Brotherhood of the Bomb
Page 41
Conceding that voters might find a response by experts more persuasive, Strauss and Cutler enlisted the aid of a dozen scientists, led by Libby, who met with Eisenhower in late October. The group subsequently issued their own press release, lamenting “the injection into a political campaign of statements and conclusions which extend beyond … existing scientific evidence.”130
But Strauss was not content to stop there.131 Mindful of the merciless moot-court grilling he had undergone from Neylan years earlier, Lawrence had hitherto refused to make any public statements on the test ban or the fallout debate, although his own views on radiation had hardly changed in that time. (Ernest continued to shun routine dental and medical x-rays. Molly, who shared his concerns, had recently led a successful campaign to ban the portable x-ray machines that were popular with children in Bay Area shoe stores.)132
But Lawrence may also have felt a residual debt to Strauss, particularly in light of his last-minute failure to testify in the Oppenheimer case.
On the evening of November 4, 1956, Lawrence summoned the head of the university’s press office, Dan Wilkes, to his Berkeley home. Wilkes was surprised to encounter another visitor, Teller. Ernest—who was “feeling no pain,” Wilkes later recalled—asked the former newspaperman to draft a press release in response to Stevenson. Teller’s version, Wilkes and Lawrence both agreed, was “too long and said too much.”133
Lawrence and Teller finally signed a brief statement which Wilkes wrote and telephoned to the wire services that night. It appeared in newspapers around the country the following morning, election day. In three numbered points, the statement proclaimed that there were “no sure methods of detecting nuclear weapons tests,” that continued testing was necessary to maintain the country’s arsenal, and that the radioactivity produced by nuclear testing was “insignificant.”134
19
A CROSS OF ATOMS
TWO WEEKS AFTER his victory in the 1956 election, Eisenhower endorsed a new initiative by Stassen to separate the test-ban negotiations from the seemingly interminable disarmament talks.1 With Stevenson’s defeat, the most outspoken advocate in Washington of a ban on the testing of big bombs remained Thomas Murray.
In his latest crusade, the evangelical commissioner sought to amend the AEC’s Weapons Effects Handbook, the most recent version of which described the explosion of a hypothetical 100-megaton superbomb. Murray hoped to discourage even consideration of such a weapon by limiting the descriptions to only such weapons as were already planned for the U.S. arsenal.2
But Murray’s Jesuitical distinctions concerning what he called “rational nuclear armament” were little understood by the public, and completely unappreciated by Strauss and the president. “He ought to be locked up. I think he is off his rocker,” a furious Ike told Strauss following Murray’s appearance before the Joint Committee early in 1957. After Strauss blocked a study—proposed by Murray—of the effects of an all-out nuclear war, the Democrat persuaded his allies on the committee to hold open hearings on the subject.3 Having tried—but failed—to have Murray’s security clearance revoked, Strauss told Eisenhower that he, too, was patiently marking the days on his calendar until June 30, 1957, when Murray’s term on the commission would expire.4
Murray, however, was determined to go down fighting. He had begun writing, in secret, what was intended to be a kind of political last testament. It was also, and no less, his parting shot at Strauss. Having arranged for the article to appear in Life magazine, Murray negotiated last-minute editorial changes from a pay telephone a block away from the AEC building—lest Strauss learn of the project via a bug in Murray’s office. (As Murray pointed out to an aide, Life publisher Henry Luce was a friend of Strauss, and the AEC chairman also served on the Board of Directors for a distillery that was a major advertiser in the magazine.)5
Appearing in the May 6, 1957, issue, “Reliance on H-bomb and Its Dangers” was a final warning against the allure of “the big cheap bomb.” Haunting the article was an apocalyptic vision of an all-out nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union—what Murray called “the three-hour war.”6
* * *
At Livermore, the test ban was likewise a growing concern, but for altogether different reasons. Despite the lab’s successes in Redwing, its future was still far from assured. The previous summer, the contract for the Atlas warhead had gone to Los Alamos. Although the clean bomb was still a priority at the lab, there was as yet no formal military requirement for the innovative designs coming out of Brown’s A Division.7 Livermore’s big bombs had yet to find a patron.
Teller, Brown, and Foster undoubtedly had this fact in mind when they attended a navy-sponsored scientific conference at Nobska Point, near Woods Hole, Massachusetts, in summer 1956. The meeting had been called to consider a variety of defense projects, but the scientists eventually focused upon a new kind of weapon—one that, not long before, had seemed only on the distant horizon: a submarine-launched ballistic missile.8
The rocket under consideration was a behemoth. To carry Los Alamos’s 1-megaton warhead, it would have to be almost five stories tall, weighing 80 tons. Too large to fit inside the submarine, a pair of the missiles would be borne in bulky compartments welded to the sub’s hull. The navy looked to Nobska’s experts for a better solution.
Because of his colleagues’ youth and inexperience, Teller spoke for Livermore. At a brainstorming session on July 20, Edward stood up to make a dramatic announcement. The navy, he suggested, had it backward: rather than build a bigger missile, it should make a smaller warhead. Teller’s remarks drew murmurs of surprise and then incredulity when he promised that Livermore could give the navy a miniature 1-megaton warhead, barely 1 foot across and weighing only 600 pounds, within five years. Teller’s bomb would be less than half the size of the smallest and lightest device that the Los Alamos lab had yet produced with comparable yield.
Teller’s promise was hardly a surprise to Brown and Foster, who had originated the recent ideas at Livermore for shrinking the size of superbombs.9 But a multitude of experiments in Nevada and the Pacific would be necessary just to prove the feasibility of the lilliputian H-bomb. A ban on nuclear testing at such a critical juncture, on the other hand, would stop Livermore in its tracks.
* * *
By early 1957, the clean bomb, still Livermore’s first priority, had become the AEC’s chief argument for continued testing.10 At the same time, recent developments at the Kremlin had given Eisenhower renewed hope for progress on the test ban. The consolidation of power in the hands of a relatively young and reform-minded leader, Nikita Khrushchev, was followed in mid-June by a Soviet proposal for a moratorium on nuclear testing lasting two to three years. Khrushchev had also accepted—“in principle”—on-site inspection of a test ban.11 On Wednesday, June 19, 1957, Eisenhower announced that he would be “perfectly delighted” to see an end to nuclear testing.12
The following day, Lawrence, Teller, and Mark Mills, the head of Livermore’s theoretical division, appeared before a subcommittee chaired by the Joint Committee’s Senator Henry Jackson. Jackson had called the session to discuss increasing plutonium production at Hanford. Within the first few minutes, however, Teller steered the discussion around to the clean bomb. Experiments then under way in Nevada, Edward claimed, would prove the feasibility of building small, highly efficient weapons. But bombs that were virtually fallout-free awaited further tests in the Pacific. At Jackson’s prompting, the trio agreed to make their case for the clean bomb before the full Joint Committee the following day.13
In the wake of Teller’s briefing, Republicans on the committee wondered aloud whether Eisenhower and Stassen knew of the various ways that the Russians might secretly violate a moratorium. While Lawrence remained mum about Alpine, Teller replied that the administration was probably unfamiliar with the latest thinking on how the Soviets could cheat. In a telephone call to the White House, Sterling Cole arranged a meeting with the president for Monday. Lawrence, Teller,
and Mills spent the weekend at a Washington hotel, being prepped by Strauss.14
Accompanied by the AEC chairman, the physicists were ushered into the Oval Office on the afternoon of June 24. Lawrence—“all tight and excited,” Teller later recalled—was literally tongue-tied in the presence of Eisenhower. (“This awe was something I just could not imagine. Ernest’s ease with authority had always been assumed; the Regents to him were like close friends.”)15 Seizing the opportunity, Teller told the president that additional testing would dramatically reduce the radiation caused by multimegaton weapons and might even eliminate fallout altogether. The resulting bombs could then be used for peaceful purposes: to excavate harbors, modify the weather, or liberate oil and gas trapped deep underground.16
Finding his voice at last, Lawrence chimed in with a suggestion: Eisenhower might wish to invite UN observers to a future clean bomb test in the Pacific, so that the world could see the progress that was being made.17
While no one could disagree with the technical points they had made, Ike told the group, opposition to testing at home and abroad was gathering momentum. He feared that the country risked being “crucified on a cross of atoms.”18
The impact of the physicists’ visit was evident in a telephone call that Eisenhower made to Dulles the next morning. Complaining that Teller had make “it look like a crime to ban tests,” Ike said he had been persuaded that the “real peaceful use of atomic science” depended upon clean bombs.19 Later that day, Dulles sent an “eyes only” cable to Stassen, in London for the latest disarmament talks, apprising him of the changed situation in Washington: “You should know that this conversation made deep impression on President and that since then he has had serious mental reservations as to the correctness of our proposal to suspend testing.”20
Teller and Strauss had once complained that whenever they opened a door in Washington they found Oppenheimer behind it. Wrote Lilienthal in his diary that fall: “Teller’s is now the featured face (instead of Oppenheimer’s) in the role of Scientific Statesman.”21
* * *
Jubilant that “everything has worked out as we had hoped it would,” Strauss sent a letter congratulating the Livermore scientists for their “performance.”22 Strauss’s aide, navy captain Jack Morse, echoed this praise in his own personal note to Teller and Lawrence: “The situation called for over-selling rather than under-selling, particularly when a simple statement could not possibly cover all the complexities involved.”23
That the trio had oversold the clean bomb was hardly subject to doubt. Memos that York had been sending to the AEC for months indicated that a typical reduced-radiation weapon would have only half the yield of a standard H-bomb but would weigh considerably more.24 Lawrence, Teller, and Mills had neglected to inform Eisenhower of a dirty little secret behind the clean bomb: its increased size and decreased yield made it no better suited for tactical use on the battlefield—the very role that promoters like Murray envisioned—than old-fashioned fission bombs.25
Likewise worried that the Livermore physicists had exaggerated the clean bomb’s potential, the head of the AEC’s Division of Military Application, Army General Alfred Starbird, interrogated York for several hours on the subject immediately following the June 24 meeting. “He is the man who must develop the weapon and is a man who is generally most optimistic,” Starbird subsequently wrote Strauss in a secret report.26 But even York had warned that a tactical clean bomb was still several years away—and “this would be based on very lucky breaks.”
There was a “great danger,” Starbird cautioned Strauss, that the public “will get mistaken ideas as to how soon we shall have clean weapons and in what types.”27
* * *
But Strauss was no longer the only one to whom Ike could turn for advice on the bomb. After stepping down from the General Advisory Committee, Rabi had become chairman of the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization when DuBridge resigned that post the previous year. Once almost moribund, its members on the verge of resigning, the committee had experienced a resurgence of influence under Rabi’s leadership.28 While president of Columbia University, Ike had learned to rely upon the street-smart Rabi to mediate disputes between the administration and the faculty.29
Moreover, that fall an unexpected event caused the stock of the fifty-nine-year-old Rabi and his committee to soar.
The Soviets’ launch of the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite on October 4, 1957, caught most of official Washington flat-footed.30 Informed by a young AEC aide that the Russians had a new satellite, Strauss initially thought that the Soviets had added another country to their empire. “Where?” he asked, ashen-faced. “There,” replied the aide cheerily, pointing skyward.31
Belated and clumsy efforts by the administration to dismiss the Soviet achievement as a “neat technical trick” and a “silly bauble” only heightened public concern. Asked at a congressional hearing what he expected to find on the Moon, Teller replied with sullen insolence: “Russians.”32
Official disclaimers aside, however, Sputnik had provoked a surprisingly prompt and decisive response from Eisenhower. Following an Oval Office meeting in mid-October, the president asked Rabi to draft the charter for a new advisory committee of scientists, one that would report to him directly.33
* * *
Before he would complete that task, Rabi and Hans Bethe sent Eisenhower an “eyes only” memo on October 28, outlining plans for an impenetrable shield in space against Russian rockets. Rabi’s prospective missile shield relied upon a recently discovered vulnerability in Soviet thermonuclear warheads. This fatal flaw had been uncovered in the analysis of debris from the most recent Russian explosions by Bethe, who headed the committee that analyzed foreign nuclear tests for the AEC. If the United States detonated its own nuclear bombs in the path of incoming Soviet missiles at a critical point in their trajectory, Rabi explained in the memo, enemy warheads could be made to explode prematurely, and harmlessly, in space.34
Bethe’s remarkable discovery justified not only “priority development” of the emergency anti-ICBM system he described, Rabi argued, but also consideration “of securing immediately a world-wide moratorium on nuclear explosions.”35
Old wounds that had never healed were reopened when Eisenhower summoned Rabi and Strauss to his office the following morning to discuss the proposal. Rabi’s space shield was temporarily forgotten as emotions that had lain dormant since the Oppenheimer hearing came to the fore.36 Ignoring Strauss, Rabi told Eisenhower that “it had been a great mistake for the President to accept the views of Drs. Teller and Lawrence” on the clean bomb, and “a tragedy” that nuclear testing had not been banned before the last Russian series was completed.37 His own temper rising, Strauss replied that he was “inclined to question some of [Rabi’s] assumptions and conclusions”—since “the Soviets can always steal our secrets.”
Puzzled by the high feeling in the room, Eisenhower asked whether there was not mutual respect among the atomic scientists. Rabi answered simply that he and Teller had known each other for more than twenty years.
The meeting ended abruptly and inconclusively. While admitting that he was sympathetic to an immediate ban on testing, Eisenhower worried about how such “a complete, sudden reversal in our position” would be greeted by our allies. Ike asked Strauss and Rabi to assemble a blue-ribbon panel of scientists to study the matter further.
“I learned that some of the mutual antagonisms among the scientists are so bitter as to make their working together almost an impossibility,” Ike wrote in his private journal that evening. “I was told that Dr. Rabi and some of his group are so antagonistic to Doctors Lawrence and Teller that communication between them is practically nil.”38
* * *
By early 1958, Eisenhower’s personal science adviser was ensconced in the old Executive Office Building next to the White House. Soft-spoken, pragmatic, and even “disarmingly pleasant,” MIT president James Killian was nonetheless already a
Washington insider: Killian had headed the top-secret study that, three years earlier, had recommended both the U-2 spy plane and reconnaissance satellites.
But Killian, too, was surprised to discover how much the ghosts of the past haunted his new office.39 Invited to lunch by Strauss, Killian was stunned when the AEC chairman asked that he promise not to reopen the question of Oppenheimer’s security clearance. (“On matters of this sort, Strauss could become emotional,” Killian wrote in his memoirs.)40
Killian and the inaugural members of what was now, pointedly, the President’s Science Advisory Committee, were prompt to recognize their opportunity. For almost a year, the U.S. negotiating position had been in disarray at Geneva. Following a failed bid for the governorship of Pennsylvania, the unpredictable Stassen had launched an ill-fated diplomatic initiative of his own. The overture succeeded only in alienating U.S. allies and, with them, Eisenhower and Dulles. By the start of the new year, with Ike’s gentle urging, Stassen was preparing to resign.41
At an NSC meeting called on January 6, 1958, to discuss the latest Russian proposal, Killian volunteered PSAC’s help with the test ban—noting that his committee had already started to look into the matter on its own. Eisenhower and Dulles seized the offer like a life preserver in heavy seas.42
Killian’s choice to lead PSAC’s study was Bethe, who was instructed to look not only at the wisdom and feasibility of a test ban but also at its potential impact upon the nuclear labs. (Warned by Strauss and the Pentagon that a test ban would turn Los Alamos and Livermore into “ghost towns,” Eisenhower had responded acidly that he “thought scientists, like other people, have a strong interest in avoiding nuclear war.”)43