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ESTABLISHING LOS ALAMOS (Los Alamos: Laboratory, 1942-1943)
Events
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Bringing it All Together, 1942-1945
The final link in the Manhattan Project's far-flung
network was the
bomb research and development laboratory
at Los Alamos, located in the mountains
of northern New Mexico. Codenamed "Project Y," the
laboratory that designed and fabricated the first atomic
bombs began to take shape in spring 1942 when
James Conant suggested to
Vannevar Bush that the
Office of Scientific and Research Development
and the Army form a committee to study bomb
development. Bush agreed and forwarded the
recommendation to Vice President Henry Wallace, Secretary
of War Henry Stimson, and General George Marshall (the Top
Policy Group). By the time of his appointment in
late September, Leslie Groves had orders
to set up a committee to study military applications of
the bomb. Meanwhile, sentiment was growing among the
Manhattan Project scientists that research on the bomb
project needed to be better coordinated.
Robert Oppenheimer, among others,
advocated a central facility where theoretical and
experimental work could be conducted according to standard
scientific protocols. This would insure accuracy and
speed progress. Oppenheimer suggested that the bomb
design laboratory operate secretly in an isolated area but
allow free exchange of ideas among the scientists on the
staff. Groves accepted Oppenheimer's suggestion and
began seeking an appropriate location. By the end of
the year,
they had settled on an unlikely site for
the laboratory: an isolated boys' school on a mesa high in
the Jemez Mountains (map at left).
Groves selected Oppenheimer to head the new laboratory.
He proved to be an excellent director despite initial
concerns about his administrative inexperience, leftist
political sympathies, and lack of a Nobel Prize when
several scientists he would be directing were
prizewinners. Oppenheimer insisted, with some
success, that scientists at Los Alamos remain as much an
academic community as possible, and he proved adept at
satisfying the emotional and intellectual needs of his
highly distinguished staff. Although Oppenheimer and
Groves were of completely different temperaments, they
worked well together. The Groves-Oppenheimer
alliance, though not one of intimacy, was marked by mutual
respect and was a major factor in the success of the
Manhattan Project.
Oppenheimer had a chance to
display his persuasive abilities early when he had to
convince scientists, many of them already deeply involved
in war-related research in university laboratories, to
join his new organization. Complicating his task
were initial plans to operate Los Alamos as a military
laboratory. Oppenheimer accepted Groves's rationale
for this arrangement but feared that the military chain of
command was ill-suited to scientific decision making and
soon found that scientists objected to working as
commissioned officers. The issue came to a head when
Oppenheimer tried to convince Robert F. Bacher and Isidor
I. Rabi (far right in image at left) of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology's Radiation Laboratory to join the
Los Alamos team. Neither thought a military
environment was conducive to scientific research. At
Oppenheimer's request, Conant and Groves wrote a letter
explaining that the secret weapon-related research had
presidential authority and was of the utmost national
importance. The letter promised that the laboratory
would remain civilian through 1943, when it was believed
that heightened security needs would require
militarization of the final stages of the project (in
fact, militarization never took place). Oppenheimer
would supervise all scientific work, and the military
would maintain the post and provide
security (below).
Oppenheimer spent the first three months of 1943
tirelessly crisscrossing the country in an attempt to put
together a first-rate staff, an effort that proved highly
successful. Even Bacher signed on, though he
promised to resign the moment militarization occurred;
Rabi, though he did not move to Los Alamos, became a
valuable consultant. As soon as Oppenheimer arrived
at Los Alamos in mid-March, recruits began arriving from
universities across the United States, including
California, Minnesota,
Chicago, Princeton, Stanford, Purdue,
Columbia, Iowa State, and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while still others
came from the Met Lab and the National
Bureau of Standards. Virtually overnight Los Alamos
became an ivory tower frontier boomtown, as scientists and
their families, along with
particle accelerators and other
experimental equipment, including two Van de Graaff
generators, a Cockroft-Walton machine,
and a cyclotron, arrived caravan fashion
at the Santa Fe railroad station and then made their way
up to the mesa along the single primitive road. The
staff included many contemporary and future stars of the
scientific community, including Luis Alvarez,
Hans Bethe, Norris Bradbury,
Enrico Fermi,
Richard Feynman, Eric Jette, George
Kistiakowsky, Seth Neddermeyer, John von Neumann, Emilio
Segrè, Cyril Smith, Edward Teller,
Victor Weisskopf, Robert Wilson, and many more. In
the spring of 1943, a sizeable contingent of British
scientists arrived at Los Alamos as well. It was a
most remarkable collection of talent and machinery that
settled this remote outpost of the Manhattan Project.
Next
Sources and notes for this page.
The text for this page was adapted from, and portions
were taken directly from the Office of History and Heritage Resources
publication:
F. G. Gosling,
The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb
(DOE/MA-0001; Washington: History Division, Department
of Energy, January 1999), 35, 37-38. See also
In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: Transcript of
Hearing Before Personnel Security Board, Washington,
D.C., April 12, 1954, Through May 6, 1954
(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1954),
12-13. The list of staff at
Los Alamos is adapted in part from
"Dateline: Los Alamos," a special issue of the monthly
publication of
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL)
(1995), 8. The photograph of the "Tech Area" at Los Alamos is courtesy LANL. The map of Los
Alamos is reprinted from Vincent C. Jones,
Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb, United
States Army in World War II (Washington: Center of
Military History, United States Army, 1988), 330.
The photograph of the students playing hockey on Ashley
Pond is reprinted from "Dateline: Los Alamos," a special
issue of the monthly publication of LANL (1995),
7. The photograph of
Ernest Lawrence,
Enrico Fermi, and Isidore Rabi is
courtesy LANL. The photograph of the MP checking
the resident's ID is reprinted in the photo insert of F.
G. Gosling,
The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb
(Washington: History Division, DOE, October 2001).
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