Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  Back at Berkeley, Serber had naively tried to put a positive face on the GAC’s recommendations in his own report to Lawrence. “Oh, Bob, don’t be a damn fool!” Ernest erupted impatiently.10 Alvarez, having meanwhile learned that Oppenheimer had indeed prevailed at the GAC, unceremoniously moved his files back to his old office.11

  Except for Lilienthal and Strauss, the commissioners seemed unwilling or unable to take a clear stand on the Super. Such indecisiveness was a growing frustration to the AEC chairman, who noted in his journal—with concern—that his own opposition to the weapon “has not proven contagious.”12

  Sumner Pike still waffled at an AEC meeting on November 3. Henry Smyth, while opposed to a crash effort, worried that any decision taken in the current international climate might prove irreversible.13 Gordon Dean favored a lawyerly approach—a secret diplomatic overture to the Soviets, offering to renounce the Super if the Russians followed suit. Should the Soviets refuse, Dean argued, the road would then be clear for the all-out effort.

  Matters were no closer to resolution four days later, when Lilienthal brought the commissioners together with GAC members who were still in town. Conant, Manley wrote admiringly, had not lost the courage of his convictions—“giving it straight from the shoulder to the Commission, not only including his views on the action that they should take but also the remark that if ever there was a point to a civilian commission this was now the one.” But Manley feared that the Harvard president’s lecture had little impact: “I think that this point that he made was rather lost.”14

  Strauss, on his way to Los Angeles to give a speech, missed the November 7 commission meeting. But the following morning, McMahon—en route between Los Alamos and Hanford, on the Joint Committee’s inspection trip—stopped by Strauss’s suite at the Beverley Hills Hotel with the welcome news that Dean was wavering on the Super. In a telephone call, the two urged McMahon’s former law partner not to yield to pressure from Lilienthal and Oppenheimer.15

  The H-bomb lobby was becoming a cabal.

  * * *

  For Strauss, opposition to the Super was less a case of mistaken judgment than a crime. Nor was he alone in believing that there was a campaign under way to sabotage the hydrogen bomb. Teller thought it suspicious that a second Los Alamos conference on the superbomb, planned for early November, had been suddenly canceled on October 31 by Bradbury, citing “scheduling complications.”16 The final straw was when Bethe had telephoned to say that he would not be coming to Los Alamos after all.17

  But Strauss was also privy to a secret that few others in the government knew: the FBI had recent, firm evidence that Soviet agents had penetrated the Manhattan Project.18

  Some two weeks before the GAC meeting, Strauss had learned from Charles Bates, the FBI agent whom Hoover had assigned as liaison with the AEC, that decrypted Soviet messages revealed the presence of a spy at wartime Los Alamos.19 Bates informed Strauss and AEC security chief John Gingrich that “Bureau Source 5” pointed to British physicist Klaus Fuchs.20 Bates added that there was also reason to believe other atomic spies had been operating at the lab, and that secrets of the superbomb had probably been compromised as well.21

  Without notifying the other commissioners, Strauss had immediately launched his own clandestine campaign to unmask the next spy—or, failing that, to find a scapegoat.

  On October 13, 1949, Strauss had telephoned Groves with questions about the British mission at Los Alamos. Following an hour-long meeting with Hoover a few days later, Strauss called Groves again, asking for more details. His queries this time concerned not only British scientists at the lab but some American ones as well—specifically, Frank and Robert Oppenheimer.

  Thus alerted that an espionage investigation was under way, Groves wrote a letter to Strauss on November 4 that was an apologia for not having acted on what he knew about the Chevalier incident at the time: “It is true that Robert was very reluctant to disclose the details of the Frank-Haakon situation and I am not sure whether we ever did learn the whole truth about it all. It was finally revealed to me under conditions which made it impossible to do much and it was very difficult to tell just how much Frank was involved and how much Robert was involved.”

  “Summing it up,” Groves wrote, “I believe that it is quite clear that Frank was sponsored, protected and otherwise looked out for by Robert and that this was done knowing full well the background and (at least previous) sympathies of Frank and, particularly of Frank’s wife (Jackie).”22

  Strauss did not tell Groves what he intended to do with the information on the Oppenheimers. But he had already obtained from Nichols a copy of the letter that Oppie’s Scientific Panel had sent to Wallace in September 1945—in which panel members had stated that they would rather see the United States defeated in war than victorious at the cost of using superbombs. When Strauss wrote back to Nichols a few weeks later, asking next for a copy of Szilard’s petition to Truman, it was clear that the noose was tightening: “Do you suppose your files could locate that document? I would be interested to see who signed it and the nature of the arguments advanced.”23

  * * *

  Unable to make a unanimous recommendation to the president, the commissioners finally decided to put their separate views in writing. Lilienthal delivered the letters to the White House on November 9. The vote was 3 to 2 against proceeding with the Super. Lilienthal, Pike, and Smyth opposed an H-bomb program, whereas Dean and Strauss were in favor. As all were aware, however, Lilienthal was already a lame duck. Two days earlier, he had announced to Truman that he planned to step down from the chairman’s job at year’s end but was willing to wait until the question of the superbomb was settled.

  Puzzled by the commissioners’ conflicting views, the president asked Souers to reconvene a special NSC committee—consisting of Lilienthal, Johnson, and Acheson, its chairman—which had earlier advised him on the production of fissionable material.24

  Sensing that the tide was beginning to turn in his favor, Teller, ebullient, wrote to Mayer that the current situation reminded him of the earlier debate on whether to proceed with the atomic bomb: “I wonder to how many people it happens that they are set back where they have been before and that they get a second chance.… But this time I love the job I am going to do—I shall even love to fight if it must be.”25

  McMahon’s resolve, too, had stiffened when he learned from a Los Alamos briefing by Manley that an “orderly, step-by-step” program at the lab might not deliver an H-bomb until 1960. Lawrence had previously told the senator that a crash effort could succeed in as little as two years.26 Teller, on the other hand, was warning the Joint Committee’s Henry Jackson that the Russians might test a Super sometime in the next eighteen months.27

  Borden spent three days drafting an argument that he and McMahon hoped would prove persuasive to Truman. McMahon sent the result, a letter almost 5,000 words long, to the president on November 21. “The profundity of the atomic crisis which has now overtaken us cannot, in my judgment, be exaggerated,” it began. Using language reminiscent of the Incendiary Document and There Will Be No Time, the letter’s conclusion was suitably apocalyptic: “if we let Russia get the super first, catastrophe becomes all but certain—whereas, if we get it first, there exists a chance of saving ourselves.”28

  Four days later, Strauss sent Truman his own, briefer but still emotional rejoinder to the GAC. “A government of atheists is not likely to be dissuaded from producing the weapon on ‘moral’ grounds,” he argued.29 Goaded by Nichols and Borden, the joint chiefs, too, had finally weighed in, adding their voices to the growing chorus. The country “would be in an intolerable position if a possible enemy possessed the [Super] and the United States did not,” Bradley wrote.30

  During the next six weeks, McMahon and Borden would send three more letters to the White House—two in one day. Lilienthal had warned the president of a possible ‘blitz’ on the Super. “I don’t blitz easily,” Truman replied with a grin.

  But the presid
ent had not expected this concerted a campaign, and it was also clear that a choice could not be postponed much longer. Following a gaffe by Colorado senator Edwin Johnson, a Joint Committee member—Johnson mentioned in a television interview that the United States was working on a superweapon 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima—McMahon began urging Truman to make his decision soon, and to make it public.31

  * * *

  Returning to Washington after the holiday recess, McMahon brought the Joint Committee together on January 9, 1950. Reading the GAC report aloud amid interruptions—“Let me get through this if you don’t mind,” he snapped at one point—McMahon could not refrain from adding his own editorial comments. On the hope that the Russians might renounce the Super, he hooted: “That is certainly a joke. Suppose they did? Who the hell would believe them?”32

  His meeting with the president had left the impression, McMahon told his colleagues, that “Missouri common sense” would compel Truman to go ahead with the H-bomb. (“Brien, it is not an easy thing to order the development of a weapon that will kill ten million people,” the president had told him, McMahon said. His rejoinder had been: “You know damn well that [the Russians] are busy at it right now.”)

  Strauss, too, was pressing hard for a positive verdict. In a telephone call to Souers, he noted that three months had passed since Acheson’s committee had been given its task. “It may be later than we think,” Strauss warned.33

  Since the October GAC meeting, the initiative had plainly passed to the H-bomb’s proponents. In a meeting that January between the commission and the Joint Committee, Strauss read his latest letter to Truman amid congratulatory murmurs while Lilienthal sat glum and silent in the background.34 Not a single commissioner spoke up to defend the scientists’ position.35 Hoping to persuade the Joint Committee to send its own unanimous but unbidden endorsement of the Super to the White House, McMahon scheduled a meeting for January 30 to discuss the issue.

  Unexpectedly, Oppenheimer, in town for another GAC meeting, also attended the session. (“I thought it would be cowardly for me not to come up here and let you disagree and raise questions where you thought we had missed the boat,” he told the committee.)36 Asked by a congressman if a war fought with superbombs might make the planet uninhabitable—“Pestiferous, you mean?” Oppie interjected—the physicist said that he was actually more worried about the species’s “moral survival.”

  As Oppenheimer probably realized, his was an effort to sweep back the tide. Just the day before, encountering Teller at a meeting of the American Physical Society in New York, Oppie had conceded that it looked as though his and the GAC’s advice would be ignored. When Teller asked if Oppenheimer would then be willing to work on the Super, the answer had been a prompt and unqualified “No.”37

  Acheson—grumbling that he had grown “impatient with obscure argument”—scheduled a final meeting of his NSC committee for January 31.38 The secretary of state not only held the tie-breaking vote on the committee but also wielded the most influence with Truman. Acheson had at one point toyed with the idea of proposing a two-year “vacation” on the Super—“bilateral if possible, unilateral if necessary”—during which time Washington would make a new effort to ease international tensions. But he had come to the conclusion that such a moratorium would be impossible for domestic politic reasons. He did not see, Acheson had bluntly told Oppenheimer, “how any president could survive a policy of not making the H-bomb.”39

  * * *

  Frustrations that had welled up for more than a year spilled out at the meeting in Souers’s office on the morning of January 31. The Super was “straight gadget-making,” Lilienthal objected.40 But his protest was largely pro forma, as he himself likely recognized. Acheson had already drafted a recommendation for Truman that would direct the AEC “to proceed to determine the technical feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon.” Johnson successfully lobbied to have the statement amended to allow the mass production of H-bombs once the weapon’s feasibility had been determined. In a desperate rearguard move, Lilienthal argued that any decision should be delayed until after a State Department policy review ordered by Acheson had been completed.41 But that, too, was rejected. At a little past noon, the three, accompanied by Souers and another presidential aide, trooped across the street to the White House with Acheson’s draft in hand.

  Lilienthal had barely begun to recite his arguments in the Oval Office when Truman abruptly cut him off, announcing that he intended to go ahead with the Super. Because of the way the Russians were behaving, the president said, he had no other choice. Outside the door, Lilienthal checked his watch; the meeting with Truman had lasted only seven minutes. It was, he wrote later that day in his journal, like saying “‘No’ to a steamroller.”42

  That afternoon, Lilienthal informed Oppenheimer and the GAC of Truman’s choice, and also advised them that they were forbidden from making any public comment on the decision: “It was like a funeral party—especially when I said we were all gagged.”43 Adding to the sense of gloom was the realization that it was now too late to make the personal appeal to the president that Oppie and Lilienthal had once discussed. Bitter talk of a mass resignation was scotched by the AEC chairman, who himself only had a few weeks left in the government.

  The president’s decision made the Joint Committee’s meeting late that day “somewhat academic,” McMahon conceded. Asked his opinion of what the next step should be on the Super, Strauss was quick to answer: “I would give it the maximum expedition, Senator.”44

  * * *

  Truman’s radio address that evening brought an end to what Oppenheimer would later call “our large and ill-managed bout with the Super.” But doubts lingered—even among those who supported the president’s decision.45 “You know, we make these weapons so that we may never use them,” Gordon Arneson remembered a “very solemn” Acheson telling him. Yet Arneson sensed a note of uncertainty in the secretary of state’s voice.46

  For Strauss, on the other hand, Truman’s decision was a long-sought-for vindication. Since the AEC’s creation, the commissioners had failed to reach unanimity only a dozen times. On each of those occasions, Strauss had been the lone dissenter. A few weeks earlier, he had told Truman that he intended to follow Lilienthal into retirement by early spring.

  By coincidence, the party at the Shoreham Hotel that Strauss scheduled for January 31—his fifty-fourth birthday—also became a victory celebration for champions of the Super. Having accepted Strauss’s invitation weeks before, Oppenheimer and the GAC felt compelled to attend. Reporters at the party found Oppie alternately distraught and defiant. To one uncomprehending newsman, the physicist compared the superbomb decision to “the plague of Thebes.” Long remembered by the host of the event, however, was an unforgivable snub: when Strauss had walked over to introduce his son and daughter-in-law to Oppenheimer at the party, the physicist, not bothering to speak or turn around, had simply proffered a hand thrust over his shoulder.47

  * * *

  The following day, February 1, 1950, Hoover telephoned Strauss to announce a second triumph: Fuchs had confessed to espionage in London. The spy’s confession was tangible proof of Strauss’s long-derided contention that there were traitors in the nation’s midst. Moreover, FBI evidence indicated that other spies might still be at large. (“We have got to put more bolts and locks on what we discover from this time forward, and give a very thorough screening,” Strauss had told the Joint Committee.)48 Later that day, Strauss wrote Truman that the Fuchs case “only fortifies the wisdom” of the president’s decision, since the “individual in question had worked on the super-bomb at Los Alamos.”

  The H-bomb decision and Fuchs’s arrest heralded a subtle but significant shift in the constellation of power in Washington. Instructed by Hoover to tell only his fellow commissioners about the damage caused by the British spy, Strauss opened an AEC meeting on February 2 by instructing Carroll Wilson to leave the room. After announcing the news about Fuch
s, Strauss asked his stunned colleagues to approve an investigation of the commission’s general manager for allowing the British into the building.49

  * * *

  The news of Fuchs’s arrest—announced in the United States on February 3—was bound to make American scientists henceforth more circumspect about what they said in public, Strauss had told Hoover.50 Lilienthal’s assessment was no less blunt. Following his own farewell party at the AEC a few days earlier, he foresaw “witch-hunts” and “anti-scientists orgies.” Truman, too, worried about the political fallout from the spy scandal—telling Souers to “tie on your hat.”51

  The storm broke less than a week later. On February 9, Senator Joseph McCarthy announced that he had a list of more than 200 Communists who had infiltrated the State Department. The recent perjury conviction of Alger Hiss in January had already propelled espionage into the headlines.

  The Joint Committee spent the first week of February in executive session, trying to gauge the harm done by Fuchs. In separate appearances, Groves and Hoover blamed the debacle upon laxness by the British and the AEC.52 As if confirming this judgment, Carroll Wilson sent McMahon a list of thirty-two top-secret documents that the commission could not account for.53

  In one of his last acts as AEC chairman, Lilienthal grimly reported on the results of a quick “damage assessment” carried out by Bethe, Oppenheimer, and others.54 The report reaffirmed that the spy knew the details of the Booster, the Alarm Clock, and the Super up to the time he left Los Alamos.55 (“That man knew everything,” Conant moaned.)56

  Oppenheimer, however, discounted the value of what Fuchs might have told the Soviets. Believing the spy’s knowledge of the U.S. atomic stockpile dated, and Teller’s concept of the Super unworkable—for the Russians, as well as for Teller—Oppie told Pentagon and State Department officials that the Soviets “were marvelous indeed” if they had made any advances based on the secrets obtained from Fuchs.57