Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (108 page)

The summer school started on 1 July 1952 and lasted for about two months, with Oppenheimer, Lauritsen and Rabi participating on a part-time basis at the beginning and at the end. One of the tasks of the summer school was to consider how and where the US was vulnerable to Soviet air attack. They decided the greatest vulnerability came from the possibility that Soviet bombers might approach the United States by flying directly over the North Pole, and so they recommended what became known as the ‘DEW (Distant Early Warning) line’. This was a line of thirty-five radar stations, stretching right across the northernmost tip of the North American continent, from Alaska in the west to Greenland in the east, which would give between three and six hours’ warning of any attack from the north. This advice was passed on to the air force by Zacharias in September 1952 and was acted upon straight away, so that by the end of that year work was under way to construct the radar stations.

The air force and the Department of Defense were very pleased with the advice they received from the summer school and with the work done by the Lincoln Project, both of which, it was generally agreed, had considerably strengthened the US air-defence system. And yet, if all you knew about the summer school was the description David Griggs gave of it in his evidence at Oppenheimer’s security hearing, you would think it was not a well-received study acting on behalf of the US air force, but a subversive communist plot. Lending considerable credence to Oppenheimer’s description of him as ‘paranoid’, Griggs talked of a
semi-secret group of four with the name ‘ZORC’ (the letters standing for Zacharias, Oppenheimer, Rabi and Charles Lauritsen), dedicated to undermining US Strategic Air Command under the guise of developing an air-defence system. Some of the people involved in the summer school had told him, Griggs said, that ‘in order to achieve world peace’, it was necessary ‘not only to strengthen the Air Defense of the continental United States, but also to give up something, and the thing that was recommended that we give up was the Strategic Air Command’.

The suggestion that the US should give up its Strategic Air Command upset him, Griggs continued, because he did not think the members of the summer school had ‘the background nor were charged with the responsibility of considering in any detail or considering at all the fact of the activities of the Strategic Air Command’. ‘I felt that for any group to make such recommendations it was necessary that they know as much about the Strategic Air Command and the general strategic picture as they knew about the Air Defense Command.’

This anxiety, however, was completely misplaced, since the summer school did
not
, in fact, recommend the abolition of Strategic Air Command, as Griggs would later admit in an exchange with Oppenheimer’s lawyers that makes clear how bizarre his earlier statements were:

Griggs. I should say what I don’t believe I did say this morning, that I believe that as a result of the Lincoln summer study our air defense is materially improved.

Q. Was that the main object of the Lincoln summer study, to find ways to improve our air defense?

Griggs. Yes, sir.

Q. And did the Lincoln study ever recommend the giving-up of any part of our strategic air power?

Griggs. No, not to my knowledge.

Griggs’s mention of ‘world peace’ possibly indicates a confusion on his part between the discussions that took place during the Lincoln summer school and the meetings of another committee in which Oppenheimer was participating during this period, namely the Department of State’s Disarmament Panel. This was a panel of consultants appointed by Dean Acheson to advise the government in connection with the work of the United Nations Disarmament Commission. Besides Oppenheimer, the other members of the panel, announced on 28 April 1952, included Vannevar Bush and Allen W. Dulles, the deputy director of the CIA.

At their inaugural meeting the panel voted Oppenheimer as its chairman. The dominant voice, however, was that of Vannevar Bush, who, while serving on the panel, became convinced of the view that Fermi and
Rabi had proposed in their ‘minority report’ in October 1949: namely that the US should attempt to negotiate with the USSR a ban on testing (and, therefore, on successfully developing) thermonuclear bombs. At the second meeting of the Disarmament Panel, held on 6 May 1952, Bush raised the possibility of a test ban, which he argued, as Fermi and Rabi had argued three years earlier, ‘would not require inspection and control’, since an H-bomb explosion would be so easy to detect. Led by Bush, and encouraged from the chair by Oppenheimer, the Disarmament Panel thus moved in a direction that had been unforeseen by Acheson and, from the point of view of Washington’s political and military establishment, was entirely unwelcome.

By the end of the summer of 1952, the panel was convinced not only of the wisdom of a negotiated test ban, but also of the desirability of postponing the Mike test, scheduled for 1 November. In a paper submitted to the President in September, the panel urged Truman to cancel the test in order to keep alive the possibility of negotiating a test ban with the Soviet Union. The test was, the panel argued, a ‘point of no return’, since, afterwards, the Soviet Union would surely regard any proposal to ban thermonuclear testing as motivated simply by the US’s desire to stay ahead in the race. Also, the panel suggested, the testing of such a powerful bomb would alienate other countries besides the Soviet Union, convincing them that the US ‘is irrevocably committed to a strategy of destroying its enemies by indiscriminate means and at whatever cost’.

As well as arguing for a postponement on the grounds of international relations, the panel stressed its belief that the test was fatally ill timed because it coincided with the presidential election, the polling day for which would be 4 November, just three days after the test was scheduled to take place. Indeed, the panel’s report was entitled ‘The Timing of the Thermonuclear Test’. It was widely (and, as it turned out, correctly) expected that the Democrats would lose the election, which meant that the test would take place just when the US was exchanging one administration for another – surely not the best time for the country to be crossing a ‘point of no return’.

By the summer of 1952, it was more or less clear that the next US government would be a Republican one, led by General Eisenhower, which was, if anything,
less
likely than Truman’s administration to be receptive to the ideas of the Disarmament Panel. For some years a ‘draft Eisenhower’ campaign, with the slogan ‘I like Ike’, had been urging Eisenhower to stand and marshalling the considerable popular support that he enjoyed throughout the country. Meanwhile Truman, who was becoming less and less popular, made it clear that he would not seek re-election. After Eisenhower fought his first primary in March 1952, winning a landslide victory, there was little doubt that he would be the Republican candidate,
or that he would beat whoever the Democrats chose as their candidate, which, in July 1952, turned out to be Adlai Stevenson.

In a campaign speech to the American Legion on 25 August 1952, Eisenhower declared that the US had need of security forces ‘whose destructive and retaliatory power is so great that it causes nightmares in the Kremlin whenever they think of attacking us’. This commitment to exactly the kind of policy against which Oppenheimer had been warning for years was made even more explicit in the public statements of John Foster Dulles (the brother of Allen W. Dulles, Oppenheimer’s colleague on the Disarmament Panel), who was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State-elect. In a speech he gave in November 1951, Dulles asked rhetorically why the Soviet Union had not attacked Germany or Japan, and answered:

In an article that he published in
Life
magazine called ‘A Policy of Boldness’, Dulles gave what became regarded as the classic statement of the doctrine of ‘massive retaliation’. How, Dulles asked, was the US to defend the ‘free world’ against Soviet aggression? To attempt to match the Red Army ‘man for man, gun for gun and tank for tank’ would, he urged, ‘mean real strength nowhere and bankruptcy everywhere’:

The policy Dulles recommended in this article called upon the creation ‘of means to hit with shattering effectiveness the sources of power and lines of communication of the Sovietized world’. ‘Today,’ he wrote, ‘atomic power, coupled with strategic air and sea power, provides the community of free nations with vast new possibilities of organizing a community power to stop open aggression before it starts and reduce, to vanishing point, the risk of general war’.

In 1952, the American general public was extremely receptive to such views for three reasons: 1. the fear of communism and of Soviet expansionism made the American people open to the idea that
something
had to be done to deter the Soviets from further acts of aggression; 2. the
prolonged, costly and indecisive Korean War had made Americans wary of engaging with communist armies on the ground; and 3. there was widespread support for reducing government spending. The policy of ‘massive retaliation’ was successfully sold as a way of meeting all three of these objectives: deterring Soviet aggression in a way that did not involve either the deaths of US soldiers or the expense of maintaining an army and a navy that could conceivably match the armies of the Soviet Union and China. In the context of such thinking, the development of thermonuclear bombs – the ultimate deterrence – seemed to make a good deal of sense.

The members of the Disarmament Panel, then, were politically isolated, with few allies among Truman’s Democrats and even fewer among Eisenhower’s Republicans. This did not deter them from trying as hard as they could to prevent the US from making what they considered to be the potentially catastrophic mistake of going ahead with the Mike test. One very powerful – and, as it turned out, prescient – reason they gave for not going ahead was that the fallout from the test would provide the Soviet Union with valuable clues about the Ulam–Teller design. Despite the strength of this argument, by the autumn of 1952 practically the only person in the whole of the US’s security establishment – comprising the GAC, the AEC, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the Departments of State and of Defense – sympathetic to a ban on H-bomb tests was Isidor Rabi, Oppenheimer’s successor as chair of the GAC. Most other members of those committees, departments and advisory bodies were not only opposed to the idea of a ban, but deeply suspicious of it.

When on 9 October the National Security Council met to discuss the Disarmament Panel’s paper, there was no support at all for its recommendation of a test ban. Indeed, Robert Lovett, the Secretary of Defense, clearly felt uncomfortable about even discussing such a suggestion. It made him feel vulnerable. The minutes of the meeting record that Lovett ‘felt that any such idea should be immediately put out of mind and that any papers that might exist on the subject should be destroyed’. Such was the shadow cast by Joseph McCarthy during this period.

Even the more limited proposal that the Mike test be postponed until after the presidential election failed to gain many adherents, despite being supported by some members of the GAC and AEC. Truman himself, though he would not publicly and officially change the date, let it be known to the AEC that he ‘would certainly be pleased if technical reasons cause a postponement’. One of the commissioners, Eugene Zuckert, was duly sent out to Eniwetok to see if any such technical reasons could be found. None could, and so, on 30 October, the National Security Council gave its approval to the series of ‘Ivy’ tests of which Mike was a part.

A day later, at 7.15 a.m. local time on the morning of 1 November (still 31 October in the US), the first Ulam–Teller hydrogen bomb to be tested exploded on the tiny island of Elugelab (less than a mile long, with an area considerably smaller than a square mile), at the northernmost tip of the Eniwetok Atoll. A few millionths of a second later, the island of Elugelab no longer existed; it had been completely vaporised by a blast that was measured at ten megatons, 800–1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. The fireball from the blast was three miles wide, producing heat that, even thirty miles away, felt as if someone had opened a hot oven. The blast lifted into the air some eighty million tons of earth and seabed that would be deposited as fallout all over the world. Several thousand people were there, all of them stunned by the enormity of the explosion. ‘You would swear that the whole world was on fire,’ wrote one of them to his wife.

One person who was
not
there was Edward Teller, despite the fact that, although he had refused to have anything to do with the Los Alamos team that organised and carried out the Mike test, he was still regarded as the ‘father of the H-bomb’. At the time the bomb went off Teller was in Berkeley, where a seismograph had been set up to monitor the seismic wave that would be produced by the explosion. The sound waves took twenty minutes to travel from Eniwetok to the Californian coast, but even so Teller was able to estimate the yield of the bomb before anyone at Los Alamos had heard anything. With a not entirely appropriate sense of paternal pride (the Mike test bomb was, after all, as much Marshall Holloway’s ‘baby’ as it was his), Teller sent a telegram to his former colleagues, announcing: ‘It’s a boy.’

A week after the Mike test, this sense of triumph was notably absent among the group of scientists, including Oppenheimer, that constituted the Science Advisory Committee to the Office of Defense Mobilization. Among them was Lee DuBridge, who was strongly inclined to resign from the committee on the grounds that, as the decision to go ahead with the Mike test showed, the government had no intention of listening to its scientific advisors. DuBridge was persuaded to stay, but he was hardly reassured when another member of the committee, the president of MIT, James R. Killian, leaned over to him and whispered: ‘Some people in the Air Force are going to be after Oppenheimer and we’ve got to know about it and be ready for it.’