Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  But Lawrence’s plans also hinged importantly upon Oppenheimer, which was why he had been so upset at Oppie’s vacillating. “Above all,” Lawrence had written Groves, “we are looking forward to the return of Professor Oppenheimer to resume direction of research and teaching in the theoretical physics, and it goes without saying that I am counting on him to share with me direction of the Laboratory program.”39

  The army and Groves were, of course, likewise an indispensable part of Lawrence’s postwar plans. Two days after Japan’s surrender, Nichols notified Underhill that the army wished to extend its contracts with the university for another six months.40 With the end of the war, Underhill and Sproul had been expecting to transfer the administration of Los Alamos to the government. Behind the scenes, however, Lawrence was already working to ensure that his highly lucrative partnership with the army continued.

  Ernest’s secret ally in this battle was sixty-year-old John Francis Neylan, chairman of the university regents. Neylan was a former newspaper reporter, born in New Jersey, who had come to California in 1909 to cover Hiram Johnson’s bid for governor. Neylan had stayed to manage Upton Sinclair’s unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign on the socialist ticket a generation later. Earning a law degree at night school, Neylan had become one of the most successful lawyers in the state—as well as the personal counsel and confidant of conservative publisher William Randolph Hearst.41 In the course of his rise to power, the young Neylan’s progressivism had gradually given way to a strident, even fanatical, anticommunism.42

  Neylan had met Lawrence early in the latter’s career and was immediately enthralled by his knowledge as well as his naive enthusiasm. The head regent soon became Lawrence’s biggest promoter on campus, as well as his unofficial political adviser.

  On August 24, 1945, Neylan departed from the agenda of an emergency meeting of the regents—he had called the session to discuss the problem of overcrowding in Berkeley’s dormitories—to urge creation of a “Special Committee on the Los Alamos Project.”43 Although the committee’s ostensible purpose would be to safeguard the university’s rights in patent matters, its charter was actually open-ended. In fact, Neylan and Lawrence intended the committee to become the university’s instrument for running postwar Los Alamos.

  After the measure was quickly approved with little discussion, Neylan appointed himself the special committee’s chairman. Sproul and two other regents, to be picked by the president and serve on a rotating basis, were its other members.

  * * *

  Long after the victory parades had ended and life had begun to return to routine at Berkeley, another kind of war silently raged on, in Washington and across the Bay. Five days after the Japanese surrender, Fidler cabled Lansdale that the FBI was seeking the army’s help in putting together a legal case against Joe Weinberg and Martin Kamen. The charge would be conspiracy to commit espionage.44

  The bureau’s plans had hit a snag. In Weinberg’s case, Fidler wrote, “no written evidence was available and other evidence [was] difficult to obtain”—a veiled reference to the fact that the information gathered by the bureau’s bugs and wiretaps might not be admissible in court.45

  Fidler informed the FBI that there was another potential complication in the Weinberg case—namely, the army’s policy of avoiding embarrassment to high project officials: “Since testimony establishing fact that (Weinberg) was working on [Manhattan Project] problems for Rad Lab would probably best be given by JRO or EOL … it is recommended that FBI in Washington be requested to withhold action since involving either of these men at this time might not be desirable.”46

  Temporarily stymied in prosecuting those he suspected of being Soviet spies, Hoover sent to the White House that fall the FBI’s dossier on Robert Oppenheimer and gave Truman’s attorney general the bureau’s recently completed “Report on Soviet Espionage in the United States”—a single-spaced, fifty-one-page document that amounted to a historical compendium of Russian spying since the Bolshevik revolution.47 The report gave the names and backgrounds of dozens of Soviet and American citizens whom the bureau believed to be agents. Weinberg, Kamen, Bransten, and Chevalier were among them.48

  Yet Hoover also had a backup plan, should legal obstacles frustrate the hoped-for prosecutions: he sent a second copy of the bureau’s massive spy report to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which Congress had made a permanent body earlier in the year.49

  * * *

  Across San Francisco Bay, the Russians, too, were busy tying up loose ends at their consulate, although their efforts had little to do with the return of peace.50

  A mid-November 1945 cable from San Francisco to Moscow confirmed that Apresyan was still following the movements of local atomic scientists—including Lawrence and both Oppenheimer brothers—even as he warned the NKVD that “scholars who have taken part in these pursuits are under the surveillance of the American counterintelligence.”*51

  Indeed, an assessment of the Smyth report that the consulate sent Fitin two weeks later included a surprisingly cocky assurance on Apresyan’s part that he could get whatever secrets Moscow needed. While the published report contained “no information about the quantity of uranium being (processed),” May telegraphed, a scientist and agent he identified as “D.” had learned the essential details from those involved in the work and could “turn it over to us at any time.”52

  Apresyan’s cable showed not only that the Bay Area espionage ring remained active in peacetime, but that—despite the end of hostilities—the war between spy and counterspy continued unabated.

  By that spring, one major combatant, the army’s Military Intelligence Division, was no longer in the fight. By February, Lansdale’s once massive counterintelligence operation in the Bay Area had dwindled to just a few agents in Oakland.53 Harold Marsh and Rufus Shivers received orders from Washington to close the Universal Adjustment Company and send its secret files to the FBI. After driving a borrowed truck containing the files to San Francisco, Marsh handed the documents over to Branigan, the bureau’s CINRAD expert.54

  The last act fell to Shivers, who had earlier tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade the local head of G-2 to take the one remaining car that army agents had used in their surveillance: a beige 1939 Plymouth, registered to a fictitious owner. Given strict orders by Marsh to lose the car, Shivers returned to the Presidio late one night and left the Plymouth in the Officers Club parking lot with the keys in the ignition. After removing the license plates, he took a trolley home to pack his bags.

  * * *

  Without fanfare, cyclotroneers who spent the war years in secret exile at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos had begun returning to the Rad Lab. Luis Alvarez, arriving in mid-September 1945 from Tinian, was surprised to find his Berkeley colleagues fretting over the moral implications of the bomb.55

  While still in the Pacific, Alvarez had worked out the design for a novel type of linear accelerator. Luie and Ernest were already talking to Alfred Loomis about obtaining financial backing for the new atom-smasher, and Groves had meanwhile promised a freight-trainful of surplus radar vacuum tubes for the machine that Alvarez called the “Linac.”56

  Ed McMillan had similarly ambitious plans. While still at Los Alamos, lying in bed one sleepless night shortly before the Trinity test, Lawrence’s brother-in-law had hit upon a clever way to synchronize the movement of particles in a cyclotron. McMillan’s invention of “phase stability” promised not only to get around the relativistic limits predicted for machines the size of the 184-inch, but also to boost the energies obtainable to 1 billion electron volts or more. Lawrence and McMillan dubbed the new machine the “Synchrotron.”57

  Insulted when Birge offered him only a lowly assistant professorship at Berkeley, Emilio Segrè coyly sought offers from other universities.58 At archrival Chicago, Seaborg pursued a similar tack. (Sproul eventually caved in—promising Seaborg a new laboratory and the chemistry department “higher salaries and subsequent expansion.”)59 But Segrè did not return to c
ampus until spring 1946, partly to repay Birge for his snub. Even then, he elected to work in the physics department rather than the Rab Lab—having decided that “although an excellent Maecenas, Lawrence was too demanding a boss.”60

  After assessing the damage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Serber had come home in late December. Birge assigned him to teach Oppenheimer’s quantum mechanics class, while Oppie dithered about returning to Berkeley.61 Serber’s wife, Charlotte, who had been in charge of the classified reports library at wartime Los Alamos, applied for the job of Rad Lab librarian; Oppie wrote her a glowing letter of recommendation.62

  Frank Oppenheimer wasted no time before becoming once more involved in the kind of political activity that his brother and Lawrence had repeatedly warned him against.63 That October, he protested the Rad Lab’s dismissal of a graduate student, Ted Finkelstein, for repeated security violations.64 In November and December, Frank spoke to Berkeley’s Democratic Forum and the state’s CIO convention about the Trinity test, ending both lectures with an appeal for the international control of the bomb.65

  Frank also agreed to teach a night class—“The Social Implications of Modern Scientific Development”—the following spring at the California Labor School, which shared quarters with Communist Party headquarters on Haight Street.66 During the day, Oppie’s brother worked with Serber on Alvarez’s Linac.67

  Lawrence’s own plans focused upon completing the long-deferred great cyclotron. For the interim, however, he enjoyed playing the role of conquering hero. Intent upon ensuring that the record of Berkeley’s contribution to the war effort would not be eclipsed by Chicago’s, Neylan commissioned an official history of the Rad Lab, paid for by the regents.68 Following suit, Sproul solicited private funds for an official portrait of Lawrence—a project inspired by Ernest himself. A bronze bust by Alfred Loomis’s wife, Manette, would soon follow.69

  But, beyond the trappings of empire, Lawrence’s postwar fame and the promise of more money from Groves and Sproul meant that a whole new generation of “boys” had joined the Rad Lab’s veterans in the days just after the war.70 Among the recent additions was Wolfgang Panofsky, a twenty-six-year-old German émigré physicist who had worked with Alvarez at Los Alamos and was nicknamed “Pief.” Since the diminutive Panofsky was the only researcher small enough to fit comfortably between the poles of the 184-inch magnet, Pief spent his first days at the lab doing measurements for Duane Sewell.71

  Herbert York, a twenty-three-year-old experimentalist from Rochester University, whom Ernest had sent to Y-12 to improve the performance of the Beta Calutrons, returned to Berkeley after the war to finish his graduate degree. Lawrence put York to work on the graveyard shift running the 60-inch, which was once again being used to make medical radioisotopes.72 The peacetime Rad Lab, Ernest had recently written Groves, “should be devoted primarily to the problems of pure science.”73

  Lawrence even revived the Journal Club, whose meetings had been suspended for the duration. In a move symbolizing the return to the status quo antebellum, his red leather chair was restored to its original place of honor in LeConte Hall.

  Unwilling to wait until funding for his new projects had been approved, Lawrence ordered that the Rad Lab’s cavernous Building 10, home of the prototype Calutron, be made ready for Alvarez’s Linac.74 Ed Lofgren joined Bernard Peters in converting the 37-inch to a scale-model Synchrotron, to be used in a test of McMillan’s phase stability concept. Sewell and Panofsky supervised the dismantling of the old 184-inch, in preparation for its conversion to a phase-stabilized cyclotron.

  That October, at a convocation in the open-air Greek theater on campus, Groves conferred the army-navy “E”—for “Excellence”—award upon Sproul. But, tellingly, the general had already signaled who would call the shots in the renewed army-university partnership. Groves had chosen Oppenheimer’s replacement without consulting either Sproul or Underhill.

  Norris Bradbury was a Berkeley-trained physicist and reserve navy commander whose duties at the wartime lab had included supervising the assembly of both the Trinity gadget and the Fat Man bomb. Although Bradbury had received Oppenheimer’s endorsement, Underhill balked at what he took to be yet another infringement upon the university’s prerogatives.75 Nonetheless, a few weeks later, the regent’s representative was once again on his way to New York, to negotiate another six-month extension of the army contracts with Nichols.76

  Lawrence, for his part, remained unperturbed by the cost of empire. He had already let Groves know that the postwar Rad Lab would look to the army for at least $1 million annually.77 In the months between the Calutrons’ success and the Trinity test, Ernest’s estimated yearly budget for the peacetime lab had ballooned a hundredfold; it climbed higher still following V-J day.78

  With peace also came the return of familiar customs. On December 7, 1945, Lawrence hosted a cocktail party for the Rad Lab’s returnees at Berkeley’s elegant Claremont Hotel, followed by dinner at Trader Vic’s. (Ernest’s favorite restauranteur invented a new drink for the occasion—a lurid, smoking concoction of rum, blue Curacao, and dry ice dubbed the “A-bomb cocktail.” “It was ghastly,” Molly remembered.)79

  The day before departing for a New Year’s vacation in Palm Springs, Lawrence received the long-awaited word from Groves: the army agreed to provide the money necessary to complete the 184-inch and authorized the start of construction on McMillan’s scale-model Synchrotron. But Groves wanted more details on the cost of Alvarez’s Linac. The general agreed to send Nichols out to Berkeley to discuss the $1.6-million appropriation that Ernest had requested for the Rad Lab in 1946.

  * * *

  Where Oppenheimer fit into all these plans remained mysterious. The previous September, when Sproul had hosted a strategy session with Ernest and Birge on how to lure Oppie back to Berkeley, all three men agreed that the physicist was “disaffected.”80 Lawrence even candidly admitted that he was probably one of the reasons why Oppenheimer was playing the part of the reluctant bride.81

  Ernest seconded Birge’s suggestion that they begin by doubling Oppie’s salary—rationalizing, unsentimentally, that “how much we pay Professor Oppenheimer really means nothing because the Government will place such large sums at our disposal if Oppenheimer is here, that his salary will be insignificant.”82 When Sproul hesitated, Ernest promised to go out and raise the money himself.83 The university president finally agreed to make the offer to Oppenheimer in person, at the “E”-award ceremony scheduled for Los Alamos on October 16.

  Sitting next to the grim-faced physicist on the bunting-covered dais, Sproul was surprised by Oppie’s icy reserve. Oppenheimer had officially resigned as director just that morning; Bradbury had been acting head of the lab since the first of the month. Between the set speeches, Oppenheimer complained that a letter he had recently received from Birge was “cold,” whereas telephone conversations with Lawrence had left the impression that Ernest did not want him back in the physics department.84 Oppie said that he understood the president himself was reluctant to have him back on campus, “because of his difficult temperament and poor judgment”—a charge that Sproul vehemently denied.

  Oppenheimer’s mood was reflected as well in the remarks he made that morning, in an address that seemed more jeremiad-like than valedictory. Using language that would later come back to haunt him, Oppenheimer taunted: “If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”85

  Almost as an afterthought, Oppenheimer told Sproul that he had already accepted an offer from Caltech. But Oppie nevertheless asked that his leave of absence from the university be extended for another year—thus keeping alive the hope that he might someday return to the campus.86

  Back at Berkeley, stung by this rejection, Lawrence and Birge urged Sproul not to honor Oppenheimer’s request; both men offered names for a replacement.87 But Sproul, overruling
them, decided to yield to Oppenheimer’s wishes. With more good grace than he felt, Ernest telephoned Oppie with assurances that his office in LeConte was still waiting—“your old hat is on the rack, your desk hasn’t been cleaned out.”88

  * * *

  Another reason for Oppenheimer’s bitterness was the news he had received in Washington, where the bomb was already caught in the grip of larger events. In the few months that he had been president, Truman had given little indication of what his postwar policy would be toward either nuclear weapons or the Soviet Union. But press accounts of his tense meeting with Stalin at Potsdam, and rumors of a looming showdown with the Russians over the Soviet occupation of Poland, made it plain that the wartime grand alliance was in tatters. Moreover, newspaper columnists and editorial writers across the country were quick to point out the obvious: America’s atomic monopoly would soon be the only counterweight to the massive Red Army, given the country’s rapid demobilization.

  Despite Byrnes’s early rebuff of his overture for international control, Oppie had returned to the capital in late September to proselytize on behalf of his newfound cause. In a series of whirlwind meetings with senior government officials—including Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Stimson’s successor as secretary of war, Robert Patterson—Oppenheimer’s efforts had met with decidedly mixed results.89

  At the State Department, Oppenheimer told Acheson that the atomic scientists as a group opposed doing any more work on weapons—“not merely a super bomb but any bomb”—as being “against the dictates of their hearts and spirits.”90 Meeting with Truman a day or two later, Oppie badly misjudged his audience. The thin, haunted-looking physicist had shocked the plain-speaking president by declaiming, melodramatically, that he had “blood on his hands.” Truman replied that any blood spilt was on his hands. In the awkward silence that followed, the president reassured Oppenheimer that, in any event, he would be raising the issue of postwar control with the British in just a few weeks.91