The Last Voice: Roy J. Glauber and the Dawn of the Atomic Age 3031299833, 9783031299834

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JOSÉ IGNACIO LATORRE

MARÍA TERESA SOTO-SANFIEL

LAST VOICE

THE

ROY J. GLAUBER AND THE DAWN OF THE ATOMIC AGE

The Last Voice

José Ignacio Latorre · María Teresa Soto-Sanfiel

The Last Voice Roy J. Glauber and the Dawn of the Atomic Age

José Ignacio Latorre Centre for Quantum Technologies National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore Quantum Research Center Technology Innovation Institute Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

María Teresa Soto-Sanfiel Department of Communications and New Media National University of Singapore Singapore, Singapore

ISBN 978-3-031-29983-4 ISBN 978-3-031-29984-1 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29984-1

(eBook)

Translated from Spanish by Mike Roberts © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

If life puts one in contact with a man so exceptional as Prof. Roy J. Glauber, and in circumstances as special as those that are described in this book, one feels obliged to tell the story. What should we call him? We asked him at the start of our meetings. “My name is Roy” he said. “Just call me Roy.” So we did…

In memory of our elders

Acknowledgements

We owe the existence of this book to the memories of Roy J. Glauber. Roy got to see a complete version of our notes in English at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had no interest in writing anything himself, because he knew that he would fight to the point of exhaustion to leave perfect, unquestionable sentences. At 90, he no longer felt strong enough. But he was interested in critically viewing the documentary we made, “That’s the Story: Roy J. Glauber remembers the making of the atomic bomb”, and helped us fine-tune the finished product and corrected some of the few errors he detected in his own narration. He also helped us to reconstruct the story as completely as his memory could, which is why he repeated the most iconic episodes several times. For our part, we helped Roy to recover certain anecdotes from his past, such as the windshield wipers for submarines. We also showed him a photocopy of the Los Alamos Primer manuscript by Robert Serber. We cherish the lovely memory of the moment when we handed him a copy of John Raper’s The Forbidden City article from the Cleveland Press on March 13, 1944. Roy was delighted that his memory had not failed him. This book was conceived on the advice of our friend and publisher Francisco Martínez Soria, then Director of Ariel. He bravely encouraged us to develop a project that would naturally be associated with English speaking culture. It is a paradox of destiny that the last voice of the Manhattan Project should be reflected in a text that arose out of a dinner with friends at a restaurant in the Gràcia district of Barcelona. Francisco is to be thanked for that.

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Acknowledgements

Extensive work had to be done to read and collate the sources underlying this text. In this endeavor, we have received innumerable useful comments, such as from scientists in CERN’s Theoretical Division, from experts in Warsaw and Krakow, from people who know every detail of the explosions, and from first-hand testimonies in the USA about the true depth of the only apparently frivolous nature of Richard Feynman. We even made contact with scholars of Russian espionage, experts in the history of the decision to use the atomic bomb, and even a scientist from the University of Oxford who participated in the first H-bomb explosion in 1954. At many essentially academic events, we received a barrage of non-obvious information. In some cases, we were unable to fully memorize or validate the details. However, they have served us to make the exceptional story told in this book more coherent, while remaining true to Roy’s own voice. We have also attended innumerable open debates at which the ethical aspects of the project have been discussed in depth by physicists, philosophers, historians, sociologists, and by German, Japanese, and American citizens. Thanks to them, we have realized that all kinds of audiences have a genuine interest in the events narrated herein. The question regarding the bounds of the concept of “fair war”, so strongly defended and attacked by different people, has been engraved in our mind. We also wish to thank Gora Shlyapnikov and Fernando Sols, organizers of the Quantum Transport in Dilute Gases congress held in Benasque in 2011. It was there that we met Glauber. Maciej Lewenstein played the key role by inviting him to the event and sharing a discussion with him about the Manhattan Project on the stage of the auditorium at the Centro de Ciencias de Benasque Pedro Pascual . That was the afternoon after our first interview with Roy. The seed of the book was planted in the mountains of the Spanish Pyrenees. A large number of friends kindly agreed to read the first, somewhat crude, draft of the book. We wanted to know whether a text with such serious scientific content could also be enjoyed by non-scientific readers. It was a real privilege to have some of our friends and colleagues read the book from a critical perspective: Ariadna Angulo-Brunet, Carlos Bravo Prieto, Ferran Cruixent, Artur Ekert, Octavio Estrada, Diego García-Martín, Judith Gilbert, Juan Bautista Hernández, Maciej Lewenstein, Francisco Martínez Soria, Manel Martínez, Mónica Mehaudy, Adrián Pérez-Salinas, Giorgio Perrone, Sandra Perrone, José María Sancho, Valerio Scarani, Javier Serrano, Germán Sierra, Gustavo Soto Sanfiel, Lorena Tosta and Isabel Villegas-Simón. We are especially indebted to Joan Andreano-Weyland, Berge Englert, Antoni Hernández Fernández and Fernando Sols, who made a particularly special contribution with a generously detailed review of the text and by offering

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pertinent comments on the events narrated in it. We also want to express our heartfelt gratitude to Mike Roberts for his dedicated translation from Spanish to English, a task that demands both linguistic expertise and a keen understanding of cultural nuances. Our final thank you takes us back to Roy. He taught us not to judge history without first trying to understand the context of the events. And, above all, he reminded us of the important need to listen genuinely and truly. To listen to each other.

María Teresa Soto-Sanfiel, Roy J. Glauber and José Ignacio Latorre, 2014. Credit Center for Quantum Technology, Singapore.

Contents

Introductions I: Him II: Us

1 1 4

It and Them. At First Front to Front To Dark and Mysterious Places Fission Discovered And Einstein Signed a Letter From Harvard to Los Alamos

7 7 8 9 11 12

Los Alamos Everyday Life in Los Alamos The Essentials Living to Work In Free Time Etiquette Friendships Candid Camera News from Outside Prayer in the Mountains Political Affairs Redefining the Site

15 15 15 16 19 20 21 22 23 23 24 25

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Contents

A Scientist at Los Alamos The First day Early Calculations The Theoretical Division: Bethe Versus Teller Computers at Los Alamos Progressively Harder Calculations Orchestrating Calculations Shared Concerns Oppenheimer The Strange Couple A Literary Figure The Arbiter of Good Taste Family Life The Bomb The Gadget Windshield Wipers for Submarines Little Boy and Fat Man Neutrons at Different Time Scales The Hardest Part The Jumbo Pre-detonation The Simplest Solution, the Biggest Problem Fruitless Efforts Lens Solution Uranium Versus Plutonium Spies Security Espionage Klaus Fuchs Theodore Hall One Who Got Away: Joseph Rotblat

27 27 28 30 31 32 33 34 35 35 41 42 43 44 44 45 46 47 48 49 49 51 52 52 53 54 54 56 56 57 59

Atomic Explosions Trinity Flash The Betting Pool The Fermi Estimate Radioactivity Japan What the Scientists Knew The Decision

63 63 63 64 65 65 67 67 68

Contents

Hiroshima Nagasaki A Telegram Ethics The Secret is Out The Aftermath of the War Towards the H-Bomb A Strange Period Silence from Los Alamos Trouble with the Law Relations with the USSR The H-bomb Ironies Losing Contact with Los Alamos Farewell to Arms Back to School Different Paths We’ll Meet Again Bizarre Happenings The Transformation of Los Alamos

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70 72 73 74 76 79 79 79 80 81 83 84 85 87 87 88 89 90 90 91

Oppenheimer Reviled The Hearings American Hero American Primitives Envy of Oppenheimer Security on Trial Private Loves The Witch Hunter The Right Word

93 93 93 94 96 98 99 102 103

Roy J. Glauber Sketches of a Bio Traveling Youth Going to College The Nobel Prize The Road to the Nobel The Sudarshan Controversy A Sad Sequel A Nobel Prize

105 105 105 107 109 109 114 117 118

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Contents

Meanings One of Them Big Science Worth the Effort

121 121 122 123

Appendix A: Nobel Laureates

125

Appendix B: Extraordinary Minds

127

Appendix C: Los Alamos Organization Chart

137

Epilogue

143

Notes

149

References

171

Index

175

About the Authors

José Ignacio Latorre JI is Full Professor in Theoretical Physics on leave from the University of Barcelona, Spain. He is Director of the Center for Quantum Technologies in Singapore and Chief Researcher at the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi, UAE. His research spans the fields of high-energy physics, quantum information, quantum computation, and neural networks.

María Teresa Soto-Sanfiel Maite has a Ph.D. in Audiovisual Communication. She has developed a significant part of her academic-scientific career at the Faculty of Communication Sciences of the Autonomous University of Barcelona from where she is on leave at present. Currently, she is Associate Professor at the Department of Communications and New Media and Principal Investigator at the Centre for Trusted Internet and Community, both at the National University of Singapore. She directed the documentary “That’s the story: Roy

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About the Authors

J. Glauber remembers the making of the atomic bomb”, which is the genesis of this book.

Introductions

I: Him Most human beings don’t manage to achieve fame. Roy did it for two different reasons. In 2005, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, a scientific recognition that is only awarded to a highly select number of minds. He won it because he made essential contributions to modern knowledge in the field of quantum optics in the 1960s, which meant we could understand how to treat coherent light mathematically and know what its consequences are. The development of lasers and their various applications to science, technology and art owed a great deal to Roy’s work. Roy is also one of the last surviving scientists who worked in the Theoretical Division of the Manhattan Project.1 He was a witness to all the events and knew all the scientists associated to the creation and launch of the first atomic bombs. He was there before, during and after it happened, meaning that historically, his is a truly privileged position that nobody else can hold. Roy arrived at Los Alamos Laboratory when he was just 18 years old. One day, while he was a physics undergraduate at Harvard University, although he was also already attending a few Ph.D. courses, someone from Washington came to interview him. He was a government emissary, who introduced himself as Mr. Trytten and had him fill out security questionnaires with the utmost secrecy. Shortly after, following brief instructions, Roy packed his belongings, sent them to a mysterious postal address in New Mexico, and took a train without knowing for sure where he was going. Working for the government was a way to avoid being sent to the Japanese front, as happened to most young © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. I. Latorre and M. T. Soto-Sanfiel, The Last Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29984-1_1

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Americans of his age, students or not. Once there, they would most probably die. The seed of this book is a mojito. Roy was attending a seminar organized by the Centro de Ciencias de Benasque Pedro Pascual , in the Aragonese Pyrenees, Spain. After a day of long scientific discussions, we sat down with him on a bar terrace to take in the beauty of the mountains that surround the town of Benasque. We learned that Roy had never tried a mojito before. We would have to do something about that! Washed down with the right drink, our conversation drifted from the physical properties of cold gases towards Roy telling us amusing anecdotes about the most prestigious physicists of the last century. From what he was saying, we deduced that Roy must have been one of the youngest scientists on the Manhattan Project. Also, given that he was 86 years old, he would be one of the few survivors of its famous Theoretical Division; the one that brought together such brilliant minds as Hans Bethe, John von Neumann and Richard Feynman. His memories had to be preserved. We viewed it as a moral duty. Roy agreed to repeat his stories in front of a camera. The next day, without further ado and in a furious rush because Roy was about to leave Benasque, we improvised a video recording. This would be the basis for two TV documentaries, 30 and 50 min long, that we subsequently made with footage provided by Los Alamos Laboratory. Some of that material had never been released before our documentaries came out. It had only just been declassified. Yet another fortuitous circumstance. And then, this book, which is the product of a series of long interviews held with Roy over three years: that one in Benasque in 2011, and others that came later in Singapore and Cambridge (USA). All of our conversations were video or audio recorded. Fortune struck again to make all this happen. After our first meeting in Europe, we coincidentally crossed paths with him twice again, first in Asia, and then in America. Condensed versions of our long conversations appear in the documentaries. But the huge amount of information that we got from Roy couldn’t all be included in any of these pieces because of the inherent limitations of audiovisual formats. We felt it would be a shame not to share the full account. One of Roy’s most remarkable characteristics is his uncanny ability to describe people, events, or feelings. His training as a scientist and teacher meant he developed a way of speaking that is clinical, polished and prolific with the details. His use of language is elegant and refined, and not in the slightest bit pompous. For us, who love beauty and properness in expression, it is a pleasure to listen to his unequivocal speech, articulated in simple

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sentences, full of precise words, and characteristic of someone who thinks hard about what he wants to say before speaking. Roy told us the story of the atomic bombs and his other memories in serious but vivid language that showed how determined he was to be true to the facts and to himself. He didn’t hide his opinions; quite the contrary, he was the master of his words and had little concern for reconciliation, perhaps a privilege of his age. Listening to him, one gets the feeling that Roy is saying what he has earned the right to say. If he wants to be cautious about anything, he’ll openly admit that. And he doesn’t give answers if he doesn’t know what they are. This book is different to the many others on the subject, some of which are wonderful, and we read them while preparing our own. The pages that follow tell the first-hand account of a true protagonist, and one who is independent, lucid, sagacious and committed to the truth. We have respectfully preserved his spirit: his voice is the one that matters. We asked the questions and we relay his answers. We confine our comments to the footnotes and to brief explanatory paragraphs. To stay as faithful to Glauber’s words as possible, some passages of his account contain small repetitions and some rather surprising adjectives. The few paragraphs that add certain relevant details have been written in extremely neutral language, with no opinion on our part. The importance of the events that Roy describes for us is indisputable. So this book is important too. The events narrated herein will remain part of world history for many years to come, perhaps even centuries or millennia. We live in the shadow of the decisions that were made at that time. Before 1945, science knew very little about nuclear energy. The scientists at Los Alamos weren’t sure they would be able to unleash the mysterious force hidden in the core of uranium atoms when they detonated the first atomic bomb in the Trinity test. That morning of July 16, at 05:29:45 local time, in the Jornada del Muerto desert, New Mexico, and less than a month before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, marked the dawn of the Atomic Age. Roy told us that an eerie silence followed for days after that first great, dazzling explosion. For the first time, the workers at Los Alamos saw what they had been working on for months, even years. From then on, relations between countries were never going to be the same again. The Second World War, ended in part by the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, gave way to the Cold War and the chain of events that led to the geostrategic distribution of the world we still live in today. The interviews were in English. “You speak very clearly,” we would often tell him. “You are so articulate and it’s really easy to understand you.” Roy

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replied with a smile: “I’ve never been told that before. Perhaps I learned it from my father, who was a travelling salesman and had to be understood by people from different places.” If ever we needed more details, he would elaborate. If we asked again, he would answer again. He is a teacher, after all. We always address him by his name, Roy, as he requested. But between ourselves, we continued to call him Glauber, a surname he told us comes from German and means “believer.”

II: Us We couldn’t help but ask Roy how he felt about having participated in the construction of such deadly weapons. It was impossible not to talk about it. We did so several times and in different ways. Roy responded indirectly and from a variety of intellectual arguments: he mentioned the number of war casualties, the number of deaths caused by other weapons and the geostrategic policy of the time. His speech and features never changed. The same gesture when listening to the question; the same tone when answering. We came to believe that he didn’t understand us. One has the duty to ask, but also the duty to respect that someone doesn’t want to talk about something. That’s our principle. So, when enough time had passed and the familiarity between us had grown, we only delicately pushed the point further. The same response. Another day, we tried again. Glauber was finally ready to acknowledge that we needed to get a personal reflection from him (possibly in awareness that we’d just find other ways to insist), and replied: “I was just a boy. I didn’t make any decisions. I could only do difficult calculations and my work had no special relevance to the success of the project. I was just an observer.” He paused briefly before mischievously adding: “a very good one though.” From then on it became clear to us that Roy felt none of those strong emotions of rejection or defense of the project experienced by many of the other scientists associated to him. One day he told us that being a survivor helped with that. He knew the story well, from the beginning through to its consequences. Did he regret having worked on the Manhattan Project? Such a simple question requires a complex answer, and we’ll come back to explore it in greater depth later. We learned a lot from the path we walked with Roy. Our meetings with him helped us to appreciate that part of history without banal biases. We listened to him with genuine attention and humility. We tried to travel with him in time. We read up on the subject to rid ourselves of hasty judgments

Introductions

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in as many senses as possible. We are pacifists, there’s no question about that. We are vehemently opposed to the use of violence against any living being. But when dealing with the story told here, we came to truly and intimately accept, from the bottom of our hearts, that life is complicated. And so are humans. And history too. The truth is out there, in different hues and in every color. It is well worth hearing the other side of the story. And here it is. José Ignacio Latorre and Maite Soto-Sanfiel.

It and Them. At First

Front to Front Glauber’s scientific career started very early. He was so good at mathematics at high school that he was moved up two years. He also made meteoric progress at college. In the second year of his bachelor’s degree, he was already taking graduate courses at the same time, which was most unusual. To become a scientist, you need to get a Ph.D. Students typically finish a degree and then continue with graduate or doctoral studies. That is how it has always worked. But it was an extraordinary situation back then. Glauber knew for sure that he wanted to be a scientist and that Harvard could cancel its Ph.D. courses at any moment because there were not enough students. At that stage of the Second World War, unless there were exceptional causes, young Americans who came of age were immediately drafted and sent to the front. In the early days of the war, they were recruited when they turned 21; then they lowered the age to 18. As a result, there were hardly any boys left at college. The Harvard Gazette estimates that a total of 27,000 people from that university, students and faculty, fought on the front lines. By his third year, Glauber had already completed almost all of his degree courses, which entitled him to work in fundamental areas of the specialty. He’d also taught a few science classes on Harvard’s so-called Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). Looking back, Glauber believes that the program did a lot of good for the universities in the years after the war. Many young soldiers who had taken it wanted to continue their college education after the conflict, which wasn’t a normal thing in the America of the time. It was

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. I. Latorre and M. T. Soto-Sanfiel, The Last Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29984-1_2

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a perverse benefit of the war, Glauber muses. But the war did many such things. Glauber wasn’t approached by Washington just because he was teaching science. There were other reasons. In 1943, everything revolved around the war. The four years of conflict had caused a severe shortage of scientific talent who could, and would, go to work in Los Alamos. Most young people were marched to the front. Older people did the research for the arms and military industries, and they tended to have families. Understandably, a lot of prestigious scientists were reluctant to go to such a secret and supposedly highly isolated place as Los Alamos. In those days, it was only very young researchers who were willing to do something like that. For civilians like Glauber, Los Alamos was voluntary; nobody was forced to go there. In fact, he put himself forward as a candidate. It happened like this: Glauber knew that sooner or later he was going to get drafted, so he reported to the people at his university. One day, a man called Elliott Perkins, who was the person who handled the draft programs where Glauber was teaching and was also the master of Lowell House where he was living, walked into the dining hall and sat at the table with some of the students milling around. Perkins started telling the young men that he had a problem with the draft board because there was an 18-year-old teacher who he felt should be exempted from being sent immediately to the Japanese front. But the board, for some unknown reason, was reluctant to accept the deferral. Perkins didn’t know that the very person he was talking about was sitting there listening to him. Glauber didn’t give away his identity. He remained silent and, as soon as he got the chance, he sent his nomination letter to Washington.

To Dark and Mysterious Places The third-floor room of the Lyman Lab at Harvard University, where the meeting between Glauber and Mr. Trytten took place, still exists today, although it has changed over the years. It’s a lot brighter now. Back then, it was a very dark, gaunt room and the door had no glass and was always closed. Glauber describes it as a mysterious place where members of the department used to gather. But it had been two years since any meetings had been held there. At 90, Glauber still has an office at Harvard. The place where he goes to work every day from his Cambridge home, not far from Harvard Square, at the wheel of a 20-year-old Toyota Camry, is just a few feet away from this intriguing room.

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Earlier we mentioned that Glauber hadn’t even finished his degree when he was already teaching at Harvard. It is said that he was a very talented young man, and he most certainly was. The bottom line, however, is that the university was extremely short on personnel, and he admits that that was the reason why they offered to give him a few classes. One day, Glauber had to leave the classroom to find the grades for some students. As he was walking to his office, he learned that someone from Washington was looking for him. It was the aforesaid Mr. Trytten. They both went to the mysterious meeting room, sat down face to face, and Trytten asked Glauber to fill in a Personal Security Questionnaire (PSQ). There were many pages, but despite the length he got it all done quickly and easily. As Glauber says, he had no past to report. Trytten didn’t tell him where the place he would be assigned was, or what it was, or what he would do. Nothing. The only thing Glauber learned was that it was somewhere ‘out west’. Once he’d filled in the questionnaire, the unfathomable Mr. Trytten simply took it and left. Glauber never saw him again.

Fission Discovered At this point of the story, we should summarize the status of scientific knowledge on the construction of a nuclear bomb at that time. What made them think the possibility of developing such a thing even existed? It might seem obvious to us now, but it wasn’t at all back then. Glauber recalls that nuclear physics was a very young science. In fact, it was hard to imagine that there could be much of it at all before scientists became aware of the existence of the neutron, which did not happen until 1932. When it was discovered that the neutron impacts the nucleus of the atom and splits it, it was also understood that the neutron could be used as a projectile against nuclear matter. Science was starting to make very slow progress down that path. Glauber recalls that the only eminent scientist who seemed to take up the matter with any particular enthusiasm was Enrico Fermi.2 In his laboratory in Rome, his research group did a great many experiments on the absorption of neutrons in all the chemical elements that they could find. They systematically induced radioactive processes, and when it came to uranium, Fermi observed the existence of energy activity, but did not attempt to explain it in any way. And that’s as far as it went. All of this happened between 1936 and 1937, and Fermi was subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize in 1938 for “his demonstrations of the existence of new radioactive elements produced by

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neutron irradiation, and for his related discovery of nuclear reactions brought about by slow neutrons.” Although Glauber points out that we now know that some of his results were not correct, in those days such recognition led Fermi, along with his Jewish wife, Laura Capon, and their children, to leave Rome for New York. He took advantage of the Nobel Prize presentation to forge a passport for his wife and after travelling to Sweden for the ceremony, they went straight to the United States. Columbia University had managed to secure his services. The following year, Otto Hahn,3 who was a chemist not a physicist, was puzzled by this great collection of activities induced in uranium that Fermi and his colleagues had discovered, and he began to investigate them further. Glauber recalls that Hahn was not the typical German. He had remained in Germany but was not very sympathetic to the Nazi cause. But most importantly, Hahn had taken on a young Lise Meitner4 (a woman!) as an assistant. There were very few women working in science at the time, but Meitner, who was Jewish and had to leave Germany for Sweden in 1938, was truly exceptional. Hahn greatly appreciated her and helped her on the way into exile. That trip would save Lise’s life. During his work, Hahn5 noticed some remarkable coincidences in the results of his observations. He had noted that there was an isotope of barium that had a similar half-life to something else he had observed. In one of the results of bombarding uranium with neutrons, Hahn and Strassman identified barium, but couldn’t fully explain their experiment. Now in Sweden, Lise Meitner, with her nephew Otto Frisch, who was visiting,6 took an interest in these results and figured out the puzzle. They realized that a neutron that is absorbed in any heavy element has a certain kinetic energy and releases a kind of uproar in the nucleus. They also noticed that the nucleus subsequently decays into a succession of well-organized states. Meitner and Frisch thought this just was a characteristic of certain decays; they even identified this element as a particular isotope of uranium, called Uranium-235. But what they were actually observing was the fission of the uranium nucleus. Glauber doesn’t remember whether they published this immediately (it appeared in the journal Nature in 1939). But what he does know is that Meitner and Frisch discussed those results with fellow physicist Niels Bohr, who happened to be coming to America at just that point, and would take the news with him: the fission of the uranium nucleus had literally been accomplished. Uranium disintegrated into two lighter elements, and released a great deal of energy as it did so.

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And Einstein Signed a Letter It so happened that the latest advances in scientific knowledge reached Leo Szilárd7 who realized instantly that this release of energy was potentially nuclear power. And also, that it had destructive potential. Szilárd also had a remarkable career. A prophet. It’s hard to identify him as anything other than a prophet, says Glauber. The war had started in September 1939, which Glauber recalls was around his birthday. Indeed, he was born on 1 September 1925 in New York. Historians agree that World War II began when the Germans invaded Poland on 1 September 1939. Glauber turned 14 years old that day. He recalls that a few months into the war, Szilárd felt he had to communicate with Franklin D. Roosevelt8 to discuss the matter. He also thought that the best way to get a meeting with the president was for Albert Einstein to write a letter. So Szilárd went to see Einstein while he was on vacation in Long Island, and took with him a draft of the letter that he had written with his colleagues Eugene Wigner9 and Edward Teller.10 The latter is a name worth remembering, he remarks, because Teller would have a huge impact on the history of the Manhattan Project and the events that followed. The encounter with Einstein was followed by a succession of meetings that amounted to a waste of approximately three critical years. If all that time had been put to better use, Glauber believes the entire history of the Second World War could have been different. But it wasn’t easy for scientists to make contact with Roosevelt. They finally managed to convey their thoughts to him with the help of New York banker Alexander Sachs, who was a personal friend of the president. Roosevelt commissioned Vannevar Bush,11 another highly regarded researcher since his early days at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), to begin looking into the matter. And so began an interminable series of meetings. The Americans were not the only ones with an interest in pursuing research into nuclear processes. Independently, the British were also working to understand the matter. When they grasped the implications of fission of the uranium nucleus and its atomic potential, Glauber feels that the United Kingdom reacted much faster than the United States. Rudolf Peierls,12 a professor in Birmingham, became the country’s principal theorist on nuclear matters, although Glauber is fascinated by the absence of Paul A. M. Dirac, the renowned professor at the University of Cambridge from research on new advances in nuclear physics. It was he who formulated the equation that bears his name and that made it possible to predict the existence of antimatter.13 He wonders why Dirac did no

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research on this emerging and worrying topic, and cannot find an answer. The archives remind us that Dirac had co-written a memorandum with the celebrated scientist Otto Frisch in 1940 in which they discussed the possibility of creating an atomic weapon. They warned that no other weapon could match a nuclear bomb and justified the importance of developing it as a counter-threat, even if it was never used. But the Brits lacked the equipment to experiment, and that favored the United States, where investigations and political decisions were slowly advancing, and Glauber recalls that the first big move was to build a nuclear reactor in Chicago. The news of the discovery of fission was in the newspapers for a year after the initial announcement. But then, for one reason or another, it gradually disappeared. Fission was unheard from again. The fact is that the military was becoming serious about the matter. Glauber knew absolutely nothing of it other than what he had read in the newspapers at the time. The physicists were very circumspect. It was a very well-kept secret.

From Harvard to Los Alamos Glauber left Harvard just before the Christmas vacation of 1943. The university gave him a special final examination, before the end of the formal period, so he could leave. These exceptions were made from time to time for youngsters who had to go and fight at the front or work for the war. Before leaving for Los Alamos, he returned to New York to spend a couple of weeks with his family. Following the instructions he had received, he finished packing his things in a trunk and had it sent to the address supplied, the famous Post Office Box 1663, Santa Fe, New Mexico. One day, he doesn’t quite remember when, before or after the New Year, although most likely during the first week of 1944, he went to take a train from New York Central to LaSalle Street, Chicago. He’d been told that when he arrived, he should make a phone call. He did just that and out of nowhere, a man appeared with more instructions. He was to go across Chicago to Deaborn Station, and get on a train called The Chief. It was an overnight trip—long, tiring, and somewhat cumbersome. The train made several stops along the way, and at each one, large numbers of people, mostly Indians dressed like cowboys, came aboard to sell blankets and jewelry to the passengers. The train took Glauber west, through Iowa, Kansas and Colorado, to New Mexico.

It and Them. At First

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The last stop was Lamy, a town about fifteen miles from Santa Fe, where Glauber got off the train and walked down the platform. Walking beside him there was a chap in a navy-blue overcoat, who he’d find out shortly after was Mr. Newman.14 They were both met by a guy who looked like a cowboy, dressed in blue dungarees, a checked shirt and a ten-gallon hat. He drove them fifteen miles to the small Palace Avenue office (East Palace Avenue, 109, Santa Fe), which had a sort of courtyard in front and was run by Dorothy McKibbin.15 Glauber later learned that anyone going to work in Los Alamos first went there to sign the register, before climbing up the hill to the laboratory. They weren’t the only people filling out documents in the office, and there was quite a backlog of people. This gave Glauber time to realize that Mr. Newman had signed his name as John, and it occurred to him that in Europe he’d have been Johan. By then, he had managed to identify the stranger. He was the renowned scientist John von Neumann.16 He’d seen his book on quantum mechanics and had read a lot about him. It also turned out that the cowboy who’d driven them there was a fellow named Jack W. Calkin.17 That name didn’t mean anything to Glauber at the time, but sometime later he’d be able to find an explanation for that and for what happened after. The three men headed north. They passed a strange rock formation called The Camel, shaped like the animal of the same name. Then they went through a town called Pojoaque, where they would usually turn west to go across a tiny bridge over the Rio Grande. But when they got there, they found that the bridge had been washed out. So, they had to go north to Española and then head for an Indian town called San Ildelfonso. Finally, they could go up into the hills and through the canyons that led to the laboratory. During the trip, Glauber overheard a very strange conversation. Von Neumann asked how things were going ‘up there’ and the cowboy explained they were having a good deal of difficulty. “What’s the matter?” asked Von Neumann. “Well,” the cowboy answered. “Matter is being annihilated.” Von Neumann started asking a series of questions in code that led Glauber, who was listening attentively, to deduce that the problem was that “worldlines are intersecting.” A ‘worldline’ is a relativistic terminology used to describe the trajectory of particles. That is as far as Glauber could go with his inferences. He couldn’t imagine what relativistic things could be going on, let alone any annihilation of matter. The cowboy and von Neumann continued their conversation in which they described increasingly outlandish details about a calculation they were doing. It was clear to Glauber that the cowboy was a mathematician who had

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worked for Von Neumann before and they were both familiar with hydrodynamic terminology. He also understood that the conversation revolved around the description of a problem and its associated calculations. However, what Glauber secretly found ironic was that the immediate issue they were trying to solve was how to describe the problems they were facing without any breach of security. Von Neumann and the cowboy clearly figured that Glauber was just a kid who was not going to know anything about the ideas they were discussing. To a certain extent, that was true. He didn’t know anything, but he knew enough terminology to find their efforts to remain secure in what they were saying completely outlandish. The fact is that Glauber would not have been able to tell what Calkin was trying to describe to von Neumann. They were both using mathematics connected with implosion, which requires the use of high explosives to compress material. Judging by the conversation, they were trying to follow the hydrodynamics of the shockwaves entering these materials and that they were trying to do the calculations by hand, with the limited assistance of the primitive desk computers of the time, which were practically calculators. Glauber didn’t think those calculations were trivial at all. First, because there’s a lot of effort involved. Second, because if the procedure for running those calculations was not designed well enough and contained instabilities, they could go crazy. That’s what was happening. In the outlandish terminology that the cowboy and von Neumann were using, the calculations were exploding.

Los Alamos

Everyday Life in Los Alamos The Essentials Even though Glauber recalls that it was isolated in the middle of nowhere, life in Los Alamos laboratory was easy. At the time of his arrival, around 200 scientists were working in many separate groups that were pursuing different work in different directions entirely. Many of the problems they were investigating were so ridiculously difficult that there were totally impossible for them to solve. He laughs as he says this; it’s quite funny to remember. Then his face goes serious again and he continues. Most of the scientists at Los Alamos were experimental. Glauber belonged to the Theoretical Division. All of the technical work was carried out within what was called the Technical Area, which was separated from the rest of the laboratory by a fence and special identification was required to get into it. This area was surrounded by the rest of the town, where about a thousand people lived, mostly families. Glauber remembers a wedding between Hugh Bradner and his wife Marge. He was an experimental physicist, a very adventurous young guy who later went to California. His wife worked with great skill in Oppenheimer’s office. The young people on the project had only been married a few years, and Glauber jests that they produced babies more efficiently than anything else that was happening in the laboratory. The army was producing more and more babies, he says, and bursts out laughing at his own joke. And one can’t help but laugh too. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. I. Latorre and M. T. Soto-Sanfiel, The Last Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29984-1_3

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There was a military police area connected to the laboratory and this was all contained within a large fence. According to Glauber’s account, the fences were almost beside the point because the country was crossed by enormous, impassable canyons. The only way to get up there was by a single dirt road, built by the military. All this created a sense of isolation. On the other hand, the climate was beautiful and country hiking on the weekends was marvelous. It was an extraordinary place for young people, he remembers. He adds that the young people in the lab were a highly active bunch, and reminds us, cracking up with laughter again as he says it, that most of them were very busy creating families. The inhabitants of the laboratory got their food from a supply system organized by the army. There was a grocery store. There was another civilian gymnasium in the lab that showed movies every other night for fifteen cents, but the scientists could also see movies in the military gymnasium, a large multipurpose hall made of wood, where pictures were shown three nights a week and the admission cost was just ten cents. There was a strange sense that they were living a kind of utopia. Glauber uses this metaphor several times as he tells this part of the story. It will appear again.

Living to Work Glauber explains that the scientists lived in wooden buildings, which contained apartments with fairly normal, but quite decent, interior furniture. They were arranged on different levels. Those that housed the machinists, low-ranking personnel and military police, were shacks. The scientists lived in places that despite having the appearance of temporary housing were as comfortable as they could be given the low budget of their construction. Each building typically contained four apartments, each with coal furnaces and staff hired specifically to run them. No scientists had to be bothered with heating the buildings. In fact, they didn’t have to worry about anything other than work, he recalls. Their business was to get up in the morning and go to the Technical Area to do their work, whatever it was. They left their offices at noon for lunch in the dining hall, another large, wooden room. And then they went back to work. Such was life. There were several dining rooms. Some, like the army mess halls, were free. But Glauber preferred to pay about $10 a week to eat at the most luxurious of all, the Fuller Lodge, which had excellent service and very reasonable food. It had a non-military cook and he was very good. The diners sat at elegant tables, usually six people at each.

Los Alamos

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The most utopian aspect of the place, Glauber reflects, was that all a scientist had to do was work, eat relatively well, and return home at around five. From that time on, he had plenty of free time before going to bed. The thing is, there wasn’t a lot going on at Los Alamos. They couldn’t listen to much radio, because there were only two stations in the entire state and the signal up there was very poor. So, all they could do was read and chat to the people from the lab, who were all well-educated university people. The scientists had very few dealings with the population at large. There were a lot of people in the laboratory. By the end of the war there were around two thousands of them, he reckons. In actual fact, there were quite a few more, about six thousand, according to the census for PO Box 1663. The scientists held a weekly colloquium, lasting from an hour to an hour and a half, which was only attended by about two hundred of the thousand or so workers that were identified with white badges. They were held in the large wooden gymnasium, which Glauber explains was prepared by the military police with handless camp chairs so that everyone could fit in. These sessions were used to discuss the entire spectrum of problems faced by the different divisions of scientists working in the Technical Area. He comments that the talks weren’t only on nuclear issues. They could be about explosives, detonators, shock waves, blast waves, or any other subject. Salaries were very low in those pre-inflationary times. Glauber remembers that he initially made $25 a week. But he had to pay about $14 for the food, which was excellent, and about another $10 a week on rent. As civilians, they had to pay rent to some sort of agency that managed the lodgings. Los Alamos wasn’t a place to save a lot of money, and Glauber doesn’t remember anyone getting rich there. Eventually, the lab raised his salary to $35 because they wanted him to stay on. The scientists were only given the freedom to go down to Santa Fe one day a month. Most of them did and that was the only time they spent much money. Glauber remembers eating at a Chinese restaurant that was quite inexpensive. At the end of the war, when he returned home after finishing his work at Los Alamos, he had saved several hundred dollars. After all, what was he going to spend money on there, other than paying for his keep and having the occasional bit of fun? There were no activities in the laboratory that consumed money, other than the movies that Glauber would go to see once or twice a week. The military screened Hollywood films that are barely remembered today like those starring Danny Kaye,18 a vigorous, vibrant comedian who was visually very funny. His wife used to write his scores and Glauber found him truly brilliant. It struck him that Kaye was a great deal like Richard Feynman, another

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notable physicist from the lab who won the Nobel Prize, and who Glauber describes in full depth later on. The difference was that Kaye sang very comically while he doesn’t recall Feynman ever singing a single word. Later in life, Glauber got to see Kaye perform in person. He sat at the edge of the stage of Harvard’s Sanders Theater and gesticulated and improvised sounds to entertain a large audience of undergraduates for an hour. There wasn’t an awful lot of drinking in the laboratory. Glauber doesn’t recall much alcohol intake when they went down to Santa Fe either, although on rare occasions, he confesses, somebody might invest in a bottle of Californian wine, which cost one or two dollars. The fact is, the lab was a military post and alcohol was controlled, though by no means prohibited. Inside the compound, the residents couldn’t buy beer of a percentage any higher than 3.2, which was very low. That didn’t mean that the military police never got drunk. It just meant they drank vast amounts in order to do so! The workers could buy anything they wanted in Santa Fe and bring it up by car. The parties they had in the laboratory didn’t involve any significant amount of alcohol, but there was usually a punch bowl involved. And Glauber also tells us that it was not altogether unheard of to find a little laboratory that was used to make their own homebrew. There were parties at the Fuller Lodge several times a year where people danced. There were also dormitory parties in the common rooms of the apartment buildings, perhaps once a year. While at Los Alamos, Glauber might have seen two in his own building. Most of the people in the laboratory were in their twenties and lived with their families in apartments, which meant they had a certain amount of space and there was social life among them. The bachelors, like Glauber, lived in individual rooms, and when they were invited to join the families they would repay their hosts by inviting them to their own dormitory parties. These also involved the aforementioned punch, if somebody knew of an appropriate recipe. But making it wasn’t the most difficult thing, Glauber jokes. The problem was finding a large enough bowl to put it in! He never tried to talk to his family on the phone during his time at Los Alamos. Because there would always be people eavesdropping on the conversation, most of the people in the lab didn’t make such calls. Laboratory security also examined any correspondence. Glauber recalls the anecdote of someone who wanted to send a congratulatory telegram in which he wrote out the words “Happy Anna was Harry vicious”, which if read quickly was “Happy Anniversary Wishes!”.

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In Free Time The soundtrack to Glauber’s memories of his time in the laboratory includes one song that was very popular in that period, sung by the famous Andrew Sisters and called Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree (with Anyone Else but Me) 19 which had appeared in the 1942 movie Private Buckaroo 20 directed by Edward F. Cline. Another slower song that comes to his mind is Long Ago (and Far Away) 21 from the film Cover Girl 22 with Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly, directed by Charles Vidor. Those were Hayworth’s strongest years; she was a sort of goddess figure. Glauber can’t remember her ever singing at all. She just appeared. She certainly didn’t act. It was also at Los Alamos that he first saw a highly sentimental movie starring Elizabeth Taylor with Mickey Rooney, National Velvet.23 He sighs that when he is given the names of the movies of that time, some scenes come flooding back, but they disappear just as fast. There was a theater in the lab as well and a dramatic group made up of fellow staff with an artistic streak in them, and who would try to put on a show once a year. One of the plays was Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring (1939), which in 1944 was adapted for the cinema, directed by Frank Capra and starring Cary Grant. It was a very popular play in New York about two slightly crazy sisters that were in the habit of poisoning their guests and burning them in the basement. The funny element in the play, both at Los Alamos and on Broadway, is a certain point at which all of these ghosts rise up and walk. For Glauber, however, the funniest thing of all was that several division leaders volunteered to perform, although he doesn’t remember Robert Oppenheimer24 , the scientific director of the project, or Richard Feynman, ever doing such a thing. There wasn’t much sport going on in the lab, though there might have been some sort of softball or baseball in the spring. And there was some touch-ball, running up and down because they didn’t have any equipment. However, most people would go climbing in the mountains, and there was cross-country and downhill skiing in the hills behind the project. Glauber only met one chess player there. He wasn’t a scientist at all, but was from the Special Engineering Detachment (SED), a navy unit whose members assisted researchers in technical, mechanical or electrical matters. They had given him the strange assignment of filling the first aid kits. He remembers his name was Dan Mayers.25 He was a strange, quiet fellow who had gained his technical experience at the Arizona School of Mines and went on to become the chess champion of the state of New Mexico.

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Glauber speaks at greater length about the SEDs, the guts of the project. These men were soldiers who had done or studied something technical in the past, which is why they were sent to Los Alamos to serve, for example, as machinists or laboratory chemists. Glauber feels that the people in the army who were in charge of screening potential staff weren’t very good at finding people of the right scientific background. The SEDs were basically used as technical personnel, and were assigned to various tasks. They lived in the barracks and were to get up at six in the morning to march around noisily and do drill. Some of the officers had discipline as their only faith. There were tremendous complaints, Glauber says, because those morning marches served absolutely no purpose other than disturbing the scientists. The crude reality was that they were inexpensive civilians dressed in uniform. The SEDs were also GIs, which of course stands for “General Issue.” Some of them served as Military Police (MPs) and lived in special barracks, separated from the rest by a fence.

Etiquette The winters at Los Alamos were really cold and the springs very windy. In the sun, summer was quite warm, but in the shade it immediately turned cool. The air was never hot at that altitude and the climate was generally fine. They could usually just wear pants that they could buy for a few dollars at a department store like JCPenney. Trousers only cost a few dollars, but Glauber didn’t need too many, and the laundry was done for them. The scientists were not completely out of the habit of wearing neck ties, and it took a little time for them to lose it. As Glauber remarks, they were more common in offices than in a laboratory. Everyone had to wear badges at all times. They carried the bearer’s photo and later on a photographic film, so they could determine whether anyone had been exposed to any radioactivity. Glauber had to return it when he left Los Alamos, as was mandatory, and it is not to be found in the archives today. It was probably lost, he tells us, because after the project ended, everything was boxed up chaotically and messily and a great deal has never been seen again. Glauber explains that there were two colors of badges: blue and white. Those who had a white badge, like him, were the ones who might be productive of ideas by learning what they were learning. They were the only ones admitted to the colloquia where the general problems of the project were discussed. Of course, there were things that the military didn’t want to be discussed publicly, such as precise details of how the weapon was to be used.

Los Alamos

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Those were just about the only things that were held back, but the scientists weren’t exactly itching to know about them in any case. If General Groves, the director of the whole Manhattan Project, had had his way, there would have been no colloquia or talk about the work and problems of other divisions. Groves wanted everyone to work in the utmost secrecy, without sharing information, but that went against the scientific procedure that is based on the discussion of ideas. The full baggage provided by scientific discussion was important background for the progress of investigations. At the time, the creation of a bomb was only a remote possibility, and they weren’t even sure whether that invention was ever going to work. The military wore badges too. A few SEDs had the white one, mostly machinists and craftsmen who were doing jobs that had to be done, but were not as central to the project. The blue badges were for people who only had a limited range of access to certain information and hence places. They could only enter the areas that were appropriate to what they were doing. No blue badges were allowed into to the colloquia. Glauber admits that he can’t be sure how rigorously all of this was actually followed, but that was at least the principle. Glauber again emphasizes the utopian character of the place, although one never mentioned the word ‘Utopia’ while there. There was nothing utopian about the way the military people behaved at Los Alamos. But it was a place where the scientists had everything done for them. Other than work, there wasn’t much else to do. In their free time, they mostly went to the movies or listened to the poor radio signal that came out of Albuquerque. That’s why they made such a great deal out of reading. Never in Glauber’s life did he read as much as he did at Los Alamos.

Friendships Glauber’s best friends in Los Alamos also came from Harvard, roughly at the same time as him. The man that had interviewed him in that dark room at the university had asked who else was there, and he and the department office both gave him names of people who had taken enough advanced courses that might be of some use. One of them was Kenneth Case, who was in his class. Another was a somewhat strange but remarkable young fellow called Frederic de Hoffman, although he had different names in different languages. He was a real operator type, who had a very different career at Los Alamos to what he had done at Harvard. And another was Theodore Hall, who apparently got in a lot of trouble later in connection with supplying information to the Russians.

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These four young men all went to Los Alamos at the same time, or two weeks apart. The people Glauber dealt with were almost entirely young bachelors who lived in the same dormitory, where the rooms were plain but reasonable, but at least they were clean and were kept warm in the winter. There was nobody of any other age there. People over forty were a tiniest minority. It was impossible to maintain a relation with anyone in Santa Fe. There were young women there in the laboratory, but the total number of unmarried ones at Los Alamos was only of the order of about twenty. There was one dormitory for all of them. Being frank, however, they didn’t seem to have any interest in Glauber or his colleagues—those ladies were very much in demand!

Candid Camera Glauber had a typical press camera of the era, a bulky model with a flash, but so elaborate that it was almost impossible to get film for. Unsurprisingly, the security people didn’t want any workers to have cameras inside the compound, for the obvious reason that they could take photos and filter them. Secrecy was a serious matter in the laboratory, Glauber insists. No one outside was allowed to know that they were building a bomb in there. So, all cameras were confiscated and only returned when staff left the lab on weekends. Glauber took pictures when he went swimming, for example, but as photography was so heavily discouraged, he says that he lost his enthusiasm for it. All the same, he does have a lot of Los Alamos pictures, but he says they are all fundamentally uninteresting and made for the wrong reasons and at the wrong times. Glauber believes the easiest and most sensible thing would have been for the directors to make a complete pictorial record of the project. But it never happened. It’s something they didn’t want to do, and that they didn’t care about either. Glauber has had something of an interest in photography all his life. He still has pictures of things he saw in the sky, taken with the telescope that he built himself when he was just 13 or 14 years old. In 1952, shortly after the project, he got a German Retina camera and used it to take pictures of Wolfgang Pauli26 (a famous image of Pauli kicking a ball towards the camera), Enrico Fermi and Albert Einstein, and of his family too.

Los Alamos

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News from Outside Most of the information that reached the laboratory from the outside came via radio. The scientists would mainly listen to news broadcasts from the only two stations accessible to them during the daytime. At night, they could often pick up stations from the Middle West, which gave brief outlines of the news, usually lasting about fifteen minutes and mainly devoted to the war. Around one o’clock in the afternoon, after meals at the Fuller Lodge, the people in the lab would sit and listen to the radio there, which was about the only way that Los Alamos staff could get information about what was going on in Europe. Visitors to the laboratory also ate lunch there. There was a long succession of fairly distinguished people that would show up for several days and then vanish, and which included most of the important scientists of the day. Glauber didn’t have much to say to them, and generally just sat there without uttering a word. The only newspaper for thousands of miles around, and hence the only one to which the inhabitants of the compound had any access, was the Santa Fe Mexican 27 , although Glauber doesn’t believe that even that was delivered daily. And if it was, then he certainly never saw it.

Prayer in the Mountains There was less religion in Los Alamos than one might imagine. But there were a couple of thousand people living there, and they were generally quite devout, so it wouldn’t have surprised Glauber if there were some people who informally ran some sort of service in somebody’s apartment. But there were no people of the cloth, no priests or ministers. At least officially, there was no representation of any religion at all. However, that changed one day when the army felt they ought to assign a chaplain to any group of soldiers larger than 300. Glauber can’t remember this chaplain doing anything other than play touch football with the residents once a week, but he assumes he must have conducted some kind of services for the militarymen, although he wasn’t aware of any impact that had on them. According to Glauber, this chaplain certainly wasn’t Jewish, and probably wasn’t Roman Catholic either, so he must have been of one of the many varieties of Protestant. Indeed, the literature on Los Alamos reveals that the priest’s name was Matthew Imrie, of the Episcopal (Protestant) Church. Glauber recalls that when the war was over, religious groups did begin to gather together at Los Alamos. With a chuckle, he adds that this was when all the smart people had gone.

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Political Affairs There was no vehicle for the expression of politics at Los Alamos. There were no political offices whatsoever. It was the military who decided and did what they wanted in the laboratory, and it was without any reference to politics. Glauber remembers that after a time, there was a feeling that they ought to hold some kind of election of a Town Council with a chairman, although he doesn’t remember it ever having any clear function, or doing anything particularly vital. The Los Alamos archives certify that the first vote for this position was held in 1943 and the physicist Robert Wilson28 was the chosen candidate, who was also the youngest group director on the project. A brilliant man, and also a sculptor and architect, it was almost at the end of the war, after the Nazi surrender, when he was one of the few scientists who questioned whether it was appropriate to carry on building the bombs. His motion received a very cold reception from the military. Eventually, after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Wilson helped create the Association of Los Alamos Scientists (ALAS) that campaigned for international control of atomic energy. The second chairman of the Town Council was the Viennese physicist of Jewish origin Victor Weisskopf.29 Glauber remembers his appointment, and claims it was because ‘Viki’ always expressed himself in a somewhat ambiguous and charming way and seemed to offend no one. He was certainly very popular in the role, Glauber using the German word gemütlich to describe him, which means someone agreeable, considerate and who is everybody’s friend. Glauber was in Los Alamos, at the time of the 1944 presidential elections, where Franklin D. Roosevelt was reelected for the fourth and final time. He seems to remember that the people of Los Alamos were able to vote, and although he’s not entirely sure, he thinks he did too. He doesn’t know the numbers, but he assumes that a majority of the people voted, as most Americans did, for Franklin Roosevelt. The history books tell that Roosevelt was responsible for approving and launching the Manhattan Project. In the 1944 elections, he beat the Republican Party candidate, Thomas E. Dewey, with 53.39% of the vote, which makes him the US president with the most election wins (four) of all time, although he never completed his final administration because he died on 12 April 1945 of a brain hemorrhage while working in his office, just a few months before the end of the Second World War. Glauber remembers Roosevelt’s death. The scientists talked about it and worried about it amongst themselves. The war was still raging and they

Los Alamos

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had been working on the bomb for years. Former Vice President Harry S. Truman30 assumed the presidency immediately, and in 1948 ran for reelection again against Dewey. Against all expectations, he won the elections and was in office until 1953. When Truman became president, the scientists supposed he had no idea at all of what was going on at Los Alamos. They may have been saying that in the lab, but Glauber is sure Truman was filled in on it presently, although he also suspects that it may not have been the first thing they told him about. Indeed, it was only after his first cabinet meeting as president that Truman learned about the existence of the Manhattan Project from the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, and he made a note of it in his personal diary. Glauber also remembers Hitler’s death in April 194531 , and jokes that he doesn’t remember anybody weeping tears over the news. They could see that the war in Europe was coming to a conclusion, but it wasn’t clear what kind of conclusion that would be. No decisions would be made on the German and Austrian occupied areas until the war was over and the allies had discussed the matter. However, it was immediately clear that the United States was in a difficult position due to not having reached Berlin in time for the end of the war. It was only by agreement with the Russians that they had any presence in the city at all. And as Glauber says, that became an issue in the following years.

Redefining the Site The entrance to the Technical Area was originally from the main avenue, which would not be known by its current name of Trinity until after 1945. This entrance led straight into the main building, where Robert J. Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the project, had an office. Other than that, there was the T building, used for administration, and just a tiny handful of other outbuildings, including one that contained a Van der Graaf generator, which accumulates electric charge for use in nuclear and particle experiments. In time, as the project expanded and the number of people increased, the Technical Area got so big that they had to start building on the other side of the road. The problem with the new layout, remembers Glauber, was that they now had to go in and out of security just in order to cross the street, which they eventually solved by constructing overpasses. The new E building was used for secretarial work, and there was an awful lot of that to be done at Los Alamos, recalls Glauber. Just calculating the payrolls of more than a thousand workers was a huge job in itself. Another

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memorable building was the Gamma One, which was put off for the whole Theoretical Division. There had always been a kind of tank there, which was a bit of a puddle.Glauber remembers it varied in the amount of water that it contained as it never held much for long because it had been made with such a highly porous stone. He says it was a vestige from the ranch school for which the site was originally built. Indeed, the existing documentation tells us that Los Alamos laboratory was built on the premises of what had once been a highly exclusive private school for boys, Los Alamos Ranch School, founded in 1917 with the purpose of offering, to a select fifty or so adolescents, a peculiar educational program that rigorously combined the philosophy of the Boy Scouts with an extremely thorough secondary education. The school operated for 25 years, and produced several notorious alumni, including the writers Gore Vidal and William S. Burroughs, the anthropologist Edward T. Hall, and the founder of the Santa Fe opera, John Crosby. When searching for the site to locate the laboratory, the military got wind of this particular one from Robert Oppenheimer, who as a child had spent the summers in the nearby Sangre de Cristo Mountains. In 1942, the school and the land around it were purchased by the US government for the Manhattan Project. In January 1943, the school awarded its last diplomas, and the army took control of the property the following month. The site was chosen because it was isolated, and had water, space, and existing buildings that could accommodate people. What’s more, much of the land that surrounded it was owned by the federal government and as it was located on a plateau, it was much easier to control access. The Fuller Lodge and the Big House, which would be used for the lab’s social gatherings, were originally intended to house the staff. The new buildings were built of wood. Needless to say, airplanes were not allowed to fly over the site, which is why there are no aerial photos of the lab in its early days. According to Glauber, one of the most curious things about the whole compound was the fact that nobody ever saw a plane. And in fact, it would be a very long time before any aircraft would fly over the site. The military constructed a fire department that had pumps, hoses and even a fire engine or two to put out fires, as everything in the Technical Area was inflammable. Glauber explains that the one real nuisance at Los Alamos was that in spring they would walk around in mud, sometimes up to their ankles. This was because the project director, General Groves, didn’t want to pave roads or create sidewalks or decent places for people to walk. The General had no

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taste for that kind of luxury. That aspect of life, Glauber smiles, was always a little on the primitive side, but it was rather colorful. Some of the buildings were accelerator buildings. The Van der Graaf accelerators came from Wisconsin, he seems to remember. There was also the cyclotron building, which came from Harvard, and another building with a Cockcroft-Walton generator in it. The purpose of these accelerators was to produce particle beams, controlled neutron beams to measure cross sections, for the scientists needed to know the effective target area of a nucleus for a particle coming in. These cross sections depended sensitively on the energy of the neutron, which had to be measured very precisely. The scientists had to avoid having neutrons surrounded by elements that could absorb them, as this could cause a small nuclear reaction. In short, they had to know how to deal with materials in the presence of neutrons, which was, at the end of the day, the whole purpose of the project.

A Scientist at Los Alamos The First day Before going up the hill to the lab for the first time, the first thing new arrivals like Glauber had to do was pass by the office in Santa Fe, where they were registered by a woman whose name was Dorothy McKibbin. Glauber recalls that this lady became a friend of Oppenheimer’s and shows up in many of the photos of the parties at his home. The car carrying Glauber, the cowboy and the incognito von Neumann finally arrived in the central area of Los Alamos. There was a beautiful log building there, called the Big House, which was one of the first buildings that the army demolished after the project. It had been the place where the students had slept when the site was a ranch school, many of them in the open air on screened porches. On his first day, Glauber was put in a bedroom there. It was late afternoon. He had to wake early next day to go to the Technical Area. The way had been cleared and Glauber was fully identified, so the next day he didn’t have any problems getting in. The question was, what division was he going to be put in? At first, he was told of several different areas of the project, and it wasn’t clear whether he would be an experimenter, a theorist, or something else. After a time without being sure where he was going, Glauber was sent to the office of Robert Bacher32 , who was the division leader for Experimental Physics. Bacher sat Glauber down and was a little curious about

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what the new recruit already knew about the project. Of course, Glauber had found out a number of things, such as the fact that the Harvard cyclotron had vanished. Also, as he had heard nothing on any consequences of the discovery of fission in 1939, or of a possible chain reaction, he guessed that was likely to be what they were working on. So, he told Bacher that he assumed they were trying to develop atomic power. His inquisitor thought that was very astute but a little behind the times. The chain reaction had been made over a year earlier in Chicago. Indeed, Enrico Fermi and his team at the University of Chicago had produced the first controlled, self-sustaining fission chain reaction, on 2 December 1942, at 3.53 p.m. on the squash courts under the terraces of the Stagg Field, the site chosen for the Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1), the first nuclear reactor. This had all been kept secret. In fact, everything about the project had been kept secret. That was the whole point, remembers Glauber. As he mentioned earlier, Niels Bohr had come across the ocean to Princeton University with the news that Lise Meitner and Otto Fritz had discovered fission in Europe. Shortly after that, probably about 1940, everything disappeared from the press. Glauber called it “a kind of informal censorship.” There were only a few people who had any likelihood of talking about that sort of thing, and somebody from security clearly went to them and said, “OK now is the time to shut up.”

Early Calculations Glauber wouldn’t say there were many difficult things to learn on the project, but there was a considerable amount of imagination solicited from the scientists. After a period of uncertainty, he was finally assigned to the group that studied neutron diffusion33 , led from 1944 by Robert Serber34 and part of the Theoretical Division directed by Hans Bethe. The fact that Glauber had taken a number of mathematics courses influenced the decision, for this was not the strong field for the experimenters who were there. He was going to be a theoretical physicist. Two of his colleagues in the group were Stanley Frankel35 and Eldred Nelson.36 Glauber was quick to notice that the latter’s name is associated to the Mormons in Salt Lake City, Utah, the followers of the churches grouped around the Latter Day Saint movement. These two both left soon after to work on computational problems, as Glauber explains in a moment. He also remembers William Rarità37 , a Brooklyn College professor, Chaim Richman38 , a former student of Oppenheimer’s who presently left theoretical work, and Kenneth Case39 , who was somewhat older than Glauber, but

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they had both come from undergraduate life at Harvard and shared the same office. The Atomic Heritage Foundation archive includes an anecdote about William Rarità. In it, Glauber explains that when he first arrived at the Manhattan Project, he was assigned to the same office as Rarità. But the latter preferred to move to Edward Teller’s temporarily empty office. According to what Glauber learned later, Rarità was outraged at having to share an office with such a young man! Glauber remembers that their leader, Robert Serber, spoke with a bit of a lisp and had a quiet voice. He had been one of Oppenheimer’s first students at Berkeley and had eventually gone to a professorship at the University of Illinois. The research problem that this group of scientists was working on was neutron diffusion. They needed to find the critical mass of uranium 235 and plutonium, and also determine how much that critical mass depends upon the surrounding matter, which they called the ‘tamper’. The idea is the following: If one puts scattering material around this sphere of fissionable material, it decreases the critical mass, that is, the minimum amount of mass necessary for an explosion to occur is reduced. Alternatively, if one has a larger mass than critical, it has a certain exponential multiplication rate, a chain reaction, which can lead to an extraordinary explosion. Glauber calculated many of those rates, although truth be said, they were oversimplified affairs and the project didn’t depend on his numbers for anything at all. To give an accurate calculation would have been enormously more complicated than what he did and, he adds, nobody would have believed in those results anyway! Glauber insists that his was not a very original position to be in. They were all well-defined mathematical problems that he could easily deal with by reading the scientific papers. But he knew which problems were unsolved, and was relatively free in his work because Serber was such a permissive group leader. So he simply did what he thought might be useful in terms of exponential multiplication rates and something about the geometry. There were no individual entrepreneurs, he says. People worked in groups and those groups functioned very smoothly. They just happened to have impossible problems in many cases. There were many things on which Glauber was not an expert, but the exchange of ideas within the laboratory was extraordinary and the atmosphere was good. The scientists were informed on all the research problems at the site, although that had not always been the case. At first, the laboratory made many efforts to keep information from going out. When General Groves was

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put in charge of the project at the start, his first thought was that nobody should know anything about what anyone else was doing. He wanted the utmost secrecy. Oppenheimer and the people around him, the chief scientists, had a terrible time persuading him that that way of proceeding would never work. A scientist really depends on having the ideas contributed by everyone who understood the problems. Scientific information needs to be circulated freely. Glauber recalls that one day was very much like another. They did work six days a week, and what they were doing on neutron diffusion problems in the theory group was a kind of attraction compared to what other people were doing, and in particular the ones who were out on the mesas performing high explosive experiments. The fact is that there was a real difficulty in bringing people to the place. The people at Los Alamos were all pretty young. The age was 22 to 26, and Glauber was likely the youngest in the Theoretical Division. There were a few oldsters, like Oppenheimer himself who was 37 or 38. They were the old men of the place, whose hair in some cases had already begun to gray. Young Glauber would go to work early at the laboratory. He doesn’t remember exactly what hours he used to do, but it was probably something like nine to five, or perhaps a little earlier. And there were many people doing additional hours, and not for any extra pay at all. Glauber insists that the payment for the work they were doing was absolutely minimal.

The Theoretical Division: Bethe Versus Teller As we were saying, Hans Bethe40 was the leader of the Theoretical Division, who Glauber introduces as a magnificent scientist and then lavishes praise upon him as he remembers his talents. In many ways, he thought he was the most extraordinary person on the project. He had a kind of theoretical versatility that was amazing, and he could estimate anything to two or three significant figures with simple calculations. He had a wonderful imagination as a theorist, and understood physics better than anyone else in the lab. Indeed, he was the very man who discovered the carbon cycle that shows how energy is produced in stars. This, together with his contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, earned him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967. There were other people who struck Glauber as very gifted scientifically, but none of them was at all comparable to Bethe. He was always close to Oppenheimer’s opinions, although Glauber adds that it also went the other way. Bethe was someone who formulated his proposals in very concrete and quantitative terms and Oppenheimer was very persuaded by Bethe.

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Edward Teller was Bethe’s rival. Glauber remembers him being an arrogant, self-centered man. When he first arrived at the lab, Glauber saw Teller’s name written in chalk next to an empty office. What had happened is that although Oppenheimer respected Teller, he had not made him head of the Theoretical Division, and on learning that, Teller had gone off in an angry state and disappeared for a month or two. Indeed, the office he left empty was the very one to which William Rarità took refuge when he refused to share a room with the novice Glauber. Teller eventually came back and was encouraged by Oppenheimer to establish not just a group, but an entire division of his own, and which was not under Bethe. That division had as its only assignment trying to find a way of initiating the thermonuclear reaction in deuterium. From that moment on, Teller broke away completely from the rest of the laboratory to run his own small group. But by the time Glauber left the project to return to Harvard at the end of 1945, he claims that Teller’s group had enjoyed virtually no success. Glauber then goes back to talking about Bethe, who he describes as an absolutely splendid head. He was a man of encyclopedic ability, but also very understanding, extremely insightful. He often made suggestions that were right on the button, and whenever Glauber speaks of him, which he does often, he uses words of admiration. Glauber adds that much as these men were all great scientists, if ever he had something to say himself, then they were always anxious to listen. But although he humbly admits that he did have a few things to tell Bethe, he never had anything to say to Oppenheimer.

Computers at Los Alamos There were computers in the lab. During his first year working on the project, Glauber learned that all advanced calculations were being done on desk computers. When he arrived, there were two kinds of electromechanical calculators on the site: the Marchant and the Friden. The scientists soon realized that they produced different sounds, different percussions, depending on the calculations that one or the other performed. Glauber recalls that one of his colleagues once created a sequence of calculations that when run on the machine produced a musical composition. The IBM machines were brought in a year later, after the Theoretical Division had a building of its own which had moved across the avenue. Glauber remembers that they were business machines that used punch cards that were

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about six inches long, but that would only carry out one or perhaps two arithmetic operations. They were black and somewhat larger than a table, and they said IBM very prominently on them. The two guys who were put in charge of these computers were initially in the same group as Glauber under Serber, namely Stanley Frankel and Eldred Nelson. The people under the charge of these two researchers included a number of servicemen who had some mathematical background. According to Glauber, one of the professionals in the calculations group went on to became a prominent mathematician.41 And years after the war, another became a logician and later the president of the famous Ivy League college on the border between New Hampshire and Vermont.42

Progressively Harder Calculations The point of the computer group was to do implosion calculations, which were very difficult to do in a way which was intrinsically stable and errorfree. As Glauber told us in his account of his original trip to Los Alamos, von Neumann and his cowboy colleague had been describing, in terms they thought were secret, a calculation that was just going crazy. Some time later, Glauber put the dots together and could understand what was happening, what that conversation was referring to. Calculations with those machines were repetitive, where had to integrate nonlinear differential equations going step by step. This meant the scientists had to be extremely careful at each stage of the calculation, but especially at the beginning. Any errors that crept in could grow cumulatively and drive the calculations crazy. The members of the group had been having quite a bit of experience in that sort of thing when the IBM machines came. Truth be known, they didn’t get many useful results. The leader of the Theoretical Division, Hans Bethe, was rather unhappy about that and figured that he would have to put somebody in charge of those machines. So, after several months of failures, he gave the assignment to Richard Feynman, who he felt was the ideal person to organize everything, form a group and be sure to get some sense out of those calculations. Glauber didn’t think anything ever depended critically on that group, but at least the machines were able to calculate what was going on, or what was supposed to go on, in these spherically symmetric compression arrangements. Not all the scientists used those computers, Glauber adds. For example, Enrico Fermi did his work by hand, and at odd hours of the morning. He would get up two hours before his family and work in privacy while it was

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still the dark of night, on the assumption that the rest of his day was going to be consumed or wasted. He was mostly interested in one significant figure, and he didn’t need a computer to do that. Glauber never saw Fermi use a slide rule or anything like it43 , but he did see Bethe use a little machine that he had brought with him from Germany. It was like a desk calculator and he operated it with a small crank. The other scientists had heavy, noisy Marchant calculators or Friden computers on their desks. As can be deduced from the above, the computers were only used to make somewhat crude approximations and used up many sheets, none of which were very useful. Glauber never viewed computers as the valuable thing in what he was doing, and they were mostly a waste of time. He also states emphatically that he never got stuck when running any calculations. Never. He supposes he could have gone to his group leader, Serber, if he’d had a problem but those were different times and that would have been considered a disgrace. The other chap in his office, Kenneth Case, was also from Harvard and was pretty knowledgeable and a very good scientist. But Glauber doesn’t think he ever harassed him with a single question. Everybody knew what they had to do, and if they didn’t, they would learn it by reading.

Orchestrating Calculations Continuing his description of the half dozen or so computers in the Theoretical Division, Glauber claims that there was no machine which would carry out more than a couple of arithmetic operations. All the calculation work was very demanding, and they had to count on the help of about twenty or thirty different people, including some GIs, to punch the cards or feed them into the machine. They were also helped by some of the scientists’ wives, mostly housewives. In fact, a large proportion of the mathematical calculations staff on the Manhattan Project were women44 , who were known as ‘computers’. Many were recruited because they had university degrees in physics or mathematics, others simply because they were all that was available in those times of war. As in so many other great human endeavors, the names of these women and their contributions should be honored in the history books, and here we can at least record the names of Jean Dow Bacher, Augusta ‘Mici’ Teller and Kay Manley. According to some references on the project, although these women were proud of their work, and of helping their husbands and learning more about the project, their primary concern was the survival of their families in that primitive military camp.45

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Once set up, the computing group was presided over by a very colorful man named Donald Flanders46 , who had just been an ordinary worker before he got promoted. He knew no physics, but he did know all of the intermediate mathematics very well and he could set things up for the people in his group to do the computations. Glauber describes him as tall and slender with a peculiarly long and pointed beard. Everybody called him Moll, after the central character of the book The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, attributed to Daniel Defoe (1722) and which tells the story of a woman who goes through innumerable vicissitudes, and who is believed to have existed in real life. Some time later, Glauber learned that Moll was actually the brother of the influential Vermont senator, Ralph Flanders.47 Moll Flanders had excellent musical knowledge. Indeed, according to the history books, he later wrote a comic ballet called Sacre du Mesa, with music by George Gershwin, in which the main characters were Oppenheimer and General Groves48 , the latter played by Flanders himself.49 Several people had brought all kinds of musical instruments to Los Alamos, so his other function there was that he directed the singing group, the choir, and conducted the orchestra such as it was at the time. Glauber claims to have had no musical abilities whatsoever. But he wanted to learn something of music, so he joined the singing group. They performed Handel’s Messiah a couple of times at Christmas, and Glauber thinks they did a pretty good job of it, give or take (rather like the IBM computers) a few performance errors.

Shared Concerns There were no electronics experts in the laboratory initially, and that was terrible because it meant the physicists had to do their own repairs. In fact, one of Glauber’s most amusing memories goes back to the time just after he first met Richard Feynman. Due to the lack of specialized personnel to repair machines, Feynman had volunteered to try to fix the computers himself. They were a massive collection of wheels and gears, but he had developed a little skill at discovering what was jamming them, even though Glauber laughs that any such mechanical calculating machine was a kind of self-destroying machine. It would only work for a week or a month, for sooner or later something in it would jam and start heating up again. The first introduction Glauber had to both Bethe and Feynman came when the former was scolding the latter for wasting his time doing that sort of thing, rather than more important scientific work. But the truth was that they didn’t have any repairmen, and it took several weeks before they found some guys who had been drafted who knew anything about mechanical calculators.

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Eventually, Los Alamos did establish an electronics group, and of its members Glauber particularly remembers Willy Higinbotham50 , who he describes as not only a smart guy, but also one of the first members of a group that in December 1944 did a little organizing to talk about the overall questions, and not just scientific ones, derived from the project and the bomb. There had been no such discussion before that date. But the scientists sensed that in several months there might be a test and thought there ought to be discussion of the weapon. Such was their concern that Glauber remembers how they once sent Robert Wilson off to talk to Oppenheimer about whether they ought to meet and discuss such matters. Wilson came back saying that ‘Oppie’ was also worried but thought that if they attempted any such discussions, the General would act to stop them immediately. So, thinking it altogether too sensitive, they agreed to stop meeting. It would not be until late 1944 when they achieved their goal and scientific information began to flow among all authorized persons. Glauber admits that his memory is failing him somewhat, but he seems to recall that after the end of the war, the aforementioned Higinbotham stayed for a time at Los Alamos and eventually ended up at Cornell. He would also be the first elected president of a group that was called the Association of Manhattan Project Scientists, where Glauber recalls that they talked openly about such things as the bomb and atomic energy. This association was the seed of the Federation of Atomic Scientists, founded on 30 November 1945, and which in turn on 6 January 1946 became the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).

Oppenheimer The Strange Couple Everyone respected Robert Oppenheimer. Glauber recalls that he had an excellent understanding of science, although he had never written many scientific papers and those he had written were impossible to understand! That said, everybody agreed that his own understanding was excellent and his ability to verbalize that understanding was extraordinary. There was nobody else in the laboratory who had the same ability to sound and act like a leader. Glauber found that quite extraordinary because there had been no sign of that earlier in Oppenheimer, describing it as a kind of strange insight on the part of General Groves and, in fact, something that Oppenheimer was eventually very embarrassed by.

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General Groves, in contrast, was a military man, and not very wellinformed scientifically. In fact, he had zero understanding of science and thought that most of the physicists were madmen. But he did realize that he needed someone who could talk to him, persuade him of what was necessary, and at the same time command the respect of all of these strange scientists. Although there were many extraordinary people in the US at the time, and many of them were at Los Alamos, Glauber is convinced that Oppenheimer was about the only person who could fill that role. Moreover, there weren’t many people anxious to pick up with their families and everything and move to the middle of nowhere. But Oppenheimer did have a bit of attachment to Los Alamos. In fact, he was the very person who chose the location of the project. The history books tell us that Groves and Oppenheimer first met in person in early October 1942 at Berkeley. Groves had arrived there after visiting Chicago, on the first stop on his tour of the major physics institutions of the day. At that initial meeting, the two discussed the need to create a specific place for scientists to work together and focus on arms development. Richard Rhodes cites an account by Bethe that explains how Groves chose Oppenheimer to run the center because he considered him “a genius, a real genius.” The General appreciated his culture and the fact that he could talk at ease about any subject. He knew about everything except sports, he’d joke! It wasn’t an easy decision because Oppenheimer was a theoretical physicist and the project involved a lot of experimentation and engineering. What’s more, Bethe says that Oppenheimer had never directed anything like that before. But after Groves had put his name forward as director to the military and the options were explored, it became clear that there was no better man for the job. Groves and Oppenheimer worked together in a way that Glauber could never quite understand. Groves was not the kind of person Oppenheimer would have chosen as a friend or collaborator, but Oppenheimer felt he had a responsibility to keep informing the General and securing the right actions from him, and he did. Glauber doesn’t believe there was anyone else who could have done that. There were other more experienced and older scientists who could have run the laboratory. But each of these great men, says Glauber, and granted that they were American, had been in the game earlier and already had their projects. For example, Arthur Compton51 was a potential candidate, but he was running the project in Chicago, and Glauber doesn’t think he would have distinguished himself as a leader anyway. Somebody else who might have been a natural leader for the project was Edward Condon.52 He was an American, born in America, and had been

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very seriously considered as director of the scientific area. In fact, he was one of the first people to do research at Los Alamos, and he served as an associate director for a few weeks under Oppenheimer. Condon was a prestigious figure who had held several positions in recent years, including one at the Westinghouse plant that Glauber himself had the honor of visiting as a prize he had won for his astronomy pictures at a science congress in New York in 1939. He recounts that later on, in the Truman administration, Condon became director of the National Bureau of Standards Laboratory. However, he was discarded as a potential head scientist at Los Alamos because he was the kind of man who wouldn’t put up with any nonsense and would not have behaved tactfully toward General Groves. Either they were firing him, or he was refusing. Glauber doesn’t don’t know the full story, but in the early discussions on how to put Los Alamos together, it became very clear that Condon would not fit. The literature on the project claims that Condon resigned from the project only six weeks after joining because of his disagreements with General Groves. Condon didn’t tolerate the policy of silence and secrecy that the military had imposed. He sent Robert Oppenheimer his letter of resignation on 26 April 1943.53 However, he remained a scientific advisor to the project from his post at the University of Berkeley until the end of the war, particularly offering his counsel on matters related to the separation of uranium. Later, he served as a consultant to the US Senate on the creation of the Atomic Energy Commission. Condon endorsed the internationalization of atomic control and the open sharing of nuclear information. Between 1947 and 1949 he was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee.54 Various references to the project reveal that other names were also considered to direct the laboratory, including Ernest Lawrence and Harold Urey.55 The former may have been Groves’ preferred choice, but Glauber doesn’t think he had the breadth of intelligence. He didn’t know how to do electromagnetic isotope separation. And the latter was a chemist. As Glauber reiterates several times, there was an awful lot of disagreement between the scientists and Groves. The latter’s notion was that nobody should have any awareness of what was going on in the lab other than what concerned his immediate job. But there was a feeling among the scientists that that would never work, that they were so much in need of new ideas for how to build things never done before that they would need everybody to know what was going on. When Glauber arrived in the beginning of 1944, there were weekly meetings in which the entire cleared staff (only about two hundred people) would gather once a week and hear talks on the latest efforts

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to solve problems in all the different areas that were involved. Oppenheimer had much to do with making that happen. Groves and Oppenheimer did not relate much. They certainly did not socialize. There were several key times when they would appear together, for example, in the famous pictures just after the Trinity test in which the two of them seem to be staring at the vestiges of the tower. The fact is, General Groves didn’t really know what to make out of Oppenheimer. To some degree, he must have regarded him as a man of another planet, says Glauber. Oppenheimer certainly felt that about Groves, but never said it. The interesting thing was that the two functioned very effectively in representing the two halves of a collective brain, Oppenheimer representing scientific insight and a sympathetic figure, and Groves being pretty careful not to say anything that would have any technical content because he would get it wrong. That said, Glauber can’t go into details of their relationship. What went on between them was probably fairly intense but also very private. They went never public about it, although Glauber senses that they represented a kind of joint personality, which was highly effective at Los Alamos. The respect for Oppenheimer in the lab was very great. People admired his sensitivity, his manifest intelligence, his understanding of everything in the project. He was also a very good scientist, even though he’d been trained as a rather abstract theorist. And he was very good at running around the laboratory visiting all of the distant sites where they were doing explosive experiments and the like. People admired the fact that he seemed to be interested in everybody’s work, and they all behaved as if they were in effect happy to work for him. Oppenheimer gave no commands. He was always a commentator and observer, and someone who encouraged people. That was the role he was in effect to take over. Glauber explains that Groves, for his part, never barked any military orders at the people in the lab. But the general attitude was that he represented the military presence that blockaded the general functioning of the place. Not that Glauber agrees that that was a truly fair representation of roles, because Groves did seem to have been a man of “some intelligence.” But he did have at least as much respect for discipline as for intelligence. The existing literature reveals that before being put in charge of the Manhattan Project, Groves had been responsible for building the site of the US Pentagon. After that, his wish had been to go and fight on the front, but his superiors had other assignments for him. In political circles, he was viewed as a pragmatic person, a doer, and a perfectionist.56 He was the right man to run the Manhattan Project.

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Glauber never heard Groves give public statements of any sort, except on one occasion. There was a kind of farewell appearance in the gymnasium at Los Alamos once the war was over. Various people were going back to their original locations. General Groves, as if exhausted by his efforts in the war, was giving the place over to his former assistant, General Thomas Farrell.57 That day, Groves gave a sort of farewell address to the people in which he said one outrageous thing after another, things that would never have been accepted during the wartime years, and which Oppenheimer insulated from any uttering. He had the whole British delegation there listening; there must have been at least twenty or thirty of them, including Rudolph Peierls, although some of the most prominent had already returned home. In front of the whole crowd sitting in the audience, Groves explained how much he regretted the presence of the British in the effort. He openly confessed that he had tried to exclude them, but had not succeeded. The joke is, laughs Glauber, the British had started the business two years before and knew more than the Americans had done initially. They were, he insists, very talented people. As he was saying earlier, Glauber never spoke to Oppenheimer in person. Oppenheimer was a big shot. Glauber was just a kid. Oppenheimer had come from Berkeley and knew the Ph.D. students and graduates from his college, but Glauber was a Harvardian. In fact, if Oppenheimer knew of him at all, it was through the papers he had written. For example, he assumes that his articles were the reason why he got the offer to join the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, three or four years later. According to the foreword to the book Quantum Theory of Optical Coherence, which includes a selection of texts by Roy J. Glauber, two months after graduating, in the fall of 1949, Glauber produced an interesting relation concerning the multiplication of two exponential operators which contain creation and annihilation operators, and this so impressed Robert Oppenheimer that he offered him the scholarship in Princeton. Back at Los Alamos, Glauber claims that Oppenheimer did know the leader of his group, Robert Serber, and several other members. These included Robert Christy58 , who was an important contributor in the hydrodynamics area, and Chaim Richman, who he says really “bombed out” as a theorist; he didn’t even really succeed. Apparently, Groves not only chose Oppenheimer, but even defended him. He’d later find out that one primary reason for the choice, absolutely necessary as a part of the position of head scientist at Los Alamos, was that it must be an American, and he must be born in America. Of course, there were a

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number of very talented foreigners there, all of whom were excluded from consideration by Groves during the selection process. Glauber feels that Groves saw himself as having made some compromises with Oppenheimer. There were things in the latter’s past which did not represent disloyalty in any real sense, but which were the kinds of questions that security people were always raising. We’ll be returning to these later. Groves was evidently willing to brush those issues aside. He trusted Oppenheimer, although he would have Oppenheimer followed, and continuously under investigation. Jumping ahead in the story, he illustrates this by explaining how, after the war had ended, everybody who had had anything to do with Oppenheimer, no matter how minor the association, was investigated. Around the early 1950s, all these people were attacked by the various committees. Glauber could name a succession of people who were under suspicion. Oppenheimer, in these years, had the awareness that everybody who had been at all near him was in danger, including his brother, Frank Oppenheimer, also a physicist59 , and who was “wiped out” at an early stage. After the war, Oppenheimer was subjected to loyalty proceedings that culminated in the cancellation of his permits to work on secret affairs. In the lab, Glauber saw Oppenheimer once a week at the colloquia and he would also visit the theoretical seminars every once in a while. But although he heard him speak many times, where he would often reinterpret what other speakers were saying, he was quite a busy man and could not stop to talk to each of the hundreds of people in the place. But Glauber did speak a little to General Groves, albeit not officially, and not in the Technical Area. He would show up maybe once every one or two months, and he always ate lunch in the same place that Glauber did, several times at the same table. Glauber found him a very silent figure and unfortunately can’t remember any conversation he ever had with him. Oppenheimer and Groves were people at the top of the totem pole. Glauber, as he himself keeps insisting, was at the bottom. Farewell, Roy. It was an honor to know you. We have received the sad news that Glauber has passed away in Newton, Massachusetts. On the morning of 26 December 2018, he was admitted to Newton-Wellesley Hospital with breathing difficulties. He was 93 years old. He is survived by his son, Jeffrey M. Glauber, and his daughter, Valerie Glauber Fleishman, as well as five grandchildren60 and his partner Atholie Rosett. This book is a testimony of the extraordinary man that he was. We decided to continue to use the present tense.

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A Literary Figure Robert Oppenheimer came from a wealthy and very sophisticated family in New York City. He went to private schools, and probably never had many friends as a child. Glauber recounts that there was a period in which his parents thought he had tuberculosis and decided to go to the west so he could breathe the cleaner air. His father bought a cabin in the mountains a little east of Santa Fe, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, where he and his brother rode horseback during the summers. That’s why he not only knew that region well but also loved it. In contrast to what Glauber says, several other sources agree that Oppenheimer was sent by his parents to New Mexico in 1922, at the age of 18, accompanied by his teacher-tutor Herbert Smith. It is said that he had caught dysentery during a trip to Europe and his parents thought that contact with clean mountain air would be good for his health. In Albuquerque, he stayed with the family of a schoolmate, Francis Fergusson, who had a house there. He also stayed at Los Pinos ranch, up in the mountains, owned by the wealthy Chaves family. Oppenheimer was fascinated by the place, and later took his brother and some friends to visit it. These sources also claim that he and his brother bought a cabin some time later. He called it Perro Caliente (Spanish for ‘hot dog’), which is what he would say when admiring the views from what he called his rancho (‘ranch’). From there, the brothers would ride to Santa Fe and Taos Pueblo, 75 miles north. Taos is the name of a Tiwa-speaking Amerindian population living in the region. The local language was entirely Spanish. In that part of New Mexico, one would never hear English outside of the two main towns of Albuquerque and Santa Fe, although Spanish was an official language of the legislature in the latter. Oppenheimer had learned Sanskrit at college. He developed what he thought was a very deep interest in Hindu scriptures by reading Sanskrit and would often quote them when he spoke. “He would produce quotations from the Lord Vishnu” laughs Glauber. “And, of course, you could only respect that! How couldn’t you?”. He was a widely read man, and fluent in three languages, meaning he was much more of a literary figure than virtually anyone else at Los Alamos. The experimenters, for the most part, might be called ‘American primitives’, if not ‘cavemen’. They were people who did practical things in practical ways and who did not have these romantic intellectual interests. So Oppenheimer was not only a source of amusement but even of respect in the war years, but it

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became a matter of deep suspicion in the years afterwards during the great days of the ‘Red Scare’, which Glauber will tell us more about later on.

The Arbiter of Good Taste Oppenheimer considered himself the arbiter of taste in theoretical physics. He was scornful of really bad taste in general, although Glauber remarks that this was not to say that his judgment was perfect. Between 1947 and 1948, at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, he was no longer doing any real original physics. He had done some things in Berkeley that Glauber found rather poor for somebody with his elevated taste, and was often disturbed by the way he wrote things up in such an unclear way. He was that much of a snob that he felt one shouldn’t give the stupid types too easy a chance to get into the business. Then, he would get carried away by what he thought were clever ideas, writing what Glauber describes as ‘drivel’. Glauber remembers Oppenheimer as a very excitable man, who was highly impressionable by what he thought was clever and original. He recalls how, in 1949, he visited him at the Institute for the first time. As soon as he arrived, he showed Oppenheimer some calculations on a blackboard. There was a certain real elegance to them and Oppenheimer was suddenly very excited and thought it was just wonderful. That was in the fall, when Glauber often had allergy problems. In the ragweed season, he would get asthma rather badly. He was no sooner at the Institute and explaining this ‘stuff ’ to Oppenheimer’s group when he came down with asthma and couldn’t even leave his room. That month, Oppenheimer was starting to present a program to a large group of people who had suddenly descended at the Institute, at which he had decided that everybody should report what he was working on. When he learned that Glauber was sick in bed, Oppenheimer proceeded to give lectures on what he had told him. Glauber was, of course, thrilled to hear of that. But he unfortunately also learned that Oppenheimer had manifest disdain for things that various other people were presenting. However, Oppenheimer was clearly impressed by another scientist who was there, Frank Yang61 , to the extent that he made him a permanent member of the Institute within a year or two. He also found a position for Glauber as a temporary replacement for Richard Feynman, who had decided to move from Cornell to Caltech, but was first going to take a year off to visit Brazil.62 So, ‘Oppie’ in effect sent him to Caltech to begin a career teaching in Feynman’s place.

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Oppenheimer was forever playing one up with individuals. Glauber was walking with him to lunch one day. He had seen a film by a French writer, he can’t recall who exactly. It was not Renoir , not Goddard, but it was someone who had a certain cachet as an artist, and had produced a number of more or less enigmatic French films. It was not Buñuel, but it was someone like him. In any case, Glauber mentioned it to Oppenheimer, realizing that he should talk about something which is intellectually high class. He remembers walking into the lunchroom telling him he had seen the film, and had been very impressed by it. To which Oppenheimer immediately retorted: “Yes, but it is nothing like reading it in French!” That was around 1952 or 1953, and was the last time Glauber ever spoke to him.

Family Life Glauber wouldn’t say that Los Alamos was a class-ridden society, but obviously he was in the lowest class of scientists with white badges. So, he didn’t get to talk to many senior people, other than getting invited to dinner with Serber’s family a couple of times in two years. He had some relation with that family and did get to know some others from the lab, but he was never part of anybody’s family at all. General Groves and his family didn’t live in the laboratory. He would visit for a week or two weeks, vanish for a month, and then visit again. He was always coming back but he was not a steady presence. He never met Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty63 at Los Alamos, although he did see her from a distance. He finds her hard to describe. There was something otherworldly about her. She had a deep, hollow voice that was somewhat haunting. To illustrate what she was like, Glauber refers to an anecdote from the first time he ever spoke to her, much later in around 1951 or 1952, after the war when he was at Princeton. He was driving through Princeton, and being a veteran of the place, he felt as if he could knock on their door. Kitty invited him in as if he were an old friend, but she immediately began criticizing the way he was dressed, in response to which Glauber protested, “I have just driven across the country!”. Glauber couldn’t say an awful lot about Kitty. She was not very tactful and seemed to produce great embarrassment for Oppenheimer whenever she appeared, quite possibly because she had been drinking, which would explain something of what went on. There is an opera that was written about Los Alamos which purported to have Kitty in it, but it was the silliest representation, or non-representation, of her and her relationship with Oppenheimer that Glauber could have imagined.

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The opera Glauber is alluding to is Doctor Atomic. With music by John Adams and a libretto by Peter Sellars, it premiered at the San Francisco Opera on 1 October 2005. The plot is an imagining of what the people working on the Manhattan Project might have felt and experienced around the Trinity test. The character of Kitty, performed by a soprano or mezzo-soprano, suffers great anguish as a result of her husband’s project.

The Bomb The Gadget Los Alamos had a public address system with loudspeakers in every building of the Technical Area, so people could be found immediately when they had a telephone call. Such a system was necessary because they were mainly technical people who were moving from one place to another and the only way to find them was via the PA. They had to be very careful about the words that were used on the telephone. Most of the people in the lab were not cleared to discuss certain matters, including virtually all of the manual workers, who did anything and could easily pick up a word or just a name. If, for example, they overheard the name of Fermi, says Glauber, it would have been a dead giveaway if it were dropped in the wrong place. So, the scientists were very careful to avoid words like ‘bomb’. That was a word that was never heard in the place. But, he asks, if it wasn’t a bomb, then what was it that they were working on? They were working on a ‘gadget’. That was the synonym for the nuclear bomb. It was just meant to convey nothing to the people who were not cleared. The term ‘atomic explosion’ didn’t appear until after the war, he adds. It was ‘nuclear bomb’ or the ‘gadget’, and that was it. Glauber claims the evasive name ‘gadget’ was invented by ‘Oppie’. Indeed, the archives confirm this by reporting that General Groves once butted into a talk that Serber was giving. On hearing the word ‘bomb’ he interrupted the seminar to warn that this term was inadmissible. Oppenheimer quickly reacted and suggested continuing the seminar using the word ‘gadget’.

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Windshield Wipers for Submarines Every once in a while, explains Glauber, there were experiments with the use of explosives to detonate the bomb. Whenever that happened, the area around Los Alamos would shake. There were probably no more than a few pounds of TNT being set off at any time. But nobody ever knew how the shock waves that emerged from that would shake the ground. The project leaders thought they had put Los Alamos far enough away from any city that it would not be evident what was happening. But for some geological reason that Glauber cannot explain, when these experiments were performed on the mesas near the lab, there would be a good deal of shaking in Santa Fe which was thirty-five miles away. It’s not that all of New Mexico shook. The place would just shudder a little bit, which Glauber describes as “a bit indiscreet.” It was to everybody’s surprise that no other place apart from Santa Fe seemed to experience these shocks. Understandably, the people in Santa Fe became very curious about what was happening at Los Alamos. They were aware of the lab’s existence because trucks carrying all sorts of material would pass through the city on their way to the project and this surely got people talking to one another about it. But it wasn’t just the local people who were speculating, and here Glauber has a rather curious story to tell. Glauber’s first dormitory at Los Alamos was near the military barracks, where there was a fellow from the Middle West who had a very large clipping from a newspaper that had been sent to him probably by his relations back wherever he came from. The article had a very splashy artwork envisioning a man trying to get past a security gate, which was closely guarded. The piece was evidently written by some reporter64 who was passing through Santa Fe and heard stories of a project out there on the mesa, at some distance from the city. Glauber points out that any night in Santa Fe you could see the lights of Los Alamos on that mesa off in the distance, so it wouldn’t have taken a great detective to work out that something was going on up there. He continues. The reporter clearly thought he had the makings of an interesting story, so he did a little investigative reporting. He learned about the shaking of Santa Fe, which had no prior record of earthquakes. He began inquiring as to who was up there, who worked in that strange place? He talked to the people who ran the clothes washing laundries in Santa Fe, and collected stories from people who had driven trucks up to the front gate and not been allowed any further.

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The journalist even learned many of the names of the scientists, but despite all his best efforts, he could not put it all together. Instead, he presented various absurd images of what they might be working on at Los Alamos and made it into a two-page spread in a newspaper. Glauber doesn’t remember the town, maybe it was in Ohio, perhaps Toledo or Akron (a center for the rubber industry). But he does remember that it was potentially very embarrassing, because there were quite a few breaches of security. The archives reveal that the journalist in question was John W. Raper, who worked for the Cleveland Press. The article was titled Forbidden City. Uncle Sam’s Mystery Town Directed by “2nd Einstein.” It was published on 13 March 1944, just over a year before the bombs were dropped. It gave the name and the fairly accurate location of the lab, and also said that it was a military-scientific compound, offering approximate data on its size and identifying Robert Oppenheimer as its director. It also reported the rumors and speculations among the population of Santa Fe regarding the explosions. The article ended by asking, “What are they working on up there?” Some locals claimed that explosives were being developed, others believed that they were working on the production of a single device and someone even came up with the suggestion that “I think it is windshield wipers for submarines!”.

Little Boy and Fat Man Glauber found it funny that there was an element of deception involved in the terminology that they used for the bombs they were creating. There was a famous detective novel by Dashiell Hammett65 called The Thin Man, which had been made into William Powell movies in the prior years. Hammett was also producing further novels with a ‘Fat Man’ as hero. Hammett is recognized as one of the greatest mystery writers of all time. We turn again to the archives, to find that The Thin Man was first published in the December 1933 issue of Redbook magazine and that it was Hammett’s last published novel. The book was the basis for a series of six films, beginning in 1934, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. In the late 1950s, NBC produced a TV series based on the novel, starring Peter Lawford and Phyllis Kirk. Back at Los Alamos, Glauber relates that they were aware that when the spherical implosion bomb was created, it would not be very thin. It was going to be a fat-looking bomb. So the small, uranium bomb was called the ‘Thin Man’, and the other larger, plutonium one was ‘Fat Man’. But that terminology got shifted a little. The term Thin Man was heard very little after 1946, because somebody had started calling the smaller one the ‘Little Boy’.

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Glauber does not know why that happened, but it was probably because it was not a very large bomb and could easily be carried by the B29 planes that existed at the time. B29s were four-engine propeller bombers used by the US in the latter part of World War II and that were still active in the Korean War. Glauber points out that the implosion bomb was the biggest thing that could be carried by that sort of plane, and it may even have required some modification to accommodate it. So, repeats Glauber, there were originally the Thin Man and the Fat Man but they turned into the Little Boy and the Fat Man during the course of the project. It is important to note that the technology of the two bombs was different. The larger bomb, Fat Man, was spherical implosion and used plutonium 239. This was the one tested at Trinity and used on Nagasaki, which we will describe in detail later. The smaller bomb, Little Boy, used uranium 235 and had a simpler detonation mechanism. The scientists in the lab were sure it would work, so they didn’t test it before it was dropped on Hiroshima. The design of the smaller bomb was finished first, but the possibility that they would need more bombs together with the difficulty of obtaining enriched uranium meant they opted to design a plutonium one too.

Neutrons at Different Time Scales Nuclear reactors had been operating in the US from late 1942, beginning in Chicago, and immediately after there was a succession of them around the country. Glauber reckons they were very tame objects as long as one had good control over the last couple of percent of the neutrons that came out after the fission process. The timing involved in those nuclear reactors was very easy and comfortable and presented no challenges at all. Glauber explains how the bomb worked. A lot of potentially fissionable material had to be put together and they had to be sure that no neutrons would start it up until it was supercritical, i.e. the explosion. The best way to go from undercritical to supercritical was to shoot a subcritical projectile into another subcritical mass. That was what they called the ‘gun assembly’, which could take place within milliseconds. It looked reasonably doable and safe to the scientists, although there was also a chance that an explosive reaction would not happen at all. When plutonium was discovered, it could be produced abundantly. There was a critical test shortly after Glauber arrived at Los Alamos, down in one of the canyons, and carried out by Emilio Segrè66 and his group. It showed

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that in the plutonium sample there was spontaneous generation of neutrons. They found this out with just a handful of atoms. From this test, they realized that the assembly from subcritical to supercritical had to take place within microseconds. That was a different story entirely and led to the idea of using high explosives, which are the only things that move fast enough. They started with a hollow sphere surrounded with explosives, somehow detonating the latter to contract that hollow sphere down to a dense sphere and then release neutrons to start the chain reaction. However, it was some years before anything remotely like that could be done. That was the ‘major story’ at Los Alamos, says Glauber. He then goes on to explain the details of how they did it.

The Hardest Part The original plan was the so-called gun assembly. That was a relatively straightforward business, says Glauber, provided there were no neutrons around to initiate the reaction. The gun assembly involved putting a cylindrical log of 235 uranium into a hole in a sphere of uranium 235 in the course of a millisecond or two. Glauber can’t remember the exact numbers. In fact, he confesses he never learned them in the first place. But, he insists, a millisecond is a pretty short length of time, a thousandth of a second. If there were neutrons present to start a chain reaction when this cylinder was only half way into the sphere, it would be a big problem. If an explosion was initiated too early, that would be called pre-detonation. You would get a nuclear blast out of it but not the ‘full show’. What you would get is a lot of radioactivity in a terrible mess. There were two key issues here, explains Glauber. First, there should be no appreciable amount of spontaneous fission taking place in the bomb, for if neutrons were produced spontaneously, and then multiplied, it was super critical. It was also very common not to get pre-detonation within that millisecond or two. It was delayed. The solution would be to arrange for something like a mechanism or device to release all the neutrons necessary to begin the process once the cylinder had been added into this cylindrical cavity. So it was that at Los Alamos they started thinking about the most appropriate way in which they should use uranium 235. The second issue was that uranium 235 could only be secured by isotope separation, one atom at a time. That was an extremely slow process. There was also the concern about not wanting to waste uranium, as it was so costly

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to obtain. That was the reason they devised and ordered what they called the ‘Jumbo’.

The Jumbo The scientists could only produce enough uranium 235 for one bomb every few months. It was essential to prevent the uranium 235 from going into vapor when they made tests and they failed. So, explains Glauber, they designed a giant steel tank with very thick walls, and hollow inside for doing tests. Making the Jumbo was no easy task. It was said to be the largest piece of steel ever fabricated in Pittsburgh, which put General Groves in a rather awkward situation. He couldn’t tell the manufacturers what they needed it for, but he did need to correctly and accurately transmit all of the scientists’ instructions. Once it was made, they also had great difficulty transporting it across the country, because there were too many places where the bridges were too low. They had to use other routes to get it all the way out to southern New Mexico. That great hollow piece of steel took its name from show business. Jumbo was a name of the famous elephant that appeared at P. T. Barnum’s nineteenth century circus. Glauber thought it sounded like an African name, and Jumbo was indeed an African elephant born in Sudan in 1860. Still a calf, he was captured and transported to Europe. After a season in Paris, where he was used for show, the animal was taken to London Zoo, which is where he got his name. By now he measured four meters. Phineas T. Barnum purchased him in 1882 and took him to the United States, where the elephant became his prize exhibit. Sadly, Jumbo was run over by a train in 1885, but his name has since come to be used as a general term for enormous things. Once built, the Jumbo at Los Alamos waited in the lab for its first test, although it was not especially necessary for Little Boy’s gun assembly, because it did not look as though there would be much danger of pre-detonation.

Pre-detonation Glauber recalls that shortly after he arrived at the lab, there was a bit of bad news from an experiment performed in a very isolated location down in Los Alamos canyon. As mentioned earlier, Enrico Fermi’s former collaborator, Emilio Segrè, was assigned the task of determining whether the other

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isotope that was being planned for use, namely plutonium, had similar properties to uranium. They needed to find an alternative so as to not depend exclusively on uranium. But all efforts had been in vain. And this gets Glauber thinking about issues from earlier times, and he explains the facts that help us to understand this part of the story. His memory flies back to the beginning of the project, and we’ll travel back with him. In the early years, the group in Berkeley directed by the famous chemist Glenn T. Seaborg67 had discovered that there were transuranic elements. These atoms had been implicitly identified by Fermi in the 1930s, but they didn’t quite realize the full extent of what they had done. The history books recognize that neptunium was discovered by McMillan and Abelson in 1940. Glauber goes on to explain that Fermi and his people made some claims about transuranic elements, but those were not accepted because the evidence was not convincing enough. But Seaborg’s group went ahead and found evidence that the absorption of one neutron by uranium 238 would lead to the element neptunium. In his explanation, Glauber skips one important point. Before becoming neptunium, uranium 238 is transformed into uranium 239. The process is summarized as follows: uranium 238, after receiving a neutron, becomes uranium 239 and this spontaneously decays to become neptunium. In turn, neptunium decays to become plutonium. Glauber goes on to explain that Seaborg also presented evidence that following beta decay, neptunium would lead to the element plutonium. He adds that these names were no accident, for Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were the names of the outermost planets in the solar system. It was discovered quickly, even before a sample of just a few atoms existed, that plutonium 239 undergoes fission when it absorbs neutrons, in much the same way that uranium 235 does. That reaction is possible because the odd/ even character of the neutron and proton populations is the same. It was even anticipated that that would be so. Plutonium 239 was an isotope of immediate interest. The question was: does that isotope produce fission spontaneously without the need for neutrons? If so, the scientists would need to find an assembly procedure that makes the bomb critical and then super critical, which is much swifter, and fast enough so as not to get any spontaneous fission during that time. Doing that meant going from a time scale of milliseconds to one of the order of microseconds, millionths of a second, in putting the bomb together, assembling it. The speed of the detonation process had to be multiplied by a thousand. That was the challenge. And it also meant that nothing as slow as

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a cannon, or gun, could be used. They had to get greater velocities and the only way of doing that was to use high explosives. When Glauber first arrived at the lab, there were many experiments being done with high explosive configurations to assemble these pieces. The problem was that they needed plutonium, and they didn’t have any, and no significant amount of plutonium would arrive for another year or more. In the meantime, they were investigating the mechanics of assembly, working out how they could accelerate these pieces, and what configuration could work.

The Simplest Solution, the Biggest Problem According to Glauber, the simplest model would have been a hollow sphere of high explosives and to put a spherical shell of metal within it. Then, if they could manage to detonate it symmetrically all around the sphere and have a merging shock wave, it would hit the spherical shell, and this would contract down to a much smaller sphere. That would be an ideal way of making a sub-critical mass supercritical and, in fact, highly supercritical because they could even compress the material. High explosives are powerful enough to even compress metal appreciably beyond its ordinary density. That would make a still more vigorous explosion when the neutrons were finally released. The researchers could easily make a kind of mechanical arrangement in which a neutron emitting material was exposed somehow or other to the radiation. They could trigger, and knew how to trigger, the release of enough neutrons to get the chain reaction started. But the great problem, says Glauber, was putting it all together swiftly enough, in microseconds. The scientists began these experiments to produce such a spherical implosion, but there was essentially zero success. First of all, the detonation waves did not converge in a simple spherical way. They went in various directions. It required fantastic coordination between all of these things for it to happen symmetrically and this virtually never happened in the first year. So these implosions were one messier than another, and they had no likelihood of being useful in all of that time. They produced great jets which went in wrong and random directions. Quite simply, Glauber sighs, for a year of those experiments there was just no good news at all.

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Fruitless Efforts There were many people involved in the experiments. The building of those bombs was a big project, involving the highest level of experimentation ever achieved in the world. The first suggestion for an implosion mechanism was apparently proposed by Seth Neddermeyer.68 But solicitation of many ideas was still essential. Indeed, many of the ideas for experiments that were pursued came from people in neighboring fields or had altogether other thoughts about the matter. Many absurd and unpractical schemes were religiously pursued. Glauber recalls such things as mounting a betatron to produce a beam of electrons and a shower of gamma rays. The idea was that a very brief pulse of gamma rays might reveal what was going on in an implosion procedure. So, they studied ways to mount this betatron in a concrete fortress, as if it were, and to project the gamma rays into an implosion experiment. But, how does one detect gamma rays? Glauber answers his own question. You had to build another concrete work house and take the gamma rays with a cloud chamber. The idea never told them a thing. The terrible experiences with implosion continued for two years. They started with sixteen detonation points spread around the outer sphere. The same thing happened every time. Where the detonation waves intersected, there were jets. And as Glauber said, the jets made a terrible mess out of everything.

Lens Solution Glauber then explains that an interesting proposal did eventually arrive. Part of the solution was to develop explosive lenses and that was a contribution for which von Neumann played an important role. Von Neumann was a general consultant on the theory of shock-waves and what happens when shock waves intersect. But he didn’t do any of the computations. There were laboratories in Maryland, Glauber remembers, which dealt with explosions and shock waves. Von Neumann actually spent more of his time there than at Los Alamos, which he only visited occasionally. In fact, he was on one of those trips when he ended up on the same train as Glauber when the latter was travelling there for the very first time. Von Neumann had been in projects involving what were called ‘shaped charges’. Glauber explains that the outer part of a bomb can be built to achieve two different detonation speeds. On exploding, a sort of optic created converging detonation waves. Thanks to this mechanism, they could get a

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certain approximation to a spherically converging detonation wave. That was an important part of the solution. The members of the team also had to learn how to synchronize these detonations at many points around the outside of the sphere. And they spent about a year and a half trying to do just that. Even so, they still had jets that eventually went off in random directions. It was a very disappointing and difficult thing to do, with one pile of bad news after another. The final solution was found only very shortly prior to the Trinity test, which was in fact done about as soon as it made any sense to make such a test with the implosion mechanism.

Uranium Versus Plutonium The assembly bomb, the Hiroshima bomb, was uranium. The plutonium, Nagasaki bomb, was plutonium. They were, Glauber insists, two different bombs. The Hiroshima bomb was considered to be a foregone conclusion. It was thought likely enough that it would work. Glauber has to say that although they had no experience with nuclear explosions, the scientists were sure that they could cause one, and parts were already being shipped off to Tinian Island. The timescale was such that they were not going to use it for a few weeks, so they could send it on a battleship. The Hiroshima bomb was a slender, long object. It worked by shooting into a hole inside a uranium 235 sphere. There was no compression of material involved and it was not necessary to do it so rapidly. Glauber stresses that all these things, in themselves, were subcritical and didn’t cause a chain reaction, but that together they became supercritical and would then produce one, leading to an explosion. The researchers learned how to do this fast enough to ensure that the chain reaction didn’t start spontaneously while the mechanism was being set. Glauber continues. The later bomb, the Nagasaki bomb, was indeed the implosion bomb and very much the same bomb that was tested in the Trinity test, which was on July 15 or 16, depending on whether the day before or after midnight is used. The exact time of the Trinity explosion was 16 July 1945, at 05:29:21 local time. This was the problematic bomb, and the hardest to build. As Glauber was explaining earlier, the implosion didn’t take place symmetrically for two years. It was a disaster. The detonation waves didn’t converge and produced jets that would shoot off still more rapidly in different directions.

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So, another part of the solution was finally not to use a spherical shell, but to use a solid sphere and make these detonation waves converge on that in a way that just compressed the solid sphere enough, so that the increase in density would make it supercritical. Eventually they developed explosive lenses that did produce converging detonation waves. And that’s what they did. It was Robert Christy, another of Oppenheimer’s students, who suggested using a solid sphere, which Glauber finds very funny because it couldn’t have been a more Christian name, alluding to the firmament, the solid dome of the sky in Biblical cosmology that God created on the second day. Glauber describes Christy as a very soft-spoken fellow, who argued that they would not get a supercritical reaction the way they were trying, and that the best they could do was to decrease the dimensions by 30% or so. If they did that, Christy insisted, then the density would double. He suggested they used the fact that there exists a lower density phase of plutonium. Although there was no more matter there, the size of the sphere would in effect increase. As it was less dense, the free path was greater. The mean free path is the distance between two subsequent collisions of molecules, and is obtained by multiplying the average speed of the molecules by the time between collisions. If the mean free path was half as great it would be as if that sphere suddenly had twice the critical mass or more. That was actually the weapon that was produced from plutonium. But they did know that if the Trinity bomb didn’t work, it would at least produce an absolutely minimum nuclear implosion of an equivalent of 300 TNT. It was purely a matter of chance.

Spies Security Glauber claims that the original purpose of the name of the Manhattan Project was intended to be misleading. Security was a big issue in the lab, and the scientists felt happy with the military presence because it protected them. Probably because of that, the place felt safe and there was never any theft of any sort. What’s more, the military were very economical, practical labor, had no families and only slept in barracks. Chroniclers agree that the project was conceived at an office in Manhattan, New York City. When the few people involved in it wanted to refer to an issue associated to what was happening there, and because there were other offices

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of the incipient project in different cities of the United States, they would use the name of the place where said issue occurred. That’s how they differentiated between them. Although various names were put forward for the project, General Groves was particularly determined that the eventual choice should not include any kind of identification. So, they decided to continue using the name of the district where it all began. It was misleading and could be attributed to as many different things as there were inhabitants of New York. To be precise, the official name of the project was the Manhattan Engineer District, deliberately using the word ‘engineering’ instead of anything to do with physics. Attempts to keep the Manhattan Project away from any suspicion of nuclear physics research went so far as to renaming a number of renowned scientists. A very incomplete list of pseudonyms includes James Oberhelm (Robert J. Oppenheimer), Ed Tilden (Edward Teller), Nicholas Baker (Niels Bohr), Eugene Farmer (Enrico Fermi) and John Woolley (John Wheeler). Note that all the codenames preserved the initials of the original names. There was one occasion when Laura Fermi, Enrico’s wife, almost missed a train at Lamy station because she didn’t answer a call on the loudspeakers for a Mrs. Farmer. She had no idea at the time that her husband had a codename! While Glauber was at Los Alamos, he witnessed some memorable visits first-hand. Vannevar Bush (who was one of the three people at the meeting that launched the Manhattan Project, together with President Roosevelt and Vice-President Henry A. Wallace) showed up once or twice. Ever since its beginning and reporting directly to President Roosevelt, Bush had been the head of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), a unit created in 1941 to drive scientific research related to the military and arms industry. Another prominent, high-ranking gentleman who visited Los Alamos was James Conant,69 the president of Harvard, who regularly sat on the scientific committees at the lab. And there was another fellow from Caltech named Tolman.70 However, there were not many elected officials who appeared at the site. That was quite normal, felt Glauber, because senators only show up when they know what’s going on and if the publicity is going to do them some good. That, he says, “is what you expect from those guys.” Glauber never heard of any major security breaches, just a few minor ones of little importance. If anybody really wanted to breach security, he says, all they’d need to do was go somewhere outside the lab and post a letter in a regular mailbox. If any security person saw them doing it, they might very well ask some questions, but it was clearly relatively easy to bypass the rules

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on correspondence. However, it would seem that very few people were in any way motivated to do so. All of the mail that was sent out from the lab was read and approved by censors, and Glauber found many letters in his pigeon hole that had obviously been opened and read before they came to his hands. And regarding the letters he sent himself, if they didn’t like what any of them said, they would be returned to the author. This happened to Glauber on several occasions. Once it was simply because he mentioned the word ‘fence’. All he had said was that they went ‘outside the fence’ on the weekend to go hiking, but he had to rewrite it, leaving the word ‘fence’ out from that sentence. That, he says, was the kind of security breach that was taking place all the time with the censored mail.

Espionage There were allegations of espionage linked to the Manhattan Project, and even evidence of it. Glauber personally knew three of the protagonists of those cases: Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall and Joseph Rotblat. He talks about them. Espionage was one of General Groves’ greatest concerns. The history books tell us that, despite his precautions, he was unable to prevent some details of the project from being leaked by some of the researchers, particularly to the Soviet Union. Aside from Fuchs, Hall and Rotblat, there were further cases of espionage concerning husband and wife Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (executed for it in 1951), the latter’s brother David Greenglass , George Koval and Morton Sobell. The fact that the Soviet Union was able to develop its own bomb so relatively soon after the war is partly attributed to the information supplied by these spies.

Klaus Fuchs Fuchs71 had come from Germany to Britain in 1938 or 1939. But he was no sooner in Britain that the British decided to get rid of him. As Glauber comments, they didn’t like people who spoke with a German accent. He goes on to say that when the war began, Fuchs was sent to Canada. But Rudolph Peierls, who knew of his considerable ability, put in a request to bring him back from Canada and make him part of the atomic project in Birmingham, where he was working at that time.

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According to Glauber, the British project did not have many real accomplishments other than theoretical, but they were exchanging information with the Americans. The famous Paul Dirac was an important part of that bridge. However, these people were eventually all brought to Los Alamos, appearing one after another in the beginning of 1944. He describes Fuchs as a very quiet, soft-spoken guy, a bachelor and hard to talk to. He did very good work on hydrodynamical problems but, of course, Glauber had no idea what he was involved in. Fuchs apparently borrowed a car one day, Glauber thinks it was from Feynman, and drove off to Albuquerque and evidently communicated with a chap named Gold72 , who was an American and probably didn’t understand anything. Glauber laughs that anybody at Los Alamos who wanted to disclose what was going on must have had terrible problems because nobody who was willing to be a communicator would be able to understand any of the information from the laboratory! Fuchs furnished Gold with details about people and affairs, and in return would later be given a position of some degree in East Germany. Glauber can’t say whether he ever exercised any power, but he was given great respect in the country for years and died there. He doesn’t think there was any spy at Los Alamos who was at all comparable with Fuchs, a man of considerable specialized scientific knowledge. The history books tell us that Fuchs worked under Hans Bethe and that after the war was over, he returned to Britain. It was there that he was investigated for espionage, convicted and imprisoned for nine years. Once released, he moved to East Germany where he was later appointed deputy director of the Central Institute for Nuclear Research, Rossendorf. He remained in that position until his retirement in 1979. For his part, Gold is said to have been a laboratory chemist found guilty of serving as courier of Fuchs’ information on the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. On arrest, his statements were used to identify a network of Soviet spies linked to the project, such as the aforesaid Greenglass and the Rosenbergs. Henry Gold was sentenced to thirty years in prison, of which he served fifteen. There were other spies. And other accusations too.

Theodore Hall The four youngsters who had all arrived from Harvard at roughly the same time (Glauber, Kenneth Case, Frederick de Hoffmann and Theodore Hall)

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often ate meals together. Glauber says that Hall became an experimenter, while Case and he became theorists, and de Hoffmann wasn’t happy. De Hoffmann73 was no spy, but he was part of the same group of young researchers as the one who was a spy, Hall. It amuses Glauber to think back on it all. He explains how de Hoffman was first an experimenter, and had some responsibility for constructing what were called the bombing tables, which worked out when you should release the bomb according to the velocity of the plane, the air currents and so on. He was occupied with that sort of thing for some time, but he wasn’t happy with that position and eventually he took another that Glauber can’t describe as being much more than a busybody. He loved the functionary position and particularly being able to travel from one site to another, exercising various different roles communicating between different projects. He attached himself to various people and carried out important functions, the last of which was when, in his usual style, he stepped forward to play some role in helping with declassification of documents that didn’t have to be kept secret after the war was over. As if to maintain the suspense, Glauber then speaks of the other Harvardian who arrived with him at Los Alamos, Kenneth Case, who he already described in detail earlier, reiterating here that he was somewhat older, was a fine scientist and that they shared the same office. He finally gets around to talking about the spy. He begins by recalling that Theodore Hall74 was initially assigned to the group of Bruno Rossi75 , an Italian experimenter who had originally been near Fermi. Rossi had spent some time already in America and was a very good, very careful experimenter. While Hall was working with him, he had a responsibility for helping to measure the fission cross-section for high energy neutrons in uranium 235. Experiments of that sort were mostly a matter of being very careful. At a certain point after some months at Los Alamos, Hall was drafted into the army and called to the front. And here Glauber pauses to explain the sidestory of what happened to the young men who were of the age to be sent to war. In principle, General Groves had agreed that it should be possible to keep young men out of the army by giving them deferment. But after a time, when the US decided to move the draft age down, that became somewhat more difficult to do. There was the feeling at Los Alamos that they couldn’t defend essentials for somebody who was just 18 years old. General Groves

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apparently gave in and just said “we can keep these people here in the army.” That they could do, and that they did with Hall. Glauber didn’t see very much of Hall after. He was living at the other end of their world, in the military barracks, and had other assignments which Glauber didn’t follow. According to the project archives, Hall was the youngest scientist ever sent to Los Alamos. Because of his considerable intelligence, he’d managed to get a degree in physics at the age of just eighteen. During a vacation in New York, young Hall visited the headquarters of the Communist Party to establish contacts with people to whom he could pass information on the Manhattan Project. Later, he relayed details to Soviet intelligence about the scientists involved, basic aspects of the implosion bomb (the Nagasaki one) and knowledge on the treatment of plutonium. After the war, Hall worked at the University of Chicago and continued to disclose information to the Soviets about the subsequent hydrogen bomb. Later still, he moved to England and worked at the University of Cambridge. In 1951, Hall was investigated by the FBI. However, he was never formally charged with espionage. In the late 1990s, he openly admitted in an interview that he had firmly believed in the danger of atomic weapons, which was why he felt the information about them needed to be shared by different countries. All that Glauber can say on the matter is that he knew that people from US intelligence managed to decrypt and translate some papers that had been used by the Russian side, in which they gave pseudo names for characters that were important to them. From that, they suspected that one such character represented Hall and another one represented Fuchs. When they announced the story later, the authorities were left with a dilemma. Should they reveal in some way that they had decrypted and translated these papers? In the end, they decided not to make any moves that would reveal that they had acquired that material. They preferred to act as if they didn’t know. Ultimately, Glauber doesn’t know how it all happened. It was merely something that he read at some point. So, he doesn’t know what the Russians knew.

One Who Got Away: Joseph Rotblat After the war, Joseph Rotblat76 was investigated and charged with espionage because he had left the project. He had arrived at Los Alamos as part of the British mission in February 1944. At the end of that same year, when it seemed that Germany wasn’t developing a nuclear weapon, he decided to

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return to Great Britain. This raised suspicions that he might be spying for the Soviets. Glauber explains in detail what prompted Rotblat to leave the lab and end his involvement in the project. He sets his story at the time when the war in Europe ended, which the history books date to the moment when Soviet and Polish troops took Berlin and the Germans surrendered, on 8 May 1945. The conflict in Asia raged on. When it was all over, Glauber says that many of the scientists at Los Alamos started asking whether there was any purpose in continuing to develop weapons. Many who had been in favor of such research felt that, if the war with Japan had gone on, and as Glauber puts it, the Americans would have just been hopping from island to island. It was quite a bloody war and the Japanese surrendered to nobody. The Americans had virtually no Japanese prisoners because they all insisted on dying on those islands. But as far as the atomic project was concerned, there was never any mention or thought that Japan might be interested in one of their own. Even though the people in the lab knew that there were one or two cyclotrons in Japan, no one heard any hint or suggestion that the Japanese were able to do that sort of thing. The thoughts at Los Alamos were entirely of Germany. After all, the whole thing had started with the Germans, who had known everything that the Manhattan Project researchers only learned later. Indeed, the Americans read Zeitschrift für Physik, the most important physics journal of the time. It often only arrived months later, but it was in their libraries. There were things related to fission in the issues from the late 1930s and early 1940s, but there was no hint that the Germans were working on any kind of project. The subject had disappeared as far as the Germans were concerned. Glauber accepts that it may have been that their military people knew things that they weren’t telling them. But there was never even a message saying they didn’t have to worry about the Germans; that they knew they weren’t doing anything. Nothing of that sort ever happened. There was certainly the fear that the second the Germans had such a weapon, they would use it. They were eventually ruthless about that, says Glauber. But the scientists knew nothing. So, the Americans went on working on their bomb, but there was never any mention of the Japanese, never any thought that the Japanese might develop it first. And then, when the war in Europe ended, only one person left the project: Joseph Rotblat. And that raised plenty of suspicions among the military.

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Glauber remembers that Rotblat was a very noisy fellow, and indiscreetly critical of the project. No sooner at Los Alamos, than he was outspoken and saying all kinds of random things about how undesirable nuclear weapons would be. According to the literature on the project, Rotblat claimed he left on two grounds. The first was that in March 1944, during a dinner at the home of his mentor J. Chadwick, General Groves had commented that the true objective of the atomic bomb was to subdue the Soviet Union. Rotblat viewed that as an unjustifiable betrayal of an ally. The second reason was that, from his early discussions with Niels Bohr, he had concluded that knowledge of nuclear reactions would enable the Germans to produce such weapons, and consequently it made sense to proceed with the project. However, it became increasingly apparent that the Germans had abandoned their nuclear program. Rotblat, who had questioned the ethics of the project, found no reason to continue working on it and decided to leave Los Alamos. Glauber continues. At the end of the war, Rotblat started an anti-nuclear campaign that the Norwegians eventually recognized with the Nobel Peace Prize. He had been part of a movement associated with the name of a town in Nova Scotia, where many meetings were held between Russian and American scientists. Glauber forgets the name of that town, but does remember that the meetings had remarkably little influence. And then he suddenly remembers. Pugwash! That was the place! History tells us that after the war, Rotblat became a prominent critic of nuclear weapons. He was also one of the founding members of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, in 1957, and later became their general secretary and president. These were meetings of academics to seek solutions to problems of national development and nuclear disarmament, including discussions between American and Soviet scientists. Rotblat and the organization received the Nobel Prize in 1995 “for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms.”

Atomic Explosions

Trinity Flash Glauber did witness the Trinity test, though he was not supposed to. There was no welcome for theorists at the test, which was in the south of New Mexico, about 150 miles from Los Alamos. It caused great suspense and tension in the laboratory. The preparations had gone on for months. Glauber was watching from a considerable distance. He had no car. Very few people did. Cars were another thing that people did not have at the lab, very much due to gasoline rationing and because they could not replace tires. But someone who did have a car drove Glauber and three others to a place where there was a mountaintop near Albuquerque, where they could see off in the distance perhaps seventy or eighty miles. Glauber doesn’t remember everyone who was with him that night, they weren’t very well known, but one was Paul Olum, a graduate student at Harvard who later became president of a university on the west coast.77 The place they went to was Sandia Peak, the only mountain around with a road to the top, and which turned out to be a little further from the explosion than they had thought. They were on no radio contact, so they had very little idea of what was going on down where the test was supposed to happen an hour or so past midnight. There were suggestions of a thunderstorm, but all they saw was some lightning from a distance, and at first there was some amount of discussion as to whether those flashes were coming from the test site or not. Eventually they © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. I. Latorre and M. T. Soto-Sanfiel, The Last Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29984-1_4

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agreed that they were not, and as they sat waiting on through the night, almost everybody gave up. Glauber claims that he was probably the most stubborn of the lot, sitting there staring south until 5.30 in the morning. Then the sky suddenly lit up from beneath, a kind of sunrise from the south. Glauber didn’t see the direct flash because it was obscured by intervening mountains. After a couple of seconds, what was occurring was a strange thing to behold. There were billowing clouds; what has been called the cloud chamber effect. There are layers of humidity in the atmosphere and as the blast and shock waves expand, they compress the air. Droplets are instantly condensed and bands appear within this expanding gas. That is exactly what Glauber saw, and traces of it can also be observed in many photographs that were taken in other tests, including in the Pacific. The desert sands were melted and took on a greenish color. Absolute green. Many people connected to the project picked up fragments from the ground and filled boxes to take back to Los Alamos. Glauber collected a couple of small packages of his own, one of which he sent to his high school while the other one was left at home when he went off to college. His mother threw it in the trash the day after he left! It was clear to Glauber that something very large and ominous had happened at the Trinity test. It was evidently just what they had been talking about for the last two years or so, and it certainly frightened them all. They got back to Los Alamos really wondering what the future held, and there was a period of absolute quiet throughout the lab in the one month that followed.

The Betting Pool Only a few hints were heard at Los Alamos that the efficiency of the Trinity explosion had been approximately what was calculated. Truth be known, they did not know what would come from it. There was a betting pool in Oppenheimer’s office, where anyone could put down two dollars or five dollars, Glauber doesn’t remember exactly how much. In a notebook, the scientists placed their predictions for what the outcome would be in kilotons of TNT, the unit used to measure ordinary explosives. The predictions went everywhere, from zero up to about one hundred kilotons. If Glauber remembers correctly, the man who won was not regularly at Los Alamos, and was just there for the test. His name was I. I. Rabi78 , a man with a characteristic voice. He was a very clever fellow who had gone

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through the book and looked for the largest interval with no bets, the largest interval of uncertainty. He put down his bet at about sixteen kilotons, and that happened to be where it was. Hans Bethe, the leader of the Theoretical Division, who had participated in the calculations and knew them very well, made a conservative bet of just eight kilotons on the assumption that everything worked more or less half way. Indeed, Glauber muses that each of the bets revealed aspects of the people who made them. A curious case was that of Oppenheimer, who bet on a ridiculously low total energy of just 0.3 kilotons. And he also made another personal bet of $10 with George Kistiakowsky that the bomb would not work at all!

The Fermi Estimate The first reasonable estimate of the energy released by the explosion was made by Enrico Fermi. Glauber describes him as a very ingenious guy who believed in doing simple, clever things. The moment he saw the Trinity flash, he began dropping little pieces of paper. He knew that several seconds later, when the blast came by his place, those pieces of paper would move. From that, he could guess what the efficiency of the bomb had been. And he made a pretty good guess, although Glauber can’t remember what it was. The history books, however, confirm that the blast wave took 40 s to reach the place where Fermi was standing about 10 miles away from the explosion and moved the pieces of paper a distance of 2.5 m. Fermi calculated the total yield at 10 kilotons, roughly half the actual result, which was estimated at 21 kilotons. It was a good on-the-spot approximation of the order of magnitude of the energy released in the explosion.

Radioactivity The Trinity test was known to everybody in America a month later, after the drop of the bomb in Hiroshima. That’s when the story went public and from then on, as Glauber points out, very little secrecy remained. The effects of radioactivity on people were not known very well in those times, he continues. The kinds of information people had were from the turn of the century, when the Curies were exposed in their laboratory and their experiments generated all the information about the dangers of radioactivity.

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Glauber is referring to the husband and wife team of Marie79 and Pierre Curie,80 to whom the pioneering discoveries on radioactivity are owed. Their work together is considered among the most influential of the twentieth century. Marie Curie was the first woman in France to obtain a Ph.D., the first female professor at the Sorbonne University, and the first person to receive two Nobel Prizes. She received the first in Physics in 1903, shared with her husband and Henri Becquerel. Her second Nobel Prize was in Chemistry, in 1911. She died of aplastic anemia, a consequence of the radiation to which she had been exposed throughout her life. For his part, Pierre Curie died in an accident when he slipped and fell beneath a horse and cart. A wheel drove straight over his head. It is believed that had he not passed away prematurely, he too would have died of causes associated with radioactivity, as also happened not only to his wife, but also his daughter (Irène Joliot-Curie) and his son-in-law (Jean Frédéric Joliot-Curie), who were also winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, in 1935, for discovering artificial radioactivity. Los Alamos would later begin to have its own experiences due to the exposure of individuals. Glauber mentions the death of one guy living in a dormitory rather near his, an experimenter named Harry K. Daghlian.81 He had been working one night stacking uranium cubes into a critical assembly and he went a little too far. He was disobeying the instructions by just working by himself. Glauber explains that while Daghlian was putting these cubes near one another, he suddenly saw something that became proverbial, the so-called ‘blue flash’. He saw radiation striking his eyes. This was immediate exposure to neutrons, and other people have also seen that blue flash, and it has typically been fatal. Although Daghlian immediately tried to destroy the arrangement with his hands, he had already been very seriously exposed to radiation. They took him straight to the hospital, but in a week he died. This was roughly April or May 1945, before the Trinity test. It was all kept secret, not from the people working on these things at Los Alamos, but from the rest of the people. Everything was kept secret at that time. Different descriptions of the project help to fill in this part of the story. The exact date of the event was in fact 21 August 1945, and Daghlian died 25 days afterwards. The specific details of the accident reveal that it happened when he dropped a tungsten carbide brick onto a plutonium–gallium alloy bomb core. Later, in May 1946, there was a similar problem with the critical assembly in which Glauber recalls that a fellow named Louis Slotin82 was also exposed because he was working alone. He died within a week. As with Daghlian, and

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as the history books confirm, this accident was also related to the bomb core, which would thereafter be dubbed the ‘demon core’. These two incidents were the most serious, but Glauber adds that there were other smaller exposures to radiation, when people got too near to the source. Those things were known to people in the lab but were not made public outside. There was considerable uncertainty in the lab about what the effects of radiation were. It’s a harrowing thing for Glauber to say, but that is one of the things that were going on in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions. The military were very intent on learning what they had as a weapon and what it would do to people. That was one of the ways they would have insisted on finding out.

Japan What the Scientists Knew The people at Los Alamos were no better informed than most Americans of what was going on in Japan, except what they might have learned from the lectures they received on bombing. The weekly colloquia were occasionally addressed by people like Luis Álvarez,83 who Glauber recalls was a splendid lecturer on the theory and practice of bombing. He had studied the Battle of Britain84 at great length and was regarded as an expert on bombing in this period. Several Brits also came, such as William Penney,85 who was certainly an expert on the battle and had himself suffered family losses in it. From those talks, the scientists at Los Alamos became very knowledgeable about ordinary bombing campaigns and firebombing in particular, which was even more destructive. But those were the only things they knew more about than average radio listeners did. It is worth pausing for a moment to consider Penney because he played an important role in predicting blast damage from atomic bombs. He witnessed the Trinity test and was part of the team led by Luis Álvarez that designed the technology to measure the shock waves that it produced. According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, it was Penney who recommended the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the bombings, and who advised on the required detonation height. He was there at Nagasaki, watching from the ‘Big Stink’ observation plane. After the war, he collaborated with the US on the development of the hydrogen bomb, before returning to the UK to work on its own nuclear program, which included the development of the British hydrogen

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bomb. He is considered the father of the UK’s atomic bomb, and was subsequently made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire and adopted the title of Baron Penney.

The Decision Glauber claims that he and his colleagues had no insight on the political discussion of what to do with the bomb. Those decisions were kept very secret from them, among committees at a very high level, not at Los Alamos but in Washington. The recommendation of most of the scientists, Glauber included, would have been to merely make a demonstration of some sort of the power of the new bombs. But it became clear from the kinds of words that came back from the military that there were no plans to do that at all. They had a new weapon and they wanted to use it. If the war were to end without casualties, they felt that would be the wrong end of the war and would influence what happened later. They wanted a complete and absolute victory. If the war was going to mean casualties, the military maintained that the bomb would save American casualties. The only other way of ending the war was an American invasion of Japan. Indeed, an invasion was being prepared that would have come some months later and would have required invading one island after another, with inevitable American losses. So, the US military made the decision to use the bomb. Glauber does not personally know how the vote went in these committees, but that was eventually revealed as what had happened. The scientists knew nothing in advance about the bombing, neither if they would be launched at all, nor when. The military didn’t tell them any such specifically strategic information. Glauber admits that Oppenheimer could well have been told, but thinks it is more than likely that he was not. Glauber doesn’t even think the president himself, Truman, made any such decision, at least in any more than a formal sense. Truman had not even been informed of the existence of the project before the death of Roosevelt. It was a total surprise to him. The military had authorization from the very beginning. It was their baby, and they could do as they pleased. Glauber is convinced that the military wanted to use that bomb one way or another. Once the Manhattan Project had shown them how to make the bomb, it was much more a property of the military. And they were not asking the individual people working on the project what they thought should be done with it. It would have been most surprising had they asked.

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The history books remind us that not only among scientists, but also among the military, there were many people who were against the use of weapons against civilian targets. For example, General Dwight D. Eisenhower himself, then Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, manifestly opposed the idea, as he recounts in an autobiographical book published in 1963. Historical reviews are also useful to elaborate a little on Truman’s attitude to the bombs. According to various sources, the president had fought in the First World War and believed that, if it had lasted any longer, he would surely have died. Consequently, during World War II, he was very concerned about soldier casualties. He wanted to stop the bloodshed. Once informed of the success of the Trinity test, Truman created an interim committee to advise him on matters related to the bomb. That committee was led by Henry Stimson (Secretary of War) and James Byrnes (Secretary of State) together with a group of respected statesmen and scientists close to the atomic project. After five meetings between May and June, the committee recommended that Truman should use the bomb as soon as possible and without warning. Certain scientists linked to the University of Chicago, led by Leo Szilárd, then spoke out against the suggestion. They demanded a meeting with Truman, but were dissuaded by Byrne. They drafted the famous Franck Report, named for the head of the committee that produced it, scientist James Franck.86 The report insisted that the US government should not use the atomic bomb and should instead perform a demonstration in the presence of international agents. It was presented to the interim committee on 12 June 1945, signed by scientists James Franck, Donald J. Hughes, James J. Nickson, Eugene Rabinowitch, Glenn T. Seaborg, Joyce C. Stearns and Leó Szilárd. The committee ignored the recommendations. The Chicago scientists subsequently conducted a survey. Of the 150 respondents, only 19 rejected military use of the bomb, 108 favored some sort of demonstration and only 23 supported military use as the most effective way to enforce a Japanese surrender. The history books also remind us that at the Potsdam Conference held between July 17 and August 2, 1945, Truman officially announced to Joseph Stalin that the United States possessed a weapon of unusual destructive force. On July 25 of that same year, Truman wrote in his personal diary from Potsdam that he had ordered the bomb to be dropped on purely military targets. The targets were soldiers and marines, not women or children. The official order on the use of the bomb came in a letter written by Groves and Stimson, that same day, sent to the Commander General of the US

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Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific, Carl Spaatz. The letter made no mention of military targets. Instead, it gave the order to drop the bomb as of August 3 at a location to be chosen from among four previously defined cities (Hiroshima, Kokura, Nagasaki or Niigata), depending on visibility. It also ordered for the launch to be observed by scientific and military personnel from other aircraft that had to keep several miles distant from the drop site. The letter also warned that other atomic bombs would follow, for which preparations were being made. It was signed by General Thomas T. Handy. When Truman spoke to the American population on the radio to announce the dropping of the bomb, that same August 6, he literally said that it was dropped on a military target in Hiroshima. After the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, and having received word of the effects, Truman decided to call off plans for further atomic attacks on Japan, which were probably being planned for Tokyo. A Gallup poll conducted in 1945 indicated that 85% of Americans approved of the use of atomic bombs.

Hiroshima On 6 August 1945, the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped the first atomic bomb, Little Boy, at 8.15 a.m. local time. The bomb exploded in the skies over Hiroshima 44.4 s later. At Los Alamos there was no joy. There was no rejoicing. There was no celebration at all. At least not that Glauber knew of. What did happen, he recalls, is that within a day of Truman making the announcement that the bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, everything was suddenly public. They made quite a detailed announcement and, even more than that, they revealed what Glauber considered one of the strangest aspects of the whole business of revelation. There was a science reporter for the New York Times who had the name William Laurence,87 which to Glauber sounded like a still older version of the English name Lawrence. He was a short, unhandsome man with a middle European accent, perhaps Romanian. He never knew very much about science, and had more or less fallen into his role at an odd corner of the newspaper reporting in those days. General Groves brought Laurence into the project long before the Trinity test, realizing that there was going to be a newspaper story and he wanted it written by a sympathetic science reporter. The problem was that although this guy was officially a science reporter, Glauber claims that he didn’t really know a damn thing. But they still gave him the whole story of the business.

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Glauber thinks they even had him at Tinian Island when the plane took off. There was certainly a write-up by William Laurence released on the very same day, August 6, that they dropped the bomb. We should note here that Tinian is one of the three islands of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, located in the Pacific Ocean and annexed to the United States. During World War II, Tinian was the site for a US military base, from which the planes that dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki took off. According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, Laurence was there for the takeoff of Enola Gay, from which the first nuclear bomb was dropped and, at the last minute, boarded the Great Artiste observation plane, from which he was an eyewitness to the launch of the second bomb on Nagasaki. The history books provide further details on why Laurence was chosen. We are told that on 5 May 1940, he published a front-page story in the New York Times about the successful isolation of uranium 235, as appeared in the scientific journal Physical Review. This article had gone unnoticed in the US, although it had some repercussion in the Soviet Union. Then, on 7 September 1940, Laurence published another article in the Saturday Evening Post on the fission of the atom. The US military quickly ordered for the newspaper to be immediately removed from bookstores, libraries and newsstands. Groves himself also requested that anyone who attempted to view any copies being held in libraries should be detained immediately. Laurence’s interest and potential knowledge on these topics got Groves thinking that he could bring him to Los Alamos to write up the story with the understanding that at some point there would be a release. Glauber also suspects that Groves felt he owed this man the story because he had been required to shut up for so long. And so it was that the New York Times transferred their journalist in exchange for the exclusive. The matter of the dreadful consequences of the bomb also needs to be addressed. The history books tell us that the number of victims and the extent of the damage caused by the Hiroshima bomb have been very difficult to determine accurately. It is a delicate topic with personal, material and spiritual repercussions, and has been the subject of many controversies. For example, as far as human casualties are concerned, we can only refer to estimates. According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, around 285,000 civilians and 43,000 soldiers were in Hiroshima at the time the bomb was dropped. About 80,000 people were killed or seriously wounded immediately. Between 90,000 and 160,000 more people died in the following four months. Five years later, the US estimated that there were approximately 200,000

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more deaths as a result of the bomb. For its part, the city of Hiroshima estimated that 140,000 people perished instantly, or in the course of the first five months.

Nagasaki Glauber explains that the scientists’ prayer was that the Japanese would give up immediately. But they didn’t do that and meanwhile the military insisted on trying out the implosion model. So, three days after Hiroshima, they took off again. But they had to fly all over Japan to find a place where the skies were clear enough. And so they dropped it on Nagasaki. History tells us of the exact moment. It was 9 August 1945 when a B-29 nicknamed Bockstar dropped the Fat Man at 11.02 a.m. local time. According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, there were 263,000 people in Nagasaki that day (240,000 residents, 9000 Japanese soldiers, and 400 prisoners of war). The same estimate claims that between 40,000 and 75,000 people died immediately after the atomic explosion and 60,000 were seriously wounded. For its part, the city of Nagasaki declares that 73,000 people died immediately or in the following five months after the bomb struck. Human victims suffered from the effects of blast wind, infernal heat and ionizing radiation. In Japan, the people that survived the effects of the atomic bomb are known as hibakusha. The literature tells us that the US military had originally chosen the city of Kokura for the second atomic bomb because there were large munitions and aircraft factories there. However, when they flew over it, the city was covered in clouds and smoke from the previous day’s bombings. As they were running out of fuel, the pilots were ordered to head towards the second option, Nagasaki, and attempt to drop the bomb there instead. Nagasaki was chosen because it had a major port, and replaced Kyoto in the final list of four possible target cities (Hiroshima, Kokura, Kyoto and Yokohama). These cities were proposed by a committee because they were urban areas of more than three miles in diameter, capable of being effectively damaged by the blast wave, and had not been destroyed by previous bombings. US Secretary of War Henry Stimson persuaded President Truman to remove Kyoto from the list because it was a cultural asset of Japan and of humanity. Stimson had visited Kyoto twice and had been stunned by its beauty. They needed to put an end to the war, but not to Japanese culture. Glauber remembers that when they dropped the second bomb, the military also wanted the news to be known immediately. Japan signed its surrender

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with General MacArthur just a few days later. The war was over, he thinks, by August 10. In actual fact, the Japanese surrender required a negotiation that did indeed begin on August 10. It was announced by the media on August 15, although the act of surrender was not signed until 2 September 1945 at 9.00 a.m. (Tokyo time) on board the American battleship USS Missouri.

A Telegram Glauber remembers that the scientists at Los Alamos learned about the bombings the same way everyone else did. In the newspapers. There wasn’t any television, and the first pictures they saw were either in photographs in the papers or in the newsreels, which was the only way they could get to see whatever action was going on. There was no joy whatsoever about the use of the bomb, he insists. What was unusual was the fact that they were suddenly told that they could communicate freely with people on the outside. That morning, when it all came out, Glauber was able to go to the little office that took telegrams and write out a five-word telegram to his folks. Curiously, they still hadn’t heard the story by the time they got the telegram. In those days, they were delivered by telephone, not by people going around on bicycles, as the popular image tends to be. So, Glauber’s family had no idea of what the message meant because they had not yet read the paper or even heard the story on the radio. They were even a little frightened by what he said, which was something like “That’s Me, Mom!”. The electrifying feeling among the scientists was that they were suddenly known to the world for what they had done. That said, on that particular August day, there was no news about the ultimate success of the end of the war. That waited for several days. The workers at Los Alamos had not been told ahead that the bomb was going to be used on August 6. That was the deepest of secrets, repeats Glauber. And likewise for the use of the Nagasaki bomb three days later. If anybody had asked them, they would have urged that they not use the second one. It was completely pointless. The only point it had, as far as Glauber could see, was that the military were in possession of a weapon that they wanted to show the world.

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Ethics There was no end of talking among the scientists. It was very exciting for them because they felt they had really done something to help end the war. And at long last, they were known to the world and could communicate with people. That alone was probably the single most exciting thing for Glauber and his colleagues. They could talk openly again to family and friends. Glauber then pauses for a long time and continues with a warning. People must realize, he says, that raids as destructive as that, and in some ways more so, were routine and were taking place daily. The unique thing, the most unique thing, about these particular raids over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was that they involved three airplanes, only one of which was active. In the other raids you had hundreds, up to a thousand planes blanketing Japanese cities with fire bombs. Dealing in these terms with casualties, running to tens of thousands was, Glauber is afraid to say, not unusual. That was already true in the European war much earlier, he adds. The history books give us further details. We are informed that the Allied forces systematically and regularly bombed Japanese cities between April 1943 and the end of the war in 1945. Those campaigns of aerial destruction were also a major cause for the final surrender of Japan. We can at least attempt to express such mass destruction of lives in numerical form. The numbers of air strike victims differ depending on the source, ranging from 240,000 to 900,000 people. For example, the Government of Japan estimated in 1949 that 323,495 people had died. In turn, US government sources estimated in 1947 that 333,000 people died and 473,000 were wounded (United States Strategic Bombing Survey). Of all those air campaigns, the Tokyo bombings were notably bloody. On the night of 9–10 March 1945, 279 American B-29 aircraft participated in Operation Meetinghouse, which dropped 1665 tons of bombs on Tokyo. Japanese sources quote more than 100,000 dead civilians and more than a million people left homeless. Other sources put the number of deaths between 80,000 and 100,000 in what the Japanese call the Night of the Black Snow. We return to Glauber, and insist on questioning him further as to whether he holds any sorrow deep in his heart because of all that happened. He accepts that it is a very interesting question, but one on which he can deliver very little wisdom. He returns with a question of his own. “Had we succeeded in making the bomb work a few months earlier, would it have been used in Europe? And how? I think you can debate that endlessly because it is quite a complicated question.”

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When we ask whether the scientists talked about the consequences of the atomic bomb, Glauber presses home his point that in terms of destruction, there was nothing very different from what had been done before. They did speak in terms of casualties, radiation casualties and the like. There was a great deal of talk about that, and a great deal of worry about what had gone on. In fact, he continues, there was a collection of people from Los Alamos who were flown to Tinian to make sure that everything went well, but also to be the first to enter the destroyed cities. Robert Serber was chosen by Oppenheimer to be one of the group of people that entered Hiroshima afterwards, and he wrote about it considerably when he came back. He wrote two books on his experiences creating the bomb and was also the subject of several biographies. Thanks to the history books, we can add here that the hatches of the plane carrying the Hiroshima bomb opened at a height of 31,060 feet (9467 m). The bomb exploded at 1968 feet (580 m) above the city skies. Meanwhile, the Nagasaki bomb exploded at a height of 1650 feet (503 m). The height at which an atomic bomb detonates conditions its devastating effects and the amount of radiation that reaches people nearby. At the time, the project scientists had little in-depth understanding of the effects of radiation. The decision on the detonation height was based on a report called The Height of the Burst of the Gadget, which considered two options: severe but not unrepairable damage or complete destruction. The recommendation was to use the bomb in the most destructive manner possible. The report even talks about eliminating as many people as possible to ensure that there would be no local ‘Fire Force’ able to put out the fires, which could also be devastating, and goes as far as to consider the differences between Japanese and German buildings. The people that entered the bombed cities were all equipped with badges that would record the amount of radiation they received. Glauber says that there was, of course, worry among them about radiation, but at the time they believed that the lingering effects were not so great, and that almost all the radioactivity went up in a great cloud, spreading in the stratosphere eventually. Glauber also has to say that while that was the image, it was not an accurate picture of what happened even in the Trinity test. Months after that test, they began finding areas with considerable radioactivity in Colorado, far north of New Mexico. Elements of the cloud must have precipitated, must have come down in that region. And that was also true of all of the atomic tests held in the years after that.

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The scientists were all aware that nobody else would produce explosions like those anytime soon. They even had the luxury of imagining that it might be decades. It was that much of an effort to do, says Glauber. Nevertheless, the history books do tell us that the US military conducted a study to find out how long it would take for the Russians to produce an atomic bomb. According to their estimates, it would take them six years without the use of espionage, and four with it. The Soviet Union performed its first atomic test on 21 August 1949. Just four years later.

The Secret is Out As Glauber was saying earlier, the project’s big reveal to the public was the William Laurence story in the New York Times, on the same day as Hiroshima. This piece was replicated by numerous newspapers around the world. In the weeks after that, Glauber says that the atomic authorities were very good at releasing the story, and an elaborate history of the entire project was written by the scientist Henry Smyth,88 from Princeton University. That was the famous Smyth Report, a book that told a very large proportion of the story, including 100 pages on all the committees that were created between 1939 and 1941. History tells us that the full title of that document was The Official Report on the Development of the Atomic Bomb under the Auspices of the United States Government. It was published in book form on 12 August 1945, a few days after the bombs were dropped on Japan. It had been commissioned to its author by General Groves, and contained general facts about the science and technology behind the construction of the bombs that could now be revealed without breaching national security regulations. Groves wrote the foreword to that report. In it he maintained that it made no sense to continue hiding the details of the administrative procedures and scientific knowledge that had been followed in the development of the project. And so the information was published. However, he also used the occasion to issue some very serious warnings: any personal or institutional attempt to obtain further information than that included in the text or anyone who, having been part of the project, disclosed data that compromised national security, would be subject to severe penalties under the Espionage Act. The book was widely distributed among the population, and contained a large amount of basic nuclear physics knowledge. That is why it was commissioned to a specialist scientist who had participated in the project, Henry Smyth, who stated that the purpose of the report was to explain in plain

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words the process of building the bomb along with the potentialities of atomic weapons. He also acknowledged that the average citizen could not be expected to understand such extremely complex knowledge, but that in the US there was a substantial group of engineers and scientists who could understand such things and who could explain them to their fellow citizens.

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Towards the H-Bomb A Strange Period Glauber describes the period at the end of the 1945 as a very strange one because the scientists from Chicago, and even a few from Oak Ridge, went to Washington and began explaining to the Congress what nuclear weapons really were. The Congress wanted to hear from all of these people. Oak Ridge was a place in Tennessee where plants associated with the Manhattan Project were built for the enrichment of uranium and liquid thermal diffusion, as well as the pilot reactor for producing plutonium. General Groves approved its construction in 1942, and also ordered the creation of a town that would house around 30 thousand workers. As Glauber says, the people in Chicago were not living on a military base and hence felt much more free and were under no pressure to shut up. If General Groves had had his way, they would never have known what they were working on. But several of the most important people there knew very well that they had furnished the means of constructing this weapon. And after the war, these people were suddenly very popular and influential. Glauber takes on a somewhat sly tone. He remembers that half a dozen or so young men in their late twenties and early thirties went to Washington to speak to the press. They were the only scientists to be heard in public aside from the official releases from Washington that included an extraordinary amount of information. The problem is that a lot of these people had never had any direct contact with the bomb project. They just had an awareness of © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. I. Latorre and M. T. Soto-Sanfiel, The Last Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29984-1_5

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its existence because they had created the first chain reaction. Glauber struggles to remember the names, but can say for sure that James Franck was one of them, who he describes as a German pioneer, and one of those people who had just missed the boat on quantum mechanics. He also remembers Eugene Wigner, who he points out was never at Los Alamos, but neither was he one of the first to rush to Washington. And also Arthur Compton, who he says didn’t go running to regale the congressmen with the story either. Things evolved from there and quickly developed into a week of great chaos of public debate, with the Chicago people talking about things they did not really understand, and discussing weapons of which they really knew very little. And the main topic of all that debate, says Glauber, was how should atomic energy be regulated.

Silence from Los Alamos Meanwhile, at Los Alamos it was all very different. The scientists were on a military base and were there as guests, Glauber might say, but also as employees of the military establishment, and felt much under the thumb of the military. Moreover, they also had the admonition from Oppenheimer that the best thing they could do was to keep quiet and let the governmental wheels roll. Oppenheimer trusted the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson89 and was convinced that the greatest danger was to have any power like this fall in the hands of people who knew nothing. He was sure that Stimson and the others in Washington would see to it that there was good legislation, regulating all of this and everything would remain under control. Pausing for a moment to focus on Henry L. Stimson, history tells us that he was both Secretary of State and Secretary of War during various US administrations, including those of Franklin Roosevelt and his successor Harry Truman. Stimson had major responsibilities in the Manhattan Project from its inception. For example, he was commissioned to select many of its scientific and military leaders, to secure its budget, and to approve the construction of various associated centers. Indeed, it was Stimson who chose General Groves to lead the project. According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, Stimson was always committed to the ethics of war and rejected practices such as indiscriminate bombing of cities or attacks on civilians. He is especially remembered for rejecting the proposal to bomb Kyoto to preserve its cultural heritage for future generations of Japanese, as we mentioned a few pages back. After Roosevelt’s death, he was commissioned to set up the interim committee

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that discussed nuclear affairs and recommended the use of the atomic bomb against Japan without prior warning. Despite having opposed all use of the bomb against civilians, Stimson defended the decision after its launch. Oppenheimer respected this man, whom he considered a humanist and hoped that this quality would lead him to make wise decisions. That was an attitude which lasted for several months. The scientists at Los Alamos believed Oppenheimer, and like him supposed that the democratic process would destroy the power involved and would remove the essential elements of US domination of the world after having created that weapon. However, eventually there was so much discussion of where the world should go with weapons production that they could not remain silent anymore. They produced a statement for President Truman. It was never made public directly, but it became the basis for Truman’s statement that the United States would prefer international control of atomic energy and nuclear weapons. In fact, Glauber maintains that Truman copied whole sections of the manuscript without citing the source. So, the scientists from Los Alamos, he says, were influential in that sense. Once that statement had been made, several of the scientists from Los Alamos went to Washington and began making the case directly. That produced a kind of tension with Oppenheimer. At that point, Oppenheimer left Los Alamos to go back to Caltech officially. It was there that he had obtained a professorship in 1938, and from 1944 to 1945, he was on secondment in the laboratory. But after returning in 1946, he did not stay long. In 1947, he accepted a position as director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. In the meantime, the whole question of the future of atomic energy was suddenly in the public arena. Oppenheimer had never wanted that to happen, says Glauber. And the executive powers in Washington hadn’t wanted it to happen either.

Trouble with the Law Glauber remembers that within days of the revelation there was a bill introduced in Congress called the May-Johnson Bill , favoring strict military control of everything having to do with atomic energy and specifying the strictest punishments for people who revealed anything. However, there were scientists, civilians and even members of the armed forces who were strongly opposed to military control. The history books give us more details. They tell us that this bill sought to regulate different aspects related to atomic energy and its production. It dealt

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with a variety of issues in relation to research, facilities and administrative, audit and security regimes. This report had actually begun to take shape even before the bombs were dropped. In June 1945, the interim committee had commissioned Henry Stimson’s assistant, George L. Harrison, to prepare a draft bill with which to open discussions. And that draft was based on a previous report by scientists Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant. Harrison enlisted the help of two attorneys from the US War Department, Kenneth Royall and William Marbury Jr. The resulting legislation proposed that nuclear energy be controlled by experts, with minimum political interference and assisted by commissions made up of the military and civilians. The proposal was based on the existing structure of the Manhattan Project. In October 1945, the draft bill was introduced to the House of Representatives by Congressman Andrew J. May and to the Senate by Senator Edwin C. Johnson, hence the May-Johnson Bill. The proposal immediately aroused a storm of criticism. The Chicago scientists were particularly outraged by the large amount of control it gave the military in decision-making and the excessively severe penalties for any disclosure of secret information, which they believed would hinder scientific work. Eventually, says Glauber, there was a joint committee of the House and Senate chaired by Senator Brien McMahon that did regulate things for a while. The history books tell us that the legislation he is referring to is what became known as the McMahon Bill , an alternative to the aforesaid MayJohnson Bill introduced on 20 December 1945. The regulation took up the discussion on atomic energy and attributed its control to civilians rather than the military. It was also more liberal than its forerunner with regard to nuclear information, and was hence supported by a good part of the scientific community. The McMahon Bill was widely debated but was eventually passed unanimously on 1 June 1946. Two months later, on August 1, President Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act, declaring that it would come into effect on the first day of the following year. This act effectively took responsibility for nuclear energy away from the Manhattan Project. Glauber recalls that the new legislation led to the creation of an Atomic Energy Commission a few months later. He seems to remember that the first chairman was Robert Bacher, who headed the Experimental Physics Division at Los Alamos. He adds that, over time, this became a strictly political position.

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Remembering on, Glauber comments that one of the next chairmen was the man who had run the Tennessee Valley Authority, David Lilienthal. He was a hero of the ‘New Deal’, in the Roosevelt times, and was a very constructive presence for a long time. However, the history books show that David E. Lilienthal was actually the first chairman. The other four founder commissioners were Robert Bacher, Sumner Pike, William A. Waymack, and Lewis L. Strauss. We will talk about the latter in detail later.

Relations with the USSR Relations with the Russians got progressively worse, says Glauber. They were never terribly good, he hastens to add. What went on in Berlin was already producing lots of troubles. He’s referring to the divergent attitudes among the allied powers to the management and division of Germany after the end of the war and the resulting tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. When he went back to Harvard in January of 1946, Glauber had the impression that Winston Churchill was not just describing in objective terms how much worse relations were getting. He was even fanning the flames. Relations with the Russians, which amounted to the blockade of Berlin, got quite bad. Historically, the allies felt they deserved a position in Berlin but the Russians denied it. The compromise they created, he says, was a kind of island of allied presence in one half of Berlin, but the city was completely surrounded by the Russian controlled area. There were fortifications put up along the border between East and West Germany. That situation went on for an age. It had become quite a nasty situation, he continues. The Russians did anything they could to obstruct negotiations toward international control of atomic energy, which was a kind of nebulous ideal put forward by serious Americans. As part of the creation of the Security Council in the United Nations, the Russians created an absolute impasse. It had that kind of complexion until they succeeded in producing their own bomb. By that time, of course, the world climate was entirely different.

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The H-bomb Immediately after the war, there were many people who came in to Los Alamos, says Glauber. There were many young theorists from the American universities who rushed there to be part of this attempt to create the thermonuclear weapon. They felt it was a way to develop a career. He found that his contemporaries were really competing with one another to get into Los Alamos. There was a whole generation of guys that were more or less well-known names later in the century. They were dying to get into that sort of thing. For scientists like Marvin Goldberger, Kenneth M. Watson and Keith Brueckner, Glauber could name many more, that seemed a way of gaining power and expertise. However, that wasn’t the kind of power or influence that Glauber wanted. He didn’t like the idea of secret work. And he didn’t find it very attractive anymore. Edward Teller would have liked the people who built the atomic bombs to have stayed there to work with him on the hydrogen bomb too. But he never had much success. In 1946, Teller accepted a position at Chicago but he never really integrated himself into the program there. He kept traveling back to Los Alamos and presently was trying to recruit people to work with him. And in 1947 or thereabouts, he was beating the drums to get people to go to Los Alamos. He always thought he was making great progress but as well as Glauber could tell it was still the same story four years later. Although Teller’s work never went to zero, it never had any success either. It was a nasty situation. All the noise was produced by Teller, urging the further development of thermonuclear weapons, while his bitterness with Oppenheimer was growing all the time. He felt Oppenheimer was urging people not to go to Los Alamos and work with him on the H-bomb. In fact, he was convinced that Oppenheimer was not only in disagreement with him politically, but was manipulating things so that no self-respecting people would work for him on nuclear weapons. That wasn’t at all true, Glauber emphasizes. Most of the prominent scientists of the day had already been at Los Alamos and had no desire to go back. There were a lot of them, Glauber included, who simply had no taste to work anymore on nuclear weapons. There were people who did. A whole collection of young contemporaries of Glauber’s were interested in going to Los Alamos because they had never been there and they felt there was some cachet to it. They thought they could analyze things and give orders to experimenters, try things. Just over three years after his appointment, Teller left Chicago. It was 1950.

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But he was not happy with Los Alamos either. He had the feeling that it was all going too slowly, and too many people were disagreeing with him. He didn’t really know what to do. So, Teller left Los Alamos too. That was 1952. Glauber says Teller insisted on establishing another project on the West Coast not far from Berkeley, at the Livermore laboratory. It was the second bomb project for several years after that. The new lab was in the hills, a little south of Berkeley and on the other side of the mountain range. According to the history books, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory was founded by the University of Berkeley in 1952. It is considered today that its co-founders were Edward Teller and Ernest Lawrence, who was the director of the radiation laboratory at Berkeley. From the beginning, Livermore was conceived as an attempt to foster competitiveness with Los Alamos in the effective development of nuclear weapons. The Livermore laboratory officially opened its doors on 2 September 1952. In his Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics, Teller says that this second laboratory for the creation of nuclear weapons was born out of a misunderstanding with the director of Los Alamos of that time, Norrys Bradbury. He claims there were too many obstacles to overcome at Los Alamos in order to successfully develop a hydrogen bomb, which is why he advocated for its creation before the Atomic Energy Commission in Washington. Teller was competing with Los Alamos, but Glauber insists that the actual proposals that worked still came from Los Alamos, not from Livermore, and this was a source of internal conflict. In fact, he doesn’t think it is very clear what they were doing with themselves at Livermore, although they were always involved in some way with thermonuclear reactions. Known since 1971 as the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, the lab still exists today, applying scientific and technological knowledge from different disciplines to security affairs. More specifically, it studies ways to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the development of methods and techniques to ensure domestic security in the US, and the production of defense and intelligence technologies. The laboratory also deals with energy and environmental safety issues.

Ironies The joke, says Glauber, is that the hydrogen bomb problem was in effect solved by a mathematician, the Pole Stanisław Ulam, who had in fact worked

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with Teller years earlier at Los Alamos. The further irony is that he had no training whatsoever as a physicist. Glauber takes us back to his own arrival at Los Alamos back in 1944, and reminds us how Teller had left the lab in a rage because Oppenheimer had decided that Bethe would lead the Theoretical Division and not him. When Teller came back, Oppenheimer offered him a division of his own. It would remain a rather small division because the only interest he had was in the super bomb, the hydrogen bomb. Ulam was one of the earliest members of that division. At first, Teller viewed Ulam as an interesting but ultimately worthless character. He was an abstract mathematician who had made great contributions to mathematical logic in his native Poland, but had no experience in anything practical at all, only very abstract inclinations. The scientists used to tease him for insisting on an absurd hypothesis, which was never proven, called the ‘ergodic hypothesis’, that some abstract mathematical assumption must underlie all of the statistical calculations that they were doing. The ergodic hypothesis, says Glauber, was the notion that, sooner or later, a statistical system goes through literally every configuration accessible to it provided there is just even a small element of chaos in the way in which it operates. Glauber claims it’s very likely a false hypothesis, but it was a steady joke in the lab. Teller himself complained that this Ulam was of no use to him at all. He did nothing of practical value. Glauber thinks Ulam was one of the first to leave Los Alamos after the war, in around September 1945. He went to the University of Southern California. He had an operation performed on some kind of brain tumor. Following that, he never felt he fitted into the university, so he went back to Los Alamos a year later, in late 1946 and after Glauber had left. In the meantime, Teller and his division had been continuing with their suggestions of how to detonate the H-bomb. Teller had many ideas of how to do it, but they were all inadequate or incorrect. But it went on and on. Even in 1949, says Glauber, he was still urging the immediate construction of a bomb on the entire country. And so it was that Ulam somehow ended up working with Teller again. Glauber wryly laughs that he must have developed some practical instincts because by about 1950, Ulam was the only one who was really making concrete suggestions for how to detonate a hydrogen bomb. Ultimately, Ulam was closer to solving the problems posed in creating the H-bomb than Teller. In Glauber’s eyes, Ulam appeared to be the one person who was most responsible of all for the weapon that was finally developed in 1952, when tests were conducted in the Pacific.

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Glauber himself was not part of that secret project and knows no further details of it. But he knows that Teller always denied that Ulam was ever relevant in any way to the creation of the H-bomb.

Losing Contact with Los Alamos Farewell to Arms After the bombs had dropped, Glauber wanted no further connection with “that sort of stuff.” It was as simple as that. All the same, he didn’t leave Los Alamos until December 1945. He could see no point in being in the east. He might as well stay in the west. He enjoyed the climate there much more than he did in the east, where he had always lived before. He spent that time finally completing some work. There wasn’t an awful lot to do in the lab, but he didn’t really need very much. It was a period of only about two months or so more that he stayed there and everybody was leaving during that time or had already left. He doesn’t specifically remember what he did on his last day at Los Alamos. It would probably have been a matter of packing up all his stuff, all the books he had bought. The one thing he could do in his time there was buy books in town. He bought quite a few to read, just literary works. Those things all had to be packed. All his belongings were sent in a trunk by Railway Express to post office box 1663. The men in the machine shop were willing to make boxes for them to send things back in. They fabricated crates and these were the most beautiful that Glauber had ever seen. They were made with first grade lumber, not the sort of things normally used for crates. Several of these were delivered to his dormitory room and when he filled them it was quite a weight of stuff that had to be sent back east because of all the books. He remembers boarding the train, and getting into Chicago. Tere, he got a reservation on the famous train to New York, called the 20th Century Limited. References inform us that this was a locomotive for first-class passengers and business people that completed the distance between the two cities in 20 h. Operational from 1902 to 1967, it was advertised as “The Most Famous Train in the World.” That day, there was a man conducting radio interviews of people getting on this distinguished train. He interviewed Glauber and when he was told

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that his subject was working at the Los Alamos project, he seemed to find that quite appealing. When Glauber was on the train, he went around to the bar to get a drink and started talking with somebody who turned out to be a member of one of the wealthiest and most influential families in America. He seemed to be very proud to be talking to Glauber and hearing his story from Los Alamos. That really impressed Glauber too. He had for a very brief time become a celebrity. But he was no sooner back east and he was nobody again.

Back to School Glauber got to New York and stayed with his folks for a week or so, and then he went back to Cambridge. Harvard was just starting to get moving again. There were many ways in which it was quite difficult to get back, especially to be an undergraduate student again. He had to spend one semester taking courses that he had very little regard for. It was just to fill all the requirements. The doubts lingered. The question he kept asking himself whether he really needed to get a bachelor’s degree. Hans Bethe was always telling him, “look, don’t bother, it’s a waste of time, you will not need that.” He had wanted Glauber to go with him to Cornell. In fact, enough went on at Cornell that he thinks it might have been wise to go there. However, Glauber had encountered the scientist Julian Schwinger90 when the latter was visiting Los Alamos, and was very impressed by one of the lectures he gave. It got him figuring that by going back to Harvard he could both get his degree and also be near Schwinger, who was still in the Radiation Lab at MIT, but also lectured at Harvard, which was very close by. So Glauber decided to go back to his old college. By the beginning of the following summer, Glauber hoped to be a graduate student again. But that was difficult because he was often doing equivalent work to what he was already doing before he left for Los Alamos, yet he had already done work at a much higher level than what was in most of the undergraduate courses. So, it was somewhat disillusioning to be integrated back into the state of not doing anything very interesting or exciting. Fortunately, Harvard had hired the extraordinary Schwinger as an instructor. Glauber got to know him, they had lunch together two or three times a week, and he was really something of an inspiration to talk to. He thinks Schwinger probably felt pretty good too for having a graduate student who had been so saturated with what went on during the war.

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While he was completing his degree, Glauber already made a start on his PhD. All at the same time. Schwinger was his thesis advisor. They worked together and become friends of a sort over the next four years. But Schwinger gave rather bad problems to his students; they’d be either uninteresting or impossible to solve, and so Glauber often found himself working by himself. In an autobiographical note on the occasion of the Nobel Prize, Glauber describes how he was never less than amazed by the elegance of Schwinger’s mathematical structures. He believed he could see further than any of his contemporaries and often seemed responsible for most of the progress in theoretical physics at that time. But Schwinger spent very little time on his many PhD students, and hence tapped very little from the confluence of so much talent. At his own suggestion, Glauber completed his thesis on quantum theory practically alone. He obtained his PhD in 1949, although he modestly adds that he doesn’t believe his thesis was any better than those of his fellow Ph.D students. In short, it became a good experience but Glauber confesses that after a while but it was very hard.

Different Paths Glauber certainly was upset enough by all the things that followed the creation of the bombs. He had no further taste for doing secret work for the government. He just didn’t want to. He wanted little to do with what he describes as characters who were bent on making the hydrogen bomb, which always seemed to him completely pointless then and still pointless now. He thinks the hydrogen bomb has no purpose whatsoever beyond being still worse. It’s not a weapon which is suited to anything that one really wants to destroy, and he thinks it was a foolish thing from the very beginning. It would have been better if it had never been developed. As far as he was concerned, it was a nasty sort of game to be involved in, and being better at it than someone else was not going to make him at all happy. So he decided to split. He felt he’d been there and didn’t want to do that sort of thing any more, especially when the flavor of it all changed. When it was Oppenheimer, he felt congenial among these people. It all changed four years later.

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We’ll Meet Again As for whether Glauber kept in touch with the people from Los Alamos, the answer is “yes and no.” The fact is that his former scientist colleagues were spotted all over the place, so they were impossible to avoid, even if he’d wanted to. The more prominent ones tended to converge on places like MIT, Harvard, Chicago, and Berkeley. There were many of those people and Glauber did keep some contact with them. But there were many who got lost. They went to relatively obscure places and he didn’t see them again. In Cambridge, there were several Los Alamos people that were now graduate students at MIT, and some were faculty members. There was much more cooperation between Harvard and MIT in those years. There wasn’t a parking problem back then, he jokes! He and his colleagues would meet with the MIT people at least once a week, so he saw them all the time. Glauber mentions a well-known chap called Martin Deutsch91 , who was a very effective experimental physicist at Los Alamos. He was the son of Helene Deutsch92 , a famous female psychoanalytical student of Sigmund Freud. Martin was a very verbal fellow, who would speak out a great deal at Los Alamos. Later, Philip Morrison93 arrived at Harvard and became Glauber’s colleague, so they evidently saw each other frequently. In late 1945, a couple of other people from Los Alamos were hired to Cambridge. One was Robert Wilson94 , who was there one or two years here before he moved off to Cornell. The other was Kenneth Bainbridge95 , a Harvard professor from the thirties who had put together the cyclotron there before the war and was famous for his mass spectroscopy and isotopes. Glauber knew of his having left Harvard to go to Los Alamos, and from that could make a good guess of what they were doing out there in New Mexico. As he suspected, when he too arrived at the lab, it turned out that Bainbridge was indeed working on explosives. That was the sort of thing he did all through the war. Later on, Glauber would also cross paths with Norman Ramsey96 , who wasn’t a Harvard professor until two years after the end of the war. Those were the people with whom he could reminisce about his time on the project after it was over and that he remembers now. The people with whom he still had regular contact.

Bizarre Happenings There were strange things that went on at Los Alamos. Bizarre happenings that Glauber never understood. For example, years later, there was a guy who

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appeared at one point for a week or two, dressed in uniform. He was in an intermediate, not completely cleared state, so he didn’t have a white badge and the scientists couldn’t in principle talk to him about what was going on. As Glauber puts it, he was intellectually a very engaging guy, who would have loved to have known what was going on and was sort of sounding it out. Glauber often talked to him and learned that he had begun his studies at MIT and was waiting to go back there at some point. He was very briefly a good friend and then he evaporated. He vanished. The point of all of this, says Glauber, is that his family had a certain history in relation to theoretical communism. US intelligence discovered that his father had never been a member of the Communist Party, but he had been a follower of somebody whom Stalin banished and presently murdered. The interesting thing was that, as far as Glauber could see, Joaquin Luttinger (which was the young man’s name) was about as loyal American as one could imagine. His father had had a brother who was one of the communists who bitterly opposed Stalin, and the father had some association too. But Luttinger did not. However, they investigated his past and turned up the fact that there was, two generations back, an association with Russia. And after that, he vanished from Los Alamos. Glauber felt the authorities had been playing the odds, something he found quite wrong. That sort of thing happened and that he didn’t like it at all. Luttinger was just a kid. Glauber ran into him again after the war. He found they were often attending the same things when they were both graduate students. Since he already had a start, Luttinger got his degree maybe two years before Glauber did and was then working with László Tisza. He went off to work with Wolfgang Pauli in about 1948 and stayed there for two years. Then, when Pauli went back to America, he brought Luttinger with him to Princeton. After that he went to Michigan, and then Pennsylvania. He had professorships in all these places, working his way. They were good friends.

The Transformation of Los Alamos After the war, Glauber went back to Los Alamos several times. He would go back with his son and daughter and spend a few weeks in a wonderful climate during the summer. But some time had passed since the end of the Manhattan Project, and he never went where the secret work was being done. The first time he went back on business was to a meeting on meson physics. They had built a large accelerator, an amazingly large one on the next mesa, over a mile or two away, to investigate nuclear forces. For a time, it was the best machine in the world for doing high energy physics.

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Louis Rosen97 , who had worked on the Manhattan Project and stayed at Los Alamos after the war, became a group leader and was now in charge of the machine. An ambitious guy, according to Glauber, Rosen sold to the Atomic Energy Commission the idea of creating this large accelerator because this would attract scientists to the lab. People with real research interest would want to go to Los Alamos again. Quite a few fundamental nuclear experiments were done there. In fact, Glauber himself seized the opportunity to work on theoretical things in connection with that machine in the early 1960s. He makes it clear that it involved no reentry into the security business at all. It was all outside the project fence. He had lost touch with all the people who were still involved with bombs. It was hard to keep track of what was happening with the H-bomb because they were not publicizing anything. Zero. Nothing. That went on for a long time, and it is still going on. Paradoxically, Glauber says it even creates the problem that you don’t know whether something is secret or not, because there is no concrete evidence one way or another. If there was a secret paper which was declared non-secret, and was known publicly and particularly if it was published, that would have been pretty clear. But all of this became a very dark area and nobody knew. Even now, when he’s been talking to us about things, he is unsure what things could still be secret because he has no evidence that they are not. After the Manhattan Project was over, Glauber says they destroyed the entire Technical Area, cleared it out, in order to make it into a civilian town. They created another whole collection of laboratories over on the next mesa, a few miles away and closer to the mountains. It was a well-built, structured laboratory and the secret work was carried on there. Nothing of the old Los Alamos remains, he says. Except the geology.

Oppenheimer Reviled

The Hearings American Hero In the immediate post-war years, Oppenheimer was a unique figure in America. He was, as Glauber put it, being lionized all the time. His picture was to be seen everywhere. People of all different ranks and sorts tried to be in his presence. He occupied a role not unlike Albert Einstein. He was an American hero. At first, Oppenheimer felt that everything that happened in Washington, and in particular in the Defense Department, was decided correctly. At least that was his attitude during the first couple of years after the war. His influence on scientists was very great in that period. There would be some government study put together and Oppenheimer would always know two or three of the most important people in that study, and would give his opinions, which were always extremely persuasive. From his position in Princeton, he was trying to defend these isolated intellectuals from the world. Teller, of course, had that view from the very first and was always trying to persuade people in Washington that they must put still more effort into making the thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb. They did not know how to do it in 1949, a point at which the Russians had finally produced their own bomb. That put a scare into everyone. Truman had no choice but to decide to go ahead full speed with making the hydrogen bomb work. That, says Glauber, was his decision.

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Meanwhile, Teller was working against Oppenheimer for years. The reason for this, says Glauber, is because around 1947–1949 Oppenheimer felt that not only did the US not know how to build the thermonuclear reaction, but did not even need it. To Teller, that was nonsense. He insisted that they had to build not only the hydrogen bomb but the biggest one they could. He would have built the ultimate weapon.

American Primitives The American primitives, the less sophisticated Americans, Glauber continues, began to shift toward Teller. There really was a confrontation, which he now goes on to recount. Lewis Strauss98 was appointed chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He was called an admiral, but Glauber is quick to point out that he was never in the Navy. Strauss felt that their duty was to build the super bomb immediately. Strauss is a key figure in the story that follows. The history books tell us that he was a man of business, and both a naval and government officer, although he never served on a ship. What happened is he applied to join the US Navy Reserve in 1925 and was assigned to an intelligence service commission. President Truman awarded him the honorary title of Rear Admiral. During the war, he helped manage naval munitions from the ground and afterwards became a member of the Atomic Energy Commission. He actively championed the creation of the hydrogen bomb from the beginning. Later, he was appointed Secretary of Commerce during the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration, but Congress rejected his permanent appointment. Glauber explains that Strauss began to feel that Oppenheimer was wanting to go slowly on the creation of the H-bomb. The truth is, he says, Oppenheimer was rather apathetic. He did not think anyone knew how to make it work, and he did not see any point therefore in pursuing it vigorously. These two positions became a conflict, which was worsened by Oppenheimer having an arrogant way about him. He was often dismissive of people who disagreed with him unless they had excellent arguments. And he acted in an especially insulting way towards Strauss. The fact is that Oppenheimer was in many ways an arrogant man. He was not an easy one to satisfy. He was also in his own particular way a snob, one of the ultimate snobs. He had, Glauber says, something bordering on scorn, maybe contempt is the word, for people who had not thought things through as he had. He took himself very seriously. He was always grave of manner

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unless he was explicitly joking. But Glauber would not have said that he was a sad fellow. He claims to have heard strange things about the relationship between Oppenheimer and the English scientist Patrick Blackett99 , although he has never known what sense to make of them. He heard that Oppenheimer finally decided to do away with Blackett, who had ended up being an enemy, and had even tried to poison him. Glauber finds all this hard to believe. He remembers that Blackett visited Los Alamos, and he seemed a rather colloquial, very charming guy. The Atomic Heritage Foundation recounts this event. Supposedly, the then young Oppenheimer was on a visit to Cambridge, England where Blackett was a fellow, and offered a poisoned apple to the latter, which he didn’t eat. According to this source, Oppenheimer was utterly distraught by the extremely demanding Blackett, who insisted that he work harder and on matters of experimental physics, while Oppenheimer preferred theoretical work. However, there are contrasting claims that the apple incident occurred when Blackett, a very attractive man, rejected young Oppenheimer’s advances. The matter was resolved by the university administration and Oppenheimer was put on probation and told to see a psychiatrist. Nevertheless, Glauber says that Oppenheimer had a charmed existence all through the McCarthy period. But the charm was broken by Lewis Strauss and the proceedings later. Glauber goes back to Strauss, saying that he began his attacks after Oppenheimer had shown visible contempt for his misunderstanding of many of the issues connected with atomic energy. Strauss had little understanding of the science, despite being chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and felt insulted by Oppenheimer and began slowly to try to decrease his influence. Eventually, Strauss came to realize that the only way they could seriously hurt Oppenheimer was to undermine his loyalty. Oppenheimer had made enough mistakes as a romantic intellectual. He had talked to the wrong people, and had associations that they could decide were suspect and disloyal. Oppenheimer was a ‘fellow traveler’, meaning somebody who did not declare himself as a communist but who shared beliefs regarding that ideology, somebody whose road was identical in principle with the communists but who would not declare himself as one. However, this had nothing to do with his brother Frank actually joining the Communist Party. Oppenheimer was never, as far as Glauber could see, very close to his brother at all, though his brother was at Los Alamos, but as an experimenter, not a theorist. So, Strauss went after him, Glauber says. And not just after him. They attacked everyone around him too. His brother Frank was also hurt by the

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hearings. He had to testify and confess his affiliation to the Communist Party. After that, he would be unable to find work as a researcher or teacher for a whole decade. Before the hearings, it was a remarkable position that Oppenheimer was in, but it was only stable as long as Groves was defending him. And Groves was willing to do that for the longest time. Eventually this became such a campaign that Glauber thinks Groves must have regretted the decisions that he made in Oppenheimer’s favor. Around that time, in another part of the planet, the Soviets were testing the RDS-1 bomb. On 29 August 1949, near Semipalatinsk (now Semey) in northeastern Kazakhstan, they carried out their first atomic explosion. The weapon they tested reached 22 kilotons. It was an exact copy of the Fat Man, which they built with the information that spies like Klaus Fuchs and the Rosenbergs had given them. When the Russians exploded a bomb, continues Glauber, from that point on the people who seemed to dominate public opinion were the opponents, the people Oppenheimer had in fact insulted, Lewis Strauss being the best example. Edward Teller had become Strauss’ chief prophet, comments Glauber, as he recalls with dismay how the events unfolded after that. What was going on was a systematic attack against Oppenheimer in the years following, culminating in the loyalty hearing of 1954, which was for the purpose of questioning the loyalty and destroying the impression of Oppenheimer.

Envy of Oppenheimer Another of the reasons Admiral Strauss hated Oppenheimer was that everybody in so many places loved him. Often times, if they had a report to write, the scientists would ask Oppenheimer to drop in and take a look at what they were doing. He seemed to know better than anybody and have a better way of saying it. Oppenheimer certainly had good phrases at his command. He wrote well, says Glauber. By this, he means Oppenheimer’s talent for rewriting other scientists’ papers. When it came to his own scholarly articles, Glauber insists that no one could understand a word Oppenheimer wrote! Glauber illustrates this with an example of when he was at Caltech, and there was something they were working on called Project Vista. It was officially a secret project being run by some group of professors at the college. Glauber’s belief is that it had to do with the defense of Europe against some sort of attack, presumably by the Russians, although he was never told what the official purpose of the project was. It was in the spring of that year when

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there was some sort of report to be written for the project, and all of sudden Oppenheimer appeared on campus and was around for a few days. He took them all by storm and completely rewrote whatever secret report was being produced by the Caltech people. Today it is known that Project Vista was actually all about improving the relationship between ground and air weapons, in terms of systems, tactics, procedures and communications. It was a secret project between scientists, military and other practitioners. The center of operations was indeed at Caltech. The project produced a final report in 1952, which was partially rejected because it went against the strategic directives set out by the senior military authorities. The other part of the report was declassified in 1980. Back to Glauber. By that time, Oppenheimer was a gloomy figure. He was having a difficult time. They were making his life impossible and he was making life impossible for his opponents by running around and making his presence felt in all of these different projects that were producing reports. In that period, he was also made chairman of the visiting committee at Harvard, which Glauber says is an odd thing. The alumni association was supposed to put together visiting committees to every department in the university to go in and examine them and report on their state of health to the university administration. Glauber confesses that he was never clear what the function of that committee was. It’s Glauber’s private opinion that this committee was often filled with wealthy alumni who knew nothing. But the university was waiting for some contribution from them. Although the rest of the members of that committee had no academic ties, its president was a real scientist, and Glauber remembers a particular one in which there was a Mr. Edward Mellon, an ancient man who ran the Mallinckrodt chemical company and also contributed to the chair that Glauber himself occupied years after. As president of the committee, Oppenheimer asked Glauber to stand up and talk about what he had been doing for the last year or so. Just a tenminute talk. It was a very good opportunity that Glauber had pitched for him, for he was doing something interesting at the time and was promoted not long after. Glauber had bumped into Oppenheimer on several occasions after Los Alamos, but never saw General Groves again. Years later, when he was giving some of his freshman seminars at Harvard, one of his first students turned out to be a granddaughter of his. Glauber couldn’t manage to hold himself back from saying what he really felt about her grandfather. She apparently didn’t disagree with him.

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Security on Trial In 1954, Glauber explains, they held this great trial of Oppenheimer’s loyalty that had no precedent in American legal history. It was one facet of a great anti-communist movement that had been going on in the country for ages, and whose roots went back before the Second World War and, in fact, to the beginning of the century. It was a procedure in which they invented their own legal rules as they went ahead. They were even tapping Oppenheimer’s telephone, including all of his conversations with his lawyers. History tells us that Oppenheimer had the chance to relinquish his security clearance to avoid the inquiries, but he preferred to fight for his honor. Glauber senses that it was foolish of Oppenheimer to allow this to happen. He would have lost his loyalty certification and would not have worked on the projects, but within some time he would probably have recovered. In any case, his security clearance would have lapsed within a couple of months anyway. They found it necessary to destroy the popular impression of Oppenheimer, and also to work against the fact that he had by that time the sympathy of virtually all of the physicists with the exception of a handful of people in Berkeley who, in contrast to Oppenheimer, felt that opposing the Russians and successfully building the hydrogen bomb were paramount issues, and hence security was too. The incredible thing was that, although Oppenheimer had left Berkeley in 1946 or 1947, at the end of the war, and he certainly had the friendship of men like Ernest Lawrence100 and then all of the people around Lawrence in Berkeley, they were all dead set against Oppenheimer in those later years when the loyalty proceedings were held. In 1954, Teller testified against Oppenheimer. That was a very subtle testimony, remembers Glauber. He finally said that he had no reason to doubt Oppenheimer’s loyalty, but he would sleep a great deal better if his security clearance were removed. He was, as Glauber puts it, defrocked. Like a priest who loses his clerical garments, Oppenheimer had lost his official status. Many likened it to a crucifixion. The history books give us further details about this episode. We are told that Oppenheimer faced twenty-four charges. All but one of the accusations were related to his alleged relations with communists, including his brother, sister-in-law and former partner, with his collaborations with left-wing organizations, and his donations to the Republicans of the Spanish Civil War. It wasn’t exactly clear what kind of procedures, or what laws, these hearings

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followed, or whether they were trials or not. Oppenheimer’s lawyers had no access to the relevant documents, because they allegedly contained high security data. What’s more, during the trial, Oppenheimer had to defend himself by memory, and often censored himself for fear of revealing classified information. Of course, to add to the charade, Oppenheimer’s communications with his attorneys had been illegally tapped. Civilians and the military testified at the hearings. General Groves was called to testify and reaffirmed his decision to choose Oppenheimer to lead the project. He also said that he would have been astonished if Oppenheimer had been disloyal. But Teller testified against him. He said that he often witnessed Oppenheimer behaving in ways that were difficult to understand and that his actions were confusing or complicated. For saying this, Teller was widely shunned by the scientific community for many years. At the end of the hearings, and despite being recognized as a loyal citizen, Oppenheimer’s authorization to access security information was revoked because of his communist associations. Ironically, it expired the day after the verdict, so he would have lost it anyway. That was 1954. Oppenheimer continued as director of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, but was thereafter excluded from any discussion of the use of atomic energy. He was vilified by some, but he also had allies who found the whole matter very ugly and actively defended his innocence. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy invited him to dinner at the White House with the winners of that year’s Nobel Prize. This was the first of various actions aimed at Oppenheimer’s political rehabilitation. The following year he was awarded the prestigious Enrico Fermi Prize for his contribution to Physics. President Kennedy was unable to present him with the award because he was assassinated before the date of the ceremony. His successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, did the duties instead. In his acceptance speech, Oppenheimer stated his belief that “it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today. That would seem to be a good augury for all our futures.”

Private Loves Oppenheimer certainly tried to have everything his own way, at least in the earlier stages. He held himself above things, says Glauber. There is no doubt there were facts that he declined to tell the security people at Los Alamos because he just thought it was none of their damn business. Glauber claims he was fairly principled about that for a long time, but also thinks he eventually

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gave way on that, ‘eventually’ meaning after Los Alamos and after all of the troubles. While they were at Los Alamos, Glauber heard very little about ‘Oppie’s’ private life. But there were a few things that did eventually emerge, mostly from the elaborate observations made on him all the time. One of the things that Oppenheimer was attacked for during the hearings was spending a couple of days away from Los Alamos with his former girlfriend, Jean Tatlock101 . He left his wife Kitty in Los Alamos and went to San Francisco to visit her. He then went straight back to the lab. But Glauber recalls that someone was observing during all that period. History tells us that Tatlock was a psychiatrist with whom Oppenheimer had a romantic relationship in 1936, before marrying Kitty in 1940. She was a member of the Communist Party and an intensely activist one too. According to the project archives, the official reason for the trip was to recruit a laboratory clerk. Oppenheimer clearly did no such thing, but Glauber also insists that he didn’t go to San Francisco to join anything communist, or to identify himself with anybody either. He simply went to visit Jean. Oppenheimer, Glauber reiterates, had no communist past. He had only attended meetings in which people with a communist past had also participated. Historians debate the nature of the relationship between Tatlock and Oppenheimer after his marriage. It is known, however, that the incident Glauber is referring to occurred on 14 June 1943. That day, Tatlock and Oppenheimer had dinner at a restaurant and spent the night in her apartment. Meanwhile, army agents were following and watching them. In fact, Tatlock’s phone had been tapped for some time. According to some sources specialized in Oppenheimer’s life, Tatlock told him that night that she still loved him and wanted to live with him. But they never saw each other again. A short time later, in early June 1944, Jean Tatlock committed suicide. She had been suffering from severe clinical depression. Glauber never quite knew what Oppenheimer’s relation with his wife Kitty was. She was quite something to deal with. He could see that. It was evident. He must have had substantial difficulty with her. The literature describes Kitty Oppenheimer as a woman of great personality and much character. During the hearings, she had to listen to the report on the weekend her husband spent with Tatlock. Yet she remained loyal to him until his death. Kitty herself was viewed as Oppenheimer’s most direct connection with communism. Before their wedding, she had been married to three other men. Her second husband had been an avowed communist who died fighting in the Spanish Civil War.

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Glauber feels it is important to make it clear that in the 1930s there were quite a few people who felt that the American economy had had it, and there were some who were optimistic about the Russian economy. Things were pretty bitter in the country, he recalls. But the people who had originally been attracted by communism were later repelled by it, which Glauber says was principally because of Joseph Stalin. He adds that if anyone still had any identification as a communist in the later 1930s, it was because they were pretty stubborn about it. There is very little about Oppenheimer or his family that Glauber would say was normal. As for their two children, he remembers that they both had problems. The daughter committed suicide and the son became a carpenter, and as far Glauber knows is still away from it all doing woodwork up on the mountains. Various sources tell us that Oppenheimer’s daughter, Katherine (Toni), was born at Los Alamos laboratory in 1944. According to her father’s biographers, she had a particularly difficult relationship with her mother. But there are contradictory versions of the story. Some say she was very affectionate and others argue that she was distant. In her childhood, Toni was clearly intellectually gifted, and also very mature, and became the voice of reason in the family. She became a translator. Her father’s death affected her deeply. Shortly after, she was denied a position as an official United Nations translator because of her father’s supposedly communist past. It is said that both events were decisive in her taking her own life in 1977. She tried to drown herself in the same sea where she and her father used to sail, and eventually hung herself while gazing at those waters. Meanwhile, the history books tell us that Peter Oppenheimer was older than Toni. He was born in 1941 in California, shortly before the family went to the laboratory. Different sources describe him as a very shy, extremely sensitive child who suffered from anxiety problems. At school he suffered bullying and teasing by his classmates. He had a very difficult relationship with his mother, who was extremely demanding and lacked the necessary tact. As for his relationship with his father, there are contradicting views, but biographers agree that he was deeply affected by his father’s hearings. He eventually left for the Colorado mountains to spend time with his uncle Frank, and later moved permanently to his parents’ ranch, Perro Caliente, in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, New Mexico. Peter became a carpenter and has spent most of his life out of the public eye, preferring to remain discreet and anonymous. According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, in an interview with historian Priscilla McMillan, he confessed that his father’s real tragedy had not been

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the loss of authorization to work on secret matters, but his mother Kitty’s alcoholism.

The Witch Hunter For Glauber, Joseph McCarthy102 was a later element in the issue. McCarthyism was a name that was used beginning in 1953 and 1954 for the actions of this one particular demagogue. But the truth is, says Glauber, McCarthy never went near Oppenheimer because the latter was too high a figure. In fact, McCarthy never said a word about Oppenheimer nor played any part in his trial. The attack on Oppenheimer was from within the highest elements of the government, and had been growing for all the years since the war, very steadily. McCarthy, Glauber maintains, was just a low slob who went after any public figure he could. He goes on to explain what McCarthyism was all about. There was a great proceeding which was carried out mostly on television having to do with the denunciations made by McCarthy. These were of the type that the army had a dentist who had once been a communist, which Glauber says was perfectly ridiculous. But people didn’t accept it as ridiculous. People thought that one communist dentist in the US Army was a disaster, because that’s the way McCarthy presented it. His hearings, which were televised, had him attacking mostly writers, people in Hollywood, people who were not going to overthrow the government. On this period, the history books tell us that the actions of Republican Senator McCarthy dominated the American political scene of the early 1950s for his sensationalist allegations of Communist meddling in American spheres of power. McCarthy’s actions fueled mass anti-communist hysteria, and were the root of the fear of the ‘Red Menace’ during the Cold War that followed the end of World War II. In 1950, McCarthy publicly accused 250 people of serving as undercover Communist agents. None of those accusations could be proven. His actions, also known as the ‘witch hunts’, coined the term McCarthyism, which also defines the political and judicial pressure of the period. He was a very heavy drinker who became an embarrassment to his own Senate after a while, when they realized he was going to the deep end, and finally it was McCarthy himself who was being denounced. There was this great hearing at one point, says Glauber, at which a man named Joseph Welch103 , who was a lawyer in Boston and was presiding the session, and after hearing McCarthy make some outrageous statement about somebody,

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interrupted him with the now famous quote: “Have you no sense of decency, Sir?”.

The Right Word Glauber says that Oppenheimer was a martyr of implicit hysteria. But he immediately realizes that hysteria is too strong a word. He tries to think of a more conservative one. But he ultimately accepts that hysteria is indeed what it was. He then tries to think of a good word to use in place of McCarthyism. Anticommunist hysteria? Paranoia? He is still unsure. Glauber then struggles to decide whether it would be more correct to say Oppenheimer ‘became’ a martyr, or to say he ‘was made’ a martyr. ‘Made’ is too strong, he finally agrees. ‘Became’ is alright. Oppenheimer was really undone by the manipulation of suspicion, he continues. His enemies did not undermine his loyalty. They cast doubt upon his loyalty. Glauber pauses and finally feels confident enough to assert that Oppenheimer was martyred by questionable suspicions of his loyalty. He seems satisfied with that definition, and assures us that that is the best he can do for the moment. It was all unfounded, he continues. There was a witch hunt among scientists as well. The committee attacked anyone who had been associated with Oppenheimer in the latter years, especially if he had joined any liberal organization on the campus in Berkeley. Those people included, for example David Bohm104 , who had become an assistant professor at Princeton. He was a very good physicist, a very good theorist, but he asked a lot of questions and began to ask more and more of those after all of the attacks on him personally. He was made to testify in Washington several times in the Un-American Activities Committee, and was suspended from Princeton in about 1950. It was a terrible time, Glauber sighs. There were committees that were competing for the privilege of the attacking anyone associated with Oppenheimer. The anticommunist hysteria in America took many different forms. Prior to the McCarthy era, there were successive generations of different associations, but all with similar objectives, and all kinds of nasty things took place. The House Un-American Activities Committee had existed before the war. It was once run by a congressman named Martin Dies, after whom it took one of its first names, the Dies Committee105 . Its members were randomly taking shots at anybody who said anything that was too liberal sounding, or

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if it sounded like something could have been inspired by the Bolsheviks. All this, says Glauber, goes back into the late 1930s, and even before that. All types of terrible things happened in the late 1920s, in which they sent whole boat loads of people back to Russia. The bitterness has a long history in America, he concludes. Glauber himself was never attacked or followed. He was still a kid and had never joined any associations. But others were. Phillip Morrison, for example, was also at Los Alamos. He was not one of the ones attacked immediately, but he was after a year or two. He went to Cornell for some years and then to MIT. Another chap who Glauber says was attacked a great deal was named Alvin Weinberg. There were implicit acts that he doesn’t remember well enough. He feels guilty for not remembering. Today, Glauber feels that the USA has that same freedom that was given to the lunatics who felt that they were in terrible danger because they had taken Russian people into America, and that they must all have been Bolsheviks. That was the fear in 1921 or thereabouts. These things had been going on sporadically. But they didn’t have the coherence and systematic quality that they began to assume in the years after the Second World War, with the difficulties with the Russians, and the blockade of Berlin. That was a license to anybody to hunt communists, even though in practical terms there weren’t any.

Roy J. Glauber

Sketches of a Bio Traveling Youth Glauber can speak Newyorkese on request. He was born in the Bronx, New York. His father, Emanuel, was a traveling salesman, and his mother, Felicia Fox, was a housewife. She was trained as a teacher before getting married, and it wasn’t more than a year before she was pregnant and Roy arrived on 1 September 1925. Glauber says his father had a passion for life as a traveling salesman and he couldn’t wait to get back to it. And it would have been an adventure to take Roy and his mother along, but they didn’t think it would work until their son was two years old. But from the time Roy was two, his father had him and his mother into the car and traveling around from one town to another, mostly in the middlewestern US. He remembers going as far west as Indiana, and as far south as Florida. He collected plenty of anecdotes along the way, such as his distinct recollection of being, when he was about three years old, in St. Augustine Florida, in the coldest weather they ever had. There were no motels in those days, though there were hotels in the towns. If they wanted to stop between towns, they had to go to what was called a tourist house, where a farmer would put a sign out on the highway saying ‘tourists’, and they could stop and stay overnight. Most of those places in what was the late 1920s did not have running water. They would have to go

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to a well to get water and there would be an outhouse somewhere behind the farmhouse. Glauber had many such experiences. Roy’s father sold various things that were used in the manufacture of women’s dresses. So he was constantly running around finding manufacturers, to whom he sold not the fabric so much, but things made of fabrics that become part of dresses. He sold a succession of different things. He would also sometimes take on two lines, which Glauber says was a normal thing to do, because it was hard to find manufacturers who wanted a full-time salesman. At a much later time it was inexpensive costume jewelry sold to clothing stores and the like. Later, when Roy was in school and the family settled down, he continued to work at all kinds of different things. Roy describes his father as a bright, intelligent man, despite a difficult upbringing on the Lower East Side of New York, which was a rather poor neighborhood. He was raised by his mother alone. Their family had broken up and when he started going to high school, he had unhappy experiences. The kids he grew up with had no use for that sort of education at all. In his generation, in that part of the world, the boys lived for the day. They could quit school which was usually in the middle of adolescence. So, he became a salesman, bought a car, and finally started traveling around. But Glauber can’t help feeling that had his father grown up with a different mother, he would have become an intellectual. He did eventually, but he did it all through reading. He never had any college education, but was ultimately much better read than his son. The family settled a little in Columbus Ohio, where Roy’s mother became pregnant again. He was five when his sister Jacqueline arrived106 . By that time, it was clear that his father’s traveling days were over. They settled in New York, in Washington Heights in uptown Manhattan. Roy found it very difficult to suddenly be in the big city. He had no ability to survive on the streets. The only place they had to play was on sidewalks and it was a very different sort of world. He had very few friends in what was a rather unhappy first year. He went to a public school nearby in a very old building. Previously, he had been in different towns every day, and as his mother never knew what in the world to do with her son in those places. She would take him around to see the sights, which meant typically visiting the police department and the fire department. He remembers seeing how they were all built around a brass pole, which was always very well polished and the firemen would run, jump on the pole and slide down one or two stories. Although he quickly admits that he never actually got to see any firemen do that!

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It was a very different life then. The family had their own apartment in Long Island, and that was a much more agreeable experience: it was a large residential neighborhood. Roy had friends again, for the first time really, and he began to develop hobbies, things he could do himself, which was mainly building model airplanes. He loves doing art work, and decided he was going to be an artist, and became very representative for that at school. When a play was put on in the auditorium, he painted the entire backdrop and was excused from class to do it. It was enormous, and got him thinking that that kind of thing represented his future. In his autobiographical note on the occasion of the Nobel Prize, Glauber comments that his mother was talented at crafts of various sorts, and it was she who encouraged him to develop those skills. However, he was warned about the dangers of a career in the arts. His mother’s sister had married a very talented artist called Sam Adler who never sold a single thing and would warn him considerably that “if you feel you absolutely have to be an artist, good. But if you see any other possibility…” In any case, he soon began to feel that his artwork was not spontaneous enough, and that a true artist shouldn’t have to think so hard before even starting drawings. Roy skipped one year in early grades. What’s more, in the later grades, they had fast classes, which permitted pupils to do all the seventh grade in one half-year and then all of the eighth grade in the next half year. Doing that again saved Roy another whole year. That way he was two years ahead of his peers when he went to college. The obvious problem was that an eighteenyear-old kid feels he is six years older than a sixteen year old. He thinks he has all the experience in the world. Nevertheless, Glauber doesn’t recall ever having had serious problems adapting to new friends because of that. The normal thing in Glauber’s childhood was to be on the move. They must have moved three or four times altogether around the city, and he remembers how every time a family changed apartment in those depression years, the landlord would first of all repaint the whole place and, secondly, he would give a month or two of free rent. So, it was attractive to pick up from one place and move to another.

Going to College It was his friend Bobby’s father, called Aaron Aronson, a graduate from the Harvard Business School many years earlier, who recommended Roy to his former university. Glauber insists that other than a recommendation, there wasn’t anything else that Aronson could really do. He did not contribute to

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the scholarship funding. He was a well-educated man, and his deepest wish was to send his own son to Harvard, but Bobby was never that sort of student, although later his younger brother was sent there. Aaron was once invited to the Glauber home and Roy showed him that he had done several things that were attractive to sponsors. He had all his science projects, all the things he had built, the telescopes and that sort of stuff. Aaron was also very impressed by Roy’s school record and the science prizes he had won. After leaving for Harvard, Roy never spent any significant time at home. But his parents were very proud of him. The matter of the telescope warrants further attention. Glauber built a primitive model following the simplistic instructions that he found in an encyclopedia. He had been amazed by a visit to the Hayden Planetarium in New York with his Aunt Sarah, and afterwards collected some manuals written by amateur astronomers and embarked on the adventure of building his own telescope with a budget that amounted to his accumulated savings of a meager $10. Glauber explains that he received financial support from some professionals who it would seem were touched by the child’s endeavor, and by the time he had completed the telescope, he still had some money left over. Glauber eventually lost touch with his friend Bobby. They were living in different neighborhoods and going to different high schools. Bobby ended up at the University of Syracuse, but Roy only saw him a couple of times again after that. Roy got into Harvard relatively easily because he got a scholarship. There was a strange way in which they financed scholarships. Usually somebody gave a sum of money, and that money was simply in the bank and available to the university. Harvard did not have many scholarships for people from New York City in those days, because they already had many applicants from the city and were not trying to encourage any more. But there was a scholarship given by the Harvard Club in New York, and Glauber was lucky enough to get one. That club is in a building in New York, he explains. It still exists today, a hall used by rather wealthy alumni. In Glauber’s day, they awarded scholarships by meeting in a committee of six or eight members, probably wealthy, together with an examiner from Harvard. One morning, says Glauber, they were producing interviews, in which all these men, a good eight of them, began to sit around a big table in a conference room. They called the applicants one after another and asked tough questions to see whether they were smart enough to get the scholarship. Roy was, of course, younger than anyone else that year. He was just sixteen.

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The very first question they asked him was what sidereal time is. Glauber reckons it was because one of the guys sitting there had done an astronomy course and seemed to remember. Naturally, Roy knew the answer. Although many of the other kids had a very difficult time testifying in front of all these old men, Roy made what he describes as a ‘pretty good showing’ and got the scholarship. The courses at Harvard were good, he continues. The students could learn what they wanted them to learn, it was just a matter of putting in the work. He started up with taking advanced calculus. He certainly worked more than his roommate, but there were some students who worked really hard all the time. That said, the average students were really not very good. The quality of Harvard students has improved enormously since then, he feels, as they consider the entrance business much more competitively these days. In that time, three quarters or more of the students were the sons of fairly well-off families in New England. But nowadays, he says, Harvard is very ambiguous about legacy. The United States joined the war raging in Europe and the Pacific in 1941, when Roy was in his first year of college. Life changed a lot for the young people of his generation. In an autobiographical note, Glauber says that changes were quickly made to Harvard’s course programs with the thought of providing as much education as possible before the young men left for the armed forces. Faculty members were also departing for war work, so everything was packed into shorter periods of time. In 1943, and after turning 18, Glauber felt ready for war work himself and filled in a questionnaire sent out by an agency called the National Roster of Scientific Personnel.

The Nobel Prize The Road to the Nobel The big issue about quantum electrodynamics in the post-war years was to ask whether it was correct. Glauber explains that there were things one could try to calculate that gave nonsensical, infinite answers. There was hard work for several years separating the nonsense from the good sense. The good sense made fantastically good sense. Researchers could make predictions good to six significant figures. So, in that sense, quantum electrodynamics really worked. The parts that were nonsense, he says, are still with us, but nobody takes them seriously anymore.

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Quantum electrodynamics was in good shape, he continues. But, what does one do with it? All of this analysis dealt with one light quantum, one photon, at a time. But what was troubling Glauber was how one deals with arbitrary numbers of light quanta. Glauber explains what he means in greater depth. How does one deal with a beam in which there are a thousand quanta present at a time? The old way of dealing with that would have been through what’s called perturbation theory, which talks about one photon at a time, something he feels would just be an endless way of describing light beams in general. Neither was it clear what a light beam really was. The implicit assumption was that a light beam is a completely random passage of light quanta like raindrops. Light falls on a surface as randomly as independent raindrops fall on a surface. But nobody was looking at that carefully, or seemed to understand that it was even a problem. At the same time, the laser was being developed. The motivations to develop the laser, Glauber feels, were extraordinarily good. But they had nothing to do with this kind of question. The principal inventor of the laser was Charles Townes107 . He and his team thought of the ways in which atoms radiate and how, when there is a very strong field, the atoms may tend to radiate together. But there was no thought at all about the field that they create. Frankly, it never occurred to these people as a problem. In this same period, there were two radio astronomers from the University of Rochester, Leonard Mandel108 and Emil Wolf109 , who developed a new kind of radio astronomy called intensity interferometry, which Glauber explains was different from the usual amplitude interferometry. They used two receivers and correlated the fluctuations in the intensity that they recorded. From this correlation, Mandel and Wolf were able to determine the sizes of sources in the sky. They were able to do the same kinds of things that normal radio astronomers could do. On learning of this, two other researchers, Robert Hanbury Brown110 and Richard Twiss111 , who had a background in engineering not in quantum theory, started asking whether it might be possible to do the same with visible light. Their immediate answer was no, because they thought visible light arrives like raindrops, completely randomly always. But they were very wrong. So, Hanbury Brown and Twiss performed an experiment with a very monochromatic discharge tube (which gave all the photons the same color, the same wavelength), and a half-silvered mirror to count light quanta, not individual quanta, but to really count fluctuations using photo multiplier tubes. And they discovered that there is a correlation between the beams

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reflected in one direction and reflected in the other direction, which seemed to suggest to them that light quanta appeared in pairs. Glauber asks now as he did then how that should be? One had to look at that. It really got him thinking hard. With the laser being developed at the same time, the people in Rochester thought immediately that they would use Edward Purcell’s112 explanation of the semi classical Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect. Purcell had used the formula from the radiation laboratory handbook on radar noise, thermal noise. So the Rochester people used that formula and made a prediction for the laser that an extremely monochromatic beam produced by a laser should then have giant fluctuations in intensity. However, Glauber thought that was nonsense, so he tried developing a theory in which that would not be so, and found the right device was using the coherent states. Then it was immediately clear to him. He did not have a good theory of how the laser radiates, but he was in effect making the guess that this was how it had to radiate. Basically, he says, it was a case of changing one’s ideas. Samuel Goudsmit113 , who had discovered the concept of electron spin with George Uhlenbeck114 , was the editor of the Physical Review at the time. Glauber knew him, so he read his little manuscript to him over the telephone in order to get his opinion. Goudsmit answered: “I can sense that you are criticizing these people and saying that what they say is not right.” Glauber said yes, that was correct. To which Goudsmit replied: “Well, I won’t publish it unless you come right out and say that they are wrong.” Glauber changed the manuscript a little bit and sent it in. The person who received the manuscript was named George Trigg115 . Although in actual fact he handled the letters section of the Physical Review, he was the editor for all practical purposes. Goudsmit was simply occupying the office. Trigg was immediately scared and said that he had to send it to referees, but he would choose the very people who Glauber claimed had it wrong. Unsurprisingly, they came back with a statement that the paper should not be published because it would just start a fight. At this point, it might be useful to explain the process of publishing scientific articles. The system involves a first review by the editor of the journal who decides whether the text is of interest. If so, it is sent for peer review, which is usually ‘blind’, meaning that neither the referees (as well as authors in some research fields) do not reveal their respective identities. The idea is for these assessors to make an objective judgment based solely on the text being considered. After reviewing the article, the referees issue their verdicts on its scientific adequacy, its rigor and its contribution to knowledge. After

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receiving this feedback, the editor accepts or rejects the article. In cases where an author contradicts somebody else’s contributions, the latter are not usually asked to referee the article, as they would be unlikely to view the text favorably. But that’s what happened with Glauber’s text. The very people he contradicted were the referees, and naturally their verdict was not a positive one. Glauber’s response was that, precisely because of the controversy, the article needed to be published. And it did indeed start a very big fight. Glauber says his opponents eventually had to admit that they were wrong, but it was concealed. They turned it into a fight over whether semi-classical theory can be used to describe light beams in general. They felt that it could and Glauber was sure that it could not. It became a struggle, whereupon Glauber wrote some papers showing that it was indeed not possible, and that a different way of describing the multi-photon aspects of light beams was required. Glauber offers more details about the controversy. He goes back in time. Trigg sent the document to someone, who obviously remained anonymous. But the response that came back was a threat. It said that Mandel and Wolf, who had written a paper that was already in print in the Physical Review, had made no mistake. It insisted that what they did was correct, and publishing Glauber’s criticism would just start a conflict that could become very serious. When Glauber received that review of his paper, he telephoned George Trigg and told him there was something extraordinary going on. They were not only not making no admission of the mistake they had made, but felt they were above publishing anything incorrect. In fact, they felt what they were doing was so correct that Glauber’s contradicting them could only lead to some kind of warfare. That was clear enough to Trigg, who Glauber told that it was impossible to imagine anyone writing such a referee response other than Wolf himself. Finally, Trigg chuckled and made it very clear that Glauber was right, that it had indeed been written by Wolf. Glauber told Trigg that he had no alternative but to publish the text as it was written. In any case, Glauber didn’t feel it was too vigorous a reference to Mandel and Wolf ’s mistake, and thought the whole matter would pass by. Trigg agreed: “Yes, we have no alternative but to publish it.” And he did. Glauber says it was not clear what Wolf was going to do with the knowledge. But one thing was clear. There was to be a conference at the new house of the UNESCO in Paris in January. Glauber can’t remember its precise title, but it was on the fundamental nature of light and was being held only a few weeks after the submission of his paper. So, Glauber wrote out his argument in a brief paper that he submitted to the committee running the conference. It arrived post deadline, but it was nonetheless accepted and he went to France.

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We should interrupt Glauber’s story here to explain that the common practice with scientific conferences is for researchers to submit their reports for consideration by a committee of experts who decide whether they are of sufficient quality and conform to the conference’s criteria. If admitted, authors then make presentations to their colleagues at sessions organized by topic. This is how the latest advances in a subject are made known. Normally, submissions of proposals need to be made in advance of a certain deadline, and any that arrive too late are usually rejected. Once at the conference, and because it had not met the deadline, Glauber was permitted to present his paper at the end of some of the regular sessions. Before that, he had attended the lecture given by Wolf and found that he had changed his paper with respect to the abstract he had submitted. The conclusion was rather different, and claimed that they did not expect the Hanbury Brown and Twiss effect to be present in their measurements. Wolf didn’t say why they were withdrawing the suggestion, but he went on to emphasize its importance, as Glauber had done in the paper he had already submitted to the Physical Review. He claimed that one had to look at the higher order correlation functions. Glauber found all this rather strange because it was making several gestures in the direction of what he had already presented himself. He asked Wolf a couple of questions about what the motivation was for these changes, but he didn’t get any reasonable answer. Then, perhaps a day later, there was a paper by Mandel in which he also had changed the story completely. It was evident enough to Glauber that he too had been sent the paper that had been refereed by Wolf. Glauber made no such accusation at that meeting. And he never did. Until now. He asked some questions that Mandel couldn’t answer either about why he was suddenly so interested in correlation functions involving fields at several different space–time points. Again, he was clearly taking several steps in the direction of what Glauber was already saying. Later, Glauber gave his paper. He doesn’t think there was anybody else in that meeting who was aware of the interplay. He simply told his story. The man who chaired that session was Alfred Kastler116 . Glauber doesn’t recall right now whether Kastler ever won the Nobel Prize, but feels he perhaps should have done as he was a great French experimenter in quantum optics. After the session, Kastler said he was very interested in Glauber’s paper and wondered if he could deliver it again and perhaps give more details. That very afternoon, Glauber did exactly that. Glauber and Kastler had only met once before, when the latter was giving lectures at the College de France and the École Normale Supérieure. But that evening, Kastler was giving a small dinner at his home and asked Glauber to

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come. From the way he was acting, Glauber felt Kastler was behaving as if he had seen history made and wanted to respond. That was the end of the matter as far as Glauber was concerned. But Mandel and Wolf found some reporters from other journals and gave them testimony that they had made no mistake at all, and that Glauber was failing to appreciate how much of optics can be explained in classical terms, and that’s what they were doing very effectively. They made no suggestion that they had made a mistake or predicted anything incorrect. But when they went back to Rochester, Mandel and Wolf started a flurry of papers which were sent to the journals, again defending themselves in what Glauber describes as very funny and indirect ways.

The Sudarshan Controversy Our protagonist then goes on to tell the story of a controversial matter linked to his scientific contribution. He says there was a young man named George Sudarshan who had been at Harvard for two years working with Schwinger, his thesis supervisor. Glauber describes him as a clever young Indian of a particular sect that he claims not to understand. He had worked with Robert Marshak117 at the University of Rochester, and together they had published a two-hundred-word abstract that mentioned the vector and axial vector couplings in beta decay theory. They thought that they might be the best candidates to properly describe that phenomenon. But at the same time, within weeks, there was a classic paper by Feynman and Gell-Mann that explained that vector and axial vector couplings were the right mathematical instrument to be used for the universal theory of weak interactions. This had happened perhaps two years before the incident that Glauber goes on to tell us about, and explains why Sudarshan and Marshak were two very bitter guys. They felt they had been scooped by Feynman and Gell-Mann. In Glauber’s opinion, however, the latter gave a very well-motivated paper, whereas the little abstract that Sudarshan and Marshak had produced had no motivation and was little more than a rather inexplicit summary. Nevertheless, they felt they had said it first and that they deserved the credit that the world was not giving them. It was perhaps on that basis that Schwinger gave a fellowship to Sudarshan to come to Harvard. But Schwinger had no particular regard for the kind of calculations that Sudarshan specialized in, which Glauber senses were on the far fringe of good sense in theoretical physics. Schwinger had no taste for

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any of that, and did not continue the position beyond two years, whereupon Sudarshan returned to Rochester. Glauber imagines that Sudarshan was feeling pretty bitter about Schwinger while he was there, and probably even more bitterly about Glauber himself, who was still at Harvard. Glauber still considered him a good friend. But Sudarshan certainly saw him as less talented than Schwinger, and also felt that he was the local expert on quantum field theory in Rochester. Glauber shares that opinion, and suspects that Mandel and Wolf probably went to him in search of information. This kind of war went on. Every time Glauber produced a paper, he observed the custom of sending out copies of preprints to people working in similar fields. So, the Rochester guys were receiving them and they were in fact writing up very similar things, or things that were borrowed from what Glauber was writing. This went on for three or four years. Graduate students were writing up papers with the same content as Glauber’s and usually not making any reference to him, and then sending them to letters journals, but not, Glauber hastens to add, Physical Review Letters, which didn’t publish most of this stuff with one exception. But Physics Letters, the European journal, was not as critical and would often publish their things. It had a long string of papers that were more or less directed against Glauber, as if Sudarshan was defending Mandel and Wolf. Mandel and Wolf decided after about three months to write up a paper denying that they had ever made a mistake. Or perhaps better said, making no reference to the fact that they had been criticized for saying something literally incorrect, which was that a laser would have a tendency to produce photon pairs and triples and the like. Whereas what Glauber had found is that a laser is ideal, in the sense that it tends to produce random numbers with a Poisson distribution and no correlation between them at all. So, Mandel and Wolf wrote a paper saying that they had made no error, and that the problem was one which could in any case be analyzed semi-classically, as was the tradition in optics in those days. Accompanying them was a letter written by Sudarshan with the purported proof which actually proves nothing, says Glauber. Sudarshan claimed that there was a general representation of all quantum optical fields which encouraged semi-classical analysis. He believed that there was a specific integral representation for the density operator in general, for any quantum field, and that this density operator representation was constructed with a distribution function. That, according to Sudarshan, would represent absolutely any optical field. Given that representation, which he claimed was universal, all quantum optical problems could be phrased precisely as if they were classical or semi-classical problems.

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All of that was claimed to be a mathematical theorem. Glauber had been trying to solve that very problem. Could quantum fields in general be represented in this way? He found that there was a class of quantum fields which could, but that it was not generally true. Moreover, the function that Sudarshan was relying on in general did not exist and could be defined. Glauber doesn’t know how these Rochester articles were refereed, but they were printed directly. And they amounted to a denunciation that what he was doing was wrong, was insufficiently general, and was making false accusations of Mandel and Wolf. He then goes on to explain that Wolf was the guy who rewrote Born’s optic. He remembers that Max Born was one of the pioneers of quantum mechanics and wrote a very physically motivated definitive text on optics involving quanta, but involving a wealth of physical material. Glauber says Born wanted that text to be kept alive and Wolf had offered to rewrite it for him. That he did, but by removing all of the physics and instituting instead some things he learned from the research that had been done at the MIT Radiation Lab during the war on the statistical theory of signals, classical signals, using probability theory. That, says Glauber, was really the content of Wolf ’s optics. What is called Born and Wolf is that, and Wolf made of himself a great authority in optics on the basis of it. That’s how it was, says Glauber, before going on to say that he personally never felt any ambitions to be an expert in quantum optics. But, given those first accusations, he had better start writing what he did know. So, he began writing papers that he had already submitted to the Physical Review. He did not have the definitive proof yet that his representation was general. In fact, he thought it certainly was not general. However, Sudarshan had made this claim that his own theory was completely general and, therefore, what Glauber was saying was trivial. This kind of conflict went on for some years after. That’s the way it stood, says Glauber. As he published papers, the Rochester people had their students write papers with essentially the same content and submit them as letters. These were published quickly, but Glauber didn’t publish many such pieces, as he would rather publish longer papers which took half a year to appear. In the meantime, his opponents’ letters would appear before his longer papers, even though they had been submitted later. Glauber sighs. It was a rather messy situation. Eventually people got sufficiently bored with it and enough realized that, in general terms, Glauber was right. The community decided to name the proposal after both Sudarshan and Glauber. It’s not something Glauber considers a correct statement, but he never went back to that sort of thing.

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He thought the Rochester people had behaved in too nasty a way, maybe because of the cloudiness that gets created when people talk about problems that they don’t understand. In whatever case, it took several years before Glauber felt the cloud had passed over. But he thinks it did, and he also thinks that he came out all right in the long run. They had made a serious mistake in Rochester. They had done something pretty stupid in fact, he opines, but they never admitted it. Life went on. But that, he concludes, may have been one reason why there was such a long interval of forty years between the work that he did and the Nobel Prize.

A Sad Sequel Early in February 2015, two weeks before our interview in Cambridge in late February 2015 where he told us the story of his Nobel Prize, Glauber received a one-line email from someone with a gravely Indian sounding name that he had never seen before. The letter made reference to two sets of papers that had never been published, and asked if Glauber had any response. He had never seen these papers in his life, but decided to look them up. One was probably in connection with the retirement of its author, George Sudarshan, who had an appointment in Austin, on the faculty at the University of Texas. There was some sort of celebration held in his honor, most likely organized by the man himself, in which he wrote little essays on his accomplishments that he had never really received adequate recognition for. One of these was the vector-axial matter that Glauber mentioned earlier. Others had to do with a way of talking about objects going backwards in time. Glauber comments that Sudarshan loved these fringe contributions. And another was so-called integral representation, as a general representation of the density operator, which Glauber now doesn’t believe to exist but had once called the P-representation or pseudo classical representation. Sudarshan was congratulating himself on originating the idea and lamenting the fact that he never received adequate recognition. The second paper that the letter referred to was written by people who, from their names, Glauber suspects were also Indian. Although it was never published, it existed in some sort of document associated with the University of Texas. Glauber went to the library and when he found it he was amazed. This article, which appeared in 2009, was a much more explicit denunciation of Glauber for criticizing this sort of work. A rather nasty piece of work, says Glauber, by two guys who could be seen as assassins of some sort.

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At first, Glauber felt he could not exclude the fact that the author of these letters is somebody with an objective frame of mind and that there might be something positive that would come out of responding to him. But he eventually decided not to answer, knowing it would just mean dredging up the past and feeding a war. Indeed, on the very morning of our interviews, he got a second letter from the same man that made it clear that he was another ‘assassin’ and he wanted to know why Glauber didn’t have the will to respond to a paper that claimed he was guilty of plagiarism. Why wouldn’t he come out and admit his guilt? Glauber doesn’t know where this person is, and cannot tell from the email address. But it’s very clear from what he is saying that he wants to create a struggle.

A Nobel Prize For years, Glauber had a going relationship with a woman called Beverly, who lived in New Zealand. It lasted ten years, from 1990 through 2000, and then from 2000 through 2002 he would go to New Zealand every year to live with her for a time, and she would go back to Cambridge and live with him. Beverly had more or less broken up the relationship, figuring that Roy was never going to settle in New Zealand. It’s a wonderful place, he says, about the most peaceful country in the world. But somebody who had been brought up as Glauber was only has a certain tolerance for peace. She would still phone from time to time, although Glauber laughs that she never quite understood whether to add or subtract the time difference, and would end up calling at the most inconvenient of times! So, when in October of 2005 Glauber had a telephone call at about 5.30 in the morning, he assumed that it was Beverly and her characteristic time calculation. But it wasn’t her. It was a youngish voice with a kind of Swedish accent explaining that he had some news and wanted to know if Glauber was interested in accepting the Nobel Prize. Glauber knew all about the connivance with making phony telephone calls at that hour of the night. But the caller was aware of that as well. He said they would put on somebody he knew, and indeed it was somebody although Glauber still thought it might very well be a joker. The voice was that of Sune Svanberg, a professor from Lund University118 , a well-known experimenter, who had run a meeting about four or five years before on the border between Norway and Sweden. The place was well north

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of Stockholm and was no longer a ski resort in the winter, but it still held conferences. Glauber remembers that they had the habit of beginning the lectures at eight in the morning, and he had never been very good at getting up at that time. He discovered that they had closed circuit television, with a camera focused on where the speaker was. So, for the first three days he was able to watch the first three speakers in the morning in bed still wearing his pajamas. But the retribution came to him at the end of the week, when he was scheduled for the first lecture of the morning at eight o’clock. He got there and told them that he had in fact watched the first lecture of the day, for the first four days, in his pajamas. That, he thought, was awfully civilized but he thought the really civilized thing would be when the first speaker could deliver the first lecture in his pajamas! When Svanberg got on the phone, he reminded him of that story and said “are you in your pajamas right now?” Of course, he was still in bed! He told him he was and was really impressed that Svanberg had remembered. And that’s how he learned that he had won the Nobel Prize. What happened was really a bit of an inspiration for Roy Glauber. The word went out almost immediately on radio announcements. The Cambridge radio stations, if they have a winner in their area, are very quick to announce these things. So, Dan Kleppner and his wife, close friends of his, were already listening to the radio, probably at six or six thirty in the morning. The Kleppners lived half a mile away and suddenly decided they could be really useful by going down the hill and parking in Glauber’s parking space. Sure enough by the time they got there, there were reporters coming in and parking all over the place. The Kleppners said that they would manage the door and keep reporters away until he was out of his pajamas. They did that for a while. However, there was one photographer from the Harvard Gazette who got a long succession of pictures of the prize winner wearing pajamas. And they were published! And that, says Glauber, is how it happened. That day was quite remarkable. Later on, there was a sort of large press conference involving the president of Harvard, who had been an assistant secretary of the Treasury in Washington. He was a very good economist but a man with almost no tact. In fact, Glauber says he didn’t remain president for very long on that very account. On the day of that gathering, he was the first to stand up. Previously, the Nobel Prize was not considered taxable by the US Treasury but under his direction it had been made taxable. That, says Glauber, was the essence of being tactless.

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That 10 October 2005 was quite a day. It involved one thing after another, with sessions with photographers and whatnot. But Glauber still taught his class, and says he did at least manage to give some fraction of his lecture. If such a thing had happened thirty years earlier, he adds, it would not have been so surprising. But he had long since imagined that it would never happen. The Nobel Prize had eluded him, but Glauber does point out that he had for years been participating in the Ig Nobel Prize, which is a kind of parody of the Nobel. There’s a fellow named Marc Abrahams, he says, with more sense of humor than anyone else. He has almost made a profession of it because he travels around every year. He makes a tour of Europe and he has a collection of people who have gotten the Ig Nobel Prize at some point before and are only too happy to appear with him. There’s one couple that invented the lawn ornaments that represent long-legged birds, although Glauber can’t remember why they got the prize. At the beginning, he tried writing some funny things for Abrahams, and thought they were successful. But Abrahams is decided that his sense of humor is the one that he will preserve. So it goes on. Glauber still hasn’t shown up there but he has done it every year. The Nobel Prize didn’t really change his life. It made him busier because he gets more mail from people and a certain number of requests for autographs, and those are things that take up his time. He thinks it would be very bad news for somebody who gets the prize quite young, like Kenneth Wilson119 , because it can easily fill one’s time. But as one grows older it certainly doesn’t improve their ability to do anything original. Glauber sighs that he lacks the mental power that he had when he was younger. The prize ceremony, he continues, is essentially dull but very colorful. The flattery is so overwhelming, he says, that you don’t get as bored as you would if you were attending somebody else’s ceremony. The charming thing he recalls was that when everyone sat down at the tables, and because somehow historically physics has precedence over other fields, he sat between the Queen of Sweden on his left side and the Princess on his right. They were in different ways both very charming women, he says, adding that he found that quite remarkable. But he didn’t dance with either of them. That, he insists, never happens at these ceremonies.

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Meanings One of Them Glauber says that the most important thing the Manhattan Project gave him was a kind of profession, although he laughs that it was perhaps the wrong one. He had always seen himself as somebody who does things with his hands and would have loved to have been an experimenter. But then he was overtaken by mathematics. It had been such a thrill to teach himself calculus in high school, and adds that there is absolutely no reason not to offer instruction in the subject at that stage but that it took the world another fifty years to learn that. When he went to Los Alamos, he had stopped being an experimenter because at college he had never had a chance to do that sort of thing. All the courses were just intellectual. So Glauber decided to be a theorist at Los Alamos and claims that he seemed somehow to succeed in the business. He really came away feeling that there had been nobody at Los Alamos who was that much better than he was. He felt like he was at the beginning of a life as a theoretical physicist. With retrospect, however, he feels that it might not have been the right decision. If he had found the right things to do at that time, he might have been smarter and more successful as an experimenter. He had more natural talent in that field while, on the other hand, he doesn’t view himself as a great mathematician. He might have had a better likelihood of being a successful experimenter, but he never had a chance to be one. Glauber then wonders aloud whether he had made anything clear in saying what he had just said. It’s always been a question on his mind. He has gone on doing theoretical work and has been successful enough to have made a difference. He certainly made the discovery at Los Alamos that he could do that sort of thing. Being as young as he was, he felt he was doing work as good as was being done there, and he showed some promise for being a scientist like the others. He came away feeling that he was one of them, that he had joined the union, as if it were. But he’s not sure if that was the right decision. He will never know that. One only has one life to live. Hans Bethe, Edward Teller… For Glauber, these were important people and they had a certain authority that he never had at all. On the Manhattan Project, he was an observer. He thought he was a good observer of these things, but he was little more than that at that stage. In fact, while he was there, he wrote some good papers and discovered some soluble problems that

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were not known to be soluble before, such as certain neutron diffusion problems. But there wasn’t anything he did there that he was able to use in any other context. At the end of the war, he wasn’t terribly excited to publish these things. There were things he did at Los Alamos that he could declassify and publish but he didn’t. He thought they probably didn’t have enough value and weren’t anything he really wanted to be known for.

Big Science Los Alamos was an engineering project. But it was engineering at such a level that it was also a scientific project. Engineers, Glauber explains, are basically people who construct graphs and tables, so they never have to do the calculations. They make them available. Engineers do this kind of thing routinely, he comments. But there wasn’t anything done routinely at Los Alamos. There had been big projects in other things but probably not as baffling, probably not as extensive, as full of uncertainty. There was something definitive about it. It was unlike any such project that had been seen before and he doesn’t think there have been many such projects since. He can’t think of any except the hydrogen bomb, but who knows? Perhaps NASA and the business of space exploration. That too was very extensive and was, in his opinion, to a considerable degree dominated politically. In the Kennedy administration, they cleared a huge area next to the MIT where old factory buildings and whatnot had been torn down to prepare a great laboratory. It was the influence of Kennedy and his brother120 to bring it to Massachusetts, where they were both born. But after they were killed, a representative of Texas became president, Lyndon Johnson121 . And that, Glauber insists, is why NASA never did go to Massachusetts, but went to Texas instead. Both before and after the war, the largest part of experimental physics was ultimately in America much more than in Europe, claims Glauber. It was the theory was not so strong in America. An American who ventured to publish in theoretical physics might even have preferred, in the old days, to put it in Zeitschrift für Physik. That changed after the war. The American journals became sources for theory, which they had rarely been before. In fact, although Glauber never published prolifically, whenever he did, it was only ever in Physical Review. Glauber also suspects that after the war, the way in which scientific papers were written changed. Before the war, they were usually signed by a single author. Afterwards, people were working in bunches and there got to be a kind of convention. If you were one of six guys who were thinking about a

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subject, even if there were three of them who never contributed anything, then their names went on the paper.

Worth the Effort But Glauber insists that he was not the best-informed voice. He says he was the youngest of all the people at Los Alamos and that put him in the position of being an observer. As much as he was a participant, he didn’t make any decisions. Glauber also agrees that he is in the position to tell the complete story, not only of Los Alamos, but also what happened after. It also helps to be a survivor, he says. But he would never claim that his opinion was the right one about anything. He may not have been a decision-maker in the lab, but he did try to have his eyes wide open. Throughout the interviews that gave rise to this book, he has given plenty of opinions. He has tried to be open with his thoughts. He certainly feels that working in physics has been a worthwhile endeavor. It has been a remarkable opportunity to work with extraordinarily insightful and gifted people. And at the same time, he has been able to explain something. He feels very proud to have worked in several different fields and especially to be able to say that some of these things were so successful that the problems have disappeared. He loves to be able to explain things that could not be explained before. But he also feels that if one does that too successfully, it’s a kind of failure and nobody pays any further attention to your work. But, yes, he concludes, it has been a great deal of fun over the years.

Appendix A: Nobel Laureates

It is clear from Glauber’s account that the Manhattan Project brought together a number of notable scientists. The following is a list of the researchers who worked at Los Alamos (1943–1945) and also received a Nobel Prize: Physics Chemistry Chemistry Physics Physics Physics Physics Physics Physics Physics Physics Physics Peace Physics Physics

1935 1951 1951 1952 1959 1959 1963 1965 1967 1968 1980 1989 1995 1995 2005

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Sir James Chadwick (1891–1974) Glenn T. Seaborg (1912–1999) Edwin M. McMillan (1907–1991) Felix Bloch (1905–1983) Emilio G. Segrè (1905–1989) Owen Chamberlain (1920–2006) Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1906–1972) Richard P. Feynman (1918–1988) Hans A. Bethe (1906–2005) Luis W. Álvarez (1911–1988) Val L. Fitch (1923–2015) Norman F. Ramsey (1915–2011) Joseph Rotblat (1908–2005) Frederick Reines (1918–1998) Roy J. Glauber (1925–2018)

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There were also several Nobel Laureates among the scientists who visited Los Alamos: Physics Physics Physics Physics Physics

1922 1938 1939 1944 1975

Niels H. D. Bohr (1885–1962) Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) Ernest O. Lawrence (1901–1958) Isidor I. Rabi (1898–1988) Aage N. Bohr (1922–2009)

Numerous scientists at Los Alamos also received other major awards. For example, the Enrico Fermi Prize was given to John von Neumann, Hans A. Bethe, Edward Teller, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Norris E. Bradbury, Harold M. Agnew, Seth H. Neddermeyer, Robert R. Wilson, Luis W. Álvarez and Victor F. Weisskopf. In mathematics, Peter D. Lax received the Wolf Prize and the Abel Prize.

Appendix B: Extraordinary Minds

Throughout his life, Glauber met a large number of important scientists, and we talked about some of them. This section collects his impromptu and honest memories about them. Some arose to set the scene for other memories, others in the middle of other stories and some in response to our questions. It is extremely seducing to be able to gain further insight into these people and their extraordinary minds. Niels Bohr Bohr was a heavyset man with a great shock of white hair who was not exactly at Los Alamos, recalls Glauber. He goes on to say that Bohr had never spoken loudly in his life. He mumbled. After the war, when Glauber visited him in Copenhagen, Bohr would put his pipe in his mouth with no tobacco. He would clench his jaw on the pipe and speak while hardly moving his lips, so you could scarcely hear a word. It was just the kind of mumbling that went on. When he gave lectures, which he did several times at Los Alamos, he was absolutely worshiped. Everyone who was cleared knew just who he was even though he was referred to as Dr. Baker, Nicholas Baker. He always traveled with his young son, Aage Bohr. According to Glauber, one had no sense of whether Aage knew physics or not for his unique assignment was to make elaborate drawings in chalk on the blackboard before his father spoke. These were very carefully done designs, beautiful illustrations.

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History tells us that Aage Bohr122 did know about physics, although we can’t be sure how much he knew at that time, because he was in his early twenties when he and his father visited the laboratory. However, in 1975 he would win the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Ben Mottelson and James Rainwater for their work on the structure of the atomic nucleus. Bohr’s talks at Los Alamos were mostly about the Uncertainty Principle, the experiments to determine that it was self-consistent. Glauber recalls how Bohr would get up with a pipe in his mouth and would not speak to the audience. They could see his lips move but could not hear very much, just a mumbling. Once they knew that was going to happen, they found an amplifier system for him with a microphone that he had to put around his neck. But, of course, the microphone was connected by wire to the amplifier and as Bohr turned around to the blackboard and turned around again and again he would wind up the wire around himself. Then there would be a kind of “pop!” The wire connection would break and once again nobody could hear absolutely anything! But Bohr would go on speaking. Glauber also remembers that Bohr’s sentences were very long. So were his talks, which were rarely less than an hour and a quarter, an hour and a half. So, it was very trying for the people to listen. Anticipating this, there was one time he remembers when some of the physicists held a little betting pool on how long Bohr would speak. On that occasion, it was an hour and a half. Albert Einstein Glauber met Einstein only briefly. He encountered him often but never really spoke to him. In those years, between 1949 and 1951, Einstein had spent years searching for the Unified Field Theory. That was his one interest. At that stage, he would only come into his office perhaps at ten thirty, eleven in the morning, and he would leave a little after noon, because he had read his mail, and thus had done everything he felt he needed to do in his rather isolated office. Glauber remembers that the principal task of many of the scientists was to protect Einstein because all kinds of crazy people would want to present their theories to him. Einstein wanted none of this. He just wanted to be left alone. So that’s how it basically was. He was mostly ‘tuned out’, as Glauber puts it, of the physics of the time. He had gradually tuned out during the years in which quantum mechanics developed from 1926 on. He made criticisms and suggestions of things that would not work in quantum mechanics, but Bohr answered all of them by showing the self-consistency of the Uncertainty Principle.

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But Einstein was never happy about that. He always felt that there is a reality that underlies all of that and we are simply not able to perceive it. According to Glauber, Einstein granted the great numerical successes of quantum mechanics, but he thought that they were presenting an illusory picture of the world. He felt that there was a classical reality that was fundamental to it all, and it was somehow being made foggy by quantum mechanics. He never found an answer to his Unified Field Theory. Richard Feynman Glauber tells us that, as a student at MIT, Feynman had won mathematics competitions. He was already very bright and very fast before he went on to became a graduate student at Princeton. Feynman began to develop a kind of ‘persona’, a way of presenting himself to the world as someone who is brilliant, different, and full of funny stories. Whenever he gave a lecture, everyone knew that there would be a great deal of fun, that he would make fun of people in the audience, that he would make jokes, that he would do everything in a way that was so original you had the feeling you had never seen anything like this before. He made a very strong impression that way. Among other things, he became a kind of great entertainer. Feynman loved stories in which all of the people he was dealing with were one more stupid than another. He would tell the stories at lunch and it entertained everybody at the table. Glauber ate lunch with him on many days but after he had heard some of these stories, and as they were embellished the third and fourth time, he started to find them a bit too much and really very boring. But those stories kept improving and they always had some germ of truth in them. Later, Feynman told many of those stories to the son of a physicist, Ralph Leighton, who was also a writer. That gave rise to the book called Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! which contained all the stories that Feynman had told and embellished over the years. Glauber adds that when they appeared in Leighton’s book, they were much more polished than the ones he heard. Feynman was not a womanizer, but he liked to cultivate that image. There were often parties in the dormitories at Los Alamos, and although there were not very many women there, the few that were would gather around him. He would perform in a corner telling stories while the music was playing. In the Fuller lodge, he would usually sit at the table involving the largest number of women and would begin telling his stories. The women loved them because they were usually charming and often funny.

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History tells us that, at the time, Feynman was married to Arline Greenbaum, his high school sweetheart. They were madly in love. Arline fell ill with tuberculosis when she was just twenty-five years old. When Feynman agreed to go to Los Alamos, he took her with him, thinking that the local climate would be good for her. At first, the lab nurses looked after her, but she was later transferred to a sanatorium in Albuquerque, two hours from Los Alamos. Feynman was constantly sneaking out of the lab to go see her and also wrote passionate letters to her. Arline died a month before the bombs were dropped. After Feynman himself passed away, a beautiful letter was found among his documents. He had written it to Arline shortly after her death. A very heavily thumbed piece of paper said: “You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive … You only are left to me. You are real.” In a post script, he adds: “Please excuse my not mailing this—but I don’t know your new address.” Glauber’s last important interaction with Feynman was when he came back from Brazil, some years after the project. Glauber was at Harvard and doing something that people thought was interesting and word reached Feynman, who wanted to hear about it and called Glauber into his office. Feynman jumped up onto the safe, sat cross-legged on top of it and told him to go to the blackboard and explain what he was doing. And so he did! But Glauber never had any very meaningful, searching dialogue with Feynman. Feynman was always busy acting Feynman. He did that with such consistency that people had to believe that there was even some truth to it! In Glauber’s eyes, Feynman was a story unto himself. When asked if there were any colorful people at Los Alamos, he says there was Feynman and there were two thousand others. There were not that many other people who wanted to stand out from the crowd for anything other than scientific wisdom. Lawrence, Compton and Urey Glauber has to say that Ernest Lawrence was the closest, in the things he heard him say, to a real fool at Los Alamos. He hastily adds that it is wrong for him to say such things. He was the director of the Lawrence Laboratory at Berkeley, where the initial work was done on the cyclotron, which he had literally invented. But he was a man given to say extravagant and often stupid things. He got along well with Oppenheimer in the years before the war, but they certainly did not get along very well in the years after it. There was one dramatic evening in 1945 when Oppenheimer had as guest speakers at the weekly colloquium, Ernest Lawrence, Harold Urey

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(who discovered deuterium), and Arthur Compton. They had never had such a group of stellar speakers at Los Alamos as those three. Oppenheimer introduced them. Urey was very conservative in his address. He expressed considerable concern on what they were doing at Los Alamos and worry about the likelihood of its success. Glauber felt his words were altogether reasonable and even impressive. He was followed by Compton, who turned out in later years to be a devotedly religious man. When he addressed the scientists as Los Alamos, Glauber thought he was saying virtually empty things and there wasn’t anything he could take away from his lecture. The final speaker was Ernest Lawrence and the best excuse Glauber could make for the stupid things he said was that they might very well have had too much to drink for dinner. He thought he made somewhat less than no sense and that it was all a little bit of an insult. Wolfgang Pauli Glauber took the unforgettable photograph of Pauli kicking a ball towards the camera, but was only with him in 1950, when he worked in Zurich for some months. Pauli wasn’t odd, he says, but he never meant to be anything less than difficult. He was a bit of a character. Glauber explains that Pauli had been a prodigy who had written a famous book article on relativity theory when he was only about seventeen. He was among the younger of the quantum mechanical pioneers and hence a sort of a child prodigy, but Glauber senses that he never quite got over that. Rudolf Peierls Peierls was one of the early people in quantum mechanics and Glauber owns a slide from 1931 that shows Peierls and Heisenberg and several others, who were on different sides of the project later on. He was a very clever guy, married to a voluble Russian woman who always made tremendous noise when she spoke. Her name was Genia and she was always outspoken and tactless. They were quite a couple. He was a small mousy fellow, and she a somewhat larger woman who always spoke to all the world at once. Peierls was one of the first to work on the atomic project in Britain. He started up in 1939, long before anything was being done in America, on what was called the Tube Alloys project. Glauber doesn’t know whether he was a professor before the war at Birmingham, but he certainly was afterwards,

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where they used to take in assistance of post-doctoral students, whose lives then were completely dominated by Genia. History confirms that Peierls was indeed hired by the University of Birmingham before the war and returned there when it was over. It also confirms that the Tube Alloys project was the world’s first attempt to produce nuclear weapons, carried out by Great Britain and Canada during World War II. Due to its high costs, after a time it was integrated into the Manhattan Project. Norman Ramsey Norman Ramsey was at Harvard with Glauber. People didn’t see a lot of him, the son of a brigadier general who had grown up on military reservations. Glauber doesn’t know if that was the reason why he had previously been at the Radiation Lab at MIT, where he was put in charge of liaison with the Air Force and with the military bases. He was younger than Oppenheimer, who was about 38, so Glauber guesses that Ramsey might have been around about 31. Ramsey had his family with him at the lab. His wife Elinor had a good soprano voice and was one of the only people in the place who could really sing. She was always there, but Norman usually was not. He would be away traveling somewhere to some Air Force base. But the scientists never knew where he was and nobody ever told them. Norman had been one of the best students in New York. He was well spoken of, but he seemed to have this background that made him natural for military liaison. He always managed to keep his relation with all sorts of fields, and hence went on to live several different careers. Erwin Schrödinger Schrödinger was only in Dublin and never came to America again. Glauber claims this was because the various women he lived with made it impossible for him to go to America. Geoffrey I. Taylor The Rayleigh-Taylor instability was relevant for the implosion, which is why G.I. Taylor went to the laboratory. One of the things Glauber learned later about Sir Geoffrey Taylor was a much earlier contribution of his. He performed the first quantum mechanics diffraction experiment. The understanding of the diffraction pattern is built up one quantum at a time, he explains. It is not interference between different

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quanta; it is one quantum interfering with itself, and then another quantum interfering with itself. In other words, a succession of quanta interfering with themselves. Edward Teller Glauber considers Edward Teller to be one of the secondary wave of European scientists rather than one of the prodigal minds who had founded quantum mechanics. He was a Hungarian refugee who fled from Germany into Russia, before he got into America, where he worked on the theories of why stars burn. The first of these was that it was a thermonuclear reaction between heavy hydrogen nuclei. That was his ultimate passion in returning to Los Alamos and from there came his interest in the hydrogen bomb. Victor Weisskopf Glauber saw a great deal of Weisskopf. He was the associate director of the Theoretical Division, who he remembers as being extremely talkative. Glauber uses the German word gemütlich to describe him, which he says is hard to translate but roughly means somebody who is very agreeable, who is everybody’s friend, certainly friendly and considerate. However, Glauber says the great charismatic Viki’s problem was that he got everything wrong, and his lectures were chaos. But he still became somebody who everyone loved, partly in the confidence that he would get everything wrong but it didn’t make any difference. His spirit was usually right, very Viennese. One had the impression that he was thoroughly saturated in culture of every sort, and he especially loved opera. Glauber remembers that by 1936 or 1937, the Russians decided they didn’t trust foreigners and Weisskopf thought it was a pretty good idea to leave. He came to America and found a position in Rochester, New York. Several other refugees who came also found positions in places like Georgia Tech, with the exception of Princeton, which was happy to sign up the stellar figures. However, adds Glauber, the American universities didn’t consume the best of them. Glauber remembers that during the Manhattan Project, some scientists mooted the possibility that an atomic explosion could cause the whole atmosphere to ignite. Weisskopf never thought that. Nobody who was a nuclear physicist with any real experience took that concern seriously. They knew that if you look up in the sky, there are supernovae, stars that are hot and suddenly explode on a different scale entirely. Although the possibilities for things of this sort had never been completely explored, it seemed very unlikely that

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the atmosphere could ignite. The people at Los Alamos thought they knew what happens when neutrons strike nuclei. But fission, the very process that started the whole business, was a complete surprise and shock. So, the question certainly arose as to whether there could be any other such thing, and that maybe there was something they had missed. There were at least a few people who were worried about that. Glauber is unaware as to whether Weisskopf was instrumental in the Vatican exonerating Galileo Galilei in late October 1992. Glauber does know of others who were working on it, and thinks it very likely that they would have appealed to Viki to come in. Robert Wilson Glauber remembers Wilson as a very colorful guy. He had been at Princeton and had a very interesting story. Unlike almost everyone else, he had been sent by the Army to Harvard to supervise the breakup of the cyclotron in order to ship it out to Los Alamos. But the story was kept up that somehow the cyclotron was being shipped to an army organization called the St. Louis Medical People. Of course, says Glauber, it never went there. It was a cover-up. The pieces went all to Los Alamos and were put back together there. Wilson was the head of the group. But Wilson didn’t only supervise. That particular cyclotron group consisted of bright young guys who had a very original way of doing things and a good sense of humor. For example, one of the first observations many of the scientists made in getting to Los Alamos was that there was no way of getting a haircut. There was no barber in the place. So, Bob Wilson ordered a barber chair, one of these great steel barber chairs, and that was delivered to the cyclotron group, right next to the cyclotron. The scientists learned how to give one another haircuts and somehow the message got to General Groves and within a couple of months he had two army barbers assigned to the place. Finally, they put up a barber shop not far from the Fuller Lodge, on the middle of the Mesa, just next to the building called the Technical PX. The Europeans Glauber also remembers many of the Europeans who were at Los Alamos and says that very few of them were incompetent. In fact, they were all pretty much more skilled than the average American working in the project. They had a lot of untalented Americans.

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All in all, there was never a large number of Brits at Los Alamos, but Glauber found them quite effective. All of them, as he recollects, were talented people. They didn’t send anybody that distance that wasn’t pretty talented. Nevertheless, Groves still said there were too many. Several British theorists and experimenters were associated with the project briefly, although there were none at the very beginning. He would say that all through 1943 they were not there, and began to arrive in sprinklings in 1944. Some of them were first assigned to other projects in America and then came eventually to Los Alamos. He doesn’t know who it was who gave the Brits the admission ticket. But in 1939, they had already started considering chain reactions and the possibility of a bomb. That project had been going on for two years, so they really had a record that the Americans didn’t have. At a point at which it was very difficult to recruit people for Los Alamos, they finally decided to bring Peierls and the several people who would work around him including Klaus Fuchs. Glauber got to know all of them. Another of the names he remembers is Paul Dirac, who wrote some papers for them, although he finds it hard to imagine that they had any value. And there was another fellow named Tony Skyrme. Glauber thought he sounded like a disembodied spirit when he spoke in a very Etonian British accent. James Tuck was another Briton. He was an experimenter who contributed greatly to the project. Jim was quite a character and the only person who had any question about him was General Groves. There were also half a dozen notorious Hungarians: Szilárd, Teller, von Neumann, Wigner, and the expert aerodynamicist von Karman. Glauber also mentions a very ‘harmless’ Hungarian called Lazlo Tisza who was partly responsible for the two fluid theory of the behavior of liquid helium. And he also recalls a Swiss chap who went back to his own country and became part of the Swiss atomic project. History tells us that he meant Felix Bloch who, unhappy with the atmosphere at Los Alamos, left for Harvard. Later, in 1952 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Edward Purcell for their work on nuclear magnetic precision measurements. He was the first Director-General of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, based in Switzerland. Glauber describes some of the European scientists as a collection of many bright guys who just missed the boat as it arrived in quantum mechanics. The initial miracle in quantum mechanics, he says, was due to Louis de Broglie123 , a Bourbon prince whose understanding of quantum mechanics not only began with the notion that you could fit waves around Bohr’s orbits but,

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Glauber claims, also ended with that because he understood almost nothing that followed. The Americans Glauber says that there was a generation of very brilliant Europeans and other wise young guys around 1925 and perhaps through 1928. But then there was the generation that came just after. All of the Americans who knew anything about quantum mechanics were in that one. There were two or three in the east, and there was Oppenheimer in the west. They all had missed the first wave of accomplishment and were doing what they could to make their contributions in the secondary wave. Oppenheimer was certainly one of those. At Harvard, they had John Van Vleck124 . A lot of them were spotted here and there at American colleges and research centers, but Glauber feels it’s important to note that they were not the people who had produced the original miracles.

Appendix C: Los Alamos Organization Chart

The organizational structure of the Manhattan Project progressively increased in complexity over time. This section shows the organization chart of the laboratory from August 1944 to August 1945 as compiled by the American Institute of Physics125 . It illustrates not only its magnitude and operations but also how the work and the different units were divided. Many of the characters that appear in Glauber’s account can be found in it. This chart only lists the names of the unit leaders. However, there were around two thousand employees working in them. The complete Manhattan Project had a larger and more complex organization, but here we only show the people who were working at Los Alamos. Laboratory Laboratory Director: Robert J. Oppenheimer Associate Laboratory Director: Enrico Fermi Associate Laboratory Director: Captain William Parsons, United States Navy Theoretical Division Division Leader: Hans Bethe Group T-1 (Implosion Dynamics): Rudolf E. Peierls Group T-2 (Diffusion Theory): Robert Serber

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Group T-3 (Efficiency Theory): Victor F. Weisskopf Group T-4 (Diffusion Problems): Richard P. Feynman Group T-5 (Computations): Donald Flanders Group T-6 (IBM Computations), September 1944: Stanley Frankel, Eldred Nelson Group T-7 (Damage), November 1944: Joseph Hirschfelder Group T-8 (Composite Weapon), May 1945: George Placzek Research Division Division Leader: Robert R. Wilson Group R-1 (Cyclotron): Robert R. Wilson Group R-2 (Electrostatic Generator): John H. Williams Group R-3 (D-D): John H. Manley Group R-4 (Radioactivity): Emilio G. Segrè F Division (This division came in and out of the project) Division Leader: Enrico Fermi Group F-1 (Super and General Theory): Edward Teller Group F-2 (Water Boiler): L. D. P. King Group F-3 (Super Experimentation): Egon Bretscher Group F-4 (Fission Studies): Herbert L. Anderson Ordnance Division Group O-1 (Gun): Francis Birch Group O-2 (Delivery): Norman F. Ramsey Group O-3 (Fuse Development): Robert Brode Group O-4 (Engineering): George Galloway Group O-5 (Calculations): Joseph O. Hirschfelder Group O-6 (Water Delivery and Exterior Ballistics): Maurice M. Shapiro Group O-8 (Procurement): Lieutenant Colonel Robert W. Lockridge Weapon Physics Division Division Leader: Robert F. Bacher Group G-1 (Critical Assemblies): Otto R. Frisch

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Group G-2 (X-Ray Method): Lyman G. Parratt Group G-3 (Magnetic Method): Edwin M. McMillan Group G-4 (Electronics): William A. Higinbotham Group G-5 (Betatron Method): Seth H. Neddermeyer Group G-6 (RaLa Method): Bruno B. Rossi Group G-7 (Electric Detonators): Luis W. Álvarez Group G-8 (Electric Method): Darol K. Froman Group G-10 (Initiator Group): Charles L. Critchfield Group G-11 (Optics): Julian E. Mack Explosives Division Division Leader: George B. Kistiakowsky Group X-1 (Implosion Research): Commander Norris E. Bradbury Group X-1A (Photography with Flash X-Rays), dissolved May 1945: Kenneth I. Greisen Group X-1B (Terminal Observations): Henry Linschitz Group X-1C (Flash Photography): Walter S. Koski Group X-1D (Rotating Prism Camera): Joseph G. Hoffman Group X-1E (Charge Inspection): Gerold H. Tenney Group X-2 (Development, Engineering, and Tests), dissolved in March 1945: Kenneth T. Bainbridge Group X-2A (Engineering), renamed X-2 in March 1945: Robert W. Henderson Group X-2B (High Explosives), dissolved in March 1945: Lieutenant William F. Schaffer Jr. Group X-2C (Test Measurements): Lewis Fussell Jr. Group X-3 (Explosives Development and Production): Captain Jerome O. Ackerman Group X-3A (Experimental Section): Lieutenant John D. Hopper Group X-3B (Special Research Problems): David Gurinsky Group X-4 (Model Design, Engineering Service, and Consulting): Earl Long Group X-5 (Detonating Circuit): Lewis Fussell Jr. Group X-6 (Assembly and Assembly Tests): Commander Norris E. Bradbury Group X-7 (Detonator Developments): Kenneth I. Greisen

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Chemistry and Metallurgy Division Division Leader: Joseph W. Kennedy Associate Division Leader (Metallurgy): Cyril S. Smith Group CM-1 (Service Group): Robert H. Dunlap Group CM-2 (Heat Treatment and Metallography): Frederick G. Stroke Group CM-4 (Radiochemistry): Lindsay Helmholtz Group CM-5 (Plutonium Purification): Glifford S. Garner Group CM-6 (High-Vacuum Research): Samuel I. Weissman Group CM-7 (Miscellaneous Metallurgy): Alan U. Seybolt Group CM-8 (Plutonium Metallurgy): Eric Jette Group CM-9 (Analysis): Herbert A. Potratz Group CM-11 (Uranium Metallurgy): Shad Marshall Group CM-12 (Health): William H. Hinch Group CM-13 (DP Site): Joseph E. Burke Group CM-14 (RaLa Chemistry): Gerhardt Friedlander Group CM-15 (Polonium): Iral B. Johns Group CM-16 (Uranium Chemistry): Edward Richers Project Trinity Head: Kenneth Bainbridge Consultant (Structures): Roy W. Carlson Consultant (Meteorology): P. E. Church Consultant (Physics): Enrico Fermi Consultant (Damage): Joseph Hirschfelder Consultant (Safety): Stanley Kershaw Consultant (Earth Shock): Lewis Don Leet Consultant (Blast and Shock): William Penney Consultant (Physics): Victor F. Weisskopf Consultant: Philip B. Moon Assembly: Commander Norris E. Bradbury and George B. Kistiakowsky Group TR-1 (Services): John H. Williams Group TR-2 (Blast and Shock): John H. Manley Group TR-3 (Measurements), renamed Physics: Robert R. Wilson Group TR-4 (Meteorology): John M. Hubbard Group TR-5 (Spectrographic and Photographic Measurements): Julian E. Mack Group TR-6 (Airborne Measurements), renamed Air Blast: Bernard Waldman

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Group TR-7 (Medical): Louis H. Hempelmann Project Alberta Project Alberta prepared atomic weapons for combat use with the following key personnel on Tinian Island Officer-in-Charge: Captain William S. Parsons Scientific and Technical Deputy: Norman F. Ramsey Operations Officer and Military Alternate: Commander Frederick L. Ashworth Fat Man Assembly Team Leader: Roger S. Warner Jr. Little Boy Assembly Team Leader: A. Francis Birch Fusing Team Leader: Edward B. Doll Electrical Detonator Team Leader: Lieutenant Commander E. Stevenson Pit Team Leaders: Philip Morrison y Charles P. Baker Observation Team Leaders: Luis W. Álvarez and Bernard Waldman Aircraft Ordnance Team Leader: Sheldon H. Dike Special Consultants: Robert Serber, William G. Penney and Captain James F. Nolan Other members of Los Alamos in the 1943–1946 period included: Samuel K. Allison Harold M. Agnew Herbert L- Anderson Henry H. Barschall Benjamin Bederson Kenneth Case Owen Chamberlain Robert F. Christy Dale R. Corson Edward C. Creutz Martin Deutsch Robert B. Duffield Anthony P. French Otto R. Frisch Roy J. Glauber Robert E. Marshak Boyce D. McDaniel

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Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky Leonard M. Rieser Leonard I. Schiff Anthony L. Turkevich James L. Tuck Jerome B. Wiesner Jerrold R. Zacharias

Epilogue

Apart from the work meetings we had with Roy to talk about the events reported in this book, we also met him on more leisurely occasions. We invited him to enjoy a typical Spanish omelet for dinner in Singapore and to Italian pasta in Cambridge. We went to dinner at his favorite Chinese restaurant in Boston and also to some wonderful restaurants in Barcelona and Singapore to savor delicious Mediterranean and Asian cuisine. We were always joined by his partner, Atholie Rosett an elegant, charming lady, who invited us to her home in Cambridge. We also got to meet several of Roy’s friends. We talked about a lot of things. They were both cultured, well-traveled people, with genuine interest in the world. They had a lot of energy and a huge will to live. The last time we saw them they were over 90 years old. Although they had certain mobility difficulties due to their age, they insisted on fending for themselves. They refused all help in getting around, which we admire. They were both tall and walked by themselves, as upright as they could. If we are fortunate enough to live so long, we hope we can do so with such dignity too. One of the funniest and most recurring themes of those conversations was the beginning of their courtship. They met at the funeral of a mutual friend. Roy chuckled that it’s at funerals that people of their generation meet. They called themselves boyfriend and girlfriend. She would sometimes she refer to him as “my other significant”, whereupon Glauber would narrow his eyes,

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between shy and embarrassed, and immediately add that the nickname was rather corny, not to say ridiculous. Atholie was the widow of a prestigious New York psychiatrist, Henry Rosett, who had specialized in addiction. They had two daughters together, Amy and Jane. Atholie was an interior designer before retiring, while Roy was still single. They hit it off immediately. They started to have long phone conversations and going out to dinner together now and again. And then came the Nobel Prize. And here there’s another anecdote that they were both pleased to recall. The award organizers asked Roy who he would like to invite to the ceremony and the gala banquet afterwards. His family was invited, of course; his two children (Jeffrey and Valerie), along with their spouses and his grandchildren. But the question was specifically asking about his partner. At that time, he was only talking to Atholie occasionally, but he didn’t want to go alone. He wanted to take a partner, so he promised them he would send an answer later. He thought about it for a little while, but he didn’t have much time to waste. He called Atholie and said that he had a proposition, but asked her not to take it the wrong way. He didn’t want to offend her, nor hurt her honor. He asked if she would like to go with him to receive the Nobel Prize in Stockholm. Atholie understood that this would mean staying in the same hotel room, so she understandably replied that she would need time to think about it. At Stockholm airport, they received the terrible news that the suitcase containing Atholie’s ball gown had been lost. Unless it got there quickly, she wouldn’t have anything to wear to the banquet scheduled for two days later! Time was running out and Atholie was looking into other options, when the suitcase finally appeared. She had to iron the dress quickly. Glauber was the oldest of the awardees and as such accepted his Nobel Prize on behalf of all the laureates126 . The date was 8 December 2005 and the venue was the Aula Magna at the University of Stockholm. Glauber was introduced by Professor Sune Svanberg, the chairman of the Nobel Committee in Physics and the same man who had called him that morning to tell him he had won the prize. Glauber’s lecture on the quantum theory of light lasted 45 min. Two days later, on December 10127 , the traditional banquet took place in the Blue Hall of Stockholm City Hall. This solemn event is held on that day to commemorate the death of Alfred Nobel128 . Some 1300 guests attend, including the Swedish Royal Family. There is a very strict dress code, and the menu is kept secret until the occasion, but it is of the most exquisite quality, selected by means of a tender.

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It is customary for members of the Swedish Royal Family to accompany the Physics laureates as they enter the hall and then to sit next to them. King Carl Gustaf led Atholie by the arm and Roy was with Crown Princess Victoria. The dinner conversation between the King and Atholie revolved around the former’s hobbies, cars and motorcycles. Roy was chatting jovially about a number of different topics with the Princess and Queen Silvia, who was sitting on his other side. They were fabulous talkers, he remembers. And this was the exceptional beginning to the courtship between Roy and Atholie, both in their eighties. It was a prize from the start! From then on, she accompanied him on his countless trips to every corner of the globe. In one of our long conversations, sitting in the living room of Atholie’s home in the oldest part of Cambridge, just over 100 yards from Harvard University, Roy began to talk to us about aspects of his personal life. Atholie nudged him to speak. It was evident that they had been arguing about the need to discuss these things, and that may be why he spoke so slowly and shyly. At first, we were a little embarrassed. We didn’t want intrude on their privacy and we certainly didn’t need him to make any confessions about matters that he might consider intimate. We had heard a few things in the corridors of the universities, from some colleagues and friends. But we respectfully never asked about personal affairs. We were only interested in his professional career. As Glauber told us his story, we viewed it as a gesture of friendship. We felt honored. So, when we were putting ideas together for the book, we initially opted not to tell this part. We would keep it to ourselves. Roy passed away while we were writing the draft, and some time later, we decided that we should tell this part, because it also helps to show that he was not just a scientist, but also a real man. In any case, he had already spoken in public about several of those events. The story goes that after his ex-wife, Cynthia Rich, had given up custody of their children, Glauber had raised them alone, and doing that had been a very important part of his life. Their history began in 1957, when they started dating. They were married in 1960, the same year that Rich began teaching writing classes at Harvard. The Glaubers bought a house the following year. In 1963, the couple welcomed their first son, Jeffrey. Roy was already 38 years old and viewed the child’s arrival as a kind of rebirth. Seven years later, in 1970, they had a daughter, Valerie. Roy believed that their family life was a peaceful one. However, Cynthia started to take an increasingly more critical attitude towards different political and social issues, such as the Vietnam War and the feminist movement,

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and their marriage suffered as a result of her militant activism. Those were troubled times, Roy says. There was even division at Harvard. And one day in 1971, Cynthia came home with the idea of a separation. She had found a legal disposition whereby she would be able to unilaterally claim for divorce and retain custody of the children. Glauber was devastated by the news. He had no choice but to find a new home. Coming to a divorce settlement would be a difficult matter that took some time to resolve. Months later, Glauber tells us, Cynthia started realizing that her life as a mother was interfering with her work as a peace activist. As a result, she stopped pursuing custody of the children so intently, and Roy took care of them full-time. In 1974, Cynthia met social worker and fellow feminist militant Barbara McDonald129 , and they fell in love. They would be together for the next twenty-six years, until McDonald’s death. Together they continued working for different social causes and wrote a famous book on the aging of women from a feminist perspective130 . Cynthia, by now an avowed lesbian, would frequently demonstrate outside the gates of Harvard and people would rush to inform Roy about it. Meanwhile, Roy tells us that he was making breakfast for their children. Being a full-time father meant that for a few years he was unable to dedicate much time to science. He didn’t have time to do research, or to publish any more articles with his results. He describes how that detracted from his career, and feels a certain shame. It is as if he were begging forgiveness because he thinks he could probably have done more, made a greater contribution. But he couldn’t, or didn’t know how to. He had to work his scientific duties around taking care of the children. Glauber received the Nobel Prize in 2005 for work he was doing while married to Cynthia in 1964. Forty years after he published it. And he spent all that time afterwards wondering whether or not he could have done more. All the same, Roy still believed that his later contributions were more than worthy. And above all, he got a huge amount of pleasure out of the experience of being a father to his children. That is something he says he would not have traded for anything in the world, certainly not for a bunch of research articles. It had been worth it to watch his children grow, to see them being educated and then forming their own families. The truth is, he’d say, when he looked at his five grandchildren, he wished he could raise them the way he had raised his own children. He secretly yearned for that opportunity. Our final meetings with Roy were in Barcelona. The second-to-last time we saw him was on the occasion of a tribute to him at the Institut de Ciències Fotòniques (ICFO). We served as cicerones to him and Atholie. We would pick them up from the hotel next to the beach, take them to the event

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and then treat them to delicious local cuisine. We also took them to visit the Sagrada Familia and to admire the beautiful Romanesque exhibits at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. It was then that we noticed that Roy’s memory was starting to fail him. The mind of the ‘Good Observer’, as he had defined himself, was now beginning to fade. We knew the end was coming. Some time later, he returned to the city. He no longer remembered us. His brain had definitely said goodbye to us. We like to think that before Roy’s brilliant intellect disappeared into the unknown, we were able to leave the traces of it here. In this very place.

Notes

1. Roy J. Glauber passed away when we were writing this book. We have chosen to remain faithful to his voice and to our relationship with him at the time of the events. 2. Enrico Fermi (Rome, Italy, 29 September 1901—Chicago, Illinois, USA, 28 November 1954) was a naturalized American physicist born in Italy, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938. He is considered one of the great scientists twentieth century. He was the director of the Metallurgical Laboratory (or Met Lab) at the University of Chicago, where he built the experimental reactor that produced the first ever artificial chain reaction, known as Chicago Pile-1. From the summer of 1944, Fermi served as associate director and consultant at Los Alamos. 3. Otto Hahn (Frankfurt am Main, Prussia, 8 March 1879–Gottingen, West Germany, 28 July 1968) was a German chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944 for his discovery of the fission of heavy nuclei. He is known as the father of nuclear chemistry. 4. Lise Meitner (Vienna, Austria, 7 November 1878–Cambridge, United Kingdom, 27 October 1968) was a naturalized Swedish physicist born in Austria who was one of the pioneers of atomic energy. Meitner explained, for the first time, the nuclear fission of uranium in terms of theoretical physics in an article published in the journal Nature. For four years she worked alongside Otto Hahn on the matter. The Nobel Prize, however, was awarded to Hahn alone at the end of the war. Today, this is agreed to be one of the greatest injustices ever committed

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. I. Latorre and M. T. Soto-Sanfiel, The Last Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29984-1

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6.

7.

8.

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by the Nobel committee towards women scientists. According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, Meitner refused to work for the Manhattan Project, saying “I will have nothing to do with a bomb.” Friedrich Wilhelm Strassmann (Bopard, 22 February 1902–Mainz, Germany, 22 April 1980) also worked with Hahn. He remained in Germany during the war. He was not anti-Semitic. He sheltered a Jewish friend in his home, risking his own life and that of his family. Otto Robert Frisch (Vienna, Austria, 1 October 1904–Cambridge, United Kingdom, 22 September 1979) was a British naturalized Austrian physicist who inherited his love for physics from his aunt Lise Meitner. He was working in Denmark initially. Together with Meitner, he advanced the first theoretical explanation of nuclear fission and its experimental detection. Later, in England in 1940, together with his colleague Rudolf Peierls, he produced the so-called Frisch–Peierls Memorandum, which described the process by which an atomic explosion is generated. This report accelerated British and American efforts to build the bomb. Three years later, he joined the Manhattan Project as the leader of the Critical Assemblies group, where he was commissioned to determine the exact amount of enriched uranium required to create the critical mass of uranium which would sustain a nuclear chain reaction. Leó Szilárd (Budapest, Hungary, 11 February 1898–La Jolla, California, USA, 30 May 1964) was a Hungarian physicist associated with the Manhattan Project. He is recognized as the first scientist to belligerently warn of the possibility of creating nuclear weapons based on theoretical knowledge of the chain reaction. In 1939 he wrote, in consultation with fellow Hungarian physicists Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner, a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the matter, which was signed by Albert Einstein. Later, he worked with Enrico Fermi in the creation of the first nuclear reactor in Chicago and the first nuclear chain reaction, in 1942. He actively advocated that atomic bombs should not be used against human targets and proposed, together with other scientists, that their existence should only be demonstrated to the enemy in order to force a surrender, but this was ignored by the authorities. After the war, he fought intensely against the creation of thermonuclear weapons and defended ethical-pacifist positions. From then on, he worked in biology, a field in which he was involved in the first cloning of human cells. Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Hyde Park, New York, 30 January 1882– Warm Springs, Georgia, USA, 12 April 1945) had taken office as President of the United States on 4 April 1933 and was reelected for

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10.

11.

12.

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the first time in 1936. Roosevelt was reelected President in the subsequent elections of 1940 and 1944. He died suddenly in 1945, a few days before Hitler. Eugene Paul Wigner (Budapest, Austro-Hungarian Empire, 17 November 1902–Princeton, New Jersey, USA, 1 January 1995) was a naturalized American physicist born in Austria, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles. He played a central role in the early stages of the project as one of the authors of the EinsteinSzilárd letter (1939) to President Roosevelt. On the Manhattan Project he led a group that designed the production of nuclear reactors. He was present at the first chain reaction performed in Chicago. After the war, he continued to work at the Chicago Met Lab. Edward Teller (Budapest, Austro-Hungarian Empire, 15 January 1908– Stanford, California, USA, 9 September 2003) was a naturalized American physicist associated with the Manhattan Project and the development of the hydrogen bomb. In fact, he is known as father of the H-bomb. After the war, he had a long scientific career that was essentially associated to weapons development. Vannevar Bush (Everett, Massachusetts, 11 March 1890–Belmont, Massachusetts, USA, 30 June 1974) was a scientist, inventor and university professor at MIT, who played a major political role in the construction of atomic bombs. Before the Manhattan Project, he invented an analog computer called a differential analyzer, which had an impact in areas of engineering and chemistry. Later, he invented the Memex, a storage device for recordings, documents and communications that is considered a precursor to the internet and hypertext. Sir Rudolf Peierls (Berlin, Germany, 5 June 1907–Oxford, United Kingdom, 19 September 1995) was a German-born British physicist of Jewish origin. He was one of the biggest names in the British nuclear program, who also collaborated with the Manhattan Project. Peierls was responsible for recruiting Klaus Fuchs, who turned out to be a Soviet spy working in the Theoretical Division at Los Alamos. He was the coauthor, together with Otto Frisch, of the Frisch-Peierls Memorandum, which described the process by which an atomic explosion is generated. Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac (Bristol, United Kingdom, 8 August 1902– Tallahassee, Florida, USA, 20 October 1984), known as P. A. M. Dirac, was a British physicist who was the founder of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. He is especially famous for his 1928 relativistic equation of motion for the wave function of the electron, which

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17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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led to his predictions on the existence of antiparticles. In 1933, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with the Austrian Erwin Schrödinger for his contribution to atomic theory. He is considered one of the most important physicists of the twentieth century. Newman was John von Neumann’s code name. Dorothy McKibbin (Kansas City, Missouri, 12 December 1897– Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, 17 December 1995) was the lady who welcomed new recruits to the Manhattan Project. She was known as both ‘the gatekeeper’ and ‘the first lady’ of Los Alamos. She ran the office that received the many scientists who came to Santa Fe to visit the laboratory. She worked there from 1943 until her retirement in 1963. She remained linked to Los Alamos, working in community affairs. John von Neumann (Budapest, Hungary, 28 December 1903–Washington DC, USA, 8 February 1957) was a naturalized American scientist born in Hungary. He had exceptional talents in a variety of disciplines, but was particularly outstanding in physics, mathematics, and computing. In 1933, he joined the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He was part of the Manhattan Project from 1943 where he worked on the concept and design of the explosive lenses used for the ‘implosion’ bomb. John W. Calkin (New Rochelle, New York, 11 October 1909–Westhampton, New York, USA, 5 August 1964) was an American mathematician specializing in functional analysis. His best known contribution is Calkin algebra. At Los Alamos he worked alongside von Neumann. David Daniel Kaminsky (New York, 18 January 1911–Los Angeles, California, USA, 3 March 1987) was a multifaceted artist, pilot, cook and philanthropist who achieved notable media fame. He received the French Legion award for his work as a UNICEF ambassador. It was recorded in 1942. Also from 1942. Published in 1944 with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Ira Gershwin. Released in the United States in 1944. Released in the United States in 1944 and directed by Clarence Brown. Julius Robert Oppenheimer (New York, 22 April 1904–Princeton, New Jersey, USA, 18 February 1967) was a physicist, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project and known as the Father of the Atomic Bomb. He is one of the main protagonists of all the events that Glauber relates in this account.

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25. His online obituary explains that he lived 91 years, from 19 September 1922 to 2 January 2014. He became interested in chess from a very young age. He beat future World Champion Bobby Fisher when the latter was only nine years old. While at Los Alamos he became interested in magic. When the project ended, he went to Harvard, became a traveler, lived in various countries, distributed amethysts and emeralds, created a garden with plants from all around the world, and became fond of playing the shakuhachi flute. Quite a character, indeed. 26. Wolfgang Ernest Pauli (Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire, 25 April 1900–Zurich, Switzerland, 15 December 1958) was an Austrian theoretical physicist, considered one of the founding fathers of quantum mechanics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945 for the so-called Pauli Exclusion Principle. His work is essential for understanding the structure of matter. 27. This is considered the oldest newspaper in the Santa Fe region. It was first published on 28 November 1849. Today it is a general interest daily newspaper available online at https://www.santafenewmexican.com/ 28. Robert Rathbun Wilson (Frontier, Wyoming, 4 March 1914–Ithaca, New York, USA, 16 January 2000) was a physicist, sculptor, and architect. He was the leader of the Cyclotron Group and its research division on the Manhattan Project. After the bombs were dropped, he played an active role in creating the Association of Los Alamos Scientists, which advocated for the international control of nuclear weapons and drafted the letter that Oppenheimer took to Secretary of War Henry Stimson. He went to Harvard, but soon left for Cornell University, where he was director of its Laboratory of Nuclear Studies and worked on the construction of four synchrotrons. In 1967, he was the first director of the National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). 29. Victor Frederick Weisskopf (Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire, 19 September 1908 – Newton, Massachusetts, USA, 22 April 2002) was a renowned theoretical physicist who was Group Leader of the Theoretical Division of the Manhattan Project. After the war, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was later Director General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). Weisskopf made major scientific contributions for which he received several scientific awards such as the Max Planck Medal, the Wolf Prize, and the Enrico Fermi Award. In addition to being a great teacher, he was a highly active campaigner against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and for the reconciliation of science and faith.

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30. Harry S. Truman (Lamar, Missouri, 8 May 1884 – Kansas City, Missouri, USA, 26 December 1972). 31. It is accepted that Adolf Hitler committed suicide together with his wife, Eva Braun, on 30 April 1945, in a bunker in Berlin (Germany). 32. Robert Fox Bacher (Loudonville, Ohio, 31 August 1905–Montecito, California, USA, 18 November 2004) was a nuclear physicist remembered, in addition to his scientific work, for an essential role in reducing the military status of Los Alamos. He was the leader of the Gadget (G) Division, which designed the implosion bomb. He helped to assemble the plutonium core of the bomb used in the Trinity test. Bacher was later an advisor to the United Nations, a member of the Atomic Energy Commission and held senior positions at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). 33. Its official name was the Diffusion Theory, IBM Calculations, and Experiments Group. 34. Robert Serber (Philadelphia, 14 March 1909–New York, USA, 1 June 1997) was a prominent physicist recruited by Robert Oppenheimer to the Manhattan Project. One of his tasks was to explain the basic principles and objectives of the project to new arrivals in the form of five talks on the knowledge necessary to build an atomic bomb. Those talks were turned by Edward Condon into written notes that became known as the Los Alamos Primer. Serber led the group of scientists who inspected Hiroshima after the bomb. After Oppenheimer died, Serber married his widow, Kitty. 35. Stanley Phillips Frankel (Los Angeles, USA, 1919–May, 1978) was an American physicist recruited to the Manhattan Project by Oppenheimer. He had been a student of his at the University of California. He became a renowned computer expert in the 1950s and 1960s. 36. Eldred C. Nelson (Starbuck, Minnesota, 14 August 1917–San Diego, California, USA, 18 October 2008) was an American physicist recruited to the Manhattan Project by Robert Oppenheimer. He led a group that was part of the Theoretical Division. After the war, he dropped out of science and worked in the private sector. 37. William R. Rarità (Bordeaux, France, 21 March 1907–Berkeley, California, ISA, 3 July 1999) was a physicist of American nationality. He had been a student of Robert Oppenheimer’s at the University of Berkeley and was recruited by him to the Manhattan Project. After the war, he was a professor of physics at Brooklyn College and a visiting researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

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38. Chaim Richmann (Tomaszow-Lubelski, Poland, 18 January 1918– Santa Cruz, California, USA, 23 March 2017) was an American physicist of Polish origin. He came to the US when he was 12 years old, fleeing the Nazis. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Berkeley, where he met Robert Oppenheimer, and was recruited by him to Los Alamos laboratory. After the war, he worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where he specialized in the use of radiation in the treatment of cancer. Upon retirement, he taught physics at San Jose State University and Cabrillo Community College. 39. Kenneth M. Case (New York, 23 September 1923–La Jolla, California, USA, 1 February 2016) was an undergraduate student when he entered Los Alamos as a researcher. He obtained his bachelor’s degree at the end of the war in 1945 and his PhD in 1948, both from Harvard University. He later worked at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Michigan, and was emeritus professor of physics at Rockefeller University. He specialized in applied mathematics and theoretical physics. His work on neutron transport was highly appreciated in the scientific community. 40. Hans Albrecht Bethe (Strasbourg, Germany, 2 July 1906–Ithaca, New York, USA, 6 March 2005) was a brilliant naturalized American physicist born in Germany. He received the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, especially his discoveries concerning the energy production in stars. 41. He is surely referring to Peter Lax (Budapest, Hungary, 1 May 1926). According to the Atomic Heritage Foundation archives, Lax joined the project as a computer operator, although he later worked in high-level mathematics. At the end of the war, he obtained his PhD and embarked on an outstanding scientific career that led to him winning the Wolf Prize and the Abel Prize, the latter considered to effectively be the Nobel Prize in Mathematics. 42. He means the scientist of Hungarian origin, John George Kemeny (Budapest, Hungary, 31 May 1926–Lebanon, New Hampshire, USA, 26 December 1992). Kemeny was president of Dartmouth College, where he introduced the use of computers to education. Throughout his career, he did much to promote the use of computers in everyday life. 43. In fact, Fermi and Stanisław Ulam developed an analog calculation machine together, called the FERMIAC. 44. See the archives of the Atomic Heritage Foundation.

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45. See Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project by Caroline Herzenberg and Ruth Howes. 46. Donald Alexander Flanders (Pawtucket, Rhode Island, 14 August 1900–Chicago, Illinois, USA, 27 June 1958) was a mathematician. His computer group was known as T-5 and was part of the Theoretical Division led by Hans Bethe. After the war, he was investigated by the Atomic Energy Commission for his ties to people connected to communist associations. 47. Ralph Edward Flanders (Barnet, Vermont, 28 September 1880–Springfield, Vermont, USA, 19 February 1970) was a Republican senator for the State of Vermont. He is especially remembered for filing a motion of censure in 1954 against then-Senator Joseph McCarthy and his witch hunt. 48. See The Atomic Bomb (Michael Blow). 49. Caroline Herzenberg and Ruth Howes, op. cit. 50. William Alfred Higinbotham (Bridgeport, Connecticut, 25 October 1910–Gainesville, Georgia, USA, 10 November 1994) was a physicist who ran the laboratory’s electronics group that developed parts of the ignition mechanism for the bomb. The Trinity test had a profound psychological effect on him, leading to his intense activism against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Towards the end of his career, he worked at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is credited with creating the first interactive computer video game: Tennis for Two. 51. Arthur Holly Compton (Wooster, Ohio, 10 September 1892–Berkeley, California, USA, 15 March 1962) was a physicist raised as a Mennonite who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927 for his studies on X-rays and “his discovery of the effect named after him.” He directed the US National Academy of Sciences, where the potential use of atomic energy for military purposes was examined. He also directed the Chicago Met Lab at the University of Chicago that produced the first nuclear chain reaction. He was part of the committee that in 1945 decided to use atomic energy against Japan. 52. Edward Uhler Condon (Alamogordo, New Mexico, 2 March 1902– Boulder, Colorado, USA, 23 March 1974) earned his PhD at the University of Berkeley (California) and became an associate professor at Princeton University. In 1943, he was recruited by Robert Oppenheimer to work at Los Alamos. Since 1940 he had been associate director of research for the Westinghouse Electric Company, where he worked in nuclear physics, solid state physics, radar and a system to

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53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58.

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separate the nucleus from uranium. In 1940, he presented his Nimatron machine at the New York World Fair, considered the first fully developed computer game. Glauber was offered the chance to visit the Westinghouse plant in Pittsburgh. There was a Van de Graaf accelerator, managed by Condon, although Glauber could not understand why they had an accelerator there! See Martin J. Sherwin A World Destroyed: The Atomic Bomb and the Grand Alliance (1977). Also known as the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA). It was created by the US House of Representatives in 1938 to investigate pro-communist activities. In the 1940s and 1950s, this committee conducted numerous investigations, essentially of artists and people in the entertainment industry. Its actions produced, in addition to various trials, a blacklist of people who refused to respond to its allegations. It was highly criticized for violating rights enshrined in the US Constitution and was dissolved in 1975. According to Hans Bethe in a description by Richard Rhodes, op. cit. As described by Lenore Fine and Jesse Remington in their 1972 book The Corps of Engineers: Construction in the United States. General Thomas Francis Farrell (Brunswick, New York, 3 December 1891–Reno, Nevada, USA, 11 April 1967) was the deputy commander general of the Manhattan Project from December 1944. He served as executive officer to General Groves, who selected him. He was at the Trinity test alongside Robert Oppenheimer. He also ran the commission to observe the launch of the bombs in Japan and their effects. Robert Frederick Christy (Vancouver, Canada, 14 May 1916–Pasadena, California, USA, 30 October 2012) was a theoretical physicist of Canadian origin and a US national and one of the last survivors of the project. Robert Oppenheimer supervised his doctoral thesis at the University of Berkeley. He began working for the Manhattan Project at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory under the direction of Enrico Fermi. Oppenheimer invited him to join the group of theorists led by Hans Bethe at Los Alamos. After the war, he worked at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and eventually became its president. He was also one of the scientists who publicly called for atmospheric nuclear testing to stop. Christy was popular for refusing to shake hands with Edward Teller after his statement during the Oppenheimer trial. They had shared a house in Chicago a few years earlier.

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59. Frank Friedman Oppenheimer (New York, 4 August 1912–Sausalito, California, USA, 3 February 1985) was the younger brother of Robert Oppenheimer, at whose behest he studied physics and became a particle scientist. He received his Ph.D. from Caltech and arrived at Los Alamos in 1943, where he worked on instrumentation for the Trinity test site. After the war, he became a professor of physics at the University of Minnesota. In 1947, during his brother’s trial, he confessed that he had been a member of the Communist Party and was forced to resign from his job. He was unable to find another teaching post anywhere in the United States, so he retired to a cattle ranch in Colorado. In 1957, he returned to teaching and researching particle physics at the University of Colorado. From then on, he worked on the development of methods and techniques for the pedagogical teaching of science and created the Exploratorium, a museum of art, science and technology in San Francisco. 60. See obituaries by Dylan Loeb McClain in the New York Times at: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/obituaries/roy-j-glauber-dead. html, and by Fritz Haake and Maciej Lewenstein in Nature: https:// www.nature.com/articles/s41566-019-0420-8 61. Known as Frank or Franklin Yang, his original name was Chen-Ning Yang. He was born on 1 October 1922 in Hefei (China). He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 for his contribution to parity laws which led to important discoveries regarding the elementary particle. Between 1946 and 1948 he was Edward Teller’s doctoral student at the University of Chicago, and an assistant to Enrico Fermi. In 1949, he went to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he was given a permanent teaching position in 1952. In 1965 he was named Albert Einstein Professor of Physics at Stony Brook University. 62. Richard Feynman was drawn to the cultures of South America. Between 1951 and 1952, he spent several months as a visiting researcher at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas (Brazilian Center for Physical Research) in Rio de Janeiro, where he developed an interest in the music, particularly percussion, and language of the country. 63. Katherine Vissering Oppenheimer (Kitty; Recklinghausen, Germany, 8 August 1910–Panama City, Panamá, 27 October 1972), née Katherine Puning. She was the wife of Robert Oppenheimer, a botanist, and the mother of their two children, Peter and Katherine (Toni). Years after Oppenheimer’s death, Kitty married another Manhattan Project scientist, Robert Serber, who Glauber had answered directly to in the lab. Kitty’s first marriage was to the activist Joe Dallet. Together with him,

Notes

64.

65.

66.

67.

68.

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she became very involved in political activities in defense of communism. This connection was used by Oppenheimer’s enemies when he was put to trial after the war. John W. Raper (McArthur, Ohio, 20 February 1870–Pueblo, Colorado, USA, 12 December 1950) was a journalist on the Cleveland Press from 1899. He started out as a drama critic, and in 1900 began to write a very popular daily column. He was a member of the so-called Soviet Table, at the City Club, where he frequently gave talks. He retired in 1947. Samuel Dashiell Hammett (Santa Maria County, Massachusetts, 27 May 1894–Manhattan, New York, USA, 10 January 1961) was a writer of detective novels and short stories, a screenwriter and a leftwing political activist. He used several pseudonyms, including women’s names. His work was highly influential on cinema and he was such an acclaimed exponent of crime novels that the Hammett Prize at the Black Week of Gijon bears his name. Associated with leftist movements, he was in prison for half a year for refusing to expose McCarthy to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He had a long, on–off love affair with the famous playwright Lillian Hellman. Emilio Gino Segrè (Tivoli, Italy, 1 February 1905–Lafayette, California, USA, 22 April 1989) was an Italian physicist who won the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physics, together with Owen Chamberlain, for obtaining conclusive evidence of the existence of antiprotons. Segrè was recruited for the Manhattan Project by Oppenheimer. He led the radioactivity group (P5 ) that measured the radioactivity of different products of fission and also calculated the amount of enriched isotopes in different uranium samples. During the Trinity test, he measured the amount of gamma radiation. After the war, he returned to the University of Berkeley. Glenn Theodore Seaborg (Ishpeming, Michigan, 9 April 1912– Lafayette, California, USA, 25 February 1999) was an American scientist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951 for identifying, synthesizing and describing ten transuranium elements. His work on the Manhattan Project was related to the process of extracting the plutonium used in the second bomb. After the war, he was the leader of the US Atomic Energy Commission, where he campaigned for the control of nuclear weapons. Seth Henry Neddermeyer (Richmond, Michigan, 6 September 1907– Seattle, Washington, USA, 29 January 1988) was an American physicist, known for discovering the muon and leading the creation of

160

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70.

71.

72. 73.

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the implosion nuclear bomb. He was signed up for the Manhattan Project by Oppenheimer. Neddermeyer proposed an implosion method based on the use of very high explosives to compress an amount of radioactive plutonium until it reached a critical density. Oppenheimer doubted that this implosion method would work. Nevertheless, he appointed Neddermeyer as head of the implosion experimentation group, although in 1944, he asked George Kistiakowsky to take over all the implosion work as associate leader and demoted Neddermeyer to senior technical advisor. All the same, it was Neddermeyer’s implosion design that was used in the Trinity test and in the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. James Bryant Conant (Dorchester, Massachusetts, 26 March 1893– Hanover, New Hampshire, USA, 11 February 1978) was president of Harvard for twenty years (1933–1953). He was one of the VIPs invited to attend the Trinity test, and was part of the interim committee that advised President Harry Truman on the use of atomic bombs. After the war, he was on the Atomic Energy Commission, where he advised against continuing with the development of the hydrogen bomb. After his term as president of Harvard, he became the first American ambassador to East Germany. Richard Chace Tolman (Newton, Massachusetts, 4 March 1881– Pasadena, California, 5 September 1948) was a prominent physicist who worked on subjects related to mathematics and chemistry. In 1938, he published the book that Glauber mentions, The Principles of Statistical Mechanics, which was a treatise on the application of statistical mechanics to quantum and classical systems that was one of the essential reference works on the subject. Emil Julius Klaus Fuchs (Russelsheim, now Germany, 19 December 1911–Berlin, Germany, 28 January 1988). He arrived in England from Germany in 1933 (Glauber gets the year wrong). He was a physicist on the Manhattan Project who was found guilty of passing information to the Soviet Union. During his time at Los Alamos he worked in the Theoretical Division under Hans Bethe’s direction. Harry Gold, born Henrich Golodnitsky (Bern, Switzerland, 11 December 1910–Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, 28 August 1972). Frederick de Hoffmann (Vienna, Austria, 8 July 1924–La Jolla, California, USA, 4 October 1989) was an Austrian physicist who emigrated to the USA in 1948. He obtained his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees from Harvard. The supervisor of his doctoral thesis was the same as Glauber’s, Julian Schwinger. On the Manhattan Project he

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74.

75.

76.

77.

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worked with Edward Teller in the development of the hydrogen bomb. After the war, he was in different organizations linked to atomic energy and biology. In fact, he was an activist in defense of the peaceful use of atomic energy. For the last eighteen years of his career he was the president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, in San Diego, California. Theodore Alvin Hall (New York, 20 October 1925–Cambridge, United Kingdom, 1 November 1999) was one of the youngest scientists on the Manhattan Project. After the war, he returned to the University of Chicago, where he completed a Master’s degree and then his PhD. After working for two research institutes, he moved to the University of Cambridge, England, where he continued his work on radiology applied to biological matters. Bruno Benedetto Rossi (Venice, Italy, 13 April 1905–Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 21 November 1993) was a Jewish physicist forced to emigrate to Denmark, where he worked with Niels Bohr. He later transferred to the University of Chicago and worked alongside Enrico Fermi. In 1943, when he was a professor at Cornell University, he received an invitation from Hans Bethe to work on the Manhattan Project, where he was the leader of the ‘Detector Group’ that developed the equipment to observe gamma radiation in the Trinity test. After the war, he was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Sir Joseph Rotblat (Warsaw, Poland, 4 November 1908–London, United Kingdom, 31 August 2005) received his Ph.D. from the University of Warsaw in 1938, after which he went to the University of Liverpool on a scholarship, temporarily leaving his wife behind, who ended up in the Warsaw Ghetto after the Nazi invasion and was killed. To help combat Nazism, Rotblat joined the British atomic project and the Manhattan Project. However, when he learned of the US interest in demonstrating its arms superiority over the Soviet Union, he abandoned these missions. His scientific contributions were not significant, but he is highly recognized for his work as a peace activist. Paul Olum (Binghamton, New York, 16 August 1918–Sharon, Massachusetts, USA, 19 January 2001) was an American scientist who began his career as a physicist, although he later specialized in mathematics. This change in his career was due to the fact that, compared with his partner Richard Feynman, he had little to contribute to physics. After the war, he obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He worked at different colleges and research centers in the USA,

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79. 80. 81. 82.

83.

84.

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and became president of the University of Oregon. He campaigned for greater control of nuclear weapons and world peace, and also for the termination of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Isidor Isaac Rabi was a Polish-born American physicist (Rymanów, 29 August 1898–Manhattan, New York, USA, 11 January 1988). He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his resonance method for recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei. Magnetic resonance imaging, used in medicine, is based on Rabi’s work. He made essential contributions to the applications of lasers, atomic clocks and radar. He also worked on radar development as director of the radiation laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission and a founding member of the Brookhaven and CERN laboratories. Marie Skłodowska Curie (Warsaw, Poland, 7 November 1867–Passy, France, 4 July 1934). Pierre Curie (Paris, France, 15 May 1859–19 April 1906). Haroutune Krikor Daghlian Jr. (Waterbury, Colorado, USA, 4 May 1921–Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA, 15 September 1945). Louis Alexander Slotin (Winnipeg, Canada, 1 December 1910–Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA, 30 May 1946) was a physicist and chemist who, like Harry Daghlian, accidentally triggered fission and exposed himself to the bomb core. He died nine days later. Luis Walter Álvarez (San Francisco, California, 13 June 1911–Berkeley, California, USA, 1 September 1988) was an experimental physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 for his decisive contributions to elementary particle physics, in particular the discovery of a large number of resonance states, made possible through the use of a hydrogen bubble chamber. Together with his son, he is credited with the well-known hypothesis about the disappearance of the dinosaurs due to an asteroid colliding with the Earth. He worked in the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago on the Chicago Pile-2. He also helped design instruments for the aerial detection of nuclear reactors to determine whether the Germans had an atomic program. In 1944, he moved to Los Alamos, where he was in charge of implosion tests. He observed the Trinity test from a bomber plane and the bombing of Hiroshima from the Great Artiste. The Battle of Britain was the German air campaign between July and October 1940 over the United Kingdom and the English Channel. Considered the largest air battle in history, it was instigated by Adolf Hitler to subdue the United Kingdom after the surrender of France,

Notes

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86.

87.

88.

89. 90.

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encouraged by the manifest neutrality of the United States and the inferiority of the Soviet army. The Germans applied bombing strategies designed in World War I, but the UK refused to yield. The British had radar on their aircraft, which greatly helped them to inflict the first major defeat on Germany in World War II. William George Penney (Gibraltar, 24 June 1909–East Hendred, United Kingdom, 3 March 1991) was a mathematician and physicist who formed part of the British delegation in Los Alamos. He initially studied collisions and shock waves for the British Navy, but in 1943 he was assigned to the secret Tube Alloys project, in which the Canadians and British joined forces to develop nuclear weapons. A year later, he was appointed head of the British delegation at Los Alamos. James Franck (Hamburg, 26 August 1882–Göttingen, Germany, 21 May 1964) was a naturalized American physicist and chemist. In 1925 he received, together with Gustav Hertz, the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery of the laws governing the impact of an electron upon an atom. He worked in the Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, where he was director of the Chemistry Division. After the war, Franck worked on understanding the mechanisms of photosynthesis. William Leonard Laurence (Salantai, Lithuania, 7 March 1880– Mallorca, Spain, 19 March 1977) was a science journalist who wrote for the New York Times. He is famed for having coined the term ‘Atomic Age’ and won the Pulitzer Prize twice. Henry DeWolf Smyth (known as Harry Smyth) Clinton, New York, 1 May 1898–Princeton, New Jersey, USA, 11 September 1986) was an American physicist who advised the Manhattan Project on methods for enriching the first samples of uranium 235. He was associate director of the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. After the war, he was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission, the US representative on the International Atomic Energy Agency, and a Professor at Princeton University. Henry Lewis Stimson (New York, 21 September 1867–West Hills, New York, USA, 20 October 1951). Julian Seymour Schwinger (New York, 12 February 1918–Los Angeles, California, USA, 16 July 1994) was a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for his work in quantum electrodynamics. He shared the award with Richard Feynman and Shinichiro Tomonaga. Recognized as one of the great theoretical physicists of the twentieth century, he worked under Oppenheimer at the University of Berkeley. Later, he was hired by Purdue University and worked with I. I. Rabi at

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92.

93.

94.

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the MIT radioactivity laboratory. After the war, he worked at Harvard and UCLA. Martin Deutsch (Vienna, Austria 29 January 1917–Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 16 August 2002) was an American physicist of Austrian origin who worked as a professor at the MIT. He is best remembered for discovering positronium. At Los Alamos he worked alongside Emilio Segrè and Victor Weisskopf. Helene Deutsch (Przemysl, Austro-Hungarian Empire, 9 October 1884–Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 29 March 1982) was a renowned psychoanalyst of Central European origin, and a naturalized US citizen. She was the founder of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and a disciple of Sigmund Freud. She is remembered as the first woman to specialize in female psychoanalysis, which she practiced at the University of Cambridge. She wrote several essays on sexuality, psychoanalysis, adolescence, neurosis, personality, and myths. Philip Morrison (Somerville, New Jersey, 7 November 1915– Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 22 April 2005) was an American physicist with a Ph.D. from the University of Berkeley, under the supervision of Oppenheimer. He first joined the Manhattan Project from the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago and later went to Los Alamos. The core of the Trinity bomb traveled in his suitcase from Los Alamos to the test site. On Tinian Island, he supervised the assembly of the Fat Man bomb. After the launch, he was part of the committee that went into Hiroshima to gauge the damage. He became an activist against the spread of nuclear weapons and changed his area of research interest to astrophysics, a field in which he wrote the first proposals for the detection of extraterrestrial life. He was a prolific science popularizer who published several books on a wide range subjects, including the Cold War and the arms race. Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge (Cooperstone, New York, 27 July 1904– Lexington, Massachusetts, USA, 14 July 1996). During the Manhattan Project, he was the director of the Trinity test, which he described afterwards as “a foul and awesome display.” He also uttered the famous words that Oppenheimer claimed was the most accurate statement about the test: “Now we are all sons of bitches.” From that moment on, Bainbridge advocated vehemently for the eradication of nuclear weapons tests and enforced civil control of such arms. In 1950, along with twelve other renowned scientists, he pleaded to President Harry S. Truman that the United States should never be the first country to use the hydrogen bomb.

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95. Norman Foster Ramsey Jr. (Washington, 7 August 1915–Wayland, Massachusetts, USA, 4 November 2011) was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in 1989 for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks. On the Manhattan Project he led the group to integrate the design and transport of weapons. He participated in the Fat Man bomb assembly on Tinian Island. In 1947 he accepted a position at Harvard, where he worked for the next 40 years. 96. Louis Rosen (Manhattan, New York, 10 June 1918–Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, 15 August 2009) was a physicist considered the father of the Los Alamos Meson Physics Facility. Like Glauber, he was recruited to the Manhattan Project while still a student, where he worked on implosion technologies assigned to the group led by Edwin McMillan. 97. Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss (Charleston, West Virginia, 31 January 1986–Brandy Station, Virginia, USA, 21 January 1974). 98. Patrick Maynard Stuart Blackett (London, England, 18 November 1897–13 July 1974) was a Nobel Prize-winning physicist in 1948 for his development of the Wilson cloud chamber method, and his discoveries therewith in the fields of nuclear physics and cosmic radiation. He worked at various British universities. He was declared leftist and called for the cancellation of the British nuclear weapons program around 1940. After winning the Nobel Prize, he was appointed head of the Physics Department of Imperial College London. The building that houses this department was named after him. 99. Ernest Orlando Lawrence (Canton, South Dakota, 8 August 1901–Palo Alto, California, USA, 27 August 1958) was a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for having invented the cyclotron. He worked for the Manhattan Project on the separation of the uranium isotope. He founded the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. He recommended that Groves consider Robert Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project. After the war, he promoted so-called Big Science research conducted with large budgets and machinery. 100. Jean Frances Tatlock (Ann Arbor, Michigan, 21 February 1914–San Francisco, California, USA, 4 January 1944). 101. Joseph Raymond McCarthy (Appleton, Wisconsin, 14 November 1908–Bethesda, Maryland, USA, 2 May 1957) was a politician who became a Republican senator and served as such for a decade, until his death. He was a major figure at the height of the Cold War, when all kinds of actions were carried out to prevent communism from

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103.

104.

105. 106.

Notes

expanding in the United States. He led the ‘witch hunt’ of American politicians, artists and showbiz figures for their alleged relationships with left-wing organizations, communism, and sex crimes. McCarthy died of liver difficulties stemming from his addiction to alcohol. Joseph Nye Welch (Primghar, Iowa, 22 October 1890–Cape Cod, Massachusetts, USA, 6 October 1960) was a lawyer who acted as chief adviser to the US Army during the McCarthy hearings, where he famously snapped at McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” David Joseph Bohm (Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, USA, 20 December 1917–London, England, 27 October 1992) was a highly reputed physicist who made contributions to both quantum mechanics and neuropsychology. He worked for Oppenheimer at Berkeley, who proposed him as part of the Manhattan Project, but Bohm was not cleared by Groves because of his communist activism. During the war, Bohm continued to do research at Berkeley. He became an assistant professor at Princeton after the war, where he worked with Albert Einstein. He was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, before which refused to reveal information about his colleagues. He would be fired from Princeton and at Oppenheimer’s suggestion, he left the USA. He was first in Brazil and later in Israel and England, where he retired. Martin Dies Jr. (Colorado, Texas, 5 November 1901–Lufkin, Texas, USA, 14 November 1972) was a Democratic politician, a member of the House of Representatives of Congress. Together with Samuel Dickstein, he created the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1938 and was its first director. The committee went through different phases and had different names until it was abolished by Congress. In its early days it was known colloquially as the Dies Committee and its purpose was to combat the subversive elements of the extreme left and right in the country. Jacqueline Gordon, resident of San Juan Capistrano (California, USA). She passed away in August 2019. Charles Hard Townes (Greenville, 28 July 1915–Berkeley, California, USA, 27 January 2015) was an American physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1964 for his work on the maser (the amplification of microwave for stimulated emission of radiation). Lasers were originally called optical masers, although the term quickly fell out of use.

Notes

167

107. Leonard Mandel (Berlin, Germany, 9 May 1927–Pittsford, New York, USA, 9 February 2001) was a physicist specializing in optics. He spent most of his career associated with the University of Rochester, where he was from 1964 onwards and was named Lee DuBridge Professor Emeritus of Physics and Optics. 108. Emil Wolf (Prague, Czechoslovakia, 30 July 1922–Rochester, New York, USA, 2 June 2018) was a naturalized American physicist and optical specialist who was associated with the University of Rochester from 1959 until the end of his career. 109. Robert Hanbury Brown (Aruvankadu, India, 31 August 1916– Andover, Hampshire, United Kingdom, 16 January 2002) was a physicist and astronomer who made contributions to radar and radio astronomy. 110. Richard Quintin Twiss (Simla, India, 24 August 1924–Sydney, Australia, 20 May 2005) was a British astronomer, pioneer of radio astronomy and interferometry. 111. Edward Mills Purcell (Taylorville, Illinois, 30 August 1912–Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 7 March 1997) was a physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1952 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance in liquids and solids. 112. Samuel Abraham Goudsmit (The Hague, Netherlands, 11 July 1902– Reno, Nevada, USA, 4 December 1978) was an American physicist of Dutch origin who was recognized for jointly proposing the concept of electron spin with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925. 113. George Eugene Uhlenbeck (Batavia, Dutch East Indies, 6 December 1900–Boulder, Colorado, USA, 31 October 1988) was an American physicist of Dutch origin. See previous footnote. 114. George L. Trigg was an American physicist associated with the University of Oregon. He was the editor of Physical Review Letters between 1962 and 1989. He died on 24 June 2014, in Pennington, New Jersey, USA. 115. Alfred Kastler (Guebwiller, Germany (now France), 3 May 1902– Bandol, France, 7 January 1984) received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1966 for the discovery and development of optical methods for studying Hertzian resonances in atoms. 116. Robert Eugene Marshak (New York, USA, 11 October 1916–Cancun, Mexico, 23 December 1992). Obtained his Ph.D. with Hans Bethe in 1939 at Cornell. He applied his knowledge of fusion in stellar processes to the shock waves at high temperatures in the implosion bomb.

168

Notes

117. A Swedish physics professor (Trollhättan, 1943) associated with the Faculty of Engineering of that university. 118. Kenneth Geddes Wilson (Waltham, Massachusetts, 8 June 1936–Saco, Maine, USA, 15 June 2013) was a physicist who won the 1982 Nobel Prize in Physics for his theory for critical phenomena in connection with phase transitions. 119. He is referring to the President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Brookline, Massachusetts, 29 May 1917–Dallas, Texas, USA, 22 November 1963) and his brother Robert Francis Kennedy (Brookline, Massachusetts, 20 November 1925–Los Angeles, California, USA, 6 June 1968). Due to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency. 120. Lyndon Baines Johnson (Stonewall, Texas, USA, 27 August 1908– 22 January 1973) assumed the presidency of the United States in 1961, replacing the assassinated John F. Kennedy. In 1963, he was democratically elected, and remained in office until 1969. 121. Aage Niels Bohr (Copenhagen, Denmark, 19 June 1922–9 September 2009). 122. Louis Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie, VII Duke of Broglie (Dieppe, 15 August 1892–Louveciennes, France, 19 March 1987) was a physicist of aristocratic origin, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1929 for his contribution to the description of the wave behavior of matter. He is considered one of the founders of quantum mechanics. De Broglie’s approach to the topic was philosophical in nature, which is why Glauber says he didn’t understand anything else later. Derived knowledge required an in-depth understanding of calculus. 123. John Hasbrouck Van Vleck (Middleton, Connecticut, 13 March 1899– Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 27 October 1980) was a scientist who won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his contribution to knowledge of the behavior of electrons in magnetic solids. In 1942, he was part of the group of eight theoretical physicists that examined the potential to create nuclear weapons and whose results were the basis for the Manhattan Project. In 1943, he was part of the committee that reviewed the designs of both bombs. He worked at Harvard University between 1939 and 1969. 124. American Institute of Physics. See: https://history.aip.org/phn/manhat tan-project.html.

Notes

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125. The video of his full speech appears on the Nobel website at: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2005/glauber/lecture/. The full transcribed text of his presentation is available at: https://www.nob elprize.org/uploads/2018/06/glauber-lecture.pdf. 126. The one for that year can be viewed at: https://www.nobelprize.org/cer emonies/nobel-banquet-menu-2005/. 127. Alfred Nobel (Stockholm, Sweden, 21 October 1833–San Remo, Italy, 10 December 1896). 128. Barbara Anne McDonald (Pomona, California, USA, 11 September 1913–15 June 2000). 129. See the book by McDonald and Rich: Look me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging, and Ageism.

References1

Books 1 Bethe, H. A. (1991). The road from Los Alamos. American Institute of Physics. 2 Bernstein, B. J. (1995, April 1). The atomic bombings reconsidered. Foreign affairs. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/asia/1995-01-01/atomicbombings-reconsidered 3 Bird, K., & Sherwin, M. J. (2006). American prometheus: The triumph and tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Vintage Books. 4 Brown, G. E., & Lee, S. (2009). Hans Albrecht Bethe (1905–2005). A biographical memoir. National Academy of Science. 5 Blow, M. (2015). The atomic bomb. New Word City. shorturl.at/bdnR7 6 Eisenhower, D. D. (1963). Mandate for change, 1953–1956: The White House years. Doubleday & Company. 7 Fine, L., & Remington, J. A. (1972). The corps of engineers: Construction in the United States. United States Army Center of Military History. 8 Feynman, R. P., & Leighton, R. (1985). Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman. Adventures of a curious character as told to Ralph Leighton. W.W. Norton. 9 Frisch, O. (1979). What little i remember. Cambridge University Press. 10 Glauber, R. J. (2006). Quantum theory of optical coherence: Selected papers and lectures. Wiley-UCH. 1 There has been a huge amount of literature generated around the construction of the first atomic bomb. In this small section of references, we only include some of the most emblematic titles, references and books mentioned in the main text.

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. I. Latorre and M. T. Soto-Sanfiel, The Last Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29984-1

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References

11 Glauber, R. J. (2006). Autobiography. In K. Grandin (ed.), The Nobel prizes 2005. Nobel Foundation. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2005/gla uber/biographical 12 Gleick, J. (1992). Genius: The life and science of Richard Feynman. Little, Brown & Company. 13 Hammett, D. (1934). The thin man. Alfred A. Knof. 14 Herzenberg, C. L., & Howes Heges, R. (2003). Their day in the sun: Women of the Manhattan project. Temple University Press. 15 Hernández-Fernández, A. (2018). Fermi: La Energía Nuclear: la Fisión Hace la Fuerza. National Geographic. RBA. 16 Kimball Smith, A., & Weiner, C. (ed.) (1980). Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and recollections. Stanford University Press. 17 McDonald, B., & Rich, C. (1983). Look me in the eye: Old women, aging, and ageism. Spinsters Ink. 18 Pais, A. (1982). Subtle is the lord: The science and the life of Albert Einstein. Oxford University Press. 19 Pais, A. (1986). Inward bound: Of matter and forces in the physical world. Oxford Press. 20 Pais, A. (1991). Niels Bohr’s times: In physics, philosophy and polity. Clarendon Press. 21 Raper, J. (1944, March 13). Forbidden city. Uncle Sam’s Mystery town directed by 2nd Einstein. The Cleveland Press. 22 Rhodes, R. (2012). The making of the atomic bomb. The 25th anniversary edition. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. 23 Serber, R. (ed.) (1992). The Los Alamos Primer: The First lectures on how to build an atomic bomb. University of California Press. 24 Sherwin, M. J. (1977). A world destroyed: The Atomic bomb and the grand alliance. Vintage Books. 25 Smyth, H. D. (1945). The official report on the development of the atomic bomb under the Auspices of the United States Government. Princeton University Press. https://www.atomicarchive.com/resources/documents/smyth-report/index.html 26 Teller, E., & Shoolery. J. (2001). Memoirs: A twentieth-century journey in science and politics. Perseus Publishing. 27 Wang, J. (1992). Science, security, and the cold war: The case of E.U. condon. Isis, 83(2), 238–269.

Websites 28 29 30 31

American Institute of Physics. https://www.aip.org/ Atomic Heritage Foundation. https://www.atomicheritage.org Harvard Gazette. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/ Los Alamos Primer (original). https://fas.org/sgp/othergov/doe/lanl/docs1/003 49710.pdf

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32 New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com 33 Nobel Prize. https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2005/glauber/biographi cal/ 34 United States Census Bureau. https://www.census.gov/en.html 35 Wikipedia. https://wikipedia.org

Index

A

Abelson, Philip H. 50 Abrahams, Marc 120 Adams, John 44 Adler, Sam 107 Alvarez, Luis W. 67 Andrew Sisters 19 Aronson, Aron 107 Aronson, Bobby 108

Bohr, Niels 28, 61, 127, 135 Born, Max 116 Bradner, Hugh 15 Bradner, Marge 15 Braun, Eva 154 Brown, Clarence 152 Brueckner, Keith A. 84 Burroughs, William S. 26 Bush, Vannevar 11, 55 Byrnes, James F. 69

B

Bacher, Jean Dow 33 Bacher, Robert 27, 82 Bainbridge, Kenneth T. 90 Barnum, P. T. 49 Becquerel, Henri 66 Bethe, Hans 2, 28, 30, 32, 34, 65, 88, 121 Beverly 118 Blackett, Patrick M. S. 95 Bloch, Felix 135 Blow, Michael 156 Bohm, David J. 103 Bohr, Aage 127

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. I. Latorre and M. T. Soto-Sanfiel, The Last Voice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29984-1

C

Calkin, John W. 13 Capon, Laura 10 Capra, Frank 19 Case, Kenneth M. 28, 33 Chadwick, Sir James 61 Christy, Robert F. 39, 54 Churchill, Winston L. S. 83 Cline, Eduard F. 19 Compton, Arthur H. 36, 80, 131 Conant, James B. 55, 82 Condon, Edward U. 36 Crosby, John 26

175

176

Index

Curie, Marie 66 Curie, Pierre 66 D

Daghlian, Haroutune Krikor 162 Daghlian, Harry K. 66 Dallet, Joe 158 De Broglie, Louis Victor Pierre Raymond 135 Defoe, Daniel 34 De Hoffmann, Frederic 58 Deutsch, Helene 90 Deutsch, Martin 90 Dewey, Thomas E. 24 Dies, Martin 103 Dirac, Paul Adrien Maurice 11, 57, 135 E

Einstein, Albert 22, 93, 128 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 69 Enola Gay 70 F

Farrel, Thomas F. 39 Fergusson, Francis 41 Fermi, Enrico 9, 22, 33, 44, 49, 58, 65 Feynman, Richard 2, 17, 32, 34, 42, 114, 130 Fine, Leonore 157 Fisher, Bobby 153 Flanders, Donald ("Moll") 34 Flanders, Ralph E. 34 Fox, Felicia 105 Frankel, Stanley 28, 32 Franck, James 69, 80 Frisch, Otto 10, 138 Fritz, Otto 28 Fuchs, Klaus 56, 135

G

Gell-Mann, Murray 114 Gershwin, George 34 Gershwin, Ira 152 Glauber, Emanuel 105 Glauber Fleishman, Valerie 40 Glauber, Jacqueline 106 Glauber, Jeffrey M. 40, 144 Glauber, Valerie 144 Gloderger, Marvin 84 Godard, Jean-Luc 43 Gold, Harry 57 Gordon, Jacqueline 166 Goudsmit, Samuel A. 111 Grant, Cary 19 Greenbaum, Arline 130 Greenglass, David 56 Groves, Leslie R. 26, 29, 35, 49, 58, 70, 76, 79, 96, 134 Gustaf, King Carl XVI 145

H

Haake, Fritz 158 Hahn, Otto 10 Hall, Edward T. 26 Hall, Theodore 57 Hammett, Dashiell 46 Hanbury Brown, Robert 110, 113 Handy, Thomas T. 70 Harrison, George L. 82 Hayworth, Rita 19 Heisenberg, Werner 131 Higinbotham, Willy 35 Hitler, Adolf 25 Hughes, Donald J. 69

I

Imrie, Matthew 23

J

Jameson, Elinor 132

Index

Johnson, Edwin C. 82 Johnson, Lyndon B. 81, 99, 122 Joliot-Curie, Irène 66 Joliot-Curie, Jean Frédéric 66

K

Kaminsky, David Daniel 152 Kastler, Alfred 113 Kaye, Danny 18 Kelly, Gene 19 Kemeny, John G. 155 Kennedy, John F. 99, 122 Kern, Jerome 152 Kesselring, Joseph 19 Kistiakowsky, George 65 Kitty (Katherine Vissering Oppenheimer, née Puning) 43, 100, 158 Kleppner, Dan 119 Koval, George 56

L

Laurence, William 70 Lawrence, Ernest 37, 98, 130 Lax, Peter D. 155 Leighton, Ralph 129 Lewenstein, Maciej 158 Lilienthal, David E. 83 Loy, Myrna 46 Luttinger, Joaquin M. 91

M

MacArthur, Douglas 73 Mandel, Leonard 110, 115 Manley, Kay 33 Marbury, William Jr. 82 Marshak, Robert E. 114 May, Andrew J. 82 Mayers, Dan 19 McCarthy, Joseph Raymond 95, 102, 103

177

McClain, Dylan Loeb 158 McDonald, Barbara 146 McKibbin, Dorothy 13, 27 McMahon, Brien 82 McMillan, Edwin 50 McMillan, Priscilla 101 Meitner, Lise 10, 28 Mellon, Eduard 97 Morrison, Philip 90, 104 Mottelson, Ben R. 128

N

Neddermeyer, Seth H. 52 Nelson, Eldred 28, 32 Neumann, John von 32, 52 Nickson, James J. 69 Nobel, Alfred 144

O

Olum, Paul 63 Oppenheimer, Frank 40, 95 Oppenheimer, J. Robert 27, 30, 31, 35, 43, 54, 64, 68, 75, 80, 84, 86, 89, 93–96, 98, 102, 103, 130, 132, 136 Oppenheimer, Katherine (Toni) 101 Oppenheimer, Peter 101

P

Pascual, Pedro 2 Pauli, Wolfgang E. 91, 131 Peierls, Genia (née Kannegiesse) 132 Peierls, Rudolf 11, 39, 56, 131, 135 Penney, William G. 67 Perkins, Elliott 8 Powell, William 46 Purcell, Edward M. 135

R

Rabi, Isidor I. 64

178

Index

Rabinowitch, Eugene 69 Rainwater, James 128 Ramsey, Elinor 132 Ramsey, Norman 90, 132 Raper, John W. 46, 159 Rarità, William 28 Remington, Jesse 157 Renoir, Jean 43 Rhodes, Richard L. 36 Rich, Cynthia 145 Richman, Chaim 28, 39 Rooney, Mickey 19 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 11, 24, 55, 68 Rosenberg, Julius y Ethel 56 Rosen, Louis 92 Rosett, Atholie 40, 143, 144 Rosett, Henry 144 Rossi, Bruno 58 Rotblat, Joseph 59 Royal, Kenneth 82

Svanberg, Sune 118, 144 Szilard, Leo 11, 69

T

Tatlock, Jean 100 Taylor, Elizabeth 19, 132 Taylor, Geoffrey Ingram 19, 132 Teller, Augusta 33 Teller, Edward 11, 31, 84, 86, 94, 96, 121, 133 Tisza, Lazlo 91, 135 Toleman, Richard C. 55 Townes, Charles H. 110 Trigg, George L. 111 Truman, Harry S. 25, 37, 70, 81, 93 Trytten 8 Tuck, James L. 135 Twiss, Richard Q. 110

U S

Sachs, Alexander 11 Schrödinger, Erwin 132 Schwinger, Julian S. 89, 114 Seaborg, Glenn T. 50, 69 Segrè, Emilio Gino 47, 49 Sellars, Peter 44 Serber, Robert 28, 33, 39, 75 Skyrme, Tony H. R. 135 Slotin, Louis Alexander 66, 162 Smith, Herbert 41 Smyth, Henry 76 Sobell, Morton 56 Sommerlath, Queen Silvia 145 Spaatz, Carl 70 Stalin, Joseph 91, 101 Stearns, Joyce C. 69 Stimson, Henry L. 69, 80 Strassmann, Friedrich Wilhem 150 Strauss, Lewis L. 95, 96 Sudarshan, George 114, 117

Uhlenbeck, George 111 Ulam, Stanislaw 85, 86 Urey, Harold 37, 130

V

Van Vleck, John 136 Victoria, Crown Princess 145 Vidal, E. L. Gore 26 Vidor, Charles 19 von Kármán, Theodore 135 von Neumann, John 2

W

Wallace, Henry A. 55 Watson, Kenneth M. 84 Weinberg, Alvin M. 104 Weisskopf, Victor 133 Welch, Joseph N. 102 Wigner, Eugene Paul 11 Wilson, Kenneth G. 120

Index

Wilson, Robert Tathbun 35, 90, 134 Wolf, Emil 110, 115

Y

Yang, Frank (Chen-Ning) 42

179