Fifties (15 page)

At the time of the Wake Island meeting, Truman’s standing in the polls was abysmally low. Thus, in the last weeks before the midterm elections, he hoped to bask a little in the reflected glory of the hero of Inchon. He forbade MacArthur to bring his press entourage; instead, only the White House press corps would attend. MacArthur arrived at Wake first. So great was Truman’s wariness
that he doubted until the very last moment whether MacArthur would come out to the plane to greet him or whether, instead, the President would have to walk over to MacArthur. MacArthur did come over to meet Truman’s plane, though wearing his usual open shirt and rumpled field cap. (“If he’d been a lieutenant in my outfit going around dressed like that,” Truman later noted, “I’d have busted him so fast he wouldn’t have known what happened to him.”)

Their meeting seemed to go reasonably well, although both men remained wary of each other. Truman was concerned about Chinese intentions, but MacArthur was reassuring: The victory in Korea, he said, had already been won, and North Korean resistance would end by Thanksgiving. The victory in Korea, he said, had already been won. Perhaps he could get the Eighth Army out by Christmas. Truman pushed a little harder on the question of Chinese intervention. Again MacArthur belittled the possibility. At best only 50,000 or 60,000 could get across the Yalu, and if they tried to move down to Pyongyang, “there would be the greatest slaughter.” This statement was a remarkable boast for so brilliant a commander: It showed, above all else, that he had spent no time studying the Chinese army or the tactics with which Mao had defeated Chiang.

When he made that promise to Truman he was not thinking of the modern new Chinese army that had unleashed such a powerful force of nationalism in its victory over Chiang. Rather, he was thinking of a weak army from a feudal society.

SIX

T
HE DECISION TO GO
ahead with the Super brought Edward Teller the scientific and political prominence he had both sought and avoided. It was characteristic of Teller’s ambivalence about his scientific role that he wanted credit for the development of the hydrogen bomb but also hated being referred to as the father of it. Teller was four years younger than Oppenheimer. Like Oppenheimer he had always been precocious, and like Oppenheimer he did not hide it very well. As a young boy he was capable of sitting at the family dinner table and announcing: “Please don’t talk to me—I have a problem.” The problem was, of course, a mathematical formula he was working on in his head. When he was six he would put himself to sleep by calculating the number of seconds in a minute (60), an hour (3,600), a day (86,400) ...

His early years in a bourgeois family in Budapest were as sheltered
and privileged as Oppie’s. There were cooks and maids and nannies. Evidently, there was a vast gap between young Edward’s astonishing intellectual accomplishments and his maturity in other areas. When he was eight years old, Edward still insisted that his nanny put his socks on for him. When she complained of this, he accused her of preferring his sister to him—a response that would not surprise those who knew him later as an adult. As a Hungarian Jew, Teller inherited a constant sense of vulnerability. Jews comprised 5 percent of Hungary’s population, but they represented a quarter of the journalists, half the doctors, and half the lawyers. Béla Kun, a disciple of Lenin, created the first version of a Communist Hungary in 1919, when he nationalized all the commerce and the land. Kun was Jewish, as were most of his advisers. When Kun fell, there was a virulent outbreak of anti-Semitism. Within months, a right-wing fascist government was created under Admiral Miklós Horthy. Max and Ilona Teller—he a lawyer, she the daughter of a banker and cotton manufacturer—were better off economically under Horthy than under Kun, but more culturally isolated than ever, and more vulnerable to prejudice.

Edward was eleven when Kun came to power. He was subjected to considerable anti-Semitism at school, even more so because he lacked social skills. Once, when an algebra teacher worked out a formula, Teller dissented and worked out the correct solution. “So you are a genius, Teller? Well, I don’t like geniuses,” the teacher said. Another teacher addressed his students as “Gentlemen, Jews, and Pollack,” because he wasn’t certain whether Pollack was a Jewish name or not. Max Teller encouraged his son to get out of Hungary as soon as he could. Two weeks before his eighteenth birthday, he left for the Institute of Technology at Karlsruhe; at the time, Germany was not just a mecca for the emerging study of the natural sciences but something of an oasis for Jews as well—at least compared to Central Europe.

That refuge did not last long; soon Hitler was on the rise and the Nazi propaganda machinery was attacking Einstein and what it called Jewish physics. In 1933, when Hitler was called on to form a government, Teller was twenty-five. A year later, he came to America. No one doubted his brilliance. Once on a visit to Copenhagen, he was invited along with Otto Frisch, another émigré physicist, to spend the weekend at Niels Bohr’s country home. Two days away from work made Teller restless, Frisch later recalled, and on the train ride back to Copenhagen he asked Frisch to create mental games for him. Frisch pondered the request and told him to imagine a chess
board with eight queens arranged so that none of them could take another. Teller thought for about twenty minutes and then gave Frisch the answer. Then they began playing chess, albeit without a board, calling out their moves. It was soon clear that Frisch, brilliant though he was, was no match for Teller.

In America, Teller quickly became part of a select group of the world’s greatest physicists. He lived and taught in Washington, where many of their professional meetings were held, and the group often ended up at his home. In those days he was gregarious and loved to play music. Mici, his wife, was a gracious, outgoing hostess, and their home was something of a salon for fellow scientists. In the months before the war, these scientists were bonded as men rarely were; not only were they of the same profession, they were mostly exiles in this new land and acutely aware of the darkness falling across Europe—as most Americans were not at the time. They traveled together, shared houses. That closeness made the eventual split between Teller and Oppenheimer unusually painful, tearing apart the center of this tightly bound group. Years later, talking about those divisions and trying to understand how men who had once had so much in common could end up so bitterly divided, Hans Bethe described both Teller and Oppenheimer as different from the others. “We, men like Weisskopf and I and Placzek, were more traditional men of science. If we were not perfect rational men, we were nonetheless men of rationality and that rationality was defined by our work.... But both Oppie and Teller were different. They were both much more emotional men, Teller openly so, Oppie equally emotional, I think, but more skillful in controlling it. And because they were more emotional, they were more vulnerable than the others in the group to the exterior world and the immense pressures that it would bring upon them after the Hiroshima bomb, and as the political importance of being a nuclear physicist became evident.”

Teller, noted Bethe, was many things but he was never a team player. At first he had seemed almost smitten with Oppenheimer, so brilliant, so attractive, so
American
—the one native son among the great names of physics. On the surface there was no one more unlike Oppenheimer than Teller—his dark countenance made fierce by great, bushy eyebrows—gregarious, volatile, spinning like a top through the world of Los Alamos, often disrupting those around him. There was a sense that Teller was someone special, brilliant but harder to contain. Only Enrico Fermi, who was like a father figure to him, could calm him down, or bring him out of his darker moods, by simply saying, “Edward, Edward!” Fermi alone could tease Teller
and get away with it. Stan Ulam later would remember Fermi, saying in his heavy accent, “Edward-a how come-a the Hungarians have not-a invented anything?”

Inevitably, the special relationship between Teller and Oppenheimer could not last. Many date the beginning of the rift to the moment when Oppenheimer made Hans Bethe the head of the theoretical division—Teller had assumed the position would be his. “That I was named to head the division was a severe blow to Teller, who had worked on the bomb project almost from the day of its inception and considered himself, quite rightly, as having seniority over everyone then at Los Alamos, including Oppenheimer,” Bethe later recalled. Even worse, Victor Weisskopf was named the deputy director. Teller thought himself the scientific superior to Weisskopf and said as much to Weisskopf, who replied that it might be true, but that he, Weisskopf, got on better with his colleagues.

During the spring of 1942, Teller had lobbied Bethe heavily for permission to go ahead on the hydrogen bomb. “One might say,” Bethe coolly noted later, “that scientifically Teller is overfertile. New ideas and new combinations of old ideas simply tumble out of his brain.” Bethe pleaded with him to concentrate on the fission bomb, but those requests had little effect. Even during the war Teller remained preoccupied with the fusion bomb. Bethe met with Oppenheimer and his top people over what to do with Teller, and for a time there was even talk of getting rid of him. The compromise solution was to let him work on his fusion bomb in a separate section while everyone else was working on the fission bomb. For a time the subject of Teller’s dissent, his tendency to provoke others, and his sensitivity to slights became something of a joke at Los Alamos. But looking back, Victor Weisskopf believed that in reality, a great political-scientific schism had already begun then. As Teller’s position on the H bomb began to isolate him professionally, he turned away from the world of science and found his allies in the world of politics. Starting in those years, Bethe and Weisskopf saw Teller change; the outgoing, enthusiastic young man was replaced by someone darker, angrier, and ever more reactionary.

Though there were periods in the years immediately after World War Two when Teller seemed optimistic about the future, they became briefer and briefer. Back in Hungary, his family was being punished by the harsh new puppet regime that had taken power in Budapest, and Teller was among the first to develop a realistic vision of the new totalitarianism being enforced across Eastern Europe. He believed that one adversary was merely being
replaced by another, and therefore his politics quickly became far more conservative than his peers’. In the immediate postwar period “he was,” said Enrico Fermi, “terribly anti-Communist, terribly anti-Russian.”

In addition to his vehement political feelings, there was his scientific obsession: the hydrogen bomb. Years later, in a secret meeting with an FBI agent, Teller said that he believed Oppenheimer had opposed the Super out of vanity, his desire not to see his own work outdone. If anything, mutual colleagues thought, the statement was more revealing about Teller than about Oppenheimer. For Teller’s career, his psyche, and the Super were all blended together as one: Those who opposed his bomb opposed him. It was a true obsession, thought his colleague Robert Serber. In the early days at Los Alamos, he would make calculations on the Super, and someone, most likely Hans Bethe, would punch holes in them. The next day Teller would be back pushing them again as if nothing had ever happened. Serber remembered an important conference at Los Alamos in April 1946 to go over the calculations on the Super. Serber and others found Teller’s projections on the Super overly optimistic. To Serber, they seemed half done, guesses really. Serber met with Teller and said the final report was not acceptable; the two went over it and toned it down considerably. A few months later, a librarian called Serber back at Berkeley to tell him that a document had come in with his name on it: It was the report on the conference—the
original
version.

Teller’s obsession with the H bomb began to isolate him from his colleagues, at first professionally and then politically and socially as well. Increasingly, he became friendly with powerful senators and Air Force generals—and, most important, with Lewis Strauss. Suddenly, it seemed he had turned into a tough and skillful political infighter. The political climate had changed to his advantage, and Teller now had the access that Oppenheimer had enjoyed in the past. In the spring of 1950, Teller pushed Oppenheimer yet again to help him recruit for the H bomb project, but Oppenheimer told him, “You know in this matter I am neutral.” Teller was furious. Old slights were remembered, old wounds reopened. He began to believe that Oppenheimer was deliberately blocking him and that Oppenheimer, above everyone else, was his opponent within the scientific community. He was wrong: Other important physicists were far more vocal in their opposition and used their influence more openly with younger colleagues against going ahead. And yet none knew better than Oppenheimer himself
the importance of his own prestige, that if he had gone back to Los Alamos, he would have been a great magnet, “even if I had done nothing but twiddle my thumbs.”

Nevertheless, under the pressure of the growing tension with the Soviets, Los Alamos began gradually to build up again with a new group of scientists. Many senior people, who had at one time opposed the idea of the Super, returned to help advise. Fermi came around—not because of any personal preference for it, but because he believed that once the President had made the political decision, it was not the job of scientists to stand in the way; after the Korean War broke out, Bethe came around, still ambivalent, half hoping he could show it couldn’t be done. But the road to the Super was not easy. The mathematical equations were not yet right, nor was Teller a particularly gifted group leader. There was always a sense among his colleagues that Teller, no matter how brilliant, raced ahead of his own evidence. George Placzek, who never made a statement unless he was entirely certain he could prove it, liked to tease Teller when he would blurt out an idea: “Well yes, Edward, you may be right, and it may be important, but you have not proved it yet.” Likewise, Felix Block would say to him, “Edward! You are jumping ahead of yourself again. You must wait and be sure.” He did not like it when the chief mathematician, Ulam, dissented at meetings. Ulam, who in no way disagreed with most of Teller’s political views, found Teller unusually difficult, obstinate, single-minded, overly ambitious, and comfortable only with acolytes.