Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  Garrison’s summation on May 6, 1954, had focused in some detail on Oppenheimer’s contradictory versions of the Chevalier incident—only to conclude, somewhat weakly, that “Dr. Oppenheimer has surely learned from this experience.”2 Gray himself had tried to finally get at the truth of the matter when he asked Oppie, during the physicist’s last day on the stand, why he had told a complicated lie to Pash if his motive was to protect Chevalier. But Oppenheimer once again dodged the question. It was, averred the physicist, “most difficult to explain.”3

  Strauss’s concern grew after a week passed without a verdict. His particular concern was Ward Evans. The chemistry professor had startled the other members of the board by making disparaging and even anti-Semitic remarks about Oppenheimer at a dinner early in the proceedings. Gray and Morgan had told Rolander that they feared Evans was so outspoken he might prejudice the case.4

  On May 20, no longer able to contain his anxiety, Strauss telephoned Belmont, asking that Hoover intervene personally with the board: “[Strauss] said that the Oppenheimer Hearing Board is in the last stages of its considerations and that things are ‘touch and go.’ He said a slight tip of the balance could cause the Board to commit a serious error.” Protesting that “it would be highly improper” for him to do what Strauss suggested, Hoover declined.5

  The suspense ended three days later, when the board, in a 2-to-1 vote, declared Oppenheimer a security risk and recommended that his clearance not be renewed.

  As Nichols had predicted, the Gray board’s verdict was largely based upon the issue of Oppenheimer’s veracity as reflected by the Chevalier incident. While the board found that the account given by Oppenheimer to the FBI was “substantially true,” it therefore concluded that Oppie’s earlier admission of lying showed he recognized that the contact by Chevalier was not just an innocent conversation but, rather, “that it was a criminal conspiracy.”

  “Loyalty to one’s friends is one of the noblest of qualities,” wrote Gray in the majority decision. “Being loyal to one’s friends above reasonable obligations to the country and to the security system, however, is not clearly consistent with the interests of security.”6

  Ironically, the single dissenting vote had been Evans’s, who argued, in a minority opinion, that Oppenheimer’s clearance should be reinstated. Gray and Morgan noticed that Evans had seemed “morose” during the hearing’s last days and concluded that he was “probably ill.”7 During the recess the chemist had gone home to Chicago. When he returned to Washington, his attitude toward Oppenheimer seemed at such a variance with his earlier views that Robb and Rolander believed “someone had ‘gotten to’ Evans.” Like Lawrence, the professor had likely learned from academic colleagues what the personal cost might be of pillorying Oppenheimer.8

  Robb learned of the verdict on May 23 and immediately notified Strauss. Bates informed the FBI that both the AEC chairman and his lawyer were “very happy” with the results.9

  Not surprisingly, the scene at Princeton was altogether different, as captured by the bureau’s wiretaps: “[Oppenheimer] reported to be very depressed at the present time and has been ill-tempered with his wife.”10 At Mitchell’s order, Oppie’s secretary at the institute had returned the last of the AEC’s classified documents a few days earlier.11

  Anticipating a long-deferred vacation in the Caribbean with his family, Oppenheimer felt obliged to send Hoover a registered letter telling of his plans, lest the bureau fear that he was about to flee the country.12 Hoover notified Strauss, Brownell, and the CIA, nonetheless, that Oppie might be preparing to defect to Russia via submarine.13

  * * *

  On June 29, 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission handed down its verdict on Oppenheimer. By a vote of 4 to 1—Smyth was the only holdout—the commission upheld the Gray board’s decision to strip Oppenheimer of his clearance, just one day before it was due to expire.14 In separate opinions appended to the majority report, Zuckert gave a lengthy and torturous justification for his decision to vote with the majority. Murray’s statement, reportedly coauthored with a Jesuit priest, was most notable for its moralistic fervor.15 Curiously, while the religion-minded commissioner thought Oppenheimer’s opposition to the hydrogen bomb defensible on ethical grounds, he still declared the scientist “disloyal.”16

  Garrison had not been allowed to make his case in person before the commissioners; nor was he permitted to see the letter that Robb and Nichols wrote in support of the board’s decision, which emphasized the Chevalier incident. (Oppie’s “misrepresentation and falsification constitutes criminal … dishonest … conduct,” Nichols intoned.)17 The AEC’s majority report, drafted by Strauss, found Oppenheimer guilty of “fundamental defects of character,” echoing Nichols in its emphasis upon Oppenheimer’s questionable “associations.”18

  On the same day that he filed the majority report, Strauss paid a personal visit to the FBI, thanking Bates and the bureau’s director effusively for their assistance. For Hoover, however, the Oppenheimer case did not end officially until two weeks later, when the Justice Department ruled that Oppie could not be prosecuted for lies told in 1943 or at the hearing.19

  On July 20, Hoover advised Strauss that so far as he and the bureau were concerned, the Oppenheimer case was closed.20

  At Princeton, the Oppenheimers prepared for a life of academic exile. Although Oppie was still very much in demand as a speaker on campuses and at academic conferences, the familiar summonses from Washington had abruptly ceased.21 In an irony that perhaps only he was able to appreciate, the AEC’s verdict had made Oppenheimer himself one of the institute’s “solipsistic luminaries—shining in separate and helpless desolation” that he had disdained in a letter to Frank almost twenty years earlier.22

  Finding more time to spend with the children—Peter, now fourteen, and Toni, eleven—Oppie and Kitty revived a favorite ritual: the family would search for four-leaf clovers on the New Jersey campus or wherever they might be visiting; the finder would Scotch-tape the little plant to an index card and present it, inscribed, to another family member—a gift of luck.

  * * *

  Elsewhere, the repercussions of the Oppenheimer case were just beginning to be felt. On June 9, 1954, journalist Drew Pearson reported in his syndicated column that Strauss had secretly recorded AEC meetings and tapped the telephones of individual commissioners. Strauss’s prompt denial was also an outright lie: “No tapping of Commissioners’ telephones or any other telephones has ever been made on my behalf by security officers or by anyone else,” he assured the president, Sterling Cole, and Pearson.23 Attacks upon Strauss for his role in the Oppenheimer case would continue throughout the coming weeks—including, most notably, in a series of articles by political columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop.24

  Teller was also much affected by the controversy. “The people here are quite worked up about the whole thing,” Rabi wrote DuBridge in late June from a meeting at Los Alamos, where physicists stood in line to read the transcript of the hearing.25 Rabi thought the testimony “much worse than [he] thought possible”—including “some horrifying passages” from Alvarez—but Teller’s remarks, he felt, were the nadir: “It does take quite a lot of nerve for him to show up at this time.”

  Edward, indeed, would have reason to regret his appearance at a picnic outside Fuller Lodge later that day. Approaching Robert Christy, a wartime colleague with whom he had once shared a house in Chicago, Teller was devastated when Christy wordlessly turned on his heel and walked away. “I won’t shake your hand either, Edward,” Rabi told him.26 Teller and Mici quickly retreated to their hotel room and made plans to leave.27 Alvarez was so alarmed by Teller’s psychological state that he telephoned Strauss to warn that their mutual friend might be suicidal.28 Thus alerted, the AEC chairman canceled his planned visit to the lab.29

  For Teller, it was the beginning of his third and final exile. Having fled the Communists in Hungary and then the Nazis in Germany, he suddenly found himself shunned by friends, like Bethe, who had
been his companions in the European diaspora. Ironically, Edward was no less isolated than Oppie, but with fewer sympathizers.*

  More than just mental anguish, the hearings also took a physical toll—and Teller was not the only victim. For almost a year, Teller and Lawrence had been seeing the same specialist for treatment of ulcerative colitis. In July, following a brief remission, Ernest’s attacks returned.30 Bradbury later recalled an emotional Lawrence unburdening himself on the subject of Oppenheimer at a Bohemian Grove encampment that August.31 Physicist James Brady, a former Rad Lab colleague, likewise remembered Ernest being “bitter, very bitter” that Oppie had lied to wartime security officials. (“I got Oppenheimer that job in the first place,” Lawrence had complained to Brady. “Of course, we’ve got a better man around here now.” “Who’s that?” Brady asked. “Teller,” Lawrence replied.)32

  Barely two months after the Oppenheimer hearings, Lawrence was approached by another former colleague—Martin Kamen—with a request that he testify in Kamen’s libel suit against the Washington Times-Herald and the Chicago Tribune. David Teeple was compelled to admit at the trial that he had given the newspapers the picture of Kamen arm-in-arm with Soviet diplomats outside Bernstein’s Fish Grotto.33 The papers had reported that Kamen was a spy.

  Lawrence agreed to testify only if Kamen guaranteed that he would not be subject to cross-examination—plainly, an impossible condition in a trial. Instead, Cooksey wrote a deposition on Kamen’s behalf. After he won a settlement from the newspapers the following spring, Kamen thanked Cooksey for rising above “the failures of men of fatal timidity.”34

  As a result of the hearings, both Teller and Lawrence wound up on a kind of scientists’ blacklist. Even though Oppie himself subsequently nominated Ernest to the editorial board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Lawrence’s name was quietly scratched from the list after Bethe objected that his views might “lead to a watering down of the contents of the Bulletin.”35

  But Strauss need not have feared that the hearings would result in the wholesale refusal of the American scientific community to carry out defense work. Although Los Alamos scientists fired off their weapon of choice—a petition with 288 signatures, which they sent to the AEC, condemning the verdict—the National Academy of Sciences pointedly refused to issue a strong statement in support of Oppenheimer.36 As Strauss wrote to Neylan in July, “[I am] very contented with the attitude of the scientists with whom I talked. Their position has been very much misrepresented to the public by a few prejudiced columnists.”37

  * * *

  Spurred, in part, by Lawrence and Enrico Fermi—who, dying of cancer, made his request a kind of last wish—Teller that fall agreed to try to heal the rift created by his testimony, and, in the process, rehabilitate his own reputation.38 In “The Work of Many People,” an article published in February 1955 by Science magazine, Teller gave Ulam credit for the “imaginative suggestion” that led to the radiation-implosion breakthrough on the H-bomb.39

  In time, Teller’s own health slowly began to improve. Old friends lost over the Oppenheimer imbroglio were replaced with new ones found at Livermore. That winter, Edward exulted to Maria Mayer: “Going to California was like going to a new country.… I never worked as hard as now and, incidentally, I am establishing a reputation that I never fight and am always pleasant … a thoroughly new existence.”40

  Livermore itself, however, remained in serious trouble, the legacy of its back-to-back failures in Nevada and the Pacific. In late September 1954, Bradbury had sent a top-secret memo to the AEC’s Division of Military Application suggesting that the second lab be made subordinate to Los Alamos. As Bradbury hardly needed to remind the commission, “The brilliant new ideas have not appeared.”41

  The General Advisory Committee, now under Rabi’s leadership, was also raising questions about the future of Livermore. At a GAC meeting shortly after the Oppenheimer verdict was announced, Rabi described the effort there as “amateurish,” adding, ominously, that Teller’s lab did not have responsibility for any “necessary” part of the weapons program.42 After Koon’s failure, the AEC had canceled its order for Ramrod, to Teller’s chagrin.43 (Stung by the move, Teller told the GAC that he had plans for a 10,000-megaton bomb—something that Rabi and colleagues dismissed as “an advertising stunt.”)44

  That winter, York began experiencing sudden, inexplicable fevers that caused him to be absent from the lab for long periods. By December, Rabi was wondering aloud at GAC meetings whether Livermore would ever “really be an important laboratory.”45

  * * *

  Despite the failure of the hydride bomb and Koon, Teller remained a dominant presence at Livermore. Lawrence had recently arranged for Edward’s promotion to full professor at Berkeley, where he remained one of the few theorists left in the physics department.

  But Livermore had also acquired a new group of young and ambitious physicists, and their efforts were beginning to have an impact.46 At twenty-four, Harold Brown was already a three-year veteran of the Rad Lab as head of A Division, which designed thermonuclear weapons. The leader of B Division, John Foster, was a thirty-two-year-old physicist whose Canadian father, a longtime friend of Lawrence, had built the first cyclotron at McGill University. The junior Foster rode a motorcycle to the lab, where he and a half dozen others designed small atomic bombs and the fission primaries for Brown’s still hypothetical, multimegaton H-bombs.47

  One of Foster’s first projects at Livermore was an innovative approach to an admittedly old idea: linear implosion, which promised smaller and more efficient atomic bombs. While experiments with nonspherical designs dated from the early days of Los Alamos—the canyons of the wartime lab had once echoed with Seth Neddermeyer’s failed efforts to perfect the art—Foster’s counterpart at the New Mexico lab questioned whether the phenomenon still had any practical application.48 Grudgingly, Rabi and the GAC urged the commission to approve only one of a pair of linear-implosion tests that Livermore proposed for the upcoming Teapot series in Nevada.49 A decision to proceed with the second test would depend on the results of Teapot/Tesla, scheduled for spring 1955.

  Livermore scientists prepared for Tesla with their customary bravado. Whereas Los Alamos had traditionally transported their devices to the test site on an army flatbed truck with a military escort, Foster and his colleagues jauntily drove to the shot tower in a late-model sedan, their bomb—crammed into a pair of heavily reinforced Samsonite suitcases—sitting in the backseat.50

  The hush countdown for Tesla began in the early morning hours of March 1, 1955, and ended at dawn’s light with a 7-kiloton explosion—more than three times what Foster had predicted.51 To the relief of Livermore scientists, the blast this time also completely obliterated the bomb’s 300-foot tower. The AEC promptly gave approval to Livermore’s second test. Six days later, Turk—another small-diameter, boosted device—yielded the hoped-for 40 kilotons.52

  For Lawrence, who flew out from Berkeley to witness Turk, the occasion was one for celebration. On March 8, he telephoned Thomas Murray to congratulate the man he called “the ‘founder’” of the second lab.53 Among the scientists gathered in York’s office, joy was unrestrained. “We’re still in business, we’re still in business!” shouted Livermore’s business manager as he ran down the hall.54

  Hoping to forestall any further talk of closing the lab, Lawrence had formally made York the director of Livermore the previous fall.55 A subsequent contract from the army for an atomic bomb small enough to be fired from a cannon gave York the justification he needed for dramatic new expansion: the lab’s scientific staff swelled to 500, following a $6-million increase in budget. By spring 1955, Livermore had outgrown its parent, Berkeley’s Rad Lab, in both staff and budget.56 But perhaps most important, symbolically, was the fact that for the first time Livermore had taken a weapons project away from Los Alamos.57

  The California lab’s belated successes had also removed a great burden from Teller, who informed Strauss in mid-April that h
e and his colleagues were “proud and happy and grateful that … [their] work needed no further elaborate justification.”58 Wrote Edward to Maria Mayer that same day: “Livermore is now running fine. In fact, it’s running so fast, it’s running away with us.”59

  * * *

  In Washington, however, York and Teller were appalled to learn that the rug might be yanked out from under Livermore just as it was finally getting on its feet.

  The possibility of a ban on nuclear testing had been raised as early as January 1954 by Murray, who had argued to his fellow commissioners that “some control over testing offers an avenue of approach to atomic disarmament which should not be overlooked.”60 Ignored by Strauss, the crusading commissioner had next approached Eisenhower with a plea for an international moratorium on tests, which might “prevent the future development of much larger yield weapons.”61 Ike’s reply, drafted by Strauss, had curtly dismissed the idea.

  The public outcry over Bravo a few weeks later encouraged Murray to try again. His particular interest was in stopping the testing of multimegaton hydrogen bombs—what he called “big cheap bombs”—replacing them with an arsenal of less powerful fission bombs, more useful against enemy troops than enemy cities.62 As always, there was an element of fervent religious conviction behind Murray’s appeal: he objected not only to the radioactive fallout caused by peacetime H-bomb tests like Bravo, but to the fact that city-destroying superbombs violated the Christian doctrine of proportionality.63 (That Murray saw no conflict between his religious views and his duties as an AEC commissioner was evident in a letter he once wrote to Truman. Just before leaving on another visit to Fatima, he informed the president that he was “going to Portugal first of all to pray to the Blessed Virgin and second to try to increase Portugal uranium production.”)64

  Privately, Ike found Murray’s notion of an end to testing attractive—if only for public relations reasons. “Everybody seems to think that we’re skunks, saber-rattlers and warmongers,” the president had complained that spring.65 After Castle was completed, the president told Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, he was “willing to have a moratorium on all further experimentation whether with H-bomb or A-bombs.”66