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Diebner, and Manfred von Ardenne pursued their own nuclear projects and conferred only occasionally, and the separate scientific communities that formed around these men were thus even smaller and more limited in their knowledge than a single Uranverein would have been. At Los Alamos, New Mexico, where scientists from the United States and Europe devised and assembled the world’s first atomic bomb, efforts by General Groves to ‘compartmentalize’ the work process were frustrated by the scientists’ need to talk to each other, to solve problems across labs, tasks, and academic disciplines. Groves wanted each scientist to ‘know everything he needed to know to do his job and nothing else’; our people, he wrote, must ‘stick to their knitting’. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific leader of the project, placated Groves as much as possible while encouraging his charges to exchange ideas through lectures and seminars. The information-sharing drove Groves wild, but it proved invaluable.33

Samuel Goudsmit came to the point another way. Along with Boris Pash, Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s aide General George Harrison accompanied Goudsmit and the Alsos team to Hechingen, where together they entered the office of the departed Heisenberg. ‘The first thing they saw’, Goudsmit recalled, ‘was a photo of Heisenberg and myself standing side by side.’ The two physicists had a complicated relationship. Once colleagues and friends, they had fallen out, for obvious reasons. At Ann Arbor in the summer of 1939 Goudsmit had futilely urged Heisenberg to stay in the United States, and Heisenberg had in 1943 written a letter to the authorities asking consideration for Goudsmit’s parents, who had recently been sent to Auschwitz; the letter was less than forceful. However they felt about each other now, there the two men were in a photograph on Heisenberg’s abandoned desk. Harrison was suspicious and wondered if Goudsmit could be trusted. ‘I could have helped him out, I suppose,’ wrote Goudsmit, ‘but that didn’t seem quite the moment to explain about the international “lodge” of the physicists.’ Carl von Weizsacker used a different metaphor: ‘We physicists formed one family,’ he claimed. Perhaps, he said, the family ought to have had ‘disciplinary power over its members’—but was ‘such a thing really at all practicable in view of the nature of modern science?’ Yes, Goudsmit would have said. Weizsacker had violated family rules, and was therefore cast out.34

5. The Americans and British move forward

The German and Central European scientists who remained in the lodge, or the family, were those who had left their country and continued their scientific work in America and Britain. Leo Szilard had professed to the American financier Lewis Strauss his disquiet over the possibility that a bomb might be made: ‘All the things that H. G. Wells had predicted appeared suddenly real to me.’ He pestered Edward Teller in Washington, Eugene Wigner in Princeton (both fellow Hungarians), and I. I. Rabi at Columbia University, whom Szilard dispatched to warn Enrico Fermi, then also at Columbia. Despite the Hahn-Strassmann finding and Bohr’s American preview of it in January 1939, Fermi remained skeptical that a neutron chain reaction might be created and ultimately produce a functional atomic bomb. When Szilard quizzed Rabi about Fermi’s response to his warning, Rabi reported dutifully that Fermi had said ‘Nuts!’ Szilard could not believe it, so he and Rabi bearded Fermi in his office.

Rabi said to Fermi, ‘Look, Fermi, I told you what Szilard thought and you said “Nuts!” and Szilard wants to know why you said “Nuts!” ’ So Fermi said, ‘Well there is the remote possibility that neutrons may be emitted in the fission of uranium and then of course that a chain reaction can be made.’

Rabi wanted to know what the man they called ‘The Pope’ meant by ‘remote possibility’. ‘Ten percent,’ said Fermi. Rabi retorted: ‘Ten percent is not a remote possibility if it means that we may die of it. If I have pneumonia and the doctor tells me that there is a remote possibility that