The thought of ceding to the army a project in which the foundation had such an immense stake stirred Fosdick’s proprietary blood. “This cyclotron is our baby, and it is going to be one of the jewels in our crown—that is, if we don’t use the bomb to blow the world to pieces with,” he told Weaver. “If Lawrence needs more money and is unable to get it from the government under the conditions which will give him complete freedom of action, I would be in favor of our stepping in.” This was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that Lawrence would play multiple sponsors against one another.
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Lawrence perceived better than the other Manhattan Project lab directors that General Groves was likely to remain a key patron of postwar physics research for years to come, since the transfer of nuclear research from the military to a civilian body was being hotly debated in Washington and was by no means assured. He had cultivated Groves assiduously, even sponsoring the general for an honorary Berkeley doctorate, conferred in 1945. Groves returned the favor by delivering the keynote at the presentation of Lawrence’s Presidential Medal in 1946, declaring, “We bet a hundred million on him and won.” His confidence in Lawrence’s administrative and scientific abilities, which dated from their very first meeting, had only been strengthened by the success of the electromagnetic separation process. During 1944 and 1945, open criticism of Groves’s regime surfaced at the Chicago Met Lab and other Manhattan Project outposts. But nothing of the sort was heard at the Rad Lab, thanks to Lawrence’s “very drastic and successful efforts to prevent any expression of opinion on the part of members of the laboratory,” as one staff member recalled. It was not by chance that Lawrence’s personal recollection of the Trinity test was the only one Groves selected for direct transmission to the Pentagon on the day after the blast.
Ernest’s determination to keep on Groves’s good side showed in his muted response to an incident that outraged the physics community and inflamed public opinion. This was the army’s wanton destruction in November of five Japanese cyclotrons. The machines, which were dismantled by occupation personnel and dumped in the Pacific Ocean, included the identical copy of Lawrence’s sixty-inch cyclotron built in Tokyo. Adding to the insult, the Tokyo lab’s director, Yukio Nishina, already had received permission from occupation officials to restart his cyclotron for biological and medical research. Instead, army engineers arrived unexpectedly on November 24 with sledgehammers and blowtorches and reduced his precious accelerator to scrap. Army officials rationalized their act as essential to the Allied effort to destroy the Japanese war machine, but this demonstration of crass insensitivity to the scientific value of the cyclotrons, which had played no part in the war, undermined the Pentagon’s claim to be a reliable steward of nuclear science.
The incident placed Lawrence in a delicate position, for he was then awaiting Groves’s approval of a budget for the Rad Lab’s ambitious postwar program. As a prewar patron of Nishina, who had sent his assistants Ryokichi Sagane and Tameichi Yasaki to the Rad Lab for training, Lawrence might have been expected to register a powerful objection to the army’s behavior. Instead, he remained offstage, leaving the campaign of condemnation to Karl Compton, who was serving as scientific advisor to the occupation forces and publicly labeled the cyclotron destruction “an act of utter stupidity.” Compton was even more infuriated to learn that the army had invoked his name to justify its action. Nishina, appearing at occupation headquarters to demand an explanation, had been told that Compton had specifically endorsed the destruction order. The truth was exactly the opposite: Compton had drafted the order allowing the Tokyo machine to be restarted for biomedical research.
While Groves sustained volleys of political fire for the episode, Lawrence consoled him by agreeing that “the present time is hardly appropriate for any move to restore the cyclotrons, and the matter probably should be deferred.” In a note to Vannevar Bush, he was somewhat more solicitous of Nishina’s needs: “I hope very much something will be done to rectify this error . . . The right thing to do would be at least to re-equip Nishina’s laboratory.” But he did not say so publicly.
Lawrence’s careful groundwork with Groves bore fruit, for the general gave freely of the army’s surplus bounty, including the radar oscillators for Alvarez and a supply of capacitors for McMillan’s synchrotron, worth $203,000. In December Groves granted the Rad Lab $170,000 from Manhattan Engineer District funds to complete the 184-inch cyclotron, authorized the launch of the synchrotron project under the army’s wartime contract with the University of California, and allocated $2.2 million for construction on the hillside and operating expenses. Recalling the Rad Lab of that era, Alvarez exclaimed delightedly, “We ran it with a big barrel of greenbacks.”
Lawrence thereby presided over a transformation of American science as profound as any change inspired purely by scientific discovery: the launch of peacetime government patronage. In 1936 the federal government had spent $33 million on research and development, accounting for 15 percent of the $218 million advanced by all sources, including industry, academia, and philanthropic foundations. From 1941 through 1945, the government’s share rose to $500 million a year, or 83 percent of the annual total. War’s end failed to flatten the trend line of spending: by 1947, the federal research budget had risen to $625 million, still representing more than half of a much-expanded total national investment in scientific research and development.
The government’s enormous role in research, especially in nuclear physics, made many scientists uneasy. In 1946, wrote Philip Morrison, “for every dollar the University of California spends on physics at Berkeley, the Army spends seven.” At that year’s meeting of the American Physical Society in Berkeley, half the delivered papers carried the disclosure that they had been funded by the army’s Manhattan Engineer District or its aggressive new service rival, the Office of Naval Research. Some thirty universities were performing nuclear physics research on navy contracts, which in some cases accounted for 90 percent of their research budgets.
Lawrence did not share his colleagues’ misgivings. One reason was his rapport with Groves, which helped him fend off any constraints on the Rad Lab’s spending of government funds. The Rad Lab occupied a special place among the Manhattan District labs for other reasons. It was the only lab to boast a prewar history and, of course, the only one with a preexisting management. Consequently, whenever Groves made plans to slim down the Manhattan Project’s lab network, he left the Rad Lab alone. “The Berkeley laboratory, I felt, would continue as long as Ernest Lawrence lived, provided it received proper financial support from the government,” he wrote later.
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Lawrence’s trolling for government funds took place against the backdrop of a fierce battle in Washington over legislation to bring atomic energy under civilian control. At issue was a bill introduced by Representative Andrew J. May of Kentucky and Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado following a presidential message to Capitol Hill. Truman’s message—drafted by State Department lawyer Herbert Marks with input from Oppenheimer—acknowledged that “in international relations as in domestic affairs, the release of atomic energy constitutes a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas.” The Truman administration committed itself to seeking “a satisfactory arrangement for the control of this discovery in order that it may become a powerful and forceful influence towards the maintenance of world peace instead of an instrument of destruction.”
At first, the scientific community was inclined to look with favor upon the May-Johnson Bill, especially since it was endorsed in a statement written by Oppenheimer and cosigned by Lawrence and Fermi—endorsed, that is, by three of the four members of the Interim Committee’s scientific panel.
But support for the May-Johnson Bill evaporated once scientists got around to reading the text, which, unlike Truman’s message, had been drafted by War Department lawyers. The bill ceded a large measure of control over atomic research to the military. The penal
ties for violating security regulations covering information judged to be sensitive had a distinctly militaristic cast, with fines of up to $300,000 and jail terms as long as thirty years for “willful” disclosures.
Over a period of weeks, criticism mounted steadily in volume and color; in one interview, Harold Urey labeled the measure the “first totalitarian bill ever written by Congress.” He added morosely, “You can call it either a Communist bill or a Nazi bill, whichever you think the worse.” The scientists’ distaste soon fell upon the bill’s eminent defenders. As Chicago physicist Herbert Anderson wrote to William A. Higinbotham, chairman of the Association of Los Alamos Scientists: “I must confess my confidence in our own leaders Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Compton, and Fermi . . . is shaken. I believe that these worthy men were duped—that they never had a chance to see this bill.”
Anderson was being unfair to Compton, who wisely postponed signing Oppenheimer’s statement until he could read the bill, and refused to support it once he had. But he was correct about the others: not even Oppenheimer had read the actual text before drafting the message to which Lawrence and Fermi had blindly signed their names. All three soon withdrew their support. The May-Johnson Bill would meet its legislative doom thanks to opposition from the scientists and public skepticism about military control, energized by public missteps such as the destruction of the Japanese cyclotrons.
Following his ill-fated endorsement of May-Johnson and his subsequent repudiation, Lawrence absented himself from the debate over domestic control. Anyway, his closest personal advisors were discouraging him from playing an active role in Washington. His brother, John, fretted constantly about Ernest’s susceptibility to bronchial and sinus infections, back conditions, and other manifestations of exhaustion and stress; these had grown worse toward the end of the war and immediately afterward, when Ernest suffered a bout of viral pneumonia. Jack Neylan was concerned that the demands of Washington service would expose Berkeley’s faculty star to the no-win politics of the nation’s capital. When Secretary of War Robert Patterson invited Ernest to Washington to give his views on successor bills to May-Johnson, Neylan issued a strong veto even though Ernest seemed honored to be asked. “He was kind of boyish about it,” Neylan recalled. “Came over to see me and said, ‘What does it mean?’ I said they’re looking for a fall guy and you’re nominated. He said, ‘Do you think they’d do that?’ I said you just don’t know politicians.” Alfred Loomis, who shared Neylan’s uneasiness, deputized San Francisco lawyer H. Rowan Gaither, who had helped manage the MIT radar lab early in the war, to assist Neylan in screening Ernest’s invitations to advisory commissions and corporate boards.
Lawrence’s withdrawal from the policy debate also reflected his long-held conviction that science and politics made for an unwieldy mix. He had been willing to lay aside that conviction during the war, when national security required his participation in the highest councils of government planning. But peace had transformed the Rad Lab back into a civilian research institution pursuing its own interests; Lawrence’s instincts told him that under the circumstances, it would be unwise for him to meddle in impenetrable policy battles in which he could find himself suddenly and unpredictably isolated in the wrong camp.
Nevertheless, appeals for his involvement in the public debate kept arriving at the Rad Lab. In February 1946 the Federation of American Scientists, a coalition of more than two dozen scientists’ groups at universities and government labs, sought his endorsement of a new atomic energy bill introduced by Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut. The McMahon Bill excluded the military from control of atomic energy, except as the technology was directly applicable to weapons, propulsion, and other military needs. Civilian supervision was vested in an Atomic Energy Commission comprising five presidential appointees. The irksome security provisions of May-Johnson were liberalized, with penalties reduced to maximum fines of $20,000 and prison terms of up to five years.
There is no written record that Lawrence replied to the overture, although around the same time, he registered a private opinion of the federation—and of scientific activism in general—in a letter to Weaver. “My own feeling is that this political activity of many of our atomic scientists is unfortunate in many ways,” he wrote. “It is particularly a great pity that they are frittering away so much time and energy on political problems, when they could be devoting themselves to scientific pursuits.”
Truman signed the McMahon Bill into law on August 1. His five appointees to the new Atomic Energy Commission were approved by the Senate before the end of the year: David Lilienthal, a former chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority, as chairman; and as members Robert Bacher, a Los Alamos physicist; Republican financier Lewis Strauss; businessman Sumner T. Pike; and Des Moines, Iowa, newspaper editor William Waymack. The commission’s most important bequest from the Pentagon’s nuclear energy apparatus was the Manhattan District’s network of atomic labs, which Groves had kept intact after the war.
This had been a difficult task, for they all suffered brain drains as their leading scientists returned to prewar academic posts or accepted jobs stemming from their newfound eminence. The lack of clarity about their postwar roles as the handover of policy authority to civilian control approached had further diminished morale among the staff members who remained. Lawrence did what he could to lend stability to the pieces of the network he could control: the Rad Lab, of course, remained his personal fiefdom and never suffered the doubts of the labs that had been created purely for the bomb program. He also pressed for the University of California to renew its government contract to manage Los Alamos. This brought him into rare conflict with his mentor Jack Neylan, who had rammed through a vote on the Board of Regents to terminate the deal. Ernest, who had initiated the contract himself, finally persuaded Neylan that its termination was tantamount to “running out on a duty” owed to the government—and that it might sever a critically important pipeline for the government patronage on which the continuing expansion of Big Science depended. Neylan agreed to extend the contract only after Lawrence pledged not to spend any time on direct management of the Los Alamos lab, though he would have “free run” to consult on its research program. Lawrence’s instincts were right, for the Los Alamos contract helped to keep Berkeley at the center of government-funded nuclear research—so much so that other universities competing for government grants began to complain about the “University of California Atomic Trust,” as it was labeled by Columbia’s Isadore Isaac “I. I.” Rabi, a Nobel laureate and veteran of the MIT Rad Lab and the Manhattan Project.
In the vacuum created by the long transition to civilian control of atomic energy, Lawrence and his lab prospered. McMillan’s synchrotron and Alvarez’s linear accelerator were under construction. Seaborg had accepted an appointment at Berkeley as a full professor, with the authority to hire four assistant and associate professors and twelve salaried graduate fellows. His hot laboratory was funded with the $400,000 left over from the Rockefeller Foundation’s original cyclotron grant, for the 184-inch accelerator, now officially a synchrocyclotron, had been completed with the grant of $170,000 from the Manhattan District, supplemented with $132,000 from University of California funds.
The 184-inch, nestled within an enormous, circular red-domed building resembling an enclosed carousel on the hilltop above campus, was still the Rad Lab’s showpiece. The machine first produced 200-million-volt deuterons before dawn on November 1, 1946, an event celebrated quietly by Lawrence and the lab crews who had worked long into the night to produce the most powerful particle beam in the world. The machine’s formal launch, scheduled for Monday, November 18, was preceded by a three-day retreat hosted by Alfred Loomis at the Del Monte Lodge in Monterey for Bush, Conant, the Comptons, and Lawrence—a replay of the 1940 retreat at which he originally had brought them together. The guests then drove to Berkeley, where they were met by the new members of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Ernest hosted a dinner for them all at Trader Vic’s,
featuring his customary personal menu—“a kind of smoked sparerib, eaten ‘by hand,’ and a coffee plus brandy,” David Lilienthal recorded in his personal journal. The AEC chairman described the physicist as “a rather fabulous figure in the nuclear field—indeed, in research generally . . . a very youthful man—big, red-faced, full of vitality and enthusiasm. Looks nothing at all like the picture of a great scientist—not at all. You get a sense of drive in talking with him, and that impression is in accordance with the facts.” Throughout the visit, Ernest’s bonhomie worked overtime, but with a serious purpose: his goal was to inculcate the commissioners with an understanding of atomic energy’s potential for peaceable uses such as generating electricity, a field in which the Rad Lab expected to play a central role. The subtext was the necessity of government funding for more nuclear reactors—including one, it was hoped, at Berkeley. “He hammered this hard,” Lilienthal recorded.
For all that he felt drawn into Lawrence’s field of attraction, Lilienthal was no innocent. He was a battle-hardened bureaucratic fighter whose career in federal service had been launched with his appointment to the New Deal’s Tennessee Valley Authority. There he had to battle wealthy and influential utility magnates hoping to throttle the TVA at birth. Lilienthal had beaten them back, despite their able leadership by Wendell Willkie, a future Republican challenger to Franklin Roosevelt (and a business protégé of Alfred Loomis), and had established the TVA as one of the most effective institutions of the New Deal.
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