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A friend of mine, a fellow theoretical physicist, after seeing Christopher Nolan’s movie Oppenheimer, asked for my take on Los Alamos National Laboratory, which in my private speech I call the Laboratory for the Destruction of Humankind.
Currently, the Laboratory is shifting from the theoretical design of thermonuclear weapons to the production of pits, the grapefruit-sized cores that trigger a thermonuclear bomb.
The Laboratory for the Destruction of Humankind hasn’t produced a certified pit in over a decade. In 2018, Congress passed a law mandating that Los Alamos produce 30 pits a year by 2026. $5 billion has already been spent to overhaul the cramped, aging facilities. The Biden Administration has pumped $4.6 billion into Laboratory for the Destruction of Humankind this fiscal year—a 130 percent budget increase over what the Laboratory received five years ago. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the planned upgrade of nuclear forces would cost a total of $634 billion over the 2021–2030 period. At the Laboratory, nationwide recruiting is underway to increase the workforce, which is currently at a record 17,273.[1]
Los Alamos is not alone. The other eight nuclear powers are scrambling to modernize their arsenals and build new weapons. In this new era of updated nuclear weapons and delivery systems, the Cold War military strategy of MAD remains. Mutual assured destruction (MAD) is the principle of deterrence which posits that a nuclear attack by one superpower on another would be met with an overwhelming nuclear counterattack causing the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender.
Most military analysts believe that MAD leads to tense international relations but a stable global peace; however, MAD does not envision a nuclear power attacking a non-nuclear nation-state, as is the case in Ukraine. If Russia explodes a small nuclear weapon at a high altitude over Ukraine as the first step in the surrender of the Ukraine government, will the United States launch a full-scale nuclear attack on Russia, thereby destroying itself and Russia? I doubt it, for such an act would be irrational. Nuclear deterrence has become more complex and thus more likely to fail.
As far as I can tell, most physicists developing improved nuclear weapons at Laboratory for the Destruction of Humankind are willing cogs in the scientific-military-industrial complex, mindlessly carrying out orders from on high. That was not the case with the old-timers from the Manhattan Project.
Six months before I left the Laboratory, I met John Manley at a small dinner party. He was Oppenheimer’s right-hand man in planning and staffing the Laboratory. Manley and Oppenheimer could not have been more different. Oppenheimer was tall, with darting, blue eyes, and nervous energy. When he spoke, his long, thin hands were so contorted that his gestures seemed bizarre. Manley was short, easygoing, and exuded ordinariness, a friendly, midwestern charm.
Manley and I ignored the other guests at the dinner party and spent the evening talking together. We both had gotten our degrees in physics from the University of Michigan; his Ph.D. was awarded three years before I was born. Manley kidded me that the University must have gone downhill since it now graduated the likes of me. We talked briefly about the golden era in Ann Arbor, the late Twenties and early Thirties when Michigan’s summer school of physics was one of the international centers for research. Heisenberg, Fermi, Dirac, Teller, Ehrenfest, Oppenheimer, and many other physicists spent part of each summer in Ann Arbor trying to understand the full ramifications of the new quantum physics in an attempt to grasp the deep secrets of nature.
When I began a three-year postdoc at Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the first persons I met was Jim Tuck, an English physicist and one of the principal designers of the conventional high explosive lenses of the plutonium bomb. One day over lunch, Tuck told me, “Oppenheimer killed the idiotic notion prevalent in other laboratories that only a few insiders should know what the work is about and that everyone else should follow them blind. I, an almost unknown scientist, came here and found that I was expected to exchange ideas with men whom I had regarded as names in textbooks. It was a wonderful thing for me; it opened my eyes. Here at Los Alamos, I found a spirit of Athens, of Plato, of an ideal republic. I think that’s why the Manhattan Project scientists remember that golden time with enormous emotion.”[2]
Recently, I heard physicist Murray Peshkin express in a more colloquial way sentiments identical to those of Tuck. “In terms of day-to-day life, Los Alamos was a microcosm of the country, but intensified. By that I mean the following. War paradoxically can be a very happy time for those who are not at risk or who don’t have a loved one who is at risk. War is a time when everybody is needed, unemployment does not exist, when everybody has a role to play, and there is considerably camaraderie. Everybody has this goal to win the war. And so there were minor annoyances like rationing and stuff like that, but it was a time when people really felt good about themselves, and that was true even more so at Los Alamos. We were going to invent the weapon that would end this miserable war. And we did. Now, sixty years later, respected historians tell me that the war was within days of being ended even without that weapon and even without an invasion. But then it didn’t seem that way at all.”[3]
Oppenheimer described wartime Los Alamos as “a remarkable community, inspired by a high sense of mission, of duty and of destiny, coherent, dedicated, and remarkably selfless.”[4]
Many old-timers at the Laboratory, the living fossils from the Manhattan Project, told me with nostalgia in their voices of the golden time developing the first atomic bomb in the most unlikely of places, Los Alamos, New Mexico, located in an isolated, high desert of incredible beauty. Every physicist I knew at Los Alamos felt the allure—dare I say the spiritual attraction—of the New Mexico landscape.
After World War II, Manley was one of the many scientists who left the Hill—the old-timers from the Manhattan Project always called Los Alamos the Hill or the Ranch—only to return several years later to perfect atomic weapons and to develop the hydrogen bomb. I asked Manley what drew him back to Los Alamos.
“I couldn’t find any place more to my liking,” he told me. “I love the climate, the small-town atmosphere, and the free spirit of inquiry at the Lab.”
I did not let Manley’s soft-spoken charm beguile me. I knew he had not given me a straight answer, and furthermore, I knew he would not.
After two years, I pieced together what the old-timers told me. The development of the atomic bomb was an intense community effort carried out under great hardship. Physicists, chemists, and mathematicians worked over sixty hours a week to build the first weapon of mass destruction. Only through the ardent dedication of all would the project succeed. Everyone—scientist, technician, secretary, and manual laborer alike—participated in a moral crusade of a cosmic order against an evil enemy. World Wars I and II and the Cold War were not simply about soldiers, matériel, and the conquest of territory. Those wars created moral meaning and fellowship in a community striving for a lofty common end. I concluded that in Modernity, most persons are isolated individuals, who unbeknownst to themselves thirst for community and for a cause that transcends themselves.
I do not know if my take on Los Alamos accords with Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
[1] See W.J. Hennigan, In the Lab Oppenheimer Built, the U.S. Is Building Nuclear Bomb Cores Again, Time Magazine, (July 24, 2023) and Congressional Budget Office, Projected Costs of U.S. Nuclear Forces, 2021 to 2030.
[2] James Tuck, quoted by Nuel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), p. 186.
[3] Murray Peshkin, “Voices of the Manhattan Project,” The New York Times (Oct. 28, 2018).
[4] J. Robert Oppenheimer, United States Atomic Energy Commission: In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1954), p. 14.
4 Responses
thank you posting your reflections and providing an insight so few people have!
Chris, always good to hear from you. Thanks for your positive comment.
George – It is difficult to imagine a much more controversial issue than the decision to employ the bomb. If the war was close to being over I wonder why the Japanese did not surrender after the first bomb. I truly appreciate your perspective. <
Ron, here are my remarks, not on the Japanese but on the unstoppable American decision to use the bomb.
The moral justification for the Manhattan Project was Nazi Germany which ended on V-E Day, May 8, 1945. By then, however, the development of the atomic bomb had momentum of its own and was out of the control of the scientists who worked on the project. By Trinity, the code name for the test shot of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico on July 16, 1945, the scientific-military-governmental bureaucracy was unstoppable, and the atomic bombing of Japan was inevitable. Four hours after Trinity, the heavy cruiser Indianapolis sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge and out to sea with the gun assembly of Little Boy. On August 6, 1945, Little Boy was dropped, and Hiroshima was destroyed in nine seconds. Three days later, Fat Man, a plutonium weapon, reduced Nagasaki to rubble.
Here is an interesting side note. Four days after delivering to the Tinian Island air base the gun assembly for the atomic bomb to be used for the destruction of Hiroshima, the USS Indianapolis was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sank within twelve minutes, resulting in the greatest single loss of life at sea for the U.S. Navy; only 317 crewmembers survived out of 1,196. Approximately 300 sailors went down with the ship; with no life rafts and only life jackets, most crewmembers died of exposure, dehydration, saltwater poisoning, and shark attacks. Perhaps eighty sailors died from the most shark attacks ever on humans. Robert Shaw, as Quint in the movie Jaws, depicted himself as a survivor of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis and described in a horrifying monologue the massive shark attacks. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9S41Kplsbs.