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informed a gathering of them, were ‘the greatest collection of crackpots ever seen’, and, if they were not to wear uniforms or salute, they must at least follow the rules of ‘compartmentalization’ he set for them. This meant that the scientists must ‘stick to their knitting’, concentrating on their individual tasks without regard for the whole. Information about the bomb itself was to be shared solely on a ‘need to know’ basis. Groves would always pretend that the Los Alamos scientists had adhered to his compartmentalization rule, and he claimed after the war that the policy had prevented any serious breaches of security. In fact, the scientists routinely defied the system— openly, as in seminars led by Oppenheimer and briefings about the project by physicist Robert Serber (who discomfited even Oppie by referring at first to ‘the bomb’, only later agreeing to call his subject ‘the gadget’); and quietly, as Szilard and others would testify, in order to make the process work better.35

8. Fissions: uranium and plutonium

The decision to assemble Manhattan Project scientists at Los Alamos, followed less than three weeks later by the chain reaction under Stagg Field, gave impetus and clarity to the project. There were many technical problems to be solved and strategic decisions to be made, but what Groves and Oppenheimer knew they needed, as soon as possible, was a fissionable core for the bomb. It could be made of U-235 or plutonium (Pu-239), with the precise amount of these materials needed remaining a matter of speculation, though not wild speculation. To produce both substances the project would need as much U-238 ore as Groves could put his hands on. Here was a task Groves readily understood, and he undertook it with his usual relentless determination. He believed, at first, that monopolizing the world’s uranium supply was possible. The Germans had Joachimsthal, but the United States had Sengier, who not only sold his Staten Island supply to Kenneth Nichols but who promised another 3,000 tons from the Congo. (In the end, the United States would amass some 6,000 tons of uranium during the war. The Congo was the source for 3,700 tons, Canada’s Great Bear Lake 1,100, and the rest came from the United States itself.)

Groves also hoped to control the world’s supply of thorium, a radioactive element often contained in monazite sands, which were abundant in the Netherlands East Indies, Brazil, and especially the Travancore Coast of southern India. In all these gathering efforts he gained the cooperation of the British.36

Having secured his uranium, Groves now faced the need to refine it on a mass scale. Compton and others had planned to erect a pilot plant for making plutonium in the Argonne Forest, 20 miles outside Chicago. It emerged, however, that the uncertainties of plutonium production made risky the presence of a plant, even the so-called semi-works, so near a big city, and it seemed more sensible to place it closer to the full-scale facility where the production work would actually occur. Groves, it will be remembered, had already purchased a large plot of land in the Tennessee Valley, as close to modest Knoxville as Argonne was to Chicago. But the immediate area was sparsely populated and its residents poor. Through the winter of 1942-3 contractors descended on the place, building a railroad extension, laying down new roads, and putting up homes for workers and plant facilities staggering in their size and facelessness: the enormous dark box of the K-25 uranium separation plant covered some 42 acres. The town thus created was called Oak Ridge (its inhabitants dubbed it ‘Dogpatch’ after the rundown spot in the L’il Abner comic strip); the place altogether was known as the Clinton Engineering works. To the site came thousands of workers. Many were not sure what they were supposed to be making. Those who thought they knew were compartmentalized and sworn to secrecy. Mail was censored, phone calls monitored, and when boredom set in there was little for entertainment except movies and games of checkers.37

They were