Pandora's Keepers (69 page)

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Herken, Gregg.
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. Henry Holt and Company, 2002.

———.
The Winning Weapon
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Hershberg, James.
James B. Conant
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Hewlett, Richard G., and Francis Duncan.
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Jungk, Robert.
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Esquire
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———.
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———.
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———.
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———.
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———.
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———.
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———.
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———.
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. Simon and Schuster, 1984.

York, Herbert F.
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. W.H. Freeman, 1976.

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New York Review of Books
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Brian VanDeMark teaches history at the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis. He has lectured throughout the world, including at Oxford,
where he was a Visiting Fellow at St. Catherine’s College and the Rothermere American Institute. He coauthored Robert S. McNamara’s
#1 bestseller,
In Retrospect
, and assisted Clark Clifford with his bestseller,
Counsel to the President
. His
Into the Quagmire
, published by Oxford University Press, is one of the classic works on Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam.

*
The value of c
²
—the square of the speed of light—is 100,000,000,000,000,000,000.

*
The NDRC became the OSRD in June 1941.

*
Evidence has recently come to light suggesting that Oppenheimer was an “unlisted” member of a Communist Party cell at Berkeley
into the early 1940s. No concrete evidence has emerged, however, that he ever committed espionage against the United States
on behalf of the Soviet Union. See Jerrold and Leona Schecter,
Sacred Secrets: How Soviet Intelligence Operations Changed American History
(Brassey’s, 2002), pp. 316–17; and Herken,
Brotherhood of the Bomb
, pp. 31–32, 54–57, 111, 251, 289, 340–41.

*
Teller’s security clearance was expedited at the specific request of Oppenheimer, whose own clearance would be withdrawn
a decade later as a result of hearings at which Teller testified as a key witness against him. See chapter ten, pp. 275–279.

*
Sherwin,
A World Destroyed
, p. 163. The Interim Committee had seven members: Stimson, as chairman (with his special assistant George Harrison as deputy);
Ralph Bard, an undersecretary, representing the Navy Department; Will Clayton an assistant secretary, from the State Department;
experienced scientific administrators Vannevar Bush, James Conant, and Karl Compton; and James Byrnes, as Truman’s personal
representative.

*
The USSR successfully tested its first atomic bomb in late August 1949. See chapter 9, p. 219.

*
Policy makers also indulged in self-deception. Stimson told Truman on May sixteenth: “I am anxious to hold our Air Force,
so far as possible, to the ‘precision’ bombing which it has done so well in Europe. I believe the same rule of sparing the
civilian population should be applied, as far as possible, to the use of any new weapons.” (Henry L. Stimson Diary, Sterling
Library, Yale University.) Truman, for his part, insisted to the end of his life that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
were directed against “military” targets.

*
In fact, the Franck Report stated: “The saving of American lives achieved by the sudden use of atomic bombs against Japan
may be outweighed by the ensuing loss of confidence and by a wave of horror and repulsion sweeping over the rest of the world.”

*
Fermi came to resent Compton’s (if not Oppenheimer’s) pressure that night. When a colleague complained to Fermi a few years
later, “Why does [Compton] talk so much these days about God and philosophy and brotherhood?” Fermi replied acidly, “Current
need. What did the country need most during the war? The Bomb. What does it need now? Religion.” (Quoted in Davis,
Lawrence and Oppenheimer
, p. 249.)

*
The U-235 for the Hiroshima bomb was transported to Tinian by the cruiser
Indianapolis
as a safety precaution. Whereas the plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb was the output of about two weeks’ production at Hanford
by the summer of 1945, the uranium bomb was the output of about six months’ production at Oak Ridge. Consequently, Washington
did not want to risk losing it by transporting it by plane, which might crash or be shot down. Three days after delivering
the U-235 to Tinian, the
Indianapolis
was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine en route to the Philippines, sinking in less than half an hour and taking the lives
of nearly one thousand American sailors.

*
The Big Three summit conference outside Berlin was attended by Truman, Churchill, Attlee, and Stalin in late July 1945.

*
Other members of the committee were Vannevar Bush, James Conant, Leslie Groves, and Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy.
The committee’s consultants—in addition to Oppenheimer—were former Tennessee Valley administrator David Lilienthal, New Jersey
Bell president Chester Barnard, General Electric vice president Harry Winne, and Monsanto executive Charles Thomas.

*
Russian scientists were well along toward a bomb of their own, due in part to the espionage of Western scientists such as
Klaus Fuchs, Theodore Hall, and Allan Nunn May (and perhaps others), whose spying simplified and sped their work.

*
This is why the superbomb also became known as the hydrogen or H-bomb.

*
The GAC in 1949 also included James Conant; Lee DuBridge, leader of the wartime radar lab at MIT and now president of Caltech;
Hartley Rowe, an engineer who had worked on materials procurement for the Manhattan Project; Oliver Buckley, president of
Bell Telephone Laboratories and an expert on guided missiles; Glenn Seaborg, discoverer of plutonium and coauthor of the 1945
Franck Report; and Cyril Smith of the University of Chicago, who had been in charge of the metallurgy division at Los Alamos
during the war.

*
One GAC member, Glenn Seaborg, was abroad on a visit to Sweden. The GAC had his views, however, in the form of a letter.
Seaborg reluctantly supported development of the superbomb.

*
David Lilienthal, chairman; financier Lewis Strauss; attorney Gordon Dean; and Princeton physicist Henry Smyth. The fifth
AEC commissioner, businessman Sumner Pike, did not attend.

*
Sakharov’s disclosure made the effort of Oppenheimer and others to prevent an escalation of the nuclear arms race appear
“hopeless” in retrospect, concluded Hans Bethe, reasoning that “Stalin would never have accepted an agreement
not
to develop the H-bomb.” (Notes, “TV 1995—Anniversary,” Hans Bethe Personal Papers.)

*
Former State Department official Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury on January twenty-first for having denied passing secret
documents to Soviet agent Whittaker Chambers during the 1930s. On February third, Klaus Fuchs was publicly arraigned in Britain
for atomic espionage during the war. Exploiting these sensational developments, Republican senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin
began an anticommunist witch-hunt on February ninth with a speech in which he claimed to have a list of 205 communists working
in the State Department.