Big Science

by Michael Hiltzik

  The next day, Serber and Oppie boarded a train to Washington for a GAC meeting, at which Oppenheimer would preside and Serber would give a presentation on the proposed heavy-water reactor. In effect, the agenda concerned the Super’s fate. When they arrived, they found Alvarez haunting the lobby, prepared to relay the GAC’s decision to Lawrence as soon as it was made. Barred from the closed meeting, he had to cool his heels for hours, watching “my friends and any number of famous military men go upstairs to a closed GAC session.” He felt almost as though his own destiny was being decided.

  The GAC spent the morning probing the views of the military. As Lilienthal recorded the scene, the thought of the Super made the Pentagon officers’ “eyes light up.” But they also were aware that deploying a weapon of such enormous power would not be a military action; the Super’s value would be strictly “psychological,” General Bradley declared. Oppenheimer ran the meeting in his typically neutral manner, not taking sides during the discussion, but the committee seemed to see things his way. As he described the session later, “quite strongly negative things on moral grounds were being said.”

  At lunchtime, Oppie led Serber and Alvarez to a small, dark café a short stroll from the agency’s offices. For the first time, he informed Alvarez directly of his opposition to the project. “The main reason he gave,” Alvarez would recount, “was that if we built a hydrogen bomb, the Russians would build a hydrogen bomb, whereas if we didn’t build a hydrogen bomb, then the Russians wouldn’t build a hydrogen bomb.” Alvarez tried desultorily to argue that Americans would find it hard to see the logic of Oppie’s position. Later, testifying at Oppenheimer’s security trial, he delivered a blunter assessment: “Pretty foggy thinking,” he called it.

  But Oppenheimer’s position accurately reflected the GAC consensus. The report issued by the committee following the October meeting was as uncompromising a brief against the Super as any that would emerge from a government panel. Oppenheimer’s preamble to the document delivered the gist: “No member of the Committee was willing to endorse this proposal,” he wrote. The hydrogen bomb’s unlimited explosive power was its most horrific characteristic: once the technical problem of initiating the fusion reaction was solved, ever-larger explosions could be arranged simply by adding more deuterium, which was easily available and cheap. “It is clear that the use of this weapon would bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives; it is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semimilitary purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations.”

  Oppenheimer’s theme was picked up in two concurring opinions issued with the report. A majority bloc composed of Conant, Cyril Smith, Lee DuBridge, and the industrial scientists Hartley Rowe and Oliver E. Buckley warned that deploying the weapon “would involve a decision to slaughter a vast number of civilians . . . A super bomb might become a weapon of genocide . . . In determining not to proceed to develop the super bomb, we see a unique opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war and thus of limiting the fear and arousing the hopes of mankind.” In a separate statement, Fermi and Rabi repeated the majority’s premonitory tone and language: “Necessarily such a weapon . . . cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide.” They further proposed that President Truman “tell the American public, and the world, that we think it wrong on fundamental ethical principles to initiate a program of development of such a weapon. At the same time it would be appropriate to invite the nations of the world to join us in a solemn pledge not to proceed in the development or construction of weapons of this category.”

  It has been suggested that the members’ emphasis on the hideous consequences of the Super had the opposite effect than they intended, for it sounded less like an argument for staying America’s hand than a warning of the consequences of letting the Russians get the Super first. It is true that a lively fear of Russian intentions and capabilities had settled upon Washington, fueling the expectation that war with the Soviet Union was inevitable. By allowing their fearsome imagery to overwhelm their moral message, the GAC members may have generated more interest, not less, in pressing the program ahead.

  Yet this view fails to reckon with the persuasive powers of Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller, which played the crucial role in creating momentum for the H-bomb. Sensing that the GAC was poised to reject the Super, they worked to shore up support for the weapon well before the committee issued its report. One day after the GAC meeting, a disconsolate Lilienthal noted in his diary that briefings by members of the Joint Atomic Energy Committee who had been visiting Berkeley were “rather awful: the visiting firemen saw a group of scientists who can only be described as drooling with the prospect and ‘bloodthirsty.’ ” Ernest Lawrence stood out as “quite bad,” he reported, describing Lawrence’s mind-set as: “There’s nothing to think over; this calls for ‘the spirit of Groves.’ ” Lilienthal concluded, “Things are certainly coming to the showdown stage and fast.”

  He was correct. The GAC report sharpened the divide between proand anti-Super camps on the AEC. Declaring themselves firmly opposed to the Super were Lilienthal, the Republican oil baron Sumner Pike, and Princeton physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth. On the other side, pressing for a development program at top speed, were Lewis Strauss and Gordon Dean, a veteran of the Roosevelt Justice Department now teaching law in California.

  Strauss was the dominant personality of the two. A self-made banking and investment mogul who pronounced his surname “Straws,” he bore down like a force of nature when in the grip of a personal obsession—and promoting the Super had become the defining obsession of his life. The matter brought out the most unpleasant aspects of a personality that was not endearing even at its best; Strauss would be described by the political observers Joseph and Stewart Alsop as a man with “a desperate need to condescend, to be always agreed with, to be endlessly approved and admired, to dominate and play the great man.” They quoted one of his fellow AEC commissioners (anonymously) as observing, “If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you’re just a fool at first. But if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor.”

  That characterization describes perfectly the course of the relationship between Strauss and Robert Oppenheimer. As Oppenheimer’s position on the Super evolved from skepticism to outright opposition, Strauss’s opinion of Oppie darkened steadily, like a cloud heralding a thunderstorm. The GAC report was a milestone in that process. It put Strauss in “an absolute dither,” Rabi would recall: Strauss “went around and talked to newspapermen all over, and to the House and Senate, and whatnot.” Meanwhile Lawrence, Teller, and Alvarez pitched in with appeals to the Pentagon and influential members of Congress. Oppenheimer stood fast as a counterweight to their campaign, but not an especially effective one, for his abstracted manner was not up to the task of communicating his overoptimistic argument that the Soviets would respond to an American offer to renounce the weapon by renouncing it themselves. Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson, declared himself flummoxed by Oppenheimer’s words. “I listened as carefully as I knew how, but I don’t understand what ‘Oppie’ is trying to say,” he told his aide Gordon Arneson. “How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm ‘by example’?”

  As the debate raged on, Truman made a show of keeping an open mind. On November 18 he appointed Lilienthal, Acheson, and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson as a special committee to weigh the political, military, and technical aspects of the Super. Lilienthal, who had informed Truman of his intention to retire as AEC chairman early in the new year, now realized that his final weeks of service would be consumed in a fruitless battle to persuade his committee colleagues—and the president—of the folly of the hydrogen bomb. With Congress clamoring for approval, Truman’s decision seemed preordained.

  On Janua
ry 31 the special committee gave Truman its recommendation that the United States proceed with the Super. The White House meeting that formally inaugurated the thermonuclear age took all of seven minutes, and it only lasted that long because Lilienthal asked for the time to express his dissenting view. He got out only a few words before the president cut him short. “What the hell are we waiting for?” Truman barked. “Let’s get on with it.”

  Later the same day, Truman announced in a nationwide radio address that he had instructed the AEC to “continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or superbomb.” That night, Lilienthal confided to his diary: “There is nothing but pain for the decision made today.” The small personal satisfaction he felt came from his having passed one of the most grueling tests of his career by showing the courage “to ‘stand up in meeting’ and say ‘No’ to a steamroller . . . Whether time proves me right and the Pres.’s two Secretaries, and the Hill boys, and the E. O. Lawrences wrong, I suppose no one will ever know.”

  • • •

  Truman’s announcement came on Lewis Strauss’s fifty-fourth birthday. The news transformed the cocktail reception he had scheduled for himself at a Washington hotel into a triumphal celebration of his quest for the Super. Oppenheimer, who had earlier tendered his acceptance, felt obliged to show up. Despondent and morose, he held himself apart from the festivities, seated alone with his back to the room. Not even when Strauss came by to introduce his daughter and her husband did Oppie turn around, instead merely offering a hand over his shoulder in silent greeting. Lewis Strauss’s sensitivity to slights, real and perceived, was exquisite. This was one affront he would not forget.

  Anti-Super physicists were crestfallen by the president’s announcement. “I never forgave Truman for buckling under pressure,” Rabi recalled.

  But for Ernest Lawrence, opportunity beckoned.

  Chapter Eighteen

  * * *

  Livermore

  On a midsummer’s day in 1950, Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez stood on the tarmac of an abandoned naval air station on the outskirts of a hot, dusty farm town. The sole claim to fame of Livermore, California, was as the former home of a onetime heavyweight champ who had moved there in the 1920s. An arch spanning the main drag marked the distinction: Home of Maxie Baer.

  They strolled about the base, taking in its cracked and overgrown runways, its derelict barracks, its empty gymnasium, and a drained swimming pool filled with debris.

  “Well, Luie,” Lawrence said, “this is it.”

  He sounded like a Moses sizing up the promised land, which was not too far from the truth. For months Ernest had been searching for a place to locate his newest project, one so big and ambitious that it would not fit on the Berkeley campus—not even on the hillside overlooking San Francisco Bay where he had built the 184-inch cyclotron. Now he had found it. Ernest Lawrence would bring the town of Livermore far more worldwide fame than Maxie Baer ever did. A hub of hydrogen bomb research, the Livermore National Laboratory would be Ernest Lawrence’s final monument. To this day, it remains one of the United States government’s largest and most secretive research institutions.

  • • •

  The road to Livermore started with a disappointment. Lawrence’s campaign to add a nuclear reactor to Berkeley’s arsenal of atom-smashing technologies dated back to his wartime effort to wrest Enrico Fermi’s nuclear pile away from Arthur Compton and the University of Chicago. It would be Fermi who delivered the final blow to his dream, at the General Advisory Committee’s meeting in October 1949—the same meeting that had produced the negative report on the Super. The GAC concurred that building a heavy-water reactor was a promising research project, but Fermi vetoed Berkeley as its home. Lawrence and the Rad Lab, he observed waspishly, had “absolutely no experience in reactor design or operation.” Why should the Rad Lab get a reactor now when there were more experienced labs all over the country? Robert Serber, who had carried Berkeley’s proposal to the GAC, had to acknowledge that Fermi had posed “the obvious question,” and that it was unanswerable.

  Exiting the meeting room, Serber delivered the bad news to Luis Alvarez, pacing the lobby downstairs. Alvarez had hoped to bring home to Ernest two pieces of good news: the GAC’s approval of the reactor, and its assent to a crash program for the Super. But after Serber’s report and his lunch with Oppenheimer, he knew he would be returning to Berkeley empty-handed. Without waiting for the GAC meeting to end, he packed up and left the capital. “I went back to doing physics,” he would write. “But not for long.” The GAC had closed the door to Berkeley’s reactor. But another door was about to open wide.

  • • •

  After the GAC dashed his dream of a reactor, Ernest mobilized the Rad Lab to find another way of generating a heavy neutron flux. A new impetus for the project had emerged: fears of a shortage of uranium ore, the raw material for the production of plutonium bomb cores. The nation’s entire nuclear arsenal was dependent on only two sources: a single rapidly depleting mine in the Belgian Congo and another in Canada, near the Arctic Circle.

  Lawrence reasoned, however, that although domestic sources of uranium ore were practically nonexistent, uranium was plentiful in another form: tons of uranium tailings piled up as waste at Oak Ridge and Hanford. To Ernest, this detritus of U-235 separation and plutonium manufacture was untapped treasure; only neutrons were needed to unlock its value. “If you have neutrons, you can make any commodity,” including plutonium, he told an enthralled Joint Atomic Energy Committee. Bombarding the waste uranium with neutrons would allow the United States to “break the bottleneck of this raw material problem,” he promised. “We can make all the atomic bombs anyone could want. We could step up the atomic bomb production tenfold . . . We have got thousands of tons of [U-]238, and we can convert that into thousands of tons of plutonium.”

  But where to get the neutrons? The Rad Lab’s idea was to develop a new type of accelerator. This involved a return to Ernest’s old “brute force” method: when all else failed, dial up the energy, step up the current, and wait for something to happen. In this case, he reckoned, one could obtain the required profusion of neutrons by bombarding an appropriate target with a high-energy deuteron beam. The neutrons in turn would act upon a secondary target; obtaining the end product one sought was merely a matter of selecting the right secondary target. If tritium was the sought-after product, for example, you used lithium-6; if it was plutonium, the raw material would be uranium—namely, that waste U-238.

  Lawrence settled on a linear accelerator as the most efficient neutron producer for his purpose. Essentially, he was uncoiling the cyclotron that years earlier he had conceived by twisting Rolf Wideröe’s linear accelerator into a spiral. On a Saturday morning in late 1949, he called an urgent staff meeting to outline the concept, unnerving not a few staff members roused from their slumbers by the unexpected weekend alert. Staff physicist Don Gow, summoned groggily to the telephone with the message “Ernest wants to see you,” thought instantly, “My God, what have I done?” Instead, he was being invited to witness Ernest’s unveiling of his most audacious project yet.

  Ernest conceived the accelerator on a stupendous scale, its prototype a tube 60 feet in diameter and 87 feet long, the first step in construction of a prodigious machine he envisioned as 1,500 feet in length. He estimated the power demand of the full-sized accelerator at 150,000 kilowatts, enough to light a city of three hundred thousand residents. “We just sat there with our mouths hanging open,” Gow recalled. “Had he really gone mad at last? But he was serious.”

  Lawrence had returned to the wartime mind-set of applying unlimited resources to a problem. That approach had raised Oak Ridge from an unpopulated valley in remote Tennessee; when national security hung in the balance, as it did now, who would begrudge a few hundred thousand kilowatts? His machine would be capable of producing a half kilogram of plutonium—just over a pound—a day. “This isn’t a large amount of power for the product one is
getting,” he would assure his rapt congressional audience.

  The Lawrence magic was alive again. The more his staff talked out the concept that Saturday morning, the more it coalesced into a plausible scheme. Certainly if the theory of heavy neutron bombardment was sound, then the linear accelerator was the right type of machine. By the end of the meeting, design tasks were already being parceled out. Without fanfare, work on the Bevatron was halted and ramped up instead on the Materials Testing Accelerator, or MTA, as the new machine was inelegantly dubbed. Scientists who had put in their time with Ernest thought nothing of the hairpin turn in the lab’s priorities. “The first priority was what he wanted done,” shrugged Brobeck, laying aside his work on the Bevatron. The new machine, like so many of Ernest’s ideas before it, was perched on the edge of technical plausibility, offering the prospect of limitless triumph or abject failure. The latter possibility was papered over, naturally, by the boss’s vibrant optimism.

  Five weeks after Truman’s endorsement of the Super, with the nation committed to a hydrogen bomb program requiring immense quantities of fissionable material, the Atomic Energy Commission approved a $10 million grant for the prototype MTA, designated the Mark I. The full-size machine, Mark II, was costed out at $100 million. For that, the AEC gave only conditional approval, with the final nod to be based on the Mark I’s performance.

  It was enough for a start. The Mark I was what brought Lawrence and Alvarez to Livermore on their scouting visit, Ernest again embracing his wartime role as impresario of a partnership of government, academia, and industry. The University of California was loath to stand as the sole sponsor of what it viewed as a pure manufacturing scheme, but Jack Neylan, lubricating a project conceived by his protégé, persuaded his old friend Gwin Follis, the chairman of Standard Oil of California, to participate; the MTA would be managed by Follis’s company through a newly organized subsidiary called California Research and Development Company.