In the summer of 1942, the oily stench of Pearl Harbor still hung on the wind across the United States. Along with the memory of the devastating attack by the Japanese, there was an aura of uncertainty, fear and even despair throughout the country.

Bataan and Corregidor had fallen in the spring, the cruel Death March had begun and Japanese armies had driven Allied forces from most of the Far East. German troops remained unchecked in Europe and North Africa until November, when they were stopped cold at Stalingrad and thrown back at El Alamein. The full import of the U.S. naval victories in the Coral Sea in May and at Midway in June had yet to be understood.

Meanwhile, a group of the world’s top physicists was meeting in Berkeley, Calif., to consider developing a dramatic means to end the war. They had come to the University of California at the invitation of their colleague, J. Robert Oppenheimer, to discuss the theoretical basis for the creation of an atomic bomb. When they finished their seminar, the course was fixed for a new age in warfare.

The Berkeley group knew that their counterparts in Germany were also engaged in research that could lead to an atomic bomb. Although little was known at the time about the ultimate effect of such a potent untested weapon, there was no doubt in the minds of most of the physicists who met in California that it would be decisive.

As early as 1939, scientists Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein had urged President Franklin D. Roosevelt to begin government-sponsored research to develop an atomic bomb for the United States. They knew that the German effort, led by their former colleague, the brilliant Nobel laureate Werner Heisenberg, could be formidable. As it turned out, Germany was unsuccessful, perhaps because Heisenberg deliberately slowed down the bomb’s development or because Adolf Hitler was more interested in developing rockets than nuclear weapons. But that was in the future, and the only future the physicists in America could see at that point was the mortal danger of a German atomic bomb.

In response to the plea of Einstein and Szilard, FDR initiated a modest program of uranium research. By June 1940, interest in uranium and its properties had increased to the point that the president created a larger organization, the National Defense Research Committee, with a broader scope of activity. He named as director Vannevar Bush, the president of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. The slowly growing effort gained further impetus in mid-1941 from a startling British document code-named the ‘MAUD Report.’ Based on British nuclear research, the report stated that a very small amount of uranium-235 could produce an explosion equivalent to that of several thousand tons of TNT. Roosevelt responded by creating a still larger organization, the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which, directed by Bush, would mobilize scientific resources to create an atomic weapon.

Recruitment of scientists intensified. As evidence of Fascist brutality and anti-Semitism had increased in Europe, the pool of physicists in the United States had been augmented by émigrés such as Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, John von Neumann, Edward Teller and Eugene Wigner. They, like more than 100 of their counterparts, had fled Europe and the Nazi nightmare for the freedom and security of the United States, and they were eager to join the war effort.

With the U.S. entry into World War II, pressure increased for America to take action. In March 1942, Bush wrote FDR a cautiously worded update on the situation: ‘Recent developments indicate…that the [atomic bomb] is more important than I believed when I last spoke to you about it. The stuff [uranium] will apparently be more powerful than we thought, the amount necessary seems to be less, the possibilities of actual production appear more certain.’

Bush went on to say that, while he believed the project would be ‘exceedingly difficult,’ production could begin on the bomb by the summer of 1943. The president replied: ‘I think the whole thing should be pushed not only in regard to development, but also with due regard to time. This is very much of the essence.’

Work on the atomic bomb in the United States now began in earnest. Arthur Holly Compton of the University of Chicago, who was responsible for the design of the weapon, knew the right man to lead that effort to build it. Soon after Bush’s March exchange with FDR, Compton asked J. Robert Oppenheimer, then a professor of physics at both the University of California at Berkeley and Cal Tech, to take charge of the initial steps in designing of the bomb. Recalling his response to Compton, Oppenheimer wrote that work on the bomb ‘at that time consisted of numerous scattered experimental projects. Although I had no administrative experience and was not an experimental physicist, I felt sufficiently informed and challenged by the problem to be glad to accept.’

Few of his colleagues would have suspected that Oppenheimer had the administrative ability to direct a project of the magnitude that Roosevelt had in mind. He had never served as a department head or a dean. Among his fellow physicists he had the reputation of being otherworldly, perhaps because of his interests in poetry and Eastern philosophy. Some thought that his broad intellectual interests had diluted the kind of intense, focused concentration required for the highest level of scientific endeavor. Although known for his incredible ability to understand the complexities of contemporary physics, he had not done the caliber of original work judged to be Nobel material. In fact, he would never win the Nobel Prize. Yet Oppenheimer would confound his critics and meet the greatest technical challenge of his era.

Oppenheimer’s first step on the long road to the development of ‘the gadget,’ as it came to be called, that burst over New Mexico’s Jornada del Muerto (’Journey of Death,’ a stretch of waterless desert) in July 1945, and to the bombs nicknamed Little Boy and Fat Man, which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki that August, was to arrange the Berkeley seminar. He secured two dormer rooms at the top of Le Conte Hall beginning the second week in July 1942, nearly three years to the day before the eventual test of the gadget at the desert site that became known as Trinity. Oppenheimer referred to the study group as ‘our galaxy of luminaries.’

One of the luminaries was Robert Serber, a colleague and close friend of Oppenheimer’s who the following year at the Los Alamos, N.M., research site would reprise the Berkeley seminar in five introductory lectures to the first scientists to join the laboratory. The notes for the lectures, collected as The Los Alamos Primer, would later be required reading for incoming scientists on the project. According to Serber, ‘The purpose of the 1942 summer conference at Berkeley was to discuss the whole state of the theory, to make an independent assessment of whether the bomb was a reasonable possibility, and to assess how well everything was known.’

Oppenheimer’s gathering resembled in microcosm the massive organization of scientific genius that he directed at the laboratory a year later. While different Berkeley attendees would be assigned specific problems or tasks, they also enjoyed a freewheeling exchange of thought and debate. Barriers to communication were anathema to Oppenheimer and his contemporaries. They believed passionately in the uninterrupted flow of ideas and information among individuals and institutions as well as nations. That tenet had been one of the prime reasons for the dramatic advancement of modern physics. It also accounted for the reason the luminaries feared Heisenberg and his colleagues in Germany. They knew what Heisenberg knew.

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