by Gregg Herken
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Prologue: Dead Files
Part One: Temples of the Future
1. The Cyclotron Republic
2. A Practical Philosopher’s Stone
3. A Useful Adviser
4. An Adventurous Time
Part Two: Inside the Wire
5. Enormoz
6. A Question of Divided Loyalties
7. Break, Blow, Burn
8. A Stone’s Throw from Despair
Part Three: Scientists in Gray Flannel Suits
9. A World in Which War Will Not Occur
10. Character, Association, and Loyalty
11. A Rather Puzzled Horror
12. A Desperate Urgency Here
Part Four: Sorcerer’s Apprentice
13. Nuclear Plenty
14. A Bad Business Now Threatening
15. Descent into the Maelstrom
16. Not Much More than a Kangaroo Court
Part Five: All the Evil of the Times
17. The Good Deeds a Man Has Done Before
18. Like Going to a New Country
19. A Cross of Atoms
Epilogue: “As streames are…”
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Also by Gregg Herken
Praise for Brotherhood of the Bomb
About the Author
Copyright
For Ben
Who can be wise, amaz’d, temperate and furious, Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man
—Macbeth, Act II, Scene III
It takes an error to father a sin.
—Letter, Robert Oppenheimer to his brother, Frank, March 12, 1930
PROLOGUE: DEAD FILES
“THE GREAT DAY when the F.B.I. gives up its dead file is worth looking forward to. We shall then learn … what bastards everybody used to be,” wrote Nuell Pharr Davis in Lawrence and Oppenheimer, a 1968 book on the two physicists and their times. What Davis could not have known—or imagined—is that, some thirty years later, the sources available to historians would include not only the Bureau’s “dead files,” with its verbatim transcripts of wiretapped conversations, but thousands of pages of declassified U.S. government documents, the intercepted and decrypted secret cables sent between Moscow and its spies in wartime, and even official Communist Party records, released from Moscow’s archives following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Supplemented by private papers and numerous personal interviews, the historical record now available makes it possible to piece together and to tell, for the first time in detail and with some authority, the story of that turbulent time. The record does indeed reveal “bastards,” but it also shows more than a smattering of real heros.
The physicists who are the subject of this book—Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller—were among the most influential scientists of the twentieth century. Theirs is a story that encompasses not only the making of the atomic bomb and its far more destructive successor, the thermonuclear “Super,” but allegations of treason and the political trials that resulted in a Cold War at home.
Much that has happened since—from the nuclear arms race, to the relationship between scientists and their government—has its roots in those days.
Although Oppenheimer’s loyalty hearing took place at the same time as the televised army-McCarthy hearings that brought down the Wisconsin senator, it was Oppenheimer’s trial behind closed doors that had perhaps the greater and more lasting effect: forty years later, Teller would blame his difficulties in recruiting scientists for “Star Wars,” Ronald Reagan’s missile defense campaign, upon the outcome in the Oppenheimer case.
It is also, and no less, a human story. For the three who are its focus, putting their science in the service of the state brought great power but, with it, wrenching choices—forcing each to decide, for example between the interests of his nation, his patron, or his friend. It is, among other things, a tale of overweening ambition and the surprising love and loyalty of a brother; one which shows that there can be nobility even in the making of bombs.
Not surprisingly, it is the kind of story that dramatists as well as historians have been drawn to. Yet is it not Faust but another of Goethe’s works that the plot perhaps most closely resembles. Like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, it is a cautionary tale of arrogance, betrayal, and unforeseen consequences; of what comes from invoking forces—both political and physical—that one neither fully understands nor controls.
PART ONE
TEMPLES OF THE FUTURE
Take interest, I implore you, in those sacred dwellings which one designates by the expressive term “laboratories.” … These are the temples of the future—temples of well-being and happiness.
—Ernest Lawrence, commencement address, 1938
1
THE CYCLOTRON REPUBLIC
EARLY IN 1939, Ernest Orlando Lawrence, the Berkeley physicist and inventor of the cyclotron, was planning a machine to change the world. It would be the largest and most expensive instrument thus far dedicated to scientific research. Requiring enough steel to build a good-sized freighter and electric current sufficient to light the city of Berkeley, Lawrence’s latest “atom-smasher” would, in theory, accelerate elementary particles to an energy of 100 million electron volts, enough to break the bonds of the atom and penetrate to its heart, the nucleus.
Almost a year after German scientists had first observed the fissioning of uranium, the atomic nucleus remained the unexplored ultima Thule of twentieth-century physics. Striking to its heart required giant machines capable of generating energies close to that of cosmic rays traveling from space. At such energies, charged particles, or neutrons, colliding with an atom broke it apart, laying bare its inner workings. The cyclotron was, in effect, a means of replicating the elemental forces of Nature.
Lawrence’s first atom-smasher had been an unimpressive glass contraption barely 4 inches across, covered with red sealing wax against vacuum leaks. By 1939, that original cyclotron hung, like a trophy, above the entrance to one of the new laboratories on the Berkeley campus. Unprepossessing, it was yet the stuff of which the dreams of alchemy were made: a twentieth-century philosopher’s stone, promising its possessor the ability to transform the elements of matter, once thought immutable.
But, beyond smashing atoms, exactly what the new machine would do remained mysterious even to Lawrence. The prospect he held up to Robert Gordon Sproul, the patrician president of the University of California, was worthy of a pre-Columbian explorer both for its sweeping vision and its lack of specificity: “Until we cross the frontier of a hundred million volts, we will not know what riches lie ahead, but that there are great riches there can be no doubt.”1
Like Paracelsus, Lawrence promised to turn lead into gold—but in infinitesimal amounts, and at prodigious cost. Mindful of the recent discovery of fission, Ernest chose to emphasize to Sproul another long-held hope of humanity that most scientists, he among them, had until now dismissed as illusory: “we may be able to tap the unlimited store of energy in the atom.”
* * *
Lawrence’s moment of discovery had come a decade earlier, in early 1929. Then an unmarried twenty-eight-year-old associate professor of physics newly arrived from Yale, he wa
s living at Berkeley’s Faculty Club and working late nights at the university library. It was on one such lonely evening, while struggling through a recent article by a Norwegian engineer, Rolf Wideröe, in a German journal, the Archiv für Elektrotechnik, that Ernest had his epiphany.
Wideröe’s article was about a new way of speeding particles to high energies by repeated applications of a lower voltage. Resonance acceleration was an electromagnetic phenomenon without obvious practical application, in which positively charged particles are accelerated sequentially by electrical impulses as they pass through a succession of vacuum tubes. The acceleration ceased only when the experimenter ran out of tubes, or the particles fell out of step with the electrical impulses and spread out, shotgun-like, hitting the tube walls. A diagram in the article showed the vacuum tubes arranged in a straight line, end to end. Since his German was weak, Lawrence was drawn to the diagram rather than the text.
With the intuitive understanding that was always his greatest strength, Lawrence instantly recognized that if the particles could be confined to a circle rather than a straight line, and kept focused by a magnet while electrical impulses accelerated them—alternately pulling and pushing—there might be no limit to the energies obtained. The following day, Ernest excitedly described his idea for a “proton merry-go-round” to Berkeley colleagues.2
For $25, Ernest built a tabletop model of his machine, debuting it a few months later before the American Physical Society. Lawrence reported on its promise to a September 1930 meeting of the National Academy of Sciences.3 Attached to a kitchen chair by a clothes hanger, it was a sensation among the scientists assembled. The first lilliputian device never achieved the energies that Lawrence promised the National Academy, but proved the principle sound. A twenty-five-year-old graduate student from Dartmouth, Stanley Livingston, helped Lawrence fashion his next machine of durable brass.
Progress thereafter was rapid, for both Lawrence and his machines. In 1930, at the age of twenty-nine, Ernest became the youngest full professor in the history of the University of California. Magnetic resonance accelerator—Livingston’s term for the proton merry-go-round—gradually gave way to cyclotron, a word inspired by the particles’ path and the Radiotron vacuum-tube oscillators that propelled them. Cyclotron had the additional bonus of sounding futuristic to prospective funders.4
An enthusiast by nature, Lawrence began planning larger cyclotrons even before the capabilities of the existing one had been explored. A little more than a year after his first success, Lawrence and Livingston had built a machine capable in theory of accelerating protons to energies of 1 million electron volts. Measured by the diameter of the magnet’s pole face, the 11–inch cyclotron was nearly three times the size of their first effort and cost disproportionately more to build: $800. Lawrence installed it, without fanfare, next to his office on the second floor of Berkeley’s physics building, LeConte Hall.
That summer, Lawrence and Livingston discovered the principle of magnetic focusing, using soft iron shims between the poles and the vacuum tank to compensate for variations in the magnetic field. Voltages obtained by the 11-inch were doubled, and then doubled again—approaching the energy believed necessary to penetrate the invisible barrier that surrounds the atomic nucleus. Moving gradually up the slope, Lawrence and Livingston crossed the milestone million volts in August 1931. On a visit to New Haven to see his fiancée, Molly Blumer, Lawrence received the good news in a telegram from his secretary: “Dr. Livingston has asked me to advise you that he has obtained 1,100,000 volt protons. He also suggested that I add ‘Whoopee!’”5
Ernest wed his longtime sweetheart in May 1932. Molly was a tall, statuesque Vassar honors graduate whose father was dean of Yale’s medical school. Enrolled in bacteriology courses at Radcliffe, Molly gave up her own promising scientific career to marry Lawrence. While still on their honeymoon, the newlyweds had just returned from a sail on Long Island Sound when Ernest learned in a radio broadcast that British scientists had been first to disintegrate an atom, using a simple voltage multiplier and a few hundred thousand volts. In a properly designed experiment, the 11-inch could have accomplished the same feat a year earlier. Quickly returning to California, Ernest made sure that he and his colleagues got credit for achieving the first atomic disintegration outside Europe. He promised Molly a longer honeymoon later.
The British discovery highlighted the fact that Lawrence’s enthusiasm sometimes overcame the discipline necessary to do science. Since he was often more interested in building grand new machines than in doing the hard work necessary to interpret experimental results, Ernest had paid less attention to having sensitive detection instruments.
To remedy that weakness, Ernest imported a friend from his Yale days, Donald Cooksey, a journeyman physicist who specialized in designing detectors. The son of a Yale professor and scion of an old California family, Cooksey had never bothered to finish the language requirement for his graduate degree. Nine years older than Lawrence, Cooksey was more cosmopolitan by far. Ernest’s first view of the New York City skyline had come from the roof of the Yale Club, where he was staying as Cooksey’s guest.6 “DC,” as he was known, soon became Ernest’s factotum, troubleshooter, and confidant at the lab.7
Following his embarrassment at the hands of the British, Lawrence proposed an order-of-magnitude increase in the power of his next cyclotron. Early in 1932, he and Livingston had begun sketching plans for a 27-inch machine capable of accelerating particles to energies in excess of 20 million volts.
There would be no more trophies to hang on the wall. In the otherwise relativistic world of cyclotron physics, one linear relationship ruled: an almost direct correlation between input and output. Higher energies required proportionately larger and more powerful vacuum pumps and electromagnets. The magnet for the 11-inch cyclotron had weighed 2 tons. For the 27-inch, Lawrence already had his eye on an 80-ton magnet, originally built for a Bay Area firm, the Federal Telegraph Company, but now obsolete and rusting away in a Palo Alto junkyard.8
Bigger machines and an expanding empire also required more room. Lawrence installed the 27-inch in an old wooden building on campus known as the Civil Engineering Testing Laboratory; the forestry and linguistic departments still maintained offices upstairs. He christened the structure, somewhat grandiosely, the “Penetrating Radiations Laboratory,” a title later shortened to “Radiation Laboratory.” For the growing number of grad students gathering around him, however, it was simply the “Rad Lab,” just as their remarkable young phenom of a professor was “EOL.”9
* * *
By sheer force of personality more than by any power of intellect, Lawrence was a commanding presence at Berkeley by the early 1930s. Although tall and good-looking—he was over six feet, with startlingly blue eyes and a shock of blond hair combed straight back—Lawrence spoke in a tenor rather than a baritone and was never comfortable addressing large groups.
Ernest was born of Norwegian immigrants at the start of the new century. His father, Carl, was school superintendent and later president of a teachers college in Canton, South Dakota. Ernest’s mother, Gunda, recalled an early childhood spent in a sod hut on the prairie. Educated at St. Olaf College and the University of South Dakota, Ernest developed values that were decidedly, even determinedly, midwestern.
Yet Lawrence’s plebeian background had not yielded egalitarian beliefs. Primus inter pares would never be a familiar concept at the Rad Lab. To the cyclotroneers, EOL was “the Maestro” or simply “Boss.” Visitors to the lab noticed a single gleaming china teacup and saucer amid the workers’ grimy porcelain mugs. Following the morning coffee break, Cooksey locked the cup and saucer as well as a silver-plated spoon in a drawer conspicuously marked “Reserved for the Director.”10
Like a medieval lord, Lawrence presided over weekly meetings of the physics department’s Journal Club—convened promptly at 7:30 every Monday evening in LeConte’s library—from a massive red leather chair reserved for him alone. It was the one ti
me that the cyclotron was turned off. Ernest introduced the presenter, usually asked the first question, and brought the proceedings to an abrupt close exactly ninety minutes later with the first ring of the campanile’s chimes, even if it meant interrupting the speaker in midsentence.11
Colleagues from eastern schools found Lawrence’s informal manner popular with students, if somewhat disconcerting. Physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth, visiting from Princeton, was dismayed by one of Ernest’s typically boisterous pep talks: “This seemed to me a rather inappropriate talk to a group of graduate students presumably of some sophistication. I found, however, not only that this was the tone of the talk which depressed me somewhat but it seemed to work, which depressed me even more.”12
Ernest’s strict Lutheran upbringing meant that frustrations and setbacks at the cyclotron seldom provoked expletives stronger than “Fudge!” or “Oh, Sugar!” But Lawrence, for all his Scandinavian stolidness, had a quick and livid temper. When it flared, a vein stood out above his left temple—a kind of weather gauge and warning to students and colleagues alike.
Disdainful of most human frailties, Lawrence had a particular intolerance for lying. Once, after berating Molly for not listening to an interview he had given on the radio, Lawrence was brought up short by her reply: “Ernest, would you rather I lied?”13
The anodyne to Lawrence’s withering temper was his charm, equally celebrated and just as quick to surface. When Northwestern University had tried to lure him from Berkeley, Sproul joined with the head of the physics department, Raymond Birge, to thwart the attempt. As ammunition to persuade the regents to promote Lawrence to full professor, Birge and Ernest’s colleagues wrote a long letter to Sproul. In it, Lawrence’s affability and winning personality were given almost as much prominence as his research.14
Possessed of energy and enthusiasm in seemingly equal measure, Lawrence terrorized the Rad Lab’s cyclotroneers—whom he affectionately called “the boys”—when at the controls of the machine. In those early days, starting the cyclotron involved closing a knife-switch. This simple act, noted one of the boys, was sometimes accompanied by an “ensuing sparking, crash, and blowing out of lights,” plunging the campus and even adjacent neighborhoods into sudden darkness.15
