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from junior scientists and their families. Princeton’s Robert R. Wilson was seduced by Oppenheimer’s vision of life on a starkly beautiful New Mexico mountain, where brilliant and dedicated scientists would work on a top-secret project that would win the war. Wilson’s wife asked about the salary; Oppie assured her they would be rich. Wilson, who had grown up riding horses in Wyoming and had recently finished reading Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, was sold. Stanislaw and Fran^oise Ulam came, as did George Kistiakowsky, Emilio Segre, Oppenheimer’s former students Robert Serber and Seth Neddermeyer, the witty Richard Feynman, and the navy captain and ordnance specialist William ‘Deke’ Parsons. John von Neumann was a visitor and consultant. As they arrived they were greeted by Oppenheimer, wearing a pork pie hat, chewing on his pipe, as relaxed and happy as his colleagues had ever seen him. On 7 December 1944 Kitty Oppenheimer (who was far less happy) gave birth to a daughter, Katherine.44

Throughout these developments, the Americans had played an uneasy game with their British scientific allies. Originally having been jolted out of their lethargy by British scientists, the Americans were at first eager to learn as much and as quickly as possible from the British. Having served as executor of the jolt in the summer of 1941, the British had then been standoffish toward the Americans. On 11 October 1941, two days after his pivotal meeting with Bush and Henry Wallace, Roosevelt had written to Winston Churchill: ‘It appears desirable that we should soon correspond or converse concerning the subject which is under study by your MAUD Committee, and by Dr Bush’s organization in this country, in order that any extended efforts may be coordinated or even jointly conducted.’ At this point, the British were ahead of the Americans in imagining and building a bomb, and possibly for that reason Churchill delayed replying to Roosevelt for two months; when Churchill did respond, he did so vaguely. Having thus delayed their pursuit of a joint effort, the British found that, by the time they decided to undertake it in mid-1942, the Americans had raced ahead and lost much of their enthusiasm for collaboration. Meeting Churchill at Hyde Park in June 1942, Roosevelt did agree that the nations should continue ‘fully sharing the results’ of their nuclear work ‘as equal partners’. As American behavior thereafter suggested that perhaps not everyone involved with the Manhattan Project had got the message, Churchill met FDR again, this time at Quebec in August 1943. The leaders there signed the Quebec Agreement, which acknowledged that the development of an atomic weapon ‘may be more speedily achieved if all available British and American brains and resources are pooled’, and looked ahead to the time postwar, when US primacy in ‘industrial and commercial aspects’ of nuclear power would be manifest. Since Groves was responsible for carrying out the terms of the agreement, and since Groves was suspicious of attempts by outsiders to breach the walls of his allegedly compartmentalized operation, the general tried to give the British only a limited view of the project in its totality.45

A British team nevertheless came to Los Alamos by invitation in late 1943 and early 1944. Nineteen British scientists observed and assisted with the work there. (James Chadwick and Bohr, who had escaped Copenhagen for Sweden, then Britain, in the fall of 1943, served as ‘consultants’ to the team.) On the team were Otto Frisch, just weeks earlier made a British citizen, Rudolf Peierls, William Penney (a specialist in blast effects), and Penny-in-the-Slot Klaus Fuchs. The British scientists and their families blended smoothly into the current of life and work on the mesa. One afternoon, Genia Peierls organized a picnic in Frijoles Canyon, nearly 20 rough miles from the town. Laura Fermi agreed to come but was afraid to drive her car, so an ‘attractive young man... with a small, round face and dark hair with a quiet look’ took the wheel He seemed nice but said little during the