Ernest Lawrence - World War II and The Manhattan Project

World War II and The Manhattan Project

During World War II, Lawrence eagerly helped to ramp up the American investigation of the possibility of a weapon utilizing nuclear fission. His Radiation Laboratory at U.C. Berkeley (known as the Rad Lab), became one of the major centers for wartime nuclear research, and it was Lawrence who first introduced J. Robert Oppenheimer into what would soon become the Manhattan Project. Prior to recommending Oppenheimer, someone Ernest saw as a brilliant theoretical physicist, Lawrence had a one on one talk with Oppenheimer in which he explained, in no uncertain terms, that Oppenheimer's "left-wanderings" of past had to come to a stop. Only with Oppenheimer's promise to end the "left-wandering" for the duration of the war did Lawrence give his personal recommendation of J. Robert Oppenheimer. An early champion of the electromagnetic separation method to enrich uranium and increase its percentage of fissile U-235, Lawrence manufactured his magnetic calutrons — specialized forms of mass spectrometers — for the massive isotope separation plants in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. It should be noted that Ernest Lawrence saw magnetic separation, or enrichment, as the best short term solution at hand, and it was Lawrence that demanded that the Government also simultaneously and generously sponsor research into chemical enrichment techniques that would eventually become more efficient. After successful completion and testing of the first enriched uranium atomic bomb at the Trinity test site in New Mexico, the question of how to use the now functional weapon on Japan became an issue for the scientists. While Oppenheimer favored no demonstration of the power of the new weapon to Japanese leaders, Lawrence felt that a demonstration would be wise. No demonstration was approved.

Lawrence's secretary, Helen Griggs married the future Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner, Glenn T. Seaborg, in 1942, as the three of them made their way to work on the Manhattan Project in Chicago, Illinois.