When Oppenheimer met with Teller and Hans Bethe to discuss the issue at his office at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton on Friday, October 21, he reportedly read or showed his visitors Conant’s letter, possibly hoping to dampen their enthusiasm without venturing an opinion. Bethe, who was still undecided, was struck by Conant’s very strong feelings, and that both the tone and content of the letter revealed that he and Oppenheimer were in close contact—apparently sharing and reinforcing each other’s doubts about the weapon, which they viewed as qualitatively different from the atomic bomb.
Teller, troubled by Conant’s vehement opposition, recalled that one phrase from the letter stuck in his mind afterward: “over my dead body.” In an interview in his office at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2003, shortly before his death at the age of ninety-four, Teller admitted to being very upset by Conant’s resistance to the H-bomb and concerned that Oppie would follow his lead. “They wanted to stop me,” he recalled. Suddenly becoming very agitated and growing red in the face, he said that the hurt and anger of his subsequent rift with Conant were still painfully fresh. “Why did he have to say ‘over my dead body’?” he demanded, pounding the arms of his wheelchair. “Why did he say that?”
Still unsure of the military value of the Super, let alone its cost and deliverability, Oppenheimer wrote Conant that same Friday, explaining that he was not sure “the miserable thing” would work, nor that the weapon—which was too large to be portable—could “be gotten to a target except by ox cart.” He was worried that “this thing appears to have caught the imagination, both of the congressional and military people, as the answer to the problem posed by the Russian advance”:
It would be folly to oppose the exploration of this weapon. We have always known it had to be done; and it does have to be done, though it appears to be singularly proof against any form of experimental approach. But that we become committed to it as the way to save the country and the peace appears to me full of dangers.
We will be faced with all this at our meeting, and anything that we do or do not say to the president will have to be taken [sic] into consideration. I shall feel far more secure if you have had an opportunity to think about it.
Oppenheimer had difficulty rounding up all the members of the GAC—he delayed the meeting for weeks so that Conant and Fermi could attend—and was not able to convene the crucial meeting to consider an expanded effort on the H-bomb until the weekend of October 28. Conant missed the Friday session in which George Kennan, equally opposed to the Super, filled the panel in on the State Department’s view of the Soviet situation. Kennan argued that Russia, still struggling to rebuild its ravaged industry after the war, might not want to commit millions to a costly weapons program and might be willing to negotiate an arms agreement that ensured neither side developed the hydrogen bomb. The Soviets preferred nonmilitary means of expansion, relying on political pressure, subversion, and economic blackmail. They might not proceed with the Super if the United States did not. When Conant arrived in Washington that evening, he was given a summary of the talk by Bethe and his other Los Alamos colleagues. Bethe, after talking to Teller and Oppenheimer, had decided he would not participate in an intensive H-bomb effort—even for the victors, the blast and radioactive effects of such a weapon would render the world not worth living in.
At ten o’clock the next day, a damp, gray Saturday morning, Conant joined the seven other members of the General Advisory Committee—Oppenheimer; Fermi; Rabi; Cyril Smith; Lee DuBridge, the Rad Lab director who was now president of Caltech; Hartley Rowe, a division head of the NDRC; and recent addition Oliver Buckley, president of Bell Labs—gathered in room 213 of the heavily guarded AEC headquarters building on Constitution Avenue. Only Glenn Seaborg, who was in Sweden, was absent. He sent Oppie a somewhat vague letter stating that he would “have to hear some good arguments before [he] could take on sufficient courage to recommend not going toward such a program.”
The morning was taken up by a military briefing with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, headed by General Omar Bradley, one of the senior battle commanders during World War II and regarded by his peers as a master tactician. Bradley felt the Soviet Union could not be allowed to have the Super first but conceded that the H-bomb’s military advantage over a stockpile of atomic weapons was “mostly psychological.” At noon, they broke for lunch, and went off in small groups to a restaurant nearby. Oppenheimer voiced his reservations about developing the hydrogen bomb and his concern that the Russians, spurred by the US lead in fission weapons, would develop their own with possibly catastrophic results. When Luis Alvarez, who had been unable to stay away, saw that the group was siding against the Super, he realized his dream of a Berkeley heavy water reactor was dead and departed angrily for California.
Later that afternoon, Oppenheimer went around the table and asked each member of the committee to express his view on the course of action the nation should take. Conant spoke out most forcefully against the hydrogen bomb, drawing on what he described later as a combination of “political and strategic and highly technical considerations” to drive home his point. During a lengthy, searching discussion of the moral implications of building a weapon up to a thousand times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb, and the danger its very existence posed to humanity as a whole, the Harvard scientist looked “almost translucent, so gray,” Lilienthal wrote in his journal that night, noting that Conant came out “flatly against it ‘on moral grounds.’ ” At one point, Conant turned to him and confided that the proceedings gave him an uneasy feeling of déjà vu. “The whole discussion,” he said, recalling the controversy over the atomic bomb, “makes me feel I was seeing the same film, and a punk one, for the second time.”
During the long, intense day of deliberations, Conant held sway over the group. Older and more senior than most of his colleagues, he had held high command during the wartime project, second only to Bush, and bore a heavy burden of responsibility for ushering in the atomic bombs that had been used against two Japanese cities. He had been Oppenheimer’s mentor for many years, and his powerful moral arguments against using nuclear weapons on such a massive scale had a profound effect on the physicist, who despite his misgivings was still on the fence about foreclosing the Super as a military option. It was “a result of Conant’s intervention,” Oppenheimer conceded some years later, that he decided to take a stand against the H-bomb. By the end of the afternoon, Oppenheimer found there was a “surprising unanimity of opinion,” and suggested they retire to begin drafting their reports and reconvene the next morning.
The committee members spent the bulk of Sunday discussing and writing their reports. The main report was written by Oppenheimer (aided by John Manley) and was signed by all eight members of the GAC present. It consisted of two sections, each compressed into two typewritten pages: part one recommended that high priority be given to developing atomic weapons for tactical purposes, urging an increase in the production of reactors, isotope-separation plants, and fission bombs; part two was devoted to the Super, with the conclusion that a crash program could conceivably overcome the formidable theoretical and engineering problems, giving it “a better than even chance of producing a weapon in five years.” However, when it came to the question of what should be done with regard to the superbomb, which was estimated to have an explosive effect “some hundreds of times that of fission bombs,” they all expressed the hope that the development of thermonuclear weapons could be avoided.
The authors confronted head-on the question of what would be involved in actually using the weapon: because of its size, the Super could not be deployed “exclusively for the destruction of military or semimilitary purposes,” they concluded. “Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations.” The eight men agreed unanimously that “it would be wrong at the present moment to commit ourselves to an all-out effort towards its development.”
As to how the g
overnment should proceed to prevent development of the Super, the committee split 6 to 2, resulting in two appended statements. The majority opinion, written by Conant (and signed by Buckley, DuBridge, Rowe, Smith, and Oppenheimer), favored a complete and unconditional commitment not to develop the weapon: “We believe a superbomb should never be produced,” they asserted. The nation’s stockpile of atomic weapons would provide a “comparably effective” means for retaliation. “The extreme dangers to mankind inherent in the proposal wholly outweigh any military advantage that could come from this development . . . a superbomb might become a weapon of genocide.”
Conant attempted to end on his usual optimistic note: “In determining not to proceed to develop the superbomb, we see a unique opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war and thus eliminating the fear and arousing the hope of mankind.”
The minority opinion, written and signed by Fermi and Rabi, was that this commitment never to produce the Super should be “conditional on the response of the Soviet government.” The United States should first ask Russia and the nations of the world to join in a “solemn pledge” renouncing hydrogen weapons and promising not to proceed. They, too, viewed the extraordinary destructiveness of the H-bomb as repellant, calling it “necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.”
It had been a grueling weekend, charged with emotion, impassioned debate, and an overriding sense of what was at stake for the future. Hurrying for the evening train to Boston, Conant felt drained. He hoped he was successful in forestalling the development of a weapon that surpassed the atom bomb in becoming a “weapon of genocide.” He had called for declassifying sufficient information on the Super to enable public discussion and debate on such an irrevocable decision. But he knew there was no guarantee that the AEC would follow their advice or that the scientists’ opinions would be enough to dissuade the military from its faith in overwhelming superiority.
On Monday morning, October 31, Lilienthal called to congratulate Conant on the decision to forswear the Super, convinced that his unswerving opposition had been the decisive factor. Fortified by the GAC’s report, Lilienthal wanted to find a way to translate the scientists’ opposition to the H-bomb into a broad statement of national policy. But he soon discovered that several members of the AEC board were critical of the report, with one caustically dismissing the policy of “renounce and announce.” Teller and Lawrence, two “experienced promoters,” as Oppie called them, had been busily rallying support among the air force generals to speed work on all the bombs the AEC labs could crank out, especially the Super. Ten days later, the members of the AEC, still sharply divided, submitted their disparate views to the president. Unable to reach consensus, they urged Truman to seek further advice. The president handed off the problem to a three-man committee composed of Dean Acheson, who had replaced the ailing Marshall as secretary of state, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson, and AEC chairman David Lilienthal.
Over the course of the fall, the secret debate over the fate of the Super continued to rage in back rooms across Washington, with the weapon’s avid supporters writing letters to the president and lobbying sympathetic senators, arguing that the H-bomb was essential to the United States’ margin of safety. As the historian Herbert F. York has pointed out, the argument was between “hawks” and “superhawks,” for the simple reason no “full-fledged doves” were granted the necessary clearances. Prominent nuclear scientists from Los Alamos and Berkeley became missionaries for the project. MIT president Karl Compton wrote the president that in the absence of an international agreement, the work on the Super must proceed; that the Russians were equally capable of developing such a weapon, and the United States could not allow such an implacable enemy to pull ahead. Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, pressed his case by letter, and then in person, arguing that given Russia’s vast armies, America had no alternative but to rely on strategic airpower, and with the Super, they could not miss. “If we let Russia get the Super first, catastrophe becomes all but certain,” he warned. “Whereas if we get it first, there exists a chance of saving ourselves.” Strauss sent a long letter supporting McMahon’s analysis and conclusion that the United States should proceed “with all possible expedition to develop thermonuclear weapons.”
Realizing that a decision on the Super had to be made before the secret debate hit the papers, Acheson invited Conant for lunch on January 8, 1950. He had all but made up his mind. The Joint Chiefs had signed a memorandum stating it would be “intolerable” to let the Russians get the weapon first, and, after reading their report, he saw no alternative to the H-Bomb development going forward. Louis Johnson was all for it. Out of respect for the eminent Harvard scientist, however, Acheson gave him one last hearing, but finally found him unpersuasive.
“After listening to Conant, it would be very easy to arrive at the opposite conclusion,” he noted in his journal the following day, “except in arguing against the position I had come to, he admittedly could not suggest an alternative.” From day one, the scientists had granted they would have to “start with the assumption that the Russians were working on it also.” Acheson’s lasting impression was not of the power of Conant’s logic—“neither the maintenance of ignorance nor the reliance on perpetual good will seemed to me a tenable policy”—but what he later described in his recollection of the debate as the “immense distaste for what one of them, the purity of whose motive could not be doubted, described as ‘the whole rotten business.’ ”
On January 31, at a regular meeting of the GAC, Lilienthal tipped the committee members to Truman’s decision to authorize work on “all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb.” Conant and his colleagues had been resoundingly overruled. It was more than just a defeat on a policy issue, it was on the policy issue—the one with the gravest significance for the nation’s future, and the fate of the world. In terms of the immediate fallout, Conant realized the GAC’s influence had been downgraded and its members’ individual standing as advisors impaired. Despite a presidential gag order instructing no one to talk about the polarizing H-bomb debate, Conant, the New Yorker reported in its Letter from Washington column on February 11, created considerable anxiety “when he called attention to the conflicts of opinion among the scientists and questioned the competence of lay officials to determine which opinions are sound and which are not.”
No one outside their inner circle knew the full meaning of what had been decided, and Conant felt impotent—and something close to desperation—that the immensely important question of whether or not to embark on the H-bomb would never be put before the American people. In Washington’s bipolar state, every assertion of a scientific or political nature had quickly bred a counterassertion, so that it was not really information, as the New Yorker observed, but “anti-information.” Despondent, several of his GAC colleagues contemplated resigning. Acheson had been so worried that Conant might quit or lodge a public protest if things did not go his way that he had tried to counsel restraint over lunch, reportedly telling him, “For heck’s sake, don’t upset the apple cart.” It showed how little he knew the man. Conant was too much the “good soldier” to resign, as he later told a friend, explaining that he and Oppenheimer still felt obliged to “do what we could to carry out orders of the president.”
For weeks, Conant had been receiving disturbing reports about the aspersions being cast on the scientists blocking the Super, including rumors that some Pentagon officials thought they wielded too much influence. The entrenched us-and-them mentality that had characterized the US approach to relations with the Soviet Union for so long now extended to the bitter dispute between those who were for and against the H-bomb. The possibility of a detrimental debate in the press had hastened Truman’s decision, but as time wore on, it was apparent the Super’s supporters were not going to let the issue drop, their attitude attaining a kind of vindictive quality. “The majority’s flat recommendation
against any development of the H-bomb was what enraged the opposition,” observed McGeorge Bundy.
Their animus was fueled in part by the public response, with a Gallup survey showing that Americans overwhelmingly favored attempting an H-bomb, and in part by the larger political climate. Just four days before Truman’s final decision, the German-born British physicist Klaus Fuchs confessed to being a Soviet spy, throwing the government—and the entire nuclear program—into a state of panic. Fuchs had been given top security clearance at Los Alamos, was an editor of the twenty-five-volume classified The Los Alamos Primer—a summary of all the research carried out—and had sat in on some of Teller’s early H-bomb sessions. By the time British intelligence agents from MI5 confronted him in London, he was working at Harwell, the center of England’s nuclear weapons research. The extent of the damage he had done was more than Conant, bilious at the thought, could begin to fathom.
Teller, who took Truman’s decision as a personal triumph, parked himself in Washington with an eye to becoming the administration’s new “No. 1” atomic expert. But like a dog with a bone, he could not let the disagreement over the Super go. One morning he argued so emotionally in favor of thermonuclear weapons that General Kenneth D. Nichols, the army’s residing nuclear authority, finally asked him why he was still “worrying about the situation so much?” Teller responded with fierce conviction, “I’m worrying about the people who should be worrying about it.”
Fear of the Russians had driven the arms race and now it drove an all-out attack on Communist spies in the government. The Soviet menace dominated the news, and the screaming headlines inflamed the public’s imagination. Playing on popular anxieties, Senator Joseph McCarthy gave a speech on February 9, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, claiming he had a list of some two hundred “Communists in government.” Republican Red-baiters carried the attack to the Truman administration, pillorying Acheson for standing by Hiss after his January conviction, and calling for the secretary’s head. In an effort to blame Acheson and the Democrats for the cold war reversals and loss of China to the Communists, after the defeat of the American-backed Nationalists in 1949, McCarthy declared Acheson a “bad security risk.” He rose in the Senate to inquire if the secretary was going to defend other unidentified Communists in the government. Right-wing elements in Congress and the military exploited the frenzy to further the HUAC investigations of subversion among the scientists and to discredit the H-bomb opponents.
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