Glenn Seaborg, whose work with plutonium was still conducted under strict government security, was more candid about his capitulation. “While I thought that the oath was an extremely unwise policy, the extent of my protest against it was to sign it on the last possible day,” he explained in his memoirs. “I saw nothing to be gained by refusing; getting fired wouldn’t make it go away. There was also nothing to be gained by alienating Ernest Lawrence, who had been turning increasingly to the right after the war. I believed in saving my political capital for more productive fights, such as working quietly to get rid of some of the unneeded secrecy rules.”
Lawrence left no public statement about his views of the affair. These can be gleaned only from the recollections of his associates, who uniformly described him as insistently supporting Neylan’s position. “Ernest felt emotionally coupled to this situation through his friendship with Neylan,” observed Alvarez.
Edward Teller detected the same emotional bond, to his intense distaste. When the oath controversy erupted, Teller, a brilliant theoretician, had just agreed to leave the University of Chicago for a faculty post at UCLA. He thought Lawrence’s endorsement of a policy that deprived his lab of its entire theoretical physics staff disgraceful. Discovering that Neylan was trumpeting his UCLA appointment as proof that the loyalty oath did not hamper the recruitment of distinguished scientists to the university, he furiously withdrew his acceptance. Hoping to soften the blow by delivering his decision in person, Teller received a sympathetic hearing from Sproul and a few other administrators. “There was one exception,” he wrote a friend: “Ernest Orlando Lawrence. Since the days of the Nazis, I have seen no such thing. I had talked sufficiently gently and generally so that Lawrence did not attack me personally. But he did use threats and he was quite unwilling to listen to any point of view except to the one of Nylan [sic]. I felt somewhat sick when I left his office.” As harsh as his feelings were, however, Teller’s split with Ernest would not last long. It would be the Super that brought them back together.
The loyalty oath affair initiated a subtle transformation in the Rad Lab’s reputation as a haven for pure science. Instead, it began to seem a place where one’s views on the fraught politics of national security and weapons development loomed over one’s career prospects. Politics had come through the door after all, more or less at Lawrence’s invitation. “Outstanding people left because the atmosphere at the Radiation Laboratory . . . did not make people who dissented feel they were welcome,” observed David Saxon, the future university president. He believed the Rad Lab was destined to face inevitable decline as physics progressed and competitive laboratories emerged—many of them built on the model Lawrence had pioneered. “But I think its decline was accelerated and amplified because of the loyalty oath.”
Chapter Seventeen
* * *
The Shadow of the Super
On September 23, 1949, a news flash turned up the political heat in the debate over nuclear policy. Ernest Lawrence spotted the startling headlines from his car when he pulled up at a corner newsstand in Merced, on his way to a business meeting at Yosemite National Park. President Truman had announced that an “atomic explosion” had been detected in the Soviet Union. His words were carefully chosen, but the implication was clear: America’s monopoly over the atomic bomb was over. It had taken Joseph Stalin’s physicists just four years to reach nuclear parity with the United States—about the time frame predicted by Robert Oppenheimer.
Back on the Berkeley campus, the news about Joe-1, as the blast was dubbed in the US, electrified Luis Alvarez. To Alvarez, who was chafing in his peacetime harness after spending four postwar years doing basic research, the Soviet bomb represented not merely a crisis but also an opportunity. As far as he knew, the American program for the Super, the thermonuclear bomb, had stagnated. If Soviets were prepared to move on from the atomic to the Super on their own, they might well beat the Americans to the prize. The big accelerators being installed at the Rad Lab with millions of government funds might as well have been lying fallow for all the good they were doing for national security; the scale of the Super project, however, was perfectly suited to the resources and ambitions of Big Science. The next day, he bearded Lawrence in his office with the words “We have to do something about this.” Ernest required no further prompting. With Alvarez standing by, he put through a call to Edward Teller, who then was still at Los Alamos weighing UCLA’s offer to join its physics faculty.
At Teller’s invitation, Lawrence and Alvarez flew into Albuquerque, landing before dawn and arriving in Los Alamos at ten in the morning. Their conversations with Teller validated Alvarez’s impressions about the lack of progress on the Super. The program, Teller told them, “had essentially not been of any magnitude worthy of the name.” To hear Teller talk, it was only because of his personal efforts that there was any program at all.
Teller, irrepressibly voluble on his favorite subject, joined them for the drive back to Albuquerque, prattling all the way about the essential requirements of a program to build the Super. In simple terms, the bomb worked by unleashing the energy created by the fusion of light isotopes of hydrogen, but it required an enormous shot of energy to get the reaction started—perhaps a small conventional atomic explosion. The technological issues, Teller acknowledged, were far from being solved; indeed, it was unclear they even could be solved. But he made one compelling point that showed Lawrence and Alvarez how they might restore the program to Washington’s front burner. Teller believed a promising option to fuel a Super bomb would be to use tritium, a superheavy isotope of hydrogen. (The tritium nucleus has one proton and two neutrons, one more neutron than deuterium, hydrogen’s more familiar heavy isotope.) Tritium could be created by bombarding deuterium with copious neutrons in a heavy-water reactor. But government-sponsored reactor development had slowed nearly to a halt since the end of the war. There lay the key, Lawrence and Alvarez recognized: push the Atomic Energy Commission to sponsor production-scale heavy-water reactors and move to a tritium-fueled Super bomb from there.
Their mission now clarified, the two Berkeley scientists emplaned for Washington at three-thirty that morning. After landing, they began making the rounds of congressional and Atomic Energy Commission offices, concluding their first day in town at dinner with Alfred and Manette Loomis, newlyweds who had extricated themselves from their previous marriages via divorces (Manette’s in Nevada). Loomis eagerly approved of the Super project. Lawrence and Alvarez, egged on by their mutual mentor, continued their campaign the next morning.
On the whole, the reception was positive. At the AEC, they met first with Commissioner Lewis Strauss and research director Kenneth Pitzer, a Berkeley physicist who had taken a temporary leave for government service. Both were enthusiastic, as was Robert LeBaron, the AEC’s Pentagon liaison officer, whose breakfast meeting with the visitors was interrupted by a telegram from Berkeley bearing the news that Ernest had just become a father for the sixth time (a daughter, Susan).
Then came the most important meeting of their trip: lunch with Senator Brien McMahon and other members of the Congressional Joint Atomic Energy Committee. Lawrence and Alvarez filled the lawmakers’ heads with a calculatedly sinister vision of Russia’s quest to rule the world by thermonuclear terror. They “even went so far as to say that they fear Russia may be ahead of us in the competition,” scribbled the committee’s hawkish executive director, William Borden, who was on hand to take notes. “They declared that for the first time in their experience, they are actually fearful of America’s losing a war.”
The two physicists received less hospitable treatment when they circled back to the AEC to see David Lilienthal, its chairman. Lilienthal had been brooding all day over a pending decision by President Truman about expanding the nation’s nuclear arsenal, a $319 million proposition pushed assiduously by the Pentagon. “A whopping big [program],” Lilienthal grumbled to his diary. “More and better bombs . . . We keep saying, ‘We have no other course’
; what we should say is ‘We are not bright enough to see any other course.’ ” His mood only darkened with the arrival of Lawrence and Alvarez, whose pitch left him so disaffected that he swiveled his chair around to turn his back on them. “The day has been filled . . . with talk about supers, single weapons capable of desolating a vast area,” Lilienthal recorded sourly, his earlier admiration for Lawrence shattered by the latter’s enthusiasm for this loathsome new weapon. “Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez in here drooling over same. Is this all we have to offer?”
Lawrence and Alvarez were equally disgruntled by their encounter with the AEC chairman. Alvarez declared himself to be “shocked about his behavior . . . He turned his chair around and looked out the window and indicated that he did not want to even discuss the matter. He did not like the idea of thermonuclear weapons, and we could hardly get into conversation with him on the subject.” This was their first hint of how the debate over the Super would divide the AEC, with Lilienthal and Lewis Strauss, the agency’s leading enthusiast for the Super, glaring at each other across a thermonuclear policy gulf.
The Washington visit launched Lawrence into the role of the hydrogen bomb’s most prominent and credible promoter. His efforts on behalf of the Super would bring Berkeley vast new patronage from the government, including the funding of an entire new weapons lab that would double the size of the nation’s nuclear program and give the US technological momentum for decades to come. But his efforts would link his name forever with the issue of nuclear proliferation and cast a shadow over his scientific legacy.
Lawrence’s campaign placed his friends and colleagues in a quandary. Most felt that the development of a US heavy-water reactor was a perfectly sound idea, given its potential to advance nuclear knowledge. But many viewed more equivocally the Super bomb program in which the reactor program was embedded. The spectacle of Lawrence’s lending his highly developed talent for persuasion to a project of such dubious morality was more painful still.
Contemplating the grand tour of Lawrence and Alvarez and the resurgent electioneering of Teller for the Super, Oppenheimer aired his doubts to Conant in a letter affectionately addressed to “Uncle Jim.” (Conant, then fifty-six, was nine years Oppie’s senior.) “A very great change has taken place in the climate of opinion” in Washington, he advised Conant. “Two experienced promoters have been at work, i.e., Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller. The project has long been dear to Teller’s heart; and Ernest has convinced himself that we must learn from Operation Joe that the Russians will soon do the super, and that we had better beat them to it.” As for the plan to build neutron-producing heavy-water reactors, Oppenheimer favored it. “For a variety of reasons, I think we must say amen,” since the reactors would serve purposes other than the Super. But he doubted that science could overcome the technical challenges of building the Super, and he was disconcerted by the underlying politics of the debate: “I am not sure the miserable thing will work, nor that it can be gotten to a target except by ox cart . . . What does worry me is that this thing appears to have caught the imagination, both of the congressional and of military people, as the answer to the problem posed by the Russian advance . . . That we become committed to it as the way to save the country and the peace appears to me full of dangers.”
After Washington, Lawrence and Alvarez planned to fly to Ottawa for a look at the Canadian government’s heavy-water reactor in nearby Chalk River, a design they thought might be adapted for tritium production. Learning that seats to Ottawa were unavailable, they instead invited themselves to visit I. I. Rabi, a member of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, at Columbia University. Rabi, who believed they were making a social call, was surprised to hear them launch into a promotional spiel for a huge program to develop a hydrogen bomb.
As Alvarez recollected the meeting, Rabi praised their proposal as just what the doctor ordered. “Rabi was worried about the Russian explosion, too, and liked our plans,” he wrote later. “ ‘It’s certainly good to see the first team back in,’ he told us. ‘You fellows have been playing with your cyclotrons for four years. It’s time you got back to work.’ ”
This would have been a significant endorsement from an influential scientist if it were true, but Rabi’s recollection of the meeting was very different. He agreed that the US program should be ramped up to recover the American lead in nuclear weaponry, but he thought his visitors’ fancies had far outrun the practicality of the Super. “They were extremely optimistic,” he recounted later. “They are both very optimistic gentlemen . . . Dr. Teller gave them a very optimistic estimate about the thing and about the kind of special materials which would be required. So they were all keyed up to go bang into it.”
Rabi did his best to bring them down to earth. “I generally find myself when I talk with these two gentlemen in a very uncomfortable position . . . Those fellows are so enthusiastic that I have to be a conservative. So it always puts me in an odd position to say, ‘Now, now. There, there,’ and that sort of thing.”
• • •
Ernest’s new cause revived his old indefatigable self. He sent Alvarez home to Berkeley to assemble a reactor design team and spread the word that the Radiation Laboratory had a new mission. Meanwhile, he returned to Washington to meet with Kenneth Nichols, Groves’s former military adjutant and now the head of weapons development at the Pentagon, to urge that the Joint Chiefs of Staff designate the hydrogen bomb as a military requirement, which would help to obtain funding on Capitol Hill. Nichols briefed the Joint Chiefs the next day, asserting that the entire scientific community endorsed the project. This prompted the chairman, World War II hero General Omar Bradley, to declare that “if it can be done . . . it would be intolerable to have us sit on our butts.”
Teller kept up a similar pace, albeit with less success. In October he visited in Chicago with Fermi, who had just flown in from Italy. Plainly skeptical but unwilling to engage in a colloquy with a wheedling Teller, Fermi pleaded that he was too tired from the flight to give him a hearing, much less a commitment. Teller moved on to Ithaca, New York, to enlist Cornell’s Hans Bethe in the Super project, and afterward reported to Alvarez that he “felt he could count on Bethe.”
This was Teller’s self-delusion talking, not his judgment. Bethe had no intention of signing on until he had weighed the undertaking carefully. But he was predisposed against it. Teller’s talk filled him with “the greatest misgivings,” he would recall. “I never could understand how anyone could feel any enthusiasm for going ahead.” It did not escape his notice that Teller, Lawrence, and Alvarez had papered over any moral qualms they might have had by considering the Super largely as a scientific challenge—“namely, how to overcome the technical obstacles.” This was not sufficiently enticing for Bethe. He brought his misgivings to Oppenheimer, who confided that he shared them and showed Bethe his “Uncle Jim” letter, explaining that Conant also opposed the Super. Bethe brooded with another friend, physicist Victor Weisskopf, over the inevitable outcome of a thermonuclear war. “We both had to agree that after such a war, even if we were to win it, the world would not be . . . like the world we want to preserve.” He turned Teller down.
But to Lawrence, seized with unrestrained enthusiasm, the project’s future seemed assured. At home in Berkeley, he spent a weekend scouting locations for a heavy-water reactor, convinced that he was on the verge of securing the project as an adjunct to the Rad Lab. His preferred site was Suisun Bay, an estuary off San Pablo Bay north of San Francisco, which he judged to be distant enough from densely inhabited areas to be safe, yet convenient enough to Berkeley for frequent oversight visits. In his optimistic mood, he guaranteed Alvarez the appointment as director of the Suisun Bay project. Rather more cautious, Alvarez confided to his diary: “I am going on almost full-time as director of a nonexistent laboratory on an unauthorized program.”
Indeed, it was not long before the Super’s apparent lack of progress in Washington had Lawrence and Alvarez feeling uneasy. When they ha
d left the capital in September 1949, things seemed to be moving at jet speed, but it had been weeks since they had heard an encouraging word. “There seemed to be a lack of enthusiasm suddenly pervading the scene,” Alvarez recalled, “and we were worried about . . . whether it was a change in climate in Washington.” They consulted Jack Neylan, who phoned his close friend Lewis Strauss to take the temperature of the capital. Neylan reported back that things were percolating along, albeit under the surface. Congress had signaled its enthusiasm for an expanded AEC program by allocating the agency a healthy budget for research, he explained. “Keep your shirts on, boys,” Neylan said. “It’s going to be all right.”
But the scientists could not shed the suspicion that someone was throwing sand in the gears, and they thought they knew who: Oppenheimer. Lawrence quietly dispatched Robert Serber to Princeton to sound out Oppie. Serber had been Oppenheimer’s scientific deputy at Los Alamos and author of The Los Alamos Primer, a thin volume handed to every scientist arriving at the bomb lab to bring him up to speed on the theoretical physics underlying the bomb design. He arrived in Princeton without a firm idea of the purpose of his trip, for he had been so deeply immured in the Rad Lab echo chamber that he assumed East Coast physicists were just as enthusiastic about the Super as Lawrence, Alvarez, and Teller. Oppenheimer promptly set him straight. At Berkeley, skepticism about the Super, much less Oppenheimer’s conviction that it should not be pursued at all, “would have been unthinkable.” But as Serber now discovered, “The East was evidently a completely different world from California.”
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