Big Science

by Michael Hiltzik

  Chapter Twenty-two

  * * *

  Element 103

  The Eisenhower White House moved swiftly to soothe Americans’ nerves over Sputnik, dispatching spokesmen to dismiss the satellite orbiting in the sky overhead as “a silly bauble” and its launch as merely “a neat scientific trick.” Keeping the administration’s more independent outside advisors in line proved more of a struggle. When Edward Teller declared on Edward R. Murrow’s popular television program that the launch was a loss for the United States “greater and more important than Pearl Harbor,” Eisenhower upbraided Lewis Strauss for his protégé’s loose talk. But the ominous implications of the Soviet achievement were hard to overlook, especially after the launch of Sputnik 2, a capsule carrying a live dog named Laika (“Barky”), one month later; the Soviet Union appeared to be outpacing the United States in the development of long-range ballistic missiles capable of carrying a large payload—a nuclear warhead, for example. Sputnik 2 weighed 1,100 pounds; the heaviest American satellite, Vanguard, weighed 3.5 pounds and had yet to make it off the launch pad. All the pride Americans had felt in the Big Science that had won World War II was draining away at the spectacle of multimillion-dollar rockets exploding in flight.

  Eisenhower understood that allaying the public’s concerns required concrete action. For advice, he turned to I. I. Rabi, whom he had come to know during his five-year stint as president of Columbia University. Born in Polish-Ukrainian Galicia, Rabi was the levelheaded physicist who had tartly denounced Strauss’s vendetta against Oppenheimer and had attempted, if fruitlessly, to talk Lawrence and Alvarez down from their starry-eyed pursuit of the Super. He also chaired the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization, a successor to the technology committees organized by Vannevar Bush during the war. In that role, Rabi strove to present a reasoned counterbalance to Strauss’s unrelenting opposition to a test ban. At a White House meeting three weeks after the Sputnik launch, he joined with Hans Bethe, the Cornell physicist who also had flatly refused Teller’s invitation to join in research on the Super, in arguing that a test ban would preserve America’s nuclear advantages over the Soviet Union and that therefore the United States should accept a ban “as a matter of self-interest.” Strauss simmered through most of the presentation but erupted when Rabi took a potshot at the illusory concept of a “clean” bomb. Strauss fired back furiously that his science advisors, Professors Lawrence and Teller, thought the assumptions underlying Rabi’s findings baseless. The bewildered president shut down the bickering and later confided to his diary: “I learned that some of the mutual antagonisms among the scientists are so bitter as to make their working together almost an impossibility . . . Dr. Rabi and some of his group are so antagonistic to Drs. Lawrence and Teller that communication between them is practically nil.”

  It was Rabi who retained Eisenhower’s confidence in this lofty scientific dispute, however. Asked for advice about a response to Sputnik, he replied that what Eisenhower needed above all was a sound, independent science advisor without ties to the political camps pitched on opposite sides of the disarmament issue. The best man for the job, he said, was a member of his Science Advisory Committee named James R. Killian.

  Killian, a soft-spoken South Carolinian of fifty-three who had succeeded Karl Compton as president of MIT, was a management expert rather than a trained scientist. But he had proven himself as a superb academic administrator, earning his spurs honing consensus among the fractious faculty cliques on the MIT campus. In his new post as chair of what would be christened the President’s Science Advisory Committee, or PSAC, he would earn the trust of both the White House and the scientific community while keeping the president “enlightened”—Eisenhower’s word—about the innumerable technological challenges facing his government. (Eisenhower called him “my ‘wizard.’ ”) In his three years chairing the PSAC, Killian also would succeed in restoring much of the confidence of scientists in their government patrons that had been lost by the persecution of Oppenheimer.

  Killian’s committee contained a diversity of scientific opinion that had been missing from Eisenhower’s scientific councils under Strauss. As members, he appointed Rabi and Bethe as well as Herbert York, who had grown bored with the routine of lab management after five years at the helm of Livermore and would presently resign to become the Pentagon’s chief scientist. For the first time since Eisenhower took office, the views of Strauss, Lawrence, and Teller were balanced by learned voices on the opposite side of the nuclear debate.

  Killian’s rise at the White House coincided with the waning influence of Eisenhower’s former chief advisors on disarmament, Strauss and Harold Stassen. The last hurrah for the two aging warriors was sounded during a marathon session of the National Security Council on January 6, 1958, when Stassen proposed a new framework for talks with the Soviet Union. His idea was to offer the Russians a two-year moratorium on nuclear testing, with compliance to be verified by eight to twelve monitoring stations on each country’s territory. What made the scheme novel was that for the first time it decoupled a test moratorium from all other disarmament issues, thereby removing the major cause of the deadlock between the two countries.

  Although Stassen’s idea resembled one that Eisenhower was quietly beginning to favor, it inspired an extended row at the NSC meeting. Secretary of State Dulles fretted that it would prompt objections from Great Britain and France. Strauss reiterated his familiar theme that the cessation of testing would have “severe repercussions” for the clean weapons program and that Los Alamos and Livermore would “lose momentum” during the suspension. He cited the conclusion of Lawrence and Teller that “several score of inspection stations would be required to monitor testing in the Soviet Union,” not the dozen or so proposed by Stassen. Eisenhower, now fully alive to the limitations of the scientific advice Strauss had been feeding him, disingenuously asked him to explain the discord in the scientific community about the efficacy of monitoring. How, he asked, could the White House reconcile the views of Edward Teller, who had just published an article doubting the effectiveness of any monitoring, and I. I. Rabi, who maintained that the necessary oversight was well within US capabilities? “Apparently Governor Stassen believes in the opinion of one group of scientists, and Admiral Strauss follows the views of another group,” Eisenhower observed. In light of subsequent events, he might have been hinting that it was time for both men to leave the field. Killian, attending his first NSC meeting, smoothly reset the debate by promising to place a definitive, neutral study of the monitoring issue by “the most highly qualified US scientific and technical personnel” on the president’s desk within a few weeks. The meeting ended with Eisenhower tabling Stassen’s plan, ostensibly for the moment.

  Stassen saw the handwriting on the wall: his tenure as Eisenhower’s “secretary of peace” effectively had come to an end. Eisenhower made it official on February 7, when he offered Stassen a consolation prize of a position elsewhere in the administration. Stassen declined, having already turned his attention to a prospective run for governor of Pennsylvania. Like Adlai Stevenson, he had achieved much in defeat. His imaginative, if often overreaching, diplomacy kept disarmament policy alive at the White House, and his final plan for decoupling a test ban from disarmament was indeed the key to breaking the logjam of policy that had made both goals so hard to achieve.

  At a White House meeting two weeks before Stassen’s departure, Strauss had reminded Eisenhower that his term as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission was to expire on June 30. Eisenhower offered to reappoint him for a new term, but Strauss had grown weary of dodging brickbats in Washington. He asked the president to “weigh very carefully” the question of his renomination, as he had “accumulated a number of liabilities, including [the enmity of] most of the columnists in the Washington press.” Eisenhower replied levelly that he shared the same liabilities. But when the time came, he let Strauss go.

  • • •

  In the early months of
1958, as the prospects for a moratorium brightened, the United States and the Soviet Union each staged a massive series of tests with the expectation that the test window would soon be closed. The US tests, known as Operation Hardtack, had been planned for nearly three years and were to encompass surface, underwater, and high-altitude trials. The latter were a particular interest of Ernest Lawrence, who was concerned that the Russians might attempt testing at one hundred thousand feet or higher in an effort to evade American atmospheric detection systems; his goal was to gather data to help counteract any such evasion. Hardtack would also test Livermore bombs of both “clean” and dirty varieties, and payloads of differing shapes and sizes. Not the least of them was a prototype of Polaris, the submarine-based warhead for the navy, Livermore’s important new government patron. By late February, fourteen thousand military and civilian technicians were on their way to the South Pacific to prepare for Hardtack, which continued to expand as project leaders tried to cram their devices into the schedule; at a White House meeting with Strauss and Dulles on March 24, Eisenhower noticed that the tests, which originally were to run from April through July, were now set to continue into September. He asked for an explanation from Strauss, who blamed the expectation of bad weather.

  At the same meeting, John Foster Dulles observed that the Russians had stepped up their own missile and bomb testing sharply—there had been eleven blasts in the space of less than three weeks—and that intelligence reports were pointing toward a Soviet announcement of a unilateral suspension of testing by the end of the month. Any such initiative, he said, would place the United States in “an extremely difficult position throughout the world.” Having completed their own tests, the Soviets would have America boxed in a corner over Hardtack. If the United States canceled the tests, it would lose technological ground to the Soviets; if it staged them, the nation would “lose the confidence of the Free World as the champion of peace.” The prospect of being outmaneuvered had converted Dulles to fervent advocacy of a test ban treaty. On the spot, he proposed that Eisenhower announce that Hardtack would be the last test series he would order during his term in office, and tie the announcement to a redoubled push for comprehensive disarmament talks.

  Despite his lame-duck status, Strauss opposed Dulles’s proposal with his customary ferocity, reiterating that testing did not present a significant health hazard. The meeting broke up dispiritedly, its attendees braced to sustain a propaganda blow from the Soviet Union, as Eisenhower pleaded wanly for his staff to “think about what could be done to get rid of the terrible impasse in which we now find ourselves with regard to disarmament.”

  The intelligence reports were correct. Under its new premier, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union announced its unilateral suspension of nuclear bomb tests on March 31, called on the United States and Great Britain to do the same, and warned that if they continued their tests, the Russians would feel free to resume their own. As White House advisors had anticipated, the Russian announcement, for all its cynicism, was an enormous propaganda victory. Calls for America to match the Soviet initiative streamed in from overseas—Albert Schweitzer renewing his appeal for an end to the tests with the words, “Mankind insists that they stop, and has every right to do so”—and from Eleanor Roosevelt and other domestic luminaries.

  As it happened, not everyone in the nuclear research and development community thought a test moratorium would be a bad thing. Livermore, to be sure, continually pressed for more testing and a larger budget—“There is far more useful work than a laboratory the present size of [Livermore] can possibly do in the immediate future,” argued a staff report of this period. “We feel that . . . limitations of funds should not be a determining factor to pursue some of this work.” At Los Alamos, however, Norris Bradbury relished getting a breather from the relentless demand for more designs and more tests. “The blunt fact appears to be that, while the country is spending more on atomic weapon research and development than it ever has before, it is almost certainly getting less return per dollar spent than it was getting in 1947–50 or in 1952–54,” he informed Admiral Starbird. Government spending on nuclear weapons research was running about $150 million a year, Bradbury estimated, about three times its rate prior to the establishment of Livermore. The existence of the second lab, moreover, made even unpromising weapons programs impossible to kill: programs questioned by Los Alamos would simply be taken up by Livermore, infused as it was with Ernest Lawrence’s bottomless optimism and the natural bureaucratic competitiveness for funding. Los Alamos constantly worried that if it rejected a project, it would be seen, to its discredit, as “less ‘enthusiastic’ ” than its rival, Livermore. “All of these things,” Bradbury wrote, “leads [sic] to a weapon program which is too long, too detailed, involves too much testing, and too much work for too little real improvement.”

  Preparations for Hardtack proceeded in a frenzy made more difficult by the unpredictable spring weather at Eniwetok. On the night of April 7, Mark Mills boarded a helicopter with a diagnostic crew to inspect preparations for one of the first tests when they ran into a sudden squall. The chopper crashed in the sea, and Mills drowned.

  When the news reached Berkeley, Ernest was writing a letter to his brother, John, who was visiting Geneva. He reported that he had recovered from his recent bouts of illness and now felt “fit as a fiddle.” Then the blow landed, devastating on both personal and professional levels. In the four years since Mills had joined the Rad Lab, he had emerged as Ernest’s heir apparent. After York’s departure for the Pentagon, Lawrence had agreed to name Teller as lab director for a single year, with the proviso that Mills would then take over permanently. The word of his death at sea provoked a colitis attack that kept Ernest bedridden for four days, until he roused himself and hobbled, ashen, into an East Bay church for Mills’s memorial service.

  • • •

  As the work on Hardtack proceeded in the South Pacific, progress on a test ban started to be made in Washington.

  In early April, Killian reported to Eisenhower and Dulles the conclusion of his experts that test ban violations could be detected with existing technology. Given the superiority of US knowledge about nuclear weapons over that of the Soviets, Killian confirmed, a bilateral agreement for the suspension of bomb tests following Hardtack “would be greatly to the advantage of the United States.” Eisenhower seemed to take Killian’s report as a comfort. A few days after receiving it, he confided to Killian that he “had never been too much impressed or completely convinced by the views expressed by Drs. Teller, Lawrence and Mills that we must continue testing of nuclear weapons.” This was revisionist history, of course; the representations by the three scientists during their White House meeting the previous June were what had prompted Eisenhower to question publicly the wisdom of a test ban.

  But the ground had shifted since then. Killian’s report helped build momentum toward an overture to the Soviets. This took concrete form on April 28, when Dulles drafted a letter to Khrushchev proposing a “technical conference” in Geneva on test ban inspections. At long last, the United States had formally divorced a test ban from the broader question of disarmament. As Khrushchev recognized, the foundation was laid for a breakthrough. On May 9 he accepted.

  Two weeks later, Eisenhower announced a preliminary agreement to the press, along with the names of the three American delegates to the technical conference: former AEC research director James B. Fisk, Caltech physicist Robert Bacher, and Ernest Lawrence. Of the three delegates, Bacher favored a test ban, Fisk was neutral, and Lawrence was opposed but flexible.

  Ernest had been at the Balboa house trying to steal a few days of rest when the invitation to Geneva arrived from Washington. Molly objected to the assignment, not least because preparation for the conference would involve weeks of intensive briefings in Washington. But as Lawrence would tell Tuve before his departure for Europe, “We helped start this and have to do what we can about it. The president asked, so I must go.”

 
The conference would mean his fourth visit to Geneva in four years. Each trip had carried its own burden of nostalgia, starting with the 1954 visit to help launch CERN’s physics lab, based so heavily on offspring of Ernest’s original accelerator. In 1955, during an Atoms for Peace conference connected to that year’s US-Soviet summit meeting, Ernest had delivered a presentation on accelerators jointly with Vladimir Veksler, the Russian physicist who had discovered phase stability in 1944 simultaneously with Ed McMillan and had been irked by McMillan’s mistaken claim to primacy. At Geneva, there were no residual hard feelings; Lawrence and Veksler shared a friendly dinner at the city’s finest French restaurant, comparing notes on the technologies that had made their careers. A year later, at a Geneva symposium sponsored by CERN, Ernest ran into Stan Livingston. They spent a long afternoon in reminiscences of a distinctly autumnal hue, marveling at how far they had come since those early experiments with the quirky eleven-inch accelerator—it was not even called the cyclotron then—and how greatly their work had influenced the course of science during the quarter century that followed.

  The new assignment presaged another reunion. Bob Bacher and Ernest Lawrence had first met in 1930, when Bacher visited Berkeley to examine one of Edlefsen’s early four-inch accelerators. Before the war, Lawrence recruited him for the radar lab at MIT, where he forged a lasting friendship with Lawrence’s brother-in-law Ed McMillan; later he collaborated with Ernest on the electromagnetic separation of uranium.