Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  The standstill idea also received support, initially, from Acheson and the State Department. Gordon Arneson reminded the secretary of state that Mike “may well represent a point of no return,” as the last opportunity to “avert the descent into the Maelstrom.”12 In early September, the panel submitted their case to the State Department.13

  Still bitter about the fate of Vista, Oppenheimer had deliberately avoided becoming too closely identified with the standstill.14 But he had discussed the details with Bush during the train ride down to Princeton for the panel’s first meeting and had later inquired of Bradbury whether a postponement of Mike would seriously interrupt Operation Ivy. In his diary, Dean expressed concern at Oppenheimer’s “undue interest in postponement of that operation.”15

  Bush had also discussed the standstill idea with Conant. But the Harvard chemist, with less than a week to serve on the GAC, had evidently had enough of lost causes.16 Rabi, who was about to replace Oppenheimer as chairman of the General Advisory Committee, was similarly cautious.

  There was no such ambivalence at the Pentagon, however—where Arneson reported “very strong feelings” against the standstill.17 Lovett even urged the panel to destroy Bush’s memo and all its supporting documents, lest the group become the next target of Senator Joseph McCarthy.

  * * *

  Even as the standstill idea was being debated in Washington, the question of creating a rival to Los Alamos still hung in the balance. That spring, fate had intervened to remove two of the project’s most vocal supporters from the scene. In March, McMahon had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.18 Although the senator and Borden tried to keep his illness a secret, the disease kept McMahon bedridden during a critical time. In early May, Lawrence was hospitalized with ulcerative colitis, a debilitating disease exacerbated by stress. Once out of the hospital, he was off to Balboa and Yosemite for two weeks of rest, canceling a planned visit to Washington.19

  Fearful that the air force on its own was about to establish a second Los Alamos at Chicago, Dean on June 9, 1952, decided to preempt that possibility by asking the regents of the University of California to approve a new laboratory at Livermore.20 But the AEC chairman had defiantly rejected Teller’s plea for a written charter spelling out that Livermore’s first and principal job would be building bombs.21

  In Lawrence’s absence, York had continued his delicate balancing act. When describing the new lab to Bradbury, he emphasized diagnostic experiments.22 Two weeks later, however, York told the Rad Lab’s business manager that Livermore’s “primary objective” would be developing thermonuclear weapons.23

  Ernest returned to Berkeley long enough to have York brief him and the AEC’s head of military application on the real mission of Livermore. Lawrence was stunned at York’s matter-of-fact description of an ambitious, independent laboratory that would begin designing nuclear weapons from its first day.24 Just a few weeks earlier, an aide had reported to Borden that Lawrence remained reluctant “to get fully into the weapons field” and seemed interested, instead, “in instrumentation, research, and [fusion energy.]”25 Understandably confused about Livermore’s real reason-for-being, Dean ordered a showdown meeting in Berkeley to settle both the second-lab question and the fate of the MTA.

  On the morning of July 17, Lawrence confronted the issue of Livermore with Bradbury, York, and Teller in his Rad Lab office. Ernest emphasized that the second lab “was to be additive to the Los Alamos effort and that it was the furtherance of the over-all program that was the objective.”26 When he asked if anyone disagreed, Teller instantly spoke up. His fear, Edward said, was that Livermore would become “nothing but a service organization,” unless the new lab’s charter specifically allowed it not only to design and build nuclear weapons but to test them in Nevada and the Pacific.27

  The impasse continued into the evening with a cocktail party at Berkeley’s posh Claremont Hotel, where the group was joined by Dean. At the bar overlooking the tennis courts, Teller—with a “lugubrious face,” York later recalled—announced loudly that he had changed his mind and was not coming to Livermore after all. “Let him go, we’ll be better off without him,” Lawrence told York in disgust.

  Following dinner, however, a peacemaker—Admiral Hayward—intervened. Persuading Dean to return to Lawrence’s office, Hayward had drafted a letter that would, he hoped, break the stalemate. An exasperated Dean agreed to sign the letter but insisted upon addressing it to Lawrence, not Teller. The key phrase spoke of “an additional and broad effort” at Livermore.28

  While Hayward’s letter fell short of an explicit charter for the lab, the compromise proved acceptable to both Lawrence and Teller.29 The following morning, Ernest, suffering another colitis attack, returned to Balboa, leaving the details of organizing the work at Livermore up to York and Teller. In a telephone call, Lawrence passed the good tidings along to Murray, who rejoiced that “the race was on, not only on an international scale, but within the boundaries of the United States as well—and between the best in the scientific fraternity.”30

  Teller’s joy was more modulated. He had already asked for and received a year’s leave of absence from Chicago and had recently informed the Joint Committee that—“either rightly or wrongly”—he was going to Livermore.31 (Fermi and von Neumann had each urged him not to take the job.) But an ironic comment may have reflected a dawning realization on Edward’s part of the price he would have to pay for his victory: “I have quit the appeasers and joined the fascists,” he glumly told a friend of Rabi’s.32

  * * *

  Almost as an afterthought, Dean and the commission voted to cancel the Mark II shortly after the Claremont meeting. At the Rad Lab, Alvarez greeted the decision with something close to relief.33 Luie—who had once boasted to the Joint Committee that the MTA would produce a half-ton of plutonium annually—had long since come to view the giant machine as an albatross around his neck. The trouble-plagued Mark I had finally achieved a sustained beam in late May. But, tellingly, the occasion was celebrated without Lawrence, who remained bedridden by his illness. Altogether, the AEC had spent some $45 million on the MTA project since its inception.

  There were other, less tangible costs. The day following Livermore’s muted celebration, Brookhaven’s Cosmotron began operating, generating the world’s first 1-billion-electron-volt beam. By contrast, Berkeley’s Bevatron remained unfinished.34 Alvarez calculated that work on the machine had been delayed by at least a year because of the focus upon the Mark I and the disruption caused by the loyalty oath.

  Alvarez likewise blamed the MTA and the oath controversy for the fact that he was no longer “in the front lines” of physics.35 Feeling isolated intellectually and socially, he avoided the Rad Lab table at the Faculty Club, eating his meals instead with grad students and technicians half his age.

  * * *

  Across the Pacific, last-minute changes were still being made to Mike, the result of belatedly discovered design flaws, even as discussions continued in Washington about postponing the test.36 But mounting resistance to the standstill had put an end to Bush’s hope that his plan might give Truman’s successor the option of reversing course and canceling the Super.37

  From Georgetown Hospital, Brien McMahon sent word to the White House that he would start impeachment proceedings against Truman if Mike was not detonated on schedule. Dean received a telephone call from Strauss, “greatly disturbed—he only calls me when he is disturbed,” wrote the long-suffering AEC chairman in his diary—who complained about Oppenheimer’s continuing interference with the H-bomb.38

  Only a few days before the test, Dean dispatched AEC commissioner Eugene Zuckert to Eniwetok to see if Mike might still be postponed.39 But Zuckert found that neither he nor the president could stop the juggernaut that had been set in motion. Reached by telephone at the Chicago hotel where he was making a campaign stop, Truman told Dean that he would not jeopardize the schedule for Operation Ivy by calling a halt to Mike.40

  The test that Borden call
ed the “thermonuclear Trinity” took place, as scheduled, on November 1, 1952, three days before the U. S. presidential election. In a few millionths of a seconds, the device that Los Alamos dubbed “the Sausage” vaporized the tiny coral island of Elugelab, digging out of the seabed a crater some 200 feet deep and 1½ miles wide. Mike was half again as powerful as its creators had predicted—more than 10 megatons.41 A passenger, with LeBaron, in an air force plane some 60 miles away, Thomas Murray likened the spectacle to “gazing into eternity, or into the gates of hell.”42

  Ironically, neither Teller nor Lawrence was on hand to witness the test. Lawrence, suffering from another colitis attack, was back home. At Griggs’s suggestion, Teller was in the basement of the geology building on the Berkeley campus, staring at a seismograph. Because of the bad blood caused by the battle over the second lab, Edward felt unwelcome at the Pacific test site. Alerted by a telephone call from York when the firing signal for Mike was given, Teller watched as, minutes later, the instrument’s needle moved almost imperceptibly, registering the bomb’s shock wave as it passed through the Earth’s crust. Lawrence was the first to offer congratulations.43

  For Borden, too, the moment was one of triumph and vindication. Unwilling to trust the news about Mike to the telephone, Dean invited the Joint Committee staffer to the AEC building to hear the details in person.

  But for one prominent veteran of the H-bomb lobby, Mike came too late. McMahon had died some three months before, the superbomb and a vastly expanded U.S. atomic arsenal his legacy.

  At Princeton, where Oppenheimer and nine other scientist-advisers to the Pentagon were meeting at the institute’s guest house, the atmosphere was subdued, even grim, a week after the test. Oppie and the members of the Science Advisory Committee to the Office of Defense Mobilization were debating whether to resign en masse. Mike had been only the latest and most spectacular example of how the Truman administration had ignored its experts.44 But the scientists finally decided against such a drastic step, hoping that the next occupant of the White House—Presidentelect Dwight Eisenhower—might be more receptive to their advice.

  Another reason for the gloom that hung over those gathered at the house on Battle Road was a “distasteful” rumor that one scientist said was circulating at MIT: the air force, he understood, was lobbying hard to get Oppenheimer’s AEC security clearance revoked.45

  * * *

  Since Vista, the air force’s “total passion” had been oriented toward ending Oppenheimer’s influence in Washington, an aide reported to Borden.46 For the past several months, the Joint Committee’s executive director had been diligently preparing his own case against Oppenheimer.47

  It had long been obvious to Borden that he could not accomplish that task alone. The previous June, he had brought a friend and former classmate down from New York to serve as the committee’s counsel. Like Borden, John Walker was a top graduate of Yale Law School.48 Borden had also hired another staffer, a former FBI agent who had been assigned to Los Alamos after the war. Frank Cotter’s assignment was to spearhead an independent investigation of Oppenheimer.

  The first job that Borden assigned Walker had been to craft a forty-page-long “Atomic Program Chronology,” meant to provide evidence for Borden’s claim that delays in the country’s nuclear weapons program could be traced to what was, at best, stunning negligence and at worse deliberate sabotage.49

  But, as Dean would note, the real purpose of Walker’s chronology was “to show that the Joint Committee has always been right.”50 Its implicit argument—that the Soviets had drawn abreast, or even moved ahead, of the United States in nuclear research because of Fuchs’s treason—had likewise been a major emphasis in Teller’s Pentagon briefings and was one reason for their extraordinary impact there.

  Dean had initially thought to counter Teller’s claim by a careful reading of the British spy’s confession—“what [Fuchs] did say and what he didn’t say”—but finally abandoned the effort as fruitless.51 Instead, the AEC chairman had encouraged Bethe to write a refutation of Teller—one which prompted, in reply, a “rather violent” rebuttal from Edward.52

  Borden and Walker likewise remained haunted by the belief that there was another spy still at large in the U.S. nuclear weapons program.53 Thus the similarities that the CIA observed between Russian reactors and those at Hanford had persuaded the Joint Committee that the “Soviets must have had agents who are as yet undiscovered.”54

  Believing that Oppenheimer was the prime candidate for this “second Fuchs,” Borden next gave Walker the task of reviewing Oppie’s classified correspondence going back to the war, as well as the minutes of every GAC meeting.55

  But McMahon’s death had meanwhile removed Borden’s sponsor and protector, while the results of the 1952 election had returned the Senate to the Republicans. McMahon’s successor, New York congressman Sterling Cole, let Borden know that he should begin looking for a new job.

  Borden intended his own legacy to be an even lengthier “H-bomb Chronology,” also written by Walker, who had begun working late into the evening and weekends in order to finish the ninety-one-page document in time for Eisenhower’s inauguration.56

  For Walker, there was still a nagging question that the committee’s documents had been unable to answer: how much had the Russians actually learned about the American H-bomb from Fuchs? Although the British spy had attended the 1946 Los Alamos conference on the H-bomb, the focus there had been upon Teller’s original Super—since thought to be unworkable. If the Russians had followed Teller’s lead, as Oppenheimer and Bethe believed, they might still be traveling down the wrong path.

  But Teller claimed that radiation implosion—the key concept behind Mike—had also been discussed at the Los Alamos meeting. Bethe disagreed, and the question remained unresolved.57 Walker had summed up the conundrum neatly in a memo to Borden: “Our entire H-bomb program rests, viz-a-viz the Russians, on a gigantic assumption—that we have a short cut and that they are blindly following the 1946 information given them by Fuchs.… Under the circumstances, the only point missing is radiation-implosion.”58

  Hoping to shed light on the mystery, Borden had asked Hoover for a copy of the bureau’s interview with Fuchs, but the request was denied.59 Finding the AEC similarly uncooperative, Walker finally turned for help to Princeton’s John Wheeler, who had been the committee’s ally on the H-bomb and in the second-lab debates. Walker sent Wheeler four pages of his draft chronology, plus two pages taken from a classified Los Alamos history.60 The six-page sheaf of top-secret documents contained references to the 1946 superbomb conference, details of the design of the Mike device, and a précis of the two dueling chronologies prepared by Bethe and Teller.61

  On the evening of January 6, 1953, Wheeler and a colleague set out from Princeton by overnight train for a meeting with Walker in Washington. When the physicist arrived at the Capitol early the following morning, he telephoned Borden in a panic to announce that he had lost the document on the train en route, presumably during a trip to the lavatory. After dismantling Wheeler’s briefcase with a pocketknife on the committee’s conference table, without results, Borden notified the FBI. The bureau ordered the Pullman car in which Wheeler had been riding put on a separate siding and minutely examined, while other agents walked the tracks all the way back to Trenton, New Jersey, and interviewed the car’s passengers. But no trace of the lost document was found.62

  Informed of the incident, Eisenhower immediately suspected an “inside job” and wondered aloud whether Borden might actually have been colluding with Fuchs all along.63 Incredulous that so much sensitive information could be treated so carelessly, Ike summoned the AEC commissioners—“like errant schoolboys,” one said—before him in the Oval Office. The Joint Committee was next to feel what one member called the “unshirted hell” of the president’s ire.64

  Nor was the irony of the situation lost upon Borden. With chagrin he learned that the “Wheeler incident,” as he thought of it, was regarded as the
“Borden incident” by the commission and the White House.65 Rather than drawing attention, as Borden had intended, to Oppenheimer and the AEC’s supposed malfeasance in the matter of the Super, the H-bomb chronology had inadvertently identified Borden himself as a security risk. Called on the carpet by Cole and the Joint Committee in executive session, the staffer miserably volunteered, “Shoot me or fire me.”66

  * * *

  Livermore had formally opened for business on September 2, 1952, the day after Labor Day. Early that morning, a gaggle of a half-dozen scientists—dubbed “Teller’s Flying Circus” by the guards—arrived at the gate, eager to begin work. But Edward was “miffed” that Lawrence had named Herbert York, not him, to head the new lab.67

  The x-ray room of the dispensary was pressed into service as York’s office. In keeping with the hurried atmosphere of the place, workmen simply covered the black, lead-lined walls with white paint and laid new linoleum. The bathroom, the only place with running water, was transformed into a makeshift chemistry lab; drums of corrosive chemicals, to be used in the analysis of airborne debris from nuclear tests, were stored in shower stalls. The base morgue was converted into a classified documents vault. The old drill hall, the only building large enough to accommodate all 123 of the lab’s scientists and engineers, doubled as an auditorium and makeshift machine shop.68

  The laboratory was afflicted with the usual problems common to any new enterprise, as well as some that were unique. Scientists complained of an inadequate number of desk lamps and telephones, and no mail service. Two physicists shared a single office in a shower. Draftsmen in the un-air-conditioned barracks were sent home when 100-degree temperatures caused sweat to smear the drawings. Especially sensitive discussions were held in an automobile parked at the end of the runway. Engineers hunting rabbits with bows and arrows at lunchtime posed an occasional hazard.