Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  A week or so later, in early March, Oppenheimer would give the Joint Committee a guarded account of his own, previous leftist leanings. His apologia ended with the proclamation that he was now “a resolute anti-Communist, whose earlier sympathies for Communist causes would give immunity against further infection.” Still, Hoover’s almost casual mention of the Chevalier incident in his testimony was the first that many in the committee had heard of the affair, and rekindled doubts about Oppie.58 In his lecture on Soviet espionage, Hoover had spent more time talking about Oppenheimer than Fuchs.59

  Casting about for ways to speed up work on the Super, the Military Liaison Committee met with the commission early in the month.60 A testy exchange between Pike and LeBaron, the Pentagon’s most outspoken advocate for haste, made the commissioners defensive. Who, Pike inquired skeptically, was suggesting that the H-bomb program could proceed more expeditiously?

  “Lawrence,” LeBaron replied.61

  * * *

  Since the scuttling of his dreams for the Benicia reactors, Ernest had hit upon another way to make the tritium that the superbomb required. His inspiration, in fact, had come just a few days before Alvarez returned to Berkeley carrying the bad news from the GAC.

  While briefing a visiting delegation of Joint Committee staffers, Lawrence had made the “somewhat startling suggestion” that the necessary tritium could be created by a gigantic new type of particle accelerator; one modeled after Alvarez’s Linac but many times its power and size. (“A cross between a note of hysteria and a tremendous enthusiasm seemed to underline this part of the discussion,” the staffers reported to Borden.)62

  The beauty of what he called his “neutron foundry,” Ernest pointed out, was that it made something out of nothing: using spent uranium to create plutonium, making tritium out of deuterium, and turning other, nonstrategic elements into radiological warfare agents.

  Hoping to confound Russian spies, Lawrence called his new machine the Materials Testing Accelerator, or MTA.63

  On New Year’s Day, 1950, Lawrence had sent Pitzer plans for a 25-million-electron-volt MTA costing $7 million. Before the week was out, Ernest was already talking about a 350-MeV production version, dubbed the Mark II. More than a quarter-mile long and costing perhaps $150 million, the bigger machine would be able to turn dross into the precious tritium.

  The commission approved the more modest version of Lawrence’s MTA on February 8, before he had even told the university of his plans. (“I am being informed at a rather late date,” grumbled Sproul.) Berkeley’s comptroller learned of the project only when Ernest advised him that another half-million-dollar building was needed on campus. But under Neylan’s prodding the university once again acceded to Lawrence’s wishes. “I made my recommendation, surrounded it with an aura of mystery, and secured the necessary approval,” Sproul wearily advised Underhill.64

  * * *

  Before construction of the first MTA could be started, however, Lawrence was distracted by a growing political controversy at Berkeley.

  Fearful that the Tenney Committee was about to impose a loyalty oath upon state employees, Sproul had decided to preempt the move by voluntarily adopting a watered-down version of the oath at the university.65 The president assumed that the measure would be uncontroversial and so was stunned when the faculty rebelled. At protest rallies on campus and in late-night faculty meetings, owlish professors likened themselves to the maquis of the French Resistance. The oath’s foremost defender among the regents, Neylan, became a particular target of the “nonsigners’” ire.66

  At the Rad Lab, Lawrence was quickly disabused of the notion that his trademark pep talks might defuse the issue. That winter, a former Rad Lab employee, David Fox—one of the grad students whom Oppie had hired during the war to work on the bomb—became a lighting rod for the debate. Called before HUAC, Fox took the Fifth when asked if he had ever been a Communist. Although Fox subsequently admitted his early membership in the party and even signed the loyalty oath, he was fired from his teaching position in the physics department nonetheless, upon Neylan’s order.67

  Using Fox’s firing as a rallying point, three tenured professors at the Rad Lab joined the ranks of the nonsigners.68 Two were theoretical physicists closely identified with Oppenheimer—including the man who had been hired to replace him, Gian Carlo Wick.69 During a tense confrontation in Lawrence’s office, Ernest had demanded that Wick surrender his security pass to campus guards.70 Shortly afterward, Wick’s teaching assistant was fired following a similar contretemps with Alvarez.71

  To Lawrence, no less ominous than the loss of Berkeley’s theorists was the prospect that Teller, too, was about to be driven away by the oath controversy. Still agonizing over whether to take the job he had been offered at UCLA, Edward wrote to his confidante that the university’s recent decision to fire thirty-one professors because of the oath made him “perversely happy. If they are such s.o.b.s I do not have to go there and I might come back to Chicago.” Teller had already inquired of the department chairman at Chicago whether his resignation letter might be withdrawn.72

  The turning point had come when Neylan bragged to faculty members that Teller’s appointment was proof the oath was not driving good people away. As Teller wrote Mayer, a last-minute effort to talk him out of withdrawing from the UCLA job backfired:

  You know that I planned to see President Sproul and a few others before resigning and so I went out to California. I did this mostly for the purpose which, in another connection, you had recommended to leave with good feelings. By and large I succeeded. There was one exception: Ernest Orlando Lawrence. Since the days of the Nazis I have seen no such thing. I had talked sufficiently gently and generally so that Lawrence did not attack me personally. But he did use threats and he was quite unwilling to listen to any point of view except to the one of Nylan [sic]. I felt somewhat sick when I left his office.73

  Although Lawrence was quick to offer an apology, Teller informed Sproul that he intended to return to Chicago.74 “I am extremely unhappy about the discharge of three theoretical physicists from the University,” Edward wrote to McMillan. “I feel embarrassed to be in a position where I am, in effect, taking their place.”75

  Birge, however, reassured the university president that there was ultimately more of expediency than principle behind Teller’s decision. The oath, he told Sproul, was “not the real reason for [Teller’s] resignation but simply a polite way of getting out of a situation which had not turned out as he thought it would.”76

  * * *

  In Washington, the anxiety over atom spies had meanwhile climbed to a fever pitch.77 Following the disclosure of Fuchs’s treason, the assumptions that had guided U.S. policy in the time of monopoly were turned on their head. What had hitherto been considered a major weakness for the Soviets—their lack of access to high-grade uranium ore—had actually turned out to be an advantage, a memo from the Military Liaison Committee argued, since it had forced the Russians to adopt more efficient production methods and had even pushed them early on to investigate the Super. Accordingly, Russia’s atomic stockpile might already be “equal or actually superior to our own,” the Pentagon speculated, while a Soviet Super “may be in actual production.”78

  At first reluctant to endorse Nichols’s plea for the hydrogen bomb, by month’s end the joint chiefs, too, were calling for an “all-out” effort on the Super—even if it meant a slowdown in the production of atomic bombs.

  Shown the MLC memo and the chiefs’ recommendation by Johnson, Truman issued a secret executive order on March 10, 1950, declaring the superbomb project “a matter of the highest urgency,” and approving production of up to ten H-bombs a year.79

  * * *

  At Los Alamos, there remained some doubt the weapon that the president had just ordered into production could ever be built. One theoretical physicist working on the hydrogen bomb characterized it as “pure fantasy from the design standpoint, as well as a very difficult delivery problem.”80 The hypothet
ical Super under consideration was some 30 feet long and a stunning 162 feet wide; the fission trigger alone weighed 30,000 pounds.81 Another problem facing air force planners was how any aircraft dropping the bomb could escape the shock wave from the mammoth 1,000-megaton explosion. LeBaron was looking into flying drones as well as robot-guided ships and submarines.82

  To Teller, the most troublesome unknown concerned the amount of scarce and expensive tritium that a superbomb would require. His “best guesses” in 1946 had ranged between 300 and 600 grams. The neutrons necessary to create that much tritium could make the plutonium for up to twenty fission bombs—a point that the GAC had tried, in vain, to bring to the attention of decision makers.83

  But the “Daddy Pocketbook,” a top-secret précis of Teller’s lectures on the Super, published in early January before the president’s H-bomb decision, predicted that a successful Super would use no more than 100 grams of tritium and could be shrunk to 5,000 pounds—small and light enough to be carried on the nose of prospective long-range rockets. Truman’s approval of the crash effort had been based on the imaginary bomb envisioned in Teller’s “Pocketbook.”84

  Hoping to narrow these varying estimates, the Weapons Development Committee at Los Alamos had begun calculating the burning of tritium and deuterium in a theoretical Super that winter. The effort was frustrated by the quirks and dubious reliability of the lab’s digital computer, designed by von Neumann and dubbed the MANIAC. (Technicians sometimes resorted to whacking the machine with a rubber mallet, to see if it gave the same result on a second run.) Frustrated by the delays, Ulam and a mathematician colleague at the lab, Cornelius Everett, undertook the same task using slide rules, mechanical calculators, and paper and pencil.85

  Ulam and Everett discovered that the prospects for success were “miserable”—unless considerably more tritium were added.86 They calculated that the necessary tritium ranged from 3 to 5 kilograms. Even so, Ulam reported that the “result of the calculations seems to be that the model considered is a fizzle.”87 Assuming a thermonuclear fire could be lit in the tritium, Ulam and Everett found, the flame failed to spread down the deuterium and tritium-filled tube. Princeton’s computer confirmed their findings a few weeks later.88 “Icicles are forming,” von Neumann telephoned Ulam dejectedly.89

  Teller’s response to this news, Ulam recalled, was to turn “pale with fury.” (Oppenheimer, on the other hand, seemed “rather glad to learn of the difficulties,” Ulam noted.)90

  Hoping in part to placate Teller, Bradbury in early March put the lab on a six-day workweek, making Edward head of a new group of two dozen scientists at the lab. The so-called Family Committee got its name from the various nicknames—“Sonny,” “Little Edward,” “Uncle” assigned superbombs of competing design. Teller’s so-called tetraton Super, 100 cubic meters of uncompressed liquid deuterium, was known as “the daddy of them all.”91

  Stymied on the Super, the Family Committee turned its attention back to the Alarm Clock. Acknowledging that seemingly insurmountable barriers still blocked that path as well, Teller reluctantly recommended that a choice between the two designs be postponed once again.92

  With a GAC review of the superbomb program planned for the fall, Teller and the Family Committee that summer approved an experiment meant to show that the lab was making tangible progress toward its goal: a test of “thermonuclear reagents” at the Pacific Proving Ground in the spring of 1951, as part of Operation Greenhouse. The test, code-named George, would use a large and specially designed atomic bomb of enormous yield to ignite a few grams of tritium and deuterium in an adjoining capsule. The shape of the capsule gave the device its nickname: “the Cylinder.”

  First proposed back in the summer of 1948, George was described by some at the lab as akin to using a blast furnace to light a match. Even proponents of the test conceded that it would do nothing to remove the current roadblock to the Super: the failure of the fusion flame to propagate in deuterium. Skeptics recognized that George was largely a symbolic step. Yet without it, Teller feared, the superbomb program might be canceled outright.93

  After freezing the design of the device at a meeting in October 1950, without any clear idea of where to go next, the Family Committee agreed to disband.94

  * * *

  In another setback, Teller’s effort to bring other scientists to the lab was still stalled. To help with the task, he had recently persuaded a twenty-five-year-old acolyte, Vienna-born theorist Frederic de Hoffmann, to abandon a Paris sabbatical and return to the lab. Regularly commuting between Washington and Los Alamos, de Hoffmann assumed the role of Edward’s alter ego and general factotum.95

  But even after enlisting the aid of the Joint Committee, few of those on the list that Teller and de Hoffmann had drawn up answered the call. Among those who agreed to come were Princeton’s John Wheeler and Edward’s former colleague, Emil Konopinski.96 Most scientists simply refused Teller’s summons, not sharing his sense of urgency or preferring academic research.97 Some, siding with the GAC, refused to work on the Super on moral grounds.98

  Despairing, Teller had even turned for help to his old nemesis. Writing to Oppenheimer that February, he adopted an almost pleading tone—“things have advanced to a desperate urgency here and I should be most anxious indeed if you could come and help us.”99 But Oppenheimer remained unmoved. While refusing to return to the lab himself, Oppie nonetheless extended leave to a physicist at the institute whom Teller had requested.100

  Privately, Teller hinted to the Joint Committee that there might be sinister motives behind the paucity of his results. “A man like Conant or Oppenheimer can do a great deal in an informal manner which will hurt or further our efforts,” he wrote Borden in April 1950.101 A few weeks later, Teller remarked to a committee staffer that Robert’s relationship with Frank seemed “unusually close.” Frank, Teller said, would never have joined the party without his brother’s tacit approval. Moreover, Oppie had been the one responsible for bringing Frank to the wartime lab, Edward pointed out.

  “Teller,” wrote the staffer in a summary sent to McMahon,

  was careful to explain that he did not himself have any idea that Robert was disloyal or intended to injure the best interests of the country according to his lights, however, he did say, that were Robert, by any chance found to be disloyal (in the sense of transmitting information) he could of course do more damage to the program than any other single individual in the country.102

  PART FOUR

  SORCERER’S APPRENTICE

  Sir, my dismay is great!

  Those spirits that I called,

  I now cannot control.

  —Goethe, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”

  13

  NUCLEAR PLENTY

  THE NUMBER OF Oppenheimer’s friends in Washington was steadily dwindling by the spring and summer of 1950. John Manley resigned as secretary to the General Advisory Committee and returned to Los Alamos. (“We’ve run away,” Manley and his wife joked in a vacation postcard they sent to Oppie from Mexico.) Carroll Wilson, one of Oppenheimer’s few allies on the Atomic Energy Commission, quit his post as general manager in early August, shortly after Gordon Dean was appointed AEC chairman.1 “I regret that all of this will add to your troubles,” Wilson wrote to Oppie apologetically. Even James Conant, so outspoken on the H-bomb the previous October, would miss several GAC meetings on the Super that year because of illness.2

  Another old friend of Oppie’s, visiting from Berkeley, was himself needy of help. Unemployed, his marriage in ruins, Haakon Chevalier was hoping to move to France but had been unable to obtain an American passport.3 Oppenheimer genially gave Haakon the name of a lawyer in New York. While a houseguest at Olden Manor, Chevalier had several “long heart-to-heart talks” with the physicist on the big lawn behind the mansion—away from hidden microphones. “I gathered,” Chevalier later wrote, “that [Oppenheimer] wanted to maintain a certain fiction regarding some important aspects of our past, that whole areas of our experien
ce were to be considered as never having existed.”4

  After his last appeal was denied by the State Department, Chevalier invoked his dual citizenship and obtained a French passport. That fall, he boarded an airliner bound for Paris. To the FBI, Chevalier’s actions looked suspiciously like flight to avoid prosecution.5

  Oppie was in need of friends because of new charges against him that surfaced in May 1950. Testifying as a friendly witness before the Tenney Committee, Paul Crouch, a former Communist Party organizer in the Bay Area, claimed to have seen Oppenheimer as well as Joseph Weinberg at a secret meeting of the party’s professional section in the summer of 1941.6 Crouch claimed that the gathering had taken place at a house in Berkeley, during late July or early August, shortly after the Nazi invasion of Russia, and that Oppie had hosted the meeting.7

  The previous month, Crouch had been driven around the Berkeley hills by Combs, Tenney’s chief investigator, and campus police until he identified a house that looked familiar—10 Kenilworth Court, where Oppie and Kitty had lived before moving to nearby Eagle Hill.8 Standing outside the residence, Crouch accurately described the interior and gave investigators details of the alleged 1941 meeting. Crouch’s wife, Sylvia, who also claimed to have been at the meeting, backed up her husband’s story.9

  However, in FBI interviews and later, with a press release, Oppenheimer claimed to have no memory of the Crouches, and flatly denied ever having attended any secret meetings of the party.10 Evidence to the contrary would be proof, Oppie conceded, that he had once been a dedicated Communist.

  Oppenheimer told bureau agents that he and Kitty had been in New Mexico, at Perro Caliente, during the time that the Crouches claimed the Berkeley meeting took place. Their son Peter, barely six weeks old, had been left with a nurse in the care of the Chevaliers.