“We know we can make them big,” he said. “We are not interested in that anymore.”
The program for Redwing included the first airborne drop of a thermonuclear device, which created an enormous fireball four miles in diameter when it detonated fifteen thousand feet over Bikini. Wind blew the fallout plume safely away from inhabited islands, which allowed Strauss, in his official statement after the tests were concluded, to crow about having achieved “maximum effect . . . with minimum widespread fall out hazard. Then, clumsily, he said too much: “Thus the current series of tests has produced much of importance not only from a military point of view but from a humanitarian aspect.”
Strauss’s allusion to a “humanitarian” H-bomb drew derision from critics of the arms race. The very notion of “clean” thermonuclear weapons was mercilessly demolished in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists by Ralph Lapp, a distinguished antinuclear physicist. By lucidly describing the process that produced an H-bomb blast, Lapp showed that a clean bomb was a fantasy. Because an H-bomb encompassed fission, which invariably produced radioactive emissions (dirty), and fusion, which did not (clean), one could reduce the relative radioactivity produced by the blast by increasing the ratio of fusion to fission in the bomb. But that increased the bomb’s overall power, which created an absolute increase in dirtiness. “The superbomb can be designed to be either relatively clean or very dirty,” Lapp wrote. “Part of the madness of our time is that adult men can use a word like humanitarian to describe an H-bomb.”
Strauss plainly had overreached, but to what end? His goal may have been to dilute the impact of a fallout study released by the National Academy of Sciences. The study concluded that the effect on Americans of radioactive emissions from nuclear tests was vastly outweighed by their exposure to diagnostic X-rays and other common sources. (Lawrence himself had launched a personal campaign in Berkeley to eradicate the casual use of fluoroscopic X-ray machines on children’s feet, a ubiquitous promotional practice that was eventually outlawed nationwide.) What drew headline attention, however, was the academy’s finding that even low-level radiation exposure carried potential genetic consequences. “The concept of a safe rate of radiation,” the study declared starkly, “simply does not make sense if one is concerned with genetic damage to future generations.” This conclusion added to public alarm not merely about test fallout but also about the global arms race generally.
Far from giving up on the “humanitarian” H-bomb, Strauss redoubled his efforts on its behalf in his role of Eisenhower administration spokesman on the technicalities of nuclear policy. The idea he put forth was that a testing moratorium would halt research into making H-bombs safer, thereby leaving the United States with an obsolete “dirty” nuclear arsenal. While Adlai Stevenson assembled PhDs to talk about the risk of elevated cancer rates and “uncontrollable forces that can annihilate us,” Strauss deployed his own cadre of scientists to dismiss these statements as lurid propaganda and depict the threat of radiation damage as minor.
Among them were Lawrence and Teller. Shortly before the election, Strauss prevailed on them to issue a statement opposing Stevenson’s test ban. Teller produced the first draft and brought it to Lawrence’s home on the Sunday before Election Day, just as Ernest was bidding farewell to guests with whom he had shared a liquor-fueled country club outing. When he finally was able to scrutinize the draft, he found that it bore all the flaws of Teller’s oratorical style: it was too long, too argumentative, and too emotional. Ernest summoned Daniel Wilkes, the university’s public information officer, to his house for an instant redrafting. Wilkes, perplexed at the sudden urgency for a statement about a policy debate that had been going on all year, warned that it would appear overtly partisan when it appeared in newspapers on election morning. But Ernest, who was “feeling no pain” from his sociable afternoon, as Wilkes recounted later, countered that the statement was a favor for Strauss and needed to be ready that night.
Wilkes’s version, issued over the signatures of Lawrence and Teller, sounded familiar themes: the country had “no sure method of detecting nuclear weapons tests” by the Soviets and continued US testing was necessary to maintain “a fast-moving scientific technical nuclear weapons program . . . We are never sure a device will work until it is tested; and we cannot know that our last idea works.” The text assured Americans that “the radioactivity produced by the testing program is insignificant” and that, no matter the outcome of the election, “tests will continue to be carried out with scrupulous regard to public health.” The statement received prominent play in newspapers around the country on the morning of the election, which Eisenhower, as expected, won in a landslide.
• • •
In defeat, Adlai Stevenson had succeeded in placing nuclear testing policy solidly on the public agenda. Inside the White House, however, the standing of Harold Stassen, the most vociferous advocate of the test ban, had slipped. Before the Republican National Convention that summer, he had irked Eisenhower by leading the “Dump Nixon” movement, which aimed to place Christian Herter, the patrician governor of Massachusetts, on the ticket as vice president in Richard Nixon’s stead. At disarmament talks, moreover, he had developed the disturbing habit of offering the Russians concessions that had not been approved by the president or Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. In March Stassen was stripped of his cabinet rank as a rebuke. Under normal circumstances, his demotion would have given Strauss an opening to lobby against the test ban; but Eisenhower was losing patience with Strauss, too, largely because of his intransigence on that very topic. The policy stalemate within the administration continued.
It was an uncomfortable time for Livermore, which was suffering through another in a long sequence of existential crises. This one dated back to the previous fall, when the AEC and the Pentagon had worked out the military program for both weapons laboratories. During that process, five projects had been canceled or suspended—all of them Livermore’s. The new schedule idled “half of our potential capability,” York grumbled to Norris Bradbury. AEC officials tried to ease Livermore’s concerns by advising Lawrence and York to keep moving ahead on advanced research—because of the lab’s role as the developer of new technologies, its products would always run ahead of the military’s known needs at any given point; sooner or later, the Pentagon’s requirements would catch up with the lab’s innovations. This would turn out to be true, but in the fallow days of late 1956 and early 1957, Livermore’s future looked bleak.
Earlier in the year, a new provocation had revived international protests against the bomb. This was Great Britain’s announcement that it would test its first thermonuclear device over Christmas Island that spring. The prospect prompted indignation in Hawaii and Japan and a statement opposing further tests from the revered humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer, issued from his home in the equatorial African nation of Gabon. Schweitzer’s warning of “a catastrophe that must be prevented under every circumstance” was read by the president of the Nobel Prize committee in Oslo to a vast radio audience around the world—except in the United States. There his words went unbroadcasted and almost unnoticed, until AEC commissioner Willard Libby issued a public riposte that served chiefly to bring Schweitzer’s statement to Americans’ attention despite the blackout.
Meanwhile, the scientific community was stirring again. The animating figure was Caltech chemist Linus Pauling, a Nobel laureate known for his strong leftist views and stem-winding oratorical flair. After receiving a standing ovation for a speech at Washington University in St. Louis advocating a test ban, Pauling launched a petition drive among scientists calling for an immediate international halt to all nuclear testing. He started with twenty-seven signatories, among them Harold Urey, Merle Tuve, and the former Rad Lab scientists Martin Kamen and Edward U. Condon. Within two weeks, there were two thousand signatures, at which point Pauling delivered the petition to the White House and released it to the press.
The petition served to
draw Lawrence and Teller back into the public debate. Their opportunity had been developing since Memorial Day, when Senator Henry Jackson of Washington called at Livermore. A member of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Jackson’s goal was to enlist Lawrence and Teller in his lobbying for increased production at Hanford, the plutonium plant located in his home state; but the conversation inevitably strayed onto the topic of the need for continued testing to preserve America’s nuclear superiority. Encouraged by the scientists’ firm opposition to a test ban, Jackson invited them to address the Joint Committee’s Subcommittee on Military Applications, of which he was chairman.
Lawrence, Teller, and Mark Mills appeared before the subcommittee on Thursday, June 20. Jackson introduced them by alluding to their goal of making atom bombs cleaner, reporting “the gleam in the scientists’ eye of making them almost like Ivory Soap”—then adding wryly: “but not quite.”
The scientists urged the committee not to short-circuit testing that could make nuclear weapons more moral. “If we stop testing,” Lawrence declared, “well, God forbid . . . we will have to use weapons that will kill fifty million people that need not have been killed.” Seen in that light, he said, a test ban would be “a crime against the people.” Teller’s contribution was a warning that the United States could never devise a foolproof monitoring regime to guard against clandestine testing by the Soviets. The committee members, impressed by the scientists’ presentations, wondered aloud if the White House was aware of their views. W. Sterling Cole, a Republican from New York, took the initiative of arranging a meeting for the three physicists with President Eisenhower for the following Monday. They holed up for the weekend in a Washington hotel suite, where they were drilled carefully by Lewis Strauss.
At nine o’clock in the morning on June 24, Strauss and his charges were ushered into Eisenhower’s presence inside the Oval Office. Ernest Lawrence, a Nobel laureate and the intimate friend of statesmen and millionaires, suffered a sudden bout of stage fright at his first meeting with a US president. His discomposure astonished Edward Teller. “This awe was something I just could not imagine,” he recalled. “He could not bring up a word. I mean he was all tight and excited.”
Lawrence eventually found his voice and launched into a speech very much like the one he had delivered to Jackson’s subcommittee. The minutes of the White House meeting quote him as stating: “If we know how to make clean weapons, but fail to do so and to convert existing weapons into clean ones, then the use of dirty weapons in war would truly be a crime against humanity.” Eisenhower listened in fascination, but tactfully schooled his visitors in the realities of international arms policy. He reminded them that the United States was “up against an extremely difficult world opinion situation” and declared that he did not want the nation to be “crucified on a cross of atoms.” But he assured them that no test ban would be accepted without a comprehensive agreement on disarmament. “We have not thought of stopping tests without some kind of package deal,” he said.
After they left the Oval Office, Strauss paraded the scientists before the White House press corps. Lawrence assured the reporters that it would be possible “to produce nuclear weapons that are in a sense just like TNT [in other words, fallout-free], except tremendously more powerful.”
A reporter asked how clean they could be. Strauss replied that fallout had already been reduced “between nine-tenths and ten-tenths, almost half the way.”
The news conference ended with a question for Lawrence: “Do you think the tests should be continued?”
“Of course I do,” he replied.
The next day, the national press parroted the figures it had been fed by Strauss: “U.S. Eliminates 95% of Fall-Out from the H-Bomb,” the New York Times reported on its front page.
Reading those words in his Manhattan apartment, David Lilienthal found them repellent. “The irony of this is so grotesque it is rather charming,” he wrote in his personal journal. “Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller, with Strauss, were the ones who were so sure that the super H-bomb, big as all hell, would be the saving of the country; that those, who like myself, entertained strong doubts about this—well, there must be something queer or unpatriotic about us . . . But now it appears that the big H-bomb doesn’t seem so clearly the answer to all the world’s problems of security.”
Lilienthal had made a long, dispiriting personal journey since that day in 1946 when he had met Ernest Lawrence for the first time and recorded his impressions of “a rather fabulous figure . . . full of vitality and enthusiasm.” Now he regarded Lawrence as a scientist on the make for government largess and personal glory. “How greedy for headline fame can you get?” he wrote. His contempt for the “salesman type” of scientist was unbounded. “E. O. Lawrence, Luis Alvarez, Edward Teller—Madison Avenue–type scientists. Scientists in gray flannel suits.”
Ernest and his colleagues left a profound impression on President Eisenhower, though not enough to prompt him to rule out a test ban entirely. Goaded by a reporter the day after their visit to give “an unequivocal yes or no on this business of immediate suspension of nuclear testing,” Eisenhower continued to equivocate, indicating that while he now had second thoughts about a test ban, he was still determined to negotiate one. The president explained that he had just been “visited by people that certainly, by reputation and common knowledge, are among the most eminent scientists in this field, among them Dr. Lawrence and Dr. Teller . . . They tell me that already they are producing bombs that have ninety-six percent less fallout than was the case in our original ones, or what they call dirty bombs . . . They say, ‘Give us four or five years to test each step of our development, and we will produce an absolutely clean bomb.’ . . . It does show, as you so aptly say, the question is not black and white.”
Eisenhower had considerably exaggerated the scientists’ purported accomplishment. They told him they needed at least six or seven years for a cleaner bomb; he quoted them as offering an “absolutely clean” device in four or five. His version left the scientific community dumbfounded, for by general agreement, there was no way to create “an absolutely clean bomb.” Even relative freedom from fallout, well short of the 95 percent cleanliness Strauss and the scientists had mentioned, could be achieved only from reducing yields. That was well understood at Livermore, where Herb York informed Brigadier General Alfred D. Starbird, the AEC’s director of military application, that developing a clean tactical weapon by the early part of the following decade could not be done except with some “very lucky breaks.” And that time frame was for weapons of immense size and doubtful transportability by aircraft or missile. Smaller weapons would take “several more years” at least, he said.
Several news publications looked into the predictions of powerful yet clean nuclear weapons made by Lawrence, Teller, and the president and determined they were talking fantasy. “What an ‘absolutely clean’ H-bomb might be remained a mystery to most scientists and congressmen, as well as to the public,” observed Newsweek. Eisenhower’s remarks revived the contempt for the very concept of a “safe” thermonuclear weapon that had been raised by Strauss’s invention of the “humanitarian H-bomb.” Asked The New Republic: “Is it ‘cleaner’ to be vaporized by H-bomb blast than to be poisoned by H-bomb fallout? Apparently so, if we correctly read the President’s words . . . When Admiral Lewis L. Strauss and his technicians”—a scornful demotion for Lawrence and Teller, two of the nation’s most eminent scientists—“plead for five more years of tests, they are asking, it seems to us, not for time to produce a ‘humanitarian’ bomb, but for a continuation of the arms race.”
Outside the White House, Lawrence and Teller barely moved the needle of debate. Those who were opposed to testing found the scientists’ promises absurd and immoral; those who favored continued tests adopted their argument that testing was the best way to make nuclear weapons less horrible and more practical. Strauss, for his part, was delighted by the performance of his trusted scientists, for plainly they had su
cceeded in buying time for continued testing, if not for sweeping a ban off the negotiating table entirely. When Lawrence and Teller arrived back at Livermore, they were greeted by letters bearing his congratulations. “Everything has worked out as we had hoped it would,” Strauss wrote. His military aide, Navy Captain John H. Morse Jr., seconded his opinion: “You may detect some feeling that clean weapon potentialities have been over-stated and over-simplified recently,” he wrote Lawrence. “I think you did exactly the right thing in statements to the President and the Press. The situation called for over-selling rather than under-selling.”
Strauss had another reason to feel optimistic about a continuation of testing: he had seen off his most determined adversary on the Atomic Energy Commission, Thomas Murray. At Strauss’s urging, Eisenhower declined to reappoint Murray when his term as commissioner expired on June 30. (“I mark off the days on my calendar” before Murray’s departure, Strauss told the president.) Murray would continue his campaign for a test ban in public appearances and congressional testimony, but now he was on the outside looking in. With the death in February of the distinguished mathematician John von Neumann, who had served on the AEC since 1955, there were now two vacancies for Eisenhower to fill—with solid supporters of continued testing, Strauss hoped. But the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy held jurisdiction over AEC appointments, and to appease its Democratic majority, Eisenhower named two former Truman aides, John S. Graham and John F. Floberg, to the open seats. Neither was vulnerable to Strauss’s sway.
The appointments were a further manifestation of Strauss’s fading influence, but a greater change was to come. It was prompted less by developments on the disarmament front than by a very different event in the technological contest between the United States and Russia.
On October 5, 1957, America awoke to the news that a man-made object launched the previous day from a Soviet space complex was orbiting overhead. It was a 184-pound aluminum alloy sphere twenty-three inches in diameter which the Russians called Sputnik—meaning “traveling companion” or “fellow traveler.” In the hysteria that followed over Soviet scientists’ apparent outdistancing their American counterparts, a new group of technical advisors was brought into the White House. Lewis Strauss’s monopoly on the scientific information reaching Dwight Eisenhower was about to end, taking with it Ernest Lawrence’s influence over nuclear policy.
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