by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Bethe was in fact undecided and was arriving that afternoon in Princeton. He came with Edward Teller, who was already going around the country, recruiting physicists to come back to Los Alamos. According to Teller, Bethe had already said he would come. Bethe disputes this, and insists that he had come to Princeton for Oppie’s advice. Instead, he found Oppenheimer “equally undecided and equally troubled in his mind about what should be done. I did not get from him the advice that I was hoping to get.”
While Oppie revealed little about his own views on the Super, he did tell Bethe and Teller that Conant was opposed to a crash program. But since Teller had arrived certain that Oppie would oppose the weapon, he left Princeton delighted that Oppenheimer seemed to be sitting on the fence. He also hoped that Bethe would now join him in Los Alamos.
But later that weekend, Bethe discussed the H-bomb with his friend Victor Weisskopf, who argued that a war fought with thermonuclear weapons would be suicidal. “We both had to agree,” Bethe said, “that after such a war, even if we were to win it, the world would not be . . . like the world we want to preserve. We would lose the things we were fighting for. This was a very long conversation and a very difficult one for both of us.” A few days later, Bethe phoned Teller and told him his decision. “He was disappointed,” Bethe recalled. “I was relieved.” Yet, despite Weisskopf’s pivotal role, Teller was convinced that Oppenheimer was responsible for Bethe’s volte-face.
In the meantime, Oppenheimer was having his own difficult conversations, agonizing over the issue, despite his scientific, policy and moral qualms. Taking his role as chairman of the GAC responsibly, he made a concerted effort to restrain his instincts and inclinations. He had put himself in a listening mode. But Conant felt no such restraints. Upon receiving Oppenheimer’s letter of October 21, he responded sharply. He told Oppie, probably in a phone call, that if the Super ever came before the General Advisory Committee, “he would certainly oppose it as folly.”
AT TWO O’CLOCK on Friday afternoon, October 28, 1949, Oppenheimer convened the eighteenth meeting (since January 1947) of the General Advisory Committee in the AEC’s conference room on Constitution Avenue. Over the next three days, Isidor Rabi, Enrico Fermi, James Conant, Oliver Buckley (president of Bell Telephone Laboratories), Lee DuBridge, Hartley Rowe (a director of United Fruit Company) and Cyril Smith would listen to expert witnesses like George Kennan and Gen. Omar Bradley and carefully debate the merits of the Super. AEC commissioners Lewis Strauss, Gordon Dean and David Lilienthal also attended some of the GAC sessions. Everyone present understood that the Truman Administration had to appear to be doing something tough and concrete in response to the Soviet achievement. Lilienthal noted in his diary the day before that Ernest Lawrence and other boosters of the Super “can only be described as drooling with the prospect and ‘bloodthirsty.’ ” These men, he wrote, believe “there’s nothing to think over. . . .” Just before the GAC meeting officially convened, Oppenheimer produced a letter he had received from the chemist Glenn Seaborg, the one GAC member absent. In 1954, Oppenheimer’s critics suggested that he had not shared Seaborg’s views, but one of the GAC members, Cyril Smith, remembered that Oppie showed the letters to everyone before the meeting began. Seaborg was reluctantly inclined to think that the country had to develop the H-bomb. “Although I deplore the prospects of our country putting a tremendous effort into this,” he wrote, “I must confess that I have been unable to come to the conclusion that we should not . . . I would have to hear some good arguments before I could take on sufficient courage to recommend not going toward such a program.”
Oppenheimer made a point of not expressing his own views until everyone else had spoken. “He never let on what his opinion was at all,” recalled DuBridge. “We went right around the table, and everybody gave his view of it, and they were all negative.” Lilienthal heard Conant, “looking almost translucent, so gray,” mutter, “We built one Frankenstein”—as if it would be madness to build another. Rabi later recalled that “Oppenheimer followed Conant’s lead” throughout the weekend discussions. According to Dean, the “moral implications were discussed at great length.” Lilienthal noted in his diary Saturday night that Conant argued “flatly against it [the H-bomb] on moral grounds.” When Buckley suggested that there was no moral difference between an atomic bomb and a Super, Lilienthal noted, “Conant disagreed: there are grades of morality.” And when Strauss pointed out that the final decision would be made in Washington and not by popular vote, Conant replied, “But whether it will stick depends on how the country views the moral issue.” Conant even asked, “Can this be declassified—i.e. the fact that there is such a thing being considered . . .?”
Rabi, presciently, observed that Washington would no doubt decide to go ahead with the project, and the only question remaining was “who will be willing to join it.” During their all-day Saturday session, Fermi initially suggested that “one must explore it and do it,” but that exploring the feasibility of the Super “doesn’t foreclose the question: should it be made use of?” Lilienthal had made up his mind: the Super “would not further the common defense, and it might harm us, by making the prospects of the other course—toward peace—even less good than they now are.”
By early Sunday, a consensus emerged among all eight GAC members present: They would oppose a crash program to develop the Super on scientific, technical and moral grounds. Rabi and Fermi qualified their opposition to the weapon—which they called “an evil thing considered in any light”—with a proposal that America “invite the nations of the world to join us in a solemn pledge” not to build the weapon. Oppenheimer toyed with signing on to this Rabi-Fermi qualification, but in the end, he and the committee’s majority advised against an accelerated program to build the H-bomb on the grounds that such a weapon was neither necessary as a deterrent nor beneficial to American security.
While Oppenheimer also offered pragmatic arguments about “whether the super will be cheaper or more expensive than the fission bomb,” the committee’s report made it clear that nuclear weapons policies must no longer be decided in a moral vacuum. Convinced that the scientific and technical work on the Super left, at best, a fifty percent chance of such a weapon being constructed, they first made it clear why any crash program to achieve it would undermine America’s security.
But to limit the issue to technical and political considerations was, in their shared view, not only a failure of responsibility, but a dereliction of duty. They were, after all, the elite veterans of the Manhattan Project, the men who had provided the scientific intelligence necessary for the creation of the atomic bomb. They had undertaken that task as enthusiastic patriots. They had followed the lead of a government determined to use the new weapon in war. Oppenheimer had worked to contain scientists like Leo Szilard and Robert Wilson who had raised moral objections to its use against Japan. But those arguments had taken place in the context of total warfare, at a time when the atomic bomb was something entirely new, and they were inexperienced in matters of state policy.
In 1949, however, circumstances were entirely different. America was not at war, the nuclear arms race had taken a new and dangerous turn with the Soviet success, and the members of the GAC were the most deeply informed and experienced atomic scientists in America. They all agreed that weapons that could annihilate life on earth could not be discussed in a military policy vacuum. Moral considerations were as relevant as technical assessments.
“The use of this weapon will bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives,” Oppenheimer wrote. “It is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations.”
Oppenheimer feared that the Super would simply be too big—or to put it another way, any legitimate military target for a thermonuclear device would be “too small.” If the Hiroshima bomb packed an explosive yi
eld of 15,000 tons of TNT, a thermonuclear bomb—if it proved to be feasible— might explode with the force of 100 million tons of TNT. The Super was simply too large even as a city-buster. It could easily destroy 150 to 1,000 square miles or more. As the GAC’s report concluded, “a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide.” Even if it was never used, the mere fact that the United States had such a genocidal weapon in its arsenal would ultimately undermine U.S. security. “The existence of such a weapon in our armory,” the GAC majority report stated, “would have far-reaching effects on world opinion.” Reasonable people could conclude that America was willing to contemplate an act of Armageddon. “Thus we believe that the psychological effect of the weapon in our hands would be adverse to our interest.”
Like Conant, Rabi and the others, Oppenheimer hoped that the Super would “never be produced”—and that the refusal to build it would make it possible to reopen arms control negotiations with the Russians. “We believe a super bomb should never be produced,” Oppenheimer wrote for the majority. “Mankind would be far better off not to have a demonstration of the feasibility of such a weapon. . . .”
As McGeorge Bundy later noted, the authors of the GAC report were essentially making the case for the kind of arms control treaties finally negotiated in the 1970s. But what if the proposal wasn’t accepted? What if the Soviets were the first to obtain a Super? In that event, the Russians would have to test the weapon—H-bombs cannot be developed without being tested—and such a test was guaranteed to be detected. “To the argument that the Russians may succeed in developing this weapon, we would reply that our undertaking it will not prove a deterrent to them. Should they use the weapon against us, reprisals by our large stock of atomic bombs would be comparably effective to the use of a super.”
Indeed, if the Super was not a feasible military weapon—because no target was large enough—Oppenheimer and the GAC report argued that it would be both more economical and more effective militarily to accelerate the production of fissionable materials for small, tactical atomic weapons. Together with a buildup of conventional military forces in Western Europe, such “battlefield” atomic weapons would provide the West with a deterrent that was far more effective and credible against any conceivable Soviet invasion force. It was the first serious proposal for nuclear “sufficiency,” a strategic concept that proposed a nuclear arsenal designed for specific tasks rather than one amassed through an irrational race of accumulation.
Oppenheimer was pleased with the outcome of the GAC’s deliberations. His personal secretary, Katherine Russell, was not so sure. After typing up the GAC’s final report, she predicted, “This will cause you a lot of trouble.” Oppie was nevertheless gratified to learn that on November 9, 1949, the AEC commissioners had voted three to two to endorse the GAC recommendations. Commissioners Lilienthal, Pike and Smyth had voted against a Super crash program; commissioners Strauss and Dean had voted for it.
NAÏVELY, Oppenheimer thought the battle against the Super had been won. But soon it became apparent that Teller, Strauss and other supporters of the hydrogen bomb were mounting a counteroffensive. Senator Brien McMahon told Teller that the GAC report “just makes me sick.” McMahon had come to believe that war with the Soviets was “inevitable.” He told a shocked Lilienthal that he thought the United States should “blow them off the face of the earth, quick, before they do the same to us. . . .” Adm. Sidney Souers warned, “It’s either we make it [the H-bomb] or we wait until the Russians drop one on us without warning.” Many other Washington officials had similarly apocalyptic reactions. The debate over the Super had thus crystallized the underlying hysteria of the Cold War and divided policy-makers and politicians into two permanently opposed Cold War camps—arms racers and arms controllers.
Responding to vigorous lobbying, President Truman asked AEC chairman Lilienthal, Defense Secretary Louis Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Acheson to study the issue once again and make a final recommendation. Lilienthal, of course, was staunchly opposed to the Super’s development. Johnson favored it. Only Acheson was undecided. But, a man of acute political instincts, he knew what the White House wanted. After Oppenheimer briefed him on the H-bomb, the secretary of state processed Oppie’s nuanced explanation of the GAC report in simplistic terms. “You know, I listened as carefully as I knew how,” he told a colleague, “but I don’t understand what ‘Oppie’ was trying to say. How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm ‘by example’?”
Acheson’s obvious skepticism led Oppenheimer to realize how few allies he had inside the Administration. However, one firm ally was George Kennan, who that autumn was preparing to resign his post as director of the Policy Planning staff at the State Department. Although Acheson had once set great store by Kennan’s advice, the two men now rarely agreed on issues of substantive policy. The architect of America’s containment policy was unhappy with how militarized that policy had become. His disillusionment was complete when the Truman Administration, in reaction to Soviet intransigence, broke its agreement with the USSR and established an independent government in West Germany. So, in late September 1949, frustrated and isolated, Kennan announced his intention to leave government service altogether.
Kennan had first encountered Oppenheimer at a War College lecture in 1946. “He was dressed in the usual brown suit with trousers much too long,” Kennan said. “He looked like a graduate student in physics rather than a man of distinction. He shuffled out to the edge of the platform and spoke without notes, as I recall, for 40 or 45 minutes with such startling scrupulousness and lucidity that nobody dared ask a question.”
In the course of 1949–50, Kennan and Oppenheimer developed a close friendship based on mutual respect and education. Oppie had invited Kennan to Princeton for a classified seminar on nuclear weapons. Kennan had also had lengthy dealings with Oppenheimer over the question of British and Canadian access to uranium. “He kept the whole thing on a very high plane,” Kennan recalled of these meetings. “He was a man who moved rapidly in the intellectual sense, and accurately and with great insight. [At these meetings] nobody wanted to engage in trivialities or to do anything but his best intellectually.”
In the midst of the debate over the Super, Kennan again traveled to Princeton, arriving on November 16, 1949. He and Oppenheimer talked at length about the “present state of the atomic problem.” Oppie found the visit “inspiriting.” Kennan’s views, he thought, were “non-doctrinaire” and “sympathetic.” At the time, Kennan was suggesting that in response to the Soviet bomb, the president could propose a moratorium on building a Super. “To me,” Oppenheimer wrote Kennan the next day, “the suggestions you made seemed reasonable. . . .” But he warned Kennan that in the “present climate of opinion” they would not seem so to many in Washington whose notions of safeguards “have attained a kind of rigid and absolute quality.” As a measure of how politically attuned Oppenheimer had become, he warned Kennan, “We must be prepared to meet and overcome the arguments which hold that your proposals are too dangerous.”
Upon receiving this warning, Kennan sat down and tried his hand at drafting a possible presidential statement announcing a decision not to build the H-bomb “at this time.” In eloquent language that substantially reflected the GAC’s analysis of the issue, Kennan outlined three succinct reasons not to proceed with a weapon of “almost unlimited destructive power.” First, “this weapon could not conceivably have a purely military employment.” Second, “there is no such thing as absolute security . . . ,” and the country’s current atomic arsenal was more than sufficiently powerful to deter any kind of attack. And third, “for us to embark on such a path would certainly not deter others from doing likewise. . . .” To the contrary, to build the Super would almost certainly inspire others to do the same.
The speech was never given, but over the next six weeks Kennan fleshed out these ideas into an eighty-page formal report reexamining the entire problem of nuclear weapons. He showed an early draft of the paper to Oppenh
eimer, who thought it “thoroughly admirable.” This prescient paper, though less well known than his famous 1947 Foreign A fairs essay which proposed a policy of containment, is a seminal document of the early Cold War. Kennan himself later called it “one of the most important, if not the most important, of all the documents I ever wrote in government.” Knowing how controversial it would be, Kennan sent it to Acheson on January 20, 1950, as a “personal paper.”
The document—“Memorandum: The International Control of Atomic Energy”—challenged fundamental assumptions underlying the Truman Administration’s view of both the bomb and the Soviet Union. Adopting Oppenheimer’s perspective, Kennan argued that the atomic bomb was dangerous precisely because it was mistakenly seen as a cheap panacea for the Soviet threat. Echoing Oppie, he wrote that the “military people” had seized upon the Super as the answer to the Russian acquisition of the bomb: “I fear that the atomic bomb, with its vague and highly dangerous promise of ‘decisive’ results . . . of easy solutions to profound human problems, will impede understanding of the things that are important to a clean, clear policy and will carry us toward the misuse and dissipation of our national strength.”
Kennan pleaded with Acheson not to support building an even more terrifying weapon of mass destruction—the Super—without first trying to negotiate a comprehensive arms control regime with the Soviets, as Oppenheimer had suggested earlier. Failing that, Kennan argued that the United States should not make the atomic weapon the centerpiece of its national defense. Instead, American officials should make it clear to the Soviets that they regarded atomic weapons “as something superfluous to our basic military posture—as something which we are compelled to hold against the possibility that they might be used by our opponents.” A small number of such weapons, he wrote, would be sufficient to deter the Soviet Union from using the bomb against the West.
