Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  Actually, those in the same profession as Fuchs (assuming that Strauss meant physics rather than espionage) were among the least troubled by the revelation that Fuchs had given information about the atomic bomb to the Soviets, since, as they had been saying for years, they never took seriously the idea that the science and technology behind the bomb could possibly be kept secret. As for the fact that Fuchs had had access at every stage to Teller’s work on the hydrogen bomb, this worried Oppenheimer still less. In fact, he told the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy on 27 February 1950, it would be a good thing if Fuchs had passed on to the Soviets Teller’s H-bomb design, since that would set them back a few years, as Teller’s bomb stood no chance of working.

  In March 1950 the editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Eugene Rabinowitch, decided to devote almost the entire issue to the H-bomb. The special issue begins with a report of President Truman’s announcement of the accelerated programme to build the H-bomb, and an account of how the project to build such a bomb, which had supposedly been a state secret, first became public. The first public acknowledgement that such a programme existed was made by the senator for Colorado, Edwin Johnson (a member of the Joint Committee), in a television debate broadcast on 1 November 1949. The debate was on the subject ‘Is there too much secrecy in our atomic program?’ and Johnson was there to argue the case that there was not enough secrecy. In the course of making his argument, however, Johnson revealed several state secrets. ‘Our scientists,’ he said:

  already have created a bomb that has six times the effectiveness of the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki and they’re not satisfied at all; they want one that has a thousand times the effect of that terrible bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki that snuffed out the lives of 50,000 people just like that. And that’s the secret, that’s the big secret that the scientists in America are so anxious to divulge to the whole scientific world.

  This ‘naïve and monumental indiscretion’, Rabinowitch tells his readers, has allowed him to do what he has wanted to do for years, which is to use his magazine to discuss the ‘grave moral implications’ that have to be considered when thinking about the decision to develop the hydrogen bomb.

  Inside the issue is an impassioned statement, signed by twelve prominent physicists, including Hans Bethe, Sam Allison, Ken Bainbridge, Charles Lauritsen and Victor Weisskopf, urging the US government to ‘make a solemn declaration that we shall never use this bomb first’. The use of this bomb, the physicists say, ‘would be a betrayal of all standards of morality’. There can only be one justification for developing this bomb, they conclude, ‘and that is to prevent its use’.

  A short statement by Oppenheimer is printed in the magazine, taken from his contribution to a television debate hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt broadcast on 12 February 1950, in which he says:

  There is grave danger for us that these decisions have been taken on the basis of facts held secret. This is not because the men who must contribute to the decisions, or must make them, are lacking in wisdom; it is because wisdom itself cannot flourish, nor even truth be determined, without the give and take of debate and criticism. The relevant facts could be of little use to an enemy, yet they are indispensable for an understanding of questions of policy.

  Also taking part in the television programme was Hans Bethe, who, because he was not a member of either the GAC or the AEC, was free to speak a little more candidly than Oppenheimer and used that freedom to echo the plea that he was to sign in the Bulletin. ‘Hydrogen bombs,’ he said in the programme, ‘can only mean a wholesale destruction of civilian populations’, and so it was important that the US pledged that it would never be the first to use such bombs. Oppenheimer was not in a position to make such a statement or to sign such a plea, but, Bethe wrote to Weisskopf after the television programme: ‘I had a long talk with Oppie, who agreed very much with what we had done and were doing. He emphasised the necessity of keeping the issue alive and I very much agree with him.’

  In the issue of the Bulletin devoted to the hydrogen bomb, space was given to Teller for a rallying cry to physicists to get ‘Back to the Laboratories!’ The tone and the message of Teller’s piece were the very opposite of those Oppenheimer had tried to convey in his Life profile of October 1949, and it is probably no coincidence that, when choosing a topic in theoretical physics to stand for the self-indulgence of not getting involved in building the H-bomb, Teller chose the area most associated with Oppenheimer. ‘Our scientific community,’ Teller writes, ‘has been out on a honeymoon with mesons. The holiday is over. Hydrogen bombs will not produce themselves.’ The rest of the special issue of the magazine, filled as it is with scientists reflecting on the horror of the H-bomb, goes some way towards explaining why this rallying cry fell on deaf ears.

  One of the few first-rate physicists to respond to Teller’s call was John Wheeler. ‘In my mind,’ Wheeler says in his autobiography, ‘I was answering a call to national service.’ He considered it urgent that the US react to the Soviet bomb with ‘a priority program to develop a thermonuclear weapon before the Soviets did’. Given this attitude, it ‘was a great disappointment to me that so few of my colleagues shared my view that a national scientific mobilization was called for’. Oppenheimer, he had heard, had remarked: ‘Let Teller and Wheeler go ahead. Let them fall on their faces.’ Oppenheimer’s own attitude at this time Wheeler sums up as:

  . . . the hydrogen bomb can’t be done, or if it can be done it will take too long, or if it can be done and doesn’t take too long, it will require too large a fraction of the nation’s scientific manpower, or if it doesn’t require too large a fraction of the nation’s labor force, it will be too massive to deliver, or if it is deliverable, we oughtn’t to make it.

  On 17 February, Teller had written to Oppenheimer from Los Alamos, asking him to join the project. ‘Things have advanced to a desperate urgency here,’ he told him, ‘and I should be most anxious indeed if you could come and help us.’ Oppenheimer was not to be persuaded. He might be chairman of the advisory panel to the US body charged with implementing the policy of pushing ahead with the hydrogen bomb, but, such were the complications of those times, it did not follow that he himself would be prepared to work on the project.

  While Teller was having trouble persuading his fellow scientists to work on the H-bomb, the urgency of beating the Soviets to it was deeply felt by politicians. On 10 March, Truman issued an order to the AEC for the thermonuclear weapons programme to be ‘regarded as a matter of the highest urgency’; specifically, the production of such weapons was to receive greater priority than the stockpiling of atomic weapons. Truman’s order set a goal of producing ten thermonuclear bombs a year.

  In April 1950, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published an article by Bethe, who was, after all, the world’s greatest authority on thermonuclear processes, which contained a timely reminder that certain basic scientific problems needed to be solved before hydrogen bombs could be built, and that it was not at this point at all clear that those problems would be solved:

  Whether the temperatures required to start a thermonuclear reaction between heavy hydrogen nuclei, even under the most favourable conditions, can be achieved on earth is a major problem in the development of the fusion bomb. To find a way of detonating such bombs will require much research and considerable time.

  Talking of producing ten H-bombs a year, the subtext went, looked a little premature. It was as if, in 1939, before anyone knew whether an atomic bomb could possibly be built, the US President had publicly announced a crash programme to build one, and then in 1944, before any tests had been carried out, the President had ordered Groves to pursue a goal of producing ten implosion bombs a year. The rest of Bethe’s article concentrated on the moral questions raised by the H-bomb, as did an article published in the May issue of the Bulletin by Robert Bacher. The following month, however, something happened to change Bethe’s mind: communist North Korea invaded South Korea.

  Back in February,
Bethe had written to Norris Bradbury, Oppenheimer’s successor as director of Los Alamos, explaining why he would not work on the hydrogen bomb. Even though it was, after Truman’s announcement, national policy to develop the H-bomb, Bethe told Bradbury: ‘I still believe that it is morally wrong and unwise for our national security to develop this weapon.’ Nevertheless, he concluded this letter by saying: ‘In case of war, I would obviously reconsider my position.’ True to his word, after the Korean War broke out, he decided, after all, to join Teller at Los Alamos to work on the H-bomb.

  By the time Bethe joined the H-bomb project, Teller had succeeded in recruiting some extremely able people, including John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam and John Wheeler, all of whom were delighted by the arrival of Bethe. ‘With his wonderful virtuosity in mathematical physics,’ Ulam wrote, ‘and with his ability to solve analytical problems of nuclear physics, he helped significantly.’ The Los Alamos team was at that time in need of all the help they could get, since they had still not solved their main problem: how to create the enormously high temperatures needed to initiate the fusion process.

  Bethe had not gone to Los Alamos hoping to solve the problem, but rather to prove that it could not be solved. The best possible outcome, he believed, would be that a hydrogen bomb turned out to be against the laws of physics. Indeed, in the summer of 1950 there was some reason to believe that the Super could not be made. For instance, it had been demonstrated mathematically that Teller’s design – what became known as the ‘classical Super’ – would not work. In March 1950, Ulam and his friend and colleague Cornelius Everett had presented Teller with the results of a long and tedious set of calculations they had performed, which gave the classical Super very little hope of initiating fusion. Teller, Ulam recalls, ‘was not easily reconciled to our results. I learned that the bad news drove him once to tears of frustration.’ Things got worse, from Teller’s point of view, when von Neumann reported that he had done the same set of calculations on his new computer in Princeton and the results tallied with those of Ulam and Everett. One day, when Ulam was visiting von Neumann at Princeton, they called on Oppenheimer, who had heard about these mathematical results and, according to Ulam, ‘seemed rather glad to learn of the difficulties’. Despite everything, Teller, von Neumann and Ulam still believed that they could solve the initiation problem and that an H-bomb could be built. They scheduled for the following year a series of important experiments called the Greenhouse Tests. These would not test a bomb – they were still a very long way from having a bomb to test – but would have the more limited goal of trying to achieve the initiation of the fusion process.

  Oppenheimer – no doubt because, like Bethe, he hoped an H-bomb could not be built – was convinced that the technical problems were insoluble, or, anyway, that it would take a long time to solve them. Much of what he said and did in these years, including the things that struck his opponents as evidence of disloyalty, was based on that conviction. One example is the work that he did, starting in the autumn of 1950, for something called the Long Range Objectives Panel. This was a committee set up by Robert LeBaron, the Deputy Secretary of Defense for atomic-energy matters and chairman of the Military Liaison Committee (whose job it was to liaise between the AEC and the military). Its purpose was to examine and report on the long-term role that nuclear weapons might play in foreign policy and in the formation of military tactics and strategy. Also on the panel were fellow H-bomb sceptics Robert Bacher and Charles Lauritsen, and several enthusiasts for the H-bomb, including Luis Alvarez, General Nichols of the army and General Wilson of the air force.

  Both Alvarez and Wilson remember being shocked during the discussions of this panel at Oppenheimer’s attitude towards the hydrogen bomb. Alvarez remembers Oppenheimer saying: ‘We all agree that the hydrogen bomb program should be stopped, but if we were to stop it or to suggest that it be stopped, this would cause so much disruption at Los Alamos and in other laboratories where they are doing instrumentation work that I feel that we should let it go on, and it will die a natural death with the coming tests.’ When those tests failed, Alvarez remembers Oppenheimer saying, that ‘will be the natural time to chop the hydrogen-bomb program off’. Much less specifically, Wilson remembers:

  The panel contained some conservative statements on the possibility or the feasibility of an early production of a thermonuclear weapon. These reservations were made on technical grounds. They were simply not challengeable by the military. They did, however, cause some concern in the military.

  So concerned was General Wilson about what he saw of Oppenheimer during these panel meetings that ‘I felt compelled to go to the Director of Intelligence to express my concern over what I felt was a pattern of action that was simply not helpful to national defense.’

  The panel’s report, written by Oppenheimer and delivered in February 1951, emphasised – as Oppenheimer’s GAC report of the previous October had emphasised – the importance of tactical atomic weapons, which, it was claimed, were (as opposed to hydrogen bombs) theoretically sound, made efficient use of fissile material and were militarily more effective, both offensively and defensively. The feasibility of hydrogen bombs, the report pointed out, had not yet been demonstrated, and so the H-bomb programme had to be seen, despite the President’s public announcement of a crash programme and his urgent command to the AEC to make that programme its top priority, as a long-term project. ‘In fact,’ Oppenheimer wrote, ‘we believe that only a timely recognition of the long range character of the thermonuclear program will tend to make available for the basic studies of the fission weapon program the resources of the Los Alamos Laboratory.’

  These words may have been written by Oppenheimer, but the report containing them was signed by all members of the panel, leading, some months later, to an enraged Teller demanding of Alvarez: ‘Luis, how could you have ever signed that report, feeling the way you do about hydrogen bombs?’ When Alvarez replied that he thought it was a harmless statement about the importance of small atomic bombs, Teller told him:

  You go back and read that report and you will see that it essentially says that the hydrogen bomb program is interfering with the small weapons program, and it has caused me no end of trouble at Los Alamos. It is being used against our program. It is slowing it down and it could easily kill it.

  At about the same time as the Long Range Objectives Panel report was delivered, Oppenheimer published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists an article entitled ‘Comments on the Military Value of the Atom’, which, subject to the restraints of official secrecy, made available to the public the thinking that had gone into the report. ‘To the first impression that the atomic weapon was a decisive, an absolute military power,’ he begins, ‘there was a reaction: it is another weapon, it is “just another weapon”.’ Without once mentioning the hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer then seeks in this article to undermine the entire thinking behind strategic bombing (thereby undermining the only conceivable use the hydrogen bomb might have). When we think of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer writes, we think ‘of the specific use that was made of it against Hiroshima and Nagasaki’:

  We think of it as an instrument of strategic bombing, for the destruction of lives and of plants, principally in cities. It is the decisive, even if perhaps not the final, step in a development that may have started at Guernica, that was characterized by the blitz against London, by the British raids on Hamburg, by our fire raids on Tokyo, and by Hiroshima.

  As against this conception of the military use of atomic bombs, Oppenheimer rather cleverly quotes from a statement given in 1949 by Admiral Ralph Ofstie, in which he expresses the opinion that ‘strategic air warfare, as practiced in the past and as proposed in the future, is militarily unsound and of limited effect, and is morally wrong, and is decidedly harmful to the stability of the postwar world’. These views, Oppenheimer points out, were expressed before the Korean War, and now, because of that war: ‘Much of what was clear to Admiral Ofstie then has become clear to all of us t
oday.’ He then goes on to suggest that using atomic bombs against military rather than civilian targets, though certainly not as desirable as the avoidance of war itself, was at least preferable to ‘the extreme form of the atom bomb as a strategic weapon’. The article ends with an account of Oppenheimer’s meeting with Nehru, India’s Prime Minister, during the latter’s visit to the United States in May 1950. When Oppenheimer took the opportunity to ask Nehru whether he had found any appreciation during his time in the States of the Hindu notion of control, or restraint, Nehru replied: ‘I cannot believe that any great people would be without it.’ The article ends with Oppenheimer’s declaration: ‘I believe the American people are a great people.’

  In opposing the very concept of strategic bombing, Oppenheimer was setting his face against the prevailing trend of US military thinking and exposing himself to the wrath of some of the most powerful people in the US. A few months after the publication of this article he was given a chance to dig himself deeper into that hole when he was invited to join a research programme called ‘Project Vista’. This was a project that had grown out of exactly the kind of thinking that Oppenheimer had recommended in his Bulletin article. In September 1950, the much-decorated and very popular US army general James Gavin was charged with the task of investigating ‘the possible tactical employment of nuclear weapons’. This was three months into the Korean War, and the clear implication was that General Gavin would identify some way of using tactical atomic weapons in the Korean conflict. Gathering together a group of experts, among whom was Charles Lauritsen, Gavin and his group went to Korea to review the situation. On their return to the States, Lauritsen suggested forming a ‘study group of top scientists and military men’ to look into the possibility of using nuclear rockets to provide tactical air support to the troops on the ground.

  At the same time Lee DuBridge had been approached by the air force to consider the possibility of using the scientific expertise at Caltech to address both strategic and tactical problems faced by airmen. After discussing this with some of his colleagues, including Lauritsen, the ‘Caltech group’, as DuBridge put it in a letter to Willie Fowler, ‘expressed the feeling that it was not qualified or greatly interested in the strategic air problem, but that the tactical air problem, particularly the problem of close support of ground troops, was more nearly in line with our interests, and the group agreed to give the matter further thought’.