Fifties (7 page)

The political pressure building around Truman to go ahead with the Super was relentless. How could his administration, already accused of being soft on Communism, fail to pursue what seemed to be the supreme weapon—especially one that might eventually end up in the hands of the Soviets. Failure to do so, Acheson noted, “would push the Administration into a political buzzsaw.” In addition, a powerful new force was pushing for the Super in the scientific community—Edward Teller. As a refugee, much of whose family still lived in Budapest, under Communist control, he was terrified by the news of Joe One, and at the time he had immediately called Oppenheimer. “What shall we do? What shall we do?” Teller kept asking over the phone. Oppenheimer became so irritated with Teller’s emotional outburst that he finally told him, “Keep your shirt on.”

Still, Teller had no doubts about which course to pursue, and he distrusted those who were more cautious. Soon after the Soviet explosion, he spent an afternoon with Kenneth Nichols, a top Army official on nuclear policy. Teller’s vehemence surprised Nichols, who asked him why he was worrying so much about the situation. “I’m not worrying about the situation,” Teller answered. “I’m worrying about the people who should be worrying about it.”

Teller began to scour America’s universities to recruit young scientists for Los Alamos, but his success was marginal; his was not a project to stir the imagination of America’s best young minds. He had wanted Oppenheimer to come back, but Oppenheimer had no taste for it. Failing to get Oppenheimer, he tried for Hans Bethe, whose prestige was almost equal to Oppenheimer’s. He visited Bethe at Cornell in October 1949. Bethe was deeply torn by events. He felt that no decent society should pursue a weapon as destructive as the Super. But he was also worried that the Russians might build one, giving them the capacity to blackmail the United States.

Bethe seemed to be the scientist in the center. He talked it over with his wife, who pointed out that he had worked on one terrible bomb already and that he had done this because America was at war with Nazi Germany. She then pointed to the room where their two young children were sleeping. Did he want them to grow up in a world with a hydrogen bomb? she asked. Still unsure of his decision, Bethe decided to talk with Oppenheimer and he went to Princeton the next day. Oppenheimer listened and handed him a letter from James Conant with a particularly devastating critique of the Super. By chance Victor Weisskopf was visiting Princeton that weekend, and the next day he and Bethe drove to New York together. Weisskopf, even more than Oppenheimer, was morally opposed to the Super. “Hiroshima was a blunder and Nagasaki a crime,” he had said after the explosion of the atomic bomb, and he had vowed never to work on nuclear weapons again. Weisskopf argued against Bethe’s fears of Soviet military and political hegemony. Even if the United States did not build the Super and the Soviets did, the Russians could not dominate the world, for the American stockpile of atomic weapons (two hundred at the time) remained a healthy deterrent. At the time, Weisskopf painted for Bethe a vivid picture of war with the hydrogen bomb, of “what it would mean to destroy a city like New York with one bomb, and how hydrogen bombs would change the military balance by making the attack still more powerful and the defense still less powerful,” Bethe later recalled. That night Bethe called Teller and said, “Edward, I’ve been thinking it over. I can’t come.” Teller was devastated. He gradually began to believe that there was a conspiracy against him and his bomb, and Oppenheimer was leading it. (“I have explained this to Teller many times,” Bethe said years later, “but he and others still blamed Oppenheimer for my not returning to Los Alamos.”)

Yet even as resistance among scientists to the Super increased, the American military was beginning to stir, particularly the Air Force, which from the start saw itself as the service charged with
nuclear-weapon delivery, and which had no intention of letting the Soviets have a monopoly on this terrifying new weapon.

The political cast of characters, even within the Truman administration, was beginning to change as well. Lilienthal, a product of New Deal liberalism, was politically in decline. He was not merely sympathetic to Oppenheimer with regard to nuclear issues, he was dependent on him—so much so that Leslie Groves liked to joke that Lilienthal would consult Oppenheimer on which tie to wear in the morning. Others, less sympathetic, were on the rise—the most notable among them was Lewis Strauss, who would emerge in the coming decade as the most important political adviser on atomic-energy matters. Truman told Lilienthal that Strauss was coming to the AEC and mentioned only that he was a businessman who had saved $20 million and put it all in government bonds.

Strauss seemed the prototype of a Wall Street tycoon but was, in fact, a man of rather simple origins. He had never been to college. His father was a shoe salesman in Richmond, Virginia, and Lewis Strauss’s early days were spent in the same profession. He was nothing if not industrious, and by the time he was twenty he had saved $20,000, a considerable amount in those days. He had intended to go on to college. But in 1917, when he was twenty-one, his mother, who had been deeply affected by the suffering of ordinary people in Europe during World War One, heard that Herbert Hoover was going to head the relief effort to provide people with food. She suggested to her son that he go to Washington to help Mr. Hoover, and shortly thereafter Lewis Strauss did just that. “When do you want to start?” Hoover asked him upon hearing of his mission. “Right now,” Strauss answered. “Take off your coat,” Hoover said, and Strauss went to work, in pure Horatio Alger style. Within two years he became Hoover’s personal secretary. Later, he went off to work for Kuhn, Loeb, married the daughter of a partner, and in time made his fortune on Wall Street. He was an Orthodox Jew who prayed twice a day. As a young salesman he had been on the road in towns too small for a synagogue, but he took the Sabbath off and read the Bible in his hotel room. Once, with his young son, he wrote a child’s version of the Old Testament.

During World War Two Strauss served with the Navy in a desk job, and he rose to the rank of rear admiral. It was a title he quite liked, and he preferred thereafter to be known as the Admiral. He had long been interested in nuclear physics, and he hoped that eventually it might provide a cure for cancer, which had caused the death of both his parents. By dint of his years with Hoover, he was a skillful
and forceful bureaucratic infighter. “He has more elbows than an octopus,” said one critic describing Strauss in internal bureaucratic battles. He brooked no dissent from those underneath him, yet with those above him, like Eisenhower and James Forrestal, he was, as Joseph and Stewart Alsop noted, “all pliability.” In his own words, he was a Herbert Hoover black Republican, and he was well connected with conservatives. He was a hard-liner on relations with the Soviet Union, and he was absolutely convinced that the Russians were further ahead on their atomic program than we believed. It had been his idea to create the aerial-surveillance program that found the radioactive fallout from the first Soviet test.

Strauss already had a reputation among the scientists. When Teller first heard he was coming on the AEC, he asked Oppenheimer what he knew of him. “Very smart and very vain,” Oppie answered—a phrase, ironically, that some of Oppenheimer’s critics would have used to describe him.

Strauss was, for his part, wary of scientists. When he first met Edward Teller, who was Jewish, and by Strauss’s lights politically on the side of the angels, he was disturbed that Teller seemed to lack serious religious commitment. He disliked those he believed to be soft on Communism, and developed particular animosity toward Oppenheimer. Earlier, during the testimony on whether or not to share atomic information with the British, Oppenheimer was asked about the overall military value of research isotopes, which Strauss thought were extremely important. “Far less important than electronic devices,” Oppenheimer answered. Then he had paused for a moment. “But far more important than, let us say, vitamins. Somewhere in between.” That had been the answer of Oppenheimer, the snobbish Berkeley professor at his worst. It had, of course, generated a good deal of laughter in the hearing room, and Strauss had flushed. At the end of his testimony, Oppenheimer turned to Joseph Volpe, an AEC aide, and asked if he had done well. Volpe, remembering the look of anger on Strauss’s face, answered, “
Too
well, Robert, much too well.”

From the moment the announcement was made about Joe One, Strauss went on red alert; on October 5 he wrote his fellow commissioners a letter reflecting the rapid polarization of political positions at that moment: “It seems to me that the time has come for a quantum jump in our planning (to borrow a metaphor from our scientist friends)—that is to say that we should make an intensive effort to get ahead with the Super. By intensive effort I am thinking of a commitment in talent and money comparable if necessary to
that which produced the first atomic weapon. That is the way to stay ahead.”

Strauss now became the leader of the more conservative scientists and politicians who were steadily gaining in power. By contrast, the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the AEC, made up of scientific experts, became the last stronghold of the old guard, men still wary of the H bomb on both moral and technical grounds.

Onetime colleagues were now poised to become sworn enemies. On October 21, 1949, Oppenheimer (who had been surprised by the Russian explosion) wrote James Conant, a fellow member of the General Advisory Committee, of the force gathering against them in favor of the Super. Nothing, he noted, had really changed about the Super since 1942; as far as he was concerned it was still a weapon of the unknown. But there had been “a very great change in the climate of opinion.” Pressure was beginning to mount from those scientists with whom he disagreed and who favored the Super: “On the other hand two experienced promoters have been at work, i.e., Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller. The project has long been dear to Teller’s heart and Ernest has convinced himself that we must learn from Operation Joe that the Russians will soon do the Super, and that we had better beat them to it.” The congressional attitude, Oppenheimer added, seemed to be, “we must have a Super, and we must have it fast.”

The person who would have to make the decision, of course, was Truman, and his room to maneuver was steadily shrinking. Beginning in September 1949, a scenario was being played out in England that would further force Truman’s hand. In a time when there were endless accusations about who was a member of the Communist party, who was a fellow traveler, and who was an actual honest-to-God spy, the case of Klaus Fuchs was special. It received far less attention than other, more celebrated, cases in which the actual amount of damage from spying remained in doubt. Because the British were embarrassed by the Fuchs case and wanted to rush it through their legal system, the trial lasted only an hour and a half. Because Fuchs was a talented physicist, with every high-level clearance imaginable, it was appallingly clear that
all
work at Los Alamos through 1946 had been completely compromised. There were even fears that Fuchs might have seriously hindered America’s progress on the H bomb.

Fuchs was a German émigré, living in England. An enemy alien
at the time the war broke out, he was briefly interned in Britain as such. Under enemy-alien status, as his biographer Robert Chadwell Williams has pointed out, he could not own a car or join a British Civil Defense team, but he could in time work on the most secret aspects of atomic physics.

Fuchs came from a long line of Quaker ministers in Germany. Once merely socialist and pacifist, his family was deeply affected by the terrible outcome of World War One and the rise of Hitler. For them and others like them, the Communists seemed to represent the only answer to the Nazis. Fuchs’s mother committed suicide in 1931, and later so did a sister, Elisabeth. Fuchs was wanted by the Gestapo as a member of the Communist party, and he left the country—on orders from the German Communist party—to continue his studies elsewhere. He arrived in England in the winter of 1933–34, one of thousands already fleeing Hitler. A good deal was known in England about his earlier political radicalism, but no one moved on it or checked out the preliminary reports very thoroughly, and he was repeatedly cleared for high-level work by British intelligence. Events, after all, were surging ahead, and soon the Soviet Union was to be England’s ally. In May 1941, Fuchs began to work on British aspects of the atomic bomb; within weeks he had volunteered to pass on top-secret information to the Russians. No one from the Party had pressured him to do this—he saw it as his duty. In June 1942 he became a British citizen; in mid-1944, he came over to America with a number of British scientists.

He was the quiet man of Los Alamos. Elfriede Segre would watch him go by, a pallid bachelor, slightly hunched, so sad, so alone, caught in a world of his own, and thought of him as “Poverino—the Pitiful One.” Stanislaw Ulam, the brilliant mathematician, noted later that Fuchs never liked to talk about his past or why he had left Germany. Some thought him a man overwhelmed by his own sorrow. He was considered a good physicist, not of the very top rank, but unusually hardworking. By late 1944 he was working in the most sensitive part of the institute, the bomb design and assembly section.

Periodically, he would slip off in a broken-down car to nearby Santa Fe. There, unbeknownst to the others, he would contact his courier, a man named Harry Gold. He gave Gold detailed reports—for example, in June 1945, a month before the Alamogordo test, he supplied a description of the plutonium bomb. He believed that he was working for humanity and peace. When Gold once offered him $1,500 for expenses (of which there were none), Fuchs brusquely
turned him down. He spied purely for political reasons. In the fall of 1945, when most of the top people left Los Alamos, Fuchs stayed on for an additional year. In 1946 he returned to England and headed the British nuclear lab at Harwell. There the British authorities, unbeknownst to the British press and Parliament and their American colleagues, were trying to build their own bomb. In 1949 Fuchs’s name was advanced for membership in the prestigious Royal Society—no small honor, particularly for someone who had the misfortune not to be born in England. There was talk that the next chair to open up at Cambridge or Oxford might go to him.