Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (106 page)

To understand the complaints and the bitterness, one has to understand the role that Edward Teller played in the construction of the world’s first hydrogen bomb, and, in particular, how surprisingly small that role was. The bomb that was exploded in the ‘Mike’ test of November 1952 was built to the Ulam–Teller design, but that, more or less, was Teller’s only contribution to it. To Teller’s great chagrin, in September 1951, when
Los Alamos began in earnest its programme of building a hydrogen bomb, the man appointed by Norris Bradbury to serve as director of that programme was not Teller himself, but Marshall Holloway, a graduate of Cornell, who had been at Los Alamos since 1943. During the Crossroads tests Holloway had been deputy scientific director, and had then been appointed leader of the Los Alamos Weapons Division. Despite filling these senior positions, he was a strangely obscure figure. When he died, a memorial tribute ended with the words: ‘In spite of the remarkable success of the “Mike” operation, Marshall remained almost anonymous except to his colleagues.’

Teller disliked Holloway even before he was chosen to lead Teller’s pet project. In his memoir Teller writes:

Within a week of Holloway’s appointment as director Teller walked out of Los Alamos and left the project altogether. Despite losing his most brilliant physicist, Bradbury was unrepentant. Great scientist though he was, Teller was no manager. He was too impetuous, too fiery and too unpopular. ‘If I’d given him control of the program,’ Bradbury later said, ‘I’d have half my division leaders quit.’

So, when Los Alamos was finally doing what Teller had wanted it to do for years – actually building a hydrogen bomb – Teller himself was back in Chicago, nursing his wounded pride. To begin with, he spent his time on some interesting theoretical work, calculating the blast effects of hydrogen bombs. It had been assumed by Oppenheimer, Conant and others on the GAC that there was no limit to the destructiveness of the hydrogen bomb, one thing that, they argued, ‘makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole’. Teller’s calculations showed this was not true. As they got more powerful, hydrogen bombs did not, in fact, get more destructive. A 100-megaton bomb, for example, would not have ten times the destructive power of a ten-megaton bomb. Indeed, it would hardly be
any
more destructive. Both would blow, in Teller’s words, ‘a chunk of the atmosphere, weighing perhaps a billion tons’, into the air. The bigger bomb, however, would not destroy a bigger ‘chunk’; it would, rather, blow the same-sized chunk into the air at three times the speed.

Interesting though such calculations were, Teller hankered after laboratory work, and, in particular, weapon-laboratory work. He could, of course,
have returned to Los Alamos, where his expertise could have been put to practical use. Bradbury had made it clear that he would be welcome there as a scientist, if not as a director. Another ex-colleague at Los Alamos has said: ‘A lot of us were really teed-off at Edward, because if he would have sat down and applied himself to the job, it would of course have gone faster.’ What Teller did instead was to use the considerable amounts of spare time he now had on his hands to campaign for the establishment of a second weapons laboratory that would act as a rival to Los Alamos.

As Los Alamos was at that time making excellent progress towards completing the programme it had been asked to undertake, the case for a second, competing laboratory was hard to make. Teller’s ostensible reason was that the pace of progress at Los Alamos was too slow and needed competition to speed it up. This might have appeared quite a strong argument in 1950, but, from the autumn of 1951 onwards, the speed and efficiency of progress at Los Alamos undermined it completely.

Among the members of the GAC and the AEC there was little enthusiasm for a second laboratory, the general view being that expressed by Oppenheimer in a letter to Gordon Dean in October 1951: such a thing was ‘neither necessary nor in any real sense feasible’. There were, however, two important dissenters. The first was Thomas Murray, who had been on the AEC since March 1950, when both Lewis Strauss and David Lilienthal resigned from it, and who quickly allied himself with those who believed that progress on the H-bomb programme was proceeding too slowly. Murray had been convinced since the June 1951 meeting in Princeton that a new laboratory, dedicated to developing the Super, was necessary. The other exception was Willard Libby, a close friend of Teller’s, who tried and failed to convince the GAC of the need for a second laboratory in October 1951.

On 13 December 1951, Teller came to Washington to present his case for a second laboratory to the GAC in person. Teller believes that the argument he presented that day was ‘among the very best I have ever made’. He was, he says, ‘constrained, logical and polite’. He was not, however, convincing. All those present, except Libby and Murray (who, though not a member of the GAC, had been invited to attend), remained unpersuaded.

Also in Washington at that time was Ernest Lawrence, who by this stage was firmly in the pro-Teller and anti-Oppenheimer camp, so much so that Robert Serber – having been told by Rabi, ‘You have to choose between Ernest and Oppie’ – had felt compelled to leave Berkeley out of loyalty to Oppenheimer. From the summer of 1951 onwards, Serber was a colleague of Rabi’s at Columbia. After the GAC meeting of December 1951, Murray met Lawrence, who made it clear that he supported Teller’s campaign for a second laboratory and that he would be happy to work
with Teller to establish one. In early February 1952, Teller visited Lawrence at Berkeley and the two of them drove out to Livermore, a site about thirty miles east of Berkeley owned by the University of California, upon which Lawrence had built a large particle accelerator called the MTA. Livermore, Lawrence told Teller, would be the ideal place for the proposed second laboratory.

With such enthusiastic support from one of the most successful scientific promoters of all time, the prospects for the second laboratory were now looking very good, in spite of the fact that the AEC and the GAC continued throughout the winter of 1951–2 to reject the idea. What Teller and Lawrence had shown in 1949, however, was that, with the right kind of political support, it was possible to impose a policy upon the AEC, rather than wait for that policy to be recommended by the GAC. It was a lesson that Teller had learned very well.

What helped Teller enormously was that he was able to exploit the reputation Los Alamos still had as ‘Oppie’s lab’, and the considerable reserves of bad feeling that by then existed towards Oppenheimer himself among US policy-makers. The list of people whom Teller successfully recruited to his campaign for a second laboratory during the first half of 1952 reads like a roll call of all those powerful men whose suspicion and hatred Oppenheimer had aroused during the previous two or three years. Moreover, in exploiting that suspicion and hatred, Teller served to raise them to new levels.

Chief among those powerful haters of Oppenheimer, of course, was Lewis Strauss, whom Teller describes in his memoir as ‘a courteous man with a deep-seated sense of decency’, and who was the first person in Washington to whom Teller went for support. Strauss promised to do whatever he could to help, and indeed went much further. ‘Strauss told me,’ Teller later revealed, ‘he loved me like a brother-in-law.’ Another enthusiastic recruit to Teller’s campaign was David Griggs, a geophysicist at UCLA, who had for years acted as a consultant for the air force and who, in September 1951, was appointed the air force’s chief scientist. ‘I think it would be fair to say,’ Teller later wrote, ‘that without Dave Griggs, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory [the name given to Teller’s second weapons laboratory] would not have come into existence. He introduced me to many influential people and succeeded in developing a lot of friends for the idea.’

David Griggs, along with Lewis Strauss, William Borden and Thomas Finletter, was one of the few people who actually believed that Oppenheimer might be working for the Soviet Union. Teller, despite his personal and professional animosities towards Oppenheimer, believed no such thing, but that such beliefs were held by people of influence was certainly a factor in his favour in setting up his proposed second laboratory, and he
did nothing to challenge them. On the contrary, he went out of his way to encourage them. In April 1952, an FBI report said that sometime earlier Teller had, in response to questions about Philip Morrison, told an FBI agent that Morrison ‘has the reputation among physicists of being extremely far to the left’. Then, though he had not been asked about Oppenheimer, Teller added: ‘Oppenheimer, Robert Serber and Morrison are considered the three most extreme leftists among physicists’, and that ‘most of Oppenheimer’s students at Berkeley had absorbed Oppenheimer’s leftist views’.

In May 1952, Teller gave two interviews to the FBI, one on the 10th and another on the 27th, in which Oppenheimer was the main topic. Teller’s main charge was that Oppenheimer ‘delayed or attempted to delay or hinder the development of the H-bomb’, which he said could have been completed by 1951 if it had not been for Oppenheimer’s opposition. In fact, at the very time this interview was being conducted, the Los Alamos programme – recommended by Oppenheimer and abandoned by Teller – had just succeeded in developing the world’s first H-bomb, ready for testing five months later. Teller also told the FBI agent that, though he himself did not believe Oppenheimer to be disloyal, ‘a lot of people believe Oppenheimer opposed the development of the H-bomb on “direct orders from Moscow”’. Perhaps Teller’s most damaging comment about Oppenheimer, however, was his remark that he ‘would do most anything’ to get Oppenheimer off the GAC. Coming from the man widely regarded as the US’s greatest authority on hydrogen bombs, this was a powerful statement.

As Teller would have known perfectly well, his new friend ‘Dave’ Griggs was one of those people who thought Oppenheimer was acting on orders from Moscow. Griggs was an air-force man through and through, and, like many US air-force men, had been appalled at the views expressed by Oppenheimer in the Project Vista report, which, he seemed to think, could only be explained by assuming that Oppenheimer was deliberately trying to undermine the military strength of the US. At Oppenheimer’s security hearing in 1954, Griggs stated unequivocally: ‘I want to say, and I can’t emphasize too strongly, that Dr Oppenheimer is the only one of my scientific acquaintances about whom I have ever felt there was a serious question as to their loyalty.’ When asked about his support for Teller’s idea of a second weapons laboratory, Griggs said: ‘We felt at the time we are speaking of, namely, late 1951 and early 1952, the effort on this [hydrogen bomb] program was not as great as the circumstances required under the President’s directive.’ Again it is worth emphasising that the dates specified by Griggs, ‘late 1951 and early 1952’, coincide
precisely
with the period when the ‘effort on this program’ was at its very greatest.

One of the most important ways in which Griggs helped Teller to
realise his ambitions of establishing a second laboratory was by introducing him to Thomas Finletter, the Secretary of the air force. Finletter became so convinced of the need for a second laboratory to rival Los Alamos that he stated that, if the AEC was not prepared to establish one, then the air force would. Step by step, then, Teller’s campaign was moving upwards through the ranks of the American political hierarchy. What Teller himself regarded as the ‘crucial interview’ came when, on Finletter’s recommendation, the Secretary of Defense, Robert Lovett, agreed to meet him. After their meeting Lovett wrote to the AEC recommending a second laboratory. By April 1952, it was clear that the AEC would have to give way to the political tide Teller had created, and after two more months of particularly intensive campaigning – both for the laboratory and against Oppenheimer – on 9 June 1952, Gordon Dean finally wrote to the University of California on behalf of the AEC, asking them to approve the establishment of a new weapons laboratory at Livermore. The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory opened on 2 September 1952. Teller had won.

The price of Teller’s victory – a price that he, Lawrence, Strauss, Griggs and Finletter were only too willing, indeed pleased, to pay – was the ruin of Oppenheimer’s reputation in Washington. When Teller began his campaign in the autumn of 1951, Oppenheimer was still a respected and influential figure in Washington; by the time that campaign ended a year later, Oppenheimer was, from a political point of view, more or less a spent force.

During that year the private whispering about Oppenheimer that had been going on for years became louder and more insistent and the public attacks on him became more common and more vicious. It is as if the campaign to establish the Livermore Laboratory and the campaign to oust Oppenheimer from the GAC and blacken his political reputation became merged into a single political movement. Those who supported the second laboratory were, to a man, those most vocal in their disapproval of Oppenheimer. When Thomas Murray visited Berkeley, for example, Lawrence told him at some length how disillusioned he had become with Oppenheimer and how opposed he was to Oppenheimer’s continued membership of the GAC. Two weeks later, Kenneth Pitzer, who had been director of research for the AEC from 1949 until his resignation in 1952, gave a speech to the American Chemical Society that, in the spirit of Teller and Strauss, blamed the GAC for the slow progress of the H-bomb programme. Afterwards he told the FBI that he ‘now is doubtful as to the loyalty of Dr Oppenheimer’.

During May 1952, as the campaign for Livermore reached its climax, so too did the attacks on Oppenheimer. On 9 May, Oppenheimer had lunch with Conant and DuBridge, the three of them gloomily aware of
which way the political winds were blowing. That night Conant recorded in his diary: ‘Some of the “boys” have their axe out for the three of us on the GAC of AEC. Claim we have “dragged our heels” on H bomb. Dirty words about Oppie!’ Ten days later this sense of a concerted attack on Oppenheimer was felt by Gordon Dean, who reported in his diary that at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, he had heard much ‘vitriolic talk’ about Oppenheimer, ‘notably from some of the University of California contingent’.