Pandora's Keepers (42 page)

Lawrence knew how to build an empire. He was an experienced, effective, and politically savvy promoter of scientific projects.
By 1949 Lawrence had spent a decade at the summit of American physics. His Rad Lab had been centrally involved in the Manhattan
Project; he had served as a member of the highest scientific advisory councils since the war; and he continued to play a major
role in atomic policy through close but unofficial personal contacts in the Pentagon and Congress. Lawrence had made his own
laboratory—the only physicist who had—and this put him in a special category. He was used to acting on his own and having
his way, though he did not see himself in this light. Rather, he saw himself as simply opposing those—such as Oppenheimer—who,
in his mind, were trying to stifle legitimate and patriotic scientific work for their own political, and therefore improper,
reasons.

Although Lawrence often piously cautioned other scientists not to “fool around” with politics, he did not follow his own advice.
¹³
Soon after Truman announced the Soviet test, Lawrence began lobbying vigorously for the superbomb’s development. He phoned
Teller at Los Alamos and said he would stop off to see him on his way to Washington. The next morning, October seventh, Lawrence
landed in the predawn hours at the airstrip that ran off the eastern end of the Los Alamos mesa, and went straight to a meeting
with Teller, who explained to him in convincing detail that a superbomb was feasible. When Teller finished, Lawrence said
simply, “In the present situation, there is no question but that you must go ahead.”
¹⁴

It was late in the day when the two finished their talk. Lawrence needed to leave for Albuquerque because he was going on
to Washington the next day. He asked Teller to accompany him, and during their trip down in the small plane that provided
service between Los Alamos and Albuquerque, they talked about the importance of enlisting the help of other top physicists.
The place to start, Teller thought, was Fermi—after all, he was undeniably brilliant and he had first suggested the idea of
a thermonuclear explosion. But Fermi made it clear that he would not help. “You and I and Truman and Stalin would be happy
if further great developments were impossible,” he told Teller. “So, why don’t we make an agreement to refrain from such development?
It is, of course, impossible without an ultimate test and when that happens we shall know about it anyway.” “Why should the
bomb be bigger?” he asked in conclusion.
¹⁵
The intensity of Fermi’s refusal was surprising; he was a reserved man, and it was unusual for him to show emotion.

Teller was unhappy, upset, and unwilling to take no for an answer. He goaded Fermi by reminding him that he had opposed the
Acheson-Lilienthal Report because he distrusted the Russians—yet now he proposed an arrangement with them without guarantees.
“Yes,” Fermi shot back, “but what else can we do?” “Go ahead and work on it if you have to,” he added. “I hope you will not
succeed.”
¹⁶
“I felt clearly,” Teller wrote in a letter after their meeting, that “Enrico wants to be rid of the whole problem. (Why talk
about it—why think about it?)”
¹⁷

Having failed to enlist Fermi, Teller turned next to Bethe. If he could convince someone of Bethe’s stature to work on the
superbomb, other physicists could be persuaded to work on it, too. Bethe seldom suffered from hesitation or indecision, but
he did when Teller arrived in Ithaca in late September 1949 seeking his help. The two sat up late into the night in the living
room of Bethe’s home discussing the issue. Autumn had come early to Ithaca that year and the temperature outside was as cool
as it was in the room. “I had very great internal conflicts about what I should do,” Bethe remembered. On the one hand, the
superbomb was a seductive technical challenge. It meant working with other top scientists and having access to powerful new
electronic computers reserved for military research. It also meant the likelihood of exciting discoveries. And there was a
political consideration: Bethe worried that Stalin might blackmail the world if he alone had it. “On the other hand,” as he
later said, “it seemed to me that it was a very terrible undertaking to develop a still bigger bomb.”
¹⁸

Undecided, Bethe talked things over with his wife, Rose. She reminded him that he had helped make an atomic bomb only because
the western democracies were at war with Nazi Germany. Then, motioning toward their two small children, Henry and Monica,
asleep in the next room, she asked him if he wanted them to grow up in a world with superbombs. “She felt that the atomic
bomb was bad enough, and that increasing its power a thousand times was simply irresponsible,” recalled Bethe. “‘You don’t
want to do this.’”
¹⁹

But Bethe was unsure. “It seemed to me that the development of thermonuclear weapons would not solve any of the difficulties
that we found ourselves in and yet I was not quite sure whether I should refuse.” He decided to call Oppenheimer, whose judgment
he respected, for advice. Oppenheimer suggested he and Teller come visit him in Princeton. Two days later, the three of them
met in Oppenheimer’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study. It was a far cry from Oppenheimer’s spartan office at Los
Alamos, where the three had met together often during the war. The bright, well-appointed room looked out over broad green
meadows fringed with trees aflame with the golden tints of autumn. At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer had resembled the enthusiastic
leader of a rugged pioneer settlement. Now he reminded Bethe of a restrained country gentleman receiving his guests at a stately
manor.

Oppenheimer said nothing as Teller presented his case, either out of caution in Teller’s presence or because he did not want
to say anything to influence Bethe—or both. When Teller finished, he and Oppenheimer mildly debated, but Oppenheimer did not
mount much of a counterattack, which was unusual for him. Perhaps Oppenheimer believed he did not need to argue what he thought
was obvious, but it was, at least with regard to the other guest, a tactical mistake. “I did not get from him the advice that
I was hoping to get,” Bethe recalled. “I did not get from him advice to decide me either way.”
²⁰
Teller, who was convinced that Oppenheimer had been using his clout to discourage physicists from working on the superbomb,
was elated by his silence. Before going to Princeton, he recalled later, “I had expressed to Bethe the worry that we are going
to talk to Oppenheimer, and after that you will not come. When we left the office, Bethe turned to me and smiled and he said,
‘You see, you can be quite satisfied. I am still coming.’”
²¹

From Oppenheimer’s institute office, Bethe walked over to the university campus, where a conference was underway. When he
reached the conference hall, he ran into Szilard, who greeted him by saying, “Ah, here is Dr. Bethe from Los Alamos.”
²²
Szilard’s remark was carefully calculated. He knew Bethe was sensitive about his weapons work, and he sought to stir Bethe’s
conscience against the superbomb by embarrassing him in front of his peers, many of whom opposed its development. “I protested
that I was not at Los Alamos,” recalled Bethe, “and didn’t know if I wanted to go back there.”

MIT theoretical physicist Victor Weisskopf was also at the conference. A close friend of Bethe since prewar days in Europe,
“Vicky” Weisskopf had eschewed weapons work since the war. He and Bethe took a long walk around the Princeton campus the next
evening. Weisskopf imagined the horrors of a war fought with superbombs for his friend as they crunched through the autumn
leaves. “Vicky vividly described to me what it would mean to destroy a whole city like New York with one bomb,” Bethe recalled.
“We both had to agree that after such a war even if we were to win it, the world would not be like the world we wanted to
preserve. We would lose the things we were fighting for. This was a very long conversation and a very difficult one for both
of us.” But it clarified things for Bethe. “Your discussion with me last weekend was most wholesome,” he wrote Weisskopf.
“I felt very much better after talking to you.”
²³
Bethe’s struggle with his conscience was over. He phoned Teller with his decision. “Edward, I’ve been thinking it over,”
said Bethe. “I can’t come after all.”

“I felt relieved,” he recalled later.
²⁴
Teller was sad, disappointed, and angry—but not at Bethe or Weisskopf. As he would increasingly do, with or without evidence,
he found his enemy in the form of his former boss. “I knew it after the meeting with Oppenheimer,” he grumbled.
²⁵

Bethe explained his decision later. “It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that it was the wrong thing to do, that we
should not have escalated. It seems to me now very clear that we should have developed the atomic bomb during the war when
we had a desperate situation with the Nazis. But in 1949 vis-à-vis the Russians we still held the cards of greater production
[and] greater delivery capability of nuclear weapons. So I think the right direction would have been to say no, we are not
going to do it. We may do some further research on it, but let’s not make it a crash program. We really didn’t need it, but
when we embarked on it, I think it was one of the many examples of overkill that we indulged in in those days.”
²⁶

While Teller sought to enlist Fermi’s and Bethe’s help, Lawrence lobbied for the superbomb in Washington. One of his first
stops was Capitol Hill, where he met with the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, including its powerful chairman,
Connecticut Democratic senator Brien McMahon. Lawrence warned McMahon that Stalin would go all out to develop a superbomb
and that the Soviet Union might be ahead in the race. For the first time in his life, he said, he was afraid that America
might lose a war—unless Washington undertook a crash program to build a superbomb. Lawrence also lobbied his high-level contacts
at the Pentagon. “It would be disastrous,” he warned those close to the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
“if the Soviets produced a hydrogen bomb before the United States.”
²⁷

Lawrence’s next stop was New York, where he went to see Rabi at Columbia. Lawrence was accompanied by Rad Lab associate Luis
Alvarez, who recounted their meeting with Rabi in his diary that evening. Rabi was “very happy at our plans,” Alvarez wrote.
“He is worried, too.” According to Alvarez, Rabi had told them, “It is certainly good to see the first team back in. You fellows
have been playing with your cyclotron and nuclei for four years and it is certainly time you got back to work.” Rabi’s recollection
was more tentative. “I felt that some answer must be made in some form to regain our lead. There were two directions in which
one could look: either the realization of the super or an intensification of the effort on fission weapons.” But Rabi felt
Lawrence and Alvarez had already made up their minds:

They were extremely optimistic. They are both very optimistic gentlemen…. They had been to Los Alamos and talked to Dr. Teller,
who gave them a very optimistic estimate about the [superbomb]. So they were all keyed up to go bang into it…. I generally
find myself when I talk with these two gentlemen in a very uncomfortable position. I like to be an enthusiast. I love it.
But those fellows are so enthusiastic that I have to be conservative. So it always puts me in an odd position [where I have
to] say, “Now, now, there, there,” and that sort of thing. So I was not in agreement in the sense that I felt they were, as
usual, overly optimistic.
²⁸

When the meeting ended, Lawrence flew back to Washington and urged the Joint Chiefs of Staff to declare their support for
development of the superbomb.

Once Lawrence had brought the superbomb to Washington’s attention, the idea went to the AEC’s General Advisory Committee (GAC)
for study and recommendation. Government advisory committees are almost always more show than substance, but the GAC was different.
Composed of a panel of nine leading American scientists, the GAC had established itself since its creation in 1947 as the
most influential source of advice to the government on atomic weapons.
^*
Its chairman was Oppenheimer, who had been chosen unanimously by his colleagues. The GAC was not Oppenheimer’s puppet, however,
because its membership also included Fermi and Rabi. Fermi worked hard and conscientiously on the GAC, but without the pleasure
that Oppenheimer felt in counseling on policy—he was a scientist, not a politician. Although the atomic bomb had shaken him
up, Fermi remained cold and clinical, even a little ruthless, in the way he disdained human emotions and went directly to
the facts in deciding any question. Oppenheimer assessed him cogently: “Not a philosopher. Passion for clarity. He was simply
unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active.”
²⁹
Fermi believed the superbomb could be built if America set itself to accomplishing the task, but he feared the devastating
consequences of its potential use. It was far wiser, Fermi thought, to try to outlaw this weapon that did not yet exist.

The afternoon of Friday, October 28, 1949, was gray and drizzly when the GAC convened in a cavernous conference room on the
second floor of AEC headquarters at 19th Street and Constitution Avenue on the Mall near the White House.
^*
The wood-paneled room looked out on the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, but no one was in the mood to peer
out the windows that day. Oppenheimer began the meeting by stating the matter to be considered: the prospects and implications
of developing a superbomb. The GAC spent the rest of the afternoon talking with top experts. George Kennan, director of the
State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and an influential and experienced specialist in Soviet affairs, told the committee
that it might be possible to negotiate an arms control agreement with Russia. Next they heard from Bethe, who stressed that
many technical problems relating to the superbomb remained to be solved. He also talked about his fear that a war fought with
superbombs would destroy what it was intended to preserve.