Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  When on 9 October the National Security Council met to discuss the Disarmament Panel’s paper, there was no support at all for its recommendation of a test ban. Indeed, Robert Lovett, the Secretary of Defense, clearly felt uncomfortable about even discussing such a suggestion. It made him feel vulnerable. The minutes of the meeting record that Lovett ‘felt that any such idea should be immediately put out of mind and that any papers that might exist on the subject should be destroyed’. Such was the shadow cast by Joseph McCarthy during this period.

  Even the more limited proposal that the Mike test be postponed until after the presidential election failed to gain many adherents, despite being supported by some members of the GAC and AEC. Truman himself, though he would not publicly and officially change the date, let it be known to the AEC that he ‘would certainly be pleased if technical reasons cause a postponement’. One of the commissioners, Eugene Zuckert, was duly sent out to Eniwetok to see if any such technical reasons could be found. None could, and so, on 30 October, the National Security Council gave its approval to the series of ‘Ivy’ tests of which Mike was a part.

  A day later, at 7.15 a.m. local time on the morning of 1 November (still 31 October in the US), the first Ulam–Teller hydrogen bomb to be tested exploded on the tiny island of Elugelab (less than a mile long, with an area considerably smaller than a square mile), at the northernmost tip of the Eniwetok Atoll. A few millionths of a second later, the island of Elugelab no longer existed; it had been completely vaporised by a blast that was measured at ten megatons, 800–1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The fireball from the blast was three miles wide, producing heat that, even thirty miles away, felt as if someone had opened a hot oven. The blast lifted into the air some eighty million tons of earth and seabed that would be deposited as fallout all over the world. Several thousand people were there, all of them stunned by the enormity of the explosion. ‘You would swear that the whole world was on fire,’ wrote one of them to his wife.

  One person who was not there was Edward Teller, despite the fact that, although he had refused to have anything to do with the Los Alamos team that organised and carried out the Mike test, he was still regarded as the ‘father of the H-bomb’. At the time the bomb went off Teller was in Berkeley, where a seismograph had been set up to monitor the seismic wave that would be produced by the explosion. The sound waves took twenty minutes to travel from Eniwetok to the Californian coast, but even so Teller was able to estimate the yield of the bomb before anyone at Los Alamos had heard anything. With a not entirely appropriate sense of paternal pride (the Mike test bomb was, after all, as much Marshall Holloway’s ‘baby’ as it was his), Teller sent a telegram to his former colleagues, announcing: ‘It’s a boy.’

  A week after the Mike test, this sense of triumph was notably absent among the group of scientists, including Oppenheimer, that constituted the Science Advisory Committee to the Office of Defense Mobilization. Among them was Lee DuBridge, who was strongly inclined to resign from the committee on the grounds that, as the decision to go ahead with the Mike test showed, the government had no intention of listening to its scientific advisors. DuBridge was persuaded to stay, but he was hardly reassured when another member of the committee, the president of MIT, James R. Killian, leaned over to him and whispered: ‘Some people in the Air Force are going to be after Oppenheimer and we’ve got to know about it and be ready for it.’

  The device that obliterated the island of Elugelab was not a deliverable bomb. This is because it used as its fusion-fuel liquid deuterium, which boils at 23.5 degrees Kelvin (minus-250 degrees Celsius). This meant that heavy and unwieldy cryogenic equipment – twenty tons of it – had to be used to maintain the deuterium at below this extremely low temperature. This, in turn, meant that the ‘bomb’ weighed more than eighty tons, about twenty times more than the ‘Little Boy’ fission bomb and much too heavy to be considered a practical weapon. No one doubted, however, that if the Ulam–Teller design worked with liquid deuterium, it would also work with lithium-6, which is a solid metal, perfectly suited for a practical, deliverable bomb.

  The Mike test could indeed, then, be seen as, in William Borden’s phrase, the ‘thermonuclear Trinity’. Nevertheless, through its very success, it confirmed something that Oppenheimer and his dwindling (and increasingly isolated) band of political supporters had been saying for the previous four years: with a yield of ten megatons, the H-bomb was, surely, too big to be considered as a military weapon. Who could imagine actually using a bomb powerful enough to destroy completely, in a single moment, a large city like London or New York? This thought seems not to have diminished the sense of triumph felt by those responsible for the H-bomb’s development. For Teller, particularly, even though he had not been part of the Los Alamos team responsible for the Mike test, this was a moment of celebration. Having received a detailed report of the test results, he decided to go to Princeton to keep his friend John Wheeler up to date and to thank him for the support he had given him at a time when Teller had felt shunned by other scientists with experience of nuclear armaments.

  While Teller was at Princeton, Oppenheimer invited him over for a drink at Olden Manor, an occasion remembered by Teller in his memoir in the following extraordinary anecdote:

  As we sat in his living room, Oppenheimer commented that now we knew the test device worked, we should find a way to use it to bring the Korean War to a successful conclusion. I was astounded and asked how that could be done. Oppie explained that we should build a duplicate device somewhere in Korea and force the communist troops to concentrate nearby so that the detonation of the device would wipe them all out.

  Then, after he had returned to Chicago, Teller received a phone call from Oppenheimer, who asked if he remembered their conversation in Princeton: ‘I assured him that I did. He then explained that he just wanted me to know that he had found a way to get his suggestion to President Elect Eisenhower.’ Teller, who ‘had not thought of the hydrogen bomb as designed for battlefield use, except possibly in an extreme crisis’, naturally recorded that he ‘could not understand Oppenheimer’s behaviour’.

  The most obvious explanation, surely, is that Oppenheimer was pulling Teller’s leg, teasing him about the military uselessness of his newborn ‘boy’. Given that it was too big to transport (as Teller himself cheerfully concedes, the Mike device ‘was so huge and clumsy that a hundred oxcarts would barely get it to a target!’), it would have to be assembled on the spot where it was to be used, and, assuming that its purpose was to attack a military target and not to kill millions of civilians in a large city, then the scenario described by Oppenheimer to Teller was the only conceivable way in which it could be used. Of course, given the possibility of using lithium-6 as a fuel, an H-bomb could be made that was not vulnerable to exactly this kind of ridicule (if that is what it was), but, as we have seen, Oppenheimer did not think a transportable H-bomb was a practical military weapon either.

  In the aftermath of the Mike test, Oppenheimer was evidently in a provocative frame of mind. The final report of the Disarmament Panel, which was delivered to Dean Acheson in January 1953, just before Acheson gave way to his Republican counterpart, John Foster Dulles, contained several recommendations that to Acheson would have been seen as misguided, but to Dulles would have been complete anathema. While Dulles had made clear his adherence to the policy of massive retaliation, the report recommended reducing ‘our commitment to the use of nuclear weapons’. The five main proposals of the report were: 1. a policy of greater ‘candor’ about nuclear weapons with regard to the American people; 2. better communication with the US’s allies regarding nuclear matters; 3. greater priority and attention to air-defence systems; 4. withdrawal from the fruitless UN disarmament discussions; 5. better communications with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower was initially surprisingly sympathetic to these proposals, but in the month he received them, his first month in office, he took a step that would more or less ensure that this report had no impact whatsoe
ver on US policy: he appointed Lewis Strauss as his atomic-energy advisor.

  Both Strauss and Eisenhower were present when, on 17 February 1953, Oppenheimer gave a lecture in New York to the Council on Foreign Relations that was an abridged, and somewhat censored, version of the Disarmament Panel’s report. The talk, entitled ‘Atomic Weapons and American Policy’, is notable for the directness of its style and tone – Oppenheimer, for once, abandoning his usual allusiveness in favour of plain speaking. He later said about himself and his colleagues on the Disarmament Panel that in the course of their work they ‘became very vividly and painfully aware of what an unregulated arms race would lead to in the course of years’, and it is this awareness and a determination to communicate it that, above everything else, pervade this talk.

  Oppenheimer begins with the thwarted hope, following ‘the bright light of the first atomic explosion’, that ‘this might mark, not merely the end of a great and terrible war, but the end of such wars for mankind’. Again, as he had done many times previously, he pins the blame for the thwarting of that hope firmly on the Soviet Union: ‘Openness, friendliness and cooperation did not seem to be what the Soviet government most prized on this earth.’ Once that hope was dashed, Oppenheimer goes on, the ‘Free World’ took refuge behind the ‘shield’ of nuclear bombs. ‘The rule for the atom was: “Let us stay ahead. Let us be sure that we are ahead of the enemy.”’ However, according to Oppenheimer, this rule is no longer sufficient, because of the nature of the arms race that it has led to. At this point, Oppenheimer makes clear, his mission to communicate the perils of that arms race runs aground because of the secrecy to which he is opposed, but to which he is nevertheless bound. ‘It is easy to say “Let us look at the arms race.” I must tell about it without communicating anything. I must reveal its nature without revealing anything; and this I propose to do.’

  Oppenheimer could not, for example, mention the hydrogen bomb, nor did he feel able to mention two of the Disarmament Panel’s five recommendations (those to do with withdrawing from UN discussions and establishing better communication with the Soviet Union). This left him with the task of putting the case publicly for the other three recommendations, concentrating in particular on the first: the need for greater candour.

  ‘It is my opinion,’ Oppenheimer told his audience, ‘that we should all know – not precisely, but quantitatively and, above all, authoritatively – where we stand in these matters.’ For, he said, his experience was that when the facts of the matter were brought to the attention of ‘any responsible group’, the result was ‘a great sense of anxiety and somberness’. He estimated the Soviet Union to be about four years behind the US in the development and stockpiling of more and more powerful nuclear weapons, but this was ‘likely to be small comfort’ when it was realised that ‘our twenty-thousandth bomb . . . will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two-thousandth’. Such was the terrifying nature of this arms race.

  One reason Oppenheimer gave for greater candour was the importance of allowing the public to reflect, in an informed way, on the security policies that were being pursued in their name, but the details of which they were not allowed to know. Rather bravely, in the face of the political winds then blowing, Oppenheimer gave as an example of such a questionable policy the plan to use nuclear weapons and ‘a rather rigid commitment to their use in a very massive, initial, unremitting strategic assault on the enemy’. This fresh attack on the doctrine of massive retaliation, of course, would have been duly noted by Strauss, Griggs, Borden and the rest of the military establishment.

  ‘The prevailing view,’ Oppenheimer said, ‘is that we are probably faced with a long period of cold war in which conflict, tension and armaments are to be with us.’

  The trouble then is just this: During this period the atomic clockfn67 ticks faster and faster; we may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.

  In such a situation, Oppenheimer insisted: ‘We need strength to be able to ask whether our plans for the use of the atom are, all things considered, right or wrong.’ And this is where the need for openness and candour makes itself clear, since: ‘We do not operate well when the important facts, the essential conditions, which limit and determine our choice are unknown. We do not operate well when they are known, in secrecy and fear, only to a few men.’

  In a startling display of his own candour, Oppenheimer went on to give some examples of the foolishness of trusting these ‘few men’. The first was Truman: ‘It must be disturbing that an ex-President of the United States, who has been briefed on what we know about the Soviet atomic capability, can publicly call in doubt all conclusions from the evidence.’ The allusion here is to a statement Truman made to the press on 26 January, in which he said: ‘I am not convinced Russia has the bomb. I am not convinced the Russians have the know-how to put the complicated mechanism together to make an A-bomb work. I am not convinced they have the bomb.’

  Oppenheimer’s next two examples were clearly identifiable as General Groves and Arthur Compton:

  It must be shocking when this doubt, so recently expressed, is compounded by two men, one of them a most distinguished scientist, who headed one of the great projects of the Manhattan District during the war, and one of them a brilliant officer, who was in over-all charge of the Manhattan District.

  Compton, when asked about Truman’s scepticism about the bomb, had delighted the President by saying that in his view it was ‘problematical’ that the Soviets had the bomb, while Groves had told the press that the fact that there had been a nuclear explosion in Russia ‘does not prove that they have the bomb in workable form’.

  Oppenheimer then went on to cite a less readily identifiable ‘high officer of the Air Defense Command’ who had said ‘only a few months ago, in a most serious discussion of measures for the continental defense of the United States’, that it was ‘not really our policy to attempt to protect this country, for that is so big a job that it would interfere with our retaliatory capabilities’. ‘Such follies,’ Oppenheimer added caustically, ‘can occur only when even the men who know the facts can find no one to talk to about them, when the facts are too secret for discussion, and thus for thought.’

  Having dealt with the need for candour at some length, Oppenheimer covered his next two points – the need for greater cooperation with allies and the importance of improving air-defence systems – much more briefly. He ended on a portentous note: ‘We need to be clear that there will not be many great atomic wars for us, nor for our institutions. It is important that there not be one.’

  It was an uncompromising and courageous speech. Somewhat surprisingly there was, initially at least, some sign that Oppenheimer’s views might have an impact on the new administration. Eisenhower, impressed by the Disarmament Panel’s report, and now by this speech, for the next few months encouraged the development of what became known as ‘Operation Candor’. The fact that Eisenhower seemed sympathetic to Oppenheimer’s views, however, seemed to Lewis Strauss and his allies only to make it more urgent and more important to combat, and finally to destroy once and for all, Oppenheimer’s influence on American policy.

  In the May issue of Fortune magazine appeared an article that contained the most sustained and direct assault yet on Oppenheimer’s reputation. It was entitled ‘The Hidden Struggle for the H-bomb: The Story of Dr Oppenheimer’s Persistent Campaign to Reverse US Military Strategy’, and began dramatically: ‘A life and death struggle over national military policy has developed between a highly influential group of American scientists and the military.’ The ‘prime mover’ among these scientists was identified as Oppenheimer, and the central issue at stake the tenability of the doctrine of massive retaliation. Oppenheimer, the article stated, had ‘no confidence in the military’s
assumption that SAC [Strategic Air Command] as a weapon of mass destruction is a real deterrent to Soviet action’, and was asking the US ‘to throw away its strongest weapon for defense’.

  The article was published anonymously, but was in fact written by Charles Murphy, a reserve officer in the US air force and the author of a regular column in Fortune called ‘Defense and Strategy’. Just as Murphy’s column invariably presented the air-force view and reflected close communication with people at the very top of the air force, so this article on Oppenheimer reflected at every turn the views of Griggs, Finletter and Strauss. The May issue of Fortune would have gone on sale sometime in April, which means that the article was most likely written in March, soon after Oppenheimer delivered his confrontational speech in New York, so it seems natural to assume that its publication represented the rising of Strauss and the air force to what they saw as Oppenheimer’s public provocation. David Lilienthal described the Fortune piece as ‘another nasty and obviously inspired article attacking Robert Oppenheimer in a snide way’.