Glimpses of a New Era

Government work had its bright side. The salaries of research assistants and associates rose sharply, some tripling, when the civil service classified them. Nonacademic staff also prospered, although less dramatically. Griggs, who received no adjustment to salary in 1940/41 despite the large increase in her duties, got 9 percent more in 1941/42; Harvie, much underpaid as shop foreman in 1940/41 at $2,000, received three times the increase under the NDRC than he had from Sproul. As for the academic staff, Lawrence paid a monthly salary of a tenth the annual rate plus a subsistence allowance of $150 a month to people he wanted to attract.^[125] Then there were deferments. Seaborg pulled a low draft number. It did not worry him: "I expect to be involved in some sort of scientific work for the war effort instead of being drafted."

In April 1941 Lawrence wrote that the Laboratory had no trouble procuring deferments for all its graduate students and research fellows. In August, Griggs reported to the American Institute of Physics that only one member of the staff had been called to duty, a research assistant who was also an ensign.^[126] No one faced unemployment. "There aren't any men available here." Lawrence raided the movie studios for engineers, junior colleges for physicists, high schools for shop boys and storeroom clerks.^[127] And, when the OSRD began to outfit the 184-inch magnet for calutron work, he reached the end, or rather, the beginning, of the supply of trained manpower. "We have government defense jobs up here for almost any number of undergraduate majors in physics."^[128]

And now the downside. All these nouveaux arrivés destroyed the spirit of the Laboratory. Ninety people, most of them employees of a few months' seniority, attended the Christmas party in 1940. "It wasn't a cozy gang. . . . We all missed you like hell." Thus insider still inside, Kamen, to insider then outside, McMillan. Some had ceased to be insiders. When Wolfgang Gentner visited Berkeley in 1939, travelling under the patronage of the German government, he had been given the freedom of the Laboratory.^[129] For several years Lawrence and Cooksey had extended themselves to help Sagane and others copy the 60-inch. None of that was possible in the fall of 1940. The regents ordered that the Laboratory be closed to foreign scientists. The reasons, as explained by Lawrence to Nishina: overcrowding and "a certain amount of work in progress of a confidential character." The boycott extended to information about cyclotrons, or so Cooksey understood it; and he evaded requests from the Japanese for blueprints of the Crocker cyclotron. The connection was pointed out by Brobeck to Kurie, who had proposed a symposium on cyclotronics. "The cyclotron is now [March 1941] working on national

defense and may soon become an official defense project, so that it might not be wise or even possible to publish information about it."^[130]

Among the disagreeable features of war is falling toward the level of one's enemies. A few years earlier Rutherford and Lawrence had joked about restriction of access to German laboratories. Rutherford: "This state of affairs in Nazi-land is rather amusing, and when some of our men from the Cavendish wished to visit Berlin to see Debye's laboratory [at the new Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physik], he wrote to Cockcroft that official permission would have to be granted by the Government before he could admit them!" Lawrence: "Your account of the state of affairs in Germany is almost unbelievable. One would think that with such a scientific tradition the German people could not adopt such an absurd course of action in scientific affairs."^[131] In the fall of 1940 the reciprocal action seemed not absurd but prudent.

The regents did not stop with closing the Laboratory to touring potential enemies. They further ordered the firing of aliens paid from state funds. The comptroller made plain to Lawrence how deep the edict cut. "We regret that under the regulation . . . Mr Segrè is not eligible for employment by the University. Immediate steps should be taken to dismiss this employee from your staff." When this ukase came, Segrè and Seaborg were engaged in establishing the fissionability of element 94 by fast neutrons. Their collaboration had been inhibited earlier by the secrecy of the uranium commitee, which asked that Seaborg direct his sensitive results directly to Briggs and not confide in Segrè, who had a tendency to inform another alien, Fermi. Lawrence had done something to regularize the situation so that (as McMillan wrote Seaborg) "You will be able to talk to Segrè after all." Lawrence saw to it that the conversations continued. He obtained

permission from the provost to have the Physics Department hire Segrè as a part-time lecturer (then much in demand) paid for not by state funds but from the Rockefeller money, the balance of his time to be spent as a research fellow on the same fund in the Laboratory. Similar arrangements kept Kenneth MacKenzie (a Canadian) and C.S. Wu.^[132]

Throughout this time of partial mobilization—from the award of the Rockefeller grant in April 1940 to Pearl Harbor—Lawrence tried to keep the Laboratory at peace work as well as at war work. The beginning of the period coincided with the end of the phony war and the beginning of the end for France. "The war has taken an almost incredible turn for the worse," he wrote Morris, on May 10. "I hope we will get busy with the problem of arming ourselves. . . . We need to take every advantage of modern science and technology." He did not include himself among those who should busy themselves with the problem. On May 21 he listed "an impossible amount of work immediately ahead," namely, the medical program, nuclear physics, and the building of "the great cyclotron." On May 29, answering Thornton, who had told of the death of his brother, a Canadian, on the battlefield: "With the world situation as it is, it does seem hard to go ahead with our work. However, this is what we must do."^[133] And did. According to Bethe, who visited California six weeks later, the hawks of scientific preparedness wheeled around the old campaigner from Caltech, not around Lawrence. "Millikan, and it seems practically everybody at Pasadena is working on defense."^[134]

The appointment to Loomis's committee under the NDRC first brought Lawrence significantly into military preparedness. But, as Millikan rightly observed, Lawrence's part was to send others to do the work, not to do it himself. At the Laboratory, too, he played the occasional expeditor in work on the uranium problem

and element 94. Unlike Tuve, intensely at work on defense matters from the fall of 1940, Lawrence's main concern until late in 1941 was the construction of cyclotrons. That fall he could still write the Rockefeller Foundation and the Research Corporation that he intended to keep up the program in basic nuclear science. In October he listed pure physics, NDRC projects, medical research, and therapy, in that order, as the chief work of the 37-inch and 60-inch cyclotrons.^[135]

Lawrence threw his heart and soul into war work during his meeting with Conant and Arthur Compton at Chicago's golden anniversary at the end of September 1941. Lawrence gave his colleagues a pep talk about the MAUD report and Berkeley's plutonium work. Conant asked whether he would set aside the big cyclotron and devote the next several years of his life to making a bomb. The question "brought up Lawrence with a start. I can still recall the expression in his eyes. . . . He hesitated only a moment. 'If you tell me this is my job, I'll do it.'"^[136] Once committed, he pursued the goal with his native optimism and relentlessness. At a meeting with Compton and others late in October, there was some talk of the uncertainties of the undertaking. "This, to my mind, is very dangerous," Lawrence wrote Compton the next day. "It will not be a calamity if when we get the answers to the Uranium problem they turn out negative from the military point of view, but if the answers are fantastically positive and we fail to get them first, the results for our country may well be a tragic disaster. I feel strongly, therefore, that anyone who hesitates on a vigorous all-out effort on Uranium assumes a grave responsibility."^[137] Lawrence could be content only with a project through which his creation, his Laboratory, might make a decisive contribution to victory. "Calutron" says it all: the contribution of California, its University, and its Radiation Laboratory to a weapon that might change the course of history.