Big Science

by Michael Hiltzik

  Finally, in the spring of 1952, Ernest broke down, landing back in the hospital with another attack of colitis. The doctors counseled rest and solitude, but it was a prescription he could not tolerate. A week at Balboa was interrupted by daily phone calls from Washington, New York, Los Alamos, and Berkeley. He tried to maintain his usual breezy mien, but it often cracked, producing outbursts of temper over even minor problems. On one occasion, he slapped a Livermore staff member who had questioned his instructions, an unprecedented breach of the Lawrence style and Radiation Laboratory protocol. The victim gave notice but was persuaded to stay after Ernest assembled the entire staff to witness his personal apology.

  Plainly, a way had to be found to enforce a rest cure. The ingenious solution came from Jack Neylan: a round-the-world voyage on tankers owned by Standard Oil of California. As company chairman Gwin Follis was a personal friend of Neylan’s—and the company itself had been Berkeley’s subcontractor on the MTA—arrangements were concluded rapidly. Ernest and Molly would be accompanied by sixteen-year-old Margaret, whose teenage suitors’ attentions made Ernest uneasy; and by Dr. John Sherrick, a stodgy old family friend who had delivered five of the Lawrence children and was slotted in as Ernest’s traveling medic.

  The group departed from the Port of New York on January 24 aboard the oil company tanker Paul Pigott, the manifest of which identified them as members of the crew (Molly and Margaret listed as stewardesses and Ernest as ship’s doctor), their wages set at one dollar each for the voyage. More surprising were the spacious and luxurious quarters available for VIP travelers on the seagoing vessels of a great American corporation. For two months they traveled in style—from New York to Beirut by sea; thence by car to Amman, Jordan, and onward by air to Bahrain, Karachi, and Ceylon, where they spent an enchanting two weeks as Paramount’s guests, watching Vivien Leigh and Peter Finch struggle to film a blockbuster called Elephant Walk. (Leigh later suffered a nervous breakdown and was replaced by Elizabeth Taylor.) They were feted by premiers and emirs and entertained at embassies and consulates as they made their way back west to Palermo, Sicily, where they boarded another tanker for the homeward passage. Ernest disembarked in New York seeming more hale than he had in years, delighting Alfred and Manette Loomis, who greeted the voyagers at dockside.

  Ernest’s condition was not to last. There were issues to manage at the fledgling Livermore lab, thermonuclear tests to attend in the Nevada desert and plans to be made for new tests at Eniwetok. International duties also beckoned. In 1954 he visited Geneva to consult on the establishment of an international high-energy physics lab under the aegis of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research; in time, this facility would host two linear accelerators, three synchrotrons, and the Large Hadron Collider, all of them technological offspring of that original, wax-slathered accelerator Ernest had held in his hand nearly a quarter century earlier. Later in the spring—on the very day the Oppenheimer hearing ended—Ernest departed for a speaking tour of Japan sponsored by the AEC’s Atoms for Peace program, which aimed to relieve nuclear research of its martial coloration by emphasizing its potential for power generation and other drivers of peacetime prosperity.

  Back home, a national debate was raging over H-bomb testing, provoked by the fallout fiasco of the Bravo tests. Lewis Strauss, determined to keep President Eisenhower on the path to thermonuclear supremacy, would demand more from Lawrence: more counsel, more public support, more time and effort. Soon after taking office as AEC chairman in 1953, Strauss expanded Project Sherwood, an Atoms for Peace program aimed at developing electric power reactors based on nuclear fusion. Livermore leaped onto the fusion bandwagon, following Lawrence’s practice of adjusting his research priorities in step with where the money was; Strauss had expanded the budget for Sherwood from $1 million to $10 million, with Livermore in line for a third of the total. But ramping up Livermore to embark on a new program meant more pressure on Ernest and more disappointment, for after a burst of enthusiasm for controlled fusion among nuclear experts, the idea proved to be unworkable.

  Then there was Chromatic. A few months after Lawrence’s return from his round-the-world tour, success appeared to be nearly at hand: Lawrence color tubes manufactured in Oakland played a role in a landmark of television history: the televised coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. On June 2, 1953, while a worldwide audience estimated at 150 million watched the coronation procession in black and white, one hundred young patients at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital, a children’s institution, viewed it live in color, on two twenty-inch Lawrence tubes displaying a closed-circuit image from three color cameras stationed along the route. But technical achievements were one thing; the commercial potential of color TV was another. Doubts were growing about the public demand for color sets. At Chromatic, the ebbing interest was sensed acutely. “Instead of having people clamoring at us for sample tubes, you couldn’t give them away,” Gow recalled.

  By 1955, Paramount would be desperate to exit the field; Ernest, feeling duty-bound to help his financial partner reduce its exposure to losses, went on the road to help Paramount find a buyer. He met with executives from Columbia Broadcasting System and Philco in the United States and flew to Holland to make a pitch, fruitlessly, to the Dutch technology conglomerate Philips. In the end, Paramount transferred Chromatic to its DuMont Laboratories, a TV manufacturer affiliated with the DuMont television network, an early network that would fail in 1956 despite launching the careers of Jackie Gleason and other future television stars. Lawrence’s technology did not quite disappear; in 1961 Paramount licensed what was left of it to Sony. A few years later the Japanese company incorporated elements of Lawrence’s design into one of the most successful color TV technologies in history, a product it named Trinitron.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  * * *

  The “Clean Bomb”

  Ernest’s colitis recurred in 1956, a flare-up he attributed largely to stress over the unresolved fate of Chromatic. But he had equally pressing concerns about Livermore. The lab’s future was still uncertain, despite a series of successful trials dubbed Operation Teapot at the Nevada Test Site in February and March 1955. After one of the blasts, the lab’s business manager ran down the hall to York’s office with the news, shouting, “We’re still in business!”

  Teapot did not end the debate in Washington over the country’s two duplicative bomb labs. Only two months later, Congress’s Joint Atomic Energy Committee convened yet another in its seemingly endless string of hearings on the topic. The agenda was framed by the committee’s staff as a series of ominous questions: “Exactly what is the relationship between Los Alamos and Livermore? . . . In the event that the two laboratories come up with similar proposals . . . how does the [AEC] decide who will do the job?” Moreover, Teapot’s success was incomplete. The operation had failed to achieve its most important goal, which was to show that radioactive fallout from weapons tests could be confined to the test site. Within days of the blasts, fallout was detected as far east as New York, New Jersey, and South Carolina. The health risks, to be sure, were negligible. But the political implications were enormous.

  Americans made anxious by reports of the dangers of fallout were not comforted by Lewis Strauss’s maladroit performance at a press conference at the White House on March 31, shortly after the Bravo tests in the Pacific. In Eisenhower’s presence, Strauss spoke haltingly from a written statement, assuring his audience that radiation reaching the United States was “far below the levels which could be harmful in any way to human beings, animals, or crops.” Unwisely, he then took questions. Asked by a reporter to describe how powerful this strange new weapon known as the hydrogen bomb might be, he replied: “As large as you wish . . . that is to say, an H-bomb can be made large enough to take out a city.”

  “Any city? New York?” he was asked.

  “The metropolitan area, yes.”

  Eisenhower accompanied him out of the room. “Lewis, I wouldn’t have answered that one that
way,” the president said levelly. “I would have said, ‘Wait for the movie.’ ”

  It was too late. Strauss’s words created alarm over the prospect of nuclear holocaust without laying to rest the public’s anxiety about fallout. For Livermore, this was the worst of all possible worlds, for it gave new life to a campaign to end nuclear testing.

  The president himself did not need the Bravo results to make him sensitive to the international drive for a test ban and nuclear disarmament. As a military man, he was skeptical about explosive devices that were too powerful to serve as practical weapons, and less impressed than Truman with the idea that bigger was invariably better. Herb York had learned this in 1954, soon after Lawrence bestowed on him the formal title of Livermore director. His authority bolstered by a title on the door and personalized office stationery, York set forth a “working philosophy” for Livermore calling for “always pushing at the technological boundaries.” In practice, that meant developing powerful but compact thermonuclear devices, with a high proportion of yield to weight. But when York sent a proposal to test a twenty-megaton bomb to the White House for Eisenhower’s approval, he was crisply rebuffed. Upon being informed that the bomb would be much larger than any ever built, the president barked: “Absolutely not! They are already too big!” As York learned later from General Andrew Goodpaster, Eisenhower’s military attaché, his request had prompted the president to reflect that “the whole thing is crazy; something simply must be done about it.”

  Eisenhower soon launched an initiative to do that “something,” appointing Harold Stassen as his special assistant for disarmament in March 1955. Stassen had been labeled the “boy wonder” of Republican politics after his 1938 election as governor of Minnesota at the age of thirty-one. His amiable North Country personality cloaked a sharp legal mind and soaring political ambition. The appointment carried cabinet rank, which Stassen was determined to exploit fully; seizing on a newspaper editorialist’s calling him Eisenhower’s “Secretary of Peace,” he audaciously advised the president that if he was asked about the nickname at a press conference, Eisenhower should reply, “That certainly expresses it.” Stassen leaped into his job with characteristic energy, declaring that he would assemble a supporting staff of “experienced men with brilliant analytical minds” to review American disarmament strategy from top to bottom. A few weeks later, he established eight task forces to take on the job. To chair the panel devoted to the crucial issues of international inspection and control of nuclear materials, he named Ernest Lawrence.

  Strauss made the most of his influence over Lawrence by urging him to appoint Teller to the task force and keep thinkers of the Oppenheimer stripe off it. His advice may have been superfluous, for when it was fully assembled, nine of the Lawrence panel’s twelve scientists were from Livermore. Besides Teller, they included Mark Mills, a bespectacled thirty-eight-year-old theoretician from Caltech who had joined Livermore the previous year and risen quickly to become one of Ernest’s most trusted aides. The remaining task force members hailed from the RAND Corporation, Rowan Gaither’s old fiefdom. This composition ensured that the panel would lean toward opposing a test ban based on doubts about the feasibility of inspections. That would create difficulty for Stassen, for international pressure to suspend tests was growing—indeed, the Soviets had proposed a test moratorium in May, just as Stassen’s task forces were coming together.

  Among the members of the inspection task force, Lawrence and Mills were willing to entertain the idea of a test ban in principle but were pessimistic that it could be adequately monitored. The hardliner, naturally, was Teller, who reminded his Livermore colleagues on the panel that a test ban struck at the heart of the lab’s very purpose. “Edward was always unabashedly hostile to the whole idea [of a test ban],” York recalled. “If we were behind, we had to test to catch up, he said; and if we were ahead, we had to test to stay there. There was no circumstance under which a test ban could be in our interest.”

  Teller’s viewpoint was shared by Lewis Strauss, who was struggling at the White House to hold the line against Stassen’s lobbying for an international agreement on nuclear weapons. On the eve of a joint meeting of all the task forces in October 1955, Strauss cautioned Lawrence against any attempt by Stassen to co-opt his reputation for the cause of disarmament. “All that the man in the street will realize,” he wrote Lawrence, “is that a great scientist, inventor of the cyclotron, has accepted this assignment and, because of the stature of his scientific ability, will pull the rabbit out of the hat.” He need not have worried. The report from Lawrence’s panel proved suitably skeptical about monitoring. The main problem, Ernest concluded, was the difficulty of tracking fissionable material in the Soviet Union to ensure that it was not finding its way into weapons. Reducing diversions even to 10 percent of total production, he calculated, would require a force of tens of thousands of inspectors fanned out across Russia’s vast territory.

  On this occasion, however, Lawrence’s immense credibility as the biggest of the big scientists failed to carry the day. His estimate came in for ridicule when Stassen presented the task force findings to the National Security Council on December 22. President Eisenhower told Stassen he was “quite sure the Soviets have never given any thought to any inspection plan which involved the presence . . . of anything like twenty to thirty thousand foreign inspectors.” Secretary of State John Foster Dulles complained that the figure would make the United States “a laughing stock”—not the best position for the United States to be in during the run-up to a summit meeting with the Russians, scheduled for the coming summer in Geneva. Stassen was instructed to “revise” his estimates and report back in mid-February.

  The prospects for a test ban agreement faded, but only temporarily. As the presidential election year of 1956 dawned, international pressure on the White House intensified. During a state visit to Washington early in the new year, British prime minister Anthony Eden proposed that the United States and Great Britain unilaterally suspend testing. The move, he explained, would give him political cover at home, where public sentiment against the bomb was steeply on the rise. The proposal won him only a stern lecture from Lewis Strauss, who maintained that concerns over fallout were overblown, and therefore a ban was unnecessary.

  Strauss already was orchestrating a propaganda campaign against fallout panic, featuring scientists on the AEC payroll. The campaign had been launched in December 1955 with a paper in the Scientific Monthly by Gordon Dunning, a “health physicist” at the AEC who assured readers that the technology for confining radioactivity to the site of a blast was constantly improving. Dunning’s paper, which declared nuclear testing to be “mandatory to the defense of our country,” was couched in the sober language of an academic treatise. It bristled with statistics that sounded comforting but were impossible for the average layperson to fully comprehend. (“Accepting the foregoing estimates, if several large thermonuclear detonations occurred every year for 30,000 years, the near equilibrium amount of carbon-14 thus created in the world would be about twenty times greater than the amount now present.”) Dunning’s bottom line was that “there is essentially no risk of hazardous amounts of fallout outside the control areas in the Pacific and continental United States.”

  Then came a widely reported lecture at Northwestern University by AEC commissioner Willard Libby, a former Berkeley chemistry professor. “It is possible to say unequivocally,” he stated, “that nuclear weapons tests carried out at the present time do not constitute a health hazard to the human population.”

  But the pressure for an end to testing continued to mount. Adlai Stevenson II, the former governor of Illinois, established leadership on the nuclear issue early in his campaign against Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee for the 1956 Democratic presidential nomination by calling for a test moratorium; Kefauver was forced reluctantly to concur. Another source of pressure was nestled within the commission itself, in the person of AEC commissioner Thomas Murray, who originally had joined with
Strauss to favor the Super project but had become unnerved by the intensity of the arms race. A millionaire businessman and a prominent Catholic layman, Murray framed his position in stark moral terms. Testifying before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, he called for a unilateral test moratorium on large devices and limitations on the size of weapons for the US stockpile, although he stopped short of an outright ban on all nuclear weapons. “God in His almighty power and goodness has given us the secret of atomic energy for purposes of peace and human well-being, and not for purposes of war and destruction,” he told the committee in February 1956.

  Murray also advocated development of a “clean bomb”—a device that could somehow deliver the destructive force of a nuclear blast minus the fallout. The rather chimerical notion of a nuclear bomb without radioactive side effects had emerged in late 1954 and had been embraced by Livermore, where it fit nicely with the lab’s brief to explore new ideas. The concept appealed to both Teller and Lawrence, who understood that public alarm about fallout could threaten the lab’s existence. In the spring of 1956, “clean” devices were placed on the program for Operation Redwing, a series of tests in the South Seas. Eisenhower mentioned the clean bomb obliquely at a press conference shortly before the operation began, when he fended off a question about Stevenson’s call for a moratorium by declaring that America’s goal was “not to make a bigger bang, not to cause more destruction [but] to find out ways and means in which you can . . . reduce fallout, to make it more of a military weapon and less one just of mass destruction.