Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [63]
The multiple centers of research and labor frustrated Compton and, in his opinion, prevented the coordination of effort essential to move the project along. In January, though ill with the flu, Compton gathered Szilard, Lawrence, and several others at his home. The time had come, said Compton, to pull together. Work at various locations caused duplication of effort and was unsustainable. The scientists made the case for consolidation in their own laboratories. Compton argued for Chicago. The city was centrally located and unlikely to be bombed, the facilities were good, housing existed despite wartime shortages, and there remained competent scientists available locally. In the end, Compton simply overrode objections. He hoped, he said, that the others would join him. Ernest Lawrence remained a doubter. ‘You’ll never get the chain reaction going here,’ he insisted. ‘The whole tempo of the University of Chicago is too slow.’ Compton disagreed, and two men ended up betting a cheap cigar on whether it would happen. Feverish, Compton rose with difficulty and went to his study to call Fermi in New York and Wigner in Princeton. Both men agreed to relocate, bringing to Chicago their plans for a reactor. His sights set at this stage mainly on plutonium, despite Bush’s and Conant’s doubts, Compton engineered the (voluntary) eviction of the university’s math department from Eckhart Hall and christened the Chicago project as a whole the Metallurgical Laboratory, or Met Lab.16
‘Now is the time for faith,’ Compton wrote to Conant. ‘It isn’t faith we need now, Arthur,’ Conant replied. ‘It’s works.’ Compton kept reading his Bible, sometimes to his fellow scientists, but he worked, too. To raise morale among the scientists displaced to Chicago, Compton and his staff found housing (Fermi’s assistants Herbert Anderson and John Marshall were placed in Compton’s son’s room), schools for children, and family doctors and dentists. The Fermis found a house near campus. It came furnished with a short-wave radio and included two youngJapanese women as tenants upstairs. Fermi was still classified as an ‘alien’, so both radio and women were removed. Compton set the Met Lab three sequential tasks: first, create a chain reaction, using uranium 238; second, extract from the fissioned uranium the plutonium that would presumably be produced; and, third, extrapolate from this pilot experience the conviction and expertise needed to build a production plant big enough to yield the nuclear fuel for a bomb. He needed a nuclear reactor, and he gave Fermi the task of building it.17
In a squash court under the university’s Amos Alonzo Stagg Field, the turf largely abandoned since the school had given up varsity football some years earlier, Fermi created his pile. His goal was to induce fission in uranium 235, embedded in U-238 in the ratio of 1:140. To prevent capture of his projectile neutrons by U-238, Fermi needed to slow his bullets down, thereby increasing his chances of hitting U-235, and for that a moderator would be essential. Lacking heavy water—recall that the Germans relied on this substance, which had its absorptive hydrogen replaced by more cooperative deuterium—and at the urging especially of Szilard, Fermi settled on graphite. The German reactor would founder in part because the graphite its builders obtained was impacted with boron and thus insufficiently ‘clean’. In the United States, the National Carbon Company provided graphite made pure by its well-chosen coke base and extra time in the furnace. Supplies of the moderator—enough, figured Laura Fermi, to provide everyone on earth with a standard pencil—began arriving in Chicago in September 1942. Physicists, technicians, and a crop of local high-school dropouts unloaded the graphite, planed and shaped and smoothed it with saws and a lathe into bricks 16.5 inches long and weighing 19 pounds, then