Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (103 page)

As Strauss knew very well, the Secretaries of Defense and State were at one with him on this question.

More decisive than Strauss’s letter was a memo sent to Secretary Johnson by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 13 January 1950, arguing that the
Super ‘would improve our defense in the broadest sense, as a potential offensive weapon, a possible deterrent to war, a potential retaliatory weapon, as well as a defensive weapon against enemy forces’. The emphasis of the scientists in their GAC reports on the fearsome power of the Super may have backfired, since it allowed the Joint Chiefs to point out that it would be preferable ‘that such a possibility be at the will and control of the United States rather than of an enemy’.

Without showing it first to the special committee, Johnson forwarded this memo to the President, who remarked that it ‘made a lot of sense’. On 31 January 1950, the special committee met the President to give its advice to go ahead with the Super, but by then Truman had already decided to do just that. When Lilienthal expressed his own opposition to the committee’s recommendation, Truman cut him short. ‘What the Hell are we waiting for?’ he said. ‘Let’s get on with it.’ That day, Truman announced to the world that he had directed the AEC ‘to continue its work on all forms of atomic weapons, including the so-called hydrogen or super-bomb’.

Rabi was furious, not so much that the decision had been taken against GAC advice, or even that it had been taken without any attempt to negotiate with the Soviet Union, as he and Fermi had recommended. What angered him, he later said, was that, in making this announcement, Truman had ‘alerted the world that we were going to make a hydrogen bomb at a time when we didn’t even know how to make one’. This, Rabi thought, was one of the worst things the President could have done: ‘I never forgave Truman.’

As it happened, that day was Lewis Strauss’s birthday, and to mark what was now, for him, a double celebration, he held a party to which all GAC members were invited. At the party Strauss walked over to Oppenheimer to introduce his son and his son’s new wife. To Strauss’s mortification, Oppenheimer did not even bother to turn around; he simply extended a hand over his shoulder. Later, at the same party, Oppenheimer was spotted by a
New York Times
reporter, standing alone. ‘You don’t look jubilant,’ the reporter said, to which, after a long pause, Oppenheimer replied: ‘This is the plague of Thebes.’ Abraham Pais has taken this characteristically gnomic remark to refer to a legion of soldiers from Thebes, the ‘10,000 knights’, who, after refusing to fight the Christians they had been ordered by the emperor to attack, were slaughtered. It seems much more likely, however (as the philosopher and science historian Robert Crease points out in a footnote to Pais’s account), that Oppenheimer was referring to the plague that, in
Oedipus Rex
, is sent by the gods to punish Thebes for the crime of harbouring the killer of Laius. The idea, surely, is that the President’s order to develop the hydrogen bomb was a punishment inflicted upon the scientists who
developed the atomic bomb, for the ‘sin’ of allowing themselves to be used as weaponeers.

From any point of view, the US programme to develop the hydrogen bomb had got off to a very bad start. Of the fourteen people whose job it now was to pursue that programme – the five AEC commissioners and the nine members of the GAC – eleven of them had voted against it. Of the other three, one, Seaborg, had abstained, and only one, Strauss, had any real enthusiasm for the project. At the same time the people who had lobbied hard for the programme had no direct responsibility for or control over its implementation. None of the scientists strongly in favour of it – Lawrence, Teller and Alvarez – were members of either the AEC or the GAC. Moreover, thanks to the McMahon Act, the control of atomic energy was in civilian hands, and consequently none of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whose views had been so influential in establishing the programme, could play the role that General Groves had played in seeing the Manhattan Project through to a successful conclusion.

The result was a perpetual struggle between those who actually wanted to see a hydrogen bomb produced and those whose job it was to produce it. Perhaps what should have happened is the mass resignation of all those members of the AEC and GAC who had voted against the programme, and their replacement with people eager to push the project through. Lilienthal had already announced his imminent retirement, letting it be known that he would leave when the issue of the Super had finally been resolved (he left in April 1950). Many of the others, including Oppenheimer and Rabi, were tempted to resign, but were talked out of it by Lilienthal. The AEC and GAC, after all, had responsibility for all aspects of atomic energy, not just weapons, and their responsibility for nuclear weapons was not confined to, or even concentrated on, the development of the hydrogen bomb. Overseeing the design, production and stockpiling of atomic bombs was at this time as important as, if not more important than, implementing the President’s demand for a hydrogen-bomb programme. One reason for staying, therefore, was to ensure that the hydrogen programme did not dominate all other aspects of atomic-energy development.

Another reason was to ensure that there remained people in influential positions who were able and willing to think about the hydrogen bomb in something other than what Oppenheimer later dismissively referred to as ‘prudential and game-theoretical terms’. Bethe had changed his mind about joining Teller’s programme after Weisskopf had spelled out to him ‘what it would mean to destroy a whole city like New York with one bomb’, and that imaginative realisation of the scale of the horror that such a powerful bomb might cause is present throughout the GAC reports. Most of the scientists who wrote those reports had worked on the
Manhattan Project and knew what it felt like to have created a weapon capable of killing tens of thousands of people in an instant. The moral responsibility for creating a weapon a hundred, even a thousand, times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb was something they wanted about as much as the people of Thebes wanted the plague. This, not disloyalty, was surely the explanation for some of the hyperbole (the talk, for example, of genocide) in those reports, and for their apparent acceptance of the shoddy thinking criticised by, among others, Alvarez and Acheson. The idea that the Soviet Union might follow the moral example of the United States if it chose not to develop the hydrogen bomb was not subversion, but rather wishful thinking.

That the other side in this struggle – Strauss, Borden, Teller, McMahon, and so on – so often saw subversion where there was, in fact, only wishful thinking, or even sometimes well-reasoned and justified moral scruples, is also understandable, for the decision to go ahead with the hydrogen bomb coincided with a series of shocking revelations about the extent of subversion in the Manhattan Project. On the basis of the Venona transcripts, the US authorities had identified Fuchs as a spy back in September 1949. The same transcripts told them that there had been at least one other spy working at Los Alamos with access to highly classified documents relating to the atomic bomb. Within a few months the trail that began with Fuchs led first to Harry Gold, who was arrested in March 1950, and then, in successive months beginning in June, to David Greenglass, Julius Rosenberg and Ethel Rosenberg.

On 9 February 1950, just a few days after Fuchs’s confession, Senator Joseph McCarthy launched the era – and the paranoia – named after him, when, in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, he claimed to have ‘here in my hand’ a list of 205 people ‘that were made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department’. In subsequent speeches by McCarthy the number of people on his list would vary, sometimes to as low as fifty-seven, but the basic idea that the US establishment had been penetrated by a ‘fifth column’ intent on destroying it would be a pervasive force in American politics for years to come.

The President was not told about Fuchs until after he had confessed on 24 January, but J. Edgar Hoover had told Strauss both about Fuchs and about the other, as-yet-unidentified spy, in October. Strauss did not inform either his fellow commissioners on the AEC or the members of the GAC about this until after Fuchs’s confession. In the meantime he gave much thought to the identity of the other spy, his top suspect being Oppenheimer. To Hoover, Strauss remarked that the furore over Fuchs ‘will make a good many men who are in the same profession as Fuchs very careful of what they say publicly’.

Actually, those in the same profession as Fuchs (assuming that Strauss meant physics rather than espionage) were among the least troubled by the revelation that Fuchs had given information about the atomic bomb to the Soviets, since, as they had been saying for years, they never took seriously the idea that the science and technology behind the bomb could possibly be kept secret. As for the fact that Fuchs had had access at every stage to Teller’s work on the hydrogen bomb, this worried Oppenheimer still less. In fact, he told the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy on 27 February 1950, it would be a good thing if Fuchs had passed on to the Soviets Teller’s H-bomb design, since that would set them back a few years, as Teller’s bomb stood no chance of working.

In March 1950 the editor of the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
, Eugene Rabinowitch, decided to devote almost the entire issue to the H-bomb. The special issue begins with a report of President Truman’s announcement of the accelerated programme to build the H-bomb, and an account of how the project to build such a bomb, which had supposedly been a state secret, first became public. The first public acknowledgement that such a programme existed was made by the senator for Colorado, Edwin Johnson (a member of the Joint Committee), in a television debate broadcast on 1 November 1949. The debate was on the subject ‘Is there too much secrecy in our atomic program?’ and Johnson was there to argue the case that there was not
enough
secrecy. In the course of making his argument, however, Johnson revealed several state secrets. ‘Our scientists,’ he said:

This ‘naïve and monumental indiscretion’, Rabinowitch tells his readers, has allowed him to do what he has wanted to do for years, which is to use his magazine to discuss the ‘grave moral implications’ that have to be considered when thinking about the decision to develop the hydrogen bomb.

Inside the issue is an impassioned statement, signed by twelve prominent physicists, including Hans Bethe, Sam Allison, Ken Bainbridge, Charles Lauritsen and Victor Weisskopf, urging the US government to ‘make a solemn declaration that we shall never use this bomb first’. The use of this bomb, the physicists say, ‘would be a betrayal of all standards
of morality’. There can only be one justification for developing this bomb, they conclude, ‘and that is to prevent its use’.

A short statement by Oppenheimer is printed in the magazine, taken from his contribution to a television debate hosted by Eleanor Roosevelt broadcast on 12 February 1950, in which he says:

Also taking part in the television programme was Hans Bethe, who, because he was not a member of either the GAC or the AEC, was free to speak a little more candidly than Oppenheimer and used that freedom to echo the plea that he was to sign in the
Bulletin
. ‘Hydrogen bombs,’ he said in the programme, ‘can only mean a wholesale destruction of civilian populations’, and so it was important that the US pledged that it would never be the first to use such bombs. Oppenheimer was not in a position to make such a statement or to sign such a plea, but, Bethe wrote to Weisskopf after the television programme: ‘I had a long talk with Oppie, who agreed very much with what we had done and were doing. He emphasised the necessity of keeping the issue alive and I very much agree with him.’

In the issue of the
Bulletin
devoted to the hydrogen bomb, space was given to Teller for a rallying cry to physicists to get ‘Back to the Laboratories!’ The tone and the message of Teller’s piece were the very opposite of those Oppenheimer had tried to convey in his
Life
profile of October 1949, and it is probably no coincidence that, when choosing a topic in theoretical physics to stand for the self-indulgence of not getting involved in building the H-bomb, Teller chose the area most associated with Oppenheimer. ‘Our scientific community,’ Teller writes, ‘has been out on a honeymoon with mesons. The holiday is over. Hydrogen bombs will not produce themselves.’ The rest of the special issue of the magazine, filled as it is with scientists reflecting on the horror of the H-bomb, goes some way towards explaining why this rallying cry fell on deaf ears.

One of the few first-rate physicists to respond to Teller’s call was John Wheeler. ‘In my mind,’ Wheeler says in his autobiography, ‘I was answering a call to national service.’ He considered it urgent that the US react to the Soviet bomb with ‘a priority program to develop a thermonuclear weapon before the Soviets did’. Given this attitude, it ‘was a
great disappointment to me that so few of my colleagues shared my view that a national scientific mobilization was called for’. Oppenheimer, he had heard, had remarked: ‘Let Teller and Wheeler go ahead. Let them fall on their faces.’ Oppenheimer’s own attitude at this time Wheeler sums up as: