by Gregg Herken
The technical advances that began with Livermore’s W-47 also made it possible, starting in the early 1970s, to place several nuclear warheads on a single missile. Further improvements, subsequently matched in lockstep by the Soviet Union, led to rapidly growing arsenals on both sides and, in response, to a nuclear freeze movement by the early 1980s.
In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan’s announcement of a Strategic Defense Initiative—a space-based shield promising to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete”—was inspired in part by Teller’s claims for a so-called third generation of bombs being developed at Livermore.23 The centerpiece of early “Star Wars” planning was a nuclear-pumped x-ray laser heavily promoted by Teller and his allies in Washington. When underground tests in Nevada raised doubts about the performance of the x-ray laser, Teller and a young protégé at the lab proposed Brilliant Pebbles, a nonnuclear alternative that became the new focus of SDI.24
Four and a half decades of unrelenting Cold War would test the faith of even true believers, leaving some doubting, some confirmed in their beliefs, and some simply transformed.
Although Haakon Chevalier was unwilling to jump off what he called “the socialist ‘train’” during the Hungarian uprising in 1956, his faith in communism had been severely shaken. He continued to ask himself, Chevalier wrote in an unpublished memoir, “whether what was wrong was deep rooted and ineradicable or a condition that could and would disappear.… The answer that the future gave, in August, 1968, was Czechoslovakia.”25
Chevalier also informed friends that he was writing “a final book, a short one, on Oppenheimer: I’ve recently discovered, if I’m not completely off my rocker, something which completely changes the estimate of Oppenheimer and his integrity.”26 Chevalier’s book remained unfinished at the time of his death, on July 4, 1985.27
George Eltenton and Frank Oppenheimer had both attended Chevalier’s eightieth-birthday celebration in Berkeley a few years earlier.28 Eltenton’s widow, Dorothea, waited until she was ninety-four and living in England to publish Laughter in Leningrad, a nostalgic account of the couple’s life in Russia during the 1930s.
Steve Nelson lived long enough to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union and the political system to which he had devoted much of his life.29 Nelson quit the party in 1957, after Khrushchev confirmed Stalin’s crimes, but he remained true to the cause at a more local and personal level. Shortly before his death, at ninety, Nelson was active in lobbying on behalf of low-income housing for the community of Truro, Massachusetts, where he lived.
Lloyd Lehmann, the Young Communist League organizer whose 1942 conversation with Nelson had given the Federal Bureau of Investigation its first evidence of spies in the Manhattan Project, was hounded by FBI agents, HUAC investigators, and the Tenney Committee throughout the 1950s. Unable to find a job, Lehmann taught himself carpentry and eventually got a contractor’s license. By the late 1990s, he and his family owned several apartment buildings in Oakland, California.30
Joseph Weinberg, likewise unable to find work in his chosen field, went on to specialize in a different branch of physics—optics—heading a research laboratory for the Spero House of Vision in Rochester, New York. Among the inventions in which Weinberg reportedly would have a part was the lineless bifocal lense. While neighbors in upstate New York during the 1990s, Joe Weinberg and Rossi Lomanitz attended concerts by the local symphony orchestra, in which Rossi’s wife, Josephine, played recorder.31
After failing as a rancher and returning to the teaching of physics, Frank Oppenheimer founded the Exploratorium, a pioneering science museum in San Francisco, serving as its director until his death in 1985. Neither Frank nor his brother ever explained the nature or extent of his involvement in the Chevalier incident. Groves, too, took whatever he might have known of that secret to the grave in 1970.
While the breakup of the USSR late in 1991 would fulfill the prophecy of John Foster Dulles—who had forecast, forty years earlier, that the United States would exhaust its adversary if it were simply “able to run the full mile”—only at the end of the nuclear arms race could its material cost be calculated: $5.5 trillion.32 Whether the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union might have been cheaper, safer, and ended sooner, before some 125,000 nuclear weapons were built by both sides, is a question that will remain forever unanswerable.33
After waging a campaign throughout the 1970s and 1980s to remove her husband’s name from the Livermore laboratory—on the grounds that Ernest would not want to be remembered for a “bomb factory”—Molly Lawrence abandoned her efforts when the end of the Cold War prompted Livermore to announce that it was shifting its focus away from weapons work.34
Although Edward Teller retired from Livermore in 1975, he remained an éminence grise there long afterward. Even in his nineties, Teller was still active, proposing a way to intercept Earth-destroying asteroids and reportedly seeking a solution to the problem of global warming.
Having known both notoriety and influence, what Teller sought was vindication. In the mid-1960s, he had hoped to prove the feasibility of his original H-bomb concept by simulating the explosion of a hypothetical Super, using one of Livermore’s early supercomputers.35 When the Persian Gulf War erupted in 1991, Teller warned Washington that Saddam Hussein might be building a uranium-hydride bomb.36 Fifty years after the imaginative breakthrough that led to radiation implosion, Teller was again denying Ulam a role in the invention.37
But on one subject—Oppenheimer—vindication always eluded Teller.38 When Oppenheimer died, Oppie’s long-time friend, Hans Bethe, assumed the mantle of the scientist of conscience in this country.39 Like Jefferson and Adams, Teller and Bethe would live on into the new century which they and their colleagues had done so much to shape. They brought with them an old and unresolved conflict.40
In 1983, when Teller rose at a White House reception to applaud Reagan’s SDI announcement, Bethe was next to stand and denounce Star Wars as folly. In response, Edward subsequently published an “open letter,” appealing to scientists to join the missile defense crusade.41 Although he addressed the letter to Bethe, Teller’s message might well have been directed to Oppenheimer’s ghost:
The one regret I have about the atomic bomb is that we missed the opportunity to attempt to end the war by a demonstration of the bomb to the Japanese.… Oppenheimer persuaded me on that occasion that it was not the business of a physicist to give advice on such matters of policy. I was too easily persuaded. Later I learned that Oppenheimer gave advice on that very question, recommending that the atomic bomb should indeed be dropped. Not much later, Oppenheimer made his famous statement that “physicists have known sin.”
At the end of Edward’s letter was a decades-late rejoinder. “I would say,” Teller wrote, “that physicists have known power.”
NOTES
The notes published here are an abbreviated version of a much longer and more comprehensive set of endnotes, which were edited for reasons of space. Those original notes, containing additional information and citations, may be accessed at the Web site www.brotherhoodofthebomb.com and downloaded without charge. A copy of the original notes—along with copies of most of the documents cited in the notes, as well as transcripts of personal interviews recorded by the author—will also be deposited with the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
AEC/NARA
Records of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, RG 326, National Archives, College Park, Md.
AECP
Committee on Atomic Energy Commission Projects, University of California archives
Army/NARA
Records of the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, RG 319, National Archives, College Park, Md.
CFBM
Committee on Finance and Budget Management, University of California archives
CIC/DOE
Coordination and Information Center, U.S. Department of Energy, Las Vegas, Nev.
&nb
sp; CINRAD
“Communist Infiltration of the Radiation Laboratory, University of California,” file no. 100–190625, FBI Reading Room
COMRAP
“Comintern Apparatus,” file no. 100–203581, FBI Reading Room
EOL
Ernest Orlando Lawrence papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
FAECT
Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians, file no. 61–7231, FBI Reading Room
FRUS
U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States
GAC
General Advisory Committee, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
Groves/NARA
Papers of General Leslie Groves, RG 200, National Archives, College Park, Md.
HUAC
House Un-American Activities Committee
ITMOJRO
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer
JCAE
Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, RG 128, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
JRO
J. Robert Oppenheimer papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
JRO/AEC
Records of the Personnel Security Board, AEC Division of Security, RG 326, National Archives, College Park, Md.
JRO/FBI
J. Robert Oppenheimer, file no. 100–17828, FBI Reading Room
LANL
Los Alamos National Laboratory archives, Los Alamos, N. Mex.
LBL
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory archives, Berkeley, Calif.
LLNL
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory archives, Livermore, Calif.
LLS/HHPL
Lewis Strauss papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa
LLS/NARA
Lewis Strauss AEC papers, National Archives, College Park, Md.
MED/NARA
Records of the Manhattan Engineer District, RG 77, National Archives, College Park, Md.
NARA
National Archives, Washington, D.C., and College Park, Md.
OSD/NARA
Records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, RG 330, National Archives, College Park, Md.
OSRD/NARA
Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, RG 227, National Archives, College Park, Md.
PSAC
Records of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, RG 359, National Archives, College Park, Md.
SBFRC
Federal Records Center, National Archives, San Bruno, Calif.
TEM
Thomas E. Murray papers, Rockville, Md.
TWPC
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Thermonuclear Weapons Program Chronology
UC
Records of the University of California, Oakland, Calif.
USAF/NARA
Records of Headquarters, U.S. Air Force, RG 341, National Archives, College Park, Md.
USDS/NARA
Records of the U.S. Department of State, RG 59, National Archives, College Park, Md.
UCSF
Library Archive, University of California, San Francisco
1: The Cyclotron Republic
1. Lawrence to Sproul, Lawrence folder, box 64, Vannevar Bush papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
2. A cyclotron is defined as a machine that accelerates charged particles by the influence of a steady magnetic field and a rapidly alternating electrical field. Henry A. Boorse et al., The Atomic Scientists: A Biographical History (Wiley, 1989), 358–59.
3. Kitchen-chair cyclotron: Luis Alvarez, “Ernest Orlando Lawrence, 1901–1958,” Biographical Memoirs (National Academy of Sciences, 1970), 263; J. L. Heilbron and Robert Seidel, Lawrence and His Laboratory: A History of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (University of California Press, 1989), vol. 1, 88.
4. Herbert Childs, An American Genius: The Life of Ernest Orlando Lawrence, Father of the Cyclotron (Dutton, 1968), 171; Heilbron and Seidel (1989), 84.
5. Childs (1968), 168; J. L. Heilbron, Robert Seidel, and Bruce R. Wheaton, “Lawrence and His Laboratory: Nuclear Science at Berkeley” (Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, 1981), 12; Heilbron and Seidel (1989), 100.
6. Transcript of interview with Jack Neylan, box 2, Herbert Childs papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, Calif.
7. Transcript of interview with Don Cooksey, box 1, Childs papers; Childs (1968), 89–90.
8. Heilbron and Seidel (1989), 10, 99; Childs (1968), 161.
9. Childs (1968), 169–70.
10. Nuell Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer (Simon and Schuster, 1968), 198; author interview with Wolfgang Panofsky, Stanford, Calif., Aug. 3, 1993.
11. Luis W. Alvarez, Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist (Basic Books, 1987), 47–48; Childs (1968), 158; author interview with Eldred Nelson, Brentwood, Calif., Apr. 14, 1999.
12. “Autobiography,” series 7, box 1, Henry Smyth papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Penn.
13. Author interview with Molly Lawrence, Balboa, Calif., Aug. 11, 1992.
14. Childs (1968), 154–55.
15. Ibid., 253.
16. Early Rad Lab: Alvarez (1987), 40–44; author interview with Kenneth Street, Alamo, Calif., Aug. 6, 1993; transcript of interview with Arthur Hudgins, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory archives, Livermore, Calif. (LLNL).
17. Kenneth Street interview (1993).
18. Alvarez (1987), 40.
19. Childs (1968), 251.
20. Notes on “How Well We Meant,” Isidor Rabi remarks at the fiftieth anniversary of Los Alamos, Mar. 1983.
21. Boorse et al. (1989), 333–40.
22. Heilbron, Seidel, and Wheaton (1981), 18.
23. Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (Simon and Schuster, 1995), 27.
24. “Atom-Powered World Absurd, Scientists Told,” New York Herald Tribune, Sept. 12, 1933.
25. Solvay Congress: Heilbron, Seidel, and Wheaton (1981), 18–23; Davis (1968), 58–59.
26. Panofsky interview (1993); Alvarez (1970), 266.
27. Emilio Segrè, A Mind Always in Motion (University of California Press, 1993), 134.
28. Author interview with Robert Serber, New York, N.Y., Apr. 4, 1992.
29. Haakon Chevalier, Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship (Braziller, 1965), 11.
30. Edith Jenkins, Against a Field Sinister: Memoirs and Stories (City Lights Books, 1991), 23.
31. Robert Oppenheimer: Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (Simon and Schuster, 1986), 119–27; Davis (1968), 20–24; Peter Michelmore, The Swift Years: The Robert Oppenheimer Story (Dodd, Mead, 1969), 7–9.
32. Transcript of interview with Robert Oppenheimer, box 2, Childs papers.
33. The art was later split between Robert and his brother, Frank, upon their father’s death. My thanks to Robert Oppenheimer’s son, Peter, for allowing me access to his father’s personal papers in his possession.
34. Childs (1968), 143; transcripts of interviews with Paul Horgan, Francis Fergusson, and Jeffries Wyman, Oppenheimer Oral History Collection, MIT archives, Cambridge, Mass.
35. Childs (1968), 510–11.
36. Transcript of interview with John Edsall, Oppenheimer Oral History Collection, MIT.
37. Childs (1968), 144–45.
38. Experimentalists, unlike theorists, apparently did not name their cars.
39. Michelmore (1969), 30; Childs (1968), 127, 144. Oppie’s cars: Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner, eds., Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections (Harvard University Press, 1980), 119, 135, 165 fn.; Frank Oppenheimer to Ed McMillan, n.d., “N.P. Davis” file, series 7, Edwin McMillan papers, RG 434, Federal Records Center, San Bruno, Calif. (SBFRC).
40. S. S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist (Princeton University Press, galley proofs, 2000), 63.
41. S. S. Schweber, “J. Robert Oppenh
eimer: Proteus Unbound,” 7. The author thanks Sam Schweber for a copy of his unpublished manuscript.
42. Smith and Weiner (1980), 144.
43. Lawrence to Oppenheimer, n.d. (fall 1936), folder 9, carton 14, Ernest Orlando Lawrence papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (EOL).
44. Robert to Frank Oppenheimer, n.d., unmarked folder, box 1, Frank Oppenheimer papers, Bancroft Library.
45. Chevalier (1965), 39.
46. Letter to?, n.d., carton 1, Frank Oppenheimer papers; Smith and Weiner (1980), 165 fn.
47. Perro Caliente: Peter Goodchild, J. Robert Oppenheimer: Shatterer of Worlds (BBC, 1980), 27; U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (MIT Press, 1971) (ITMOJRO), 101.
48. Interviews: Molly Lawrence (1992) and Elsie McMillan, Bellingham, Wash., Sept. 24, 1992.
49. Smith and Weiner (1980), 159.
50. Michelmore (1969) 53.
51. Smith and Weiner (1980), 171.
52. Childs (1968), 172–73.
53. Lawrence to C. D. Shane, Jan. 28, 1936, folder 9, carton 14, EOL.
54. Schweber (2000), 199.
55. Oppie evidently absorbed Adler’s lessons well; he was valedictorian of his class.
56. Schweber (2000), 52.
57. Cited in Oppenheimer to F. Osborn, Feb. 14, 1949, Osborn folder, box 54, Robert Oppenheimer papers, Library of Congress (JRO).
58. Melba Phillips incident: Transcript of Alvarez interview, box 1, Childs papers; Robert Serber, Peace and War: Reminiscences of a Life on the Frontiers of Science (University of California Press, 1998), 27.
59. Transcript of interview with Edwin McMillan, 128, Bancroft Library.
60. Author interview with Robert Wilson, July 16, 1996, Ithaca, N.Y.
61. Cottrell: Heilbron and Seidel (1989), 107–8; Davis (1968), 40.
