Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  Bethe did not hesitate to blame the AEC and Livermore for putting obstacles in the way of the test ban. He and Killian had already advised Stassen that U.S. negotiators “had been sold a bill of goods” by Lawrence’s task force.44

  In early April, Bethe and Killian reported to the president and the National Security Council on the results of the PSAC study.45 What Bethe proposed was a far more modest and less intrusive inspection system than that outlined by Lawrence. Instead of several hundred monitoring stations, manned by thousands of inspectors, Bethe’s “practical detection system” called for an even 100 stations worldwide, 70 of which would be behind the Iron Curtain. Augmented by aircraft, orbiting satellites, and a handful of ships, his system, Bethe argued, would make it possible to detect any militarily significant nuclear explosions underground, underwater, or in space.46

  The next day the Russians, as expected, declared that they were suspending nuclear tests indefinitely and invited the United States to do the same. While Eisenhower felt compelled to publicly dismiss the Soviet overture as “a side issue” and “a gimmick,” a few days later he proposed that both sides send technical experts to Geneva, to discuss methods of monitoring a test ban.47

  While PSAC and Bethe’s panel had thus far avoided giving advice on whether a test ban or moratorium was in the nation’s interest—believing the question to be more political than technical in nature—Killian argued that Eisenhower deserved the advice of those he called “his scientists” on such an important matter. In order to discuss that question away from the pressures of Washington, the science adviser scheduled the next gathering of PSAC at Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico.

  On April 17, 1958, following the Ramey meeting, Killian reported to Eisenhower and the NSC that a test ban would be “greatly to the advantage of the United States.”48 While the president’s scientists thought it impractical to cancel the next series of U.S. nuclear tests—Operation Hardtack was scheduled to begin in just four days—PSAC urged Ike to seek a moratorium on testing immediately upon Hardtack’s conclusion.49

  Voting for the first time on a question before them, PSAC members at Ramey had been all-but-unanimous in endorsing a ban. Only York—de facto the labs’ representative on the committee—abstained. After a day of coaxing by other PSAC members, however, York, too, voted for a ban. At Livermore, Teller branded York’s turnabout “traitorous.”50

  * * *

  Rumors that Eisenhower might cancel Hardtack before it began sparked a near panic at the California lab.51 Less than a week after Sputnik, the Pentagon had restored funds cut from the budget for Polaris, the navy’s new submarine-launched ballistic missile. As the Nobska study had predicted and Polaris proved, a second generation of intercontinental-range missiles—smaller, more concealable, and quicker to fire—was already waiting in the wings.52

  Work at Livermore on the miniature warhead for the Polaris, the W-47, had likewise been sped up.53 Development tests of the device dominated the Livermore shots scheduled for Hardtack and were anxiously awaited at the lab.54

  By contrast, the “open shot” of a clean bomb that Lawrence proposed to carry out before a crowd of international observers was regarded with a mixture of disdain and amusement by weaponeers at both labs. (“If you require Japanese lanterns or potted palms as part of the decor please let us know,” a sympathetic Los Alamos physicist wrote his counterpart at Livermore.)55 Bradbury hardly bothered to hide his contempt for what he decried as an empty public relations exercise and a “Roman holiday.”56

  Because of the need to test the W-47’s components, Hardtack had grown to thirty-five shots—ten more than the number that “appalled” Eisenhower when Strauss had outlined the series the previous summer. Two of the recently added tests were multimegaton, high-altitude explosions that Lawrence had requested to try out new detection techniques for Alpine.57

  Another series of experiments, deemed both vital and urgent, was meant to be the trial of yet another concept for an emergency missile defense, the brainchild of Nick Christofilos—a brilliant but eccentric Livermore physicist whom colleagues described as an “idea factory.” Christofilos theorized that enemy missiles might be rendered harmless in flight if hundreds of nuclear weapons were exploded above them, in space, where a temporary cordon sanitaire of high-energy electrons would scramble the missiles’ warheads and delicate electronics.58

  Operation Argus—the test of the so-called Christofilos effect—would be carried out in secret, partly as a trial of Teller’s hypothesis that nuclear explosions could go undetected in space.59

  So busy was Livermore with the W-47, the clean-bomb demonstration, and Argus, that Starbird worried the workload at the lab might be “approaching criticality.”60 Adding to the stress was the fact that York, virtually on the eve of Hardtack, had left the lab to head up a newly created civilian research office at the Pentagon.

  York’s departure prompted Teller to ask Lawrence for permission to take over leadership of the California lab until Hardtack was completed. Lawrence agreed to let Edward take the reins, on the condition that he yield them after a year to Mark Mills, whom Ernest had already picked as York’s successor.61 In early April 1958, Teller officially assumed the role that many believed he had occupied de facto since the start of the lab: director of Livermore.62

  * * *

  That spring at Los Alamos, Bradbury was complaining that his laboratory had “lost control of its destiny in the weapon business”—largely because of Livermore.63 His chief worry, Bradbury advised Starbird, was that unless Los Alamos transformed itself into “a factory-sort of business,” it would be judged “less ‘enthusiastic’” than Livermore: “We can do the weapons described in the laboratory program, but is it really the right thing for the country? I don’t know.”

  Bradbury’s crisis of confidence caused him to take an altogether different view of a temporary ban on testing than Teller and Livermore. For his lab, Bradbury wrote, “the thought of a moratorium, cast in the proper context, is not too painful.”

  The ennui at Los Alamos found a mirror in Lawrence’s situation at Berkeley. Although it had been several months since his last serious bout with colitis, the disease had taken a visible toll. Not quite fifty-seven, Lawrence’s shock of blond hair, while still full, had turned gray. Ernest’s famous grin, though undiminished, was set in a face going slack and jowly.

  Perhaps the most notable change, however, was the fading of Lawrence’s legendary energy. Longtime friends were stunned to hear him talk of retirement. (Asked by Ernest and John to scout out some land in northeastern California for a ranch, a friend was struck by its barrenness: “It wouldn’t raise three jackrabbits an acre. They only liked it because it reminded them of South Dakota.”)64

  Ernest had also been forced to abandon his dream of riches from his color-TV invention when Paramount sold the Chromatics production facility in Emeryville to Litton, which promptly converted it to making military radars. The venture that had begun with such enthusiasm and the financial support of Loomis and Gaither never produced a commercial product.*65

  Even at Livermore, Lawrence had begun to seem only a detached spectator—a victim of changing times. As was now evident to all, research that produced weapons was of far more interest to Lawrence’s government patrons than the basic science that went on at Berkeley.66 The man who had long been Ernest’s biggest booster on campus—Jack Neylan—had resigned from the regents in 1955, following a final row with Sproul over the handling of a labor dispute at Livermore.67

  The GAC had meanwhile decreed, pointedly, that machines costing tens of millions of dollars to build and $1 million or more annually to operate were “too large for single universities.”68 An AEC-sponsored report on the future of the national labs might have had Lawrence in mind when it warned about the aging of the laboratory directors.69

  Lawrence’s fatigue was reflected as well in his changed attitude toward physics. When a twenty-year veteran of the Rad Lab asked Ernest what he had in mind to supplan
t the Bevatron, the answer surprised him. The era of big machines was probably over, Lawrence reflected, since the energies employed were already “so far beyond human scale.”70 “I’m in favor of doing the science but you should do it more slowly,” Lawrence had told York during a recent visit to Washington.71

  At the Rad Lab itself, the political passions aroused a decade earlier by the loyalty oath had also long since cooled. All of the nonsigners fired during the controversy had been quietly offered their jobs back—including even David Feldman, the physicist whom Lawrence had once accused Oppenheimer of trying to “plant” on him. Like Feldman, not all accepted the invitation.72

  Ironically, Alvarez, once Lawrence’s protégé, had lately become one of his most vocal critics at the lab. Angered when his own experiments did not receive priority on the Bevatron, Luie hinted darkly about reporting his former mentor to the AEC for misappropriating federal funds. Upset as well by what he viewed as Ernest’s increasing conservatism in science, Alvarez had formed an alliance instead with Stanford’s Pief Panofsky, one of the young physicists who had been driven away by the oath controversy.73

  Lawrence had even recently informed Sproul that he was thinking about stepping down as Rad Lab director, the position he had held for more than twenty years.74 To Birge, already retired, Ernest spoke wistfully of someday returning to LeConte, so that he might putter around again in his own small laboratory.

  The loss of close friends and longtime associates had also given Lawrence a heightened sense of his own mortality. The premature death, from cancer, of Bernard Rossi, an early operator of the 60-inch, was seen by many at the Rad Lab as an ominous harbinger of tragedies to come. “It appears that time is beginning to catch up with all of us,” wrote a Berkeley colleague to Joseph Hamilton on the occasion of Rossi’s death.75 Less than a year later, Hamilton, too, was dead, at age forty-nine the victim of leukemia.76 Shortly thereafter, Lawrence advised Molly’s mother against daily x-ray treatments following cancer surgery.77

  But the death that affected Lawrence most was that of Mark Mills, the man whom Ernest had chosen to be York’s heir apparent. Mills was killed a week later, in a helicopter crash at the Pacific proving grounds. Fearful that any delay might give opponents an excuse to cancel Hardtack, he had ignored the regulation forbidding nighttime flights in order to fix a diagnostics problems at an outlying atoll: ground zero for the first Hardtack test. The helicopter had run into a sudden squall on the return flight and crashed near a reef. Both pilots and another physicist escaped; Mills, trapped in the craft under twelve feet of water, drowned.78

  Concerned that word of Mills’s death might prompt a recurrence of Lawrence’s colitis, Rad Lab colleagues tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the news from him. Shortly after writing John that he felt “fit as a fiddle,” Ernest was struck by an attack of severe bleeding that left him weak and pale. He left Berkeley to spend several days recuperating at the house on Balboa Island, returning in time for Mills’s funeral.79

  * * *

  While there was no outward sign that Lawrence’s views on the test ban had changed since he, Teller, and Mills appeared before Eisenhower in the Oval Office, at the final meeting of the Alpine task force, in March 1957, only Lawrence and Stassen had sounded an optimistic note. But Ernest, who said on that occasion that he favored a “reasonable limitation” of testing, had yet to define what that was.80

  A year later, whatever hopes that Lawrence might have had for putting reasonable limits on testing seemed pinned not on talks in London or Geneva but on personal diplomacy. During the Alpine meetings, Lawrence had spoken to Stassen of “disarming personalities” and a “common sense approach” should formal negotiations fail and the Russians reject the U.S. inspection plan. He told Stassen that a broadening of scientific and cultural exchanges between the two countries might even “break down the Iron Curtain.”81

  The possibility that a diplomatic breakthrough could come about from face-to-face contact between American and Soviet physicists was also a subject that Lawrence had discussed with Admiral Chick Hayward, Ernest’s host for a trip around Cape Horn onboard the aircraft carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt in summer 1956. Hayward thought Lawrence not only enthusiastic about but even obsessed with the idea of meeting his opposite numbers in the Soviet Union.82

  During subsequent visits to the East Coast, Loomis and Gaither were likewise surprised—and even alarmed—by the intensity of Ernest’s expressions of faith that he could get to the Russians through their scientists.83

  At Berkeley, Lawrence had taken to giving visiting Soviet physicists personal tours of the Rad Lab. When the State Department vetoed a planned dinner for the Russians at Trader Vic’s, Ernest barbequed hot dogs at home for his guests. Although Lawrence was forced to turn down a reciprocal invitation from the Soviet Academy of Sciences—to the relief of J. Edgar Hoover—he again played host late in 1957, taking four Russian scientists on a driving tour of the California coast.84 Another visit, by a Soviet chemist in spring 1958, kept such contacts alive.85 He found the Russian scientists “very friendly and normal,” Ernest had informed Stassen.86

  Strauss was likewise aware of and disturbed by Lawrence’s contacts with the Russians. But the clipped warning that Donkin sent the AEC chairman on the final Alpine meeting had undoubtedly been a new cause for alarm: “Lawrence et al unanimously agreed that nuclear tests should be limited at earliest date with or without an armament agreement.”87

  * * *

  In early May 1958, when Khrushchev accepted his proposal for a conference of experts on the test ban, Eisenhower lost no time, instructing Killian to schedule the talks for that summer in Geneva. (He had “never been too much impressed, or completely convinced by the views expressed by Drs. Teller, Lawrence, and Mills that we must continue testing of nuclear weapons,” Ike told his stunned science adviser.)88 On May 21, while on vacation in Yosemite, Lawrence learned that he was one of those chosen by the president to represent the United States.

  Ernest was the compromise candidate.89 Although Strauss had campaigned strenuously to have Teller at the talks, Edward was plainly anathema to Eisenhower, Dulles, and Killian. The significance of the choice of the other two scientists picked for the American team was also surely not lost upon Strauss. Robert Bacher and James Fisk, the delegation’s leader, had both testified strongly in Oppie’s defense at the 1954 hearings. Initially disappointed not to be among those chosen for the U.S. delegation—“Adm. Strauss saw to that”—Bethe was nonetheless pleased to be appointed a consultant to the group. Harold Brown was also made a consultant at Geneva, as was Strauss’s personal assistant, Jack Morse.

  Still, the AEC chairman looked to the forthcoming talks with undisguised dread. “Nothing good has ever come out of Geneva,” Strauss told journalist Clare Boothe Luce.90

  * * *

  Strauss, too, was now facing an end of sorts. “Just as a ship too long at sea collects barnacles,” he told the president, “the hostility of a small but vocal coterie” made it unlikely that he could continue to serve as AEC chairman. Clinton Anderson held an “almost pathological dislike” for him, Strauss admitted to Eisenhower.91

  Anderson had already made it plain that Strauss would face an uphill confirmation battle should he be reappointed by the president.92 Strauss told Ike that he planned to step down at the end of June. Eisenhower picked engineer and investment banker John McCone to replace him.93

  Strauss, however, had not so much yielded the field as simply decided to direct his campaign against the test ban from a different vantage point: behind the scenes. At his request, he was appointed a special consultant to the Atoms for Peace program by Eisenhower, a role that allowed him to attend NSC meetings whenever nuclear matters were discussed.

  By that summer, there may also have been a nagging concern in Strauss’s mind about where Lawrence’s ultimate loyalties lay. With the start of the Geneva talks and the end of his own government service only a week away, he sent Lawrence this “parting thought”: “No matt
er how eminent the Russian scientists are or how persuasive, never let yourself forget that they are the envoys of men who are cold-blooded murderers. Deal with them with reserve.”94

  * * *

  Although left exhausted by the travel and late-night briefings required as preparation for the technical talks at Geneva, Lawrence ignored the entreaties of Molly and John that he decline the president’s summons for reasons of health.95 Indeed, as the prospect of meeting with his Soviet counterparts neared, Ernest’s enthusiasm and vitality actually seemed to return. “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble with the Russians,” he told a Rad Lab colleague before embarking on his last trip to Washington.96

  Stopping off en route to see Arthur Compton, in a St. Louis hospital recuperating from a heart attack, Lawrence justified his unscientist-like willingness to see limits put on nuclear experiments as the price that had to be paid for control of the arms race.97 In Washington, Lawrence paid a visit to his boyhood friend, Carnegie Institution physicist Merle Tuve. “We helped start this and have to do what we can about it,” he told Tuve.98 On June 27, 1958, Ernest and Molly boarded a Swissair flight for Geneva.

  * * *

  Hardtack had meanwhile gotten off to an inauspicious start, while preparations for the Geneva conference were still under way.99 Nearly half of the devices exploded in April and May had given lower-than-expected yields. Two of the prototype clean bombs fired by Los Alamos and Livermore had been outright fizzles.100

  Reporting on Hardtack’s failures to Eisenhower in mid-June, Bethe noted that they “may show that we are close to the limit of what we can attain in ‘cleanness’ of weapons.”101 He also informed the president of what was surely, for both, a much keener disappointment: the most recent Russian tests had fixed the previous flaw in Soviet ICBM warheads. The opportunity for deploying Rabi and Bethe’s missile defense shield had passed.

  Hardtack’s troubles even extended to Pinon, the proposed clean-bomb demonstration. After only five of the fourteen invited countries agreed to send observers, Pinon had been postponed to the end of July.102 In late June, four AEC division heads wrote to the commission’s general manager urging that the test be canceled. As they pointed out, the so-called clean bomb would produce many times the fallout of the weapon that had been dropped on Hiroshima. But fallout was not their only—or even their primary—concern: