by Gregg Herken
Strauss and Teller grew alarmed as the moratorium idea gained momentum, inside as well as outside the White House.67 That spring, responding to his constituents’ concerns, Joint Committee chairman Sterling Cole endorsed “a halt to a search for more destructive bombs” in a letter to Eisenhower.68 Even the redoubtable Dulles, architect of the administration’s controversial “massive retaliation” military doctrine, thought the moratorium “an area where we have a chance to get a big propaganda advantage—and perhaps results.”69
But the handwritten note that Eisenhower slipped Dulles at an NSC meeting, called in early April to study the test ban, probably foreordained the outcome. “Ask Strauss to study,” Ike instructed.70
Strauss reported back that the development of promising new weapons—including the small, low-yield bombs that Murray favored—would be seriously hampered by such a ban. More to the point, Strauss and Defense Secretary Charles Wilson argued, was the fact that the Russians could cheat by testing secretly, in such remote regions as Antarctica. Reluctantly, Eisenhower and Dulles conceded that the time was not yet ripe for a test ban.71
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A year later, the public’s rising fear of radiation threatened to bring about an end to nuclear testing anyway, at least within the continental United States. Hoping to dampen the furor over tests in Nevada, Teller proposed using northern Alaska as an alternate site.72 The air force, taking a different tack, recommended that the AEC henceforth describe U.S. tests as “friendly blasts.”73
In September 1954, the Defense Department had asked both Los Alamos and Livermore to explore the possibility of designing a new type of H-bomb—one in which the effects of radioactive contamination could be either diminished or enhanced.74
There was little enthusiasm at the nuclear labs—or anywhere else—for the so-called dirty bomb, where large areas of enemy territory could be made almost permanently uninhabitable by jacketing the weapon with a common element, like cobalt, which produced long-lived fission products. Conversely, there were few advocates among the military for the reduced-radiation, or “clean,” bomb, at a time when U.S. war plans regarded enemy casualties caused by fallout as “bonus effect.”75
Recognizing that the future of all nuclear testing might well depend on their ability to reduce fallout, however, Livermore scientists responded to the Pentagon order with alacrity. In December, York reported that his lab was working on two different and promising approaches to the clean bomb. The Defense Department awarded the Livermore program “urgent” status, asking the lab to make clean weapons a major effort.76
Murray was another enthusiast for what the religion-minded commissioner called “the ‘pure’ bomb.” “Our objective should be to test a weapon of this type at the earliest possible date,” he had written Strauss that fall.77 In a meeting just two days after Tesla, Teller informed Murray that the lab’s recent success had “opened up a completely new field” for small bombs as well as large ones. He looked forward to the time when “the ‘pure’ weapon idea could take on added impetus,” Murray told Teller.78
One reason for Murray’s avid interest in the clean bomb was the fact that his campaign to ban large H-bomb tests had reached a dead end with the administration. (His latest meeting, this time with Dulles, lasted only five minutes. “I thanked Mr. Murray for his ideas,” the secretary of state wrote in a memo of their conversation.)79 Undaunted, Murray had written once more to the president in mid-March 1955, this time proposing a so-called threshold test ban, which would eliminate thermonuclear tests in the megaton range—tests that the GAC claimed would be easily detectable.80 Strauss, however, advised Eisenhower against any such agreement with “a cynical and treacherous enemy.”81
Ike, in fact, already had another approach in mind. Unwilling to abandon the test ban as an eventual goal, the president on March 18 appointed Harold Stassen his special assistant for disarmament.82
The thirty-one-year-old former “boy governor” of Minnesota had made a career disguising his considerable ambition behind a facade of midwestern blandness. Three years earlier, Stassen’s maneuvering had guaranteed Eisenhower a first-ballot nomination at the Republican convention. As Stassen was well aware, Ike owed him a political debt.
But what Stassen intended to be his first step—a comprehensive review of American foreign policy and strategy—was preempted by the Soviets, who, in early May, themselves called for a ban on nuclear testing. Although the Russian proposal was quickly rejected by the American side, since it had no provisions for inspection or enforcement, the fact that the Soviets had been first to propose a test ban infuriated Eisenhower.83 Following the failure of the Geneva summit that June, the president encouraged Stassen to wrest the diplomatic initiative from the Russians.84
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In July, Stassen announced the creation of eight blue-ribbon panels to study different aspects of disarmament, including a test ban.85 Hoping to placate conservative critics, the Minnesotan put well-known and respected figures at the head of each group. (Jimmy Doolittle was chairman of one panel; Walt Disney and Charles Lindbergh were among Stassen’s candidates for “disarmament consultant.”)86 To lead the all-important Task Force on Nuclear Inspection, Stassen chose Lawrence. Stassen also asked the various agencies involved—the Pentagon, the AEC, and State Department—to provide “experienced men with brilliant analytical minds” to assist the experts.87
Deeply skeptical of Stassen’s enterprise—as he was, indeed, of any initiative to the Russians—Strauss volunteered McKay Donkin, the “special assistant” he had earlier used to dig up dirt on Oppenheimer, to serve as the commission’s liaison with Lawrence’s task force.88 But Donkin’s real job was to spy on the inspection panel. At Strauss’s urging, Teller and Griggs were also added to Lawrence’s task force, which comprised a dozen scientists, most drawn from RAND and Livermore.89
Stassen had assigned Lawrence’s panel responsibility for devising an effective inspection system to uncover clandestine nuclear explosions, the fatal weakness of every test-ban proposal put forward thus far. Eisenhower hoped to make Lawrence’s scheme the centerpiece of his diplomatic overture to the Russians at the next summit.
Using the cover name Project Alpine, the group met for the first time that fall in Washington, where they received briefings from the CIA, the AEC, and the air force on Russian nuclear capabilities.90 While opinion among the panel’s experts varied as to the feasibility—and desirability—of a test ban, one task force member, York, remembered another, Teller, as being “unabashedly hostile to the whole idea.”91
Lawrence, on the other hand, seemed at least willing to maintain an open mind.92 Stassen scheduled a meeting of all the groups for late October 1955 at the Quantico Marine Base in Virginia, where task force leaders would report on progress.93
Plainly concerned that Lawrence, whether out of sympathy or enthusiasm, might be about to embrace Stassen’s vision of a disarmed world, Strauss advised caution: “All that the man in the street will realize is that a great scientist, inventor of the cyclotron, has accepted this assignment and, because of the stature of his scientific ability, is a magician and will pull the rabbit out of the hat.”94
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Strauss need not have worried. As Donkin assured the AEC chairman, Lawrence’s report to the Quantico conference would be direly pessimistic about the prospects for a test ban. Indeed, Ernest told his peers that a moratorium on testing could be “dangerous” for the United States, since the nation’s technological edge might be lost. His task force had concluded that the Russians would be able not only to test but to produce and stockpile nuclear weapons clandestinely. Unwilling to grant Russian inspectors access to Los Alamos or Livermore, Lawrence’s experts were nonetheless proposing to send tens of thousands of U.S. and UN inspectors to comb the Soviet Union for hidden bombs.95
The plan encountered immediate resistance when it was submitted to Eisenhower and the NSC that December. State Department representatives protested that Lawrence’s task force had a
n “exaggerated idea” of what was required to verify a test ban. An internal AEC study had recently concluded that 7,500 inspectors—not the 20,000 to 30,000 proposed in Lawrence’s report—would be required for the job. (The authors of the AEC report lamented, ironically, that no one from “the Oppenheimer camp” had been on Lawrence’s panel to counter the anti-ban sentiment there.)96
Dulles’s response to the plan was even less diplomatic. The secretary of state told Stassen that Lawrence’s “all-or-nothing proposition,” with its divisions of inspectors and armadas of aircraft and helicopters, “would make the United States a laughing stock” at Geneva.97 Disheartened, Dulles and Eisenhower urged Stassen and Lawrence to “refine” their inspection plan.
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In rejecting Lawrence’s plan, the president observed that there had been “too much talk about too little.”98 Temperamentally at least, Ernest seemed inclined to agree. Moreover, on at least one subject—the Russians—he had begun to split from Strauss.
During an Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva the previous summer, Lawrence and another Alpine recruit, Glenn Seaborg, had invited Soviet physicist V. I. Veksler to dinner at Perle du Lac, a French restaurant near the Palais des Nations.99 Veksler was in Geneva to announce that Russia would soon complete a particle accelerator with twice the power of Berkeley’s Bevatron.100 Ernest and the Russians had gotten on so well that Lawrence urged Veksler to make a long-deferred visit to the Rad Lab.101
Lawrence also surprised colleagues by not lobbying the AEC for an accelerator at Berkeley to match or exceed the Russians’. But age, and illness, had muted Lawrence’s enthusiasm for empire.102 Because of the MTA fiasco, moreover, Brookhaven’s Cosmotron was already more powerful, better funded, and hence more likely to yield the next big discoveries in particle physics.103 Sitting together at a café on the shore of Lake Geneva, drinking beer, Lawrence and his erstwhile collaborator-turned-rival, Stan Livingston, reminisced fondly about times long past.104
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Strauss, by contrast, was feeling besieged. Early in 1956, the AEC chairman found himself under attack by the press, the public, and Congress. “For the first time in my life, I have enemies,” he confided to a friend.105
The midterm election victory that had returned control of Congress to the Democrats had also made Clinton Anderson, a senator hostile to Strauss, the new chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Anderson was openly critical of Strauss for favoring private industry in awarding AEC contracts for nuclear power plants. For Anderson, moreover, there was an even more important issue literally closer to home: radioactive fallout. The New Mexico senator believed that Strauss had shown a cavalier disregard for scientists’ warnings about the harmful effects of nuclear testing in the American Southwest.106
The AEC’s spokesman in the fallout debate was chemist Willard Libby, whom Strauss had picked to replace Smyth on the commission the previous year. Despite Libby’s repeated assurances that radiation from U.S. nuclear tests presented “no basis for concern,” his claims were so often contradicted by other scientists—and, occasionally, by the AEC’s own press releases—that Libby quickly lost effectiveness in the role.107
Even more worrisome to Strauss than his critics outside the commission was the man he viewed as the enemy within: Thomas Murray. The long-simmering tension between the crusading commissioner and the AEC chairman had come to a boil over the same conflict-of-interest issue that irked Anderson: the awarding of AEC contracts. Murray considered the so-called Dixon-Yates deal—in which the commission agreed to buy power in the Southeast from two private utility companies rather than the TVA—another instance where Strauss had exceeded his authority as chairman.108 Verbal exchanges between Murray and Strauss at AEC meetings had become so heated that the secretary sometimes felt compelled to clear others from the room.109
Murray’s latest enthusiasm was an “Atomic Summit,” which he hoped might awaken world leaders to the as-yet-unappreciated consequences of a global thermonuclear war. Murray had urged Eisenhower to invite “an audience representative of all the peoples of the world” to Eniwetok for the next series of U.S. tests, so that they might witness, as he had, the effects of a large H-bomb detonation close up. Libby and Strauss opposed Murray’s demonstration idea as likely to give the Russians vital clues as to the design of America’s weapons.110
After Strauss and Libby beat back Murray’s efforts to amend a blanket AEC pronouncement that testing was safe, the maverick commissioner made the case for his H-bomb test ban before a closed session of Anderson’s Joint Committee.111 Six weeks later, Murray went public with his appeal in open testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Basing his argument unabashedly upon ethics rather than strategy, he claimed that the targeting of Russian cities and civilians was morally unjustifiable.112
Murray’s testimony infuriated Strauss, particularly when Adlai Stevenson, Eisenhower’s likely opponent in the upcoming presidential election, adopted the test-ban issue as his own less than two weeks later.113 Stevenson echoed Murray’s call for a unilateral end to multimegaton H-bomb tests.114 Desperately seeking a way to counter Stevenson’s initiative, Eisenhower announced a few days later that the next series of U.S. nuclear explosions in the Pacific—Operation Redwing—would include tests aimed at perfecting the clean bomb.
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Like a Wild West shoot-out, Redwing would also determine which of the two nuclear labs would get the assignment to develop the warhead for the country’s first intercontinental-range ballistic missile, the Atlas. Strategists were already calling the hypersonic, H-bomb-tipped ICBM the “ultimate weapon.”115
Bradbury showed little heart for the coming contest. The previous fall the Los Alamos director had given the AEC notice that, in his view, the art of nuclear weapons design had already entered a rococo phase. Indeed, Bradbury thought the future of the bomb looked “unrewarding.”116
Livermore, on the other hand, anticipated Redwing with unbridled enthusiasm. Ignoring Eisenhower’s injunction that the United States would never again have a nuclear test as powerful as Bravo, York talked of exploding a 20-megaton device somewhere over Alaska’s Brooks Range. (York abandoned the plan after being informed that the airplane dropping the bomb might not be able to escape the explosion.)117 At the request of hawkish members of the Joint Committee, Livermore’s director also promised to look into the feasibility of “atomic grenades.” (They would be “too heavy to throw,” York subsequently reported.)118
Boasting that it bred racehorses—compared to Los Alamos’s workhorses—Livermore particularly looked forward to the debut of its candidate for the clean bomb, a test code-named Zuni.
Zuni was detonated in the predawn hours of May 28, 1956. The bomb gouged a half-mile-wide crater out of Bikini atoll’s Eninman Island and cast some 3 million cubic yards of vaporized rock and coral into the stratosphere. Although the test was considered successful—more than 80 percent of the bomb’s yield came from fusion—Zuni still rained radiation over a broad expanse of ocean. In what at first seemed likely to be a repeat of the Lucky Dragon incident, another Japanese vessel, the freighter Mizuho Maru, and its crew were downwind of the explosion and received a dusting of fallout.119
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Hoping to make political capital from the clean bomb test, Strauss announced in a press release that Redwing had produced “much of importance not only from a military point of view but from a humanitarian aspect.”120 To the AEC chairman’s dismay, his comment created its own firestorm. Murray cited it as further evidence that Strauss intended to ignore the opinions of the other commissioners.121 Test-ban supporters publicly ridiculed the notion of “humanitarian H-bombs.”122
Eisenhower, too, was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the man whom Stevenson had identified as Ike’s “chief atomic energy adviser.”123 Pressed by his Democratic rival again on the test ban that fall, Eisenhower scolded Strauss for not coming up with new ideas: “We’ve just got to get going here. And you haven’
t done much.”124
But Strauss remained secure in the knowledge that there seemed little alternative to the status quo. Stassen’s ill-timed support of a “dump Nixon” movement had alienated Eisenhower as well as the vice president. Testifying before Congress that spring, the AEC chairman had stubbornly refused even to discuss what inspection measures might be necessary for a test ban, citing security as his reason.125
While Lawrence and his experts had meanwhile made some progress, reducing the number of on-site inspectors to a fraction of their original estimate—6,890 to be exact—it was still too large a force to likely be accepted by the Russians.126 The day after Zuni, Lawrence and other members of his task force met with Stassen in Washington to discuss the upcoming strategy for Geneva.
Flanked by Teller and Mark Mills, an associate director at Livermore, Lawrence informed Stassen without preamble that the task force “had not changed its views at all” and still opposed setting any limits to testing.127 Teller reminded the group of Livermore’s continuing work on the clean bomb. Although he challenged Teller’s assumption that any limitations on testing would necessarily benefit the Russians, Stassen reluctantly agreed not to raise the test ban as a separate issue with the Soviets at Geneva.
It was Stevenson who made the test ban an unavoidable issue in the presidential campaign a few weeks later. In a speech to the American Legion’s annual convention, the Democratic nominee cited Murray in support of his claim that the United States could already detect H-bomb tests “anywhere.”128
Anxious to counter Stevenson, who had already received endorsements from Smyth and other prominent scientists, Strauss issued a press release claiming that the fallout threat was “vague, unproven,” and in any case secondary to “the more immediate and infinitely greater dangers of defeat and perhaps obliteration” at the hands of the Russians.”129
