The Girls of Atomic City (10 page)

TUBEALLOY

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LISE AND FISSION, 1938

Four years after Ida Noddack had challenged Enrico Fermi’s findings, another female scientist was struggling to make sense of unexpected data. December snow crunched beneath Lise Meitner’s feet as she walked steadily alongside her nephew Otto Frisch over frozen Nordic ground. The Austrian physicist kept up on foot as Frisch glided along on cross-country skis through the woods near the coastal village of Kungalv, Sweden.

Lise was frozen in thought, icy cold air needling nostrils and skin and eyes, infusing the already tense atmosphere with a frigid alertness. Night was falling on 1938, a year in which the radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’s fictional
War of the Worlds
had terrorized Americans, and another very real world war was fast becoming fact. A man named Adolf Hitler had just been named
Time
magazine’s “Man of the Year.” Lise mulled over the latest advancement in her field of physics, and its potential ramifications on an increasingly unstable political landscape, one which had led to her own exile from Berlin months earlier.

Lise had recently received a letter from her now long-distance colleague, Otto Hahn, a radiochemist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, in Berlin. She had just seen Hahn a month ago in Copenhagen. Mere exile wasn’t enough to keep the shy but driven woman from consorting with her old team, even if at a great distance. She had little choice: Once Austria had been annexed by Germany she began to abandon hope that her Austrian citizenship and scientific standing could protect her from the likes of SS head Heinrich Himmler, on whose radar she had eventually landed. Though she had been baptized at birth and long considered herself a Protestant, she was, in the eyes of the Nazis, a Jew.

She had waited too long to leave, perhaps, keeping her head down and buried in her work, as the political situation deteriorated around her. Once the Anschluss and concerned friends convinced Lise it was time to flee, she boarded a train for Holland. The reason for travel given to all but a handful of those closest to Lise was vacation. She had an invalid passport, prompting friends to pull whatever strings they could with political contacts in Holland and officials with Dutch immigration. Hahn had given her a ring that belonged to his mother, feeling it might be useful in case of an emergency. On the way to the station, she wanted desperately to turn around and go back. As the train approached the Dutch border, Lise’s anxiety grew. The train stopped. Patrolmen walked through the train. Her friends’ efforts had been successful, and Lise passed into Holland without incident. She eventually made her way to Sweden, where physicist and friend Niels Bohr had secured a spot for her in the laboratory of Karl Manne Georg Siegbahn at the Physics Institute of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences.

Lise was grateful for the position but missed her daily interaction with Hahn and the third member of their team, chemist Fritz Strassmann. She would sing quietly to herself in the lab as she did her experiments alongside Hahn, a man with whom she’d worked for decades, a man who knew her back when she was banished to research in a basement workshop because a superior thought women in the chemistry labs were dangerous—their hair might catch on fire. She corresponded with Hahn and had arranged for their clandestine Copenhagen meeting to discuss their ongoing work. The Meitner-Hahn-Strassmann team were still focusing much of their research into the bombardment of Tubealloy with neutrons, spurred on as many in their field were by the work of Enrico Fermi. Fermi had just been awarded the 1938 Nobel Prize for his work on nuclear reactions with slow neutrons. Lise’s lab was among others now firing up the neutrons, publishing their results. Bombardments away.

Ida Noddack’s husband, Walter, mentioned to Otto Hahn that Hahn should incorporate Ida’s critique of Fermi’s work in his publications and talks on the topic. Hahn was unimpressed, saying he didn’t want to make Ida look “ridiculous.” Her “assumption of the bursting of the . . . nucleus into larger fragments was really absurd.”

However, the results of Hahn and Strassmann’s latest experiment had turned Lise’s holiday stroll in the woods of Kungalv into a mental marathon. They needed answers. And Hahn thought Lise would be the one with the smarts to provide them.

THE “LIQUID DROP” MODEL

Hahn’s letter to Lise had arrived on the shortest day of the year, rendered even more brief by both latitude and urgency. After bombarding Tubealloy with neutrons, Hahn and Strassman had found isotopes of barium of all things, an element just about half the size of Tubealloy. How could that have happened? Tubealloy couldn’t have split apart, could it? Lise had written Hahn back immediately. She, too, found the results “amazing.”

“Perhaps you can suggest some fantastic explanation,” Hahn wrote in response. “We understand that it really can’t break up into barium. . . . So try to think of some other possibility. . . . If you can think of anything that might be publishable, then the three of us would be together in this work after all.”

Lise sat and sketched in the woods, working to give shape to the physics storming through her winterized mind. Her 34-year-old nephew, Otto Frisch, the better artist and himself working in nuclear physics with Bohr in Copenhagen, refined the images. Frisch hadn’t wanted to discuss Hahn’s findings at first. This visit in Kungalv, Sweden, with his 60-year-old aunt was for the winter holidays, and he had his own experiments to ponder. But Lise wouldn’t drop it. She found her thoughts inspired by Bohr’s “liquid drop” model of the nucleus—a model that hadn’t been available for consideration when Ida Noddack put forth her views on Fermi’s findings.

Nobel Prize laureate Niels Bohr had already contributed much to the understanding of the atom. He first introduced the theory that electrons traveled in specific
orbits
around the nucleus. These were also called at different times and under different circumstances shells, clouds, or energy levels. (Visual interpretations of Bohr’s model of the atom would inspire Styrofoam ball mobiles and science-fair entries for decades to come.)

His
liquid drop
model was exactly as it sounded: The nucleus of an atom shouldn’t be viewed as a hard, spherical entity, but was more akin to a drop of liquid, capable of moving, elongating . . .
dividing
? If a nucleus
did
divide, the tremendous energy that held the atom together would be released in the process. That energy would be proportional to the mass of the nucleus. Lise had attended Albert Einstein’s lecture in Salzburg in 1909, where he discussed a revolutionary concept: the conversion of mass into energy.

E = mc
²

Using this and various other formulae—Lise’s nephew was amazed at the equations his aunt kept effortlessly on call in her mind—the two scientists scribbled and computed. They estimated that the division of a nucleus of Tubealloy would result in not only the emission of other neutrons but a release of energy in the neighborhood of 200 million electron volts
for each individual atom.

That was enough power to be noticed. Frisch would later describe this as enough energy to make a grain of sand, visible to the human eye, jump. And one mere gram of Tubealloy—one-fifth of a teaspoon, less than what one would spoon into a cup of coffee—contained an estimated 2.5 x 10
²¹
atoms. That’s 2.5 sextillion, or 25 followed by twenty zeroes.

In one gram.

Forget jumping grains of sand—that was enough energy to displace a chunk of desert.

THE PROJECT IS BORN

Back in Stockholm, Lise wrote Hahn that she was “fairly certain now that you have a splitting towards barium . . .”

For Hahn, publishing with his longtime, yet exiled, non-Aryan collaborator posed difficulties. Lise understood at the time. She knew that while isolating evidence was essential, being able to explain what you have witnessed was equally as crucial if not more so. So she and her nephew did. She helped put into words what Fermi had seen years earlier but failed to fully explain, what Noddack had deemed possible when everyone else doubted her. Hahn and Strassmann had found the evidence, but Lise made sense of it.

Fission.

That’s what Lise and Frisch decided to call it.

Frisch got word to Bohr just prior to Bohr’s boarding the ship
Drottningholm
bound for America. There he would discuss the findings with all the right members of the scientific community. In January 1939, Hahn and Strassmann published—without Lise—in the scientific journal
Naturwissenschaften
a paper describing what they had witnessed. Their findings arrived in the United States shortly after Bohr’s ship. Lise collaborated with Frisch over the phone—he in Copenhagen, she in Sweden—and composed their own paper explaining what Hahn and Strassmann had observed, which was published in the British journal
Nature.
It was the first theoretical interpretation of the fission process. Much research followed under the flags of several nations, and the emission of neutrons during fission was confirmed—as was the release of cosmically confounding amounts of energy that went along with it.

Bohr’s ship was met by Enrico Fermi and his wife, Laura, who had arrived in the United States earlier that month with their family. After picking up Enrico’s Nobel Prize in Stockholm they had just kept going. Laura was Jewish, and Benito Mussolini’s Italy was not safe for her, no matter who her husband was. Also in the United States, Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard and others believed secrecy was now needed: The scientific community should work to keep any further discoveries quiet. There was a war on. Szilard and another Hungarian physicist, Eugene Wigner, met with Albert Einstein in Princeton, explaining the snowballing developments in the field of nuclear physics and convincing the genius professor with static-electric locks that President Roosevelt needed to support Tubealloy research efforts in the United States. They warned that Germany was already conducting their own research and drafted a letter saying so. Einstein put his signature to it. Alexander Sachs, an economist and a friend of the president, delivered it.

Shortly thereafter, in October 1939, the first of a long line of committees and advisory groups and classified brain trusts that would eventually evolve into the Manhattan Engineer District and the Project was formed and given a paltry $6,000 in funding. On December 6, 1941, one of these administrative incarnations—the S-1 Section of the Office of Scientific Research and Development—met and proposed not only another administrative reorganization, but more importantly an “all-out” effort to work on unleashing this new power. If anyone present had had any misgivings about committing time, money, and manpower to what would become the Project, they may likely have changed their minds the very next day, December 7, 1941.

The snowy realizations of an exiled female Austrian physicist had resulted in an unprecedented mobilization of military, industrial, and scientific worlds. Fast-moving bullets and slow-moving neutrons were aimed toward a single objective: a victorious end to the war. Ida Noddack’s theories and Lise Meitner’s explanations had resulted in a chain reaction of their own, science colliding with military and industry, splitting into compartmentalized and mobilized units, each moving along its own trajectory, ready to make sand jump in the desert.

CHAPTER 4

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Bull Pens and Creeps

The Project’s Welcome for New Employees

Perhaps we just don’t know where to begin. Judging from pre-war standards, a three-year accumulation of shop-talk should add up to quite a total for the average man.

—Vi Warren,
Oak Ridge Journal

Virginia Spivey was stuck in limbo, the kind that existed for those lacking appropriate paperwork—and in triplicate. If there were a penance designed specifically for the shy-yet-spunky, 21-year-old woman, it came in the form of a daily challenge to devise something of value to teach the other fidgety individuals who were stuck with her in a place called the “bull pen.”

Before new arrivals to CEW could be given free reign to work at their new jobs, the appropriate clearances had to be earned, physicals passed, photographs and fingerprints taken, urine collected, and stacks of “I swear I won’t talk” papers signed. They could move into housing, but it was life in the bull pen until job clearance came through. The amount of time this process took depended on the individual and the job. Someone working in an area of a plant that was a degree closer to the Secret required much higher clearance than someone working in the cafeteria.

Until the precious stamp of approval arrived, life went on. People got settled in their trailers, houses, or dorms, and many spent their days in the bull pen near the Castle. There they smoked, read, possibly learned skills that may or may not have anything to do with the
new job they had yet to secure, or they sat idly by, waiting for their chance to move on.