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The uneasy relationship between the scientists and the military was beginning to find its shape about the time of the Chicago chain reaction. Only three years earlier Albert Einstein, advised by his fellow refugee physicists Leo Szilard and Eugene P. Wigner that the Germans were likely to produce an atomic weapon, had addressed a letter to President Roosevelt warning of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type." Once Roosevelt was persuaded that America ought to have that bomb first, he set in motion, albeit very slow motion initially, a coordination of scientific effort that would lead inevitably to a working partnership with the American military. Watson Davis, a science editor of the 1930s, anticipated the central difficulty of that partnership in a single observation: "The most important problem before the scientific world today is not the cure of cancer, the discovery of a new source of energy, or any specific achievement. It is: How can science maintain its freedom and . . . help preserve a peaceful and effective civilization?"
In a time of war against world-seizing powers, Davis' question had to lead science logically, purposefully and enthusiastically toward a collegial relationship with the American military. Once that relationship was established it was not to be undone. After Hiroshima, with or without a war serving as matchmaker, the soldiers and the physicists were to be wedded for the rest of the century. Yet in the 1940s it was not with the military per se that many scientists believed they were forming a partnership. Rather, it was with the war as a specific and isolated entity. Agnew recalls how zealously Oppenheimer worked to keep the scientists in a draft-free status: an effort for symbolic, if not functional, independence.
For their part, most of the military had no knowledge of the atom bomb project. General Groves was in charge of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos and on Tinian, but he served as a manager and coordinating supervisor--an exceptionally capable one, according to Agnew; an overbearing and tyrannical one, according to critics--not as a commander directly involved with the conduct of the war. Not even General Douglas MacArthur, the monarchical commander in the Pacific, knew of the Bomb in the making.
Yet while these two technically separate units of physicists and soldiers trained and worked in relative isolation from each other for an event no one was sure would ever take place, and while the scientists restricted their intellectual freedom in pursuit of preserving their civic freedom, the fact is that both they and the military were working their way toward the same meeting place. That their relationship would be sealed over Hiroshima deeply troubled some of the scientists afterward, who may have read in the aerial pairing of the Enola Gay and the Great Artiste the end of their control over a universe they had disclosed. In 1943, however, most of the scientists wanted victory first, and Los Alamos was their theater.