the long train ride. En route, Groves briefed Bohr on what to expect at the classified research facility. The project, Groves explained, was compartmentalized: A person working on one part of the bomb effort wasn’t cleared to know what was happening with the other parts. Groves told Bohr what was permissible to say and what wasn’t. It was as if the closer Bohr got to the bomb, the more its secrecy controlled him. The bomb had changed his name, was now adding silences and absences to his speech, and would dictate the research questions he posed.

  Built on the site of an old boys’ school in the Jemez Mountains, Los Alamos was as remote as it was breathtaking. The location was chosen by Robert Oppenheimer, who famously loved the desert. From the mesa on which the facility sat, evening sunsets turned the Sangre de Cristo Mountains a sublime red. The mountains lived up to their name: Blood of Christ. Although many of the scientists at Los Alamos had spent time in Bohr’s Copenhagen institute, the classified facility where they now worked had an entirely different spirit than the one Bohr had fostered in Europe.

  Upon his arrival, Bohr found an environment buzzing with energy: Scientists and engineers worked at breakneck speeds to develop the bomb. He wrote, “What until a few years ago might have been considered a fantastic dream is at the moment being realized in great laboratories erected for secrecy in some of the most solitary regions of the States.” But underlying the Manhattan Project was a sense of mounting anger, hostility, and remorse among the scientists. Even as these men worked to generate a light more powerful than a thousand suns, the environment at Los Alamos was diametrically opposed to the “Copenhagen Spirit” that so many of them had come to take for granted. The secrecy was crushing: Colleagues couldn’t talk openly with
one another about their work—a hallmark of the scientific tradition. Army security officers censored the physicists’ incoming and outgoing mail and regulated all contact with outsiders. Even Leo Szilard, who had passionately argued for keeping nuclear fission secret back at Princeton and who had done more than anyone to start the Manhattan Project, was frustrated with life at Los Alamos. He hated working under military leadership. The feeling was mutual: In 1942, General Groves unsuccessfully tried to have Szilard interned for the duration of the war as an “enemy alien.” Moreover, the physicists at Los Alamos were haunted by the fact that they were now building, in secret, what they knew would be the most devastating weapon ever devised. They were realizing the gravity of their work. They were unlocking nature’s secrets—a cause whose nobility few of them ever had any reason to doubt—so that the U.S. Army could incinerate entire cities in the blink of an eye. Victor Weisskopf later wrote, “In Los Alamos, we were working on something which is perhaps the most questionable, most problematic thing a scientist can be faced with. At that time physics, our beloved science, was pushed into the most cruel part of reality and we had to live it through.”

  As Bohr learned more about the bomb, he gradually came to realize the true scale and scope of the Manhattan Project, discovering what historian Richard Rhodes called “a separate, secret state with separate sovereignty linked to the public state through the person and by the sole authority of the President.” The Manhattan Project had its own bureaucracies, its own Air Force, its own pilots, its own bombing ranges, its own factories, its own industrial workers, its own laws and police, even its own quasi-universities. At its height, the Manhattan Project employed over 130,000 people: It represented an industrial sector equal in size to the entire American auto industry. Bohr came to learn that the Manhattan Project was much, much more than a secret weapon. A secret geography and an attendant mode of sovereign governance had taken hold. In a conversation with Edward Teller, the Danish physicist remembered their exchange back at Princeton: “You see, I told you it couldn’t be done without turning the whole country into a factory,” said Bohr. “You have done just that.”

  Perhaps even more remarkable than the scale of the bomb was the fact that, by and large, the bomb actually did remain secret—not necessarily from foreign intelligence agencies, but to the public, to Congress, and to the courts. It was a stunning feat of social engineering and a tremendous exercise in executive power. Roosevelt secretly authorized funding for the bomb in 1941 “from a special source available for such an unusual purpose,” but by 1944 the amount of untraceable monies attracted the attention of a certain Senator Harry Truman. Billions of dollars were disappearing into the “Manhattan Engineering District” under line items like “Engineer Service, Army” and “Expediting Production.” When Truman discovered the disappearing funds, he was livid. The senator assumed that someone was bilking the government, but as he tried to follow the money trail, he only encountered the bureaucratic labyrinth that served as a cover for the Manhattan Project’s financing. Truman eventually confronted Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson about his findings, and Stimson—the man who’d shut down Yardley’s Black Chamber fifteen years prior—found himself on the opposite side of the line separating the black world from its white counterpart. He told Truman that the funds were going toward a project that the president had ordered “most top secret,” and that Truman would not be told of its purpose under any circumstance. Truman retreated, but Stimson realized he could not maintain the Manhattan Project’s enormous black budget without informing some members of Congress. With an eye toward preserving the bomb’s secret funding, Stimson held a meeting on February 18, 1944, to brief top congressional leaders. The assembled congressmen gave their approval and committed themselves to protecting the project—the architects of the Manhattan Project would no longer need to fend off the Appropriations Committee. Except for a small handful of legislators, Congress, including Truman, was kept in the dark about the bomb. The future president would only come to learn the details of the nuclear program after being sworn in in 1945.

  The secrecy that went along with the Manhattan Project was also relatively new for the Army. If the Manhattan Project represented a new era in industrialized bomb-making, so did the industry-sized secrecy apparatus joining it. Nine years after the first nuclear explosion, Leslie Groves would testify at the Oppenheimer hearings that he had very little experience with secrecy before the Manhattan Project: “The Army as a whole didn’t deal with matters of security until after the atomic bomb burst on the world because it was the first time that the Army really knew there was such a thing, if you want to be perfectly frank about it!”

  Trying to break the spell of collective despair plaguing the secret lab at Los Alamos, Bohr took to arguing that atomic power could be put toward the benefit of humanity at the conclusion of the war. The end was by now in sight. Just as the small community of nuclear physicists had taken the lead in advocating for and building the bomb, Bohr looked toward a future in which these same men would become leaders of a postwar nuclear policy that would improve the lives of countless people.

  Bohr started preparing for a return to openness in nuclear physics and for international cooperation in preventing nuclear proliferation. Nuclear energy was no longer a theoretical possibility. It was salient fact. Bohr understood that the postwar fate of nuclear energy went hand in hand with the postwar fate of societies in general. If atomic research and development continued to be defined by the logic of its wartime origins, then it spelled an impossibly dangerous future. An international version of Bohr’s “Copenhagen Spirit” was the best insurance against human annihilation, an “open world,” as Bohr called it.

  Bohr aggressively lobbied the American and British governments to develop a postwar nuclear policy defined by openness, international cooperation, and the peaceful use of atomic energy. He traveled to Britain for an audience with Winston Churchill. The notoriously cantankerous prime minister dismissed him outright. In Washington, Bohr was more successful. Meeting with his old friend Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, Bohr described his failed meeting with Churchill and his sense of urgency about postwar nuclear policy. Frankfurter relayed Bohr’s concerns to the president, and Roosevelt agreed to see the scientist. In preparation for the meeting, Bohr crafted a memo for the president outlining his arguments: “A weapon of unparalleled power is being created which will completely change all future conditions of warfare. . . . Unless, indeed, some agreement about the control of the use of the new active materials can be obtained in due time, any temporary advantage, however great, may be outweighed by a perpetual menace to human security.” For Bohr, the only possible way to prevent an arms race was “an initiative, aiming at forestalling a fateful competition, [that] should serve to uproot any cause of distrust between the powers on whose harmonious collaboration the fact of coming generations will depend.” Bohr’s memo calling for harmonious international cooperation was stamped “Top Secret.”

  On August 26, 1944, Bohr arrived at the Oval Office to see Roosevelt. Over the summer, the Allies in Europe had successfully crushed the German army’s western front. The war in Europe would soon be over, its scales having tipped decidedly in the Allies’ favor. Roosevelt was now in a position to contemplate postwar policy. As Bohr and Roosevelt sat together in the Oval Office, the president explained that he’d read Bohr’s memo and that he agreed with the physicist’s main points. Roosevelt joked with Bohr about the scientist’s failed meeting in London; he had plenty of experience dealing with Churchill’s obstinacy. Nonetheless, intimated Roosevelt, the prime minister would eventually come around. The president promised to discuss the matter with Churchill the following month.

  The meeting at Hyde Park couldn’t have gone worse for Bohr. On Monday, September 19, the two leaders sequestered themselves in one of the smaller rooms of Roosevelt’s great estate overlooking the Hudson River. Paris was liberated; the Germans had been driven out of much of France; Allied armies were ste
adily taking Italy; and there was no indication that Hitler would be able to build the bomb. But as the leaders discussed Bohr’s proposal, Churchill remained unyielding. That day in Hyde Park, Roosevelt either capitulated to the prime minister or made it clear that he had never intended to go along with Bohr’s proposal in the first place. Churchill was clearly furious with what he perceived as Bohr’s political meddling, later growling, “The President and I are worried about Professor Bohr. . . . He is a great advocate of publicity. He made an unauthorized disclosure to Justice Frankfurter who startled the president by telling him all the details. . . . It seems to me that Bohr ought to be confined or at any rate made to see that he is very near the edge of mortal crimes.” The meeting ended with a renewed commitment to the bomb’s secrecy. Moreover, the leaders agreed, Bohr would be placed under investigation “to ensure that he is responsible for no leakage of information, particularly to the Russians.” The very qualities that made Bohr an international treasure before the war—his intellect and his commitment to international cooperation and openness—now made him suspect. The elder scientist was put under surveillance.

  One of the grim ironies about the Manhattan Project’s secrecy is that by the time of Churchill and Roosevelt’s meeting in late 1944, the initial justification for the secrecy was gone: It was clear that Nazi Germany would not be able to develop an atomic weapon, certainly not before the war’s end. But the secrecy persisted. What was at the outset a temporary wartime measure had in a few short years become a new normal. For challenging what had become “common sense,” Bohr fell under official suspicion.

  Just as the Black Chamber stayed open long after its initial justification was gone, when the Second World War finally ended, the “huge factory” Bohr had foreseen didn’t go away, nor did the secrecy associated with it. The secrecy didn’t end when nuclear weapons incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and newspapers reported on the “secret cities” producing the bomb; it didn’t end when Japan surrendered and the war was officially over. Instead, the bomb’s secret geography grew. Secrecy had become, in the words of McGeorge Bundy, “a state of mind with a life and meaning of its own.”