The Target Committee (Kindle Single) by Paul Ham

The Committeemen
     
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    Date: May 12, 1945
    Memorandum for: Major General L.R. Groves
    Subject: Summary of Target Committee Meetings on May 10 and 11, 1945
     
    1. The second meeting of the Target Committee convened at 9:00 AM, May 10, in Dr. Oppenheimer’s office at Site Y with the following present: General Farrell; Dr. C. Lauritsen; Colonel Seeman; Dr. Ramsey; Captain Parsons; Dr. Dennison; Major Derry; Dr. von Neumann; Dr. Stearns; Dr. Wilson; Dr. Tolman; Dr. Penney; Dr. Oppenheimer.
     
    In May 1945 thirteen highly intelligent individuals filed into Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer’s office at Site Y, code for Los Alamos. They were all of a gentlemanly, rational disposition, and several were at the summit of their careers. All had a vital scientific or military link with the Manhattan Project, the purpose of which was to build an atomic bomb. The most influential committeemen were Oppenheimer, Navy Captain William “Deak” Parsons and Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, the eyes and ears of Major General Leslie Groves, the head of the project, who did not attend but to whom they all ultimately reported.
    Oppenheimer
     
    Robert Oppenheimer was a tall, thin man with blue eyes and a shock of dark hair. He tended to walk on the balls of his feet, giving the appearance that he floated by. A baggy, light suit hung off his lanky frame and, together with his pork-pie hat, suggested a maverick, faintly clown-like impression.
    Nobody disputed his scientific and managerial brilliance, but his appointment as scientific leader of the Manhattan Project had not gone unopposed. Oppenheimer was a Jew; his former girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, a communist; and his brother, Frank, a Jewish communist. Those facts had placed Oppenheimer outside the East Coast establishment who played God’s deputy in deciding who ran America. The secret services believed Oppenheimer’s dubious associations with ‘reds’ compromised him and, in the early 1940s, had refused to clear him to work on the Manhattan Project.
    Oppenheimer’s exceptional intellectual and, as it proved, administrative, gifts overrode the security risk in the eyes of Major General Groves, who directed the project. That Oppenheimer was related to, or slept with, communists did not mean he shared their convictions, concluded Groves. He had read Oppenheimer’s dossier and saw something that eluded the secret services. On July 20, 1943 the general confirmed the scientist as “absolutely essential to the project.” 1 Thus began one of the oddest and most effective working partnerships in American history: Groves, boorish, precise and demanding; Oppenheimer, frail, cultured and intellectual.
    Born in 1904 to a wealthy, liberal New York family, Oppenheimer’s early correspondence portrays an extremely clever young man in the thrall of his transcendent intellectual gifts. At Harvard (where he attended Danish physicist Niels Bohr’s lectures in 1923) and later at Christ’s College, Cambridge, Oppenheimer used his prodigious talent as a tool for rapid self-advancement. To the Harvard authorities he justified his case for jumping straight to advanced physics on the grounds that he had received 96 percent in his physicsentrance exam and “grade As” in all his subjects.
    He was widely read, and provided a “partial” list of the books he had studied, including several volumes on kinetic theory, thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and quantum theory; James Crowther’s
Molecular Physics
; Henri Poincaré’s
La Physique Moderne
and
Thermodynamique
; James Walker’s
Introduction to Physical Chemistry
; Wilhelm Ostwald’s
Solutions
; J. Willard Gibbs’
On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances
; and Walther Nernst’s
Theoretische Chemie
. These were advanced texts and Oppenheimer read them in their original languages. He also read Ancient Greek and Latin. He had already completed his freshman year with top grades in French prose and poetry (Corneille through to