personal life was equally flamboyant, and subject of much comment. Two years earlier in 1940, he had shocked friends and colleagues by marrying Kitty Puening after a whirlwind romance, and their son Peter had been born so soon afterward that Oppie had attempted to jokingly defuse the scandal by dubbing him “Pronto.” Kitty was dramatic, dark-haired, and petite; claimed to be a German princess; and was prone to putting on airs. She had also been married three times before the age of twenty-nine and had been with her previous husband for less than a year when Oppie met her at a Pasadena garden party. It was characteristic of Oppie that he would fall for someone so exotic, utterly unsuitable, and beyond reach as Kitty, who, among her many problems, was at the time another mans wife. Oppenheimer, who was besotted, called her “Golden.” His close-knit circle was less charitable, considering the poetic young Wunderkind—who was so bereft after his mother’s death in 1930 that he described himself to a friend as “the loneliest man in the world”—easy prey for a calculating woman. The faculty wives who had doted on Oppie, who was known for bringing flowers to dinner, took an instant dislike to her. After his marriage, many of his peers felt he became more socially ambitious than ever, as though seeking to remove himself from the dreary confines of academic life, and came to regard him with a mixture of envy and resentment. To Greene, however, he seemed even more of a romantic figure. While she would never have admitted it at the time, she was, she said, “more than a little in love” with her boss.
Back in the spring of 1942, Oppenheimer had been summoned to the office of Arthur Compton, the director of the new Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) at the University of Chicago, and briefed on what was unofficially becoming known among physicists as the country’s “bomb headquarters.” Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Compton decided that America was moving far too slowly in its atomic bomb research and that the country needed to drastically step up its efforts if a weapon were to be developed in time to be used in the current war. Ever since December 1938, when the German and Austrian scientists Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner first reported their startling discovery that uranium atoms fissioned upon impact by neutrons, physicists in laboratories around the world had been working on how the process of fission, in which a large quantity of energy was released, along with neutrons, could possibly make a chain reaction—and a nuclear explosion. By the summer of 1939, with the drums of war beating in Europe, the Hungarian refugee scientist Leo Szilard had become so alarmed about reports that the Germans were working on a powerful new weapon that he prevailed upon Albert Einstein to write to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warning him about the military application of nuclear fission. The president had approved the formation of a uranium-research committee, and $6,000 had been appropriated, but there was so much confusion about the new science of fission that little had been accomplished.
Impatient with the committee’s progress, Compton decided to centralize all the different teams at the Met Lab—the misleading name was meant to disguise its main purpose—to make a concentrated push to develop a method for making a fission explosive. He told Oppenheimer that even as they spoke, the Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was secretly at work in a squash court, tucked under the west stands of the university’s football field, to achieve the first chain reaction in a graphite pile. With all signs indicating that Fermi’s pile would work, Compton needed Oppenheimer, whom he regarded as having a brilliant mind, to take charge of a division of the Met Lab and organize a group to study the physics of an explosive chain reaction—or bomb. It was going to be an extraordinarily difficult task, but Compton thought
Back in the spring of 1942, Oppenheimer had been summoned to the office of Arthur Compton, the director of the new Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) at the University of Chicago, and briefed on what was unofficially becoming known among physicists as the country’s “bomb headquarters.” Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Compton decided that America was moving far too slowly in its atomic bomb research and that the country needed to drastically step up its efforts if a weapon were to be developed in time to be used in the current war. Ever since December 1938, when the German and Austrian scientists Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner first reported their startling discovery that uranium atoms fissioned upon impact by neutrons, physicists in laboratories around the world had been working on how the process of fission, in which a large quantity of energy was released, along with neutrons, could possibly make a chain reaction—and a nuclear explosion. By the summer of 1939, with the drums of war beating in Europe, the Hungarian refugee scientist Leo Szilard had become so alarmed about reports that the Germans were working on a powerful new weapon that he prevailed upon Albert Einstein to write to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warning him about the military application of nuclear fission. The president had approved the formation of a uranium-research committee, and $6,000 had been appropriated, but there was so much confusion about the new science of fission that little had been accomplished.
Impatient with the committee’s progress, Compton decided to centralize all the different teams at the Met Lab—the misleading name was meant to disguise its main purpose—to make a concentrated push to develop a method for making a fission explosive. He told Oppenheimer that even as they spoke, the Nobel Prize-winning Italian physicist Enrico Fermi was secretly at work in a squash court, tucked under the west stands of the university’s football field, to achieve the first chain reaction in a graphite pile. With all signs indicating that Fermi’s pile would work, Compton needed Oppenheimer, whom he regarded as having a brilliant mind, to take charge of a division of the Met Lab and organize a group to study the physics of an explosive chain reaction—or bomb. It was going to be an extraordinarily difficult task, but Compton thought
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