Big Science

by Michael Hiltzik

  But there would be little time for retrospection over the next few weeks, for the briefing schedule for the three delegates was punishing. The delegates “practically lived together,” Bacher recalled, cramming on the technical aspects of test monitoring like grad students preparing for their orals. Watched over by armed soldiers during the week, they left the briefing room only for meals and sleep. After the first Friday, a bone-weary Ernest Lawrence boarded a red-eye flight west for a few days at Balboa and was back in the air two days later for another grueling week. He returned to Berkeley the following Friday, though he arrived too late to make his son Robert’s high school graduation. Meeting him at the airport, Molly judged him “as near exhaustion as I had ever seen him” and lobbied him again to withdraw from the Geneva conference. Instead, he returned to Washington for two more weeks of briefings.

  That final stage included sessions with State Department diplomats, who fretted that the scientists, rank novices at diplomacy, would be dragged into political discussions by their wily Soviet counterparts; at one briefing, Secretary Dulles himself emphasized that the delegates were to do “a purely technical scientific job”—no politics whatsoever. To maintain the aura of technical consultation, Dulles decreed that no diplomatic staff would be formally assigned to the delegation.

  The stress on Ernest did not let up. The State Department botched the travel arrangements for him and Molly, placing them on a plane without sleeper berths, which Ernest desperately needed for the long first leg from New York to Lisbon, Portugal; he arrived in Europe prostrate. It did not help that the Soviets kept the Americans guessing until the last moment about whether they would even appear. Two weeks before the scheduled July 1 start of the talks, the Russians suddenly had insisted that the agenda be broadened to encompass negotiation of the test ban itself. It remained unclear whether they would relent in the face of firm American opposition to the idea. “We were going, and hoped they’d show,” recalled Bacher.

  The Soviets did show, though it became evident with their first appearance on the tarmac at Geneva that the State Department’s concerns about their political intentions were well taken. Among the delegates was a “shaggy man with an unprepossessing manner and a crooked smile,” whom American Kremlinologists identified promptly as Semyon Tsarapkin, one of Moscow’s craftiest diplomatic negotiators. The Americans came to call him “Old Scratchy.” Tsarapkin and Fisk, the American delegation’s chair, would wrestle during the succeeding weeks over the course of the talks—politics versus science.

  The meetings were wedged in among constant banquets and receptions, at which Ernest considered his attendance essential to forging a personal connection with his Russian counterparts. At one garden party, he had an unexpected encounter with Robert Oppenheimer, who was in Geneva on other business. It was their first and only meeting since the security hearing, and it would be the last time they saw each other. They exchanged a few anodyne words—“it certainly was not unpleasant,” recalled Oppenheimer, who stayed only briefly and left first.

  There were sightseeing trips up the Swiss Alps designed as getaways for relaxation, but these excursions only taxed Ernest’s weakened constitution. After two weeks in Switzerland, he developed a hacking cough and a persistent fever. Molly, fearing the reappearance of his viral pneumonia, summoned a doctor. He detected no respiratory infection but prescribed shots of liver and placenta extract, a novel therapy for weakened immune systems. After that, Ernest was seldom out of bed except for brief outings for fresh air and visits to the doctor. “He just didn’t seem to get well,” recalled Bacher. Finally, in the fourth week of the ordeal, he decided to go home.

  • • •

  John met Ernest at the Berkeley house and the next day whisked him to Oakland’s Peralta Hospital, where his gray pallor shocked the attending physicians. But two days later, he was strong enough to call for his painting gear, intent on pursuing a hobby he had taken up at the urging of Manette Loomis. He promised to join Molly and the children in Balboa within the week. The next day, however, his condition worsened again. The paints were left untouched, the resolve to visit Balboa gone. It was clear to the doctors that Ernest’s chronic colitis had severely compromised his digestive system. The prospect of surgery was raised, which would mean the removal of much of his colon and a permanent change in his quality of life. At John’s insistence, Ernest was transferred across the bay to Palo Alto Hospital, the better to consult with its Dr. Albert Snell, one of the nation’s preeminent specialists in colitis.

  On the Berkeley campus, Cooksey engaged in hushed discussions with Clark Kerr, the new president of the University of California, about transferring the directorship of the Radiation Laboratory to Ed McMillan, whose appointment Ernest endorsed. Molly, summoned by her sister, Elsie McMillan, returned north to sit with Ernest full-time. After resisting the idea of abdominal surgery for years, he had finally relented after consulting with Snell, but now he seemed to be looking ahead to a more distant prospect. “You know,” he told Molly, “I wish I’d taken more time off. I would have liked to, but my conscience wouldn’t let me.”

  The surgery was scheduled for August 27. Molly leaned over Ernest as he was being wheeled into the operating room and whispered, “I’ll be here when you wake up.” The operation lasted five hours. After it was over, she saw him for only a moment. This time, when she leaned close, she thought she heard him say, “Molly, I’m ready to give up now.” It was ten o’clock at night. The doctors encouraged her to take a rest—Ernest would be slow coming out of sedation, they said—so she repaired to a late-night coffee shop. But the wait was agonizing, and she rushed back to the hospital. When she came out of the elevators, she knew at once from the look on the nurses’ faces that Ernest was gone, at the age of fifty-seven.

  Ernest’s condition had astonished the surgeons in the operating room. Infection and colitis ulcers had so compromised his system that they were amazed he had been able to play tennis just a few months earlier. The chances that he could have had a normal recovery, much less a normal lifestyle, were virtually nonexistent. Ernest’s friends and family members contemplated with mixed feelings of dread and relief what his existence would have been like: “A man of Ernest’s disposition,” Cooksey told a condoling colleague, “would have been in complete misery as an invalid.” But now there was other work to do, he wrote. “Ernest left such a heritage that for those of us here, we have a fine challenge to carry on.”

  Many of Ernest’s friends and colleagues pondered that heritage after his death, but perhaps the oddest judgment came from Robert Oppenheimer. On a wintry day in late January 1959, he stopped at David Lilienthal’s house in Princeton. Oppie’s hair had turned silvery; he seemed ruddier and less gaunt than Lilienthal remembered from the last time they had seen each other. They had a long talk about Lilienthal’s efforts to promote disarmament through the nonprofit Twentieth Century Fund. Toward the end, Lilienthal elicited “the one touch of anything resembling bitter feeling in this man, who was treated so badly when he should have been knighted.” It came when Lilienthal mentioned Ernest Lawrence.

  As Lilienthal recorded the conversation in his journal: “Lawrence died of frustration, Robert as much as said, because of the long strain of an over-reaching ambition, culminating in his efforts to torpedo the talks in Geneva concerning the ending of the bomb tests.” Oppie’s startled host replied that Ernest “had always seemed to my observation to be a very picture of the extrovert, the satisfied man, the man of bounce and buoyancy.” No, Oppenheimer said: “I have known him longer and closer than you; his fears that he was being, or might be, undermined in his position were a terror for him.”

  It was indeed, as Lilienthal reflected, a “strange sidelight.” It was also at odds with the facts, and with Oppenheimer’s own judgment as he relayed it a few years later to Lawrence’s biographer, Herbert Childs. Basing his words on the description of Lawrence’s role at the Geneva talks that he had received from his own close friend Robert Bacher, Oppenheimer a
cknowledged that although Lawrence “had very grave doubts” about the possibility and even the wisdom of a test ban, “apparently he was quite willing to subordinate his doubts to the mission that he was contracted to make.” That was much closer to the truth: Lawrence had gone to Geneva out of a sense of duty and a commitment to seeing the talks through, and the effort shortened his life.

  The Geneva conference continued for three more weeks after Lawrence’s return home. James Fisk, who supervised the American side of the talks with a diplomatic skill unexpected of a scientific appointee, brought home an agreement designating the detection of nuclear bomb tests as “technically feasible.” It was the indispensable prelude to talks on a test ban. The very day after the Geneva meeting adjourned, Eisenhower proposed that negotiations begin on October 31. To set the stage for talks, he announced that the United States would observe a one-year moratorium on testing, renewable annually on condition that the Russians also refrained from testing during the period and that “satisfactory progress” continued to be made toward a disarmament agreement. Within a few days, Khrushchev agreed.

  Since Hiroshima, there had been more than 190 atomic and thermonuclear tests in the atmosphere, underground, and at sea. The United States accounted for 125 of these; the Russians, 44; and Great Britain, 21. Now, for the first time since 1945, the man-made thunder and lightning at nuclear test ranges around the world ceased.

  The talks continued for more than two years, in peaks and valleys of hope and gloom, while the test ranges remained silent. The silence ended during the early months of John F. Kennedy’s presidential term. The Soviet Union announced on August 31, 1961, that it would resume atmospheric testing and made good on the threat the very next day. Kennedy held out until March 2, 1962, when he announced in a televised address that the United States would resume nuclear tests in the atmosphere. The new round of testing ended in the summer of 1963, when America and the Soviet Union reached a limited test ban agreement, outlawing tests in the atmosphere, at sea, and in space—everywhere, in short, except underground.

  The three-year test moratorium had been a difficult period for Livermore, now under the leadership of Edward Teller. Its devices typically were more sophisticated and complicated than those of Los Alamos, and therefore harder to perfect via theoretical modeling rather than testing. But the lab, which was rechristened Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1980, thrived and expanded by exploiting its productive relationship with the Air Force and the Navy. Livermore continued to work on Polaris during the moratorium, then followed with the next-generation submarine-launched nuclear missile, Poseidon. In the 1970s, its work yielded MIRVs, multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles. These were warheads loaded with eight to fourteen nuclear payloads, each one up to twenty-five times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. MIRVs, which encompassed the land-based MX missile program, were the ultimate product of Livermore’s long quest for a high-yield, low-weight nuclear device.

  • • •

  The Radiation Laboratory lived up to its heritage and its challenge as a centerpiece of Big Science. Seven of Ernest’s students and colleagues there would win Nobel Prizes in physics or chemistry after his death. Four more members of what was presently rechristened Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory would join them in the pantheon—scientists who had not worked directly with Ernest but continued the traditions he established at the Rad Lab as his heirs.

  Many others earned the esteem of their fellow chemists and physicists even if they fell short of the ultimate honor—a Nobel Prize. One was Albert Ghiorso, a squat, stubborn physicist who had arrived at Berkeley just before the war and became known equally for his wizardry with electronics and his unimpeachably liberal views—“the only person I know who describes Franklin Roosevelt as a conservative,” Seaborg would write of Ghiorso. He also became known as the most assiduous and creative hunter of new elements in history, credited with the discovery or codiscovery of twelve transuranics.

  Among them was element 103, which Ghiorso and colleagues at Berkeley believed in 1961 that they had found via a process known as “atom-at-a-time” chemistry—literally detecting an average of a single atom in each of hundreds of trials. Continuing a tradition in which they had honored the lab with the christening of element 97 as berkelium in 1949 and element 98 as californium in 1950, they named this one—an element that to this day has not been seen by the human eye—lawrencium.

  Epilogue

  * * *

  The Twilight of Big Science?

  Molly Lawrence, resistant to spectacle as ever, rejected a public funeral for her husband. Instead, at ten o’clock on the third day after Ernest’s death, a few hundred invited friends and colleagues filled the pews of Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, two blocks from the campus and a short stroll from the site of the old Rad Lab.

  Presiding was Clark Kerr, the balding labor economist who had succeeded Bob Sproul as Berkeley’s chancellor soon after the loyalty oath conflict. (Sproul was elevated to the presidency of the rapidly expanding University of California system, a post in which Kerr succeeded him in 1958.)

  Ernest surely would have been gratified to hear Kerr place his life and career within the continuum of humanity’s unending quest for knowledge:

  Manlike creatures have lived on this planet for at least a million years. Throughout those million years they have constantly groped to understand more about and to control better the world about them. A few of them have shot some ray of light into the great unknown darkness of ignorance and illuminated a new era for all future generations. One of the strongest of these beams of light was created by Ernest Lawrence, and men forever after will see farther and understand more because of it. Each of us and each of our children owe to Ernest Lawrence a debt beyond price. For by his expansion of our understanding, by his reduction of our ignorance, he has added a little to the human dignity of each of us and something more to the meaning of life.

  Those who knew Ernest best might have heard echoes in these words of Raymond Fosdick’s testimonial two decades earlier, when he marked the Rockefeller Foundation’s huge $1.15 million grant for the 184-inch cyclotron by calling it “a mighty symbol, a token of man’s hunger for knowledge, an emblem of the undiscourageable search for truth which is the noblest expression of the human spirit.” Those of a more practical cast of mind pondered Ernest’s role as an impresario of research administration. “He will always be remembered as the inventor of the cyclotron,” wrote Luis Alvarez in a memorial for the National Academy of Sciences. “But more importantly, he should be remembered as the inventor of the modern way of doing science.”

  • • •

  Over the decades that followed, Ernest Lawrence’s way of doing science remained the model. The creation of the large-scale interdisciplinary laboratory might have happened without him, for discoveries in high-energy physics created their own demand for ever-larger, more complex, and more costly accelerators. But the development of Lawrence-style labs seemed inevitable only in retrospect. To Ernest’s contemporaries and the first generations of scientists who succeeded him, there were many other paths Big Science might have followed. To them, his invention of the big laboratory “where physicists, engineers and technicians could work together symbiotically to construct ever larger and more complicated particle accelerators” (the words are those of the British physicist John Bertram Adams, who served as CERN’s director from 1975 to 1980) was uniquely American, and uniquely Lawrencian. It was Ernest Lawrence, for instance, who elevated engineers to coequal status in the accelerator lab—physicists in Europe, by contrast, “tended to shun the ‘dirty’ details of engineering,” which surely accounted for Europe’s lagging behind the United States in accelerator technology, though it may also have encouraged a freer, less machine-bound approach to physics on the continent.

  The momentum created by Lawrence’s leadership of the Rad Lab carried physics forward into the 1970s. Steven Weinberg, a future Nobel laureate (in 1979, for his contribution
s to the theory of the electroweak force), arrived at the Rad Lab as a postdoc in 1959, when the Bevatron that Bill Brobeck built for Ernest reigned on the hilltop. The Bevatron, Weinberg recalled, “had been built specifically to accelerate protons to energies high enough to create antiprotons [protons with a negative charge], and to no one’s surprise antiprotons were created.” But so were many other types of particles, which demanded the construction of yet another generation of accelerators, more energetic and of course more expensive, to penetrate the new mysteries. Just as the first glass and wax accelerators begat the 27-inch and 37-inch cyclotrons, and they begat the 60-inch and the 184-inch, the Bevatron pointed the way to accelerators too big to fit in the ravine and too costly to be built by a single university. So the new machines were built by academic consortiums and university-government collaborations like the ones underlying Fermilab outside Chicago, and CERN. The new generation of scientific instruments were beyond monumental in scale; on the Illinois prairie and in the pastoral belt on the border between France and Switzerland they became, in Weinberg’s words, “features of the landscape.”

  • • •

  But within a few short years of Ernest Lawrence’s death, skeptics were questioning the scale and expense of the enterprises his methods had fostered. Among the doubters was physicist Alvin M. Weinberg, who in 1961 had coined the term “Big Science.” Weinberg, as it happens, was then the director of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory—the laboratory founded by Ernest Lawrence and General Groves to enrich uranium using electromagnetic separation. But that gave him a unique vantage point from which to survey the research harvest Ernest Lawrence had sowed.