Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  At Lawrence’s lab, Oppenheimer’s absence had thus far been no impediment to progress, as several projects long in the works finally came to fruition. Just after the stroke of midnight on October 16, 1947, Alvarez’s Linac produced its first beam.43 A few weeks later, Lawrence sent the AEC his outline for the lab’s next two years of operation. The plan announced Ernest’s next big machine: the “Bevatron,” a Synchrotron 120 feet in diameter, theoretically capable of accelerating protons to 6 billion electron volts. Lawrence’s ambitious plan left no doubt that he intended Berkeley to remain the dominant power in high-energy physics: the money he requested for the coming year was nearly two-thirds of the total that the AEC had promised to spend on accelerators.44

  But the commission’s tepid response showed that Lawrence and his laboratory still faced significant political obstacles in Washington. Replying to Berkeley’s proposal, Fisk spoke ominously of a “modest effort,” the need for “paper studies,” and of a decision some six months hence.45

  Ten days later, Lawrence was back in Washington to lobby for his Bevatron. Opposing Berkeley’s new machine was a prominent member of the GAC and a former ally of Ernest’s: Isidor Rabi. Rabi’s interests were no less parochial; he wanted the commission to build a smaller and cheaper accelerator nearer Columbia, at the AEC’s new Brookhaven laboratory on Long Island.46 Underhill, also in Washington, quickly sent Sproul a warning note: “General conversations around one of the eastern institutions is that it is time to break the University of California atomic trust.”47

  But Lawrence knew that his ace in the hole remained the university’s contracts with the AEC, which were due to expire by July 1, 1948.

  On the morning of December 31, 1947, Lawrence, Sproul, and Underhill assembled in Sproul’s office to consider whether to renew Contracts 36 and 48. When Underhill objected that Bradbury’s actions showed the Los Alamos director to be still beyond Sproul’s control, Lawrence countered that the university gained much more than it lost from its relationship with the commission. Told that AEC support for the Bevatron might be the quid pro quo for renewing the contract, Sproul sided with Lawrence.48

  Bacher and AEC general manager Carroll Wilson arrived in Berkeley a week later to seal the deal. While what went on at Los Alamos would continue to be determined by the AEC—“exclusively,” Wilson emphasized—the commission agreed to “give Mr. Lawrence, if he is chosen by the University to be its scientific representative, a free run of the place.”49 In a concession to Underhill, Wilson let the university pick the lab’s next director, subject to the commission’s approval.

  It was a wary and guarded partnership at best. Wrote Sproul in his office diary: “My final word was, ‘we are now engaged, but the banns are not to be published until each party has had an opportunity to investigate the background and intentions of the other more thoroughly.’”

  At the end of January 1948, the regents voted to extend the Los Alamos contract for four more years.50 Sproul agreed to a faculty appointment at Berkeley for Bradbury, who was about to be dropped from his teaching post at Stanford, having been away from the campus for the past seven years.51 Bowing to the inevitable, Underhill finally took the step he had long resisted and bought a business license for the University of California in the state of New Mexico.52

  As part of the vows exchanged in Sproul’s office, Lawrence got his Bevatron. But the machine had been scaled down to one-quarter of its original size to make it more palatable to Fisk and the AEC’s auditors. In another compromise, Brookhaven received funding for its own, nearly identical accelerator. Designed by Stanley Livingston, Ernest’s long-ago collaborator—and now his rival—Brookhaven’s machine was dubbed the “Cosmotron.”53

  As Lawrence had hoped, Oppie’s help proved to be key in the battle over the accelerators. Fisk had finally left the decision of which of the competing machines to fund up to the General Advisory Committee. At a climactic moment, when Rabi appeared to have swayed the GAC in favor of Brookhaven, Oppie saved the day by arguing that “discouragement of the Berkeley group would result in the loss of something valuable to the national scientific health.”54 Oppenheimer’s Solomonic decision had kept the West Coast atomic trust intact, while giving the new East Coast lab a promising start.

  Ernest celebrated his good fortune by purchasing a new Cadillac convertible, using money from the Loomis fund.*55 When mesons—the long-sought binding force of the nucleus, previously seen only in cosmic radiation—were observed on the Rad Lab cyclotron later that month, even Lawrence’s critics seemed won over.

  “Isn’t physics wonderful?” cabled Rabi from Columbia.56

  * * *

  His close call over the Bevatron convinced Lawrence anew of the importance of having powerful allies in Washington. A Joint Committee survey of the Rad Lab the previous year had noted that even the AEC found it “difficult to know what goes on in the project.”57 Since then, Ernest had taken steps to improve communications. Among those whom Lawrence courted during his visits to the capital was California congressman Chet Holifield, a Joint Committee member whose district included Balboa Island, as well as Hickenlooper, who paid a visit to the Rad Lab in February 1948.58

  Mutual interest had also made unlikely political bedfellows of Neylan and Lilienthal. In gratitude for his help in brokering the Bohemian Grove deal, the ultraconservative Neylan hosted a dinner for the liberal AEC chairman at the Pacific Union Club that April.59

  The morning after the dinner, Lawrence and Lilienthal attended the inaugural meeting of Neylan’s new oversight committee for Los Alamos, in the regent’s law office on Montgomery Street in San Francisco.60 Afterward, Lawrence took Lilienthal on a leisurely drive down the coast to Balboa Island, where the AEC chairman was a weekend guest at the new beach house. Lawrence used the occasion to lobby Lilienthal on his latest enthusiasm: radiological warfare.

  * * *

  That spring, the AEC and the Pentagon created an ad hoc committee of experts to revisit the subject that had both fascinated and repulsed scientists since the discovery of fission. Lawrence and Alvarez were each asked to join the nine-man panel.61 Since his proposal to the Interim Committee for a noncombat “demonstration” of the atomic bomb in 1945, the idea of making modern warfare less lethal, especially to noncombatants, had been of special interest to Lawrence.62

  But Ernest’s advocacy of what he claimed was a humane alternative to atomic bombs failed to find an echo with Lilienthal, who listened politely but later wrote in his journal:

  Brimming full of enthusiasm, [Lawrence] said his discovery was a way to make war painless.… The idea was to spread radioactive material in a narrow swath, so that the enemy army just couldn’t get at you; a cordon insanitaire, or radiotaire.… When this [was] first mentioned months ago, it hit me in the pit of the stomach so hard that I was almost sick.63

  Subsequently, Lilienthal ordered the AEC’s so-called rad war study redirected, so as to make it “somewhat more endurable.”64

  Unable to persuade Lilienthal, Lawrence was surprised to discover even more spirited opposition coming from an old friend.

  James Conant had done work for the Army Chemical Corps during the First World War and found the similarities between “RW” and poison gas too depressing. (The AEC, he thought, had “enough urgent problems without attempting to emphasize this one.”)65 At the Committee on Atomic Energy, which he chaired for the Pentagon’s Joint Research and Development Board, Conant resolutely beat back a proposal that would have accelerated research on the subject.66

  Throughout the summer and fall, Lawrence labored to change Conant’s mind. During one three-day period in September, Ernest regaled his friend on the humanitarian potential of radiological warfare at the Bohemian Grove, over lunch in Berkeley’s Faculty Club, and during dinner at Trader Vic’s.67 But not even Lawrence’s celebrated charm could sway the Harvard chemist’s resolve.68

  When Lawrence and Alvarez raised the subject again, on a drive from Berkeley to San Francisco, Conant protested that h
e was “getting too old and too tired to be an adviser on affairs of this sort.”

  “I did my job during the war,” he said wearily.69

  * * *

  Following another summer spent at Los Alamos, Teller’s efforts to spark a crash effort on the Super were similarly falling flat. In Washington, his lobbying mostly consisted of briefing Bacher, who had pledged to keep the Joint Committee informed of progress on the hydrogen bomb. (Privately, Teller protested to Maria Mayer that Bacher was “at best a third rate physicist,” yet admitted that there was another reason for disliking the AEC commissioner: “To Oppy he was the ideal yes-man. That, of course, is the main reason of my antipathy.”)70

  Concerning the Super, there was, in truth, not much progress to report. Teller had completed another top-secret report on the subject before returning to Chicago. The previous fall, Los Alamos had published LA-643—“On the Development of Thermonuclear Bombs”—which pulled together all the aspects of H-bomb research at the lab to date. Teller’s mood, as reflected in the report, had become decidedly more pessimistic in the eighteen months since the superbomb conference. While Edward still thought the classical Super “probably feasible,” even he now acknowledged that its complexity put it at least several years away.

  Unexpected problems with both the Super and the Alarm Clock had surfaced in recent studies at the lab. The latest calculations showed that the Super would require almost twice the amount of tritium Teller had earlier estimated. The availability of tritium—which could only be made at the cost of sacrificing the production of plutonium for atomic bombs—was likely to be “the determining factor in the early construction of any thermonuclear bomb,” LA-643 noted.71

  While Teller anticipated no “extremely big difficulties” with the Alarm Clock, this design, too, suffered from some of the same problems that plagued the Super. (Unmentioned in the Los Alamos report was a recent calculation that showed it might take a fission explosion equivalent to 1 million tons of TNT—a megaton—to ignite the device.)72 In an effort to get around these problems, the Alarm Clock had steadily grown to a behemoth weighing between 40 and 100 tons—much too large to be carried by existing aircraft. Teller himself conceded that further work on the design looked unpromising.73

  Recognizing that any decision taken at this point was almost certainly going to go against him, Teller recommended postponing a choice between the Super and the Alarm Clock until more detailed calculations could be made on von Neumann’s new digital computer.

  Notwithstanding these technical barriers, Teller judged that the greatest obstacle to the Super lay in the realm of politics, not physics. Next to Bradbury, he regarded Oppie and the General Advisory Committee as his most serious adversary. While pronouncing LA-643 “admirable,” the GAC had failed to endorse either increased tritium production or the thermonuclear tests that Teller’s report called for.74

  Instead, in June 1948, the committee recommended accelerating work on the fission Booster—if necessary at the expense of delaying development of the Alarm Clock and Super.75 Another of Teller’s early ideas that had been revived and modified in LA-643—a boosted hydride bomb—received the back of the hand from both Oppenheimer and the Military Liaison Committee, which dismissed it as “not now considered promising.”76

  By that summer, Teller had what he considered yet another example of Oppie’s interference.

  In early July, Oppenheimer and other scientists met in Berkeley at the request of the Military Liaison Committee to divine the future of atomic warfare. The “Panel on Long-Range Objectives” had been called into being to forecast likely developments over the next decade in the areas of nuclear weaponry, atomic propulsion, and radiological warfare.77 Under Oppie’s direction, the experts actually ranged further afield into such subjects as the world uranium supply and tactical fission weapons. But the panel gave the Super little attention—and no priority.78

  Whereas LA-643 had judged it “not very probable” that the Soviets might develop an Alarm Clock–type weapon, barely a week after Oppenheimer’s latest report Teller forwarded his own new and very different assessment of the future to Bradbury.

  Titled “The Russian Atomic Plan,” Teller’s memo argued that the Soviet Union, in its efforts to catch up with the West, might have taken a “surprising and disquieting” alternate course.79 Speculating that the Russians had decided not only to construct but to test their first atomic bomb in secret—“in order not to give us premature warning of their strength”—he hypothesized that large-scale, clandestine production of the ingredients for a Soviet Super had already begun at decentralized sites around the USSR. The implications for U.S. security were obvious. “One may feel less certain about our continued superiority in atomic warfare,” Teller concluded.*80

  * * *

  The question implicit in “The Russian Atomic Plan”—when would the Soviets have the atomic bomb?—had begun to preoccupy others in Washington, Lewis Strauss among them.

  There was already a wide disparity of views as to the answer. Confident that he had cornered the world market on atomic raw materials, Groves thought the American nuclear monopoly might endure for as long as a generation. A few scientists, like Arthur Compton, took a more cautious view, believing it would be a decade or more before the West confronted a Soviet atomic bomb.81 But most of those who had a hand in building the American bomb predicted that the breathing spell would be much shorter, perhaps five to seven years. Only a few jeremiads in the military—members of the Special Study Group in Air Force Intelligence—warned, late in 1947, that the “Russians could conceivably complete the first atomic bomb in summer or fall of 1949.”82

  Strauss proved to be even more of an alarmist, arguing in spring 1947 that a Soviet nuclear test might be imminent.83 With the zeal of a dishonored prophet, he appealed to Defense Secretary James Forrestal to be on the lookout for a Soviet bomb.84

  Oppenheimer, on the other hand, remained surprisingly complacent. As late as April 1948, he predicted that a Soviet nuclear threat was still “a long time to come.”85

  What might have seemed, in calmer days, an honest disagreement or a simple case of bureaucratic inertia took on a more sinister cast to Strauss, who took the GAC’s lack of anxiety concerning the Soviet bomb to be part of an emerging pattern; one in which Oppenheimer or Oppie’s friends were the common element.

  In January 1948, Conant’s Committee on Atomic Energy had expressed “grave doubts” about the effectiveness of the long-range detection system that Strauss favored, adding that it seemed “highly improbable any foreign country will detonate an atomic bomb within a period of three years.”86 (Strauss, at the same meeting, said that the air force “urgently needed” $1 million to establish an airborne detection program. When the committee failed to act on his plea, Strauss offered to pay part of the sum out of his own pocket.)87

  Strauss had earlier had a run-in with the GAC and its influential chairman over another, unrelated issue. At the Bohemian Grove meeting, Strauss had been the only commissioner to vote against a policy extending the prewar custom of making isotopes freely available to hospitals and research institutes overseas.88 The AEC’s 4-to-1 vote, the first occasion where the commission was not unanimous on an issue, had particularly disturbed Lilienthal, who lost sleep over the incident.89

  Nor had Strauss accepted defeat gracefully. Even after Truman announced the new policy, Strauss continued to lobby the State Department and Forrestal in an effort to overturn the decision.

  But perhaps most ominous, from Lilienthal’s viewpoint, was Strauss’s reaction when the AEC chairman had tried to salve the wound. After Lilienthal genially suggested that “you just didn’t realize what you were doing,” Strauss’s quick reply had disabused him, he wrote, of that naive notion: “[Strauss] turned and grinned in what seemed a very genuine way and said, ‘No, I’m old enough; I knew exactly what I was doing.’”90

  * * *

  What Lilienthal described as “this secrecy incubus” was also creating an inc
reasingly oppressive political atmosphere in Washington by 1948. The previous fall, the loyalty hearings begun by HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas had spread to both sides of the country. On October 28, 1947, Thomas had notified Hoover in a telephone call that he intended to expand his current hearings—on Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry—to include “the tie-up between the Oppenheimers and the Soviet embassy.”91 As Hoover subsequently informed Attorney General Clark, the focus of the new inquiry would be Frank Oppenheimer—whom HUAC “apparently intends to attack.” Hoover added that Thomas almost certainly had “tap” (that is, transcripts of army or bureau wiretaps) to use as evidence.92

  On what was to have been the final day of the Hollywood hearings, Thomas produced a surprise witness. Former FBI special agent Louis Russell was a ten-year veteran of the bureau who had recently joined the staff of the House committee. In testimony prompted by HUAC’s chief investigator, Robert Stripling, Russell described the Chevalier incident as Robert Oppenheimer had recounted it to bureau agents a year earlier.

  The link between Russell’s story and the previous testimony seemed tenuous at best. (“Nobody on the staff could explain what it had to do with the committee’s inquiry into Communism in Hollywood,” wrote the San Francisco Chronicle’s baffled reporter.)93 But word of Oppenheimer’s alleged involvement in a spy plot created an immediate sensation in newspapers across the country.94

  Cornered by reporters at his home in Stinson Beach, Chevalier described Russell’s story as “greatly garbled” and denied that he had approached Oppenheimer “in order to obtain information of any kind.”95 Contacted in England, where he had moved from Berkeley just three weeks earlier, Eltenton refused comment.96 From Princeton, Oppenheimer declared that he would likewise “withhold comment, either confirmation or denial”—an equivocation that both angered and perplexed Chevalier.97