The Trinity Paradox Read online

  Esau took the top sheet, careful not to smudge the ink, then snapped the ivory paper. Crisp, decisive movements always made points with his superiors. Esau had learned such details years before when he started his rise in the party as a Brown Shirt.

  He sat back in the leather-covered chair, swiveling around to look at the office he’d recently commandeered. He had come in with the appropriate bustle and appearance of authority—another thing he had learned in the National Socialist Party, that the appearance of authority carried nearly as much weight as authority itself.

  He had ordered several lesser workers to move the desk and the chair into the office he selected, the one with the best view of Berlin. He had never bothered to check whose office this was; the Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics claimed it now.

  Though the day was cold for early summer, he left the window open to clear the air of stale cigarette smoke. He heard street sounds outside, the vehicles, the people going about their business even during wartime.

  He noticed dust marks on the bookshelves from where the previous occupant had kept his library. Esau’s own boxes were piled in the hall outside the door. Sooner or later he would have someone unpack them, make this look like a proper office.

  He thought of his cramped dormitory room in Cambridge back when the world was different, back when the unfair Treaty of Versailles remained a festering sore for Germans but not yet cause for a renewed war. German physics held the reins of science, and universities such as Gottingen held the greatest minds of philosophy, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Esau had pursued studies in high-frequency electronics as a guest in Great Britain, eventually gaining some fame in the early days of wireless telegraphs and television.

  His English friend and companion, Graham Fox, had assisted him in his studies, and they had both gone far. Rutherford taught at Cambridge, with its meadows and tree-shaded river. Niels Bohr himself came to give guest lectures. The Cavendish Laboratory, where Chadwick had discovered the neutron in 1932, had been the best equipped in all of Europe.

  Abraham Esau had engaged in innumerable discussions, not just within classes, but also in their favorite meeting place, an old cafe’ in a remarkably clean alley. Other students gathered there to argue over their own imaginary problems. Scribbled mathematical formulae covered the marble-topped tables, and the waiters had strict instructions never to wipe away the marks without special permission. Unsolved problems left on the marble were often completed by other students who came in later. Esau smiled to himself; those were heady days. The vivid memories held many distinctive colors, sounds, and odors for him—but the world had since gone flat.

  He had not seen Graham Fox for many years. They had grown apart as Esau absorbed himself in party politics, working his way up in the German government. His calling had been to use his knowledge and talents to help resurrect Germany from its economic death. He had been appointed President of the Reich Bureau of Standards, and later head of the physics section of the Education Ministry’s Reich Research Council. Abraham Esau, with his cursed Jewish-sounding name, had stumbled through many pitfalls, back-stabbings, and political maneuvers to get to his position now. It had made him many enemies, and few friends.

  Esau straightened the photograph on the corner of the desk. He had no wife, no children—this was a picture of himself. One party weekly described him as “a thickset man with a tough farmer’s skull” and had made fun of his peasant ancestry, his East Prussian accent. Even his competency in physics. Too many people enjoyed picking on Abraham Esau.

  In the photograph, though, Esau looked impeccable, wearing a gray wool jacket, neat tie, crisp white collar. He kept his steel-colored hair trimmed well above the ears and oiled into place so that it showed the parallel lines of combs’ teeth. He had one eyebrow raised, pale irises the color of water. An intelligent-looking man, a powerful man, with an upturned sneer caused by a tangled scar on his upper lip—the mark of a boating accident when he and Graham Fox had gotten a bit drunk and gone out on the river when they shouldn’t have.

  Esau laid the stationery back on the desktop. Plenipotentiary for Nuclear Physics. The title had so many trappings, held so much power.

  It had not seemed surprising that a German, Otto Hahn, would announce the discovery of the fission of the atomic nucleus in 1939, the year war broke out. Hahn had been unable to believe his own results for the longest time, probably sabotaged by his Jewish assistant Lise Meitner before she fled Germany. Finally, when he could no longer refute his astonishing results, Hahn had published his discovery in a public forum for all the world to see.

  Esau found it remarkable how things had changed in only four years. Now open dissemination of such important information was unheard of. All German nuclear work—and no doubt all American and British as well continued at a frantic pace, but those discoveries were carefully hidden behind the shield of secrecy.

  As Plenipotentiary, he now had to reconcile all the disparate work on nuclear physics in Germany, but he did not know how to do it. Certainly, their own researchers were among the most brilliant in the world; but they were scattered, each one working on his own pet project. It reminded him of horses pulling a cart in opposite directions, getting nowhere.

  Three separate German teams worked on the same problem, and each team refused to cooperate with the others, and each received funding from different ministries.

  The experimentalist von Ardenne operated the smallest program under the auspices of the Ministry of Posts—a more unlikely sponsor Esau could not have imagined. But von Ardenne had done what he found necessary to implement his ideas. Esau admired that. He himself had done a similar thing, back in 1939, when the Reich Ministry of Education appointed him to look into the possibilities of developing energy from the atomic nucleus. Hahn had just announced his discovery of fission, and physicists worldwide were falling all over themselves to be first with the next breakthrough.

  On his own initiative, Esau had stockpiled all uranium available in Germany. When the Joachimsthal mines in Czechoslovakia came under German control, Esau immediately requested samples of radium from the mines. He had worked hard, he had shown his mettle, his persistence, and his vision. But instead the Ministry of Armaments had decided to start its own nuclear research program behind Esau’s back.

  They appointed Dr. Kurt Diebner to do their work. Diebner had been whining for years to get something like this, and now he had stolen it from Esau. Abraham Esau was ordered to cease his own atomic research and to stop questioning orders. They told him to surrender his carefully stockpiled reserves of uranium to Diebner. He had no choice in the matter.

  But now, three years later, the roller coaster of political machinations had left Esau in a position to step up, to become the new Plenipotentiary. Now he oversaw Diebner’s work, which, with his group of physicists at Göttingen, was the second prong of German nuclear research. Esau despised Diebner, with his thick black glasses, sloping forehead, and ponderous speech. Diebner had once accused Esau of stealing his work, claiming that he himself had been working on the problem since 1938… which was absolutely absurd, since Hahn hadn’t even discovered nuclear fission until the year after that.

  Diebner’s team seemed the most productive of the three, but Esau knew that was only because Diebner had confiscated the cyclotron from Frédéric and Irene Joliot-Curie in Paris, when the Nazis had overrun France. Diebner had taken Joliot-Curie’s work; he had copied the Frenchman’s ideas and implemented them himself. Whose ideas would he steal next?

  The third and most impressive arm of nuclear research was led at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute in Dahlem, a suburb of Berlin. Its most prominent member was Dr. Werner Heisenberg, the scientist who had developed the famous quantum Principle of Uncertainty, for which he’d won the Nobel Prize in 1932.

  Heisenberg was the darling of the theoreticians. His fame was greater than any of the others, yet he was quiet, firm, not as much a prima donna as so many of the other researchers. Heisenberg kept his voice lo
w, his words clipped, his thoughts very clear. Esau didn’t care for Heisenberg personally, though he respected the man.

  A few months earlier, when Abraham Esau had called a conference to discuss nuclear physics work with the Nazi high command, he invited many important people in the party, as well as a great number of prominent German physicists. The idea was for the first day to be an overview, a sales pitch to the leaders of government about what exactly the research teams were working on, with subsequent days devoted to in-depth secret discussions and papers among the nuclear physicists themselves.

  Goering had curtly declined Esau’s invitation, as had most of the others. Not until much later did Esau realize that his own secretary had bungled her job and mailed the wrong schedules, inviting the government and military representatives to a long agenda of technical papers with nonsensical titles, making no mention of the general overview. No wonder so few of the important ones had showed up.

  Still, the room was crowded. The physicists milled around, uneasy in such a large crowd. A handful of men in military uniforms sat at a long table and in wooden chairs near the wall.

  Esau ignored the physicists and spent his time making sure the officials remained comfortable, that they had coffee to drink, that someone attended to them immediately if they had questions. Perhaps, even though their superiors had not bothered to come, Esau could impress upon them what his section was doing for the war effort, what this strange nuclear physics was about. But how was he to explain atomic fission to people who did not even know what an atom was?

  “Gentlemen,” Esau said. He paused, waiting for those gathered in the room to fall silent and turn their attention to him. Self-consciously, he straightened his tie. The physicists, dressed in street clothes rather than uniforms, continued to rustle about; they had no interest in what Esau would say, since they already knew more about the subject than he did himself. Let them act snobbish, Esau thought— they wouldn’t get far in their research without his support.

  “Gentlemen,” he said again, focusing especially on the ranking man there, Air Marshal Erhard Milch of the Luftwaffe. “You are familiar with presentations of enhanced explosives and new ways to fashion artillery—but I guarantee that you have never before heard how German science can unleash an entirely new destructive power, one as limitless as the universe itself. It is a power that springs from the most fundamental particle of all matter—the center of the atom itself.”

  Esau held up a clenched fist. “In 1938 our esteemed Otto Hahn discovered how the nucleus of the uranium atom can be split, releasing the energy contained within.” He held up a second clenched fist against the first, put them in front of him, then violently snapped them apart. “This suggests the possibility of a superbomb, a weapon based on atomic energy.

  “Upon learning of this, I myself stockpiled all of Germany’s uranium resources, because the uranium nucleus is the only one that exhibits this phenomenon of fission. But alas, it is not even that simple, because only a very special type of uranium is susceptible. This type of uranium, an isotope with an atomic weight of 235 instead of the more usual 238, is exceedingly rare. Out of every thousand grams of purified uranium, only seven are of the proper type, and even then, the uranium-235 is completely mixed with the rest. We are developing techniques to separate it out.”

  Esau was losing his audience. He saw them scowling, skeptical; this was not what they wanted to hear. He did not want to discuss the many failures so far, but to emphasize the possible results.

  “Lest you be discouraged, let me point out that a single bomb made with uranium-235 would be more powerful than a thousand of the best bombs we have available now. The successful completion of this project will more than compensate for the difficulties. Because of this, we believe nuclear investigations should be given the highest priority from the Armaments Ministry and Education Ministry. We can win the war as soon as we overcome this obstacle of separating out the special uranium.”

  “And what is so difficult about that?” Air Marshal Milch said. He remained seated. He clearly knew that he outranked everyone in the room. Insignia decorated his shoulders and his breast. His cheeks were chubby, his eyes small and dark. He puffed on a deep brown cigarette, as if to flaunt that he could obtain good Turkish tobacco even with rationing. “German chemical workers pride themselves that they can process any material.”

  Esau nodded soberly, though it was a stupid question. “It is not so simple, Herr Marshal. We cannot use a chemical process because there is no chemical difference between the isotopes—they are both uranium, as far as the chemistry goes. We must find a physical method. We are working with devices such as cyclotrons, a new instrument called the ultracentrifuge, another called the ‘isotope sluice.’

  “The actual difference between the good uranium and the bad uranium, if I may call it that, is infinitesimally small. Let me use this comparison: imagine you are on top of the Cologne Cathedral, looking down upon a crowd. You are given the task of finding the one man who has an odd number of eyelashes in his left eyelid… and you have only a pair of dirty binoculars to work with. That is the magnitude of our task.”

  The physicists in the room seemed amused by the comparison, and a few applauded. Air Marshal Milch scowled. Esau continued rapidly, “The Fuhrer has requested that we find a way to utterly annihilate Great Britain. This bomb can do it! We can bring even America to its knees. But we can do this only if we receive the fullest support for our work.”

  Esau knew he had to make his point with Milch. Armaments Minister Albert Speer had not bothered to attend the conference, but Milch had his ear and would report back, favorably or unfavorably.

  Air Marshal Milch got to his feet. Esau recognized why the man usually remained seated, because he was relatively short and stockily built. He set his smoldering cigarette on the edge of the scarred table, then looked across the room. “And such a weapon—Professor Heisenberg, tell me, how big would a bomb have to be to destroy a whole city?”

  Esau’s fingernails dug into his palms. Heisenberg, always Heisenberg! Why hadn’t Milch bothered to ask him?

  Heisenberg shrugged, then answered after a moment of pursing his lips in thought, “About as large as a pineapple.”

  “So.” Air Marshal Milch sat back down. His face seemed to be carrying a smile.

  Esau cringed, suspecting that now they would be given the order to produce such a bomb and have one ready within a few months. Obviously, Heisenberg was a theoretician—he had no common sense. If he had any background in party politics at all, he would have learned never to make promises that might later backfire….

  Somehow the conference had achieved its aim. Word trickled up the chain of command. Armaments Minister Speer and Deputy Fuhrer Goering had become interested in the project, though Hitler himself had taken no notice. Esau had been appointed Plenipotentiary of Nuclear Physics.

  Now he stood up from the desk in his new Berlin office, went to the hall and called for someone to bring his boxes into the room. He wanted to unpack. He knew he would be staying awhile. This project still had an enormous amount of work to do before it could accomplish its aims.

  Was it something to be proud of, Esau wondered, to oversee this broken-up nuclear program, with its offshoots of scattered research? With physicists squabbling over minimal resources, duplicating each other’s work?

  The whole thing seemed impossible. It would take a miracle.

  4

  Los Alamos

  June 1943

  “If the new weapon is going to be the determining factor in the war, then there is a desperate need for speed. Three months’ delay might be disastrous.”

  —James B. Conant

  “One might point out that scientists themselves have initiated the development of this ‘secret weapon’ and it is therefore strange that they should be reluctant to try it out on the enemy as soon as it is available… The compelling reason for creating this weapon with such speed was our fear that Germany had the technical skill ne
cessary to develop such a weapon and that the German government had no moral restraints regarding its use.”

  —The Franck Report, composed by seven dissenting nuclear scientists, delivered to Secretary of War Stimson, June 11, 1945

  Mud still covered A Street, but the mountain morning shone blue and crisp. Though the research town was a mere shadow of what it would become decades later, Elizabeth thought the place had a greater intensity to it, a desperate frenzy that kept everyone working their hardest. Jeeps sped by carrying loads of uniformed soldiers; bespectacled men picked their way across puddles to the Tech Area.

  All the women wore dresses. Mrs. Canapelli had loaned Elizabeth a dress, a gaudy green flowery print that probably would have looked better on a sofa, and she had mentioned the best days to look at new bolts of material at the PX—as if Elizabeth had any intention of sewing herself a dress. Elizabeth hadn’t even worn a skirt in years, but at least now she felt part of the crowd. Mrs. Canapelli had also loaned her bobby pins and barrettes for her hair. Better to avoid calling attention to herself any more than she had to. Elizabeth intended to keep hiding in the woodwork as long as she could—at least until she figured out what she wanted to do.

  Keeping to the side of the street, she made for the administration building. Groups of men passed her on the way. Several smiled a wordless greeting, one man whistled loudly. She wasn’t supposed to mind that sort of thing in 1943.

  She clutched the paper given her by the shift captain. Working the In-Processing desk should be easier now that she knew the position would be only temporary. Someone would find her paperwork, though it had been right on top of the In box, and the transfer to von Neumann’s computations group would no doubt take a few more days, even with expedite stamped on the form.