The Age of Radiance (42 page)

On September 28, 1945, the Scientific Advisory Panel of Stimson’s Interim Committee—Oppenheimer, Compton, Lawrence, and Fermi—recommended “that no such effort [comparable to the Manhattan Project] should be invested in [the fusion] problem at the present time, but that the existence of the possibility should not be forgotten, and that interest in the fundamental questions involved should be maintained.” Oppie reported at the meeting,
“General Groves told me very briefly . . . that, with things as they were, the work at Los Alamos ought to continue, but this did not apply to the Super,” while Conant, who had been a staunch supporter of weapons development before Hiroshima, said that they had built one Frankenstein and didn’t need another, that continuing thermonuclear R&D would be “over my dead body.” Compton explained their fusion decision to Vice President Henry Wallace:
“We should prefer defeat in war to victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its determined use.”

Fermi knew that Teller had a very different opinion and asked him to write to the committee with his thoughts; Teller responded on October 31, proving himself a pioneer in the Washington tradition of threat inflation: “The time needed [for another country to produce thermonuclear weapons] may not be much longer than the time needed by them to produce an atomic bomb. . . . There is among my scientific colleagues some hesitancy as to the advisability of this development on the grounds that it might make the international problems even more difficult than they are now. My opinion is that this is a fallacy. If the development is possible, it is out of our powers to prevent it.” This brief did not overturn the committee’s overwhelmingly negative
view. At around this time, Oppenheimer wrote Ernest Lawrence that nuclear weapons should be outlawed and shunned, “just like poison gases after the last war,” but Lawrence, along with Luis Alvarez, still supported fusion research wholeheartedly, and this was the moment that would split the alumni of Los Alamos into two camps: arms race or arms control.

With support coming from nowhere, Teller gave up and joined Fermi in Chicago, where he was reunited with many old friends and colleagues, coauthored thirteen scientific articles, and appeared regularly in the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
. His life was so good that his friend and colleague Gene Wigner insisted, “The years after Los Alamos and until the renewal of his preoccupation with national security were perhaps Teller’s most fruitful years scientifically.” Leo Szilard very much also wanted to return to Chicago, but Enrico let colleagues know that there would be no room for him.

In time, Szilard agreed with Fermi’s take that nuclear science had matured and looked for another field with the potential for world-changing breakthroughs. By 1947, he was studying molecular biology at Cold Spring Harbor. His most significant work probed the relationship of brain chemistry, electricity, and memory, but as before in Berlin and then Chicago, he was more useful serving as a sounding board and a spark of inspiration for others than as a working lab scientist. About creator’s remorse, he joked that having to watch MGM’s 1947
The Beginning or the End
—with John Gallaudet as Szilard, Joseph Calleia as Fermi, Hume Cronyn as Oppenheimer, and Leslie Groves as primary consultant—was more than enough atonement for the physicists who’d crafted the Bomb.

In October 1946, Congress was considering a bill that would keep atomic arms development under the Pentagon’s command in an agency headed by Leslie Groves. After learning this, Leo Szilard and Edward Condon arranged for scientists at Chicago and Oak Ridge to send hundreds of telegrams to their congressmen and went to Washington to wage legislative war. Everyone in DC would meet with Ed and Leo since they were “Los Alamos scientists”—and, assuming their phone calls were being monitored, they ended each conversation with “And God bless General Groves
!” Staggeringly, they won. On January 1, 1947, Truman signed a bill that transferred the nation’s atomic powers from the War Department to a new civilian agency, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), headed by David Lilienthal, who’d previously overseen the Tennessee Valley Authority; Oppenheimer was named chairman of the agency’s General Advisory Committee (GAC), and began his new life as a man-about-Washington, welcomed into the highest echelons of political power.

Bush, Conant, Oppenheimer, and Lilienthal then met constantly to forge an international policy that would prevent a global arms race, and some of their ideas were included in an American presentation by Bernard Baruch (who called it “the last, best hope of earth”) to the just-created United Nations Atomic Energy Commission on June 14, 1946. Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes, however, was so outraged by one of their ideas—a foreign body (a UN committee) controlling an avenue of American defense—that he included subclauses to maintain the American nuclear monopoly for years to come, something that the Soviets could never accept. Without Byrnes’s machinations, the arms race could have been stopped before it had even begun.

Since America was the only nation with nuclear weapons, and since she expected to maintain this status indefinitely because her scientists knew “atomic secrets,” it was difficult for most Americans to even understand the point of arms control. The United States was the richest country in the world and, being the only one with the Bomb, the most powerful, and to many, it seemed that this would be the way things would remain for decades to come. Oppenheimer, fearful of the threat of a global outbreak of nuclear arms, and Teller, worrying about a nefarious Uncle Joe Stalin wielding incomprehensible hydrogen weapons, seemed obscure or old-fashioned or even neurotic.

Instead, in the wakes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the revelation of their new status as a global superpower that had won World War II, the American public adopted nuclear weapons with the same popular enthusiasm that the world had greeted radium three decades before and X-rays at the start of the epoch. Fat Man and Little Boy became popular salt and pepper shakers; fluoroscopes were used to reveal a proper shoe size; uranium clinics offered cures for bursitis; and budding preteen chemists could experiment in the basement with their own Atomic Energy Lab while reading
Atomic Bunny
comics. Mailing in Kix cereal box tops and fifteen cents would get you 1947’s Lone Ranger Atomic Bomb Ring, a plastic spinthariscope in the shape of an atom bomb that held polonium sparking a screen—“genuine atoms split to smithereens!” The AEC organized a popular fair spread over New York’s Central Park, “Man and the Atom,” sponsored by such nuclear contractors as Westinghouse, which gave youngsters a comic book,
Dagwood Splits the Atom
, whose hero had been chosen by Leslie Groves himself. Eventually one AEC chief, Lewis Strauss, would predict that in the next decade
“it is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter; will know of great famines in the world
only as a matter of history; will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds; and will experience a life span far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age. This is the forecast of an age of peace.”

By the summer of 1948, Edward Teller’s Chicago idyll was upended by news of the Soviet invasions of Hungary, his birthplace, and Czechoslovakia, with its uranium mother lode at St. Joachimsthal. Communists were victorious in China, and soon enough, they would successfully blockade Berlin. It appeared to many that America’s foes were taking over the world, that the United States was in real danger.
“Russia was traditionally the enemy,” John von Neumann said of his countrymen. “I think you will find, generally speaking, among Hungarians an emotional fear and dislike of Russia.” Had Edward Teller been certain that a hydrogen bomb was impossible, that nobody could make it, he would have set his sights elsewhere. But like Leo Szilard’s thinking of Hitler, Ed was tormented by what might happen if the Americans failed to create such a mighty weapon, and the totalitarians succeeded.

Then came the call from the mesa: Los Alamos wanted Teller back. Director Norris Bradbury
“was rather diffident in his approach to the scientists who had left,” Stan Ulam said, explaining the ironic origins of what would turn out to be an epic clash of Hungarian physicist and Polish mathematician. “He felt that they should recognize by themselves how important for the country and the world it was for them to come back. As a result, although he wanted to, he did not like to ask people like . . . Teller to visit. It was actually left to me, with his consent, to write such invitations. . . . Thus, in a way I was instrumental in bringing Teller back to Los Alamos.” Teller asked Oppenheimer what he thought; Oppie encouraged him to return; and in August 1948, Teller replied to Bradbury, “[I am] giving most serious consideration to this possibility. . . . The main reason that attracts me is the great importance of the work on the atomic bomb. I fully realize the menacing international situation and I believe that the United States must develop its military strength to the utmost if we are not to succumb to the danger of communism.”

In the wake of his return to New Mexico, Ed Teller would so turn against Stan Ulam that Ulam would give him a photograph and inscribe it
To My Enemy
, while a student of Ed’s, Freeman Dyson, would conclude that Teller was “a good example of the saying that no man is so dangerous as an idealist.”

A
t a Council of Foreign Ministers meeting in London in September of 1945, Secretary of State Jimmy Byrnes decided to try using America’s atomic monopoly to cow Soviet representative Vyacheslav Molotov: “You don’t know Southerners. We carry our artillery in our pocket. If you don’t cut out all this stalling and let us get down to work, I’m going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it.” Molotov seemed unconcerned. Later that night, he in turn was joshing with Britain’s delegate and suddenly blurted out, “You know, we have the atomic bomb.” No one knew what to think; Byrnes assumed Molotov was bluffing. In fact he was, but only by degree.

The previous July 24, at Potsdam, Truman remembered that he
“casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force. The Russian premier showed no special interest. All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese.’ ”
“I was sure,” Churchill said, “that [Stalin] had no idea of the significance of what he was being told . . . his face remained gay and genial and the talk between these two potentates soon came to an end. As we were waiting for our cars, I found myself near Truman. ‘How did it go?’ I asked. ‘He never asked a question,’ he replied.” Jimmy Byrnes later explained that this was a deliberate feint, that the American president didn’t want the Soviet premier to rush in against Japan when that war had already been won to claim spoils, as he was doing so furiously across Eastern Europe. But Stalin’s apparent indifference at this momentous news had a good explanation—he knew about America’s nuclear weapons program long before Truman did, since the Georgian had the world’s best espionage agency, and the American didn’t have a high enough security clearance before inheriting the Oval Office.

The day after
Enola Gay
struck Hiroshima, a Soviet nuclear physicist remembered, “Stalin summoned [atomic bomb chief Igor] Kurchatov and accused him of not demanding enough for maximum acceleration of the work. Kurchatov answered, ‘So much is destroyed, so many people perished. The country is on starvation rations and everything is in shortage.’ ” He barely knew the full horror: Over 20 million Russians had died in World War II, and another 10 million had been executed by Beria’s NKVD. Twenty-five million more were homeless; one hundred thousand farms, seventy-two thousand villages, and thirty-one thousand factories had been demolished; the Russian people were indeed starving. Yet, “Stalin said irritably
to his Oppenheimer, ‘If the baby doesn’t cry, the mother doesn’t know what he needs. Ask for anything you need. There will be no refusals.’ ”

During 1946, Igor Kurchatov created—with help from his NKVD spy network and Stalin’s urgent priority of no refusals—a Soviet copy of Fermi’s Chicago pumpkin patch at Arzamas-16, the Russian Los Alamos. Following Fermi’s technique, Kurchatov built a series of ever-larger subcritical piles, and just as Anderson and Zinn had seen on the evening of their creation, it became clear to the Soviets on December 24, 1946, that adding one more layer would trigger fission.

Physicists B. G. Dubovsky and I. S. Panasyuk were there for Christmas, and their memories are almost a perfect echo of Chicago Pile-1’s birth, with shutdown rods slowly removed from the pile, but in this case, the winching was done by Kurchatov himself: “We were all very anxious, of course. . . . Everyone was silent. The only sounds were the clicks of neutron counts from the loudspeakers and Kurchatov’s brisk orders. As the seconds passed, the graph showed an almost linear growth of reactor power. For the first time the sound turned into a roar. The indicator lamps no longer blinked but burned with a reddish-yellow light. . . . The tension became extreme when the second boron trifluoride counter, which was located within the underground control room, began producing more frequent clicks than its background of two or three per minute—an increase which meant that neutrons from the reactor had penetrated the thick layers of earth and cement and reached the room.”