Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [69]
If Groves got off on the wrong foot with Bush, he nevertheless quickly established himself as a demanding and effective advocate for his new cause. On his first full day on the job, Groves sent his assistant, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Nichols—‘uninspired but punctilious’, according to Peter Wyden—to New York to strike a bargain with Edgar Sengier, the Belgian head of Union Miniere du Haut Katanga, who was, it may be recalled, sitting on more than 1,200 tons of uranium and prepared to do business. Nichols made the deal, sanctified on a sheet of yellow scratch paper. The following day, a Saturday, Groves authorized purchase of a substantial plot of land in Tennessee, for the purpose of building an enormous plant for the creation of uranium isotopes, and he met Donald Nelson, head of the War Production Board, whom he bullied into assigning the Manhattan Project the government’s highest priority rating, loosening bottlenecks and cutting red tape that had previously frustrated the bomb effort. On 23 September, minutes after he had been promoted from colonel to brigadier general, Groves met Stimson, Bush, Conant, and a few others. Stimson suggested a committee of seven to manage the project. Groves countered with a request for just four—Bush, Conant, a navy representative, and himself1—and Stimson acceded. At this point, Groves rose and said he had to leave: he was on his way to Tennessee and did not want to miss his train. Bush began to think that Groves had been a good choice after all.30
Groves seems to have braced himself to deal with the Manhattan Project scientists. He was an engineer, and proud of his grasp of mathematics, but he knew nothing about quantum physics, a disability in his own mind that he sought to cover with bluster. He came to Chicago on 5 October to inspect Arthur Holly Compton’s Met Lab. Groves and Compton, both sons of Presbyterian ministers, found they nevertheless had differences: Groves referred privately to Compton, for some reason, as ‘Arthur Hollywood’, while the gentler Compton thought Groves guilty of an ‘unfamiliarity with scientists’. The two men were ultimately reconciled. Not so Groves and Leo Szilard, whose animosity toward each other was legendary, and in high relief emblematic of the mistrust that existed between scientists and the military men assigned to keep them on task. (The Groves-Szilard feud began at the Met Lab, when Groves, out of his depth, insisted on discussing with Szilard cooling systems for nuclear reactors.) The Chicago scientists ran some equations for their visitor. At one point Groves caught a small transcribing error, which the offending scientist remedied with a finger stroke, leaving Groves smug about his own expertise yet worried at the feckless imprecision of the men and women in his charge. ‘Dr Compton, your scientists don’t have any discipline,’ Groves insisted later. Compton remonstrated that ‘responsible’ scientists had a kind of discipline, but that it was ‘not possible for anyone to tell a scientist what he must do’. However calmly put, that was exactly what Groves feared.31
The general went next to Berkeley, and Ernest Lawrence’s Radiation Lab. Still on his mettle because of his experience in Chicago, Groves thought Lawrence was trying to patronize him with breezy talk about his cyclotron—engineer’s talk, perhaps, but not what Groves wanted to hear. He wanted to know how much U-235 Lawrence was making, and how quickly. When Lawrence confessed that the separation process remained in its infancy, Groves steamed. ‘Professor Lawrence,’ he said, in front of the Rad Lab staff, ‘you’d better do a good job. Your reputation depends on it!’ Lawrence was stunned, but only temporarily; he got his own back at lunch: ‘General Groves, you know... my reputation is already made. It’s your reputation that depends on this project.’ Thereafter