The First War of Physics (60 page)

Hall’s time at Los Alamos was also over. Towards the end of May he was told that he had lost his security clearance. A review of his security file had probably concluded unfavourably, and he was obliged to leave the Hill a few days later. There appeared to be insufficient evidence to bring a case, however, and Hall was given an honourable discharge on 24 June.

Greenglass had turned down a request to continue working at Los Alamos and had been honourably discharged four months earlier, on 29 February. He moved with his wife Ruth to Manhattan and set up a business with his brother-in-law.

Able and Baker

The purpose of the Crossroads test series was to examine the effects of atomic weapons on a ‘ghost’ fleet of 71 ships that had been assembled and anchored in the Bikini Atoll lagoon. Feeling somewhat excluded up to this point, the US Navy wanted to get in on the atomic act. At issue was whether or not the Navy could withstand the onslaught of atomic weapons, and what this might mean for the future allocation of resources between the Navy and the Army Air Force in post-war American defence budgets.

The test fleet included decommissioned American vessels, such as the aircraft carrier USS
Saratoga
and the battleships USS
Nevada, Pennsylvania, Arkansas
and New
York.
It also included captured vessels, such as the German cruiser
Prinz Eugen
and the Japanese battleship
Nagato.
Live animals and plants were placed on some ships to test the effects of radiation. The ships held various quantities of fuel and ammunition, to simulate battle conditions.

The first test, codenamed Able, was to be an air drop on the battleship USS
Nevada
, a veteran of Pearl Harbor, painted bright orange to make it easier to identify from the air. There were another 23 vessels anchored within 1,000 yards of the
Nevada.
More distant ships held a variety of instruments to record radiation levels and the effects of the blast.

The tests were a major media event, with over 130 newspaper, magazine and radio correspondents from America, Australia, Britain, Canada, France and China invited to observe from the USS
Appalachian.
Two Soviet observers were also invited.

The Able test took place shortly after 9:00am local time on 1 July 1946. The bomb yield was 23,000 tons of TNT equivalent, but the test was little short of a disaster. The bomb fell a quarter of a mile away from the target. The USS
Gilliam
was sunk instead, and four other vessels were either sunk or severely damaged. On seeing that the target battleship was still afloat, General Joseph ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell cursed: ‘The damned Air Corps has missed the target again.’

If the intention had been to demonstrate the awesome destructiveness of atomic weapons, then the test failed here as well. The observer ship was stationed too far away. On seeing the distant spectacle, one of the Soviet observers, Simon Alexandrov, remarked somewhat contemptuously that it was: ‘Not so much.’ As the
Economist
reported: ‘Dressed in all the trappings of an exaggerated and sometimes frivolous publicity, the first Bikini atom bomb experiment has left rather the impression of a fireworks display which slightly misfired.’

But these would be experiments with long-term legacy effects. American naval personnel entered Bikini Atoll lagoon just seven hours after the explosion. They swam in the lagoon and boarded the target ships that had remained afloat.
⁶

A second test, codenamed Baker, was held a little after 9:30 on the evening of 24 July, local time. This test was more successful. The bomb was exploded about 90 feet beneath the surface of the sea with a yield of 23,000 tons of TNT equivalent, driving a spectacular column of radioactive water and steam high into the air and showering the entire area – and the target ships – with radiation. However, by the time of this second test, interest had waned (or had been deflated by the Able test), and there were fewer to observe and report the results.

The Crossroads tests were not intended to be seen as part of American atomic diplomacy. This was not meant to be a thinly-veiled statement of American atomic supremacy and a further warning to the Soviet Union. But the timing of the tests, hard on the heels of Baruch’s overtures to the UN Atomic Energy Commission, was unfortunate. The Truman administration received thousands of letters, some of which pleaded for restraint. One woman from Long Island wrote: ‘The United States can not hope to win the confidence of the people of all countries when our endeavours to promote peace are cemented by a display of supreme might.’ Oppenheimer refused to observe the tests and questioned their appropriateness ‘at a time when our plans for effectively eliminating [atomic weapons] from national armaments are in their earliest beginnings’. An editorial in
Pravda
dismissed the tests as ‘common blackmail’, which ‘fundamentally undermined the belief in the seriousness of American talk about atomic disarmament’.

A third test was called off, on Groves’ suggestion. Relations with the Soviet Union were now at an all-time low. Los Alamos needed to concentrate its efforts on building the American stockpile of atomic weapons.

Born secret

By the time the McMahon Bill had passed through both Houses of Congress, it had undergone a dramatic transformation. Gone was the call for a liberal dissemination of technical information. In its place, a section entitled ‘Control of Information’ introduced the term ‘restricted data’:

The term ‘restricted data’ as used in this section means all data concerning the manufacture or utilisation of atomic weapons, the production of fissionable material, or the use of fissionable material in the production of power, but shall not include any data which the [US Atomic Energy]
Commission from time to time determines may be published without adversely affecting the common defence and security.

No doubt mindful of the fallout from the Gouzenko affair and Nunn May’s espionage activities, in cases where the offence was clearly intended to be damaging to US interests, the punishment for communicating restricted data was established to be death or life imprisonment. Where no such intent could be proved, the lesser punishment was to be a fine of not more than $20,000 or imprisonment for no more than twenty years, or both.

In America this was (and remains today) an unprecedented restriction of free speech:

The phrase ‘all data’ included every suggestion, speculation, scenario, or rumor – past, present, or future, regardless of its source, or even of its accuracy – unless it was declassified. All such data were born secret and belonged to the government. If you related a dream about nuclear weapons, you were breaking the law.

Truman signed the Atomic Energy Act on 1 August 1946. It came into force on 1 January 1947. It ended all prospects for ‘full and effective’ Anglo-American co-operation.

In Britain, another secret cabinet committee, again known only by its ‘Gen’ number – Gen 163 – took the decision to produce atomic weapons independently of America. The British sentiment behind this decision was encapsulated by a comment made by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin:

We’ve
got
to have this. I don’t mind for myself, but I don’t want any other Foreign Secretary of this country to be talked at, or to, by the Secretary of State in the United States as I just have in my discussions with Mr Byrnes. We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.

Britain now wanted its own deterrent.

A complicated cock and bull story

The Atomic Energy Act called for the establishment of a civilian US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), a purely national organisation tasked with the management of domestic atomic energy matters. Responsibility for the Manhattan Project laboratories and factories passed to the AEC from the Manhattan Engineer District in January 1947.

Truman appointed Lilienthal as chairman of the AEC. The Atomic Energy Act acknowledged the need for an advisory committee on scientific and technical matters, called the General Advisory Committee (GAC). Although Truman had grown wary of Oppenheimer, the ‘cry baby’ scientist, it was inevitable that the former scientific director of Los Alamos would be called to serve on the GAC. Oppenheimer was duly appointed, along with Rabi, Seaborg, Fermi, Conant and others. Oppenheimer, delayed by bad weather, arrived late for the GAC’s first formal meeting in January 1947, to discover that in his absence he had been elected chairman.

After the euphoria of the Acheson–Lilienthal report and the debacle of the Baruch plan, Oppenheimer had become somewhat withdrawn. He had left Los Alamos to return to teaching at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. But teaching had lost its appeal. His mind was barely on the task, and his telephone wouldn’t stop ringing as politician after politician sought his views on atomic energy. He seemed to be forever on a plane, bound for Washington, Los Angeles or San Francisco.

One of the recently appointed Atomic Energy Commissioners was Lewis Strauss, a self-made millionaire businessman who had worked in the navy during the war. Strauss was also a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Towards the end of 1946 Strauss offered Oppenheimer the position of director of the institute. Oppenheimer thought long and hard about it, and eventually agreed to move from the West Coast. At least at Princeton he would be nearer to Washington.

The intransigence of the Soviet Union, which Oppenheimer had seen at first hand, convinced him that no agreement on the international control of atomic energy was likely in the near future. He told Hans Bethe that he had ‘given up all hope that the Russians would agree to a plan’. He saw the
Soviet counter-proposals to ban the atomic bomb as a device designed to ‘deprive us immediately of the one weapon which would stop the Russians from going into Western Europe’.

Though hardly the stance of a ‘hawk’, Oppenheimer’s transformation from ‘leftwandering’ idealist to Cold War realist was complete.

But Oppenheimer was to find it impossible to put his past indiscretions behind him. The FBI had continued to poke around in the murky depths of the ‘Chevalier incident’. Because of the allegations contained in his FBI file, Chevalier himself had found it impossible to obtain the necessary clearance for war-related work and had stayed on in New York as a freelance translator and writer. He returned to teaching in Berkeley in the spring of 1945 before being asked to provide translation services at the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. On returning to Berkeley once more in May 1946 he found that he had been denied tenure.

In June, FBI agents had simultaneously, but separately, interviewed Chevalier and Eltenton, the agents cross-checking their stories by phone. At one stage, Chevalier’s interviewer pulled a file towards him and said: ‘I have here three affidavits from three scientists on the atomic bomb project. Each of them testifies that you approached him on three separate occasions for the purpose of obtaining secret information on the atomic bomb on behalf of Russian agents.’ Chevalier was nonplussed. He thought this was all a joke at first, then realised he had no alternative but to relate the conversations he had had with Eltenton and Oppenheimer. The FBI agents didn’t seem all that interested in his story.

Chevalier had an opportunity to compare notes with Eltenton a few months later, and realised that they had both been interviewed by the FBI at the same time; Chevalier in San Francisco and Eltenton across the bay in Oakland. Then the opportunity came to raise the matter directly with Oppenheimer during a cocktail party at the Oppenheimers’ home on Eagle Hill. Oppenheimer suggested they talk outside.

‘I had to report that conversation, you know’, Oppenheimer said.

‘Yes,’ Chevalier said, ‘but what about those alleged approaches to three scientists, and the supposed repeated attempts to get secret information?’

Oppenheimer gave no reply. Chevalier saw that his friend was extremely nervous and tense. When Kitty called a second time for Oppenheimer to attend to their guests, he lost his temper and ‘let loose with a flood of foul language, called Kitty vile names and told her to mind her goddamn business’.

Oppenheimer himself was interviewed by the FBI on 5 September 1946, a little over three years since his ill-fated (and recorded) conversation with Pash and Johnson. He now conceded that in attempting to protect Chevalier he had fabricated a ‘complicated cock and bull story’ about Eltenton’s approach to three scientists. If this was indeed the truth, and it is difficult to understand Oppenheimer’s motives otherwise, then he might have felt that confessing the lie would be the end of the matter.

The Atomic Energy Act obliged the FBI to review the security clearances of all involved and removed any obstacles to an open and thorough investigation of Oppenheimer’s past activities. The level of surveillance was increased and Oppenheimer’s colleagues were questioned about his loyalty. Lawrence vouched for him once again, declaring that Oppenheimer ‘had a rash and is now immune’, even though the personal distance between the two physicists was growing.

Hoover sent a summary of Oppenheimer’s weighty FBI file to the AEC in early March 1947. Although Strauss was visibly shaken by what he read, he told Oppenheimer shortly afterwards that he saw nothing in it that would stand in the way of his appointment as director of the Institute for Advanced Study. The Oppenheimers arrived in Princeton in July.

Oppenheimer was given a ‘Q’ clearance for his work with the GAC the following month.

Modus vivendi

The Atomic Energy Act had ended the prospect for a ‘full and effective’ collaboration between British and American nuclear scientists but the commitment to share raw materials, managed by the Combined Development Trust, remained. The Groves–Anderson memorandum had not changed the basic premise of the wartime agreements. This meant that Britain
could, in principle, lay claim to half the production of uranium ore from the Belgian Congo. Britain had no immediate use for the uranium ore, but having taken the decision that Britain should become an independent atomic power, Attlee had decided to stockpile the ore for future use in Britain’s own bomb project. He duly staked his country’s claim.