Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  The Pinon weapon is so large that it clearly will not illustrate the cleanliness of tactical defensive weapons, development of which we have stressed in reference to Hardtack and in other statements of policy with respect to testing. What Pinon will do is to show not how “clean” is a nuclear weapon, but rather how “dirty” is a high yield thermonuclear weapon.103

  As the AEC’s head of public relations warned Starbird, Pinon would “disclose that we have made essentially no progress in our attempts to reduce substantially the size of feasible clean weapons.”104

  * * *

  At Geneva’s Palais de Nations, eleventh-hour demands by the Russians had raised doubts whether the Soviet delegation would even show up. The test-ban negotiations were set to begin in an atmosphere “of no nonsense, no politics, and not much hope,” Time magazine reported on July 1, 1958. Still travel weary, Lawrence felt well enough by that weekend to attend a reception sponsored by CERN, Europe’s nuclear research center.

  In the garden of the Hotel du Rhône, Ernest encountered Robert Oppenheimer, in Geneva for the CERN meeting. The unexpected meeting, while brief, was neither strained nor unpleasant for either man, Oppie later remembered: “There was, I would say, a sense of disengagement, but certainly not hostility.”105 It was the last time the two men would see each other.

  At Gaither’s expense, Lawrence had brought along a Russian-speaking engineer from Berkeley, Leo Tichvinsky. Ernest hoped to use Tichvinsky as a facilitator as well as a translator in his personal meetings with the Russians. Lawrence most looked forward to meeting his opposite number on the Russian side, physical chemist Nikolai Semenov, the sole Nobel prize–winner on the Soviet delegation.106

  In an effort to persuade the Russians not to walk out of the talks, Lawrence had drafted a so-called break statement—a brief speech to be used in the event that negotiations seemed about to collapse. He planned to address his plea to Semenov, asking the Russian, as a fellow Nobel laureate, not to abandon the negotiations for the sake of both their countries, and the world.107

  Ernest’s appeal turned out to be unnecessary; the Russians stayed. But his attitude was already a concern to Ron Spiers, the foreign service officer whom the State Department had appointed a liaison with the U.S. delegation. Spiers cabled Washington: “Lawrence is like a little boy, indiscriminately enthusiastic. When the Russians handed their agenda across the table, they gave copies to Fisk and Lawrence. The latter quickly glanced over it, nodded his head happily and said ‘that’s good. Very good.’ I shuddered and tried to get a copy.”108

  Although relieved that his prepared speech to Semenov proved unnecessary, Lawrence was disappointed when the latter brushed aside his subsequent attempts at conversation, apologizing that he spoke only Russian. Ernest’s invitation to dinner, extended to Semenov and his wife, seemed to offer a second opportunity. But the appearance at the Perle du Lac of an uninvited guest, an English-speaking Soviet foreign ministry official, promptly dashed that hope, too. Semenov remained an “enigma,” Tichvinsky reported to Lawrence.109

  On July 13, only two days after his discouraging démarche with Semenov, Lawrence came down with a severe cold and fever. While Ernest remained bedridden at the Hotel du Rhône, Brown, Bethe, and Tichvinsky reported in relays on the negotiations.

  To the surprise of the U.S. negotiators, the talks were making rapid and steady progress. “My summary impression,” telegraphed Spiers, “is the Russians really want this conference to produce unanimous agreement.”110

  Lawrence was frustrated at his inability to take part in the talks. His condition worsened, but he continued to resist Molly’s pleas that they return home. “I could never live with myself if I left before this conference is over!” Ernest told her.111

  On July 23, physical examination by a doctor summoned to the hotel confirmed acute ulcerative colitis. A few days later, still feverish and in pain, Lawrence bowed to the inevitable and asked the State Department to book an emergency flight home. Molly and John arranged for Ernest to be admitted to Berkeley’s Peralta Hospital immediately upon his arrival.112

  * * *

  Half a world away, at Bikini atoll, the Livermore firing party was readying the proof-tests of the Polaris warhead. On July 22, Juniper, one candidate for the W-47 primary, exploded with a force of 65 kilotons, exceeding even the lab’s highest estimate. The following day, Olive, the test of the W-47’s fusion secondary, gave almost twice the predicted yield: 200 kilotons.113 These back-to-back successes ensured that the W-47, and Polaris, stayed on their accelerated schedule.114

  The irony of Livermore’s triumph was not lost on those at the lab. Having failed to build a small clean bomb, Livermore had produced an exceptionally dirty one in the W-47. Moreover, the Polaris warhead, while arguably revolutionary, would be attached to a missile that was, given the inaccuracy of submarine-launched missiles of the time, suited to only one purpose: city-killing.115

  Two days later, on July 26, Pinon was canceled outright by the AEC with little fanfare. Lack of interest, security concerns, and a desire to avoid embarrassing publicity contributed to the decision.

  Hoping that Livermore’s dramatic results with the W-47 might be enough to turn thinking around on the test ban, Teller telegraphed Starbird, asking that he also pass word of the lab’s stunning successes to the Joint Committee.116

  Accompanied by Bradbury and McCone, Teller was at the White House on August 12 to brief Eisenhower in person on Livermore’s Hardtack results. The W-47, he told the president, represented an improvement “by a factor of two to five” over existing weapons.117 Equally dramatic progress might be made if testing could be continued for another year or two. The president, silent throughout Teller’s presentation, observed quietly at its end that the worldwide consensus that opposed nuclear testing was even more powerful than thermonuclear weapons. While Ike had recently approved another extension of Hardtack—adding several more tests, meant to ensure the safety of existing bombs—this time he made it plain that he intended to go no further.118

  In desperation, Teller and Libby turned to McCone. Unwilling to confront the president on so important a matter after only a few weeks in office, however, the new AEC chairman instead asked his predecessor to intercede—warning Strauss that he might want to don a bulletproof vest first.119

  On August 20, Strauss met with Eisenhower in the Oval Office. When Ike began to read a draft announcement he had prepared, welcoming the successful conclusion of the Geneva talks, Strauss interrupted to accuse the president of “surrendering.” Eisenhower exploded: the only future that Strauss was able to envision led either to war or to a never-ending arms race; a test ban, on the other hand, might eventually be the way to a stable peace. Stunned by Ike’s reaction, Strauss said that he personally thought it impossible to compromise with sin. He and the president had come to a “permanent fundamental disagreement,” Strauss wrote that night.

  The next morning, the White House received a cable from Fisk in Geneva, announcing that both sides had come to full agreement on an inspection system for a test ban before adjourning. The “Geneva system” would be modeled closely on the plan outlined by Bethe and PSAC: a total of 170 inspection posts on the ground and ten ships would monitor compliance with the moratorium.

  On the afternoon of August 22, Eisenhower announced that U.S. nuclear testing would cease with the completion of Hardtack at the end of October. While Ike indicated that the moratorium would be reviewed on a year-to-year basis, he invited Khrushchev to begin talks immediately on making the test ban permanent.

  * * *

  The news from Geneva failed to stir a reaction in Lawrence, who had been transferred by ambulance to Stanford Hospital, at John’s insistence, a week earlier. Molly’s concern had grown when Ernest stopped boasting of making a quick recovery at Balboa.

  Finally, reluctantly, Lawrence consented to the colostomy operation he had long refused to consider. Even in extremis, he refused to submit to x-rays.

  On August 27, surgeons
discovered severe atherosclerosis of the main artery leading to the abdomen in the course of the operation. Not knowing the degree to which Lawrence’s circulation was compromised by the blockage, the doctors had already severed many of the vessels that carried blood to the lower trunk during the procedure. Before the five-hour ordeal was over, the patient had gone into circulatory shock. Numerous blood transfusions were of no avail. Ernest’s final words to Molly were “I’m ready to give up now.”

  He died shortly before midnight.

  * * *

  Earlier that day at the White House, Fisk and Bacher, just returned from Geneva, had briefed Eisenhower and the NSC on the successful conclusion of the negotiations.120 McCone, meeting with Ike in the Oval Office beforehand, had persuaded the president to approve a few last underground tests in Nevada, to be carried out in the waning days before the moratorium went into effect.121

  Thousands of miles and many time zones away, in the South Atlantic, one test was awaited with particular eagerness. In the early morning hours of August 27, a rocket carrying the first Argus experiment lifted off the deck of the navy support ship Norton Sound. Rising slowly at first, the missile disappeared through broken clouds. Minutes later, its 2-kiloton warhead detonated, some 100 miles up.

  While the final results would not be known for several days, it was immediately evident that the “Christofilos effect” had fallen short of expectations. An orbiting American satellite detected no signs of any new and deadly radiation belt.122 Like the grin of the Cheshire cat, the prospective shield against attacking missiles had simply and silently faded into space. There would be no magical defense against the nuclear weapons already in U.S. and Soviet arsenals, or those about to be added.123

  Nine weeks later—following a final, furious volley of tests by both sides—the proving grounds in the Soviet Union, the Pacific, and the American desert fell suddenly silent.

  EPILOGUE: “AS STREAMES ARE…”

  As streames are, Power is; those blest flowers that dwell

  At the rough streames calme head, thrive and do well

  But having left their roots, and themselves given

  To the streame’s tyrannous rage, alas are driven

  Through mills, and rockes, and woods, and at last, almost

  Consum’d in going, in the sea are lost.

  —John Donne, Satyre III

  THE MORATORIUM ON nuclear testing lasted barely 1,000 days. On September 1, 1961, the Soviet Union conducted a low-yield test and the following month set off the biggest bomb in history—a mammoth 58-megaton explosion. Khrushchev strongly defended his action, arguing that the West—that is, the French—had been first to violate the test ban, and that the United States had failed to carry through on promises made at the 1958 conference of experts.1 Unmentioned by the Soviet leader was the fact that he was also under pressure from his own generals to catch up with the United States, which had pulled further ahead in the arms race with Hardtack. Among the weapons tested by the Russians that fall would be the warhead for a Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile.2

  The Geneva talks on a permanent test-ban treaty had broken down suddenly in January 1959, after the U.S. delegation announced that some of the assumptions on which the moratorium was based were in error. A new “decoupling theory”—proposed by David Griggs and scientists at Livermore—of how the Russians might cheat by testing underground, and a subsequent reanalysis of seismic data from the Nevada Test Site, had forced a reappraisal of the U.S. negotiating position.3 The result was a nearly tenfold increase in the number of inspection stations to be located on Soviet territory.4

  Although Livermore’s theory was later discredited, America’s diplomatic votre-face produced “the most violent reaction imaginable” from the Russians, the U.S. ambassador in Geneva later remembered, and “spread a pall over the negotiations from which they never completely recovered.”5

  Nearing the end of his presidency, Eisenhower was forced to abandon his goal of putting an end to nuclear testing. Killian’s successor as science adviser, George Kistiakowsky, would attribute a little-noticed line in the president’s farewell address—which warned about “the unwarranted influence of a scientific-technological elite”—to Ike’s fury with Teller and Livermore over the fate of the test ban.6

  Lewis Strauss had hoped to carry on the fight against communism as Eisenhower’s commerce secretary.7 But Strauss’s enemies in the Senate, led by Clinton Anderson, conspired to deny him that post. Like the ghost at the banquet, the Oppenheimer case haunted Strauss’s confirmation hearing.8

  For Oppie’s defenders, the humiliation of the so-called Tugboat Admiral was poetic justice. “It’s a lovely show—never thought I’d live to see my revenge,” telegraphed the wife of a Berkeley physicist to Oppenheimer from the capital. “In unchristianly spirit, enjoy every squirm and anguish of victim. Having wonderful time—wish you were here!”9

  Edward Teller resigned as Livermore director in 1960, the better to oppose without hindrance the test-ban treaty that was soon to be pursued by President John Kennedy. Ironically, Teller’s opposition was based on the argument that testing needed to continue in order to develop a defense against ballistic missiles.10 Stalemated by the same intractable technical disputes which had bedeviled Eisenhower, Kennedy finally settled for a less ambitious goal—one previously dismissed by Killian as a mere “propaganda step”: a test-ban treaty that forbade nuclear testing everywhere but underground. While it pushed public concern with fallout from the headlines, the 1963 Limited Test-Ban Treaty had little or no restraining effect upon the nuclear arms race, which continued, and even accelerated, despite the agreement.11

  In April 1963, Kennedy announced that Robert Oppenheimer would be the next recipient of the Enrico Fermi medal. Edward Teller had received the prize the year before. Subsequent attempts by PSAC scientists to restore Oppie’s security clearance were quietly turned back by Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, who feared rekindling emotions over the case.12

  Barely a week after the assassination in Dallas, Texas, President Lyndon Johnson hung the Fermi medal around Oppenheimer’s neck at a brief ceremony in the cabinet room. During the reception, Teller stepped up to shake Oppenheimer’s hand. For David Lilienthal, who was also present, the occasion was “a ceremony of expiation for the sins of hatred and ugliness visited upon Oppenheimer.”13

  But the event reawakened strong emotions nonetheless. From his farm at Brandy Rock, in retirement, Strauss wrote Life magazine that the honor visited upon Oppenheimer had “dealt a severe blow to the security system which protects our country…”14 “Justice sometimes moves slowly—but it does move, and sometimes it arrives,” wrote Birge to Oppenheimer from Berkeley.15 Rabi, on the other hand, thought there “too much history for simple rejoicing.”16

  For some, it was too late for either reconciliation or expiation. Lilienthal remembered the time, a few years before, when Oppenheimer had stopped by his house in Princeton to talk. Lilienthal thought it remarkable that his friend expressed no bitterness about his fate, except when Lawrence’s name was mentioned—whereupon Oppie offered this “strange sidelight”:

  Lawrence died of frustration, Robert as much as said, because of the long strain of over-reaching ambition, culminating in his efforts to torpedo the talks in Geneva concerning the ending of the bomb tests. I said I was surprised; that E.O. Lawrence had always seemed to my observation to be a very picture of the extrovert, the satisfied man, the man of bounce and buoyancy. “No,” Robert said, “I have know him longer and closer than you; his fears that he was being, or might be, undermined in his position were a terror for him.”17

  Oppenheimer declined to take part in the national debate over nuclear weapons policy and rarely spoke thereafter of his loyalty hearing.18 Asked to speculate on what Lawrence might have said had he testified in 1954, Oppie answered: “It would have been hard for Ernest but it would have been good. I know that there were several fatalities in a sense with this business. All
sorts of directors and myself.”19 Oppenheimer’s voice trailed off in the interview, and he left the sentence unfinished.

  When David Bohm wrote to him in December 1966, asking whether he felt any regret over the bombing of Hiroshima, Oppie wrote back: “My own feelings about responsibility and guilt have always had to do with the present, and so far in this life that has been more than enough to occupy me.”20 Oppenheimer died a few weeks later, on February 18, 1967, of throat cancer.

  But Oppenheimer lived long enough to see the fulfillment of the prediction he had made in his 1953 Foreign Affairs article on candor. When the United States built its 20,000th bomb, in 1960, that weapon did not—“in any deep strategic sense”—offset the Soviet Union’s 2,000th bomb, built perhaps the year before.

  Instead, for the next thirty years the nuclear arms race would dominate the fears and drain the resources of both superpowers, a competition mirrored, in microcosm, by the unceasing rivalry of Livermore and Los Alamos. By the time that Norris Bradbury retired, in 1970, the laboratory that he had originally agreed to run for six months had designed more than sixty different nuclear weapons, ranging from a subkiloton “backpack” bomb to the 15-megaton Bravo.21

  Over the next twenty years, Livermore would make similarly impressive additions to the U.S. arsenal, among them the so-called enhanced-radiation weapon, or neutron bomb. An ironic and unintended spawn of the lab’s clean weapons program, the neutron bomb was designed to kill people while leaving buildings intact. Livermore director Harold Brown puckishly dubbed it “the capitalist bomb.”22