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the atomic scientists, the SENSE OF WONDER, AND THE BOMB
MARK FIEGE
ABSTRACT
The atomic scientists' intense fascination with nature helped them to produce the knowledge necessary to create the bomb. These physicists, chemists, and mathematicians believed that nature should be reduced to its essential parts, observed, explained in terms of laws, and manipulated for human purposes. Their relationship to nature, however, included more than just this instrumental mentality and method, which alone were insufficient to yield scientific insights. Walking, hiking, and mountain climbing loosened the scientists' minds and helped them to think about atoms and subatomic particles. More important, the scientists' deep feelings about nature—curiosity and emotions generally known as wonder—inspired them to undertake the research that eventually informed their Manhattan Project work. By describing a little-known side of the bomb, this essay advances a recent scholarly trend toward studies of the hidden or unexpected environmental features of America's atomic project.
| IN DAY OF TRINITY, a history of the atomic bomb, the journalist Lansing Lamont recounted a story about Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director of the Manhattan Project and the guiding light of Los Alamos, the federal government's secret laboratory located in the high country of north central New Mexico. On July 15, 1945, Oppenheimer and other project personnel gathered at Trinity Site, some 150 miles south of their research compound, to test the weapon that they had conceived and built. As the final hours in the countdown slipped away, Oppenheimer climbed the one-hundred-foot steel tower that loomed above ground zero. Like the other Manhattan Project scientists, he was anxious about the test, and he wanted to reassure himself that the bomb was set to go. Finding nothing amiss, he descended and returned to base camp, several miles away, and there struck up a conversation with the metallurgist Cyril Smith. In the midst of their talk, Lamont reported, Oppenheimer paused and gazed at the sheer slope of the darkening Sierra Oscura, immediately east of the test site. "Funny," he mused, "how the mountains always inspire our work."1 |
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Lamont never explained what Oppenheimer meant by that comment. It was one quotation extracted from numerous interviews with Manhattan Project participants, and the journalist clearly intended it to add little but geographical texture to a fast-paced story centered on colorful personalities, technological wizardry, secret strategizing, espionage, the demands of global war, and a climactic, mind-boggling explosion. The mountains that spoke to Oppenheimer provided the backdrop to the drama, but that was all. Peaks, slopes, rock, and the sunlight and shadow that played across them—these were part of the story's setting, not its substance. |
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Environmental historians, however, might well pause and reflect on Oppenheimer's statement before hastening to the mushroom cloud. Mountains, we know, are not trivial, and the powerful feelings that they evoke are worthy of attention. Modern people have gone to the mountains for all kinds of reasons: to escape the constraints of everyday life, experience physical challenge, gain an altered sense of self, witness beauty, feel awe and wonder, and come close to God. Mostly, modern people have viewed the mountains as sources of insight and joy: Physical elevation has involved a corresponding elevation of the soul.2 In light of this popular attitude, Oppenheimer's comment might seem strange. How could mountains matter to scientists focused on mastering nature for terrible purposes? How could a source of spiritual insight and goodness contribute to the creation of such a fearsome, destructive, perhaps immoral, weapon? |
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