Yet the assumption that Lawrence and Teller would work together in unalloyed harmony turned out to be an instance of hope triumphing over reality. Once the lab won the AEC’s blessing, it became clear that the two scientists actually had very little in common. Their approaches to physics were divergent: Lawrence was an experimentalist nonpareil, Teller a profoundly intuitive theorist. They also held diametrically opposed views of how to organize and staff Livermore and how to structure the thermonuclear program. Teller saw the lab as a reflection of his own brimming self-esteem—as a huge laboratory staffed with name physicists working in lockstep according to his handcrafted research strategy. But “Ernest couldn’t see that for beans,” York recorded. “He was only willing to step in slow . . . no big names and no big plans.” Lawrence conceived Livermore as a reflection of his own style, or more precisely as a replication of the original Rad Lab, staffed with talented but unsung young physicists eager to make their names at Berkeley, not coasting on reputations established elsewhere.
“You get a bunch of bright young fellows, and they’ll learn it all,” he advised York. “Those that have famous names—that’s not because they’re any better, it’s only because they’re a little older.” In Lawrence’s flat-management paradigm, there would be no titles among the scientists at Livermore, no pecking order among the PhDs on the laboratory floor. No titles were necessary, he declared proudly, because “there is no higher title than professor in the Radiation Laboratory.”
No one who knew Teller would have expected him to submit meekly to Lawrence’s authority. They both were fully alive to their own eminence, each backed by powerful and influential patrons. Lawrence’s position as doyen of the Rad Lab and Teller’s as the indispensable genius of thermonuclear technology made compromise impossible. Once the time came to organize the new lab, the only way to maintain friendly relations between the two was to keep them far apart. This task fell to the beleaguered York, who served as their go-between, shuttling between Berkeley and Chicago, where Teller had set up his Super lab in exile. York could see that fashioning a modus operandi for the new lab that met both men’s specifications would be practically impossible, for “they were poles apart.”
With Teller’s dawning realization that he might not be slotted in for the role of supreme authority at Livermore, his old habit of undermine-and-conquer returned. A golden opportunity for his scorched-earth bluster arrived when the AEC released its official mission statement for Livermore in June 1952. The document set forth as the lab’s objective the “development and experimentation of methods and equipment for securing diagnostic information on behavior of thermonuclear devices . . . in close collaboration with the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.” (This was meant to recognize the particular expertise of York and other Berkeley scientists who had participated in Greenhouse—namely, the measurement and analysis of nuclear blasts.) The commission further expressed its “hopes that the group at UCRL”—that is, the University of California Radiation Laboratory at Livermore—“will eventually suggest broader programs of thermonuclear research to be carried out by UCRL or elsewhere.”
Livermore’s nebulous mandate was an ideal fit for Lawrence’s scheme. For Teller, however, it replicated the unfocused dithering he had been grousing about. His response came at a reception in July at Berkeley’s elegant Claremont Hotel, marking Livermore’s launch as a national laboratory. Before a cheerful crowd that included Lawrence and Gordon Dean, the “well-lubricated” Teller dropped a bombshell, declaring that he would have nothing to do with the new lab.
This was tantamount to a threat to throttle Livermore at birth. Lawrence, for his part, was inclined to call Teller’s bluff, for his putative partner was already proving entirely too fractious for his taste. “We would probably be better off without him,” he muttered to York. To the AEC, however, the standoff signified that the Teller issue had not been solved by the creation of the second lab after all, which made Livermore a costly and time-consuming way of making no progress. At Dean’s insistence, “intense negotiations were resumed among all concerned,” York related. Within days, these yielded a commitment from the AEC that thermonuclear weapons development would play a part in Livermore’s program from its inception. In Livermore’s organizational chart, Teller would be designated as one of several members of the Scientific Steering Committee, but in recognition of his “obvious special status,” he was awarded veto power over the committee’s decisions. In other words, Teller was to have no formal authority at Livermore but was granted the implicit authority to direct its thermonuclear research program as he saw fit.
That still left open the question of who would manage Livermore day to day, in effect as Lawrence’s viceroy. Ernest solved that problem by handing the reins to York. The offer surprised York almost as much as Lawrence’s original question about the need for a second lab. He was struck by the nonchalance of Lawrence’s decision making: there had been no search committee; no bureaucratic procedure or vetting of candidates. Lawrence had asked him if he thought he could “run it,” and as soon as York assented, “he simply instructed me to do so . . . He gave me no new title, no immediate raise in salary, or any other change in status. He made no announcement about it, except an informal one to his immediate associates.” York chalked up his new opportunity to Lawrence’s visionary audacity: “It certainly was a matter of great guts,” he reflected. “Who else would take the major responsibility for a new lab and then ask a thirty-year-old man with no experience to run it?”
He may have ascribed too much free will to his mentor. In fact, Lawrence had come under pressure from Oppenheimer and the General Advisory Committee to establish a conventional management structure at Livermore, with the goal of creating a counterweight to Teller, who would be inclined to seize any unclaimed authority. York might be young and untested, but as Ernest’s designated director, his managerial authority would be, at least in formal terms, indisputable. The arrangement with Teller, York reflected, was “peculiar,” but it did the job: “None of the strained relationships that had surrounded Teller at Los Alamos developed at Livermore.”
For all that, Lawrence remained unmistakably the animating force at Livermore, which soon acquired the operational features of a classic Lawrence laboratory. It was collegial and interdisciplinary, with only the blurriest lines distinguishing the individual researchers’ responsibilities. As one Berkeley scientist related in contrasting the approaches of the two labs toward designing a bomb, at Los Alamos “some folks would work on one part . . . others on another part . . . They would write memos to each other.” At Livermore “there were no fiefdoms. We were all working together.”
But the AEC’s dream of thermonuclear research blooming via a collegial relationship between Los Alamos and Livermore proved chimerical. The labs squabbled continually over credit for technical advances. The first friction point was the “Mike” test at Eniwetok in November 1952, involving a large thermonuclear device. The Mike device was based on the Teller-Ulam design and built by Los Alamos; Livermore, which at that time was fully engaged in “simply coming into being,” played no role whatsoever. Yet following the government’s announcement of the test, if not its spectacular results—a 10.4-megaton blast that completely obliterated Elugilab, an island in the Eniwetok Atoll—it was Livermore that received popular credit for the feat.I
The reasons, York surmised, were Teller’s association with Livermore and the AEC’s “absurdly strict secrecy policy,” which prevented the issuance of even a simple clarification of the roles of the two laboratories. An accurate picture emerged only in 1954, when Norris Bradbury was granted permission to counter Teller’s public charges that Los Alamos had dragged its feet on the Super. The impetus was the publication of a highly sensationalized book, The Hydrogen Bomb: The Men, The Menace, The Mechanism, by journalists James Shepley and Clay Blair Jr., which accepted Teller’s version of events as gospel. Bradbury, incensed at Teller’s implication that Los Alamos scientists had shown disloyalty by hol
ding back on the Super, observed at a press conference that his staff had “built a laboratory that developed every successful thermonuclear weapon that exists today.” Three years had passed since Bradbury had offered an almost identical defense to the AEC’s Colonel Fields, but Teller had never ceased carping about Los Alamos. A few months after the press conference, Teller, wounded at being shunned by former friends and colleagues over his continued bellyaching, finally attempted to set the record straight in an article for Science. Livermore’s work thus far, he wrote, “has been mostly that of learning the difficult art of inventing and making nuclear weapons. All the magnificent achievements that have become in the meantime known to the world have been accomplished by Los Alamos.”
In fact, within the thermonuclear research community, Livermore’s reputation was marred by the almost comic fizzles of the first devices it readied for testing. As products of the lab’s emerging interest in small-scale hydrogen bombs that could be delivered by aircraft or ballistic missile, these were designed to have modest yields—but not as modest as the embarrassing pops they emitted on the test range. At the first explosion of a Livermore device in Nevada in 1953, just six months after the lab’s founding, the blast was not even powerful enough to incinerate the tower holding the device, a key metric for trials of this type. (For the follow-up trial two weeks later, the tower’s height was halved to ensure that no trace of it would remain after the blast.) Livermore defended its flop as the not-unexpected product of vigorous innovation, on the theory that one can often learn more from mistakes than from easy successes. The new lab had inherited this tenet from its parent, Ernest Lawrence, who had experienced not a few such mishaps during his career. In any case, despite the anticlimactic results, the test results were interpreted by the AEC as validating Livermore’s role as the developer of “new ideas” in thermonuclear technology.
But more embarrassment lay ahead. The occasion was Operation Castle, a test of Los Alamos and Livermore inventions at Bikini Atoll in March 1954. The first trial, of a Los Alamos device code-named Bravo, was a fiasco, though one that brought a sort of perverse credit to the Los Alamos lab. Its designers had miscalculated the physics of the fusion reaction and drastically underestimated its yield, with the result that an expected five-megaton device exploded with triple that energy. The enormous fireball showered dangerous radioactive fallout over task force personnel who were thought to be safely out of range. A radioactive plume of vaporized coral drifted east, covering seven thousand square miles of ocean. The cloud necessitated the hasty evacuation of nearby Marshall Islands residents to Kwajalein Island, four hundred miles distant, where they were treated for radiation sickness. Worse, from the standpoint of international relations, the fallout reached a hapless Japanese fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru (“Lucky Dragon Five”), sickening its twenty-three crew members, one of them fatally. Lewis Strauss, who had succeeded Dean as AEC chairman, unjustly labeled the boat a likely “Red spy ship,” intensifying the furor in Japan and creating a very public black eye for the American testing program.
Then came Livermore’s turn, with a device code-named Morgenstern that was expected to yield one megaton. It was another dud, its 110-kiloton blast barely visible to observers watching from naval vessels on the fog-shrouded horizon. Mortified, the Livermore team canceled a second test. The Los Alamos devices had shown up their designers too, but at least their results truly were super; indeed, the Castle tests of the Los Alamos devices pointed toward what Rabi, who had succeeded Oppenheimer as chairman of the GAC, called a “complete revolution” in nuclear weaponry; a sudden maturing of the technology that opened the door to a vastly expanded role for thermonuclear bombs in America’s strategic arsenal.
The Los Alamos staff returned from Operation Castle with a self-confidence they had not felt since the end of the war. By contrast, a pall of humiliation fell over Livermore, whose dismal record was now oh-for-three. “It was not surprising that some Los Alamos scientists filled the air with horse laughs,” acknowledged York. More disturbingly, the serial fizzles prompted new questions about Livermore’s management, its work product, and its cost. Bradbury renewed his attack on the very concept of a second lab. It had been “believed in some quarters that brilliant new ideas would flow from the establishment of competition,” he wrote Colonel Fields at the AEC. “The brilliant new ideas have not appeared.” Bradbury’s complaint found an increasingly sympathetic audience at the General Advisory Committee. Livermore “had [not] been an effective organization in the two and a half years of its existence,” Rabi observed at the committee’s meeting in December 1954. He wondered aloud whether it might ever “really be an important laboratory.”
Doubts about Livermore’s future spread among the staff. They interpreted their slapdash working conditions, created by chronic underfunding by the AEC, as an ominous sign that the agency’s commitment to Livermore remained conditional. Working plumbing was scarce, and the lack of air-conditioning tormented scientists and engineers trying to function in the baking heat of California’s Central Valley. Livermore seemed to be an auxiliary outpost caught between two larger labs, Los Alamos and Berkeley, and it was hardly unreasonable to wonder, with Rabi, if it would ever amount to more.
As it turned out, the staff worried for naught, for they had not accounted for the insatiable demand for research and product created by competition among the military service branches, each striving to secure thermonuclear arsenals it could call its own. Notwithstanding the test fizzles, the AEC had committed fully to Livermore, its faith in Ernest Lawrence still strong. Livermore’s first-year budget in fiscal 1953 had been $3.5 million and its staff contingent 698. By 1956, the end of York’s five-year tenure as director, the lab boasted a $55 million budget supporting a staff of 3,000. One year later, the professional staff numbered 4,000 and Livermore ranked as the largest of the AEC’s research labs. That year, its research in lightweight thermonuclear bombs came together with the navy’s urgent desire for a nuclear ballistic missile that could be launched from a forthcoming class of submarines with unprecedented range. The result was Polaris, a weapons system that marked Livermore’s “coming of age.” Within five years, the lab’s budget was $127 million, and the staff reached five thousand. Livermore would stay.
* * *
I. A megaton, then as now the conventional measurement of the energy of a nuclear blast, is defined as the equivalent energy of one million tons of TNT. The Hiroshima bomb has been estimated at about fifteen kilotons, or the equivalent of fifteen thousand tons of TNT.
Chapter Nineteen
* * *
The Oppenheimer Affair
J. Robert Oppenheimer made many enemies with his persistent critique of US nuclear policy and the rush to the Super, but none as implacable as Lewis L. Strauss. Given Lawrence’s relationship with both Oppenheimer and Strauss, it was inevitable that he would be drawn into their conflict.
Strauss’s enmity for Oppenheimer deepened as the latter’s opposition to the hydrogen bomb solidified. After the appearance of the General Advisory Committee’s broadside against the Super in 1949, Strauss became convinced, in his customary fashion, that Oppie was not merely a fool but a traitor. As long as Strauss remained a minority voice on the Atomic Energy Commission, however, he could only chafe powerlessly at Oppenheimer’s exalted role as the AEC’s leading scientific advisor. His determination to remove Oppenheimer from the high councils of government went quiescent after his retirement from the AEC in February 1950, when he recognized that Truman’s decision to pursue the Super marked the successful completion of his long campaign for this leap forward in national security.
But the interlude was brief. With the arrival of a Republican administration in 1953, Strauss returned to Washington endowed with extraordinary access to the White House. President Dwight Eisenhower installed him as his personal advisor on atomic energy in March and appointed him to the AEC chairmanship three months later. From his new perch, Strauss fixed his sights on Oppenheimer�
�s last means of direct influence on commission policy, a consultantship he had been awarded by the previous chairman, Gordon Dean.
Even before Strauss’s appointment was made public, he began moving against Oppenheimer, impelled by the physicist’s increasingly outspoken campaign for a public debate on nuclear policy. Oppie’s campaign took form in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on February 17, 1953, before an elite audience of opinion makers and financial leaders, Strauss among them. His theme was the need for “candor” from political leaders about the dangers of nuclear proliferation and the necessity of international disarmament. “We do not operate well when the important facts, the essential conditions, which limit and determine our choices are unknown,” Oppenheimer declared. “We do not operate well when they are known, in secrecy and in fear, only to a few men.”
Strauss seethed as Oppenheimer outlined the state of the arms race between America and the Soviet Union. Oppie spoke in abstract terms because, as he acknowledged, the government’s demand for nuclear secrecy required him to gloss over the horrific details. He warned that during the Cold War, the “atomic clock ticks faster and faster” and closed his speech with a vivid image of two great powers in mortal conflict: “two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”
Oppie’s speech had been cleared by the White House and was said to have impressed Eisenhower himself. Strauss felt differently. Speaking of Oppenheimer’s call for candor, he advised the president, “The campaign is dangerous and its proposals fatal.” The facts Oppenheimer favored disclosing publicly “are of the greatest significance to the general staff of an enemy.” To advocate placing such information in the public record, Strauss asserted, was perforce an act of disloyalty.
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