Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  But there was no longer any doubt about the real purpose of Livermore when Lawrence, Teller, and York met with commission members at AEC headquarters on September 8. While Lawrence spoke vaguely of pursuing “promising new concepts,” Teller outlined for the commission—in detail and with prepared sketches—his idea for a radically different type of H-bomb, called “Ramrod.”69 Ramrod was to be a thermonuclear trigger for an even larger bomb of uncompressed deuterium. Behind the device lay Teller’s still-unabandoned dream of the Super.

  The only new structures to be erected at the site were both devoted to Project Whitney, the weapons program at Livermore.70 The dimensions of the cinder-block Fabrication and Assembly Building had been dictated by the requirements of the 21-ton radiation-implosion Alarm Clock, the first device that York planned to build at the lab. A second building was reserved for Livermore’s Univac computer, to be used in designing the new Alarm Clock and other weapons.71

  As part of Livermore’s unwritten promise not to compete with or draw resources from Los Alamos, the emphasis at the new lab was upon daring innovation and “bolder” designs.72 (York joked that a Livermore-designed primary could be any shape but Fat Man–round.)73 In a compromise meant to placate Teller, York appointed the mercurial physicist to the lab’s six-member Steering Committee and gave him sole veto power over its decisions on laboratory programs. That the Ramrod was now the first priority of Project Whitney was one result. Another was the fact that a modernized version of the hydride would be the first atomic weapon designed and tested by the lab.

  In a jury-rigged blockhouse built within the drill hall, no more than 100 yards from York’s office, a two-man team of scientists worked late into the night, mixing uranium with deuterated polyethylene and compressing the mixture in the breech of a 16-inch artillery piece.74 Teller’s hydride bomb was to be tested in the Nevada desert that spring.

  * * *

  Except for unannounced weekly visits, Lawrence was a curiously missing presence at the lab he had helped to create. Early in 1953, Ernest and Molly, their daughter, Margaret, and the family’s doctor sailed as passengers onboard a Standard Oil tanker to the Middle East and Europe, for a ten-week tour brokered by Neylan. Like the landscape painting that Lawrence had also recently taken up, at Molly’s urging, the cruise was a welcome and needed distraction. John Lawrence hoped it might be a cure for his brother’s worsening bouts of colitis.

  But Ernest had meanwhile found another diversion—an invention—which put new demands on his time. For almost a year, Lawrence had been working on a new type of picture tube for color television, a technology then in its infancy.75 Ernest hoped that his invention, conceived in spare moments spent on the beach at Balboa, might also make him rich, the equal of those wealthy businessmen he admired. Rowan Gaither and Alfred Loomis bankrolled the founding of a new corporation, which Lawrence christened “Chromatics.” A dilapidated Oakland warehouse was readied as an assembly line for the day when the picture tube was perfected.76

  Meanwhile, turning the garage of a vacation home that he bought on the slopes of Mt. Diablo, near Livermore, into a makeshift workshop, Lawrence brought Alvarez and others from Berkeley to tinker with the device on nights and weekends. Suffused with the sickly-sweet smell of melted solder, the tiny, crowded garage recaptured for Ernest some of the innocent camaraderie of the early Rad Lab.

  * * *

  On Monday, March 30, 1953, workers at the Nevada Test Site put the final touches on a 300-foot steel tower—three times the height of Trinity’s—for Teller’s uranium-hydride bomb. On the eve of the test, code-named Ruth, Los Alamos veterans had come to regard the confident young upstarts from the rival weapons laboratory with a mixture of curiosity and disdain. (Los Alamos scientists transported their bombs to the test site in custom-made containers of finely machined metal, painted army olive-drab. By contrast, the boxes that contained Livermore’s bomb were made of silver-painted plywood. “Ours looked like it came from a garage,” said one California physicist enviously.)77

  Early Tuesday morning, the countdown for Ruth began. It ended a short time later with a pregnant pause and what one Livermore weaponeer described as a “sickeningly small” explosion. When the dust and smoke cleared, most of the tower remained standing; only the top portion had disappeared, remnants of it hanging down at weird angles. The ensuing silence was finally broken by hoots of derisive laughter from Los Alamos physicists; one of whom observed, sotto voce, that next time Livermore should build either a bigger bomb or a smaller tower.

  * * *

  In Washington that spring, President Eisenhower was still becoming accustomed to the world that Mike had made. Briefed by Dean even before the inauguration on the results of the H-bomb test, Ike had visibly paled when the island of Elugelab was described as “missing” following the explosion.78

  Thomas Murray was another whose thinking had been fundamentally changed by the superbomb. After he witnessed Mike, Murray’s memos to the president on the subject of nuclear weapons assumed even more of a religious fervor. In a draft letter that he asked Truman to give to Eisenhower, Murray urged the president-elect to make a new overture at international control—offering “the Russians a last clear chance to avoid a likely doomsday.”79

  In the wake of Dean’s briefing, Ike proved surprisingly receptive to Murray’s message. Whereas Acheson had counseled that the 1952 disarmament panel’s report should be withheld from the public as too disturbing, Eisenhower wholeheartedly agreed with the report’s conclusion; namely, that there was an urgent “need for candor about the arms race.” Inviting Oppenheimer and Bush to personally make the case for greater openness before the National Security Council that May, Ike afterward told his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, that one of his administration’s goals would be to inform the public about the growing destructiveness of nuclear weapons and, specifically, about the dangers of an unrestricted arms race.80

  The fact that Oppenheimer was once again advising a president infuriated and depressed Borden, who learned that Oppie had even scheduled a personal meeting with Ike—“on an urgent matter that he would reveal to no one but [Eisenhower]”—for the end of May; coincidentally, Borden’s last day on the Joint Committee.81 In frustration, Borden turned to Strauss, who had provided some of the material for Borden’s ill-fated H-bomb chronology from his own personal files.82

  Eisenhower, worried that he might come under attack for security lapses following the lost-document fiasco, had made Strauss his special assistant for atomic energy a few weeks earlier.83 (One of Strauss’s early actions in that role was to head off Oppenheimer’s planned meeting with Ike.) Strauss had welcomed Borden to his office in the old Executive Office Building in late April, where the two men almost certainly discussed Oppie.84

  Strauss had also been one of the sources for an attack upon Oppenheimer that appeared in the May 1953 issue of Fortune magazine. Fortune editor Charles Murphy, the anonymous author of “The Hidden Struggle for the H-Bomb,” was a reserve air force officer and personal friend of Finletter’s.85 Strauss and Murphy would likewise collaborate on a subsequent Fortune article, designed to counteract an essay by Oppenheimer in the July 1953 issue of Foreign Affairs. Approved in advance by the president, Oppie’s article praised Ike’s new policy of candor about the arms race.86

  As Borden and Strauss were now forced to admit, not only had their campaign against the physicist been ineffective, but the tide of events seemed to be running strongly in Oppie’s favor. The Weinberg trial, which Borden originally hoped would implicate both Oppenheimer and his former grad student in espionage, had instead made the mysterious “Scientist X” something of a folk hero.

  In March 1953, Weinberg had been found not guilty of lying under oath four years earlier, when he had denied to HUAC ever belonging to the Communist Party. The government had been unwilling to reveal the wiretap evidence that gave proof of Weinberg’s meeting with Steve Nelson and Weinberg’s party membership. Likewise, the Justice Department had been
too fearful of the Crouches’ vulnerability as witnesses to even raise the Kenilworth Court episode during the trial.87 Although the presiding judge voiced his dismay at the jury’s verdict, Weinberg went free.88

  With the aid of Vice Admiral Hyman Rickover—the driving force behind the navy’s nuclear submarine program, and a long-time Joint Committee ally—Borden had meanwhile lined up a job as special assistant to the vice president of Westinghouse’s reactor division in Pittsburgh.89 Before leaving the government, however, Borden had also arranged though his successor on the Joint Committee—Corbin Allardice, a former AEC public relations man—a consultancy contract as well as a security clearance for another year.90

  On May 14, 1953, Borden checked out Oppie’s security file one last time from the AEC document vault.91 Retreating to the family’s vacation home on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, Borden would spend the next three months brooding over Oppenheimer’s voluminous dossier.92

  On his last day at the Joint Committee, Borden had handed Allardice a short memo on unfinished business. Among his suggestions—“members should contribute money to a fund for coffee served during Committee meetings,” and “re-interviewing Fuchs”—was an attached list that contained thirty-eight questions regarding Oppenheimer.93

  “In the 1940–1942 period, did Dr. Oppenheimer have any close friends who were not identified with Communism?” Borden wondered.94

  16

  NOT MUCH MORE THAN A KANGAROO COURT

  IN EARLY JUNE 1953, Strauss told Hoover that he intended to accept the post of AEC chairman, which Eisenhower had offered him three months earlier. Strauss had originally demurred, in part because he suspected those around the president of being too liberal or at least too sympathetic to Oppenheimer. He was particularly suspicious of Ike’s national security adviser, Robert Cutler, who still served with Oppie on the board of the Harvard Corporation. In accepting the job, Strauss had warned Ike that he was going to approach Cutler and “‘lay the cards on the table’ concerning Oppenheimer.”1

  The only “bright part in his taking over these new difficult duties,” Strauss told the FBI’s Charles Bates, “was the fact that the FBI had been most cooperative with him and he felt he could rely on the Director and the Bureau in matters of mutual interest.” Indeed, later that day Strauss requested and received Oppenheimer’s security file from Hoover.2

  Less than a week after being sworn in as AEC chairman, Strauss ordered the classified documents library at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study eliminated and replaced with a facility under the commission’s control.3 But Strauss discovered that he was one day too late to cut Oppenheimer off entirely from atomic secrets. In one of his last acts as chairman, Dean had renewed Oppenheimer’s consultancy contract for another year—to June 30, 1954—on the grounds that Oppie needed a Q clearance to help implement the recommendations of the disarmament panel.4

  Strauss was also doing what he could to block the administration’s push for greater “candor.” Early on, he had proposed that all official statements on the hydrogen bomb be cleared first with his office—a form of censorship that Eisenhower resisted. By that fall, when Ike proposed an ambitious plan of his own to share civilian atomic power with the world, Strauss effectively hijacked the administration’s “Operation Candor,” transforming it—during breakfast meetings at the Metropolitan Club with presidential adviser and speech writer C. D. Jackson—into what Jackson called “Operation Wheaties.” What had begun as a sincere effort to inform the public about the dangers of nuclear war was being transformed into a cynical public relations campaign.5

  As AEC chairman, Strauss showed an almost paranoid obsession with Oppenheimer: passing along to Hoover, for example, the gossip that Earl Browder’s son had secured a position at the institute because of Oppie, and claiming that Oppenheimer was cheating on his AEC expense accounts. (“Admiral Strauss stated that while this was a small matter in itself, he thought it did indicate an interesting sidelight upon the character of Dr. Oppenheimer.”)6

  That fall, Strauss hired David Teeple, one of the former army CIC agents who had shadowed Martin Kamen to the rendezvous with Soviet diplomats at Bernstein’s Fish Grotto, and later worked for Hickenlooper. Teeple’s job was to dig up derogatory information on Oppenheimer.7 Strauss also put McKay Donkin, an investigator in the AEC’s Office of Security, on “special assignment” to assist Teeple. The AEC chairman even personally helped line up interviews for FBI agents investigating the physicist.8 Increasingly, Strauss treated the commission’s security office and the bureau itself as his own private detective agency.9

  Nor did Strauss hesitate to use his new office to settle old scores.10 More than three years after Carroll Wilson had left the commission, Strauss interceded to deny the former AEC general manager a clearance when Wilson took a new job at the Metals and Control Corporation. Wilson had finally turned for help to Vannevar Bush and Henry Smyth.11 When Gordon Arneson, the State Department’s atomic energy expert, ran afoul of the man he derisively called “the Tugboat Admiral,” Strauss had Arneson declared a security risk and fired.12

  * * *

  The Russians’ failure to fulfill his worst fears by testing a hydrogen bomb was disturbing his sleep that summer, the AEC chairman told friends.13 The suspense ended in late August, with the test of Joe-4. But AFOAT-1’s analysis of the debris from the bomb actually showed that it was the United States, and not the Soviet Union, which held the thermonuclear advantage. The Soviet device had been similar to Teller’s original Alarm Clock, with a yield of 400 kilotons, far less than the multimegaton Mike.14 The CIA believed that the radiation-implosion secret of the new Super remained unfamiliar to—or was at least as yet undemonstrated by—America’s adversary.

  While the advent of a Soviet H-bomb was not unexpected, it had the effect of strengthening Strauss’s hand. That autumn, Eisenhower quietly acceded to the AEC chairman’s request that all official statements concerning H-bombs be cleared first with him. That step marked the end of “Operation Candor.” As Ike announced in a press statement—drafted by Strauss—his administration henceforth did not intend to disclose details “of our strength in atomic weapons of any sort.”15

  * * *

  By that fall, Borden’s original list of 38 questions concerning Oppenheimer had swelled to 500.16 “All his spare time seems to be devoted to brooding about your business,” Ken Mansfield told Teller in early November.17

  Also worrying Borden was the fact that those who were left behind on the Joint Committee did not seem to share his obsession with Oppie.18 That included Frank Cotter, who had just completed his months-long review of the case against Oppenheimer. Cotter concluded that legal action against the scientist was problematic at best, since much of the evidence was based upon illegal wiretaps. Moreover, the former FBI agent thought an actual trial both unnecessary and unwise, as likely to alienate the nation’s scientists. “I believe that in the future he will become a weaker voice and hope that he will never become a voice speaking for martyrdom,” Cotter advised the Joint Committee. He recommended that they merely “continue to follow the case.”19 Allardice, Borden’s successor, agreed.20

  As Borden was well aware, the letter that he had drafted for McMahon to give to Truman, warning about Oppenheimer, had never been delivered. A similar letter, written for Cole’s signature and intended for Eisenhower, likewise remained unsent.21 Meanwhile, Borden’s few remaining allies on the committee were fast dwindling: Walker had already returned to his law practice in New York.

  The final straw may have been a memo that Cole and Allardice wrote in early November, intending to send to Hoover. Although they appended a partial list of Borden’s questions, the two noted that “[they had] not reached any definite conclusion on Dr. Oppenheimer.”22 Borden feared, with reason, that Cole and Allardice were preparing to wash their hands of the case.23

  The prospect that Oppenheimer might get away with conduct that Borden considered treasonous finally compelled the ex-staffer to act. On N
ovember 7, 1953, Borden mailed from Pittsburgh’s main post office a three-and-a-half-page, single-spaced letter that he had been mentally writing for more than six months. Addressing the letter to Hoover, Borden recapitulated Oppenheimer’s extraordinary influence as a government adviser, listing twenty-one “factors”—most linked to events before 1943—that led him to his “own exhaustively considered opinion … that more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.”24

  * * *

  Hoover’s immediate suspicion was that Borden’s letter might be a plot to embarrass Eisenhower, in retribution for the humiliation of the Wheeler incident.25 But he also recognized, Hoover told aides, that he “might later be confronted with the question of what the FBI did about it.”26 While little or nothing in Borden’s letter was new to Hoover, the FBI director ordered his agents to interview the ex-staffer.

  What else to do about the letter was a dilemma inadvertently solved for Hoover a few days later during a visit from Thomas Murray. The commissioner had come to the bureau to complain about Strauss’s hiring of Teeple, but also to inquire whether the FBI had anything new on Oppenheimer.27 Hoover told Murray about the letter, complaining that Borden had decided “to dump [it] into the lap of the FBI.”

  At Murray’s request, Hoover sent him a copy of the letter a week later. The FBI director also sent a copy to Herbert Brownell, Eisenhower’s attorney general. Strauss found a copy of the letter—along with a brief note from Hoover and Oppenheimer’s latest FBI file—on his desk when he arrived for work at the commission on Monday morning, November 30.28

  On Tuesday evening, Strauss received a distraught telephone call from Defense Secretary Charles Wilson, who confessed that Borden’s letter had come as “something of a shock.” Wilson wondered whether Oppenheimer had not also been involved in the Wheeler incident.29 “I do not know that he is a Communist,” Strauss told Wilson, “but I do know that he is a liar.”30