Big Science

by Michael Hiltzik

  Lilienthal was to become amazed at the number and variety of Lawrence’s patrons. One was Colonel Robert R. McCormick, the idiosyncratic right-wing owner of the Chicago Tribune, who conceived a friendship with Lawrence based on his role in developing the bombs that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and transformed war “from irrationality to idiocy.” Lawrence confided to Lilienthal that they were so close that he stayed at the McCormick country mansion when visiting Chicago. He worked assiduously to forge a relationship between the New Dealer Lilienthal and McCormick, whose Tribune had been Franklin Roosevelt’s fiercest critic during the New Deal; he arranged for McCormick to visit the Argonne and Hanford labs and even tried to persuade Lilienthal to join the publisher on one of the trips—a potentially unpleasant encounter from which Lilienthal wisely begged off.

  • • •

  In the first week of January 1947, the Atomic Energy Commission appointed its most important body of technical counselors, the General Advisory Committee. Chaired by Oppenheimer, the GAC was composed of Conant, Fermi, Seaborg, Rabi, DuBridge, former Los Alamos physicist Cyril Smith, and industrialists Hartley W. Rowe and Hood Worthington. On the surface, this appeared to be another victory for Lawrence, for five of the members were his friends or former colleagues. When the GAC convened in early 1947 to apportion nuclear research funds among the old bomb labs and new university-based aspirants, Oppenheimer decreed that the committee should “pass no judgment on the work of the University of California, which has a special history.” A contemporary witticism recalled by Brobeck told the story more succinctly. The AEC charter established that in the case of a disagreement with the director of one of the atomic labs, the commission could remove the director. “Somebody asked, ‘What about the Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley?’ The answer was, ‘Oh, in that case, the director removes the commission.’ ”

  A few months after the cyclotron launch, the opportunity arose for further Rad Lab lobbying. This time it was a joint meeting in Berkeley of the AEC, the General Advisory Committee, and the heads of the government labs. Again playing host, Ernest arranged four full days of wining and dining—what AEC historians recorded as “good, big dinners with plenty of red meat”—at Bohemian Grove, the rustic hideaway for the Bay Area elite in the Northern California woods. He had Jack Neylan on hand to assure the commission of the University of California’s commitment to Lawrence and Los Alamos, and, undoubtedly, to forge a personal link between the powerful Lilienthal and the persuasive and influential Neylan.

  From Berkeley’s standpoint, the meeting came off as a roaring success. What helped was that it provided the commissioners with a chance to get out of Washington, where the atmosphere was thick with red-baiting security inquiries and a never-ending policy debate over whether atomic energy research should be directed more at munitions or peacetime applications. After the guests had departed, Don Cooksey informed Alfred Loomis that “members of the committee . . . and several of the directors enlarged to me on the wonderful progress they had made in coming to a mutual understanding of each other’s problems. My own belief is that those four days may be marked as of inestimable value to the country.” Two months later, the commission appropriated $15 million for new accelerator construction, much of it destined for Berkeley.

  Yet the Rad Lab’s standing with the AEC was not unassailable. For one thing, the relationship between Lawrence and Oppenheimer had become seriously frayed. Ernest had pressed Oppie to return to Berkeley after the war, but their wartime experiences had widened their personal differences into a gulf. Oppenheimer in particular had evolved; he no longer was the aloof, self-absorbed intellectual who had gone off to Los Alamos anxious to prove himself in the world beyond theoretical physics. Ernest would find it very difficult to deal with an Oppenheimer who had acquired a supreme self-confidence in the crucible of war. “He regarded me as potentially a very good physicist, a widely read man,” Oppie reflected years later, “but in a certain sense not worldly, not experienced, and not very sensible. And this feeling is very hard to change once it’s established in a friendship. And when the circumstances change, there is a little wrench.”

  Oppenheimer had spent the war embroiled in nearly constant battles with Berkeley administrators over the management of Los Alamos, and he was hurt that Lawrence failed to appreciate why that might have soured his feelings about the university. “It may seem odd and wrong to you that the lack of sympathy between us at Y [Los Alamos] and the California administration . . . could make me consider not coming back,” he wrote Ernest a few weeks after the bombings. He chalked up Ernest’s lack of empathy to the latter’s having settled into the role of big man on the Berkeley campus: “It would not have seemed so . . . hard to understand if you remembered how much more of an underdogger I have always been than you.” But Lawrence’s insensitivity kept surfacing. When Oppie called to tell him he would rejoin the Berkeley faculty after all, Lawrence responded, “Good, I can clip your wings a little.” Years later, Oppenheimer would still remember that as “an awful moment.”

  Oppenheimer’s tenure at Berkeley would not last long. During a visit to the Rad Lab in November 1946, AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss, a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, New Jersey, pulled him aside to offer him the institute’s directorship. The institute, an independent, privately funded research center, was known to the public largely as the home of Albert Einstein, but in general, its scientific reputation was mediocre—a condition the trustees thought Oppenheimer could remedy. Oppie irritated Strauss by dithering over the offer for months without replying. But in the end, he concluded that relocating to the East Coast would make it easier for him to participate in the important policy debates taking place in Washington while he created a world-class research mecca in Princeton. His appointment was announced in April.

  • • •

  Another challenge to the Rad Lab’s domination of government patronage came from a new university lab under development at the eastern end of New York’s Long Island. The Brookhaven National Laboratory was conceived as a powerful regional counterweight to Berkeley. It had been established in 1946 with the blessing of General Groves and under the guiding scientific spirit of I. I. Rabi of Columbia. Rabi stitched together the new lab’s sponsoring consortium, known as Associated Universities, from nine large Eastern research institutions that would have been hard pressed to compete individually in the multimillion-dollar world of postwar high-energy physics.I Rabi would become as powerful a guardian of Brookhaven’s interests as Lawrence was of Berkeley’s, for as a member of the General Advisory Committee, he was perfectly placed to keep an eye out for efforts by Oppenheimer and Seaborg to tilt research grants toward the Radiation Laboratory.

  If Associated Universities committed a misstep, it was to wait for the handover of power from the Manhattan District to the AEC before acquiring the lab’s rural site, a decommissioned US Army base known as Camp Upton. The delay allowed Lawrence to exploit Groves’s largess without competition: by the time Brookhaven was chartered, the foundations for Lawrence’s three new accelerators already had been laid. The Brookhaven team, which included Stan Livingston, recovered quickly under Rabi’s energetic guidance, however. By the time of the Bohemian Grove retreat, they were ready with a proposal for their own big accelerator.

  The Rad Lab’s entry in what became a two-way battle was a machine designed by Brobeck and labeled the Bevatron, referring to its goal of producing particles at energies over 1 billion electron volts—in fact, 10 billion electron volts. Brobeck had designed the Bevatron around McMillan’s phase stability principle; his idea was to combine the synchrotron’s variable magnetic field and the synchrocyclotron’s variable frequency in one hybrid accelerator, exploiting both principles to drive energies to a new frontier.

  Initially, the competition was amicable. Lawrence, placed in a companionable spirit by Loomis’s hospitality at Del Monte, happily showed off Brobeck’s designs to Rabi. He seemed pleased at the chance to expand the Cycl
otron Republic once again. Anyway, explained Brobeck, “they needed something at Brookhaven.” But trouble arose once it became clear that the AEC’s accelerator budget of $15 million would not be sufficient to support two Bevatrons—in fact, it might not be enough to build even one. That locked the two labs into a zero-sum game that only one could win unless both compromised significantly. At McMillan’s suggestion, Lawrence shrank his proposal to a 6-billion-volt machine budgeted at just under $10 million. Yet even that was so ambitious that the AEC was forced to consider whether Ernest was thinking too far ahead and whether it made any sense at all to build two similar machines at opposite ends of the country. On the GAC, Fermi emerged as a prime critic of Lawrence’s scheme, suggesting that it was premature to build an accelerator in the billion-volt range even before the three new Rad Lab machines had been put through their paces. It would harm science, he argued, to “endorse what appears to be an unthoughtful program.” Rabi, meanwhile, was urging his team to think on a Lawrencian scale. As Rabi’s handpicked accelerator builder, Stan Livingston had sketched out a 750-million-volt synchrocyclotron. But measured against the Bevatron, that energy range seemed paltry. “Take something that’s a bigger challenge,” Rabi needled Livingston. “Make something big.”

  The two labs’ plans landed at the AEC almost simultaneously in February 1948: Berkeley’s for a machine rated at 2.8 billion volts and Brookhaven’s at 2.5 billion. (To distinguish it from the Bevatron, it was christened the Cosmotron.) The rivalry weighed heavily at the Rad Lab: having learned that Brookhaven was about to submit its proposal, Lawrence gave Brobeck and his design staff a scant two weeks to finish theirs. Their task was eased somewhat by Lawrence’s unassailable reputation as an accelerator builder. “What we submitted was largely a cost estimate,” Brobeck recalled, “because you didn’t have to convince these people that Lawrence could build an accelerator . . . It was a very brief proposal; it didn’t have a lot of scientific justification.” The cost estimate was $4.5 million.

  When the GAC weighed the two proposals, questions of morale and laboratory politics, not scientific merit, came to the fore. Rabi, citing Berkeley’s three existing accelerators, suggested that Brookhaven should be given a chance to catch up. That idea was parried by Oppenheimer, who argued that the “discouragement of the Berkeley group would result in the loss of something valuable to the national scientific health.” Yet overall sentiment on the GAC was drifting in Brookhaven’s direction.

  Then Lawrence pulled a rabbit out of his hat. For the better part of a year, the Rad Lab had been trying to produce mesons, the most sought-after and elusive subatomic particles of the moment, in the restored 184-inch cyclotron. Their existence had been predicted in 1934 by Japanese physicist Hideki Yukawa, who speculated that they carried the force that binds the atomic nucleus together, counteracting the mutual electromagnetic repulsion of its positively charged protons. (The meson quest had been one of the goals Ernest presented to Warren Weaver in support of the original Rockefeller Foundation grant for the 184-inch.) Mesons had been found only in cosmic rays, which made them the natural quarry of high-energy physicists. The 184-inch synchrocyclotron was one of the few machines that could accelerate alpha particles to the energies required to produce them. Yet through 1947, Lawrence’s attempts to capture an artificially produced meson on photographic film were unavailing.

  Then, in February, a gifted young Brazilian experimentalist named Cesare M. G. Lattes arrived in Berkeley. Within days, he had remedied the experimental shortcomings that had prevented Lawrence from producing mesons, and before the end of the month had captured tracks of the first artificial mesons ever seen. Lawrence was summoned to the phone at Trader Vic’s to receive the news. He bolted out of the restaurant, leaving his nonplussed dinner guests behind, to view the evidence for himself.

  To Ernest, the discovery was more than a triumph of applied physics; it was a means of reminding the GAC of the Rad Lab’s standing as the preeminent high-energy laboratory in the world. When the committee reconvened in April, there was no longer any question of denying it a piece of the Bevatron pie. The members decided to fund two machines of different sizes, each optimized to produce different particles; the only question left was which lab would build which machine. In the end, Berkeley got approval for a Bevatron to produce 6-billion-volt protons, satisfying Lawrence’s predilection for building as big as he could. Brookhaven settled for a cosmotron rated at 2.5 billion volts, though it received the GAC’s explicit promise that it could come back to the well for bigger machines in the future. Lawrence’s reputation and his nimble management of this newest patron had carried the day.

  * * *

  I. The nine universities were Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Johns Hopkins, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Rochester.

  Chapter Sixteen

  * * *

  Oaths and Loyalties

  “E. O. Lawrence personally never quite demobilized after the end of World War II,” the Rad Lab physicist Wolfgang “Pief” Panofsky would observe many years later.

  The German-born scientist was right. While the Rad Lab quickly moved back into basic nuclear research, Ernest Lawrence maintained his personal interest in military projects. He continued working on the calutron, determined to increase its efficiency even after 1948, when Oak Ridge was fully converted to gaseous diffusion for uranium enrichment and the Atomic Energy Commission canceled funding for calutron development. He consulted with Admiral Hyman Rickover on the development of nuclear-powered submarines, advising that the service would have to invest “real cash” in the effort—not the cheeseparing $2.5 million budgeted for preliminary studies, but $100 million. (“To be credible, the project would have to be big,” Ernest counseled in true Big Science style, “and if it were big, it would attract good people.”) And he toyed with the how-tos of radiological warfare, a project that perverted the health-giving radioisotope research he had so long pursued with his brother John into a search for death-dealing tactical weaponry. “RW,” as it was known, was “a subject which was very close to Professor Lawrence’s heart,” Alvarez recalled. But mainstream figures in science and the military disdained RW as ineffective, impractical, and immoral.

  Ernest seemed to be trying to preserve the atmosphere that had helped Big Science win the war. As the debate over the social and political implications of the bomb intensified during the first uneasy years of peace, he assumed an increasingly obstinate position in favor of more weapons research and less introspection about it. National security was paramount, he argued. Its protection meant pursuing the most advanced nuclear technology that could be exploited for the purpose. That would come to mean the Super: the thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bomb.

  Lawrence’s concern with the threat to national security from outside forces, specifically Communism, dated back to his earliest involvement with wartime research, when security issues deprived the Rad Lab of Rossi Lomanitz and Martin Kamen. But after the war, his outlook became colored more by his intimate association with wealthy conservatives such as Jack Neylan, whose opinions about the cunning of Communists and their determination to subvert Western civilization were one-dimensional to the point of self-caricature. Ernest was soon to become entwined in the increasingly supercharged atmosphere of suspicion and accusation that anticommunism brought to the Berkeley campus.

  • • •

  The hunt for secret communists at the Radiation Laboratory began in 1947, when a publicity-hungry state senator named Jack Tenney, chair of the California legislature’s Un-American Activities Committee, staged an investigation into what he asserted was suspiciously lax security at Berkeley. Like many red hunts of the day, the Tenney hearing had a Gilbert and Sullivan comic-opera flavor. The star witness was the committee’s chief investigator, who told of having ambled up to the Rad Lab’s hillside perimeter with a flashlight. He crawled under the fence and wandered around without ever being challenged, thereby exposing an enormous hole in the security fabr
ic of the nation.

  These revelations failed to inspire an outcry by the press or the public, and the committee presently ended its investigation. The nationwide miasma of anticommunism, however, was not to be dispelled so easily. In 1948 the Atomic Energy Commission responded to pressure from the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) by forming regional personnel security boards around the country to vet employees of AEC contractors, such as the University of California, whose political affinities had come under question. The chairman of Berkeley’s board was Neylan, who had been specifically recommended to the AEC by Ernest Lawrence. Admiral Chester Nimitz and Major General Kenyon Joyce, two renowned local war heroes, rounded out its membership, though they generally sat by silently during hearings while Neylan conducted the inquisitions.

  The Neylan board’s first case involved a former Los Alamos chemist named Robert Hurley, who had fallen under suspicion because his Latvian-born wife purportedly had leftist sympathies. Neylan subjected Hurley to a withering examination at his San Francisco law office, with only Hurley’s mentor, Berkeley chemistry dean Wendell Latimer, present to offer counsel and support. Hurley sarcastically parried Neylan’s questions about his associations with liberal organizations while Latimer quietly seethed at the injustice of a proceeding based on hearsay and FBI files that the accused was forbidden to see. Neylan concluded that Hurley was prevaricating—“he was the smart-alec type,” he observed later—and ordered him fired, only to learn subsequently that Latimer had quietly rehired him. Neylan ordered him fired again, and this time the dismissal stuck.

  Latimer brought his complaints about the board’s dual role as prosecutor and jury to David Lilienthal. The AEC chairman referred Latimer’s objections back to the board, prompting General Joyce to ask Neylan “if some kindly but pointed advice from Ernest Lawrence would not be beneficial in getting Latimer on a more conservative and less emotional track.” Neylan responded that he already had approached Lawrence, who had assured him that Latimer was merely “overworked.”