Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [58]
Ernest O. Lawrence was a small town boy from South Dakota, with a reputation for probity and decency underscored by his use of expletives no sharper than ‘fudge!’ Wooed away from Yale by Berkeley in 1928, Lawrence refined his fascination for machines, joined to his acuity for nuclear physics. In the hills behind the Berkeley campus Lawrence built a cyclotron, in which nuclear particles were accelerated at great speed around a magnetized circular racetrack, producing radioactive isotopes of the elements. He also developed a humbly righteous sense of the potentialities of nuclear products. In 1937 Lawrence’s mother, Gunda, had been diagnosed with inoperable cancer. Ernest, along with his physician brother John, had bombarded Gunda’s tumours with neutrons, far more penetrating and therefore more effective for use on humans than gamma or X-rays, and her amazed doctors pronounced her cured. The rectitude of making radioisotopes was thus to Lawrence beyond question. Whether their use in a possible bomb-building project was equally legitimate was yet to be determined.7
Compton’s other visitor was Conant. He had worked on mustard gas during the First World War. President of Harvard and head of the NDRC, ‘Conant operated at the crossroads of America’s power elite—gliding easily among educational, scientific, political, corporate, military, media, diplomatic, nuclear, and intellectual realms’, as his biographer James Hershberg has written. Some regarded Conant as aloof1—Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter characterized him as ‘incurably cold, without radiations’— while others found him capable of humor, spontaneity, and intellectual flexibility. Whatever decision the three men reached that night in Compton’s living room would come in some form to Conant’s NDRC, as Compton well understood.8
The host himself was as widely known and respected as the others. Like Lawrence, he came from a small, Midwestern town: Wooster, Ohio, in his case, where his father was a Presbyterian minister and Professor of Philosophy at the local liberal arts college. His mother was a missionary for religious causes; his sister and her husband were also ministers. Arthur’s older brother, Karl, had become a physicist, and was now at MIT. Arthur’s own gifts had won him a Nobel Prize (for work on gamma rays), his academic position as Dean of Physical Sciences at Chicago, and chair of the National Academy of Sciences committee formed to advise the government on possible military uses of nuclear energy; he was thus Conant’s organizational complement. Compton could seem stiffly pious in his willingness to bring God into his classroom and his social discourse, and his prominent jaw and erect bearing put some off. But there was no doubting his qualities as a physicist. Enrico Fermi, recalled his student Leona Woods, believed that ‘tallness and handsomeness usually were inversely proportional to intelligence’, but ‘he excepted Arthur Compton... whose intelligence he respected enormously’. (Fermi was balding and compact.) Compton’s religious inclination was to avoid weapons work. His hatred of Nazism pulled him another way.9
Lawrence spoke first. His recent conversation in Berkeley with Marcus Oliphant had persuaded him that an atomic bomb might be feasible, and a series of breakthroughs in his own lab and elsewhere in the country convinced him further. Months earlier, using Lawrence’s cyclotron, the Berkeley physicist Glenn Seaborg had bombarded U-238 with neutrons and coaxed from it at last a transuranic element with the atomic number 94; Seaborg would call it plutonium. Enough plutonium extracted from common uranium would provide a suitably powerful core for an atomic bomb. It seemed equally