Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  With his consultancy fees and the money he received in fall 1945 for the Wheeler award—given annually to “Berkeley’s most useful citizen”—Ernest and Molly bought a small beach house on Balboa Island, near Los Angeles, as a summer retreat. Lawrence also purchased a bigger boat, a 30-foot cabin cruiser, to replace the vessel built by Alvarez’s uncle.

  That summer, Neylan arranged a personal visit to San Simeon, the castlelike villa that William Randolph Hearst built between San Francisco and Los Angeles on the California coast. The experience of meeting Hearst “turned out to be even more fabulous than expected,” Ernest gushed in a thank-you note.60

  Among those used to the penurious academic life, Lawrence’s social climbing inspired no small amount of envy. William Knowland, editor of the Oakland Tribune, was among the prominent Californians attending a reception and dinner that Neylan hosted for Ernest at the exclusive Pacific Union Club. Following a long weekend spent with the Lawrences at Del Monte Lodge, Neylan and Loomis arranged for a mutual friend and fellow Bohemian Grove campmate—San Francisco attorney Rowan Gaither—to become Ernest’s investment counselor.61

  After Neylan and the regents approved purchase of the Wilson Tract, the land above the giant cyclotron that Lawrence had tried but failed to acquire during the war, Ernest’s empire also had more room to grow.

  By spring 1946, Lawrence’s earlier $l-million-a-year budget for the Rad Lab had doubled and now included funds for, among other things, a new radiochemistry lab on campus for Seaborg and a medical physics clinic for John and his physician colleagues at University Hospital.62

  Even so, the future was not entirely unclouded, for either Lawrence or his laboratory. Early in the year, a Pentagon advisory committee had recommended that university laboratories focus on unclassified research and fundamental science, leaving secret military research to government-run national labs.63 Although the report considered Lawrence’s Berkeley an exception—“a special type of national laboratory”—it left the future of army funding for the Rad Lab in some doubt.64 One longtime rationale for the accelerators at Berkeley—the production of radioisotopes for medical research—had already been reassigned to DuPont’s reactors after the war. Most of the $75 million that Groves had approved for annual postwar “nucleonics” research was earmarked for two new federal laboratories, potential rivals to Berkeley: one at Argonne, outside Chicago, and the other at a site in the Northeast yet to be determined.65

  That April, the army promised Lawrence the full $2 million he requested. But Groves—fearful of plutonium spills in populated Berkeley—balked at Seaborg’s “hot lab” and at John’s medical physics program, which the army saw as having only a tenuous connection to defense. Groves was also still dragging his feet on Alvarez’s Linac, pending a fuller accounting of costs. Yet Lawrence was confident that these funds, too, would ultimately be approved. As Cooksey reassured Loomis at the end of the month, “we can see nothing to hold us back.”66

  Indeed, the only real obstacle was the university. As Lawrence was keenly aware, future army funding was contingent upon the relationship between the university and the government continuing. Sproul, however, remained eager to relieve himself of the wartime burden. Nichols had warned Groves that the intercession of Secretary of War Patterson might be needed to persuade the university president to renew the two army contracts.67

  Underhill, anxious to avoid another fait accompli like Groves’s choice of Bradbury, had begun insisting upon personally approving all personnel appointments at Los Alamos.68 With the June 30, 1946, termination date looming, Underhill urged Sproul to call Lawrence, Groves, and others together for a “roundup and showdown on the New Mexico project.”69

  Instead, the deadline passed uneventfully. Groves once again persuaded the university to extend the contract on a temporary basis.70 Meeting with the finance committee that fall, Sproul observed in frustration: “If we get rid of bomb making, plutonium, and New Mexico, I would be very happy.”71

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  The logjam over the McMahon bill had finally broken that summer, following an amendment that created the Military Liaison Committee to serve as Pentagon watchdog over the civilian Atomic Energy Commission. The MLC disarmed those critics who objected to the exclusion of a military voice in matters pertaining to the bomb.72

  As well, McMahon’s Senate committee had meanwhile expanded to include nine members from the House.73 Like the Military Liaison Committee, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy constituted another set of eyes—and interests—to keep watch over the civilian commission. In late July, the day before signing the McMahon bill into law, Truman picked the first of five commissioners for the AEC.

  Lewis Strauss, fifty, was a self-made millionaire—a former shoe salesman turned investment banker. Strauss had also been a personal aide to President Herbert Hoover. Commissioned a rear admiral in the Bureau of Ordnance during the Second World War, he worked on procurement and served as an assistant to the navy secretary.74

  Early on, Strauss had a special stake in atomic energy. The loss of both parents to cancer awakened an early interest on his part in the therapeutic uses of radiation.

  Truman’s interest in Strauss—a Jew and a lifelong Republican—stemmed from the president’s need to appear nonpartisan as well as ecumenical in his appointments to the commission. Overlooked in the choice was Strauss’s personality, which combined extraordinary vanity and stubbornness with a vindictive streak.75 (Oppie, not yet aware of the latter trait, observed of Strauss in a wiretapped conversation with another physicist: “He is not greatly cultivated but will not obstruct things.” It was a rare and fateful misjudgment on Oppenheimer’s part.)76

  The lone scientist to be picked to serve on the commission was Los Alamos veteran Robert Bacher.77 Truman chose David Lilienthal to chair the AEC after James Conant and Karl Compton each turned down the post. (Lilienthal confided to his journal that he feared only “frustrations, neurotic scientists, and insensitive Trumanites.”)78

  The acolytes had a quick familiarization tour. In November, the group visited Manhattan Project sites in a commandeered army C-47 which Lilienthal dubbed “the Flying Neutron,” accompanied by an armed guard and a coffin-sized box of top-secret documents.79 After Los Alamos, where Teller was predictably sanguine about prospects for the Super, Lilienthal saw—for a second time—the room-sized vault where the nation’s atomic arsenal was stored. In Berkeley two days later, following drinks and dinner at Trader Vic’s, Lawrence enthused about the commercial possibilities of civilian atomic power reactors.

  The only sour note on this grand tour was sounded by Groves, whom Patterson would soon appoint to the Military Liaison Committee. (He felt like a mother hen seeing strangers take her chicks away, Groves remarked plaintively to the entourage.)80 The general made it plain that he considered himself, not Lilienthal, the one best suited to watch over the nation’s interests with regard to nuclear energy.

  Rather than surrender the Manhattan Project’s laboriously compiled personnel security records to the AEC and Lilienthal, Groves that summer had given some of the files to Hoover and the FBI.81 But the so-called investigation files that Groves had kept in his own personal safe during the war—on the Oppenheimer brothers, Weinberg, Nelson, and others—he took with him to the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, where he became the director in early 1947. (“General Groves’ instructions were that these files were to be wrapped and sealed, and that no person other than himself was to open them,” wrote his secretary in a note appended to the files after the war.)82

  Under the provisions of the McMahon Act, responsibility for atomic energy passed to the civilian AEC at midnight on December 31, 1946. In March 1947, Lilienthal and the commission moved into their new headquarters, the art-deco Public Health Building across Constitution Avenue from the Reflecting Pool.

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  One unintended consequence of the McMahon Act had been to return Robert Oppenheimer to a position of influence in Washington. The legislation that cr
eated the AEC had also established the General Advisory Committee, appointed by the president, to assist the commissioners on technical and scientific matters. There was never any question but that Oppie would be a member of what the press called the AEC’s “atomic brain trust.” Conant, Fermi, Rabi, and Seaborg also served on the GAC. By the time that Oppenheimer, delayed by a snowstorm, arrived in Washington on January 8, 1947, a day late to the committee’s inaugural meeting, he had already been unanimously elected chairman.83

  The GAC was almost immediately embroiled in controversy. Shortly after assuming office, Lilienthal and the other commissioners had been amazed to discover that America’s vaunted atomic arsenal consisted of only a few weapons.84 Not one of the plutonium pits or uranium cores in the vault at Kirtland Air Force Base was currently usable as a bomb, Bacher reported; it might take as long as two weeks to assemble a single weapon.85

  Given such a dire situation, the army was exasperated at the lack of enthusiasm shown by the GAC for radiological warfare, a concept once again in vogue with that service, which was promoting “rad war” as a more humane alternative to Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons.86 The navy, for its part, objected to recently published remarks by Oppenheimer concerning the obsolescence of its big ships—an issue that had come to the fore during Operation Crossroads, the atomic tests at Bikini atoll in summer 1946.87 (Oppenheimer had expressed “misgivings” about the navy-sponsored tests in a personal letter to Truman, requesting that he be dropped from a panel of scientists asked to analyze the results.)88 Oppie and Conant would even offend the newest service—the U.S. Air Force—by deprecating the technical feasibility and military worth of a favorite blue-suit project: the nuclear-powered bomber.89

  But easily the most controversial advice to come from Oppenheimer and his colleagues concerned the Super.

  At their second meeting, in February, members of the GAC discussed progress toward the superbomb. They urged the AEC to “assign a higher urgency to this work,” in part “as a stimulation to improvement” of atomic bombs by Los Alamos.90 At that same meeting, however, committee members recommended that reactors rather than superbombs be given priority at the lab. Since “rapid progress was not anticipated” on the Super, wrote Oppenheimer that April, he and his colleagues recommended that Los Alamos simply make regular progress reports on the most promising designs.

  * * *

  Such halfhearted affirmation evoked scorn on the part of Edward Teller. In April 1946, Teller had presided over a classified three-day “Conference on the Super” at Los Alamos. Oppenheimer and Bethe had passed up Teller’s invitation in order to attend the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences.91 But among the nearly three dozen scientists in the audience at the lab was Klaus Fuchs.

  On the conference’s opening day, Fuchs and John von Neumann told Teller and Serber about a new idea they had for using an exploding atomic bomb to compress and ignite the Super’s thermonuclear fuel by implosion. A few weeks later, shortly before Fuchs returned to England, he and von Neumann jointly filed a classified patent on their invention.*92

  In preparation for the conference, Teller and a half dozen of his lab colleagues had written a report—LA-551, “Prima Facie Proof of the Feasibility of the Super.” Prefaced by sixty pages of classified calculations and drawings, LA-551 concluded that a superbomb fueled by deuterium was indeed feasible. But the report’s recommendation—that “a large-scale theoretical and experimental program” be undertaken immediately to develop the weapon—amounted to Teller’s special pleading. Edward also urged, as the next logical step, a prompt start on making the tritium necessary for mass production of the Super.

  The focus of the Los Alamos conference was upon one specific design, the so-called runaway Super that Teller had first proposed at the 1942 Berkeley summer seminar. His bomb consisted of a cubic meter of uncompressed liquid deuterium at the end of a cylinder attached to one or more high-yield, gun-type fission bombs. The design relied upon the energy from the detonation wave of the atomic explosion to trigger the thermonuclear reaction. A small amount of tritium gas was injected halfway down the tube, between the deuterium and atomic bombs, to start the deuterium burning. Theoretically, there was almost no limit to the power of the device; increasing the yield was simply a matter of adding more deuterium.

  The question that dominated the second and third days of the conference—whether the thermonuclear flame would spread or simply go out—was the same problem that had bedeviled the summer meeting at Berkeley. The physics conundrum, which had almost caused the Super to be abandoned at wartime Los Alamos, returned to haunt Teller anew at the 1946 conference: as the energy from the exploding atomic bomb heated the mass of hydrogen fuel, energy was lost through radiation.93

  Various schemes and fixes were proposed to get around this obstacle. But like a dog chasing its tale, the discussion went round and round; no solution was in sight.94

  Serber claimed that Teller ultimately “solved” the problem by ignoring it. (Serber was at the meeting under protest; his Urbana colleague, physicist Phillip Morrison, had persuaded him to come, having predicted—correctly—that Teller would use the conference as a springboard to lobby for the Super.)95 Calculations done by von Neumann’s ENIAC computer at Princeton had deliberately left out the radiative cooling effect, since the complex hydrodynamics of thermonuclear burning were beyond the capabilities of the machine. Similarly, optimistic estimates were substituted for hard numbers in the critical opacity calculations, which remained unfinished by Mayer at Chicago.96

  Teller summarized the results of the conference in a draft report, written that May. It conceded that definitive proof of the Super’s feasibility required the actual test of a finished device. He also acknowledged that a crash effort to develop the superbomb would necessarily draw away “a considerable fraction” of the resources needed to build a stockpile of atomic bombs in the coming years. Tritium, for example, could only be produced by Hanford’s reactors, which were already engaged full-time in making plutonium for the nuclear arsenal. Accordingly, a decision on whether to proceed with the Super had to be “part of the highest national policy,” Edward argued.

  Shown the draft report by Teller, Serber thought it “incredibly optimistic,” protesting that the runaway Super was not a workable scheme, nor was a solution evident—much less “simple,” as Teller argued. Serber sat down with Teller later that month to write a revised version that was more realistic.97

  Back in Chicago, Edward completed the final “Report of Conference on the Super,” LA-575, and sent it to Los Alamos. Two days later, on June 14, 1946, Fuchs left the New Mexico lab to return to England.98 Checking Teller’s report out of the Rad Lab library in Berkeley, Serber was upset to discover it essentially unchanged from the original version.99

  * * *

  Teller was back at Los Alamos a few weeks later with his family, following the end of classes at Chicago, Boasting that he had arrived at the lab “in the proper (or rather not proper but usual) crusader spirit,” Teller posed a rhetorical question to confidante Mayer: “Do you think there is any chance that I shall be somewhat less foolish than I have been?”100

  In August, 1946, Teller proposed a new design for a hydrogen bomb, which he christened the “Alarm Clock” to distinguish it from the Super.101 (His Alarm Clock, Teller boasted, would wake up the world.) This device would use an atomic trigger to ignite alternating layers of enriched uranium and a mixture of deuterium and tritium arranged in concentric shells. Although more powerful than a conventional fission bomb, the Alarm Clock, unlike the runaway Super, could not be of unlimited yield. But Teller and the new leader of the lab’s Theoretical Division, Robert Richtmyer, hoped that it might be a practical alternative to the Super.102

  By that fall, calculations by two of their colleagues at the lab—mathematicians Stanislaw Ulam and Nicholas Metropolis—showed that major unresolved problems remained with both the Super and the Alarm Clock. Despite the fact that these obstacles had yet to be su
rmounted, Teller urged Bradbury to begin scheduling tests of prototype thermonuclear weapons for the coming year.103

  Bradbury simply ignored him.104 A seven-page letter that the lab director sent to the army in November, concerning various projects at Los Alamos, neglected even to mention the Super.105

  It was not only Bradbury but Oppenheimer whom Teller now blamed for raising barriers to his pet project. Through his friendship with Fermi, Teller was aware of the reservations that the GAC had expressed about the superbomb in Washington. On a visit to Stanford that summer, Teller had driven across the Bay to see Oppie, later writing to Mayer of the visit: “We have been extremely friendly. He is a clever man. If he would really like me he would not have acted very differently. But mistakes are not corrected easily.”106

  * * *

  Oppenheimer had briefly returned to teaching on the Berkeley campus in fall 1946, having already spent much of the year commuting between committee assignments in Washington and his other job at Caltech. (“I did actually give a course, but it is obscure to me how I gave it now.”)107 The experience was less than the triumphant homecoming he may have expected. Because Oppie’s affiliation this time was with the Radiation Laboratory rather than the physics department, he suffered the humiliation of having to report to Lawrence. Once, when Ernest uttered a good-natured if insensitive remark about clipping Oppenheimer’s wings, Oppie asked sarcastically whether he now needed Lawrence’s permission to order office supplies.108

  Oppenheimer also found it difficult to return to academic life for another reason. Shortly after arriving back in Berkeley, Oppie confided to Birge that he already missed Washington’s corridors of power.109 Offered the directorship of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study in early 1947, Oppie welcomed the chance to return to the East.110 The offer came from Lewis Strauss, who served on the institute’s board of directors.