Bomb by Steve Sheinkin Read Free Book Online Page A

engineer by training. He’d just finished managing the construction of the Pentagon, the biggest office building in the world. Groves brought the job in on time and on budget. As a reward he was put in charge of the atomic bomb project.
    â€œMy initial reaction was one of extreme disappointment,” he confessed.
    Groves was a big man, with a big personality—loud, bossy, demanding, quick to criticize. “He had no hesitation in letting others know of his own high opinion of himself,” said one former staff member.
    Another put it simply: “Groves is the biggest S.O.B. I have ever worked for.”
    And yet everyone agreed that to lead a huge project, involving the juggling of dozens of complex tasks, Groves was the right choice.
    â€œIf I can’t do the job,” said Groves, “no one man can.”
    In meetings over the next few days, Groves was given the complete picture. Roosevelt wanted the U.S. Army to take over the atomic bomb project—code named the Manhattan Project, because its first offices were located in Manhattan. It was Groves’s job to make sure the bomb got built quickly, and in complete secrecy. Groves was promoted to general and took command of the Manhattan Project on September 18, 1942.
    â€œI was not happy with the information,” Groves grumbled about what he’d learned so far. “In fact, I was horrified. It seemed as if the whole endeavor was founded on possibilities rather than probabilities. Of theory there was a great deal, of proven knowledge not much.”
    When Groves met with Uranium Committee members in Chicago, they told him it would take somewhere between ten and one thousand pounds of uranium to make an atomic bomb. The wide range infuriated Groves. It would be like trying to plan a wedding, he shouted, and telling the caterer, “We don’t know how many guests are coming—maybe somewhere between ten and a thousand—but see to it that you have the right amount of food for them!”
    Groves knew he could handle the planning and logistics. The problem was, he was going to have to rely on physicists to figure out how to build the bomb. Groves needed to quickly gather a team of the best scientists in the country—and he needed to pick someone to lead it.
    *   *   *
    R OBERT O PPENHEIMER WANTED THE JOB.
    Oppenheimer first met Groves on October 8, on the Berkeley campus. Groves was traveling around the country, meeting people who’d been working on the Uranium Committee. He and Oppenheimer chatted at lunch, then Oppenheimer invited Groves back to his office for a longer talk.
    Oppenheimer laid out his vision for getting the bomb built. Work was being done at universities all over the country, he told Groves. Scientists were wasting time doing the same things on different campuses. And, because of security worries, they weren’t allowed to share information over the phone or by mail. That had to end.
    â€œA major change was called for in the work on the bomb itself,” Oppenheimer later explained. “We needed a central laboratory devoted wholly to this purpose, where people could talk freely with each other.”
    Groves was impressed. “He’s a genius, a real genius,” Groves told a reporter years later. “Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly, I guess there are a few things he doesn’t know about. He doesn’t know anything about sports.”
    Groves also liked the fact that Oppenheimer had been born in the United States. Most of the top physicists in the country were from Europe. That made it nearly impossible to carefully check their backgrounds, to make sure they could be trusted with American secrets.
    But Oppenheimer presented problems, too. “No one with whom I talked showed any great enthusiasm about Oppenheimer as a possible director of the project,” Groves lamented. First of