The Journals of Ayn Rand Read online

  General Groves was the only boss over Oppenheimer.

  Scientists given choice of problems. Reasons instead of authority.

  Free to solve problems.

  Scientists like music. Long walks, skiing, horses.

  No one ever gave an order at Los Alamos. [AR recalled this part of the interview years later: “I asked him whether the scientists worked under orders. He looked at me in the way that my best characters would have, and said in a morally indignant tone: ‘No one ever gave an order at Los Alamos. ’ ”]

  They did things they didn’t want to do—only because they understood the necessity. A great scientist ran the machine shop. People who ran calculating machines and other dull jobs.

  After a hundred experiments—“we’re getting something.”

  [AR’s meetings with Oppenheimer proved useful later: he became the model for Robert Stadler in Atlas Shrugged. In a 1961 interview, she recalled: “Oppenheimer set the character of Stadler in my mind, which is the reason for the first name of Robert. It’s the type that Oppenheimer projected-that enormous intelligence, somewhat bitter, but very much the gentleman and scholar, and slightly other-worldly. Even his office was what I described for Stadler—that almost ostentatious simplicity. ”]

  January 16, 1946

  Notes on interview with General [Leslie R.] Groves

  Groves—top in his profession (Army engineering)—took chance on disgrace if project failed.

  He was told of his appointment first in hall of Congress building—came out of Military committee where he testified—met General Somervell—asked his opinion on taking assignment with General overseas—Somervell told him the Secretary of War had another assignment for him “which might win the war.” Groves [complained about being] given a research job; [at first] he thought it was fantastic and doomed to failure.

  Groves didn’t know project would succeed. “I thought we had a 60% chance—and had to take it before anyone else did.”

  Groves had to make crucial decisions—often against the advice of his scientific advisors. (In the case of starting Oak Ridge from [Dr. E. 0.] Lawrence’s “speck of light.”) Groves had no organization set up—there was no time—he ran things himself—appointed the right men and almost never changed them.

  Groves was “salesman” to get big industries to take the contracts.

  They could have refused—but not one of them did. The story of DuPont—the board of directors—the meeting and the papers face down—Chairman speaks—not one paper is turned over (among those who didn’t turn the paper over was Lamont DuPont, who owns 60 million [dollars worth] of DuPont stock). [The papers contained classified information on the Manhattan Project, which the Department of Defense was willing to divulge if necessary.]

  Groves says he would like to see stressed “teamwork and American management”—no other country could have done it.

  Groves went to Milwaukee to see a contractor; he solved two technical problems for [the contractor] while in a hotel room conference.

  One method of doing a certain scientific process had to be abandoned after spending a huge sum.

  January 23, 1946

  Interview with Dr. Kaynes

  [Dr. Kaynes was apparently a scientist who worked with Richard Feynman in the computing group at Los Alamos.]

  Conflict of scientists who were in Army. But [they were] free in the laboratory. Never worked under compulsion.

  What is the critical mass?

  One works with cross-section (cyclotron involved).

  Neutron renector—looked for damper—tried to “freeze design.”

  At request of Fermi, made calculations to see if the world would blow up.

  Dr. Hans Bethe gave talk at colloquium before test; they were terrified when they realized how little they knew.

  Dr. Kaynes accepted job knowing nothing about it. Arrived in early 1944. Used first names. Dr. Bethe told him they were making a new element. Told everything. Asked: “What do you want to do?”

  Worked with a “screwball”—Richard Feynman.

  (Scientists dressed sloppy. Only big shots dressed—Bethe and Oppenheimer, but not Fermi.)

  Bohr and son came often. Fermi eventually came and stayed there about a year before test. Chadwick was stationed there (for British) almost from beginning. Lawrence visited. Dr. Bethe. Dr. [George B.]

  Kistiakowsky—White Russian.

  (Ideal of most professors—university without undergraduates.)

  Feynman was Kaynes’ group leader (about age 27). He traveled to Albuquerque to see wife, who was dying of T.B. Beat tom-toms right in laboratory—the more noise, the harder he was thinking. Wife died. No one paid attention to work hours.

  One hundred tons of TNT used to test instruments—a few months before atomic test.

  Dr. [William George] Penny got word his wife in London was hurt in bombing. Later learned his wife died—intense hatred.

  Los Alamos originally planned for 75 scientists, grew gradually.

  Polish scientist who could not find his wife in Warsaw.

  Columbia—started work with Fermi—men came out all black from carbon. Fermi—scientific. Compton—administration.

  (Communists not allowed on project.)

  Art Wahl (chemist) discovered plutonium—E. O. Lawrence’s laboratory at Berkeley.

  January 25, 1946

  Interview with Mrs. Oppenheimer

  Test was referred to as “Trinity.” Test was on a Monday—the next Saturday Mrs. Oppenheimer gave a party—evening dress. Mood was one of relief.

  After Hiroshima they did not feel like celebrating.

  The Oppenheimers were the first family to move to Los Alamos.

  [The town] had about 30 people then—a big dormitory for scientists in one of the schoolrooms. The Oppenheimers lived in one of the masters’ houses of the old school. Community life was much friend lier and more harmonious than in other cities—higher mental level.

  Dr. Oppenheimer took job only on condition that his essential workers would know the secret.

  A great part of their work was spent in meetings and conferences.

  At first, scientists were afraid of possible German atomic research, but later learned there was none. Scientists worked in order to save lives and end the war.

  Was it in order to beat the Germans to the discovery? “Good God, no!”

  January 29, 1946

  Interview with Colonel Nichols

  [Colonel K. D. Nichols served under General Groves, and had responsibility for the design, construction, and operation of the plants which produced the fissionable material required for the bombs.]

  Spies tried not to be promoted.

  Nichols, [General George C.] Marshall, and a civilian wandered for a day, choosing the site.

  Plans about center of town—useless planning.

  Ore refined at other plant [Oak Ridge, Tennessee].

  Scientists impatient with engineers.

  Main problem: critical size and detonation.

  Detonation—crucial—the gamble.

  Lawrence [influential in] selecting Oppenheimer.

  FBI security men—separate organization. Foreign spy. Feed back answers to Germany. (Phony answers written by scientist.)

  Miss Tracey (Compton’s secretary): “I have a husband on Iwo Jima. You don’t have to ask me.”

  Better work when they knew what they were doing. “Never saw such a change in a town” (as took place after they knew).

  Mrs. Nichols—story of how she heard news that it was a bomb.

  Community troubles with scientists who hated restrictions, such as no choice of schools for their children.

  January, 1946

  Philosophic Notes

  Answer to Oppenheimer’s worry:

  “Scientists are the representatives of free inquiry. They will protect you—and they will not work for or under compulsion. The atom bomb and the sudden ruling position of the scientist shows that force is not practical. Force needs brains to be applied. Without thought, you cannot even indulge in violence. Brute force is nothing—thought and principles everything.

  “The atom bomb is a weapon of defense—it is not good for looting—and dictatorships are looters. The atom bomb is the weapon of a free country.”

  For “overall” guidance:

  Wars are caused by the anti-rational, pro-force psychology of men. If we do not deal with one another through reason—nothing is left to us but brute force. Whenever anyone advocates the achievement of anything whatever through the use of force or compulsion on men—he is planting the seeds of war.

  Have a sequence where somebody wonders what causes war—and scattered, “human” examples of the above psychology.

  “What causes wars?” can be a kind of overall theme and unifying line.

  “Just as a tiny, invisible atom holds forces that determine the shape of matter—so you, each man, by the ideas you hold, determine the shape of world events.” (“Do not worry about anything except your own ideas and responsibility. It will work.”)

  Everything we have comes from someone’s thought.

  Scene where mother says “nobody wants war”—and we show all the preaching of violence: worker—“take the property of the rich by force”; industrialist—“make workers work by force”; teacher—“educate people by force”; writer—“make people go to my plays by force”; farmer—“prohibit the sale of milk from other states by force”; dietitian—“make everybody drink orange juice by force.” “Since society is complex—we need force.” (Then show scene at construction site.)

  The antagonists: the Nazi ideal—a horde of armed brutes; the free ideal—a scientist, alone at a blackboard. (Sequence about the ancestors of both sides.) England in ruins—“our only defense”—Chadwick. Conclus
ion from “teamwork” is not “any man is unimportant, only the team counts,” but “every man is important.”

  “All human activities are like a chain reaction; somebody has to be the first neutron.”

  Don’t forget line (toward end): “It was not an accident.”

  Someone (maybe Chadwick) looks at sky and says: “God did give us a means for right to win over might: the mind which can find the secrets of the universe and which cannot work for evil, because it cannot work under compulsion.” (Evil [men] steal the ideas and achievements of free men; it is up to free men to protect themselves and the world from that—by protecting freedom.)

  The men that a dictatorship needs most (if it’s real power that it wants) are the first to turn into its bitterest enemies (Fermi, Einstein) —by the very nature of the idea of dictatorship.

  January 19, 1946

  [The following is AR’s “general outline” of the screenplay.]

  We open with an immense shot of the night sky—the stars and planets—the vast mystery of the universe. Camera tilts to include the earth below—a dark spread of hills, wide and desolate under the sky. A single pinpoint of light shows somewhere in the hills; it looks like a feeble, futile competition to the flaming spread of the stars. Camera moves forward slowly, and we begin to distinguish the figure of a man standing in the hills. He seems helpless and small, totally insignificant in the face of the immensity of the universe.

  The man is about thirty years old. He is looking up at the sky. His face is weak and bitter. He turns slowly and walks toward the light we have seen; it is the lighted window of a small, modest house somewhere in the hills of California.

  Inside the house, a young woman is lying in bed. The man, her husband, comes in. He speaks bitterly of the fact that man is only a worm in the universe—a helpless, insignificant worm—and what is the use of anything? The young wife reproaches him gently—that is no way to talk on the day when their son was born. And we see the new-born child beside her.

  The young mother is full of hopes and dreams for her son. She expects him to have a great life in a great new world; the war has just ended, there will never be another war. She asks her husband what important events took place on the day of her son’s birth. The father picks up a newspaper—it is the year 1919. He glances through the pages, briefly naming the big events of the day. Somewhere at the bottom of a page, he finds a small item announcing that Sir Ernest Rutherford, British scientist, has succeeded in smashing an atom of nitrogen. He drops the paper contemptuously; he does not consider this of any importance; scientists, he says, are useless; this is the day of the practical man, the man of action.

  There is a photograph of Rutherford in the paper. From it we dissolve to Rutherford himself, in his laboratory in England. He is being interviewed by a couple of reporters—it is not considered a big story—the reporters are not too impressed. Yes, Rutherford says, he can explain his experiments so that the laymen would understand—he is not sure, however, that it would interest many people. He proceeds to explain briefly the nuclear theory of the atom, which he had formulated in 1912, and his present experiment by which he transmuted nitrogen into hydrogen. Of what practical use is that?—asks one of the reporters. A little astonished, Rutherford, the theoretical scientist, answers: “I don’t know.” “Then why are you interested in that kind of research?” Rutherford answers, very quietly: “Only because it is knowledge of the truth.”

  We dissolve to the young father saying: “What is the truth? There is no such thing as objective truth.” He is saying it to his son, now ten years old. It is the year 1929. The boy is an earnest, intelligent child; his face shows future strength and character. (For the purpose of this outline only we’ll call him John X—he can be anyone, he is the young generation of today.) The father is reproaching him for his scholarly inclinations—the boy studies too much, reads too much, asks too many questions. The father wants him to go out more, learn more about the world and become useful when he grows up; people who think are useless; the mind is a superstition, truth is a superstition, everything is relative, we mustn’t question anything, we must learn to take orders. The father is a kind of petty-Fascist type, a shiftless failure who wants to run everything and does nothing, who takes out his own incompetence in hatred for the world; he represents the cheap cynicism, the irrationalism, the contempt for moral standards and intellectual principles which characterized his generation all over the world.

  Tied into this scene we show, with brief explanations, a scene of Dr. E. O. Lawrence, at the University of California, with his new invention—the cyclotron; and a scene of Dr. Robert J. Van de Graaf, at Princeton, with his new giant electrostatic generator—two important points in the progress of atomic science.

  Then, as the father complains about the state of the world—there is nothing to do now, after the stock market crash, no frontiers left to conquer—we go to a plane flying over the desolate wastes of North Canada. Gilbert Labine discovers the black rock on the shore of a lake. We show his expedition through the snow the next year, the discovery that the rock is pitchblende [uranium ore], the establishment of his company.

  1932. John X is 13 years old. He shows signs of becoming nervous, restless, bitter—as he studies in secret from his father. He has to smuggle the latest scientific magazines into his room and hide them. In connection with his studies, we show scenes of: the Cockron-Walton experiments, in England, splitting atoms with protons; Sir James Chadwick, in England, discovering the neutron; Prof. Harold Urey, in America, discovering heavy water.

  1934. Niels Bohr, in Denmark, formulates his theory of the structure of the [atomic nucleus].

  Enrico Fermi, in Italy, invents the technique of bombarding an atom with slow neutrons.

  Scene of Fermi’s clash with Fascist officials who hamper his work. (I would like to have information from Fermi about an authentic incident—also the exact date and manner of his escape from Italy.)

  John X is now fifteen. There is a violent scene when he tells his father that he wants to become a scientist. Scientists, the father declares, are no good, because they “live in ivory towers.” Man must act, not think. His son must learn to be practical; take, for instance, that fellow who’s growing so powerful in Germany; of course, the father says, I don’t approve of some of his ideas, but nobody will deny that he’s practical, a realist, a smart man with an efficient system who’ll get what he wants. As an illustration of how one goes about being practical, the father seizes the boy’s books and throws them into the fireplace.

  As the books burn, we dissolve to a huge pile of books burning in the square of a German city, under swastika flags. And we see the “practical man,” Hitler, in his office, bending over a map of Germany. He tells his assistants that he controls all of it—he boasts about his power—to hell with principles and theories—thinking is a weakness—the brain is evil—action and force are all that counts—a powerful State can accomplish anything—the individual doesn’t matter—the mind doesn’t matter (exact quotations from Mein Kampf to be used here). Camera pans to the window of the office: there is a light in a distant window of the dark city outside. Camera moves toward that window and into the room. It is a modest study. A solitary man sits working at a desk. The desk holds nothing but books, papers, abstract formulas. The man is Einstein.

  Scene of Einstein leaving Germany. (I would like to have the date and authentic details from Einstein.)

  1936. John X, seventeen, is entering college. He has given in to his father and given up his ambition of becoming a scientist. As a result, he is a listless, frustrated, embittered youth, cynical, without fire or faith, without much interest in anything—like most of the youth of that time. His father, very pleased, accompanies him when he enrolls at the University of California to study whatever it is his father has selected for him. Actually, the father is not interested in any education, but wants him to become a great college athlete. (“The brawn is mightier than the brain.”) As they walk down a hall of the University, they see—through a half-open door—a man at a blackboard in a modest office. The man has his back to us and is writing incomprehensible formulas on the blackboard. From a friend or a minor college official accompanying them, they learn that the man is working on some mysterious studies of the mesotron and cosmic rays. “There!” says the father, “do you want to end up like that?” The boy shakes his head. As they pass the door, we see the sign on it: “J. R. Oppenheimer.”