Big Science

by Michael Hiltzik

  Oppenheimer’s point was more nuanced than it might have seemed on the surface; he was calling for introspection among scientists that had been lacking—and perhaps unnecessary—before the power of fission was unleashed. But Lawrence responded brusquely to what sounded like Oppie’s assumption of guilt on behalf of scientists everywhere. “I am a physicist,” he snapped, “and I have no knowledge to lose in which physics has caused me to know sin.”

  Yet bonds of friendship, colleagueship, and shared travail in the bomb project made it difficult for Lawrence to dismiss Oppenheimer’s disquiet entirely. The weekend after Nagasaki, Ernest visited Los Alamos. He found Oppie wracked with self-doubt and struggling to draft another communiqué for the Interim Committee. This one addressed the “scope and program of future work in the field of atomic energy.” Oppie was attempting to place before the committee his “profound” thoughts about the future of atomic weaponry, including what he called “the superbomb.” Oppenheimer reported the scientific committee’s conclusions that there could be no “effective military countermeasures for atomic weapons,” that the United States could not be sure of maintaining “technical hegemony” in atomic weapons, and that “such hegemony, if achieved, could [not] protect us from the most terrible destruction.” That could be done not through scientific and technical expertise but only by eradicating war. Lawrence and Oppenheimer agreed on that point. Where they disagreed was that Lawrence believed that goal had been reached by the bombing of Japan; Oppenheimer, by contrast, feared that the bombs of August had made it more remote than ever.

  Lawrence largely approved of Oppenheimer’s draft of the communiqué but requested one telling change. Oppenheimer had written, “We are most doubtful that even a profound strengthening during the coming years of our technical position in the field of atomic weapons could make an essential contribution to the problem of ending war.” Lawrence proposed a substitute: “It is needless to say that as long as our nation requires strong armed forces we must stockpile and continue intensive development of atomic weapons, and it is probable that we can thereby retain supremacy for a number of years. However, we are certain that . . . other powers can produce these weapons in a few years . . . We consider it imperative, therefore, to take determined steps towards international arrangements that will make such developments improbable, if not impossible.”

  To Oppenheimer, this sounded like a marketing pitch for government funding of Lawrence’s laboratory, and he persuaded Ernest to back down. The scientific committee’s memo, as finally prepared for Stimson, acknowledged that the development of more effective nuclear weapons “would appear to be a most natural element in any national policy,” but emphasized that national security could be “based only on making future wars impossible. It is our unanimous and urgent recommendation to you that . . . all steps be taken, all necessary international arrangements be made, to this one end.”

  Yet when Oppenheimer arrived in Washington with the letter, Stimson was absent—a man of seventy-seven trying to recover his strength at an Adirondacks resort after the superhuman exertions of the summer. Instead, Oppenheimer was shunted off to George Harrison, who relayed his thoughts to Jim Byrnes, now Truman’s secretary of state. Byrnes instructed Harrison to give Oppenheimer a blunt reply: “For the time being, his proposal about an international agreement is not practical and . . . he and the rest of the gang should pursue their work full force”—work, that is, on the Super, the next-generation weapon predicted to be thousands of times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Japan.

  Back in Los Alamos, Oppenheimer recorded his thoughts in a disconsolate letter to Lawrence. In Washington, he wrote, “it was a bad time, too early for clarity.” He had tried to communicate that the national interest did not lie in simply continuing atomic bomb work, and even suggested banning atomic weapons by international convention “just like poison gases after the last war.” (The allusion was to a prohibition on poison gas signed at the Geneva Convention in 1925.) But no one was listening. “I had the fairly clear impression from the talks that things had gone most badly at Potsdam, and that little or no progress had been made in interesting the Russians in collaboration or control,” he told Ernest. “I don’t know how seriously an effort was made.” (In fact, no effort had been made.) Oppie reported two “gloomy” developments in Washington: one being Byrnes’s order to continue the bomb research; the other being a “ukase,” or edict, from Truman “forbidding any disclosures on the atomic bomb . . . without his personal approval.” It seemed to Oppenheimer that the opportunity to keep atomic weapons under control via international agreement was slipping away, perhaps never to be recovered. More disturbingly, scientists’ ability to control their own professional destinies seemed to be slipping away. He confessed to feeling “a profound grief, and a profound perplexity about the course we should be following.”

  The final paragraphs of Oppie’s letter to Ernest concerned his return to Berkeley. The last few weeks’ discussions about the future course of the bomb program, conducted in an atmosphere of shared emotional and physical exhaustion, had driven a wedge between the two friends, though by no means was it the only wedge. Oppenheimer had doubts about how well he might fit in on campus—“any fruitful future in Berkeley would have to depend . . . on a certain mutual respect for nonidentical points of view.”

  He was intimating that physics at Berkeley might have to continue without Robert Oppenheimer. This was only one change that Lawrence knew he would face as war gave way to peace. There were challenges ahead, but also opportunities—massive opportunities. And no one in science would be better positioned to exploit them than he was.

  Chapter Fifteen

  * * *

  The Postwar Bonanza

  American physicists emerged from the war torn between two contradictory sensations. In the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they were hailed as heroes; even portrayed bearing the “tunic of Superman” (in the words of Life magazine). Their pronouncements on scientific, social, and even political issues were eagerly sought and widely published.

  But many felt burdened by the consequences of their work. “In the past, scientists could disclaim direct responsibility for the use to which mankind had put their disinterested discoveries,” wrote James Franck, the Met Lab physicist who had emerged as the intellectual leader of the debate over the social consequences of nuclear research. “We cannot take the same attitude now because the success which we have achieved in the development of nuclear power is fraught with infinitely greater dangers than were all the inventions of the past.”

  For the moment, the American public and its political leadership were indifferent to these concerns. President Truman, who felt he had shown a valorous decisiveness in ordering the bombs to be dropped, had no tolerance for retrospective moralizing. That soured his first meeting with Oppenheimer, who was invited to the Oval Office on October 25, 1945, to discuss legislation for domestic control of the atom. Oppie immediately got off on the wrong foot with Truman by declaring, “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.” In Truman’s version of the meeting, he offered Oppie a handkerchief and replied, “Here, would you like to wipe them?” Recounting the episode to Dean Acheson, then his undersecretary of state, he labeled Oppenheimer a “bellyaching” scientist and groused about how he had “come into my office . . . wringing his hands and telling me they had blood on them because of the discovery of atomic energy.” He instructed Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.”

  Unburdened by Oppie’s metaphysical brooding, Ernest Lawrence eagerly accepted public accolades for his role in ending the war. These included the Presidential Medal for Merit, then the government’s highest civilian honor, presented by General Groves and Bob Sproul at a Berkeley ceremony in early 1946. Consulting contracts were tendered by Eastman Kodak, General Electric, and the American Cyanamid Company, and invitations flowed in to serve on government committees, to lecture, to testify before Congress. Regent Jack Ney
lan, seeing that his protégé was inclined to accept them all and that the flood of commitments was sapping Ernest’s health, stepped in as a buffer “to protect him from being marauded,” as he put it later. Ernest, somewhat abashed at telling supplicants that he would have to check with Neylan before accepting their invitations, called him his “father confessor.”

  Lawrence had expected that the Rad Lab, like other scientific institutions, would be placed on a crash diet after the war as the torrent of military funding dried up. The demands of the Manhattan Project had swelled the complex on the hill above the Berkeley campus to thirty buildings filled with a professional workforce of 1,200, but as early as mid-1944, Lawrence had advised Sproul that it soon would shrivel into a modest outpost of the Physics Department, its budget cut by some 99 percent to $85,000 a year.

  But he made that prediction before the bombs fell—indeed, it was during that grim period when the failure of the Alpha racetracks had laid him out in a Chicago hospital room. Now Lawrence’s expectations for growth and funding turned positively libidinous. He mapped out a spectacular expansion of the laboratory to be funded jointly by the university, General Groves’s Manhattan Engineer District, and the Rockefeller Foundation, without devoting much thought to how the bills might be divided up among them. “Our stock was so high at that time that it didn’t make any difference,” Bill Brobeck would recall. “The money would come from somewhere.” At the outset, most of it came from Groves, who committed to supporting Lawrence’s laboratory at the level of more than $3 million a year.

  What drove the new program forward was the return of Lawrence’s gifted team of physicists from their wartime assignments. Their publication of new discoveries had been halted during the war, but they had not stopped thinking—or absorbing the knowledge gained from work on the physics of the bomb. McMillan and Alvarez returned from Los Alamos impatient to try out new approaches they had conceived to address that old bugaboo, the relativistic barrier to higher energies. Bethe had not been wrong about this obstacle, merely premature; but if the cyclotron were to move beyond 30 million electron volts, the issue had to be faced now.

  McMillan dubbed his idea “phase stability.” It was based on a realization that had come to him “lying in bed one night” at Los Alamos. Particles could be driven to ever higher energies in the cyclotron, he realized, by accelerating them not in streams but in pulses, with the accelerating voltage oscillating in frequency to keep them in phase as they approached the speed of light. The process would yield less current—that is, fewer particles—but give them higher energies. The insight, which would be implemented in an accelerator known as the synchrotron, was a breakthrough on a par with Lawrence’s own recognition of the cyclotron principle. “If I had the true historical sense,” McMillan recollected, “as soon as I woke up in the morning I would have written down in a notebook: ‘I made a big invention last night.’ ” Instead, he wrote a letter to the Physical Review, which, in accordance with the rules of wartime secrecy, kept it locked away until it could be published (in September 1945). Only then did McMillan learn that he had not been the first physicist to conceive of phase stability; that honor went to Vladimir Veksler of the Lebedev Physical Institute in Moscow, who in 1944 published two papers on the subject that had not reached McMillan when he wrote his own. Veksler protested in a letter to the Review that McMillan’s paper had made “no reference . . . to my investigations.” He had a point, as McMillan acknowledged in a published apology. The synchrotron principle has ever since been attributed to McMillan and Veksler, who discovered it nearly simultaneously but certainly independently, working half a world apart.

  Alvarez, meanwhile, pondered a similar physical limitation governing the acceleration of electrons. His thoughts turned to linear acceleration, the technology that Lawrence had been developing with David Sloan at Berkeley until the cyclotron demonstrated its superiority in 1931. In physics, however, that was ancient history. Alvarez concluded that at the much higher energies attainable in 1945, the linear accelerator might be more efficient than the cyclotron for certain purposes; his inspiration came from advanced oscillators that had been invented for radar at the MIT Rad Lab. Known as SCR-268s, these had been rendered militarily obsolete before war’s end. Consequently, three thousand devices were collecting dust in army warehouses. At Alvarez’s behest, Lawrence requisitioned them from Groves. Soon 750 surplus oscillators were on their way to Berkeley, where Alvarez proposed to use them to accelerate electrons to speeds sufficient to produce artificial muons, subatomic particles that thus far had been detected only in cosmic rays.

  As Lawrence had perceived toward the end of the war, peacetime offered the opportunity to make Big Science much bigger. The ambitions of McMillan and Alvarez alone called for three huge new machines: a synchrotron capable of accelerating electrons to 300 million and eventually to 1 billion volts; a linear accelerator to drive protons to 140 million volts (Alvarez had reconfigured his machine to accelerate protons once he recognized that McMillan’s phase-stability synchrotron would work better for electrons); and the 184-inch cyclotron, redesigned after the war to exploit phase stability and eventually rechristened the synchrocyclotron.

  That was not all. Glenn Seaborg, anxious to return to Berkeley from Chicago, proposed building a “hot lab” on the hill to continue his work on transuranic elements, which he believed were lying in wait to be discovered in abundance. For this, he needed equipment to manage intense radioactivities and, as a capstone, a nuclear reactor—the one nuclear technology that had eluded Lawrence’s grasp. To pressure Berkeley to meet his requirements, Seaborg took a page from Lawrence’s book: he let the university know that Arthur Compton had offered him a salary of $10,000 and the authority to hire a dozen scientists if he remained in Chicago. Lawrence pried the necessary salary and staff approvals from Sproul, and committed himself personally to finding money to build Seaborg’s hot lab and reactor.

  Last but not least was the cherished research in biomedicine, which Ernest did not propose to abandon. His plans included the continuation of John Lawrence’s work with radioactive tracers and therapeutic isotopes as well as John’s research in the biological effects of fission and the metabolism of plutonium and other transuranics by the human body, conducted in collaboration with Joseph Hamilton of the medical school. In 1945 the regents had finally addressed the medical school’s hostility to this research by creating a Division of Medical Physics within the Department of Physics. At its inception, the division had a roster of four faculty members, including John, who was appointed an assistant professor of medical physics and mostly paid out of the Physics Department budget.

  The Rad Lab budget for 1946 and beyond climbed to more than $2 million a year—not including construction of the new machines. Building the synchrotron and the hot lab and refurbishing the 184-inch would cost at least another $605,000. As for Alvarez’s linear accelerator, Lawrence did not even submit an estimate—the device was too novel even to calculate a rough construction budget. No one knew better than Ernest that his expansion plans would outstrip the resources of the university, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Research Corporation, his customary financial backers. He also knew that his fund-raising would face intense competition from traditional university rivals as well as such new bidders as the Manhattan Project labs at Chicago, Oak Ridge, and Los Alamos, which all hoped to establish themselves as permanent research centers in peacetime.

  Keeping ahead of the competition would demand the full measure of Lawrence’s fund-raising prowess. On September 19, a few weeks after the Japanese surrender, he was in Raymond Fosdick’s New York office, painting word pictures of the marvelous 184-inch cyclotron. His goal was to obtain a new grant to finish the construction that had been halted by the war. In the years since the first grant was made, he explained, the cyclotron’s original design had been outrun by new technological possibilities. The $400,000 remaining from the Rockefeller Foundation’s initial $1.15 million was insufficient to finish the job
.

  In making his pitch, Ernest committed a grave faux pas. Laboring under the misimpression that the foundation would surely be proud of its unwitting role in the Manhattan Project—the $60,000 grant it had made blindly to convert the 184-inch for uranium separation—he assured Fosdick that “if it hadn’t been for the RF, there would have been no atomic bomb,” as Fosdick repeated to Weaver the next day. Lawrence was unaware how tactless this sounded to Fosdick, who had been brooding over the foundation’s investment in what had turned out to be an instrument of unparalleled death and destruction. Fosdick considered that his foundation had been hoodwinked into a deal with the devil. The organization had funded the 184-inch in the name of “man’s hunger for knowledge,” as he had written in the foundation’s 1940 annual report; five years later, in its annual report for 1945, he declared mournfully that this once-honorable quest had “brought our civilization to the edge of the abyss . . . The pursuit of truth has at last led us to the tools by which we can ourselves become the destroyers of our own institutions and all the bright hopes of the race.” Fosdick had no good answer to the dilemma now facing science. “In the long run there is probably no method of sifting out the bad from the good in scientific research . . . The mighty imperative of our time, therefore, is not to curb science but to stop war . . . Science must help us in the answer, but the main decision lies within ourselves.”

  Yet even as Lawrence’s words were reminding Fosdick of the foundation’s guilt, they cracked open a door to its redemption. By outlining the cyclotron’s vast potential for advancing the peacetime goals of basic science, Ernest convinced Fosdick that the machine just might serve as a beneficent scientific counterbalance to Hiroshima. Entranced again by Lawrence’s “thrilling” optimism, as he described it to Weaver, Fosdick came away from the meeting anxious that the Rad Lab might not need the foundation’s funds after all. Lawrence had mentioned the possibility that he might look to the army for the funding necessary to complete the cyclotron, even if a government grant would mean devoting the machine chiefly to military research.