Pandora's Keepers (40 page)

If we are
sure
to get a Third World War, the later it comes the worse for us.

Victor of next war will
make
a world government, even if that victor should be the United States, having lost 25 million people dead.

Szilard’s fear of a nuclear World War III appalled him so much that he decided to have nothing more to do with physics, which
he had once associated with creativity but now associated with destruction. In 1947 he took up the study of biology, which
was for him a rejection of death and an affirmation of life. Hotel lobbies and cafés remained the settings where he communicated
his ideas to others in wide-ranging discussions. People who came in contact with Szilard remained impressed by his capacity
to see far beyond what most others were seeing or thinking, but some also concluded dismissively that he had become a Don
Quixote, tilting against a nuclear windmill that had begun to turn faster and faster.

After the war, Hans Bethe returned to Cornell, but continued doing weapons work at Los Alamos during summers because he thought
this would give him the credibility to influence government policy along lines he considered constructive. This “inside” strategy
reflected Bethe’s pragmatic temperament. He thought that refusing to do any weapons work (as did some of his wartime colleagues)
would not accomplish anything: atomic bombs would not go away—Pandora’s box had been opened irrevocably—and there would always
be other competent scientists willing to do anything he refused. He explained his thinking this way:

In order to fulfill this function of contributing to the decision-making process, scientists (at least some of them) must
be willing to work on weapons. They must do this also because our present struggle is (fortunately) not carried on in actual
warfare which has become an absurdity, but in technical development for a potential war which nobody expects to come. The
scientists must preserve the precarious balance of armament which would make it disastrous for either side to start a war.
Only then can we argue for and embark on more constructive ventures like disarmament and international cooperation which may
eventually lead to a more definite peace.
⁴⁸

As relations between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorated in the late 1940s, Bethe grew skeptical. By the end
of the decade, he expected a nuclear war between America and Russia within ten years.
⁴⁹
Bethe’s sense of foreboding and pessimism intensified with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. He continued, however,
to urge that America’s atomic stockpile be kept to a minimum compatible with national security. He privately worried that
Cold War firebrands in Washington were whipping up a dangerous atmosphere in which scientists might be compelled to invent
more frightful weapons.

Ernest Lawrence’s direction of the Rad Lab after the war was more absolute and also more distant. The Rad Lab had grown so
large that he no longer knew all the people who worked for him. Instead of pausing for brief conversations on inspection walks,
he now merely checked to see whether everyone on the staff was busy. This sometimes produced comical results. Once, Lawrence
happened upon a man who seemed to be loafing. “What are you doing?” he snapped. “I’m just waiting for the phone to ring.”
“You’re fired,” said Lawrence. “I work for the telephone company,” the man replied.
⁵⁰

If the size of the Rad Lab had changed, its spirit had not. Lawrence still wanted to do big things and tended to treat his
staff like servants. He drove them hard as always, but more now through subordinates than through personal contact. When he
did see them, the tension he created had a new edge to it. No longer shrugging off an idea when it became a blind alley, Lawrence
grew irritated and inclined to fix blame. He was driving himself harder than ever. He began to drink in the evenings, and
Rad Lab personnel he encountered on nighttime visits to the lab noticed it. “Although he seemed perfectly sober,” said one
staffer, “it really smelled.”
⁵¹
The cumulative toll on Lawrence manifested itself in the form of ulcerative colitis, intestinal bleeding that he found increasingly
difficult to stanch.

Lawrence’s mission had become one of raising ever more money and building ever larger machines. His intense optimism, his
connections to rich donors, and his high-powered contacts in Washington still proved an effective combination. A new laboratory
rose at his bidding near Livermore, a quiet town an hour’s drive east of Berkeley in a dry, rural valley—tucked in the foothills
of the Sierra Nevada—known for good wines, fields of roses, and grazing horses and cattle. (Today it is known as the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory.) The navy had used a square mile of the Livermore Valley as a training camp during World War
II, and Lawrence converted this camp into a satellite of the Rad Lab. In the tense atmosphere of the Cold War, Livermore quickly
became a high-tech compound of hundreds of olive-drab buildings and thousands of employees—all surrounded by barbed-wire fences
and guardposts obscured from a distance by tall eucalyptus trees. It was a long way from the early days of the Rad Lab.

Every Friday afternoon, Lawrence drove out to Livermore from Berkeley in his baby blue Cadillac convertible to survey his
new domain. He had an office reserved especially for him, where he began his weekly visit by interrogating Herbert York, a
young Berkeley post-doctorate whom he picked to run the lab for him. “What’s going on?” Lawrence would say to York. “What’s
new?”
⁵²
Lawrence then would walk the grounds, asking everyone he encountered to explain what they were doing.

Although Lawrence still looked to Oppenheimer to interpret the findings made with his machines, the relationship between the
two physicists was changing. Before the war, Lawrence had been the leader in the public mind and his laboratory had been famous.
He had won the Nobel Prize; Oppenheimer had not. After the war, Oppenheimer was hailed as the father of the atomic bomb, the
wizard of the scientific world. His name carried magic. Crowds gathered around him. Lawrence had reacted by urgently seeking
to enlist Oppenheimer in his projects, but instead Oppenheimer had left for Princeton. “To Lawrence,” said I. I. Rabi, who
spoke with both men during this period, “Oppenheimer’s leaving Berkeley seemed treason.”
⁵³
On a visit to Berkeley in the summer of 1949, Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, encountered Lawrence at a faculty party. Kitty,
who was tight, loudly scolded him for banishing Frank from the Rad Lab. Oppenheimer looked on, saying nothing. Their fabled
friendship was rapidly deteriorating.

When Enrico Fermi returned to Chicago after the war, he bought a large, three-story house on University Avenue a few blocks
east of campus and set about creating an expansive new Institute for Nuclear Studies. (Today it is known as the Enrico Fermi
Institute.) Ground was broken for the institute on July 8, 1947, in the block between 56th and 57th Streets and Ellis and
Ingleside Avenues, across the street from Stagg Field, where Fermi had achieved the world’s first chain reaction five years
earlier. Once construction was completed, Fermi moved his office and laboratory into the ground floor of the institute’s south
wing. Discussions with Teller were frequent and productive. Fermi leveraged Teller’s originality, often developing his ideas
far beyond the point reached by Teller, though Fermi always credited his friend’s contributions.
⁵⁴

Teller was not the only Manhattan Project colleague hanging around the Midway. Veterans of the Met Lab and Los Alamos thronged
to Chicago after the war to study physics, attracted by Fermi’s reputation. Fermi did not teach only advanced students; he
wanted to bring beginners into contact with science, and taught the elementary physics course to large classes with great
enthusiasm and success. It was “standing room only” when Fermi taught, and he would talk with equal brilliance to a crowd
as to a single student. It seemed effortless, but this impression was contrived. Fermi spent hours preparing for each course.
Once, when he had to be away from Chicago, Fermi asked a graduate student to take over a session of one of his classes. Fermi
handed the student a small notebook in which he had written out the entire lecture.
⁵⁵

Once a week, Fermi held an informal seminar for graduate students. The group gathered in Fermi’s office and one of his students
proposed a topic for discussion. Fermi then searched through his carefully indexed papers to find his notes on that topic
and shared them. He always kept the discussion focused on the essential aspects of a topic. He taught his students that physics
should not be an esoteric specialty but rather a practical and relevant discipline, and he was always eager to learn—and grateful
when he found out something new. Throughout, he was rigorously inductive in his reasoning; theoretical generalizations came
only
after
empirical observation. Exploring the mysteries of nature was a great adventure for him, a thrilling sport for the intensely
competitive and confident man behind the mask of nonchalance and modesty.

As he had before the war, Fermi continued to dislike pretension and stuffiness. Whenever he and Laura planned a party where
the guest list included an important person—as many of the atomic scientists were after the war—Fermi would say, “We’ve got
to dilute him with somebody.” He was amazingly unassuming, given his fame and accomplishments. After the war, he helped General
Electric build nuclear reactors, telling its engineers what to do and boosting its corporate profits enormously. One night
at dinner Laura said, “Enrico, I went to the store today and put our name on the list for a dishwasher.” “Fine,” said Fermi.
“Enrico, you know the president of General Electric. If you tell him you want one, you’ll get it tomorrow.” “No,” he said,
“we’re on the list, we’ll wait and get it when it comes.”
⁵⁶

But some things had changed. Friends noticed that Fermi was becoming more reflective, and were surprised to glimpse his occasional
detachment from physics—unheard of before the war. The steady reading he had been doing since coming to America extended and
deepened his cultural interests beyond what they had been in his Italian days. He even began to meditate on literature and
philosophical questions, once remarking to Laura that “with science one can explain everything except oneself.”
⁵⁷
Fermi was struggling to understand himself and his place in the new world he had helped to create.

As the atomic scientists strived to warn people about the dangers of nuclear weapons, the political climate began to change,
and the Cold War set in. By the early 1950s, American public opinion shifted from sympathy for Russia as a wartime ally to
fear of the Soviet Union as an expansionist power. This fear found expression in many ways, including pressure to expand America’s
atomic arsenal. Partly in response to this pressure, and partly the result of bureaucratic momentum and military demand, the
size of the nation’s atomic stockpile grew from thirteen in 1947 to nearly three hundred in 1950, with a corresponding increase
in strategic delivery capability.
⁵⁸
What Bohr and the other atomic scientists had feared—a growing reliance on nuclear weapons and the beginnings of a nuclear
arms race—was coming to pass. The direction of America’s atomic program would soon become a major political issue, struggled
over vehemently by those with competing visions of the future.

H
IGH IN THE CLEAR
, cold air off the Kamchatka Peninsula of Siberia in early September 1949, a chemical filter fitted into the nose of an American
reconnaissance plane picked up traces of particles containing disintegrating nuclei. Like cancer cells in their earliest stages,
the nuclei portended ominous consequences. Scientists who analyzed the particles determined that the invisible grains of matter
caught in the plane’s filter were highly radioactive and part of a cloud that was drifting east. Further analysis determined
that the particles had been produced by a fission explosion. On August twenty-ninth, over the steppes of Kazakhstan, the Soviet
Union had tested its first atomic bomb—a virtual copy of the U.S. plutonium bomb based on data stolen by spies—and had shattered
America’s short-lived nuclear monopoly.

Robert Oppenheimer had just returned to Princeton after spending the summer at Caltech and Perro Caliente when the phone rang
in the study of his Olden Manor home. It was a call from Washington reporting the news. Many officials were incredulous, but
Oppenheimer sensed immediately that it was true. Still, he was shaken by the news, and in this he was not alone. Most Americans
had accepted the comforting (and mistaken) belief that it would be many years—maybe decades—before the Soviets would have
the bomb. The idea of a nuclear-armed Stalinist Russia was ominous, suddenly presenting serious dangers of a kind totally
different from any that America had faced before.