In July of 1945 the scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project organized a betting pool on the yield of the bomb detonated in the world’s first atomic explosion. The winner was the last entrant, who took the only number available.
“The Day That Shook the Earth,” The Wall Street Journal
We were sitting around the lab–me, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, Robert Oppenheimer and the rest of the Manhattan Project gang—shooting the breeze, talkin’ baseball.
“Hey, did you hear the Tigers got Hank Greenberg back?” Teller asked.
“He’s gotta be rusty after four years in the Army,” I said, but what did I know about baseball, I couldn’t hit a cow’s butt with a banjo.
Isidor Isaac Rabi snapped at me, sayin’ “He’s a natural, he homered in his first game back.” I figured it was only fellow feeling on his part for The Hebrew Hammer, but I didn’t say nothin’. I had a pile of atoms to split before I got off work at five.
I sometimes got feelings of inferiority bein’ around all those smart guys. There was Berkeley’s Ernest Lawrence, Army Maj. General Leslie Groves, Harvard’s James Conant, a freakin’ Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard. Me? I was responsible for tapin’ the cables and metal fuse boxes to “The Gadget,” the implosion-design plutonium device we was gonna set off in the New Mexico desert. They were the brains, I was the brawns.
“Suppose we make this interesting,” Oppenheimer said to Kenneth Bainbridge, who had designed the test. What design? You push a button and either it works or it fizzles into “Jumbo,” the big vessel that would contain the plutonium so it could be used again. That stuff ain’t cheap.
“Like how?” Bainbridge said, one eyebrow arching skyward like a mushroom cloud.
“A betting pool. We make a bracket with different bomb yields.”
“The TNT equivalent in kilotons?” I asked, pretending to know what I was talking about.
“Right. Everybody picks one at a dollar a square, whoever comes closest to the actual total destruction wins the pool.”
“I’m in,” said Norman Ramsey, a pessimistic physicist. “I pick zero.”
“Zero?” Teller asked skeptically. “So six years, 130,000 people working on the project, two billion dollars . . . and we come up with—nothing?”
“You got it,” Ramsey said, plunking down a dollar bill.
I heard a little snort from Teller’s nostrils. He was a proud man, difficult to get along with, one of the Hungarian “Martians” who had emigrated to the U.S. because he was sick of eating goulash. I could see from the faraway look in his eyes that the wheels in his brain were spinning; he was known for his ability to calculate large numbers in his head, such as the Cubs’ Peanuts Lowrey’s batting average against right-handed pitchers.
“I’ll take the high number,” he said, pulling his wallet from his pocket and plunking down a Washington. “I say forty-five kilotons.”
I heard a low whistle from the corner. It was Fermi, who had seen Teller take his theory of beta decay and run with it, scoring a touchdown with his Gamow-Teller Transitions, like Roy “Wrong Way” Riegels in the 1929 Rose Bowl.
“Teller,” Fermi said sharply, “you couldn’t tell a pion from a muon.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ll take 22 kilotons.”
The other guys placed their bets until there was only one square left, 18 kilotons, and Philip Morrison wandered in. “What are you guys doing?” the 29-year-old rookie asked.
“Having a little fun with a weapon that could mean the end of life on earth as we know it,” Oppenheimer said. “You want a piece of the action?”