Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  From the beginning, Strauss and Nichols had the advantage of knowing their adversaries’ moves in advance, thanks to the FBI wiretaps, which had been put in place on New Year’s Day.3

  The taps had been operative less than a week, however, when the agent in charge of the bureau’s Newark, New Jersey, office threatened to pull the plug, on ethical grounds. He “wanted to be sure that the Bureau desired the technical surveillance continued in view of the fact that it might disclose attorney-client relations,” the conscientious G-man notified Hoover. The FBI director—after first checking with Strauss—replied that the wiretaps were “warranted.”4

  The monitoring of Oppie’s conversations with his lawyers revealed, as Strauss had predicted, that Garrison intended to summon a parade of notables in Oppenheimer’s defense. All could be expected to attest to Oppenheimer’s selfless government service and sterling personal qualities. Manhattan Project veterans Rabi, Bacher, Conant, and Bush were among those whom Garrison had lined up as witnesses.5

  But both sides surely recognized that the most important witness for the defense was almost certain to be Groves, who had always steadfastly defended his pick of Oppie to run Los Alamos. With his case against Oppenheimer well under way, Strauss began making a case against Groves.

  * * *

  Strauss had not bothered to hide his contempt for the former Manhattan Project director in a 1951 conversation with Borden, to whom he confided: “Groves is and always has been stupid.… [Strauss] added that whereas once it might have been worthwhile to consult General Groves, that time is long since past.”6

  Already aware that Groves had belatedly admitted lying to the FBI, Strauss had recently located another piece of incriminating evidence to use against the general. The letter that Groves wrote Oppenheimer in May 1950, when the physicist feared being called before HUAC, had been discovered in mid-January by an AEC security man sent to retrieve classified files from Princeton. LaPlante duly gave the letter to Bates, who passed it along to Strauss and Hoover.7 Groves’s unbidden testimonial—“that at no time did he regret his decision”—had been intended as ammunition for Oppenheimer to use against the Crouches. Strauss now planned to use it as ammunition against Groves.

  Strauss and Groves probably talked about the letter as well as the upcoming hearing during a train ride together on January 21 to Groton, Connecticut, for the launching of the nuclear submarine USS Nautilus. Shortly afterward, therefore, Strauss told Belmont that “Groves might now be sorry that he had sent such a letter to Oppenheimer.”8

  For Hoover, too, the evidence that linked Frank to the Chevalier incident and implicated Groves in the cover-up was a welcome weapon to use against the man who had been his wartime nemesis.9 (“From the above it is readily apparent that Groves has attempted to withhold and conceal important information concerning an espionage conspiracy violation from the FBI,” Belmont wrote his boss. “Even now Groves is behaving with a certain amount of coyness in his dealings and admissions to the Bureau.”)10

  Groves himself was all too aware of how his recent admission to the FBI made his position in the case tenuous. The general also knew—or at least suspected—that Oppenheimer’s calls were being monitored. On January 22, when Oppie telephoned to ask Groves if they could have lunch together the following week in New York, FBI agents recorded that Groves was “courteous [to JRO] but has indicated that he knows nothing about the case except some gossip.”11

  With the trap thus set, Strauss judged the time right to spring it. On February 19, 1954, Groves met with the AEC chairman in Washington, at Strauss’s request. Asked whether he would clear Oppie now, Groves answered no. Asked, “Do you think Oppenheimer is a security risk?” Groves responded in the affirmative. Afterward, Strauss informed Robb of the results of his interrogation, reminding the lawyer to “be sure to ask these questions of Groves at the hearing.”12 Later that afternoon, Nichols took Groves to see Robb and Arthur Rolander, the AEC security man who was assisting the prosecution.13

  Confident that the most important defense witness was now solidly in the prosecution’s camp, Strauss saw no need to compromise. When Rabi proposed a deal whereby Oppenheimer would agree to resign his AEC contract in exchange for Nichols withdrawing the statement of charges, Strauss promptly rejected the offer as “out of the question.” In early March, Garrison, too, told Strauss that he and Oppenheimer would “fight.”14

  * * *

  With the hearing only weeks away, each side had a new appreciation of the stakes involved. Strauss told Mitchell that the “importance of the Oppenheimer case could not be stressed too much,” while a defeat for the AEC would be “another ‘Pearl Harbor’ as far as atomic energy is concerned.”15 Brownell predicted that the hearing “would be bigger than the Alger Hiss case” and might result in a criminal indictment of Oppenheimer.16 Strauss and Nichols—who had begun meeting daily on the case in the chairman’s office by February—knew they had a vital but unseen ally in Hoover.17 Robb and Strauss had already assured the FBI director that nothing in the bureau’s files would be shared with Oppenheimer’s lawyers.18

  Under Robb’s direction, Rolander began collecting documents and conducting interviews on Projects Vista and Lexington, the air force’s ill-fated nuclear bomber, and AFOAT-1, which Strauss claimed Oppenheimer had tried to kill at its birth.19

  Strauss and Nichols also did what they could to put obstacles in the path of Oppenheimer’s defense. When Garrison, having had a preview of the opposition’s tactics, began to rethink his early decision not to obtain a security clearance to try the case, Strauss and Nichols rejected his request on the grounds that Garrison’s associate, Herbert Marks—a former AEC general counsel—was a security risk.20 Although Garrison realized that without a clearance the defense would be at a disadvantage when it came to allegations that Oppenheimer had impeded progress on the hydrogen bomb, in deference to Marks, he decided not to press the issue.21

  * * *

  The FBI wiretaps revealed tantalizing details not only of Garrison’s strategy but of the problems being encountered by the defense.

  On February 6, 1954, Oppenheimer telephoned his brother in Colorado, telling Frank that he was in “considerable trouble.”22 The bureau’s transcript suggests that Oppie realized not only that his phone was tapped but that his mail was being read: “J. Robert Oppenheimer also indicated that he hoped to see Frank for a talk at the first opportunity as he cannot adequately discuss the problem in a letter.”

  But the hoped-for visit did not take place. More than a month later, FBI agents picked up mention of Frank’s name again in a telephone call from Oppie to Garrison: “Subject feels it necessary that someone contact his brother to discuss his phase of involvement.”23

  Since Garrison could not afford to take time out for the trip—the hearing was now less than two weeks away—he sent an associate in the firm, Samuel Silverman, to see Frank. Silverman arranged a rendezvous in early April at Dorothy McKibben’s old Manhattan Project office in Santa Fe.

  Told by Garrison simply to “go talk to Frank Oppenheimer and see what he can tell you,” Silverman chatted amiably with Oppie’s brother in the tiny room on East Palace Avenue.24 Eventually, Frank invited Silverman to the ranch at Blanco Basin, a few hours’ drive over the mountains. The lawyer later reported to Garrison that he and Frank had sat together on the porch overlooking the snow-covered peaks, while Frank spoke of the difficulty of running a cattle ranch.25 Silverman drove his rental car back to Albuquerque and flew home to New York, little enlightened.

  * * *

  Alerted by the wiretaps to the impressive array of character witnesses that Garrison had lined up for Oppenheimer, Robb and Rolander traveled to Berkeley in early March, seeking witnesses for the prosecution. Strauss’s lawyer had already decided that he and Rolander would only interview those the FBI had not already talked to, with one exception: Oppie’s former colleagues at Berkeley. (As Pitzer had earlier confided to bureau agents, “We know this man.”)26

  The tw
o lawyers arrived in California armed with a lengthy list of questions, based in part upon the Joint Committee’s 1950 interview with Teller, which Cole and Allardice had helpfully provided.27 Additionally, Bates had given Robb transcripts of the bureau’s spring 1952 interviews with Teller and Pitzer.28

  After talking to Pitzer and Latimer, Rolander and Robb interviewed Lawrence in his office on campus.29 Ernest spoke with some heat of how his colleagues had been “taken in” by Oppie, but—“giving him the benefit of doubt”—he believed that “everything [Oppenheimer] did can be attributed to bad judgment.”30 Lawrence also told Robb, emphatically, that his former friend “should never again have anything to do with the forming of policy.”

  Robb and Rolander interviewed Alvarez twice, at Berkeley and Livermore, probably because he was not as circumspect about Oppenheimer’s motives. Blaming Oppie for the termination of the Benicia reactor project and the MTA—as well as for the fact that both Livermore and the Rad Lab were now “on the black list” with scientists—Luie hinted that there was more behind Oppenheimer’s opposition to the superbomb than moral qualms. “Alvarez said that if a star basketball player suddenly started to miss shots as Oppenheimer did in this instance, everybody would think there was something wrong,” Rolander wrote in notes of the interview. The head of British intelligence had once told him, Luie confided, that “Oppenheimer was a Russian agent, worse than Fuchs.”*31

  Teller had since had a charge of heart about being an anonymous informant and told Rolander and Robb that he wanted to be identified as the source for any information of his that might be used in the hearing. Robb’s questions to Teller focused upon Oppie’s role vis-à-vis the hydrogen bomb: “[Teller] said there is no question that Oppenheimer tried to impede the H-bomb program.” As to the reason for this interference, however, Edward seemed ambivalent.

  Teller stated that he did not know what motivated Oppenheimer, nor could he prove that he had not acted in good faith.… He said that Oppenheimer has given a great deal of bad advice in the matter of the H-bomb, and that in the future his advice should not be taken and he should never have any more influence.… He said he hoped Oppenheimer’s clearance would not be lifted for a mere mistake of judgment.32

  * * *

  By the time that he returned to Washington in late March, Robb was confident of victory.33 (Warned that Oppenheimer was too “fast” and “slippery” to be caught in a cross-examination, the former prosecutor replied: “Maybe so, but then he’s not been cross-examined by me before.”)34

  Strauss, too, no longer feared that the hearing might be more an embarrassment for the commission than for Oppenheimer. Hoover had sent the AEC chairman a copy of Frank Oppenheimer’s FBI interview in early January.35 For weeks, Strauss had known that both Oppenheimer brothers as well as Groves were ensnared in a tangled web of deception over the Chevalier incident: Oppie by having told Pash and Groves two different and conflicting versions of what happened, and then a third to the FBI; Groves by his failure to report Oppenheimer’s admission concerning Frank to the FBI at the time; and Frank by denying to bureau agents any involvement whatsoever.

  Wherever the truth lay, Strauss and Robb realized that Oppie would either have to admit to lying about the incident or else implicate his brother in the plot, whereas Groves’s own complicity ensured his silence in Oppenheimer’s defense. Moreover, Robb’s recent interview with Lawrence meant that the prosecution would be able to counter Garrison’s big guns with witnesses of equal caliber, especially on such highly technical questions as whether Oppenheimer had tried to sabotage the superbomb.

  Still, Strauss was taking no chances. Smyth and Rabi had urged that Eisenhower be the one to pick the three-member Personnel Security Board that would sit in judgment of Oppenheimer. Instead, Mitchell had already chosen two members of the board, a scientist and an industrialist. Ward Evans was a chemistry professor at Chicago’s Loyola University who had previously served on the AEC’s regional board, almost always voting to deny clearance. Thomas Morgan had been president of Sperry Gyroscope before being appointed by Truman to a presidential commission on defense preparedness.

  But the most important member of the board—its chairman—was Strauss’s choice. Gordon Gray, the president of the University of North Carolina, was an attorney who, following a brief career in Democratic state politics, had been appointed secretary of the army by Truman. Perhaps the most salient of Gray’s qualifications from Strauss’s point of view, however, was his public defection from Adlai Stevenson’s camp in the 1952 campaign. Then, as later, Gray had attacked Stevenson for being too liberal.36

  * * *

  In early March 1954, before the Gray board met for the first time, Strauss was compelled to travel to Bikini atoll, where the latest round of U.S. nuclear tests—Operation Castle—was taking place. The first test, code-named Bravo, was of a “dry” thermonuclear device, a crucial step toward development of an H-bomb small enough for a missile warhead.37

  Like Mike, Bravo turned out to be far more powerful than its designers expected—exploding with a force more than twice the predicted 7 megatons. But while the fallout from Mike had dissipated over miles of trackless ocean, the 2 million tons of sand and coral vaporized by Bravo were carried by prevailing winds well outside the designated danger zone, passing over inhabited atolls of the Marshall Islands as well as the twenty-three-man crew of the Japanese fishing boat Fukuryu Maru (Lucky Dragon).38

  By the time that Strauss returned to Washington in midmonth, one of the boat’s crewmen was critically ill and most others were suffering from radiation sickness. The incident had drawn headlines in Japan, prompting criticism of U.S. nuclear testing from around the world. An impromptu remark by Eisenhower later in the month—that the test “must have surprised and astonished the scientists”—inadvertently added fuel to the furor, as did Strauss’s subsequent admission to the press that a Bravo-sized bomb could destroy any city, including New York. (“I wouldn’t have answered that one that way, Lewis,” Ike gently admonished.)39

  Bravo also literally overshadowed the preparations for the test of Livermore’s first H-bomb: the Ramrod device proposed by Teller.40 The unexpected power of the Los Alamos–designed Bravo had blown the roof off the corrugated tin hut that housed Livermore’s superbomb, while radiation from the test had forced the Livermore firing party off a nearby atoll and out to sea. Lawrence, who had been on hand to witness Bravo, was forced by a recurrence of his illness to return to California before the Livermore test, code-named Koon.41

  In the early morning hours of Wednesday, April 7, 1954, the countdown for Koon wound down to zero.42 From the deck of the USS Curtis, Duane Sewell and his Livermore colleagues peered into the fog and low overcast as a dim glow briefly penetrated the murk. The contrast with Bravo was instantly apparent. (“Did it go off?” asked Sewell anxiously.) Whereas lab pessimists had scaled back early estimates of a Bravo-like yield to a single megaton, the actual explosion was only a tenth that magnitude, almost all of it accounted for by Koon’s Los Alamos–supplied fission primary.43

  The fizzle produced a mood of near desperation among the lab’s weaponeers. Following the disappointing results of the twin hydride tests, the California lab now had an unbroken record of failure. Eager to get at least one score on the tally board before the end of the series, some urged that the only other Livermore-designed bomb scheduled for Castle—a cryogenically cooled, “wet” version of Ramrod, in a test code-named Echo—be moved to a barge and exploded as soon as possible, even though any diagnostic data from the shot would be lost. Instead, Herb York and Harold Brown decided to cancel the test. Commission experts agreed with Teller’s colleagues that the next bomb, too, was likely to fizzle, given its similarity to the ill-fated Koon.44

  Beyond embarrassment at Livermore’s failure, York and Teller had another, deeper concern. In the wake of the lab’s disastrous debut in Nevada and the Pacific, they expected that questions would again be raised concerning the need for a second weapons laborato
ry. Predictably, the loudest criticisms came from a familiar quarter. Just weeks after Koon, Norris Bradbury wrote to the AEC questioning whether Livermore needed or deserved an independent test program. Bradbury’s memo likewise branded the rival lab for pursuing weapons of dubious design and only “problematic interest.”45

  * * *

  On Monday, April 12, 1954, five days after Teller’s H-bomb had fizzled in the Pacific, the Oppenheimer hearings began in Room 2022 of Building T-3, across Constitution Avenue from AEC headquarters. The barracks-like temporary structure had been erected in the early days of the Second World War, on the empty sward of land between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.

  Members of the Personnel Security Board—Gray, Evans, and Thomas—sat at a long baize-covered table at the room’s east end. The opposing lawyers, Garrison and Robb, and their staffs faced each other across two mahogany tables fitted together and attached like the stem of a T. At the base, standing apart, was a single wooden chair for witness testimony; behind it, a nondescript leather sofa, usually occupied by Oppenheimer, sitting alone.46

  Nichols had forbidden Garrison from making an opening statement, so much of the first morning was taken up by Gray’s reading of the statement of charges and Oppenheimer’s fourteen-page reply, recounting his life and career. After lunch, Garrison entered into the record wartime letters from Groves and FDR, praising the physicist for his work on the atomic bomb.

  Across the street at the AEC that afternoon, there were already signs that Oppenheimer was in trouble. Groves telephoned Nichols with word that, while Garrison still wanted him to testify, Oppie’s lawyer was disturbed by the fact that Groves’s recollection of the Chevalier incident did not jibe with Oppenheimer’s.47

  Most of the next two days was taken up by Garrison’s direct examination of Oppenheimer. On Wednesday morning, April 14, when the subject turned to Frank, it was Oppie who prompted Garrison’s question.48 The lawyer asked, “Was your brother connected with this approach by Chevalier to you?” Oppenheimer’s reply had the sound of an answer prepared well in advance: “I am very clear on this. I have a vivid and I think certainly not fallible memory. He had nothing whatever to do with it.”