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It is very interesting that the censor himself has to tell me to tell my wife not to tell me that she’s … But they had an answer. They said, yes, that they are worried about mail being intercepted on the way from Albuquerque, and that someone might find out that there was censorship if they looked in the mail, and would she please act much more normal.
So I went down the next time to Albuquerque, and I talked to her and I said, “Now, look, let’s not mention censorship.” But we had had so much trouble that we at last worked out a code, something illegal. If I would put a dot at the end of my signature, it meant I had had trouble again, and she would move on to the next of the moves that she had concocted. She would sit there all day long, because she was ill, and she would think of things to do. The last thing she did was to send me an advertisement which she found perfectly legitimately. It said, “Send your boyfriend a letter on a jigsaw puzzle. We sell you the blank, you write the letter on it, take it all apart, put it in a little sack, and mail it.” I received that one with a note saying, “We do not have time to play games. Please instruct your wife to confine herself to ordinary letters.”
Well, we were ready with the one more dot, but they straightened out just in time and we didn’t have to use it. The thing we had ready for the next one was that the letter would start, “I hope you remembered to open this letter carefully because I have included the Pepto-Bismol powder for your stomach as we arranged.” It would be a letter full of powder. In the office we expected they would open it quickly the powder would go all over the floor, and they would get all upset because you are not supposed to upset anything. They’d have to gather up all this Pepto-Bismol … But we didn’t have to use that one.
As a result of all these experiences with the censor, I knew exactly what could get through and what could not get through. Nobody else knew as well as I. And so I made a little money out of all of this by making bets.
One day I discovered that the workmen who lived further out and wanted to come in were too lazy to go around through the gate, and so they had cut themselves a hole in the fence. So I went out the gate, went over to the hole and came in, went out again, and so on, until the sergeant at the gate began to wonder what was happening. How come this guy is always going out and never coming in? And, of course, his natural reaction was to call the lieutenant and try to put me in jail for doing this. I explained that there was a hole.
You see, I was always trying to straighten people out. And so I made a bet with somebody that I could tell about the hole in the fence in a letter, and mail it out. And sure enough, I did. And the way I did it was I said, You should see the way they administer this place (that’s what we were allowed to say). There’s a hole in the fence seventy-one feet away from such-and-such a place, that’s this size and that size, that you can walk through.
Now, what can they do? They can’t say to me that there is no such hole. I mean, what are they going to do? It’s their own hard luck that there’s such a hole. They should fix the hole. So I got that one through.
I also got through a letter that told about how one of the boys who worked in one of my groups, John Kemeny had been wakened up in the middle of the night and grilled with lights in front of him by some idiots in the army there because they found out something about his father, who was supposed to be a communist or something. Kemeny is a famous man now.
There were other things. Like the hole in the fence, I was always trying to point these things out in a non-direct ma
So I used to pick the locks all the time and point out that it was very easy to do. And every time we had a meeting of everybody together, I would get up and say that we have important secrets and we shouldn’t keep them in such things; we need better locks. One day Teller got up at the meeting, and he said to me, “I don’t keep my most important secrets in my filing cabinet; I keep them in my desk drawer. Isn’t that better?”
I said, “I don’t know. I haven’t seen your desk drawer.” He was sitting near the front of the meeting, and I’m sitting further back. So the meeting continues, and I sneak out and go down to see his desk drawer.
I don’t even have to pick the lock on the desk drawer. It turns out that if you put your hand in the back, underneath, you can pull out the paper like those toilet paper dispensers. You pull out one, it pulls another, it pulls another … I emptied the whole damn drawer, put everything away to one side, and went back upstairs.
The meeting was just ending, and everybody was coming out, and I joined the crew and ran to catch up with Teller, and I said, “Oh, by the way let me see your desk drawer.”
“Certainly,” he said, and he showed me the desk.
I looked at it and said, “That looks pretty good to me. Let’s see what you have in there.”
“I’ll be very glad to show it to you,” he said, putting in the key and opening the drawer. “If,” he said, “you hadn’t already seen it yourself.”
The trouble with playing a trick on a highly intelligent man like Mr. Teller is that the time it takes him to figure out from the moment that he sees there is something wrong till he understands exactly what happened is too damn small to give you any pleasure!
Some of the special problems I had at Los Alamos were rather interesting. One thing had to do with the safety of the plant at Oak Ridge, Te
So finally Emil Segre said that the only possible way to get it right was for him to go down there and see what they were doing. The army people said, “No, it is our policy to keep all the information of Los Alamos at one place.”
The people in Oak Ridge didn’t know anything about what it was to be used for; they just knew what they were trying to do. I mean the higher people knew they were separating uranium, but they didn’t know how powerful the bomb was, or exactly how it worked or anything. The people underneath didn’t know at all what they were doing. And the army wanted to keep it that way. There was no information going back and forth. But Segre insisted they’d never get the assays right, and the whole thing would go up in smoke. So he finally went down to see what they were doing, and as he was walking through he saw them wheeling a tank carboy of water, green water—which is uranium nitrate solution.