Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  Interesting though such calculations were, Teller hankered after laboratory work, and, in particular, weapon-laboratory work. He could, of course, have returned to Los Alamos, where his expertise could have been put to practical use. Bradbury had made it clear that he would be welcome there as a scientist, if not as a director. Another ex-colleague at Los Alamos has said: ‘A lot of us were really teed-off at Edward, because if he would have sat down and applied himself to the job, it would of course have gone faster.’ What Teller did instead was to use the considerable amounts of spare time he now had on his hands to campaign for the establishment of a second weapons laboratory that would act as a rival to Los Alamos.

  As Los Alamos was at that time making excellent progress towards completing the programme it had been asked to undertake, the case for a second, competing laboratory was hard to make. Teller’s ostensible reason was that the pace of progress at Los Alamos was too slow and needed competition to speed it up. This might have appeared quite a strong argument in 1950, but, from the autumn of 1951 onwards, the speed and efficiency of progress at Los Alamos undermined it completely.

  Among the members of the GAC and the AEC there was little enthusiasm for a second laboratory, the general view being that expressed by Oppenheimer in a letter to Gordon Dean in October 1951: such a thing was ‘neither necessary nor in any real sense feasible’. There were, however, two important dissenters. The first was Thomas Murray, who had been on the AEC since March 1950, when both Lewis Strauss and David Lilienthal resigned from it, and who quickly allied himself with those who believed that progress on the H-bomb programme was proceeding too slowly. Murray had been convinced since the June 1951 meeting in Princeton that a new laboratory, dedicated to developing the Super, was necessary. The other exception was Willard Libby, a close friend of Teller’s, who tried and failed to convince the GAC of the need for a second laboratory in October 1951.

  On 13 December 1951, Teller came to Washington to present his case for a second laboratory to the GAC in person. Teller believes that the argument he presented that day was ‘among the very best I have ever made’. He was, he says, ‘constrained, logical and polite’. He was not, however, convincing. All those present, except Libby and Murray (who, though not a member of the GAC, had been invited to attend), remained unpersuaded.

  Also in Washington at that time was Ernest Lawrence, who by this stage was firmly in the pro-Teller and anti-Oppenheimer camp, so much so that Robert Serber – having been told by Rabi, ‘You have to choose between Ernest and Oppie’ – had felt compelled to leave Berkeley out of loyalty to Oppenheimer. From the summer of 1951 onwards, Serber was a colleague of Rabi’s at Columbia. After the GAC meeting of December 1951, Murray met Lawrence, who made it clear that he supported Teller’s campaign for a second laboratory and that he would be happy to work with Teller to establish one. In early February 1952, Teller visited Lawrence at Berkeley and the two of them drove out to Livermore, a site about thirty miles east of Berkeley owned by the University of California, upon which Lawrence had built a large particle accelerator called the MTA. Livermore, Lawrence told Teller, would be the ideal place for the proposed second laboratory.

  With such enthusiastic support from one of the most successful scientific promoters of all time, the prospects for the second laboratory were now looking very good, in spite of the fact that the AEC and the GAC continued throughout the winter of 1951–2 to reject the idea. What Teller and Lawrence had shown in 1949, however, was that, with the right kind of political support, it was possible to impose a policy upon the AEC, rather than wait for that policy to be recommended by the GAC. It was a lesson that Teller had learned very well.

  What helped Teller enormously was that he was able to exploit the reputation Los Alamos still had as ‘Oppie’s lab’, and the considerable reserves of bad feeling that by then existed towards Oppenheimer himself among US policy-makers. The list of people whom Teller successfully recruited to his campaign for a second laboratory during the first half of 1952 reads like a roll call of all those powerful men whose suspicion and hatred Oppenheimer had aroused during the previous two or three years. Moreover, in exploiting that suspicion and hatred, Teller served to raise them to new levels.

  Chief among those powerful haters of Oppenheimer, of course, was Lewis Strauss, whom Teller describes in his memoir as ‘a courteous man with a deep-seated sense of decency’, and who was the first person in Washington to whom Teller went for support. Strauss promised to do whatever he could to help, and indeed went much further. ‘Strauss told me,’ Teller later revealed, ‘he loved me like a brother-in-law.’ Another enthusiastic recruit to Teller’s campaign was David Griggs, a geophysicist at UCLA, who had for years acted as a consultant for the air force and who, in September 1951, was appointed the air force’s chief scientist. ‘I think it would be fair to say,’ Teller later wrote, ‘that without Dave Griggs, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory [the name given to Teller’s second weapons laboratory] would not have come into existence. He introduced me to many influential people and succeeded in developing a lot of friends for the idea.’

  David Griggs, along with Lewis Strauss, William Borden and Thomas Finletter, was one of the few people who actually believed that Oppenheimer might be working for the Soviet Union. Teller, despite his personal and professional animosities towards Oppenheimer, believed no such thing, but that such beliefs were held by people of influence was certainly a factor in his favour in setting up his proposed second laboratory, and he did nothing to challenge them. On the contrary, he went out of his way to encourage them. In April 1952, an FBI report said that sometime earlier Teller had, in response to questions about Philip Morrison, told an FBI agent that Morrison ‘has the reputation among physicists of being extremely far to the left’. Then, though he had not been asked about Oppenheimer, Teller added: ‘Oppenheimer, Robert Serber and Morrison are considered the three most extreme leftists among physicists’, and that ‘most of Oppenheimer’s students at Berkeley had absorbed Oppenheimer’s leftist views’.

  In May 1952, Teller gave two interviews to the FBI, one on the 10th and another on the 27th, in which Oppenheimer was the main topic. Teller’s main charge was that Oppenheimer ‘delayed or attempted to delay or hinder the development of the H-bomb’, which he said could have been completed by 1951 if it had not been for Oppenheimer’s opposition. In fact, at the very time this interview was being conducted, the Los Alamos programme – recommended by Oppenheimer and abandoned by Teller – had just succeeded in developing the world’s first H-bomb, ready for testing five months later. Teller also told the FBI agent that, though he himself did not believe Oppenheimer to be disloyal, ‘a lot of people believe Oppenheimer opposed the development of the H-bomb on “direct orders from Moscow”’. Perhaps Teller’s most damaging comment about Oppenheimer, however, was his remark that he ‘would do most anything’ to get Oppenheimer off the GAC. Coming from the man widely regarded as the US’s greatest authority on hydrogen bombs, this was a powerful statement.

  As Teller would have known perfectly well, his new friend ‘Dave’ Griggs was one of those people who thought Oppenheimer was acting on orders from Moscow. Griggs was an air-force man through and through, and, like many US air-force men, had been appalled at the views expressed by Oppenheimer in the Project Vista report, which, he seemed to think, could only be explained by assuming that Oppenheimer was deliberately trying to undermine the military strength of the US. At Oppenheimer’s security hearing in 1954, Griggs stated unequivocally: ‘I want to say, and I can’t emphasize too strongly, that Dr Oppenheimer is the only one of my scientific acquaintances about whom I have ever felt there was a serious question as to their loyalty.’ When asked about his support for Teller’s idea of a second weapons laboratory, Griggs said: ‘We felt at the time we are speaking of, namely, late 1951 and early 1952, the effort on this [hydrogen bomb] program was not as great as the circumstances required under the President’s directive.’ Again it is worth emphasising that the dates s
pecified by Griggs, ‘late 1951 and early 1952’, coincide precisely with the period when the ‘effort on this program’ was at its very greatest.

  One of the most important ways in which Griggs helped Teller to realise his ambitions of establishing a second laboratory was by introducing him to Thomas Finletter, the Secretary of the air force. Finletter became so convinced of the need for a second laboratory to rival Los Alamos that he stated that, if the AEC was not prepared to establish one, then the air force would. Step by step, then, Teller’s campaign was moving upwards through the ranks of the American political hierarchy. What Teller himself regarded as the ‘crucial interview’ came when, on Finletter’s recommendation, the Secretary of Defense, Robert Lovett, agreed to meet him. After their meeting Lovett wrote to the AEC recommending a second laboratory. By April 1952, it was clear that the AEC would have to give way to the political tide Teller had created, and after two more months of particularly intensive campaigning – both for the laboratory and against Oppenheimer – on 9 June 1952, Gordon Dean finally wrote to the University of California on behalf of the AEC, asking them to approve the establishment of a new weapons laboratory at Livermore. The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory opened on 2 September 1952. Teller had won.

  The price of Teller’s victory – a price that he, Lawrence, Strauss, Griggs and Finletter were only too willing, indeed pleased, to pay – was the ruin of Oppenheimer’s reputation in Washington. When Teller began his campaign in the autumn of 1951, Oppenheimer was still a respected and influential figure in Washington; by the time that campaign ended a year later, Oppenheimer was, from a political point of view, more or less a spent force.

  During that year the private whispering about Oppenheimer that had been going on for years became louder and more insistent and the public attacks on him became more common and more vicious. It is as if the campaign to establish the Livermore Laboratory and the campaign to oust Oppenheimer from the GAC and blacken his political reputation became merged into a single political movement. Those who supported the second laboratory were, to a man, those most vocal in their disapproval of Oppenheimer. When Thomas Murray visited Berkeley, for example, Lawrence told him at some length how disillusioned he had become with Oppenheimer and how opposed he was to Oppenheimer’s continued membership of the GAC. Two weeks later, Kenneth Pitzer, who had been director of research for the AEC from 1949 until his resignation in 1952, gave a speech to the American Chemical Society that, in the spirit of Teller and Strauss, blamed the GAC for the slow progress of the H-bomb programme. Afterwards he told the FBI that he ‘now is doubtful as to the loyalty of Dr Oppenheimer’.

  During May 1952, as the campaign for Livermore reached its climax, so too did the attacks on Oppenheimer. On 9 May, Oppenheimer had lunch with Conant and DuBridge, the three of them gloomily aware of which way the political winds were blowing. That night Conant recorded in his diary: ‘Some of the “boys” have their axe out for the three of us on the GAC of AEC. Claim we have “dragged our heels” on H bomb. Dirty words about Oppie!’ Ten days later this sense of a concerted attack on Oppenheimer was felt by Gordon Dean, who reported in his diary that at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, he had heard much ‘vitriolic talk’ about Oppenheimer, ‘notably from some of the University of California contingent’.

  It was during this month, May 1952, that Teller gave his interviews to the FBI, telling them that he would do anything to get Oppenheimer off the GAC and handing them gossip that some people believed Oppenheimer to be taking his orders from Moscow. At the end of the month, Hoover sent transcripts of those interviews, together with transcripts of interviews with Pitzer and Libby, to the Justice Department, the White House and the AEC.

  Oppenheimer, of course, knew what was afoot, and a meeting he had with David Griggs on 23 May shows how much the campaign against him was unsettling him. The origin of this meeting lay in a lunch Griggs had attended during the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences. Over lunch, Griggs had met DuBridge and Rabi and expressed the view that the GAC was not doing enough to push through the accelerated H-bomb programme ordered by the President. Rabi told him that if he could read the minutes of the GAC meetings, he would see that this was not true and suggested that he ask Oppenheimer to show him the minutes.

  So the next time he was in Princeton, which was 23 May, Griggs called on Oppenheimer. ‘I didn’t really expect that I would be allowed to read the minutes of the General Advisory Committee,’ Griggs later said, ‘and it turned out that this was not offered by Dr Oppenheimer.’ The two spoke for about an hour, during which Oppenheimer, referring in particular to the Princeton meeting of June 1951, attempted to convince Griggs that the GAC was fully committed to the H-bomb project. The conversation took a somewhat uncomfortable turn when Griggs moved on to the subject of a bit of tittle-tattle about Thomas Finletter. A story was going around that Finletter, at a meeting with the Secretary of Defense, had been heard to remark that if the US had a certain number of hydrogen bombs it could rule the world. Griggs was concerned about this story circulating, because it ‘suggested that we had irresponsible warmongers at the head of the Air Force at that time’. He therefore asked Oppenheimer if he himself had been spreading the story and, if so, what grounds he had for thinking it true. Oppenheimer replied that he had heard this story from an unimpeachable source and dismissed Griggs’s vehement insistence that it was false.

  The discussion got even more tense when Oppenheimer asked Griggs if he thought he, Oppenheimer, was pro-Russian or just confused. ‘As near as I can recall’, Griggs said, ‘I responded that I wished I knew.’ Oppenheimer then asked Griggs whether he had impugned his loyalty to high officials in the Defense Department, ‘and I believe I responded simply, yes, or something like that’. The meeting ended with Oppenheimer calling Griggs a ‘paranoid’.

  Four days later, Bethe went to see Griggs in order to lighten the increasingly tense atmosphere between the air force and some of America’s leading atomic scientists. Bethe later recalled that the occasion was surprisingly pleasant:

  Dr Griggs had been very much an exponent of the view that Los Alamos was not doing its job right and very much an exponent of the view that thermonuclear weapons and only the biggest thermonuclear weapons should be the main part of the weapons arsenal of the United States. I had very much disagreed with this, with both of these points, and so I expected that we would have really a very unpleasant fight on this matter. We didn’t.

  On all the issues that divided Griggs and Oppenheimer – the alleged need for a second weapons laboratory, the importance of strategic bombing, the hydrogen bomb, the value of openness versus the need for secrecy, and so on – Bethe’s sympathies were, in every case, with Oppenheimer, and yet Griggs clearly did not regard Bethe as a dangerous subversive, nor did he appear to dislike him. Why the difference?

  The answer seems to be twofold. First, Griggs seems to have thought that Oppenheimer was not just – as, presumably, he believed Bethe to be – expressing a series of misguided opinions; rather, his opinions were part of a ‘pattern of behaviour’ (a phrase used often by Oppenheimer’s detractors at this time) that identified him as someone working actively against US interests. Second, on a personal level, Oppenheimer seems to have aroused in Griggs something close to hatred. Leona Libby, Willard Libby’s wife, describes their friend ‘Dave’ Griggs in glowing terms: ‘a pillar of honesty, a fine scientist, a strong servant of the military and of the weapons laboratories, very careful to think clearly, and devastatingly outspoken’. He was, she says, ‘strongly built, with blue eyes that could become very cold and fierce when he encountered bad science, hypocrisy, or other unpleasantness’. Recounting some of the details of Griggs’s testimony against Oppenheimer at the security hearing, Leona Libby writes: ‘I remember how his blue eyes blazed coldly when he felt strongly on an issue, as he surely did on this one.’

  Though Oppenheimer, when he felt so inclined and the occasion demanded it, was capable of charming almost any
one, he seemed to go out of his way during this period to antagonise and offend his political opponents. Having twice publicly humiliated Lewis Strauss, and having offended Griggs by calling him ‘paranoid’, Oppenheimer, a few weeks after this latter incident, seemed determined to antagonise one of the most powerful people in the US military establishment: Thomas Finletter. The occasion was a lunch that Finletter’s aides, William Burden and Garrison Norton, had arranged in the hope that meeting face-to-face would help Oppenheimer and Finletter overcome some of their disagreements. Griggs was also invited, and a few days before the meeting provided Finletter with an ‘eyes only’ memo, describing in detail his own recent encounter with Oppenheimer. The lunch was, one of its participants later recalled, one of the most uncomfortable events at which he had ever been present. Oppenheimer arrived late and was steadfastly unresponsive to any attempt to engage him in conversation. His manner seemed to suggest contempt for everyone in the room, and, as soon as the meal was over, he turned his back on his fellow diners and walked away. After Oppenheimer had gone, Finletter laughed and said to his aides: ‘I don’t think you fellows have convinced me I should feel any more positively about Dr Oppenheimer.’

  Oppenheimer’s term as a member of the GAC was coming to an end in the summer of 1952. There is some uncertainty about whether he wanted to renew his position on the committee or whether, like Conant and DuBridge (whose membership of the GAC was also coming to an end), he was looking forward to freeing himself from the pressures and unpleasantness that surrounded US nuclear politics at this time. On 14 June 1952, Conant wrote in his diary with evident delight: ‘Lee DuBridge and I are through as members of the GAC!! 10½ years of almost continuous official conversations with a bad business now threatening to become really bad!!’ Two days earlier Oppenheimer had told Dean that he, too, would not be seeking reappointment after his term came to an end, but in his case there is no indication that he was delighted to leave.