A Fiery Peace in a Cold War

by Neil Sheehan

  Early in 1944, “Oppie” summoned von Neumann back to Los Alamos. Other developments on the plutonium bomb had rendered imperative the creation of an implosion method that would succeed. Wrapping the plutonium core of the bomb with conventional explosives and detonating them to crush the plutonium with enough force and simultaneity to drive it to the supercritical stage of a nuclear explosion was a simple idea. The details, however, were extraordinarily complex. Enlisting his friend Stanislaw Ulam to help him with the mathematics, von Neumann set out to solve the riddle. To prevail, von Neumann needed all the knowledge of explosions he had acquired from past experiments.

  His first task was to determine precisely how and at what speed the detonation waves from the wrapper of conventional explosives should converge in order to force the plutonium to supercriticality. To find the answers to this part of the problem, von Neumann and Ulam had to perform an exhaustive number of mathematical calculations. Once they had the results and had put together a mathematical model of the correct convergence, von Neumann moved on to his second task—diagramming the detonation wrapper by delineating the arrangement of fast-burning and slow-burning explosives required. He had to diagram to nearly perfect exactness. The calculations showed that an error of more than 5 percent would make the difference between a conventional explosion followed by a nuclear detonation and a conventional bang followed by a nuclear fizzle. The diagram was then turned over to George Kistiakowsky, the ingenious Ukrainian-born chemist, to transform it into reality, which he so brilliantly did.

  And as the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fruit of John von Neumann’s mind was at work again to enhance their destructiveness. It was he who had discovered in the course of his experiments that large bombs had a greater blast effect if detonated at an optimal height above their targets rather than at ground level. At both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, therefore, the bombs had been set for air bursts to maximize the obliterative effect on the cities and their inhabitants.

  When Bennie Schriever went to Princeton to seek his help, von Neumann was near the height of his influence and prestige. His role in the making of the atomic bomb and then the Super were widely known within the upper reaches of government and the scientific community. His initiative in advancing the electronic computer had also brought him public recognition and the luster of his reputation for mathematical genius was undimmed. Von Neumann was liked as well as admired by his colleagues. With his wide erudition and a trove of ribald jokes, he was always an interesting and amusing companion. The militancy of his attitude toward the Soviet Union was not regarded as wild and totally irrational at the time, even by those who did not share its intensity. Fear of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe had been brought to a peak by the Korean War, and no matter how mistaken in retrospect that fear may have been, it was all too real at the time. (In 1952, von Neumann had proposed persuading the best mathematicians in West Germany to immigrate to the United States in order to deprive the Soviets of their talents when the place was overrun.)

  The death of Stalin in March 1953 and the negotiations that were to bring a truce in Korea that July did not lessen the fear because the Soviet Union, rather than the person of Stalin, was now perceived as the menace. At bottom, von Neumann’s contemporaries liked and trusted him as much as they did because they sensed the fundamental decency of the man. He was to display it conspicuously in 1954 by testifying in defense of Robert Oppenheimer, who was wrongly accused of disloyalty and deprived of his security clearance because of his opposition to creating the hydrogen bomb when the issue was still open to debate before Truman had made his decision. Von Neumann’s defense of Oppenheimer was all the more striking for its moral courage because his political patron happened to be the financier Lewis Strauss, the man who, as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, was stage-managing the conspiracy against Oppenheimer. Despite this conflict of opinion, Strauss apparently appreciated von Neumann’s sincerity because he subsequently arranged his appointment to the commission.

  Schriever recalled years later that, as he had anticipated, the technical details of the conversation between von Neumann and Teddy Walkowicz were beyond his ken. Von Neumann was generous with his time—the meeting lasted several hours. Von Neumann explained, with occasional resort to chalk and blackboard, the process by which one progressed from the eighty-two-ton, liquid-fueled Mike device exploded the previous November to the warhead Schriever needed by the end of the decade for a practical ICBM—a dry hydrogen bomb of less than a ton in weight and one megaton in yield. Von Neumann based his findings on radiation flow and other data from the Mike test, which gave him confidence that much lighter dry bombs of lesser yield could be built in the future. He said he expected more data from the Castle test series scheduled for the spring of 1954 at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands of the central Pacific, when the United States was to set off its first dry thermonuclear devices fueled by lithium deuteride.

  Bennie left the meeting well satisfied. He now had more than the simple confirmation for which he had originally gone to Princeton. He had scientific validation and, coming from von Neumann, perhaps the nation’s foremost authority on nuclear weaponry, that validation was unchallengeable. He also recalled returning to Washington with something else that gave him additional satisfaction. Earlier that year, von Neumann had agreed to head the recently created Nuclear Weapons Panel of the Air Force’s Scientific Advisory Board. Ironically, it was Schriever who had lobbied Jimmy Doolittle to set up the panel during the March gathering at Maxwell, so that they could obtain better information on what to expect in the size and yield of nuclear weapons to come. (Among his other roles, Doolittle served as a vice chairman of the SAB.) In the course of this meeting at Princeton, von Neumann now told Bennie he would see that the panel included in its reports a hydrogen warhead light enough for a missile to carry. When attempting to drive a project as big as the ICBM through the Air Force bureaucracy, having as much scientific judgment as possible in your favor was a key component in succeeding. Von Neumann’s ultra-hawkish views, the widespread esteem in which he was held, and his ability to marshal the talents and support of his fellow scientists were to provide assistance of the utmost importance in bringing Schriever’s vision to fruition.

  32.

  FINDING AN ALLY

  Schriever understood that as a mere colonel—even though on the list for promotion to his first star in approximately a month and a half—he could not possibly carry a project of this magnitude forward by himself. He needed a leader much higher in the Pentagon aviary, someone with the imagination to see the strategic necessity to build an ICBM force and with the energy, verve, and daring—and the bureaucratic and political clout—to prevail against the entrenched opposition. As it happened, for the past several months he had known just such a man, Trevor Gardner, the new special assistant to the secretary of the air force for research and development. In the story of how the ICBM came into being, Gardner was to soar briefly across the firmament like a Roman candle. While he burned, he burned brightly.

  Gardner was, like Schriever and von Neumann, another immigrant to America. He was a Welshman, born in Cardiff in 1915. His father was a boilermaker who worked for a firm in Wales that built boilers for steam electrical generating plants. While Gardner was still a child, his father obtained a position as manager of one such small plant in South America and took the family off with him. The precise country and town has been lost to family memory. All that is remembered is that the place was somewhere up in the Andes. Whatever the location, the job did not last and by 1928, when Gardner was thirteen, the family had shifted to Southern California. Despite the empty-pocket years of the Great Depression, Gardner managed to cobble together enough odd jobs to take full advantage of California’s magnificent educational opportunities. He took his bachelor’s degree in engineering with honors from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles in 1937 and then taught freshman mathematics at USC while he gained a master’s in business administrati
on two years later.

  By 1942, soon after Japan’s Sunday morning surprise at Pearl Harbor, he was running the developmental engineering section of the California Institute of Technology at nearby Pasadena as a protégé of Charles Lauritsen, Caltech’s senior and highly respected physicist. Under Lauritsen, he helped to fabricate explosives for George Kistiakowsky to use up at Los Alamos. The work earned him a Presidential Certificate of Merit at the end of the conflict. When Bennie Schriever met him in 1953, Gardner had five years of prosperity behind him running a company he had started in Pasadena, Hycon Manufacturing, which produced electronic components for aircraft and for short-range, air-to-ground rockets for Navy fighter-bombers. Hycon brought him to the attention of Harold Talbott, a wealthy New York businessman, investment banker, Republican Party fund-raiser, and acquaintance of the new president, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ike believed that prosperous businessmen and bankers would make sound government executives and so appointed a goodly number to his cabinet and the higher levels of the administration. Talbott happened to have had extensive experience in aircraft manufacture during earlier years. Eisenhower therefore named him secretary of the air force and Talbott in turn summoned Gardner to Washington to be his special assistant for research and development.

  Colonel Vincent “Vince” Ford, who was to serve as Gardner’s executive assistant and became his closest friend and confidant, remembered the day in March 1953 when he glanced up from his desk in the outer room of the office suite on the fourth floor of the Pentagon and saw a figure standing in the open doorway. The man was looking at Ford intently through thick rimless glasses held in place by narrow gold frames. He was large, about six feet tall and a couple hundred pounds, with big shoulders and dark, reddish-brown hair trimmed close. He was attired fastidiously in a navy blue suit with the points of a crisply pressed and folded white handkerchief protruding from the breast pocket, a silk tie of steel gray, and a white shirt. In his left hand he held a gray felt fedora, which was, like the suit and the silk tie and the white shirt, part of the dress code of a successful business or professional man of the era. When he put his right hand forward to shake Ford’s, Vince noticed the flicker of one of the gold cuff links that held the French cuffs of the shirt in place. “Hi,” the man said in a resonant voice. “My name’s Gardner. I’ve been told this is where I come to work.” As Ford shook the proferred hand, he felt it grip his firmly. “My name is Ford,” he replied. Gardner gestured toward the open doorway of the large inner office that was to be his. “Let’s go in here and talk,” Gardner said.

  Ford assumed the conversation was meant as an employment interview so that Gardner could decide whether to hire him. Then a lieutenant colonel, Ford had been executive assistant to the previous special assistant for research and development during the Truman administration, William “Bill” Burden, the first to hold the position and like Talbott a New York investment banker. After Burden had left, Ford waited on in the office to see whether Burden’s successor would want him to continue. He wasn’t certain he would be kept. Technically, Ford was physically unfit for active duty. A flying accident in his youth had left him with a grotesquely twisted left foot and ankle. In order to be able to walk, Ford had to encase the foot in a specially fashioned boot with steel braces on both sides of the ankle. He was able to move reasonably nimbly, without crutches or cane, but that did not change the fact that he was still a cripple. In 1948, Schriever, not a man to let a technicality deprive him of the services of a capable officer, had hired Ford and got him restored to active duty. Ford had then worked for Schriever for two years before moving up to become Burden’s executive assistant. He was an ambitious, highly intelligent, and complicated man, capable of being extremely devious.

  As it turned out, Gardner paid no more attention to Ford’s disability than Schriever had. He never did tell Ford he was hired. They simply picked up where they were that day. “My name is Trev,” Gardner said, after Ford had addressed him as Mr. Gardner, “and that’s the way I like it. No formalities. Okay?” Gardner then did something during that first conversation which told Ford that informality was not the only thing that was different about this man. As Ford was speaking, Gardner suddenly reached across to a yellow legal pad that was lying between them on the conference table. He tore off a corner of the top sheet, rolled it into a wad with his thumb and forefinger, and, tossing it into his mouth, began chewing it, all the while continuing to listen and to fix Ford with those intense hazel eyes behind the glasses. It was a clue that, as Ford was later to concede, Trevor Gardner was “not the sort of man with whom one ordinarily made friends.”

  Whatever contradictory traits could exist in one man, Gardner had them. He was a good listener, but he was also extremely impatient. The ponderousness of the Air Force bureaucracy provoked particular ire. When he inquired about some matter he considered urgent and was told that the subject would have to be “staffed” and that he could expect a memo in three days, he would bark back over the phone, “I don’t want a memo. I want a decision—in an hour!” He could be offhanded and informal and polite, as he was in Vince Ford’s first encounter with him, and he could be abrasive and profane. Gardner did not hesitate to tell some important man that what he was doing “isn’t worth a good goddamn.” And he once snapped, “Shut up, Tommy!” at Lieutenant General Thomas Power during a meeting in a room filled with other bestarred men. Power had annoyed Gardner by talking while Gardner wanted to think. Since leading LeMay’s first firebombing of Tokyo on March 9, 1945, Power had become one of the Air Force’s most prominent generals. He did not appreciate the humiliation, especially in the presence of his contemporaries. Like encounters led much of the senior Air Force leadership to detest Gardner. And Gardner had a serious drinking problem. He kept it under control during the day, although a couple of double-shot Old Forester bourbons with ginger ale, his standard potion at lunch, made him more aggressive back at the office in the afternoon. The night was another matter. Ford grew accustomed to calls from him at all hours, the voice sometimes so slurred that he could barely understand him. The nocturnal bouts affected his personal life by worsening a troubled marriage, but seemed not to interfere with his work because he had extraordinary recuperative powers. After a few hours of sleep, a shower, and breakfast with strong black coffee, he was fit and alert.

  Yet for all his disdain for bureaucracy when it got in his way, he was a canny bureaucratic operator himself. He had an excellent sense of when and how to maneuver. His own memos, always “staffed” for him by Ford and frequently by Schriever or others with special knowledge, were trenchant and to the point. He was apt at recognizing the talents of other men and at exploiting those talents to further his objectives. He had the ability to gain the confidence of those above him who mattered. Harold Talbott had complete trust in him. He was also a man of extraordinary determination, utterly ruthless about accomplishing his goals. The determination showed in his walk, the powerful shoulders hunched forward slightly, the head inclined in thought. And, like Schriever and von Neumann, Gardner was motivated by the intense patriotism of the immigrant to whom America has been good. All of these qualities were to make him the man for the hour.

  Schriever and Gardner met through Vince Ford. In one of his first moves on Gardner’s behalf, Ford had taken Gardner around the Pentagon and introduced him to anyone in the research and development field he thought might be useful. Jimmy Doolittle had been one; Schriever had been another. Gardner shared Schriever’s vision of technology as the means to maintain American military superiority. He also shared Schriever’s interest in ballistic missiles. In an article published in Air Force, the magazine of the semiofficial Air Force Association, the same March of 1953 that Gardner arrived at the Pentagon, he argued that the United States and the Soviet Union were in a race to build long-range missiles. “The fate of the free world may well depend,” he wrote, on which nation won. A keen strategic sense was another of Gardner’s many qualities. He understood how the credibility of LeMay’s Str
ategic Air Command as a deterrent would be undercut in the public mind and among America’s European allies if the Soviets achieved an ICBM first and the United States had none of its own in the works to match. What he did not know was that the ultimate weapon had at last become feasible.

  Hoping that Gardner might be able to initiate the ICBM program that was beyond him for the moment, Schriever went to see him soon after returning from Princeton. He passed on the information he had obtained from von Neumann, explaining how the ability to size down a thermonuclear warhead made the missile feasible. Gardner hardly needed encouragement. On May 20, 1953, twelve days after Schriever’s and Walkowicz’s visit, he was in von Neumann’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study, seeking and receiving the same briefing and the same scientific validation that a one-megaton hydrogen bomb less than a ton in weight would be available as a missile warhead by the end of the decade. Gardner returned to Washington and began the campaign.

  Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson, the president of General Motors, had become secretary of defense after Eisenhower’s inauguration in January 1953. He was one of the “eight millionaires” in the new cabinet. (The dollar still held sufficient purchasing power then for the term to signify wealth equivalent to that of a billionaire at the end of the twentieth century.) The assumption behind his appointment was that a man who ran the largest private corporation in the world, which General Motors then was, could use his skills as an industrial manager to oversee and reform the biggest of government departments. That June, in one of his efforts to try to bring efficiency to the military-industrial complex, Wilson instructed Harold Talbott to form a committee to review the confused and confusing array of missile projects the Army, Navy, and Air Force had under way. These encompassed air-to-air, surface-to-air, and both short-range surface-to-surface tactical and long-range surface-to-surface strategic weapons. The point was to eliminate duplication and boondoggle projects that would never result in anything useful. Talbott in turn assigned the task to Gardner. His enterprising special assistant for research and development proceeded to use the committee not as a means of saving money, but rather as a cover for a scheme Gardner was evolving to spend a lot more money on a crash program to build an intercontinental ballistic missile. As Gardner was wont to gleefully exclaim to Ford when he had a project in play that particularly appealed to him: “We’ve got a live one.”