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​​Oppenheimer on his team

Groueff: But how did you form the nucleus of your team there, the very first men that you recruited? Did you travel personally?

Oppenheimer: Yes.

Groueff: From university to university?

Oppenheimer: I went in the first instance to those who were working on the problem, or on some fringe of the program. We had had a meeting at Berkeley during the summer of ’42 with six or seven quite good theoretical physicists. And most of them agreed with me that they needed a place to get to work. And one of them did not want to come but the other fellow did. There was a center at Stanford, there was a center in Minnesota, there was a center in Princeton, there was a center in Cornell, and a few others but I am not trying to be complete. And I went and visited and saw who would like to come and invited them.

Groueff: Without knowing where the site was?

Oppenheimer: No, at that time, the site was probably vague at first and less vague later. It was always the problem of how much one could say. Of course, I remember visiting Princeton to collect a group of people. And then I started talking to people through at the Radiation Laboratory and the people working on proximity fuses and other projects with some guidance as to who might be spared. And [I spoke to] some people from the Metallurgical Laboratory in Chicago, some people from the radiation laboratory in Berkeley. So it was not trivial to persuade people that this was real but it was not entirely crazy to know where to go to start, you see.

Groueff: You started then from people who had some connection with the Project like Chicago?

Oppenheimer: Right, although I went very soon to the MIT Radiation Laboratory, the Radar Center, to get some really good scientists like Breit and [Luis] Alvarez and [Kenneth] Bainbridge.

Groueff: That is another fantastic thing. It seems to me that in wartime with so many important top-priority projects, one should think that all those scientists, or at least good ones, the top ones will be so much in demand that when you start a new project, to be able to assemble—

Oppenheimer: Well, remember, this was ’43 and the crisis of radar and proximity fuses was over.

Groueff: I see. And also, Chicago group—

Oppenheimer: There was quite a lot that was interesting in this so that people wanted to do it if they could. Some, not all.

Groueff: But you built it so it was not built at once but little by little.

Oppenheimer: No, I think our population doubled every four months.

Groueff: Doubled?

Oppenheimer: So since we were there a couple of years, it was a rather rapid growth.

Groueff: Could you give me a few names of the very first people who came with you to Los Alamos?

Oppenheimer: Yes. John Manley, Robert Wilson, John Williams, [Joseph] Kennedy, [Hans] Bethe very early, [Robert] Serber, [Emil John] Konopinski. I could go on.

Groueff: So you started with them and each one of them had more suggestion for recruitment?

Oppenheimer: Well, the recruitment was in the first instance for more or less my worry. Robert Wilson was there very early and brought [Richard] Dick Feynman, for instance. He was brilliant.

Groueff: Yeah, he is very colorful and gave me a lot of very colorful stories about Pasadena.

Oppenheimer: Well, he was at that time in Princeton.

Groueff: He must have been a kid.

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Oppenheimer: He was.

Groueff: When I saw him now, he looks like a young man—very handsome, movie actor type.

Oppenheimer: Yes. Well, he was not so young and handsome then but he was—well, all this is well recorded and there is no point in wasting time.

David Kaiser: One of the really fascinating aspects of the Manhattan Project and Los Alamos in particular—the central scientific laboratory for the entire project—was this tradeoff, the tension between secrecy and classification. Clearly, information could not be allowed to travel very far or wide. Yet, many of the scientists really kind of chaffed at what felt like a very unscientific approach to sharing information. Many of the scientists were in the habit of frankly talking all the time. That’s how they felt they learned was talking very freely in open-ended brainstorming sessions with their colleagues, with their students, with newcomers.

I think a real kind of master stroke, a brilliant maneuver that Oppenheimer put in place originally over the objections of some of the military leaders like General Groves—though they eventually came to work it out—was to have a weekly colloquium at Los Alamos for at least all people of a certain kind of training level. Not every single person on the mesa could join, but it was open to wide groups of people where there could be some degree of sharing across the otherwise very carefully separated out divisions.

Ben Diven: I think the colloquia were one of the most important things. Everybody who was a staff member at the lab was allowed to come to colloquium. And I don’t know how many people, I suppose it was some hundreds, and Oppenheimer insisted that everything could be discussed there. There were no compartmentalization and it was very often true that people who—well, the idea was to have various group leaders usually describe what the group was working on and what their main problems were, what they were having trouble with. And very frequently then it would turn out that somebody who had not associated with them at all would come up with an idea of something that would actually be important.

Chicago- One of the most important branches of the Manhattan Project was the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago. Known simply as the “Met Lab,” the laboratory’s primary role was to design a viable method for plutonium production that could fuel a nuclear reaction. The research conducted on plutonium composition, isolation, and, later on, radiation effects, was vital to the success of the Manhattan Project. More

Berkeley-The Rad Lab, short for “Radiation Laboratory,” was the site of Manhattan Project research at the University of California, Berkeley. Ernest Lawrence formed the lab in 1931, three years after his arrival at the university.More

Perdue- The Purdue University Physics Department operated a cyclotron during the early part of the war, conducting important nuclear research. Many of the scientists working on the project were transferred to Los Alamos to continue work on the Manhattan Project. More

CalTech- Before the war, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) was a leading university in the fields of particle and nuclear physics. It was especially known for its experimental physicists. Many scientists who had important roles on the Manhattan Project were affiliated with Caltech, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Tolman, and Robert Bacher. In addition, a group working at Caltech under Charles Lauritsen directly assisted in the bomb-building effort, providing help manufacturing detonators that would be used in the atomic bombs.

Theoretical Physics- A branch of the field of physics which is dedicated to coming up with mathematical explanations for natural events. They design formulas which may not be able to be physically tested. Researchers in this field ponder questions such as how the universe developed. Isaac Newton is considered the first theoretical physicist, called “natural philosophy” in his time

Engineering- The branch of science concerned with the physical design and construction of engines and structures.