Los Alamos
Base Y is a place in the middle of some strange wilderness where many of our friends have disappeared. There, several people from Europe were unhappy because living in a closed area reminded them of the ...... concentration campsI'd certainly be pleasant to be in the y base, this was the opinion of a young man with a pensive pipe in his mouth. I had never met him before, and he came to Chicago to visit us and explained Base Y to us as best he could. He was the director of the laboratory there, and his name was Robert Oppenheimer.......
Laura Fermi, "The Biography of Fermi".
The construction of the uranium and plutonium factories was over, but Groves had a more important task ahead of him: where were the atomic bomb experts, or in his words, "the scientific madmen who spent a lot of money to find out", to build their atomic monsters
Before the establishment of the "Manhattan Engineering Area" in June 1942, American atomic physicists did not devote much energy to the construction of the atomic bomb, because at that time even the most basic chain reaction had not been realized, the separation of uranium or the industrial production of plutonium had not begun, and all that had been done before was only to demonstrate the feasibility of the atomic bomb. As for how to design the atomic bomb and how big the atomic bomb should be, no one knew at the time, and some optimistic people in the military even thought that there was no need to rush, and after collecting enough uranium and plutonium, it would only take 20 scientists three months to make an atomic bomb. However, after General Groves took over the project, he decided to immediately begin the design and manufacture of the atomic bomb, preferring to have atomic bombs and other materials rather than atomic bombs.
The design of the atomic bomb was called Project Y, and there were many people who chose to lead it, such as Arthur Compton or Ernest Lawrence, but Groves, Bush, Compton, Connant and others negotiated and finally decided to appoint Julius Robert Oppenheimer, who was not very famous at the time, as the head of Project Y.
Oppenheimer graduated from Harvard University, studied in Cambridge and Göttingen, and returned to the United States in 1927 to work on atoms and nuclei at the University of California and the California Institute of Technology. Groves learned that Oppenheimer had amazing intellectual and managerial talents, had superb knowledge of theoretical physics, and was also highly respected in the academic community. Compton, though more experienced in executive leadership, could not afford to leave the "metallurgical laboratory" in Chicago for an extended period of time, and Lawrence, another suitable candidate, was unable to take a break from his vital work in the field of electromagnetic separation at Berkeley. Yuri of Columbia University was a brilliant chemist, but he was not technically qualified to lead the work, and his health was not very good. Oppenheimer's greatest weakness was that he had not won a Nobel Prize, a credential that was somewhat bleak among his many Nobel Prize-winning colleagues, and Groves feared that he might not be treated with the respect he deserved. When Groves submitted Oppenheimer's name to the Military Policy Committee, there was a lot of opposition to the nomination, so Groves asked each commissioner to come up with a better candidate. When the Military Policy Committee met again a few weeks later, it became clear that there could be no more suitable person than Oppenheimer, and he was officially appointed head of the scientific department of the Y Project.
But there's another problem, and Oppenheimer's file contains a lot of things that don't like it: before the war, he had contacts with many liberal leftist and pro-communist political organizations, donated money to them, and twice nearly married a female Communist named Joan Tatrok. Groves thinks it's nothing, but "above.""Some people were uncomfortable with this, so they put Oppenheimer under the tightest surveillance network, and the FBI file about Oppenheimer was 4 feet 6 inches (1.)37 meters) thick. In the post-war McCarthy era, Oppenheimer was deeply unjustized for this.
As soon as Oppenheimer's appointment was confirmed, he began to search for a suitable location for the atomic bomb laboratory. As with the fissile material factory, the place had to have enough water, allow for a mild climate for year-round construction, and it had to be kept away from the main towns, partly for secrecy and partly in case "the magician knocked over his alchemy cauldron" (Grovesian) so as not to harm the fish in the pond. However, since some of the most important scientists were to be inhabited in the area, they had to be guaranteed a satisfactory living condition.
After an extensive survey of the southwestern United States, Groves personally selected three locations, the one in California that was later rejected because it was too close to Los Angeles, and another in Nevada that had heavy winter snow closures. In the end, all that remained was northern New Mexico, close to the state's largest cities and transportation hubs, Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Oppenheimer pointed out to Groves that in Los Alamos Canyon, north of Santa Fe, there was a small boarding school for ranch kids, where he had lived with the Boy Scouts for a time as a child. Oppenheimer's family had a ranch in the nearby Pecos Valley, so they knew the area inside and out. In fact, Oppenheimer had suggested that his own ranch should be used as a base for Project Y, but he gave up because there were too many small pastures of the surrounding Indians and the difficulty of land acquisition. The advantages of Los Alamos are many: it is far from the population center, accessible only by a few roads and a few canyons, it is very secluded and easy to secure and confidential, and the first construction workers can live in a boarding school without having to build a separate house;There is a large amount of wasteland around it that can be requisitioned;And there was also water, which was not sufficient, but enough to meet the needs of life (Oppenheimer did not anticipate the scale of the expansion and the Xi of scientists using water lavishly). New Mexico's National Guard Division, which was captured by the Japanese in the Philippines after Pearl Harbor, was very anti-Japanese and was more than willing to cooperate with the military's land acquisition efforts (although they did not know what the land was for).
Intrigued by Oppenheimer's presentation, Groves and he took a train to Santa Fe in November 1942 to investigate the local situation. The Rio Grande Valley, north of Santa Fe, is a wide basin with a hot and inhospitable base, with the rolling Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east and the green Jemes hills to the west and northwest. The Hermes hill is cut into a series of parallel terraces with a dry canyon bottom for most of the time, and the Los Alamos Ranch School sits on such a plateau, with more than 10 wooden and adobe classrooms and dormitories, a small chapel, a well, a repair yard and a small generator room. Due to the shortage of teachers after the United States entered the war, the director of the boarding school happily closed the school and sold the school building to the military.
In January 1943, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began to move into Los Alamos, building laboratories, homes, factories and other equipment in a dense sea of mud, and a city was built on a plateau more than 2,000 meters above sea level. New families poured in, residential construction never kept pace with population growth, barracks-like bungalows and buildings sprang haphazardly around the few houses, and the streets were nameless and stretched aimlessly in all directions, dividing the terraces into intricate patterns. All the dwellings are timber-framed, painted green on the outside and diagonally facing the street at a 45-degree angle in order to maximize the use of the land. Almost all the streets are the same, the houses have no house numbers, and newcomers can only make out their way by the help of the tall water towers that rise above the highest part of the city. There is not a single bare tree in the whole of Los Alamos, and the original tree also died during construction. The roads are unpaved and the pavement is colloidal clay, which turns into a thick layer of mud when it rains in the summer and a thick layer of mud when it snows in the winter, and the roadside is littered with building materials and downed trees, and cranes, rollers and trucks are scrambling through the ......When the Fermi family moved from Chicago to Los Alamos in August 1944, they saw such a discouraging picture.
In addition to Fermi, there are many scientists from the United States, Great Britain, Canada and other countries who have lived here with their families, and for two and a half years, the city of Los Alamos was not on the map of the United States, its inhabitants did not have the right to vote, it did not exist for the average outsider, for the very few who knew about it, it was Base Y, and for those who had to communicate with the residents of Los Alamos, it was P.O. Box 1663. The entire Los Alamos Canyon is cut off from the outside world, the main entrance to the town is the East Gate, which has a road leading to Santa Fe, and the West Gate, which is only open to non-military personnel for a few hours a day, and through which you can reach the scenic Hermes Hills and the Rio Grande Valley, where you can go fishing, skiing, and climbing.
Anyone entering and leaving the town of Los Alamos had to show their pass to the gendarmes on duty and register, and only those with special badges were allowed to enter the technical area fenced off with barbed wire, and the whole town was surrounded by two other layers of barbed wire, but all the children of Los Alamos knew that there was a hole, so they often acted as adult guides, sneaking out with young scientists and engineers.
All well-known scientists leave Los Alamos under pseudonyms, Enrico Fermi changed his name to Eugene Farmer, Harold Yuri changed his name to Hugh Ullman, and Compton had two names, Mr. Comas when traveling on the East Coast and Mr. Comstock when traveling on the West Coast. However, there is one person who also uses a pseudonym in Base Y, and his name is Mr. Nicholas Baker, and those who have known him in the past refer to him as "Uncle Nick", because "Mr. Baker" is difficult to say, and his real name and surname are strictly forbidden to mention. Uncle Nick's name was one of the best things about keeping Los Alamos secret, and if anyone who had nothing to do knew that a world-famous atomic physicist like Nils Bohr was working at Los Alamos, it would have been one of the most significant wartime leaks between the United States and the United Kingdom.
Bohr and heavy water plants
Roosevelt: "You know a lot about the development of atomic science?William Stephenson (head of the British Special Operations Executive Directorate): "Yes, I keep in touch with people who are well versed in atomic science. The most important of these is Dr. Bohr in Denmark. "--Memoirs of Stephenson.
The whole story of Bohr's escape from Denmark could be written as a best-selling thriller**.
When Europe's most famous atomic physicist arrived in the United States on January 16, 1939, he had spoken with Fermi with anxiety about some signs of things to come, and in a large, noisy room at the Wyverd-American Mail Line's docks, Fermi's wife faintly heard some of the words they were discussing: "War ......."Hitler ......Denmark ......Danger ......Occupy ......Bohr then traveled to Princeton to meet with Albert Einstein, during which he also visited atomic physicists and chemists, during which he spoke in an increasingly apocalyptic tone about the catastrophe in Europe, the collapse of the European security system, and worried about his family, his homeland, and Europe as a whole.
In the early morning of April 9, 1940, the Germans quietly occupied Denmark, and Allied scientists were horrified to find Bohr, Europe's most prominent atomic physicist, in the hands of the Nazis, along with the newly built cyclotron at the University of Copenhagen. However, until the autumn of 1943, the German occupation in Denmark tried to maintain a semblance of calm, as if they had no intention of Nazifying Denmark, and the German occupation forces were strictly ordered to avoid offending the Danes as much as possible, and the SS did not hunt down Danish Jews. Bohr, his institute, and his cyclotron were not touched, and even after the declaration of war between Germany and the United States, they could continue to receive funding from the Rockefeller Society. Of course, these hypocritical acts do not hide the fact that Denmark has become a colony of Nazi Germany and is being plundered and tortured by the occupiers.
In February 1943, Sir Chadwick, a pioneer in atomic physics, drafted a carefully worded letter to Bohr inviting him to England. At this time, Bohr was still immersed in work at the Copenhagen Institute of Theoretical Physics, studying the problem of atoms. British intelligence and the Danish underground resistance feared that Bohr's enthusiasm for his work would lead him to success in favor of the German exploration of the atomic bomb, and the Danish underground even planted explosives under the pipes connecting heavy water and cyclotrons in his laboratory, just in case.
Bohr rejected Chadwick's delicately worded request to stop his work, and politely refused to go to England to continue his research. Chadwick did not dare to mention that the Anglo-American development of the atomic bomb required Bohr's work, because Bohr was an anti-violent pacifist. The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the U.S. Strategic Intelligence Service (OSS) held emergency meetings in London and New York to discuss the possibility of kidnapping Bohr and blowing up the Copenhagen lab in an emergency. In the end, the Germans themselves solved the moral dilemma of the allies. In August 1943, the German Emperor in Denmark, Dr. Best, asked King Christian X to install Nazis in the country, but the king proudly rejected him, saying that "there are no Nazis in Denmark." Annoyed, Best ordered the SS to arrest the "saboteurs" at will and send the Danes to labor camps in Germany. These measures infuriated the Danish people, and sabotage spread throughout the country, with a German officer almost beaten to death with a stick by workers in Hans Christian Andersen's hometown of Odense. On 28 August, the German ambassador delivered an ultimatum to the Danish Prime Minister demanding an end to the resistance or martial law. Fifteen minutes before the expiration of the ultimatum, the Germans received a reply of "No!".”
On 29 August, the Germans occupied the fortress and military base in Copenhagen and disarmed the Danish army. King Christian X hastily wrote a note urging Bohr to flee immediately, as he could no longer protect him. Bohr first summoned his assistant Stephen Rosenthal (a German Jew in exile in Denmark) and gave him a sum of money to exile, then hastily collected all his manuscripts, correspondence, and other documents, sealed them in a metal tube, buried them in the garden of the Carlsberg Building (a luxury mansion gifted to Bohr by the Danish beer magnate Carlsberg), and then hid his gold Nobel Prize in nitric acid in a cellar. The order for Bohr's arrest was on the desk of the Gestapo in Copenhagen when the order to arrest Bohr was placed on the desk of the Gestapo headquarters in Copenhagen before the Germans began to hunt down Jews in September.
After escaping to Sweden, Bohr found Princess Ingeburg (sister of Christian X and sister-in-law of King Gustav V of Sweden), who had joined the British intelligence organization and worked for the Allies. Ingerborg led him to the King of Sweden, where Bohr begged the King to let the Germans send to Sweden the hundreds of Jews arrested in Denmark, to which Gustav V replied that he had made such a suggestion when the expulsion of Jews began in Norway, but was humiliatingly refused. At this time, Princess Ingeburg interjected and said, "Nils, you are completely out of real life. You are in the Third Reich, but you don't know anything about it. ”
This sentence stung Bohr for the first time. Previously, he had refused to cooperate with both the Axis and the Allies only out of pacifist ideals, but now it is becoming increasingly clear that if one side is needed to use a catastrophe such as the atomic bomb to destroy the war, then it is better for this side to be the side against **. He decided to go to England and help the Allies build the atomic bomb. He was led by British personnel stationed in Sweden to a deserted airfield outside Stockholm, where a mosquito plane was waiting. Bohr put on a thick coat, a protective cap and a mask, was strapped to the bomb bay and set out on a long journey.
Soon after takeoff, the Mosquito aircraft climbed to an altitude where oxygen was needed to make it difficult for the enemy to intercept. The driver used the in-flight intercom system to tell Bohr "now you should put on an oxygen mask", but there was no response. The driver tried the intercom system again, but still did not answer. The Mosquito plane will fly for two hours, and if it still maintains this altitude, Bohr will die of lack of oxygen, and if he lowers the altitude, he may be relieved, but he may be killed by the enemy's night fighters. Turning around and flying back is tantamount to throwing yourself into a net, and under pressure from the Nazis, Sweden will not let Bohr go again. The pilot finally flew close to the sea at full speed and flew to Scotland along a route outside the range of the German fighters. Over the Orkney Islands, he turned on the friend or foe identifier, and at this time there was no sign that Bohr was still alive.
Stephenson, the head of the Special Operations Executive Directorate, was anxiously waiting from a deserted night fighter base near Edinburgh. After the plane landed, the ambulance crews and mechanics rushed to the dusty plane, the door of the bomb bay was opened, Dr. Bohr's limp body was lifted down, and placed on the waiting stretcher, and the doctor quickly gave him oxygen and inotropic injections. Stephenson asked, "Is there any hope?".The young doctor pulled out the needle and said, "The pulse is weak, but we will turn him around." ”
A few days later, Bohr's son was also picked up from Stockholm, and he was familiar with his father's progress. The father and son were housed in a hotel near Westminster, where British scientists and intelligence officers asked them about the progress of the German atomic bomb. Five days later, Churchill met Bohr. According to Churchill, because Bohr had refused to go to England on several occasions and had almost slipped to the point of helping Germany, he "should be confined or, in any case, let him see that he was on the verge of committing a mortal crime." Bohr's son later described his father's return from meeting with Churchill as follows: "...Dejected......After being scolded, he immediately began dictating a written opinion on the atomic energy project and the ...... of opposition to the atomic bomb”
At the end of 1943, Bohr and his son went to New York and used the name "Beck" on their fake ID cards, because he couldn't remember any other pseudonyms, whether in Stockholm or London, he often Xi say "I am Bohr...... as soon as they pick up **Uncle Nick Baker and young Jim Baker were recruited into the Manhattan Project, and 18 months later they finally helped the Americans build the first atomic bomb.
Before fleeing, Bohr poured several bottles of heavy water from his laboratory into beer bottles and hid them in the basement, where they remained hidden during the war and remained undetected by the Germans. Heavy water was the main moderator used by the Germans in their attempts to build nuclear reactors, because Bohr's protégé Heisenberg had calculated that pure carbon (graphite) was "unusable", and his assistant Karl von Weizsäcker's calculations and experiments at the University of Heidelberg supported this erroneous conclusion. Heisenberg had proposed a heavy water plant in Germany in early 1940, and a few months later Germany invaded Norway and took over the only heavy water plant in the world at the time, the Norwegian Hydro Company, located in the town of Yukan, 120 kilometers west of Oslo, and put it directly into the orbit of Germany's atomic bomb program.
British spies found that Farben had quietly invested in the Norwegian plant long before the war, on the condition that Farben have an indefinite monopoly on heavy water and improve the electrolysis production process to immediately increase production by a factor of 10. In February 1940, the Norwegian Hydro Company supplied the first batch of heavy water to Joliot-Curie in France for the construction of France's first reactor, and within three months** the Germans who invaded Norway occupied the site of the factory, cutting off the plant from heavy water outside the Third Reich**.
Shortly thereafter, Britain's atomic bomb project, code-named "Pipe Alloy", was also in operation, with members not only British physicists such as Chadwick, but also Jewish scientists Frisch and Rudolf Pyles, who had been in exile in Germany, and several French scientists who had fled to Britain after June 1940 (who had also brought 200 kilograms of heavy water). Soon after the work began, however, scientists scattered across the rural laboratories discovered that it would take enormous resources to turn the atomic bomb from a design to a practical one. The production of 1 kilogram of uranium alone requires 20,000 workers, 500,000 kilowatts of electricity, and 1$500 million in money, and the British atomic bomb project did not have the technical support of large companies like DuPont and Westinghouse (only Imperial Chemical provided some help), nor the funding of ** and the military, because such a high cost was too high for Britain to afford. In July 1940, the British ambassador to the United States, the Marquis de Lotheon, proposed to Roosevelt** that comprehensive cooperation be carried out in the field of military science and technology, including atomic**.
In the summer of 1941, Harold Yuri and Professor Pegram visited England to learn about British work in this field. At that time, the British were mainly engaged in theoretical work on the separation of uranium by gas diffusion and the production of plutonium by heavy water reactors, and there was no progress on graphite reactors and electromagnetic separation methods. It was ironic that some British scientists were reluctant to share atomic bomb intelligence with them because they thought their work had far outpaced that of the United States, and that some Americans were reluctant to work with the British for the same reason. In the end, Churchill and Roosevelt negotiated the issue amicably at the Quebec Conference in 1943: a "Joint Policy Committee" was established in Washington, with Stimson, Bush, Connant, Groves, Chadwick, British Field Marshal Deere, Canadian Quartermaster Howee, and Churchill's scientific adviser Lindeman all members, and the results of atomic bomb research were produced by the United States and Britain (including Canada) Sharing, as for atomic energy technology in the industrial and commercial spheres, given that the United States has provided the vast majority of human, material and financial resources for the program, the United States** can unilaterally decide what intelligence to provide to the United Kingdom "on a fair and reasonable basis."
The cooperation between the United States and Britain in the atomic bomb program had a more significant significance, that is, to sabotage the heavy waters of the Nazis**, and the United States had to rely entirely on the power of British espionage agencies in this matter, because the latter had already established an effective spy network in the occupied areas of Europe, which could not only spy on intelligence but also carry out sabotage missions.
By the time the Luftwaffe's first bombs arrived in London in the late summer of 1940, Norway's heavy water production had increased to 300 kilograms per month, enough for Germany's "uranium program." With the cooperation of the leader of the Norwegian underground resistance, Liv Tronstad, the British began a serious plan to destroy the Norwegian heavy water plant. In an area nicknamed "Little Norway" near Toronto, Canada, hundreds of young men and women exiled from Norway were trained in parachuting and sabotage, and four of them who had lived near the town of Yukan were singled out for further rigorous training, and then airdropped around the town of Yukan to infiltrate and spy on the heavy water plant. In October 1942, the group sent back a telegram stating that "the Germans are going to carry out all the heavy water, believing that the weight is sufficient for Berlin's present needs." The telegram caused a panic in the Special Operations Executive Directorate, and an emergency meeting of the wartime cabinet decided to send a regular commando team on gliders to launch a full-scale armed attack on the heavy water workshop of the Norwegian Hydro Company.
In the middle of the night on November 9, 1942, two Halifax bombers, each carrying 17 commandos, took off from England and flew northeast with two Holsa gliders on board. As a result, the assault team was completely annihilated: the towing cable of the first glider was broken due to icing, the glider crashed on the mountain, 8 out of 17 people survived, they were arrested by the Germans as soon as they crawled out of the wreckage, 4 were taken to field hospitals, died with air injected into their veins, and the other 4 were executed. The tractor of the second glider crashed into a mountain, and the glider forced its landing on a nearby mountain, killing all 14 survivors. The Germans found a map of the town of Yukan from the wreckage of the glider, the German Commissioner in Norway Josef Tepoven and the German Commander in Norway von Falkenhorst visited the town of Yukan and ordered the army and the Gestapo to search for suspicious people there, and the heavy water plant of the Norwegian Hydropower Company was filled with garrisons and became a large barracks.
In order to make a noise, London instructed the Norwegian underground organization to launch an attack on the Morse Lake dam near the town of Yukan in order to divert the German forces defending the factory. On February 16, 1943, the British sent six more commandos to parachute near Lake Skrucken, 28 kilometers from Yukan, at 1 a.m. the next day. On 23 February, the Norwegians skied to the British commandos, who had been living on sweet potatoes for a week, and several of them had developed chilblains. That night, the 10-man assault team hiked through a complex forest, crossed a raging rapid, climbed a 300-meter-high ice cliff, and unexpectedly entered the area of the heavy water plant through the exit of the sewer pipe.
At 0:30 on February 24, commandos in white clothes and white trousers quickly approached the factory door, quickly cut iron chains and locks, and pushed the door into the workshop. The roar of the machines in the factory obscured their movements, and since the layout of the factory was exactly the same as the model built in England, the commandos managed to find the cable tunnel that connected to the enrichment chamber, and touched the electrolyzed water workshop on the 7th floor, where the two dozing Norwegian guards were pressed to the ground and ordered to drink before they could understand what was going on. On the instructions of the engineer in exile in Britain, the commandos installed 20 packs of explosives on top of 18 high-concentration batteries and some other plumbing equipment, lit the fuse, ordered the captives to hurry upstairs and flee for their lives, and then escaped the same way. As soon as they got out of the cable tunnel, there was a ** sound behind them, but the sound was surprisingly slight and did not attract the attention of the Germans in the slightest. The next morning, the Germans discovered that the water electrolysis plant had been blown up, and 450 kilograms of precious heavy water (up to $4,500 per kilogram**) flowed out of the blown up sink and discharged into the factory.
Hydro Norway resumed production almost a year after the attack, and since then the Allies have carried out several airstrikes on the plant, but the results have not been satisfactory, and many pilots and Norwegian civilians have been sacrificed in vain. In the end, the British stopped the bombing work and switched to preparing to destroy the transport lines of the plant. At the end of 1943, intelligence came from Norway that a shipment of heavy water equivalent to half a year's production (5,000 pounds, or about 2,270 kilograms) would be shipped to Germany along with the equipment of the heavy water plant, and that the weakest link in the transportation route was the train ferry at Lake Tinsjak. On February 20, 1944, the Norwegian underground blasted the last of Germany's precious heavy water into the bottom of the lake at a depth of 400 meters with explosives installed in advance on the ferry "Hydrodro".
To be continued