24 days to the Doctor Atomic premiere!

Along with all its thrilling theatricality and musical challenges, Doctor Atomic has also presented some unexpected pleasures as we connect with members of the scientific, political, and artistic communities for their comments and insights ahead of the opera’s Met premiere on October 13. The most gregarious of the lot continue to be the Manhattan Project veterans. With the youngest member of that group now 83, they are a stately, vigorous bunch as they recall Los Alamos and relate to us their experiences there by email.

What were your personal responsibilities at Los Alamos?
E.L Jossem:I was initially a member of P Division where I designed and constructed specialized electronic instrumentation. After Trinity, I was a member of F Division where we were setting up to measure H and D cross-sections.

Did you personally know J. Robert Oppenheimer? What were your impressions of him?
ELJ: That was a long time ago. I have only a vague memory of having met him once.

It is often reported that the scientists at Los Alamos worked in isolation, many not knowing what the others were doing. This is a theme that is represented in Julian Crouch’s set design for the opera Doctor Atomic at the Met. Is this consistent with your experience?
ELJ: Certainly the extent of one’s knowledge of what others were doing depended on where one was in the technical organizational structure and the level of one’s technical security clearance. At the level of one’s peers, however, I believe people were generally aware of what their peers were doing.

What are your current feelings on the legacy of the atomic bomb and subsequent developments in weapons programs and international relations?
ELJ: In the last few pages of the Epilogue of his book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes discusses the parallel evolution of the nation-state and the republic of science and its implications for weapons programs and international relations. Not to repeat that discussion, let me just say that I am in agreement with the ideas expressed there.

As a different way of understanding the legacy, it is interesting to speculate about how the history of the past 63 years might have been different had Trinity been a dud, or if atomic weapons had not been available for, say, another several months, and that before then the war in the Pacific had ended with Russian troops occupying Japan.
ELJ: The legacy of the atomic bomb involves more than just international relations and weapons development programs. Not often discussed are the influences it has had on the development of physics itself, on the way physics research is carried out in this country and internationally, and on the effects it has had on our major universities. All are effects which are significant and which, in the long run, may prove to be comparably important.

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America’s entry into the Second World War happened scarcely three months into my first semester as a college freshman. A number of Harvard science courses were compressed and intensified at that time, and it was announced that others would be given for the last time “for the duration,” since the faculty members were disappearing into wartime research. After two years then, with nominal junior status and age 18 I had managed hastily to pack in most of the physics courses available to graduate students. It was at that point in 1943 apparently that the call went out from Los Alamos to recruit whoever was left, and I was approached by a personnel representative from Washington who was constrained to be as uninformative about the project “out west” as he could be.

The trip to that remote mesa in the shining Southwest was a thrill. The scenic and climatic aspects of the two years I spent there were always exhilarating. The work however was less thrilling. The evidences I could glean indirectly before going to New Mexico led me to guess the project was somehow nuclear in nature and that it must thus be concerned with establishing the nuclear chain reaction that had been speculated about years earlier.

I was shocked to be told on arrival that the slow neutron chain reaction was old news if still secret, and that the project intended to produce the fastest of chain reactions, a bomb. It took some months to overcome that shock, aided considerably by fear of the likelihood that the Germans were engaged in the same effort, and that if indeed a bomb were attainable we needed at all costs to succeed before they did.

I worked in the theory division, mainly on mathematical studies of neutron diffusion problems, including the calculation of critical masses and multiplication rates. The mathematical work was eventually interesting, but rarely as exciting or decisive as the many surprises and disappointments encountered by the experimenters.

Wartime life at Los Alamos had a number of unique qualities. One’s friends and colleagues were all intelligent, male, and quite youthful. Most of the scientists were scarcely older than our present graduate students. The project leaders, including Oppenheimer, were only their late 30’s, and there was hardly any gray hair to be seen on the hill. The fact that we were only called upon to work, that all our daily needs were provided for us, by a Native and Spanish-American labor force and by the military, even lent a somewhat utopian flavor to our confined world. But that life stopped a bit short of providing luxuries like sidewalks to spare our walking through ankle-deep mud. Pavement seemed too extravagant to the military brass. The recreations of bachelor life on the hill came down to reading, hiking, and the occasional movie (admission price 10 cents in the military police gym, 15 cents in the civilian gym).

Oppenheimer proved to be a remarkably successful leader of the project. The work faced a long succession of frustrating problems that required innovative, often far-fetched solutions. He earned everyone’s respect by keeping up with all of them and welcoming new ones. More importantly he insisted that all the work of the project be made known to all of the cleared staff so that the ingenuity of everyone could be enlisted. We found General Groves far less impressive in those terms, so much so that he was often the butt of sub-rosa jokes. He did however come to accept the technical needs of the scientists, whom he regarded as creatures from another world, and to translate them into action. Oppenheimer and Groves, though poles apart in their tastes and backgrounds, clearly came to cooperate closely and perhaps even to respect one another. In combination they held together huge research and military efforts that would otherwise have remained wholly mismatched.

We tend these days to forget the vast technical problems and uncertainties that faced the project in the early years. It seemed less than certain then that the projected weapon could be made to work at all, or that it could be developed before other factors ended the war. There seemed to be no fear that the Japanese could do it, so it is interesting that there was virtually no exodus from the project when the war in Europe was concluded. The project had by that time grown to a considerable size and possessed a self-sustaining momentum. It had outlived the fears of the German efforts that motivated many of us and was overtaken by the suspense and tensions that preceded the Trinity test.

The huge success of that test, greater than nearly anyone had realistically anticipated, came as an awesome shock. The test results were hardly analyzed during the brief and ominous interval punctuated by the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two ruthless uses of the weapon that there had been far too little effort to avoid. The only jubilation we felt was for the end of the war and for resuming free contact with the world we had grown up in. –R.J. Glauber

This entry was posted by Caroline Cooper on Friday, September 19th, 2008 at 1:39 pm and is filed under Doctor Atomic Blog, 2008-09 Season. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.