Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  While still in Washington, Oppenheimer had also called the Scientific Panel together again to complete the report on future research that Stimson had requested.92 More than 100 pages long, the study drew upon the work of dozens of scientists and covered topics ranging from biomedical research using radioactive isotopes to possible countermeasures against atomic bombs. A section some 5 pages in length, written mostly by Fermi, dealt with the Super.93

  Oppenheimer delivered the highly classified report to the Interim Committee at the end of the month. In his executive summary, he chose to focus upon the hydrogen bomb. Noting that successful development of superbombs was not assured, he gauged the task of determining the Super’s feasibility as comparable in difficulty to building the atomic bomb: “It is our recommendation that no such effort should be invested in this problem at the present time, but that the existence of the possibility should not be forgotten, and that interest in the fundamental questions should be maintained.”94

  This was a dramatic turnabout from the view that Oppenheimer had expressed to the Tolman Committee just a year earlier—when he had said that the Super should be “pursued with vigor and diligence, and promptly”—and was no doubt, in part, a reflection of the psychological impact of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.95

  But, as Oppenheimer also realized, the Scientific Panel’s report had already been overtaken by events in any case. By the time that the document was presented to the Interim Committee, the seventy-eight-year-old Stimson was already gone from the administration, having made a last—and unsuccessful—appeal of his own for international control as his final act in government. The committee’s acting head, George Harrison, recommended that the panel’s report be held “in escrow,” until such time as Congress could take up the twin issues of domestic legislation and cooperative control.96

  Oppenheimer and Compton—perhaps anticipating this possibility—had already secretly conspired to move discussion of the Super to a higher level.

  On September 27, 1945, Compton sent Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace his own brief summary of the Scientific Panel’s report. Acknowledging that there was a “reasonable chance” that a superbomb could be built, Compton wrote that he and his colleagues had nonetheless decided to recommend against proceeding with the weapon. Unlike the lukewarm position that the panel had taken on thermonuclear research in its formal report, Compton’s letter to Wallace left no doubt where the panel stood on the Super: “We feel that this development should not be undertaken, primarily because we should prefer defeat in war to a victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its determined use.”97

  It was as though Compton and Oppenheimer had turned the clock back to their lakeside walk in Michigan three years earlier and, glimpsing the future more clearly this time, had chosen a different path.

  As a courtesy, Compton sent copies of the letter to Groves, Harrison, and Bush, admonishing each to treat its contents—and especially the paragraph concerning the Super—as “highly secret.”98 Compton obviously hoped that enlisting Wallace’s support might help to kill the superbomb, just as Wallace’s endorsement had been crucial—in Compton’s eyes, at least—to ultimate development of the atomic bomb.

  But by the time that the letter reached him, Wallace was hardly in a position to advocate any such controversial stand with Truman. A week earlier, public outcry had followed press accounts of the cabinet meeting where Stimson urged a more cooperative “direct approach” to Russia. What Stimson had proposed was only a symbolic sharing of basic information about atomic energy, as a gesture of good faith. Opponents of the idea in the cabinet, not wanting to attack the venerable Stimson, had focused their scorn instead upon Wallace, who valiantly came to the idea’s defense.99

  Portrayed in newspapers as a scheme to “give the atomic secret to Russia,” the so-called Wallace Plan was doomed from the outset.100 The commerce secretary was forced to write a public apology to Truman, defending himself for even raising the idea.101 Not surprisingly, Wallace made no mention of Compton’s initiative in his letter to the president.102

  Nor would the Scientific Panel’s report, with its more qualified reservations about the Super, have an impact upon official Washington—where Truman, in early October, pointedly described the U.S. atomic monopoly as a “sacred trust.” In November, Patterson ordered all copies of the report recalled, pending creation of a permanent commission on atomic energy to replace the Interim Committee. A few weeks later, the Interim Committee itself was dissolved; along with it, the Scientific Panel likewise disappeared.

  The panel’s lengthy report, as well as Compton’s letter to Wallace, passed into dusty filing cabinets fitted with combination locks, and thence into oblivion.103

  * * *

  The harsh winter that followed the war froze water pipes at Los Alamos, persuading several more scientists and their families to leave the mesa and return to academe. Included in the general exodus were the Bethes, who went back to Cornell after Rose grew tired of using water trucked from a nearby creek to wash the family’s laundry.104

  The normally stoic Bradbury protested to Groves that it was becoming increasingly difficult to hold people at the lab without a commitment from the army that the work of Los Alamos would continue.105 Not knowing how long his alliance with the University of California would last, however, Groves gave no assurances. In December, he told Bradbury he could guarantee salaries at the lab for only another six months.106

  To be on the safe side, Teller had already sounded out his friend Robert Mulliken, chairman of Chicago’s physics department, about the possibility of joining Fermi on the faculty there.107 But Edward postponed making further plans until he knew whether Los Alamos would continue work on the Super.

  While awaiting that word, Teller had begun teaching classes in elementary quantum mechanics at “Los Alamos University”—the impromptu classroom that wartime veterans had established to train new recruits and to keep their own minds sharp.108 Perhaps because he regretted bending to Oppenheimer’s will in the matter of Szilard’s petition, Edward had also become a political activist of sorts—joining the Association of Los Alamos Scientists (ALAS) and helping Robert Wilson, one of the group’s founders, draft a statement calling for the international control of atomic energy.*109

  At a subsequent meeting of ALAS, Teller led a discussion on the role of scientists in influencing public opinion. (He urged that they present the facts only, without interjecting their own political views.)110 That fall, perhaps more out of boredom than conviction, Edward and metallurgist Cyril Smith lectured a rather bewildered assembly of Indians at Taos Pueblo on the prospects for the peaceful atom.111

  Oppenheimer’s speech at the “E”-award ceremony had finally removed any doubt about where he stood on the question of the lab’s future. It would be many years before anyone could improve upon the job done at wartime Los Alamos, Oppie told Teller. When Edward asked that Oppenheimer intercede with Bradbury and urge that superbomb research continue, Oppie flatly refused.112 Teller told friends, in hushed tones of horror, that Oppenheimer spoke of giving the mesa back to the Indians.

  * * *

  On a rainy night in early November 1945, more than 500 scientists and their spouses crowded into the auditorium at the lab to hear Oppenheimer speak about the implications of what they, collectively, had wrought. Even after he had stepped down as director, Oppie remained a dominant presence at Los Alamos. Speaking softly and earnestly for more than an hour, without notes, Oppenheimer argued that the threat of the bomb had created a common interest among humanity—one “which might almost be regarded as a pilot plant for a new type of international collaboration.”113

  The following morning, Oppie, Kitty, and Peter drove down off the mesa in the family Cadillac, bound for Pasadena.

  In his inaugural speech as director, Bradbury talked guardedly of the future—defining the principal task of the postwar lab as that of improving the Fat Man bomb. On the topic of superweapons, Bradbury s
poke only of possibilities: “This does not mean we will build a Super. It couldn’t happen in our time in any event. But someday, someone must know the answer: Is it feasible?”114

  Unwilling to remain at Los Alamos on the strength of such an equivocal promise, Teller gave the new director an ultimatum: he would stay at the lab only if Bradbury launched an intensive program to develop either the Super or Teller’s other wartime obsession, the hydride bomb.115 As part of this crash effort, Teller also wanted Bradbury to commit to carrying out at least a dozen Trinity-type nuclear tests a year.

  Bradbury had already offered to make Teller head of the Theoretical Division, replacing Bethe. But there was neither enthusiasm nor money in Washington for what Edward wanted, Norris patiently explained.116 Late in October, Teller notified Bradbury that he planned to leave the lab at year’s end. Norris obligingly agreed to transfer the contract for opacity research to Chicago, where Mayer had agreed to join Teller and Fermi.117

  For Teller, the decision to leave Los Alamos was wrenching. “I have started to feel homesick for this place before I have even left it,” he wrote to Mayer that fall.118 But he also began taking steps to ensure that his work on the superbomb survived at the lab as a kind of legacy.

  On October 5, 1945, Los Alamos published the “Super Handbook,” a top-secret compendium of everything that was known to date about the H-bomb. Teller was its principal author. Three days later, Edward completed the “Super-Gadget Program,” a summary report on the thermonuclear research that he had done in cooperation with Fermi and Konopinski. It recommended the production of superbombs in quantity once the feasibility of the weapon was determined.

  Teller’s work on the Super and related projects continued almost to the day of his departure. In mid-December, shortly after arranging the shipment to Chicago of his piano—a small concert grand with a cracked sounding board which Mici had dubbed “the Monster”—Edward filed a classified patent on the Booster, the fission bomb whose yield would be increased by burning tritium and deuterium at its core.119

  Teller likewise did what he could before leaving to promote his ideas in the political world. That winter, he flew to Washington to testify before Congress on behalf of a bill that promised to free scientific research from military interference.120 Tipped off by Fermi that the Scientific Panel had taken a dim view of superbombs in its report on postwar research, Teller prepared a lengthy rebuttal. Presented as the answers to a series of hypothetical questions, Teller’s letter was, in essence, his case for the Super.121

  Teller’s letter argued that the first American superbomb could be ready in as little as two years if it were made the focus of a concerted, crash effort, though five years was “a conservative estimate.”122 Since the Super itself did not require any hard-to-obtain materials like enriched uranium or plutonium, Edward posited that a Soviet H-bomb might follow closely the Russians’ first fission weapon. As to whether ethical qualms should figure in the decision whether to proceed with the Super, Teller dismissed the question as simply irrelevant: “If the development is possible, it is out of our powers to prevent it.”

  Exhorting that work on the H-bomb be transferred to “a capable and strong group of men,” Teller sent the letter to Fermi on October 31, 1945. A few days later, as promised, Fermi forwarded the document to its real and intended audience, Secretary of War Patterson.

  When Teller’s move to Chicago was delayed for several more weeks that January, he used the postponement to teach a final class at the lab’s impromptu university. In the days before the move, Teller’s mood had shifted, and he had even begun looking forward to leaving Los Alamos. Bradbury’s decision not to pursue the Super had removed a great burden from him, Edward confided to Maria Mayer. A friend at the lab accused Teller of “behaving like a pious man should when his mother-in-law dies.”123

  On February 1, 1946, Edward, Mici, and Paul drove down from the mesa and headed east.

  * * *

  Those who stayed at Los Alamos regarded the news coming out of Washington about the bomb with emotions that ranged from bemused detachment to speechless outrage.124

  A much-quoted after-dinner address that Groves gave in September to a group of International Business Machine executives at the Waldorf-Astoria sparked a firestorm at the lab.125 Groves had spoken of keeping the bomb “under the control of the United States until all of the other nations of the world are as anxious for peace as we are.… I mean they must be anxious for peace in their hearts, and not merely by speech or by signature to a treaty they do not intend to honor.”126

  “Did it really add anything to the expression of your opinion to say, ‘and the more they talk the shorter the time seems to get’?” John Manley wrote to Groves in exasperation.127 Groves apologized to Bradbury for the controversy that the speech provoked—but not for its message.128

  More controversial still was Groves’s attempt to railroad through Congress legislation that originated in the War Department, and that would have given the military a dominant voice in the domestic control of the atom. The May-Johnson bill proposed to create a part-time, nine-member commission responsible for the military as well as the civilian applications of atomic energy. Because the commission’s four uniformed members would have had veto power over the majority’s decisions, however, the bill was derided by civilian-control advocates, including the newly formed Federation of Atomic Scientists.129

  Surprisingly, Groves’s ally in this uphill battle was Robert Oppenheimer. Whether out of conviction, innate pessimism, or residual feelings of gratitude, Oppie joined Groves in championing the “War Department bill,” despite opposition from baffled colleagues.130

  Addressing a meeting of ALAS that fall, Oppenheimer had counseled the lab’s scientists against taking precipitous action to get their views before Washington.131 Yet Oppie’s visit to Truman had already shown that he believed in speaking the truth to power—starting at the top. Indeed, the question of how best to influence nuclear policy had been the subject of long and frequent arguments between Oppie and his brother, who favored public education over direct government action. (Robert felt “the path of public education was too slow,” Frank later recalled.)132

  At Groves’s request, Oppie even rounded up the signatures of two of his three Scientific Panel colleagues in a telegram of support for May-Johnson.133 Only Compton, wary, had declined.

  But when Lawrence and Fermi joined Oppenheimer in a press conference at the Pentagon, it became embarrassingly evident just how little they knew of the legislation they had endorsed. As Ernest was sheepishly forced to admit to reporters, he had never actually read the May-Johnson bill—and was unaware, for example, that it mandated ten years of prison and a $10,000 fine for the kind of inadvertent security slips that he had repeatedly committed during the war.134

  Lawrence promptly withdrew his support from May-Johnson. Asked by Wilson and Higinbotham to testify before Congress on behalf of a rival bill, which guaranteed control over the atom to civilians, Lawrence sought the counsel of Neylan.135

  Acting as the trial attorney he had once been, Neylan asked Lawrence to sit for a mock cross-examination. Within minutes, the lawyer had Ernest sputtering, caught up in contradictory statements about simple matters of fact. Lawrence turned down Wilson and Higinbotham’s request.136 Henceforth, Ernest vowed, he would only wield his influence as Neylan directed—in secret and behind the scenes.

  PART THREE

  SCIENTISTS IN GRAY FLANNEL SUITS

  E. O. Lawrence, Louis Alvarez, Edward Teller—Madison Avenue–type scientists. Scientists in gray flannel suits.

  —David Lilienthal, journal, March 1958

  9

  A WORLD IN WHICH WAR WILL NOT OCCUR

  AS THE MOMENTUM behind the May-Johnson bill slowed to a crawl in the Senate, an ambitious freshman Democrat from Connecticut—Brien McMahon—rose to take advantage of the stalemate. Forty-two-years-old, dapper, and florid-faced, with a trademark diamond stickpin in his lapel, McMahon had a reputation as a
crusading prosecutor. While an assistant attorney general, he had brought the Harlan Country Coal Operators to justice.1 McMahon had been in Congress barely a year.

  After creating a special committee on atomic energy in December 1945, and making himself chairman, McMahon introduced legislation that called for a full-time, wholly civilian Atomic Energy Commission. Learning from Groves’s debacle, McMahon wisely enlisted the support of atomic scientists and key Republicans beforehand.2

  But the progress of the McMahon bill through Congress abruptly stalled in mid-February 1946, with disclosure of an espionage ring operating out of the Soviet embassy in Ottawa, Canada. Twenty-two suspected spies were arrested. In testimony before McMahon’s Senate committee, Groves used the spy scandal to cast doubt upon the wisdom of giving sole control over atomic energy to civilians.*3

  Two weeks later, when a British veteran of the Manhattan Project who had worked in Canada, physicist Alan Nunn May, confessed to giving samples of enriched uranium to the Russians, the entire community of atomic scientists suddenly came under suspicion.4

  * * *

  Not surprisingly, those who had been the subject of previous security investigations became the focus of renewed attention. On May 8, 1946, the wiretap on Robert Oppenheimer’s home in Berkeley—deactivated shortly after the war by the army—was reinstalled by the FBI, upon the order of bureau director Hoover.5 FBI agents once again dogged Oppenheimer’s steps on visits to Washington and Los Alamos.6

  The bureau’s wiretapping of Oppenheimer had been approved by Tom Clark, Truman’s attorney general, after Hoover presented Clark with what appeared to be incriminating evidence of Oppie’s continued association with Communists.

  Returning to the Bay Area after the war, Oppie and his family had spent several weeks at his brother’s house in nearby Albany, where the FBI had also installed a bug. During a New Year’s Day party at Frank’s, the bureau’s bug picked up a conversation between Oppie and FAECT organizers Paul Pinsky and David Adelson. Afterward, a joking comment by Pinsky to Adelson about Oppenheimer—“shall we claim him as a member?”—was interpreted by bureau agents as confirmation that Oppie was still affiliated with the Communist Party.7