Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  But Oppie himself seemed little affected by the ordeal. He and Kitty spent the weekend at the Chevaliers’ beach house just a few weeks after the HUAC hearings ended. FBI agents waited in cars on the road outside. Other G-men, monitoring a hidden listening device, strained to hear conversations above the sound of breaking waves.

  For Frank and Jackie, the future was more problematic. Having recently sold a van Gogh he had inherited from his father to buy an 800-acre spread in Blanco Basin, near Pagosa Springs, Colorado, Frank looked forward to a new life as a cattle rancher. But the land, at an elevation of nearly 10,000 feet, had only a small cabin made of rough-hewn logs. During the long winter, the neighboring ranchers would move their cattle to land they owned at a lower elevation—an option not open to Frank and Jackie.

  In early spring, the couple piled blankets near the door and heated water on a wood stove. Sitting near a window in the darkened house, watching with binoculars the cattle standing in snow-covered fields, they waited for the first calves to be born.19

  * * *

  Having survived HUAC’s interrogation with both his reputation and his career intact, Robert Oppenheimer was relaxed and confident when he appeared before the Joint Committee barely a week later. Oppie had been called to testify in hearings begun by Hickenlooper, who was engaged in a last-ditch effort to hamstring David Lilienthal. The Iowa senator had charged the AEC chairman with “incredible mismanagement.”20 Unlike HUAC’s closed sessions, the Joint Committee hearings took place under klieg lights, with reporters present.21

  Still hoping to overturn the commission’s ruling on the export of isotopes, Strauss volunteered to speak on that issue as an example of Lilienthal’s alleged malfeasance. Strauss had already testified twice in executive session about a request for radioactive iron that had come from a group of Norwegian scientists, one of whom was suspected of being a Communist.

  Asked about the potential for misuse of such material, Oppenheimer responded with the kind of quick and casual brutality for which he had become infamous among faculty colleagues at Berkeley. His target this time, however, was Strauss. Deadpan, Oppenheimer compared the military significance of isotopes to that of bottled beer, a shovel, or vitamins. As laughter broke out in the hearing room, even some committee members joined in. Volpe, watching from the sidelines, saw the color rise in Strauss’s face and the latter’s jaw muscles clench.22 Afterward, when Oppie asked him, “How did I do, Joe?” Volpe, shaking his head, answered: “Too well, Robert, much too well.”23

  * * *

  The deteriorating international situation had been a factor in Teller’s decision at the end of 1948 to return to Los Alamos full-time for a year.24 Since 1946, he had been shuttling between the lab and Chicago during summers and holiday breaks. The previous spring, a Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia had dragged one more country behind the Iron Curtain. That summer, a war scare ensued after the Russians cut off Allied access to Berlin. In China, as the new year began, Mao’s armies were advancing on all fronts. It is “quite clear that I am needed in Los Alamos more than I am needed in Chicago,” Teller wrote Maria Mayer, adding, “being necessary is an extremely important thing for me.”25

  Edward planned to devote the coming year to work on the Super and other bombs. Anxious to accommodate the temperamental Hungarian, Bradbury had created the Committee for Weapons Development, on which Teller served, and had also made him an assistant director of the lab.26 At the committee’s first meeting, Teller proposed testing four new devices by mid-1951: an advanced implosion bomb, the hydride, the Booster, and a prototype fission trigger for the Super that was dubbed “Little Edward” at the lab.27

  Initially, his return to the New Mexico lab seemed to have the desired tonic effect. “I think I have a right to feel at home and I do,” Teller exulted to Mayer.28 But just a few weeks later the familiar ennui was back. “The amount of physics I am not doing here is considerable,” Edward wrote.29

  What Teller complained was his “hibernation” at Los Alamos was a reflection of the frustrations he was encountering at the lab. His colleagues remained, as ever, unenthusiastic about Teller’s original hobbyhorse—the hydride bomb, which the GAC had recently voted to deemphasize—while the Super seemed as far from realization as ever.30

  So morose had he become about the future, Teller wrote Mayer, that he proposed sending a rocket to Mars loaded with algae and bacteria as “insurance in case an atomic war terminates life on Earth.”31

  * * *

  American setbacks in the Cold War had also given new importance to the question of when the Russians would get the bomb. Ironically, as time passed without producing evidence of Soviet progress toward a weapon, complacency grew.32 In July 1948, the Central Intelligence Agency had estimated mid-1950 as “the earliest date by which it is remotely possible that the USSR may have completed its first atomic bomb.” The agency believed mid-1953 to be “the “most probable date.”33 A year later, CIA analysts still held to 1953 as the most likely year but added a curious hedge: they now predicted the Russians’ first bomb “cannot be completed before mid-1951.”34

  By spring 1949, the United States was flying specially equipped B-29s along the periphery of the Soviet Union, part of a long-range detection system operated by an air force detachment known as AFOAT-1.35 On the same day in June that Oppenheimer testified before HUAC, Conant’s Committee on Atomic Energy recommended cutting research and development funding for airborne detection. Conant’s intent was to channel more money and effort into seismic detection, which both he and Oppenheimer believed had a better chance of reliably discovering clandestine nuclear explosions.36

  For Strauss, however, this interference by a second committee on which Oppenheimer served seemed another example of obstructionism bordering on sabotage. Following a briefing in early August 1949 on the Long-Range Detection Program, Strauss wrote the director of AFOAT-1 with a warning that any “failure to detect the first Russian detonation might be fatal.”37

  The specter of a Soviet bomb had likewise begun to haunt McMahon and Borden, who wrote to the AEC a week later, asking that they be notified immediately when the commission had evidence of an atomic explosion in the Soviet Union. Borden’s letter was prompted by recent reports in a Paris newspaper of a major seismic disturbance near the Afghan border.38 Picked up by the Associated Press, the story had been reprinted in American papers. “The article is inaccurate in most particulars,” Sumner Pike, the acting AEC chairman, reassured Borden on August 31, 1949.39

  * * *

  At the time Pike wrote his letter, the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union was already some forty-eight hours old.

  Word of the Russian bomb reached Washington at the start of the busy Labor Day weekend. By the early morning hours of September 7, AFOAT-1 analysts had identified an air sample obtained from a B-29 flying between Alaska and Japan as consistent with debris from a fission explosion. When further analysis confirmed this finding, the air force alerted the Truman administration on September 9.40

  Official Washington remained skeptical of the news nonetheless.41 The new defense secretary, Louis Johnson, was one of the doubters. Truman’s national security adviser, Admiral Sidney Souers, likewise expressed hope that the radiation had come from a Soviet reactor accident rather than an actual weapon. Even the president himself apparently remained unconvinced that the Russians had the bomb.42

  Realizing that there was at least a political need for more proof, the air force hastily assembled a covey of experts to make the case that the atomic monopoly had indeed ended.

  The first call went out to Vannevar Bush, who was surprised to be the one picked to head the effort. (“But wouldn’t it be more reasonable for Dr. Oppenheimer to be chairman?” Bush innocently asked. The reply, he later remembered, was “that they prefer it the way it was.”) To Bush, it was the first subtle hint of the trouble to come for Oppenheimer.43

  Bush nevertheless decided to include Oppie on the top-secret panel, which met f
or five hours on September 19 before concluding unanimously that the evidence pointed to a Soviet atomic bomb, subsequently dubbed “Joe-1.”44

  The Russian bomb caught many unawares. Oppenheimer had just returned to his Princeton home, Olden Manor, from a week at Perro Caliente when the telephone rang with the summons from Bush.45 On vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Lilienthal and his wife had been driving back from a dinner in Edgartown when they were startled to see an AEC official suddenly materialize out of the fog, standing by the side of the road. Huddled around a kerosene lamp at Lilienthal’s summer home, drinking beer from an icebox, the two men discussed the Soviet bomb and “the whole box of trouble it portended,” the AEC chairman wrote in his journal. After a night of little sleep, Lilienthal flew back to Washington early the next morning.

  Even for those who had long predicted it, the Russian bomb came as something of a shock. Stopped at a traffic light on his way to Yosemite, Lawrence saw a banner newspaper headline heralding the monopoly’s end. Just back from England, Teller learned at the end of a Pentagon briefing on tactical nuclear weapons what everyone else in the room already knew. Acting on impulse, he immediately telephoned Oppenheimer with a desperate query: “What should we do now?” Edward later remembered Oppie’s sharp, almost scolding reply: “Keep your shirt on.”46

  * * *

  But Teller’s question was nonetheless the one that preoccupied most Americans—Oppenheimer included—in the days to come. Back in Washington, Lilienthal found Oppie “frantic, drawn” and Bacher “deeply worried” not only about the Russian bomb but by the American reaction.47 Oppenheimer’s hope that Truman might use the news to announce an end to “the miasma of secrecy” that enshrouded the subject of atomic energy had been quickly disappointed.48

  Others looked to the president to take more tangible—and decisive—action.

  Just a few weeks earlier, after much agonizing, Teller had finally decided to accept a teaching offer from UCLA.49 The Soviet bomb now caused him to reconsider his plans. At a recent meeting on new weapons to be developed at Los Alamos, Teller had put the Super at the end of his list—a reluctant concession to the roadblocks in the device’s design, and the persisting stalemate caused by insufficient computing power at the lab.50 But the sudden end of America’s atomic monopoly had him once again actively proselytizing for the Super by that fall.51

  At Berkeley, chemist Wendell Latimer cornered Ernest Lawrence over lunch at the Faculty Club to talk about the Super. Like Teller, Latimer believed that the hydrogen bomb was the only logical response to Joe-1. Despite his earlier stand against the H-bomb, Lawrence’s growing anxiety for the future—as well as a nostalgic remembrance of his role in the Manhattan Project—made him sympathetic to Latimer’s appeal. (When, years earlier, Oppie told an MIT audience that physicists had “known sin” because of the atomic bomb, Ernest bristled at the suggestion; there was, he declared, no occasion on which physics had caused him to know sin.)52

  Later that day, Alvarez and Lawrence discussed how they might lobby for the hydrogen bomb at an upcoming conference in Washington on radiological warfare. Receiving further encouragement in a telephone call from Teller, the two left Berkeley a day early in order to stop off at Los Alamos on their way east.

  Arriving in the predawn hours of October 7, 1949, the duo received a briefing on the current state of thermonuclear research from Teller, Manley, and two physicist-mathematicians at the lab: George Gamow and Stan Ulam. Energized by Ernest’s enthusiasm, Teller followed him and Alvarez back to the Albuquerque Hilton, where the trio talked into the early morning about the newly improved political prospects for the Super. In the room, Lawrence washed one of his new drip-dry shirts in the sink, showing Teller how it could be worn in the morning—a useful trick, he suggested, that would facilitate Edward’s forthcoming role of H-bomb lobbyist.53

  Teller endorsed Lawrence’s plan to mobilize support in Washington for the construction of several new heavy-water reactors to produce tritium, since scarcity of that isotope looked to be one of the chief obstacles to the Super. “E.O.L and I said we would get going on that at once,” Alvarez wrote in a diary he began keeping of the trip.54

  * * *

  At the Capitol, the Soviet bomb had created a mood receptive to the message being borne by Lawrence and Alvarez. In an “emergency” meeting of the Joint Committee on September 23, immediately following Truman’s public announcement of Joe-1, Oppenheimer’s genial assurance that there was no need for drastic action was simply ignored. Senator Eugene Millikin spoke ominously—if elliptically—of taking “therapeutic measures” against Russia in light of the new development. When Lilienthal faced the gauntlet a few days later, McMahon pointedly rejected what he characterized as the AEC chairman’s “doctrine of ‘enough bombs.’” “Why not all-out effort for super-weapon, with help of British?” Borden wrote in a note he passed to the senator.55

  Ironically, those in uniform—to the extent that they knew anything of the H-bomb—remained surprisingly ambivalent about the Super.56 By contrast, Joint Committee members, pointing to Joe-1 as evidence of America’s sudden and glaring military weakness, ascribed near superhuman powers to the Russians. Staffers worried aloud that the Soviets, using captured Nazi scientists, might already have an arsenal of the ultimate weapon that Borden had anticipated in his apocalyptic book: a long-range rocket topped with a nuclear warhead.57 In the atmosphere of crisis, the Super was presented as a quick way for the United States to recapture its lost hegemony.

  During lunch that afternoon with the National Security Council’s Souers, Strauss was surprised to learn that Truman evidently knew nothing about the H-bomb. Using Souers as his conduit—the two navy men had become friends during the war—Strauss sent the president a memo he had begun composing shortly after Truman’s announcement.58 It argued that the Soviet Union might already be ahead of the United States in the arms race.59 Borrowing a term from physics, Strauss urged Truman to leapfrog the Russians with a quantum jump—a crash effort for the Super.

  * * *

  Alvarez and Lawrence arrived in Washington on Saturday afternoon, October 8. Not pausing to rest after the flight from New Mexico, the two took a taxi to the AEC building, where they received an encouraging reception from, among others, their former Berkeley colleague Kenneth Pitzer, who had meanwhile replaced Fisk as the commission’s head of research. “Told them what we planned to do and got good response,” wrote Alvarez in his impromptu diary.60

  On Monday, the pair had lunch with McMahon and two Californians on the Joint Committee, Carl Hinshaw and William Knowland, who told them of plans to send a scouting party out to Los Alamos and Berkeley later in the month to gauge the prospects for the Super.61 From Capitol Hill, Lawrence and Alvarez returned to AEC headquarters for a meeting with the commissioners. But the session with Lilienthal went badly. Invoking the “spirit of Groves,” Lawrence tried to rally the AEC chairman behind the new reactors and the Super. Instead, Lilienthal wordlessly swiveled his chair and stared silently out the window.62

  In New York that evening, the two saw Isidor Rabi at Columbia “and found him,” Alvarez wrote, “very happy at our plans.” Luie found particularly auspicious Rabi’s parting comment: “It’s certainly good to see the first team back in.”63

  But crowded skies thwarted their plans for enlisting the aid of America’s allies. Ernest had hoped to persuade the Canadians to let him use their heavy-water pile at Chalk River to make tritium until Berkeley’s new reactors were built. Unable to get seats on a flight to Ottawa, Alvarez returned to Berkeley while Lawrence flew back to Washington. McMahon had scheduled an executive session with the Joint Chiefs of Staff two days hence.

  In a meeting the following afternoon with Nichols, who had meanwhile replaced Groves as head of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, Ernest added his voice to those urging the joint chiefs to declare a formal military requirement for the Super.64 Nichols promised to pass Lawrence’s message along to the air force’s chief of staff and �
�no. 1 bomber man,” General Hoyt Vandenberg. At the Joint Committee meeting on October 14, Vandenberg announced that the air force’s view was that the superbomb should be rushed to completion as soon as possible.65

  In the letter that McMahon sent to Lilienthal and the Pentagon later that month, the speculative thesis that Teller had raised the year before in “The Russian Atomic Plan” suddenly achieved the sober status of accepted fact: “As you know, there is reason to fear that Soviet Russia has assigned top priority to development of a thermo-nuclear super-bomb.”66

  * * *

  While slow to coalesce, opposition to the superbomb was also forming. During the time that Lawrence and Alvarez had been making their rounds in Washington, Oppenheimer was in Cambridge, attending a meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers with Conant. In private conversation, the quiet chemist had been surprisingly passionate in his denunciation of the H-bomb.

  Back in Princeton on October 21, Oppenheimer received a briefing by Manley and Bradbury on the status of thermonuclear research. That afternoon he put his thoughts on superbombs in a letter to Conant.

  Despite the fact that “two experienced promoters have been at work, i.e., Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller,” Oppenheimer wrote, his own view was that the technical problems plaguing the Super seemed no closer to resolution than they had in 1942: “I am not sure the miserable thing will work, nor that it can be gotten to a target except by ox cart.” But this was not Oppie’s greatest concern: “What does worry me is that this thing appears to have caught the imagination, both of congressional and of military people, as the answer to the problem posed by the Russian advance.”67