Luis Alvarez, who was named the MTA’s chief designer, accepted the job with a distinct sense of foreboding. He would be proven right. The MTA, he would recollect, “occupied most of my time for the next two years. It was not a happy time.” Lawrence had built his career by overreaching and then making good on his promises. He was about to reach too far. On a strictly technical level, the MTA was a “tour de force,” Alvarez acknowledged. “Ernest loved technical extrapolation, and we had fun drawing such an accelerator.” But as for building the beastly thing, “we were working in absolutely unexplored territory.” The sixty-foot main cylinder would contain the largest vacuum ever produced thus far, an enormous engineering challenge in itself. The giant metal “drift tubes” suspended inside the cylinder, which the deuteron beam would traverse, each weighed several tons. They were connected to one another by ramshackle wooden bridges over which construction men, technicians, and scientists clambered nervously.
The biggest challenge was posed by the immense energy coursing within the drift tubes. Stored electrical energy is discharged by sparking, a common bug in new accelerators that was customarily eliminated by polishing down any interior imperfections attracting the discharge. Inside the Mark I, these sparks packed the power of lightning bolts, ripping through the drift tubes and leaving behind what Pief Panofsky described as “spectacular stalagmites and stalactites of copper.” Alvarez assumed personal responsibility for making sure the tanks were polished smooth. “Night after night for weeks on end, like a test pilot learning to fly a new plane,” he recalled, “I sat at the control panel gradually running the drift tube voltage up to the point where the tank would spark.” That point would be marked by a gigantic thunderclap, after which Alvarez would haul his gangly frame into the tube to strip away the stalagmites and stalactites and buff the surface smooth. Then he would crank up the voltage again until another sharp report summoned him back inside.
While the Mark I was still undergoing this shakedown procedure, Lawrence spent his time soothing official doubts about the MTA by citing the continuing threat of a shortage of fissile material. Well into 1951, this served as an effective all-purpose defense: asked by the Joint Atomic Energy Committee to predict when questions about the MTA’s feasibility would be settled, he replied brusquely, “I am not waiting to see.” Considering the urgency of finding a way “to free us from the raw material bottleneck,” he said, “if we can do that for a few hundred million dollars, why, let’s get going and do it.”
Yet the bottleneck was already disappearing. In 1950, uranium production from mines in Colorado increased sharply, exceeding Canadian output for the first time. New ore deposits were discovered in western New Mexico, and procurement officials expressed high hopes for a scheme to extract uranium from phosphate processed by fertilizer manufacturers in Florida. The key to all this increased production turned out to be the magic of the free market: after the AEC announced a hike in the price it was willing to pay for ore, deposits that had seemed locked deep within Mother Earth suddenly started reaching the surface.
These developments eroded the rationale for the costly MTA. The United States was still dependent on South Africa and the Congo for most of its ore, but with the new sources coming on line, the panic that had driven approval of the Mark I only a year earlier dissipated. Lawrence suddenly found himself waging a fierce battle against rising complaints at the AEC about the MTA’s high cost and indifferent performance. Interrogated at an AEC meeting by Commissioner Henry DeWolf Smyth, he repeated wanly, “MTA breaks the bottleneck in raw materials . . . It seems self-evident to me we should push the process development ahead just for this reason, even though we feel there is now only a remote possibility that our foreign supplies might be insufficient or cut off.”
Smyth’s query underscored that Ernest’s government patrons were becoming less susceptible to his charm. In part this new skepticism reflected the superior technical knowledge of his official overseers, who now included trained physicists with knowledge of nuclear physics that equaled or even exceeded his own. Smyth was a former chairman of the Princeton physics department who had authored an official history of the bomb program released to the public following Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was never going to be swayed by Ernest’s enthusiasm and vague promises alone, as had Cottrell, Weaver, and Conant—scientists all, but relative strangers to the mysteries of the nucleus—much less Sproul, Crocker, or Neylan, to whom Lawrence’s science was as indecipherable as a conjuror’s repertoire.
Smyth was also unhappy with Lawrence’s habit of proposing increasingly ambitious projects before his previous ones had borne fruit. So when Lawrence unveiled yet another audacious scheme in 1952—this one for a neutron-producing cyclotron code-named J-16 and bearing an astounding price tag of $30 million—Smyth was distinctly unmoved. “I don’t understand clearly enough what it is you propose to do to see $30 million in the machine,” he wrote Lawrence—a rare but telling rebuff to a man who had routinely emptied his backers’ wallets through his sheer vision and optimism. Smyth observed that Congress had slashed the agency’s research budget for 1953 from $43 million to $33 million, “as you no doubt have heard.” Even if he were inclined to buy into Lawrence’s vision, funds were scarce.
Lawrence’s ability to maintain AEC backing for the MTA was fading fast. In July the agency voted to defer construction of the Mark II indefinitely. Standard Oil’s California Research and Development subsidiary read the handwriting on the wall: the decision was tantamount to cancellation. The cost of the Mark I had already doubled from the original estimate of $10 million, and CRD’s president, Fred Powell, was forced to question “the wisdom of continuing further research and development work.” At Livermore, the project was hemorrhaging personnel. Some staff were laid off as the project approached what increasingly looked like a dead end, while others—mainly those whom Lawrence had reassigned from the Rad Lab—were returning to their former responsibilities at Berkeley. The project staggered on for eighteen months and was shuttered for good in December 1953.
“The prototype MTA attempted to carry a technology beyond its reasonable limits,” Alvarez reflected. Lawrence delivered his own judgment nonverbally by becoming more detached from the project as its fortunes waned. As Lawrence machines went, this one was a fiasco, not even yielding substantial or unique knowledge to advance the science of accelerator design.
The MTA was a lesson in the management of Big Science in the new postwar landscape. Competition for the favors of academia, industry, and government was more intense, the qualifications of the judges higher, and the standards of success more exacting than before. Gone were the days when Ernest Lawrence’s laboratory reigned as virtually the only bidder for millions of dollars in research support, his record and reputation sufficient to persuade his patrons to open their wallets; now there were rivals with records and reputations that matched his own. Nor could dispensers of government patronage merely weigh scientific projects against one another: the cost of high-energy physics had become so great that broader priorities were implicated. Officials and lawmakers now had to balance any spending on science against other burgeoning demands—for social programs, highways, school buildings, and other physical infrastructure. In the coming decades, these issues would only become more pressing.
Still, the MTA’s failure marked only a temporary stumble in Lawrence’s influence over domestic nuclear policy. The MTA might be dead, but the Super was still very much alive. Even before the first pieces of the Mark I were dismantled, Ernest was planning a new venture—one that would exploit the official mania for the hydrogen bomb to bring Livermore the prominence he originally expected to come from the MTA. Torrents of AEC cash would soon be on their way, transforming the old air station. The guiding principle was that a crash program to build the Super bomb required a Los Alamos of its own, and that place should be Livermore.
• • •
The idea that America required a second weapons laboratory to supplement Los Alamos originat
ed with Edward Teller and was driven by two factors. One was the conviction of the stocky, beetle-browed Hungarian physicist that the lethargic pace of thermonuclear research had placed the United States at the mercy of the Soviet Union. “If the Russians demonstrate a Super before we possess one, our situation will be hopeless,” he wrote in a frantic memo for a 1949 meeting on research priorities at Los Alamos.
The second factor was Teller’s inability to get along with anyone who doubted either the need for a crash H-bomb program or the likelihood of its eventual success. Teller’s obsessive personality created a managerial dilemma for Norris Bradbury, the able Berkeley-trained physicist who had succeeded Oppenheimer as Los Alamos director. Teller’s intellect was indispensable at Los Alamos, but his presence was intolerable. The quandary deepened in mid-1950, when it became evident that the solution to a vexing technical issue in hydrogen bomb design rested on the collaborative work of Teller and the Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam.
Teller continually disturbed the peace at Los Alamos, where uncertainties about the lab’s role in postwar research already had the staff on edge. His chief tactic was the threat of resignation—underscored now and then by an actual resignation. These outbursts forced Bradbury into a repetitive routine of pleading with Teller to stay and persuading him that he was loved. Meanwhile, Teller was constantly sharing his grievances with powerful friends and supporters in Washington, including Congressman Brien McMahon, chair of the Joint Atomic Energy Committee; William Borden, the committee’s executive director and a fanatical hawk on the subject of the Super; and AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss, Washington’s best-placed and most passionate supporter of the bomb program.
Notwithstanding Teller’s grousing, Los Alamos actually was making significant progress on the Super. In the spring of 1951, the lab staged Project Greenhouse, a test of thermonuclear technology at the South Pacific coral atoll of Eniwetok. Greenhouse was a turning point in the American H-bomb program. Teller and AEC chairman Gordon Dean were on hand for the key trial on May 8, which produced an awe-inspiring fireball that melted a crater into the coral, obliterated the two-hundred-foot tower holding the device, and destroyed three hundred tons of equipment around it. The device was not a hydrogen bomb, exactly, but it was “the first thermonuclear test explosion on earth,” in the words of one witness, the young Berkeley physicist Herbert York. The blast proved the feasibility of a controlled thermonuclear device so decisively that Teller claimed paternity immediately, wiring back to Los Alamos, “It’s a boy.”
But the success of Los Alamos seemed to make Teller even more insistent about a second laboratory. His attitude in turn intensified the debate over how to handle him. A few weeks before Greenhouse, Bradbury had tried to mollify the willful physicist by creating a semiautonomous thermonuclear division at Los Alamos, giving Teller authority over 25 scientists. Teller dismissed the offer out of hand, damning it as exactly the sort of half measure he had been fighting for years. He went over Bradbury’s head to Gordon Dean to propose instead an independent new lab in Boulder, Colorado, where some 130 physicists would report to him alone.
Dean rejected this audacious plan, in part because he was unconvinced that a second lab was needed at all, much less on Teller’s megalomaniacal scale. The AEC chairman could not imagine how a bifurcated weapons program would operate or how the reduction in responsibility for the Super would affect morale on the New Mexico mesa. His most important question was whether the mercurial and messianic Teller could manage anybody. The list of prominent scientists who had refused to work with him was long and growing longer. A typical concern was voiced by Emilio Segrè, who had known Teller for decades and had turned aside his invitation to collaborate on the Super with the accurate if gracious judgment that he was a man “dominated by irresistible passions much stronger than even his powerful rational intellect.”
Like Dean, Norris Bradbury could not conceive of Teller’s helming a major lab of his own. Most division leaders at Los Alamos “wouldn’t work with him,” he recalled later. “I wouldn’t put him in charge. Oppie hadn’t put him in charge. Oppie knew him just as well as I did, perhaps better.” Finally, tiring of his unending battles with Teller over research policy, in September 1951 Bradbury appointed Marshall G. Holloway, a Los Alamos veteran with a no-nonsense administrative style, as head of the thermonuclear division. Although Holloway’s temperament was ideal for supervising a lengthy schedule of South Pacific tests stretching through the coming year, his appointment was also a calculated affront to Teller, who suspected Holloway of inadequate devotion to the Super. Informed by Bradbury that his role would be limited to “coordinating” with Holloway, an infuriated Teller again threatened to resign. His assistant, Frederic de Hoffmann, placed a panicky phone call to Gordon Dean to warn that Holloway’s appointment was “like waving a red flag in front of a bull” and that “Teller would never stay under those circumstances.” Dean refused to intercede, and within a week Teller made good on his threat. He returned to the University of Chicago to brood, declaring that he would continue working on the Super independently. He was there when Ernest Lawrence tracked him down and invited him to visit Livermore.
• • •
Teller’s departure from Los Alamos failed to quell interest in a second laboratory. His unrelenting disparagement of Los Alamos had made inroads at the AEC, forcing Bradbury to shuttle to Washington to defend his team. Communing with a sympathetic Colonel Kenneth Fields, the AEC’s chief of military application, Bradbury pointed out “the somewhat ironic fact that every current weapon development has arisen out of the suggestion (and in many cases, the urging) of this laboratory.” Had not the lab proven its worth to the AEC by meeting the agency’s ever-greater demands for more thermonuclear tests? Yet instead of receiving recognition and gratitude, Los Alamos received “rather thinly veiled criticism” that it was not up to the job of weapons research and development.
The General Advisory Committee, still chaired by Oppenheimer, was also leaning toward a second lab. The GAC had reached the conclusion that the intensified test schedule really was placing insupportable pressure on Los Alamos; sooner or later, Oppenheimer feared, the workload would erode the quality of the lab’s product. The GAC also was responding to a change in the wind in Washington resulting from the invasion of South Korea by North Korean troops in June 1950, followed by the intervention of Communist China on the North’s side. As fears rose that the United States was fated to stand alone against a Sino-Soviet Communist alliance, it was becoming harder for the committee to resist the prevailing idea that everything possible should be done to move the Super along.
The question of a second lab, furthermore, had become a proxy for the question of what to do with Edward Teller. Everyone agreed that despite his vexing personality, Teller’s intellect was a crucial asset for the bomb development program; the difficulty was finding a management formula that would satisfy both Teller and Bradbury, avoid exacerbating morale problems at Los Alamos, and maintain progress in thermonuclear research. None suggested itself, and 1951 ended with the issue still unresolved at the AEC.
On the West Coast, however, Ernest Lawrence was developing his own solution to the agency’s dilemma. At a physics department reception on New Year’s Day, he pulled Herb York aside. “Drop in on me this week,” he said. “There’s something I want to discuss with you.”
A couple of days later, in Lawrence’s office, York was startled when Ernest asked him bluntly: “Does the United States need a second nuclear weapons laboratory?” York, who knew nothing of the high-level politics driving the Super debate, avoided giving a straight answer, but Lawrence’s question was mostly rhetorical. He outlined a concept for a second lab as initially “a small group . . . in support of Los Alamos and controlled thermonuclear work . . . We’ll start small and see what happens.” He instructed York to pack his bags for a trip east to quietly sound out scientists and government officials about locating this new group at Livermore. Thirty years of age, the burly, cre
w-cut York found it “heady and exciting” to act as Ernest Lawrence’s personal envoy in meetings with “all those other physicists whom I had been reading about in books and hearing about in lectures.” Since the names on his itinerary all favored the second lab—they were AEC and air force officials who had been listening to Teller for months—it was unsurprising that York returned to Berkeley as a convert to the idea. “I reported to Lawrence that I, too, felt it would probably be useful to establish a second laboratory,” he recalled. “The idea of doing so at the Livermore site was, for us, a natural one.”
• • •
Lawrence drove Edward Teller out to Livermore during the first week of February, hoping that Teller would become the instrument of his hopes to create a permanent foothold for Livermore in the thermonuclear program. The hulking Mark I, not yet dismantled, still sat in its barnlike home: a corrugated metal building the length of a football field that hove into view while they were still miles away. Upon returning to Berkeley later that day, Ernest asked Teller to leave Chicago and help him establish the second laboratory. For this brief moment, the two physicists’ ambitions and skills fell into perfect accord. Teller could have a place of his own to pursue the Super with a team of high-quality scientists; Lawrence, whose reputation continued to lure the world’s best young physicists to Berkeley, would supply that elite manpower while expanding the boundaries of his research empire.
The AEC, Congress, and the Pentagon all recognized that Livermore, at a stroke, answered every objection raised against the second lab. “We debated this at some length,” Gordon Dean recounted later. The second lab “had to be a place that was already established if you were going to save time. It had to be a place where you had . . . a man in there who commanded respect, that Teller would work for and work with, and be comfortable working with. There was only one place that I could finally fasten on that fitted this, and this was to work under Ernest Lawrence.” The arrangement worked, Dean recalled a few years later, “because of Teller getting along very well with Dr. Lawrence.”
Big Science Page 39