A chief of staff can get things done in a hurry if he wants to. I was sworn
in as a temporary officer before we left the building; before the day was
out I was at the bank, signing a note to pay for the sloppy service
uniforms the Army had adopted and to buy a dress uniform with a beautiful
shiny belt—a dress outfit which, as it turned out, I was never to need.
We drove over into Maryland the next day and Manning took charge of the
Federal nuclear research laboratory, known officially by the hush-hush
title of War Department Special Defense Project No. 347. I didn’t know a
lot about physics and nothing about modern atomic physics, aside from the
stuff you read in the Sunday supplements. Later, I picked up a smattering,
mostly wrong, I suppose, from associating with the heavy-weights with which
the laboratory was staffed.
Colonel Manning had taken an Army p. g. course at Massachusetts Tech and
had received a master of science degree for a brilliant thesis on the
mathematical theories of atomic structure. That was why the Army had to
have him for this job. But that had been some years before; atomic theory
had turned several cartwheels in the mean-time; he admitted to me that he
had to bone like the very devil to try to catch up to the point where he
could begin to understand what his highbrow charges were talking about in
their reports.
I think he over stated the degree of his ignorance; there was certainly no
one else in the United States who could have done the job. It required a
man who could direct and suggest research in a highly esoteric field, but
who saw the problem from the standpoint of urgent military necessity. Left
to themselves, the physicists would have reveled in the intellectual luxury
of an unlimited research expense account, but, while they undoubtedly would
have made major advances in human knowledge, they might never have
developed anything of military usefulness, or the military possibilities of
a discovery might be missed for years.
It’s like this: It takes a smart dog to hunt birds, but it takes a hunter
behind him to keep him from wasting time chasing rabbits. And the hunter
needs to know nearly as much as the dog.
No derogatory reference to the scientists is intended—by no means! We had
all the genius in the field that the United States could produce, men from
Chicago, Columbia, Cornell, M. I. T., Cal Tech, Berkley, every radiation
laboratory in the country, as well as a couple of broad-A boys lent to us
by the British. And they had every facility that ingenuity could think up
and money could build. The five-hundred-ton cyclotron which had originally
been intended for the University of California was there, and was already
obsolete in the face of the new gadgets these brains had thought up, asked
for, and been given. Canada supplied us with all the uranium we asked
for—tons of the treacherous stuff—from Great Bear Lake, up near the Yukon,
and the fractional-residues technique of separating uranium isotope 235
from the commoner isotope 238 had already been worked out, by the same team
from Chicago that had worked up the earlier expensive mass spectrograph
method.
Someone in the United States government had realized the terrific
potentialities of uranium 235 quite early and, as far back as the summer of
l940, had rounded up every atomic research man in the country and had sworn
them to silence. Atomic power, if ever developed, was planned to be a
government monopoly, at least till the war was over. It might turn out to
be the most incredibly powerful explosive ever dreamed of, and it might be
the source of equally incredible power. In any case, with Hitler talking
about secret weapons and shouting hoarse insults at democracies, the
government planned to keep any new discoveries very close to the vest.
Hitler had lost the advantage of a first crack at the secret of uranium
through not taking precautions. Dr. Hahn, the first man to break open the
uranium atom, was a German. But one of his laboratory assistants had fled