Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  In order to fulfill this function of contributing to the decision-making process, scientists (at least some of them) must be willing to work on weapons. They must do this also because our present struggle is (fortunately) not carried on in actual warfare which has become an absurdity, but in technical development for a potential war which nobody expects to come. The scientists must preserve the precarious balance of armament which would make it disastrous for either side to start a war. Only then can we argue for and embark on more constructive ventures like disarmament and international cooperation which may eventually lead to a more definite peace. 48

  As relations between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorated in the late 1940s, Bethe grew skeptical. By the end of the decade, he expected a nuclear war between America and Russia within ten years. 49 Bethe’s sense of foreboding and pessimism intensified with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. He continued, however, to urge that America’s atomic stockpile be kept to a minimum compatible with national security. He privately worried that Cold War firebrands in Washington were whipping up a dangerous atmosphere in which scientists might be compelled to invent more frightful weapons.

  Ernest Lawrence’s direction of the Rad Lab after the war was more absolute and also more distant. The Rad Lab had grown so large that he no longer knew all the people who worked for him. Instead of pausing for brief conversations on inspection walks, he now merely checked to see whether everyone on the staff was busy. This sometimes produced comical results. Once, Lawrence happened upon a man who seemed to be loafing. “What are you doing?” he snapped. “I’m just waiting for the phone to ring.” “You’re fired,” said Lawrence. “I work for the telephone company,” the man replied. 50

  If the size of the Rad Lab had changed, its spirit had not. Lawrence still wanted to do big things and tended to treat his staff like servants. He drove them hard as always, but more now through subordinates than through personal contact. When he did see them, the tension he created had a new edge to it. No longer shrugging off an idea when it became a blind alley, Lawrence grew irritated and inclined to fix blame. He was driving himself harder than ever. He began to drink in the evenings, and Rad Lab personnel he encountered on nighttime visits to the lab noticed it. “Although he seemed perfectly sober,” said one staffer, “it really smelled.” 51 The cumulative toll on Lawrence manifested itself in the form of ulcerative colitis, intestinal bleeding that he found increasingly difficult to stanch.

  Lawrence’s mission had become one of raising ever more money and building ever larger machines. His intense optimism, his connections to rich donors, and his high-powered contacts in Washington still proved an effective combination. A new laboratory rose at his bidding near Livermore, a quiet town an hour’s drive east of Berkeley in a dry, rural valley—tucked in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada—known for good wines, fields of roses, and grazing horses and cattle. (Today it is known as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.) The navy had used a square mile of the Livermore Valley as a training camp during World War II, and Lawrence converted this camp into a satellite of the Rad Lab. In the tense atmosphere of the Cold War, Livermore quickly became a high-tech compound of hundreds of olive-drab buildings and thousands of employees—all surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guardposts obscured from a distance by tall eucalyptus trees. It was a long way from the early days of the Rad Lab.

  Every Friday afternoon, Lawrence drove out to Livermore from Berkeley in his baby blue Cadillac convertible to survey his new domain. He had an office reserved especially for him, where he began his weekly visit by interrogating Herbert York, a young Berkeley post-doctorate whom he picked to run the lab for him. “What’s going on?” Lawrence would say to York. “What’s new?” 52 Lawrence then would walk the grounds, asking everyone he encountered to explain what they were doing.

  Although Lawrence still looked to Oppenheimer to interpret the findings made with his machines, the relationship between the two physicists was changing. Before the war, Lawrence had been the leader in the public mind and his laboratory had been famous. He had won the Nobel Prize; Oppenheimer had not. After the war, Oppenheimer was hailed as the father of the atomic bomb, the wizard of the scientific world. His name carried magic. Crowds gathered around him. Lawrence had reacted by urgently seeking to enlist Oppenheimer in his projects, but instead Oppenheimer had left for Princeton. “To Lawrence,” said I. I. Rabi, who spoke with both men during this period, “Oppenheimer’s leaving Berkeley seemed treason.” 53 On a visit to Berkeley in the summer of 1949, Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, encountered Lawrence at a faculty party. Kitty, who was tight, loudly scolded him for banishing Frank from the Rad Lab. Oppenheimer looked on, saying nothing. Their fabled friendship was rapidly deteriorating.

  When Enrico Fermi returned to Chicago after the war, he bought a large, three-story house on University Avenue a few blocks east of campus and set about creating an expansive new Institute for Nuclear Studies. (Today it is known as the Enrico Fermi Institute.) Ground was broken for the institute on July 8, 1947, in the block between 56th and 57th Streets and Ellis and Ingleside Avenues, across the street from Stagg Field, where Fermi had achieved the world’s first chain reaction five years earlier. Once construction was completed, Fermi moved his office and laboratory into the ground floor of the institute’s south wing. Discussions with Teller were frequent and productive. Fermi leveraged Teller’s originality, often developing his ideas far beyond the point reached by Teller, though Fermi always credited his friend’s contributions. 54

  Teller was not the only Manhattan Project colleague hanging around the Midway. Veterans of the Met Lab and Los Alamos thronged to Chicago after the war to study physics, attracted by Fermi’s reputation. Fermi did not teach only advanced students; he wanted to bring beginners into contact with science, and taught the elementary physics course to large classes with great enthusiasm and success. It was “standing room only” when Fermi taught, and he would talk with equal brilliance to a crowd as to a single student. It seemed effortless, but this impression was contrived. Fermi spent hours preparing for each course. Once, when he had to be away from Chicago, Fermi asked a graduate student to take over a session of one of his classes. Fermi handed the student a small notebook in which he had written out the entire lecture. 55

  Once a week, Fermi held an informal seminar for graduate students. The group gathered in Fermi’s office and one of his students proposed a topic for discussion. Fermi then searched through his carefully indexed papers to find his notes on that topic and shared them. He always kept the discussion focused on the essential aspects of a topic. He taught his students that physics should not be an esoteric specialty but rather a practical and relevant discipline, and he was always eager to learn—and grateful when he found out something new. Throughout, he was rigorously inductive in his reasoning; theoretical generalizations came only after empirical observation. Exploring the mysteries of nature was a great adventure for him, a thrilling sport for the intensely competitive and confident man behind the mask of nonchalance and modesty.

  As he had before the war, Fermi continued to dislike pretension and stuffiness. Whenever he and Laura planned a party where the guest list included an important person—as many of the atomic scientists were after the war—Fermi would say, “We’ve got to dilute him with somebody.” He was amazingly unassuming, given his fame and accomplishments. After the war, he helped General Electric build nuclear reactors, telling its engineers what to do and boosting its corporate profits enormously. One night at dinner Laura said, “Enrico, I went to the store today and put our name on the list for a dishwasher.” “Fine,” said Fermi. “Enrico, you know the president of General Electric. If you tell him you want one, you’ll get it tomorrow.” “No,” he said, “we’re on the list, we’ll wait and get it when it comes.” 56

  But some things had changed. Friends noticed that Fermi was becoming more reflective, and were surprised to glimpse his occasional detachment from physics—unhear
d of before the war. The steady reading he had been doing since coming to America extended and deepened his cultural interests beyond what they had been in his Italian days. He even began to meditate on literature and philosophical questions, once remarking to Laura that “with science one can explain everything except oneself.” 57 Fermi was struggling to understand himself and his place in the new world he had helped to create.

  As the atomic scientists strived to warn people about the dangers of nuclear weapons, the political climate began to change, and the Cold War set in. By the early 1950s, American public opinion shifted from sympathy for Russia as a wartime ally to fear of the Soviet Union as an expansionist power. This fear found expression in many ways, including pressure to expand America’s atomic arsenal. Partly in response to this pressure, and partly the result of bureaucratic momentum and military demand, the size of the nation’s atomic stockpile grew from thirteen in 1947 to nearly three hundred in 1950, with a corresponding increase in strategic delivery capability. 58 What Bohr and the other atomic scientists had feared—a growing reliance on nuclear weapons and the beginnings of a nuclear arms race—was coming to pass. The direction of America’s atomic program would soon become a major political issue, struggled over vehemently by those with competing visions of the future.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Superbomb Debate

  HIGH IN THE CLEAR, cold air off the Kamchatka Peninsula of Siberia in early September 1949, a chemical filter fitted into the nose of an American reconnaissance plane picked up traces of particles containing disintegrating nuclei. Like cancer cells in their earliest stages, the nuclei portended ominous consequences. Scientists who analyzed the particles determined that the invisible grains of matter caught in the plane’s filter were highly radioactive and part of a cloud that was drifting east. Further analysis determined that the particles had been produced by a fission explosion. On August twenty-ninth, over the steppes of Kazakhstan, the Soviet Union had tested its first atomic bomb—a virtual copy of the U.S. plutonium bomb based on data stolen by spies—and had shattered America’s short-lived nuclear monopoly.

  Robert Oppenheimer had just returned to Princeton after spending the summer at Caltech and Perro Caliente when the phone rang in the study of his Olden Manor home. It was a call from Washington reporting the news. Many officials were incredulous, but Oppenheimer sensed immediately that it was true. Still, he was shaken by the news, and in this he was not alone. Most Americans had accepted the comforting (and mistaken) belief that it would be many years—maybe decades—before the Soviets would have the bomb. The idea of a nuclear-armed Stalinist Russia was ominous, suddenly presenting serious dangers of a kind totally different from any that America had faced before.

  Fearing a national panic, Oppenheimer urged Washington to preempt Moscow’s announcement of the test by breaking the news to the U.S. people first. Many Americans, including those in high places, had great difficulty believing that the Soviets could achieve such a technological feat on their own. Truman, dubious, grudgingly accepted the scientists’ conclusion and released news of the Soviet bomb on September twenty-third. That same evening, Oppenheimer received a call from Teller, who was back at Los Alamos doing consulting work. “What should we do now?” Teller asked Oppenheimer excitedly. “Just go back and keep working,” said Oppenheimer. Then, after a long pause, he added: “Keep your shirt on.” 1

  Teller’s anxious “What should we do now?” became the question of the day in Washington as well. The Russian bomb fed fears triggered by earlier Soviet actions: the occupation of Eastern Europe and the use of the Red Army to install governments controlled by local communist parties in East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Poland. While the United States and its Western European allies made their own contributions to Cold War tensions, the Soviet Union under Stalin readily appeared to be a dangerous totalitarian regime. Coming at a time when the Cold War was rapidly worsening—the Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin Blockade, and Mao’s victory in China had all happened within the past year—Russia’s atomic test seemed the latest and most spectacular setback for the West against what it saw as a monolithic, aggressive communist axis stretching across Eurasia, encompassing half of the world’s people and threatening the rest. Combined with the Soviets’ development of long-range aircraft capable of reaching the United States, a Soviet atomic bomb promised to end America’s historic sense of invulnerability. Contributing to this vulnerability were fresh memories of Pearl Harbor. These anxieties about nuclear vulnerability fed American fears of the Soviet Union.

  The answer that came back from many quarters within the American government and the American scientific establishment was to embark on a crash program to develop the superbomb. In the current crisis atmosphere, the superbomb seemed the best means for the United States to regain its lost nuclear supremacy. 2

  The destructive power of a superbomb was as revolutionary in respect to the atomic bomb as the latter was to conventional weapons. Unlike an atomic bomb, which used the explosive energy of fission (the splitting of uranium and plutonium isotopes by neutrons), a superbomb would use the explosive energy of fusion, in which the nuclei of two light atoms (usually isotopes of hydrogen such as deuterium or tritium) * combined to form one, heavier nucleus. This combining, or thermonuclear fusion, of two atomic nuclei into one occurred only at extraordinarily high temperatures and pressures (for example, those found at the center of the sun) and released enormous—theoretically unlimited—amounts of heat, energy, and radiation, far greater even than fission.

  Advocates of a superbomb, led by Teller, argued that it was only a matter of time before Russia developed one; America must have its own in order to avoid falling behind or being blackmailed. They further contended that the superbomb was morally no different from the atomic bomb, or any other weapon for that matter; it all depended on what policy makers did with them. Teller had voiced this view as far back as 1945. Terming moral opposition to the superbomb “a fallacy,” he had written to Fermi in October of that year:

  If the development is possible, it is out of our powers to prevent it. All that we can do is to retard its completion by some years. I believe, on the other hand, that any form of international control may be put on a more stable basis by the knowledge of the full extent of the problem that must be solved and of the dangers of a ruthless international competition. The terrible consequences of a superbomb will not be avoided by ignoring or postponing the issue but by wise and provident planning. 3

  His thinking had not changed since then, except to become more fervent. Teller and other advocates of the superbomb believed in the principle—bordering on an imperative—that physicists, like other scientists, had an obligation to understand nature and develop new knowledge. They could not avoid the responsibility of knowing the facts, no matter how terrifying. In Teller’s mind, once he and other physicists had realized an atomic bomb was feasible, a thermonuclear weapon was scientifically the next logical step.

  Few physicists had challenged the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, and almost no one other than Bohr and Szilard had given thought to the time “after the bomb.” Questions did not emerge until shortly before Hiroshima; and even then, few opposed the use of the bomb against Japan. The atomic bomb debate occurred only after the weapon was made. The superbomb debate, in contrast, occurred before the weapon was made. What is more, no one now could plead ignorance of its effects. Physicists knew they were confronting in the superbomb a scientific issue, and a personal choice, fraught with large moral and political implications.

  The superbomb debate played out before secret boards and committees of the U.S. government. But reduced to its barest essentials, the debate amounted to a personal duel between two proud and brilliant men: Oppenheimer and Teller. Everything about the duel was compelling: the drama it sparked, the struggles it produced, and above all, the clashing perspectives and values it revealed.

  For Teller, this moment had been a long time coming. The idea of
a superbomb had originated in conversations between him and Fermi at Columbia University back in the fall of 1941. One afternoon, as they walked back to Pupin Laboratory after lunch, Fermi had casually—almost offhandedly—asked Teller whether he thought an atomic explosion might be used to produce a thermonuclear reaction. In the center of an exploding fission bomb, extraordinarily high temperatures—approaching 40 million degrees Fahrenheit—were produced, and so at least one of the conditions necessary for igniting a thermonuclear reaction seemed to be feasible, perhaps even within reach.

  The idea had intrigued Teller. It appealed to his immense curiosity and competitiveness. It also appealed to his intense ambitiousness. A scientist who knew Teller sensed this quality in him from the start:

  When I first met Teller, he appeared youthful, always intense, visibly ambitious, and harboring a smoldering passion for achievement in physics. He was a warm person and clearly desired friendship with other physicists. Possessing a very critical mind, he also showed quickness, sense, and great determination and persistence. However, I think he also showed less feeling for true simplicity in the more fundamental levels of theoretical physics. To exaggerate a bit, I would say his talents were more in the direction of engineering, construction, and the surveying of existing methods. But undoubtedly he also had great ingenuity. 4

  Teller’s mind worked with dazzling swiftness and creativity. He liked to discuss ideas with others, using these conversations to strike sparks and generate insights. Teller would slap his forehead as he corrected or discarded an idea—and then dash off another. Fermi, who knew him well, often said of him: “If only he could find one thing to concentrate on!” 5 With the superbomb, Teller had found his one thing.