Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  It is clear that the use of this weapon would bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives; it is not a weapon that can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations.

  Part Three of the report then provides the committee’s response to the question put to it: would it recommend a crash programme to develop the Super? Here Oppenheimer and Manley were careful to spell out where there was unanimity and where there was not:

  Although the members of the Advisory Committee are not unanimous in their proposals as to what should be done with regard to the Super bomb, there are certain elements of unanimity among us. We all hope that by one means or another, the development of these weapons can be avoided. We are all reluctant to see the United States take the initiative in precipitating this development. We are all agreed that it would be wrong at the present moment to commit ourselves to an all-out effort towards its development.

  We are somewhat divided as to the nature of the commitment not to develop the weapon. The majority feel that this should be an unqualified commitment.

  Others feel that it should be made conditional on the response of the Soviet government to a proposal to renounce such development.

  Appended to this main report were the two other reports. The first, written by Conant and DuBridge, and signed by those two plus Buckley, Oppenheimer, Rowe and Smith, spoke of the Super as a ‘weapon of genocide’. Moving slightly away from the issue of whether a crash programme should be initiated, this ‘majority report’ (as it came to be called) committed itself unequivocally to the recommendation that no programme of any sort to build this weapon should be pursued: ‘We believe a super bomb should never be produced.’ That the Russians might build a Super should not frighten the US into building one, the report insisted, since: ‘Should they use the weapon against us, reprisals by our large stock of atomic bombs would be comparatively effective to the use of a super.’ Finally, Conant and DuBridge wrote: ‘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 limiting the fear and arousing the hopes of mankind.’

  The second appendix, the ‘minority report’, written and signed by Fermi and Rabi, describes the Super as ‘necessarily an evil thing considered in any light’ and argues that it would therefore be wrong for the US to initiate a programme of building such a bomb without first inviting ‘the nations of the world to join us in a solemn pledge not to proceed’. When questioned about this at Oppenheimer’s security hearing, Fermi said that his view was that, if it turned out not to be possible to get an international agreement to outlaw research into the Super, then the US ‘should with considerable regret, go ahead’. Of this view, however, there is no trace in the report drawn up by him and Rabi.

  The GAC recommendations were not reported in the press and could not be, as they remained classified information. The main report had recommended that ‘enough be declassified about the super bomb so that a public statement of policy can be made at this time’, but, for the moment, public discussion of the Super was illegal. Edward Teller, however, was not a man to be deflected from his purpose by such niceties, and he made it his business to find out what the GAC had advised. First, he spoke to Fermi, who, Teller wrote to his friend Maria Mayer, ‘did not tell me what the General Advisory Committee proposed’, but ‘He did tell me what his own ideas are. He said: “You and I and Truman and Stalin would be happy if further great developments were impossible. So, why do we not make an agreement to refrain from such development?”’

  Teller added: ‘I have never been so frightened as I am now when I hear his argument of compromise.’ Hearing Fermi’s views produced in Teller the same despondency that listening to Oppenheimer had produced in Alvarez. ‘Washington,’ Teller told Mayer, ‘will try every substitute rather than decide to make an all-out effort . . . What I saw in Washington makes it quite clear that there are big forces working for compromise and for delay.’ On the other hand: ‘There are also forces which work for action.’

  Teller got a glimpse of how powerful these latter forces were when he was summoned to Brien McMahon’s office in Washington. ‘Before I could say anything,’ Teller records in his memoirs, ‘McMahon said, “Have you heard about the GAC report? It just makes me sick.”’ McMahon then introduced Teller to William Borden, his aide. ‘If you can’t reach me, talk to Bill,’ McMahon told Teller. ‘He has my complete confidence.’ As Teller quickly discovered, Borden was a man after his own heart. In fact, he was possibly the only person of influence in Washington who was more frightened of the Soviet Union than Teller himself was. In 1946, Borden had published a book called There Will Be No Time: The Revolution in Strategy, in which he argued that, unless the US and the Soviet Union united ‘into a single sovereignty’ (which, of course, he considered extremely unlikely), then war between the two was inevitable. Impressed by the German V-2 rockets that had attacked London in 1944 and by the awesome power of the Hiroshima bomb, Borden predicted that future wars would be fought by rockets tipped with nuclear warheads. It followed, he thought, that the US should equip itself with the largest, most powerful nuclear arsenal it possibly could. In January 1949, after McMahon had replaced Hickenlooper as chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, he appointed Borden as the committee’s executive director. After his meeting with McMahon and Borden, Teller must have realised that, with men like this in positions of power, the ‘big forces working for compromise and for delay’ were not going to have it all their own way.

  Throughout November 1949 a great and acrimonious battle took place in Washington over the H-bomb, the two sides seemingly evenly matched and the outcome unpredictable. Oppenheimer and Rabi had both believed it to be inevitable that the views of Teller and the Joint Committee would prevail, but, in adding their signatures to the GAC report, they had made such an outcome rather less certain. Another setback for Teller came when he received a phone call from Hans Bethe saying that he would not, after all, be prepared to join Teller’s proposed H-bomb project. Teller, as was his wont, saw in the decision the malignant influence of Oppenheimer, but, just as he was wrong to believe that it had been Oppenheimer who had swung opinion at the GAC meeting, so he was wrong again on this occasion. What had dissuaded Bethe from working on the hydrogen bomb was not Oppenheimer, but a conversation Bethe had had in Princeton with Victor Weisskopf and George Placzek. ‘Weisskopf vividly described to me a war with hydrogen bombs,’ Bethe later said, ‘what it would mean to destroy a whole city like New York with one bomb and how hydrogen bombs would change the military balance by making the attack still more powerful and the defense still less powerful.’ A few days after this conversation, he told Teller he would not join the project: ‘He was disappointed. I felt relieved.’

  Another blow to Teller’s position came on 9 November, when the AEC met to consider what course of action they should recommend to the President in the light of the GAC report. The result was a three-to-two majority in favour of the GAC view: Pike and Smyth siding with Lilienthal in opposing the accelerated Super programme, and Gordon Dean supporting Strauss, who, of course, was strongly in favour of such a programme. More hope for the GAC position came later that day, when the AEC recommendations were presented by Lilienthal to the President. According to John Manley, Lilienthal, after seeing the President, ‘came back feeling happy’ because Truman had said ‘that he was not going to be blitzed into this thing by the military establishment’.

  On the other hand, the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, who had in the past seen eye-to-eye with both Oppenheimer and Lilienthal, was unpersuaded by the GAC’s arguments, particularly those in the ‘majority report’, which, though they had been written by Conant, Acheson asked Oppenheimer to defend. ‘You know,’ Acheson told Gordon Arneson, ‘I listened as carefully as I knew how, but I don’t u
nderstand what “Oppie” was trying to say. How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm “by example”?’ Acheson had recently been appointed by President Truman onto a three-man special committee to consider the hydrogen-bomb question, the other members of which were David Lilienthal and the Defense Secretary, Louis Johnson, who was firmly convinced of the need for the United States to acquire the Super as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, Borden drafted a long letter to be sent to Truman on McMahon’s behalf, outlining in urgent tones the case for an immediate crash programme. ‘If we let Russia get the super first,’ the letter insisted, ‘catastrophe becomes all but certain – whereas, if we get it first, there exists a chance of saving ourselves.’

  On 2–3 December 1949, the GAC reconvened to consider the issue again, but, Oppenheimer reported to the AEC, none of them wished to change the views they had expressed in October. Lewis Strauss, however, was not going to rely on Oppenheimer to convey his opinion. Instead, he wrote directly to the President, telling him: ‘I believe that the United States must be as completely armed as any possible enemy.’

  From this, it follows that I believe it unwise to renounce, unilaterally, any weapon which an enemy can reasonably be expected to possess. I recommend that the President direct the Atomic Energy Commission to proceed with the development of the thermonuclear bomb as the highest priority subject only to the judgment of the Department of Defense as to its value as a weapon, and of the advice of the Department of State as to the diplomatic consequences of its unilateral renunciation of its possession.

  As Strauss knew very well, the Secretaries of Defense and State were at one with him on this question.

  More decisive than Strauss’s letter was a memo sent to Secretary Johnson by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 13 January 1950, arguing that the Super ‘would improve our defense in the broadest sense, as a potential offensive weapon, a possible deterrent to war, a potential retaliatory weapon, as well as a defensive weapon against enemy forces’. The emphasis of the scientists in their GAC reports on the fearsome power of the Super may have backfired, since it allowed the Joint Chiefs to point out that it would be preferable ‘that such a possibility be at the will and control of the United States rather than of an enemy’.

  Without showing it first to the special committee, Johnson forwarded this memo to the President, who remarked that it ‘made a lot of sense’. On 31 January 1950, the special committee met the President to give its advice to go ahead with the Super, but by then Truman had already decided to do just that. When Lilienthal expressed his own opposition to the committee’s recommendation, Truman cut him short. ‘What the Hell are we waiting for?’ he said. ‘Let’s get on with it.’ That day, Truman announced to the world that he had directed the AEC ‘to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or super-bomb’.

  Rabi was furious, not so much that the decision had been taken against GAC advice, or even that it had been taken without any attempt to negotiate with the Soviet Union, as he and Fermi had recommended. What angered him, he later said, was that, in making this announcement, Truman had ‘alerted the world that we were going to make a hydrogen bomb at a time when we didn’t even know how to make one’. This, Rabi thought, was one of the worst things the President could have done: ‘I never forgave Truman.’

  As it happened, that day was Lewis Strauss’s birthday, and to mark what was now, for him, a double celebration, he held a party to which all GAC members were invited. At the party Strauss walked over to Oppenheimer to introduce his son and his son’s new wife. To Strauss’s mortification, Oppenheimer did not even bother to turn around; he simply extended a hand over his shoulder. Later, at the same party, Oppenheimer was spotted by a New York Times reporter, standing alone. ‘You don’t look jubilant,’ the reporter said, to which, after a long pause, Oppenheimer replied: ‘This is the plague of Thebes.’ Abraham Pais has taken this characteristically gnomic remark to refer to a legion of soldiers from Thebes, the ‘10,000 knights’, who, after refusing to fight the Christians they had been ordered by the emperor to attack, were slaughtered. It seems much more likely, however (as the philosopher and science historian Robert Crease points out in a footnote to Pais’s account), that Oppenheimer was referring to the plague that, in Oedipus Rex, is sent by the gods to punish Thebes for the crime of harbouring the killer of Laius. The idea, surely, is that the President’s order to develop the hydrogen bomb was a punishment inflicted upon the scientists who developed the atomic bomb, for the ‘sin’ of allowing themselves to be used as weaponeers.

  From any point of view, the US programme to develop the hydrogen bomb had got off to a very bad start. Of the fourteen people whose job it now was to pursue that programme – the five AEC commissioners and the nine members of the GAC – eleven of them had voted against it. Of the other three, one, Seaborg, had abstained, and only one, Strauss, had any real enthusiasm for the project. At the same time the people who had lobbied hard for the programme had no direct responsibility for or control over its implementation. None of the scientists strongly in favour of it – Lawrence, Teller and Alvarez – were members of either the AEC or the GAC. Moreover, thanks to the McMahon Act, the control of atomic energy was in civilian hands, and consequently none of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose views had been so influential in establishing the programme, could play the role that General Groves had played in seeing the Manhattan Project through to a successful conclusion.

  The result was a perpetual struggle between those who actually wanted to see a hydrogen bomb produced and those whose job it was to produce it. Perhaps what should have happened is the mass resignation of all those members of the AEC and GAC who had voted against the programme, and their replacement with people eager to push the project through. Lilienthal had already announced his imminent retirement, letting it be known that he would leave when the issue of the Super had finally been resolved (he left in April 1950). Many of the others, including Oppenheimer and Rabi, were tempted to resign, but were talked out of it by Lilienthal. The AEC and GAC, after all, had responsibility for all aspects of atomic energy, not just weapons, and their responsibility for nuclear weapons was not confined to, or even concentrated on, the development of the hydrogen bomb. Overseeing the design, production and stockpiling of atomic bombs was at this time as important as, if not more important than, implementing the President’s demand for a hydrogen-bomb programme. One reason for staying, therefore, was to ensure that the hydrogen programme did not dominate all other aspects of atomic-energy development.

  Another reason was to ensure that there remained people in influential positions who were able and willing to think about the hydrogen bomb in something other than what Oppenheimer later dismissively referred to as ‘prudential and game-theoretical terms’. Bethe had changed his mind about joining Teller’s programme after Weisskopf had spelled out to him ‘what it would mean to destroy a whole city like New York with one bomb’, and that imaginative realisation of the scale of the horror that such a powerful bomb might cause is present throughout the GAC reports. Most of the scientists who wrote those reports had worked on the Manhattan Project and knew what it felt like to have created a weapon capable of killing tens of thousands of people in an instant. The moral responsibility for creating a weapon a hundred, even a thousand, times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb was something they wanted about as much as the people of Thebes wanted the plague. This, not disloyalty, was surely the explanation for some of the hyperbole (the talk, for example, of genocide) in those reports, and for their apparent acceptance of the shoddy thinking criticised by, among others, Alvarez and Acheson. The idea that the Soviet Union might follow the moral example of the United States if it chose not to develop the hydrogen bomb was not subversion, but rather wishful thinking.

  That the other side in this struggle – Strauss, Borden, Teller, McMahon, and so on – so often saw subversion where there was, in fact, only wishful thinking, or even sometimes well-reasoned and justified moral sc
ruples, is also understandable, for the decision to go ahead with the hydrogen bomb coincided with a series of shocking revelations about the extent of subversion in the Manhattan Project. On the basis of the Venona transcripts, the US authorities had identified Fuchs as a spy back in September 1949. The same transcripts told them that there had been at least one other spy working at Los Alamos with access to highly classified documents relating to the atomic bomb. Within a few months the trail that began with Fuchs led first to Harry Gold, who was arrested in March 1950, and then, in successive months beginning in June, to David Greenglass, Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg.

  On 9 February 1950, just a few days after Fuchs’s confession, Senator Joseph McCarthy launched the era – and the paranoia – named after him, when, in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, he claimed to have ‘here in my hand’ a list of 205 people ‘that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department’. In subsequent speeches by McCarthy the number of people on his list would vary, sometimes to as low as fifty-seven, but the basic idea that the US establishment had been penetrated by a ‘fifth column’ intent on destroying it would be a pervasive force in American politics for years to come.

  The President was not told about Fuchs until after he had confessed on 24 January, but J. Edgar Hoover had told Strauss both about Fuchs and about the other, as-yet-unidentified spy, in October. Strauss did not inform either his fellow commissioners on the AEC or the members of the GAC about this until after Fuchs’s confession. In the meantime he gave much thought to the identity of the other spy, his top suspect being Oppenheimer. To Hoover, Strauss remarked that the furore over Fuchs ‘will make a good many men who are in the same profession as Fuchs very careful of what they say publicly’.