Free Bomb by Steve Sheinkin Page A

was—didn’t he realize his country needed him?
    He took the job.
    *   *   *
    S IMILAR SCENES were taking place at top universities all over the country.
    â€œPeople I knew well began to vanish, one after the other,” Stanislaw Ulam, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin, recalled. Then Ulam got a letter inviting him to join a project doing important war work in New Mexico. Suddenly he knew where everyone had gone.
    â€œI accepted immediately with excitement and eagerness,” he said.
    When the physicist Robert Marshank got a similar letter, he announced to his wife that they were leaving immediately.
    â€œWhat’s it all about?” she asked.
    â€œI can tell you nothing about it,” he replied. “We’re going away, that’s all.”
    â€œAt least tell me why we are going away,” she demanded.
    He refused. Only when they were halfway across the country did she find out they were headed for the Southwest.
    Oppenheimer did a lot of the recruiting personally. “I traveled all over the country,” he said, “talking with people who had been working on one or another aspect of the atomic energy enterprise.” It wasn’t always easy to get them to sign up. “The notion of disappearing into the New Mexico desert for an indeterminate period,” he recalled, “disturbed a good many scientists.”
    And yet Oppenheimer’s offer did have appeal. “Almost everyone knew that if it were completed successfully and rapidly enough, it might determine the outcome of the war,” he said. “Almost everyone knew that this job would be part of history. This sense of excitement, of devotion and of patriotism prevailed. Most of those with whom I talked came to Los Alamos.”
    *   *   *
    A MONG THOSE WON over was a twenty-four-year-old physics grad student named Richard Feynman. He was working in his room at Princeton University when in burst a young physics teacher named Bob Wilson.
    Wilson announced that he’d just been given a top-secret job. “He wasn’t supposed to tell anybody,” Feynman remembered, “but he was going to tell me because he knew that as soon as I knew what he was going to do, I’d see that I had to go along with it.”
    The work, Wilson explained, had to do with uranium and fission and a whole new kind of bomb. “There’s a meeting at—”
    â€œI don’t want to do it,” Feynman cut in.
    â€œAll right,” said Wilson. “There’s a meeting at three o’clock. I’ll see you there.”
    Wilson turned and left.
    â€œI went back to work,” Feynman said, “for about three minutes.”
    Then he got up and started pacing, thinking about what little he knew about fission and the possibility of building atomic bombs. “This would be a very, very powerful weapon,” he said, “which in the hands of Hitler and his crew would let them completely control the rest of the world.”
    He decided to go to the meeting. Soon after, Richard Feynman disappeared from the Princeton campus.

CHICAGO PILE
    EARLY ON THE MORNING OF DECEMBER 2, 1942, two figures crunched over the frozen snow covering the campus of the University of Chicago.
    â€œIt was terribly cold—below zero,” remembered Leona Woods, a twenty-three-year-old physics grad student. Walking alongside Woods, hunched against the cold, was the world-famous Italian physicist Enrico Fermi.
    Woods and Fermi ducked through a gate leading into the football stadium. They nodded to security guards and hurried down a dark hallway beneath the stands, their breath forming frost clouds in the air. It was just as cold inside as out.
    Under the football stands were a series of unheated squash courts. They opened the door to one of the courts and stepped inside.
    â€œThe scene of this test at the University of Chicago would have been confusing to an