Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  There was little doubt by now where Lilienthal stood on the question of the superbomb. In his journal, the AEC chairman described Alvarez and Lawrence as “drooling with the prospect [of the Super] and ‘bloodthirsty.’”68 But Lilienthal also recognized that the issue required a formal, scientific airing. He and Oppenheimer had agreed to convene a special meeting of the General Advisory Committee shortly after hearing of Joe-1.69 Lilienthal hoped for a broader inquiry than just whether to proceed with a crash effort for the Super; one that might answer the philosophical query: “Is this all we have to offer?”

  Lilienthal also knew that several of those on the commission already agreed with him. In the meeting with Alvarez and Lawrence, only Strauss had spoken out unreservedly for proceeding with the hydrogen bomb. A relatively new commissioner, attorney Gordon Dean—Brien McMahon’s former law partner—had seemed pensive and noncommittal. On the other hand, the man who had meanwhile replaced Bacher as the commission’s only physicist, Princeton’s Henry Smyth, was outraged at the Berkeley scientists’ attempt at “short circuiting” the AEC by appealing directly to Congress. “Apart from being an expert in his field and a brilliant scientist,” Smyth diplomatically reminded Borden in a note, Lawrence was “also something of a promoter; and that several times in the past he may have overstepped the line in pushing projects which add to his own ‘Empire.’”70

  * * *

  Engaged at the moment in a frenetic cross-country drive to recruit scientists to work on the Super, Teller was encountering unexpected obstacles. Still hoping to persuade Bethe to join the effort, he had been in the Cornell physicist’s office when the telephone rang with a call from Oppenheimer. Arriving at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study the next day with Bethe in tow, Teller and Oppenheimer eyed each other like rival suitors, while the object of their attention sat silent between them.71 Teller’s indelible memory was of Oppenheimer quoting a phrase by Conant. The Super, Conant had said, would go forward “over my dead body.”72

  For Teller, as troubling as Conant’s opposition or Bethe’s silence was the uncertain attitude of Enrico Fermi, whose visit to Italy had forced a postponement of the GAC meeting on the Super. Seeing Fermi shortly after his return from Europe, Edward was disappointed to find his former colleague uninterested in talking about superbombs.73 Unable to change Fermi’s mind in the short time remaining—Teller was due back at Los Alamos for the Joint Committee’s inspection tour—he telephoned Alvarez, who recorded the mixed results of the recruiting campaign in his diary: “[Teller] said he felt he could count on Bethe. Felt Oppie was lukewarm to our project, and Conant was definitely opposed.”74

  * * *

  Because of Fermi’s European trip, the special meeting of the General Advisory Committee was postponed until late October. Seaborg would not be a participant; not wishing to ruin his own chances for a future Nobel prize, he had refused to turn down an invitation to the awards ceremony in Sweden at month’s end. Tipped off by Latimer to the mounting controversy over the Super, Seaborg drafted a letter for Oppenheimer to read to the committee. The missive’s tortured syntax reflected its author’s reluctance to offend either side in the coming debate.75

  At Princeton, meanwhile, a steady stream of lobbyists and supplicants had begun arriving at Olden Manor. Upon the heels of Teller and Bethe came James McCormack, head of the AEC’s Division of Military Application, various members of the Military Liaison Committee, and Robert LeBaron, the recently appointed Pentagon official responsible for atomic affairs.76 (A vain and flamboyant figure, LeBaron claimed to trace his ancestry back to the Plymouth colony and boasted that he had studied atomic physics with Madame Curie at the Sorbonne. He had been recommended for the Pentagon post by Strauss.)77

  But notably absent from the ranks of Oppie’s visitors was Lawrence, who had on several occasions been only a short train ride away. Nor was the reason any mystery. Asked years later about the cause of the falling-out between him and Ernest, Oppie answered: “My brother and … a rather puzzled horror about the H-bomb were the origin.”78

  Instead, on October 27, Lawrence sent an emissary: Robert Serber.79 (“Ernest thought I would get a more sympathetic hearing from Oppenheimer than Luie would.”)80 Oppie’s shy friend and former student was a logical choice for a proxy, but a poor one. Taking Serber along on the train down to Washington for the meeting, Oppenheimer enumerated the arguments against the Super. Away from Lawrence and the hothouse atmosphere of the Rad Lab, Ernest’s would-be advocate joined the ranks of H-bomb skeptics.81

  Back in Berkeley, Lawrence had meanwhile scouted out a promising location for a half-dozen “Chinese copies” of the Chalk River reactor: Suisun Bay, north of San Francisco, near the little town of Benicia. He told Alvarez that with AEC funding the reactors “could probably be constructed starting immediately.”82 Impulsively, he anointed Luie the future director of the as-yet-unbuilt “Benicia Laboratory.” (“I am therefore going on almost full time as director of a nonexistent laboratory on an unauthorized program,” wrote the almost-giddy Alvarez.)83 In anticipation of the move, Luie cleared out his desk at the Rad Lab and transferred his files to Lawrence’s office on Cyclotron Hill.

  * * *

  On Friday afternoon, October 28, 1949, Oppenheimer convened the GAC’s seventeenth meeting in the wood-paneled conference room on the AEC building’s second floor, which looked out onto the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Detained in Cambridge on Harvard business, Conant had sent word that he would not arrive until that evening.84

  First to speak was George Kennan, the young Soviet expert whose lengthy telegrams from the Moscow embassy had become the intellectual foundation of the Truman administration’s “containment” policy. Head of the State Department’s policy planning staff, Kennan was in the course of preparing a seventy-nine-page treatise that, when it was finished in January, would cite Shakespeare and the Bible to explain the effect of superbombs upon the nation’s relations with Russia.85 Kennan spoke for almost an hour and was followed by Bethe, who, by contrast, gave a brief, concise, and highly technical account of where research stood on the Super.

  Serber spoke next of Lawrence’s plans for tritium-producing reactors. Challenged by Fermi why Berkeley should spearhead the effort—of all the AEC-funded laboratories in the country, the Rad Lab was the only one without experience in reactors—Serber replied that Lawrence saw the need as so great that he was willing to divert the efforts of his boys to meet it. Smyth let it be known that he looked upon this latest evidence of Lawrence’s selflessness with a gimlet eye.

  Oppenheimer began Saturday morning’s session by reading Seaborg’s letter.86 Lilienthal and the commissioners arrived shortly afterward. Worried by reports that the AEC was cool to the idea of the Benicia Laboratory, Alvarez had decided to make an eleventh-hour appearance at AEC headquarters but was able to get no farther than the lobby.87 He remained there, like an island in the torrent, as the joint chiefs and others summoned by Oppenheimer hurried past.

  By acclamation, the committee decided to focus the next two days upon the Super. Disillusioned by the brevity and shallowness of previous GAC meetings, Conant had suggested holding “the equivalent of hearings … bringing in as witnesses people as far down the line as we like.”88 Oppenheimer agreed, promising committee members “an opportunity to come to grips with some questions which long have eluded us.”89

  Speaking for the military, the joint chiefs’ chairman, General Omar Bradley of the army—“very G.A.R.-ish, countryman’s accents,” noted Lilienthal—surprised all by arguing that the Super’s principal value might be chiefly “psychological.”90 (“A useful thing to have around the house,” Lilienthal wrote contemptuously.) General Lauris Norstad, head of air force planning, echoed Bradley’s point but had no answer to Lilienthal’s question: why not simply increase atomic bomb production instead of building a fearsome new weapon?

  Still stuck in the lobby, Alvarez was reduced to searching people’s faces for clues to what was going
on upstairs. Shortly after noon, he caught Oppenheimer’s eye as Oppie and Serber paraded past. During lunch at a nearby restaurant, Alvarez was surprised to hear Oppenheimer argue that the Russians might follow suit if the United States decided not to develop the Super. The last time he could remember discussing the Super with Oppie, in 1943, Oppenheimer had held out the prospect of work on the H-bomb as an inducement to come to Los Alamos.

  Realizing that the Benicia Laboratory was doomed if, as it appeared, Oppenheimer and the GAC decided to oppose the Super, Alvarez did not bother to return to his vigil in the lobby but instead booked a flight home. Back in Berkeley, he made a final entry in his diary: “Particularly interesting talk with Oppie.… Pretty foggy thinking.”

  * * *

  At the AEC conference room on Saturday afternoon, the mood of the meeting subtly began to change.91 Rabi and Fermi had come to Washington believing that a decision to proceed with the Super was probably foreordained, if only for reasons of domestic politics. But a quiet protest by Hartley Rowe, an engineer who had been at wartime Los Alamos—“We built one Frankenstein,” Rowe muttered—sparked a contentious and unexpected debate over the morality of the Super.

  When Strauss spoke up to remind the group that the decision on the Super would not be made by popular vote, Conant—“looking almost translucent, so gray,” Lilienthal thought—replied that Strauss had missed the point, since “whether it will stick depends on how the country views the moral issue.” As for his own views, Conant left no doubt. “This whole discussion makes me feel I was seeing the same film, and a punk one, for a second time,” he announced to the meeting.

  The intensity of Conant’s convictions began to sway the skeptics, Rabi and Fermi included. Although practical objections were also raised—the scientists thought the chances better than even that a successful Super could be built within five years—it was the ethical argument that held sway. When the meeting adjourned that evening, its participants broke into small groups to draft their recommendations. Oppenheimer and Manley agreed to write the overall report. With DuBridge’s help, Conant crafted the portion that dealt specifically with the Super. Believing that a recommendation simply not to proceed would be ignored, Rabi and Fermi searched for a more practical approach. Their hope, Fermi said later, was “to outlaw the thing before it was born.”92

  Early on Sunday morning, October 30, Oppenheimer reconvened the GAC and the various drafts were read aloud. Lilienthal, joining the discussion, was surprised to discover that the committee, which he had thought evenly split on the crash effort the night before, now seemed uniformly opposed to the Super. The AEC chairman returned to his office shaken, canceling a previously scheduled trip to the Midwest: “Some terrible and deeply important things to work out in my mind,” he wrote in his journal.93

  Others in the room also noticed the change of mood. Attorney Gordon Dean thought the language used by GAC members surprisingly emotional, evoking “visceral reactions.”94 Even the normally inscrutable Fermi seemed curiously “worked up,” Manley recollected.95 Genocide, a relatively new word, appeared twice in the drafts.

  After lunch, the committee set about finalizing its report; by three o’clock the task was done. Conant’s summary reflected the passion that had flared in the conference room on Saturday afternoon:

  We believe a super bomb should never be produced. Mankind would be far better off not to have a demonstration of the feasibility of such a weapon, until the present climate of world opinion changes.… In determining not to proceed to develop the super bomb, we see a unique opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war and thus of limiting the fear and arousing the hopes of mankind.

  DuBridge, Rowe, Cyril Smith, and Bell Laboratories president Oliver Buckley added their signatures to what the committee considered its “majority report.”

  Standing apart from Conant’s draft was a single-page letter written by Rabi and Fermi, titled “An Opinion on the Development of the ‘super.’” Arguing that any decision on the H-bomb had to be linked to national policy, the two denounced the Super in moral terms even stronger than those used by Conant. “It is clear,” they wrote, “that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country.”

  Going on to describe the hydrogen bomb as “necessarily an evil thing considered in any light,” Rabi and Fermi proposed what they hoped would be seen as a workable alternative between a crash program and outright renunciation: a promise not to go ahead with superbombs provided other nations exercised similar restraint. Key to the plan was their faith that the tests necessary to the development of an H-bomb would be detectable “by available physical means”—that is, the same technology that had tipped the United States off to Joe-1. Privately, Lilienthal deemed it a “rather thin proposal.”96

  Before adjourning, Oppenheimer offered each member an opportunity to express a final, personal view. Only then did he thank his colleagues, admitting that he would have felt compelled to resign from the GAC had they not rejected the all-out approach to proceed with the Super.97 Offering to affix his signature to either Conant’s draft or the letter by Rabi and Fermi, Oppie finally signed only the so-called majority report, with its unequivocal rejection of the Super.98 Evidently forgotten was his earlier admission to Conant that it would be “folly” to oppose the new weapon.

  The summary that Oppenheimer and Manley prepared for Lilienthal endorsed the increase in neutron production to the 1-gram-a-day level that Lawrence had sought. But the extra neutrons were to be used to make radiological agents, plutonium for atomic bombs, and the Booster, not tritium for the Super. Almost as an afterthought, the GAC also recommended that any new reactors be built at Argonne, not Berkeley. Thus did Lawrence’s dream of the Benicia Laboratory evaporate, as Alvarez had feared.

  Late that afternoon, Oppenheimer returned to the AEC building to see Lilienthal once more before catching the train back to Princeton. His concern, Oppie told Manley, was that the AEC chairman no longer had the “drive, stamina and courage left to get enthused about the matter of the super-bomb and carry it through.”99 Although the Hickenlooper hearings had ended two weeks earlier with Lilienthal’s exoneration, the effects of the ordeal obviously lingered. Moreover, the showdown over the Super could not be postponed: McMahon was scheduled to meet with the commissioners the following afternoon, Monday, October 31.

  For Oppenheimer, the three-day meeting had been a heady time, reminiscent of the optimism that followed the Acheson-Lilienthal report. Back at Princeton, he wrote Niels Bohr: “In fact, it would not seem to me out of the question that great and hopeful changes could occur within the next months.”100

  But Kay Russell, Oppie’s secretary at the GAC, had a more realistic view when she handed the majority report back to Oppenheimer for signing. “This will cause you a lot of trouble,” she predicted.101

  12

  A DESPERATE URGENCY HERE

  REACTION TO THE General Advisory Committee’s report was not long in coming. Manley recalled a “rather violent discussion” between Lilienthal, the scientists, and McMahon on Monday evening, Halloween. “What [McMahon] is talking is the inevitability of war with the Russians, and what he says adds up to one thing: blow them off the face of the earth, quick, before they do the same to us—and we haven’t much time,” Lilienthal wrote in his journal afterward.1 The senator dashed off a letter to Truman the next day, asking for a personal meeting.2

  On Tuesday morning, November 1, Lilienthal and a somber and reflective Acheson discussed the GAC report on a flight to South Bend, Indiana. When he had first learned of the Super, in 1946, the weapon had seemed but a remote prospect, Acheson said. Now it seemed that the Russians, too, would probably have it in time, unless superweapons were banned.3 “What a depressing world it is,” Acheson reflected.

  The secretary of state had asked Lilienthal for the names of people to consult on t
he Super.4 But Acheson already had a list in mind. At its top, not surprisingly, was Oppenheimer.

  Yet Acheson remained unpersuaded by Oppenheimer’s logic when they discussed the GAC report a few days later. “You know, I listened as carefully as I knew how,” he told aide Gordon Arneson, “but I don’t understand what Oppie was trying to say. How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm ‘by example?’”5

  Teller had headed east from Los Alamos almost immediately after the GAC meeting. Stopping off in Chicago, he found Fermi unwilling to discuss the report in detail but coyly hinting at its contents. (“You and I and Truman and Stalin would be happy if further great developments were impossible. So, why do we not make an agreement to refrain from such development?” Fermi asked rhetorically.)6 Edward wrote Maria Mayer that he had been “thoroughly frightened” by what Fermi disclosed, and barely able to control his anger: “Enrico does not know what I think of him. But—unfortunately—he has an inkling.”

  Going on to Washington, Teller learned more about the GAC report from McMahon. (“It makes me sick,” said the senator, succinctly.) “What I saw in Washington makes it quite clear that there are big forces working for compromise and delay,” Teller wrote Mayer on the flight back to New Mexico. For the first time, he asked her to burn the letter after she had read it.

  Back at the lab, Manley showed Teller the majority report and the letter written by Rabi and Fermi.7 At first morose and silent—“very unusual,” Manley noted—Teller offered a bet that he would be a prisoner of the Russians within five years if the United States decided not to proceed with the Super.8

  Strauss, too, had been uncharacteristically quiet during the long meeting on October 30—interrupting only once to ask, incredulously, whether the scientists actually meant to abandon work on the Super even if the Soviets declared they would not go along. Oppie refused to be baited by Strauss’s hypothetical question, answering only that he believed the Russians would not decline.9