Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (102 page)

After lunch, an angry and disappointed Alvarez set off back to Berkeley, convinced, as he later put it, that ‘the program we were planning to start was not one that the top man in the scientific development of the AEC wanted to have done’. In his diary at the time, he noted that he had had an ‘interesting talk with Oppie’, in which he saw, however, some ‘pretty foggy thinking’.

That afternoon the GAC members, together with four of the five AEC commissioners, talked through all the issues involved. Before he arrived at the meeting, Rabi had believed both that (as Lilienthal summarised Rabi’s views in his diary) the ‘decision to go ahead will be made; only question is who will be willing to join in it’ and that the crash programme was indeed the answer to the Russian atomic bomb. Fermi had been of the opinion that (again, in Lilienthal’s words) ‘one must explore it and do it and that doesn’t foreclose the question: should it be made use of?’,
while Oppenheimer had believed, as he said in his letter to Conant, that it would be folly to resist the crash programme. Apart from these two, all the other GAC members present at this meeting had arrived believing, for a mixture of technical, strategic and moral reasons, that it would be wrong to develop the hydrogen bomb, even if some of them believed (as Oppenheimer did) that the decision to build the bomb was, for political reasons, unavoidable. By the end of the afternoon session, however, this political pessimism had been overcome and the GAC members had reached a unanimous decision
not
to recommend a crash programme, with Rabi and Fermi – perhaps having Kennan’s testimony in mind – believing it was important to stress that this should be conditional on getting an
international
agreement not to pursue research on the Super. At the end of the meeing Oppenheimer suggested that they spend the evening writing reports and reconvene the next morning.

Three reports were written that evening. Manley and Oppenheimer wrote the main report, which was signed by all eight attending committee members. Part One of this report recommended an increase in the production of reactors, isotope-separation plants and atomic bombs, particularly ‘an intensification of efforts to make atomic weapons available for tactical purposes’. This last recommendation shows how far Oppenheimer’s thinking had changed since the end of the war, being, as it is, the exact opposite of his earlier Bohr-inspired view. At the centre of that earlier view was the thought that atomic bombs were not simply a new, more deadly weapon; they were a radically different
kind
of weapon, so powerful that the (rational) fear of using them might put an end to war itself. Now Oppenheimer was advocating atomic bombs as tactical devices, treating them
precisely
as just another weapon.

This change in attitude seems to have been prompted by two things: 1. the heavy burden of having led a project that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Japanese civilians,
^fn66
and 2. his disillusionment following the breakdown of talks to negotiate international control of atomic weapons. He no longer believed in the notion of a bomb too big to use (if he did, the Super was, surely, just that), and he had no wish to be instrumental in the creation of a bomb that could kill civilians on a scale many times greater than the bomb that had been unleashed on Hiroshima. An atomic bomb designed to be used as a tactical weapon, against soldiers rather than civilians, was, for him, a lesser evil than a hydrogen bomb that was many times too big to be used in such a way and could
only
be used for the mass slaughter of civilians.

Part Two of the main report spells this reasoning out. It takes a fairly
optimistic view of the chances of overcoming the technical problems in the way of developing the Super: ‘We believe that an imaginative and concerted attack on the problem has a better than even chance of producing the weapon within five years.’ But it then addresses the question of why anyone would
want
to develop such a weapon. Given that ‘it has generally been estimated that the weapon would have an explosive effect some hundreds of times that of present fission bombs’, one had to face the question of what might be involved in actually using this weapon:

Part Three of the report then provides the committee’s response to the question put to it: would it recommend a crash programme to develop the Super? Here Oppenheimer and Manley were careful to spell out where there was unanimity and where there was not:

Appended to this main report were the two other reports. The first, written by Conant and DuBridge, and signed by those two plus Buckley, Oppenheimer, Rowe and Smith, spoke of the Super as a ‘weapon of genocide’. Moving slightly away from the issue of whether a
crash
programme should be initiated, this ‘majority report’ (as it came to be called) committed itself unequivocally to the recommendation that
no
programme of any sort to build this weapon should be pursued:
‘We believe a super bomb should never be produced.’ That the Russians might build a Super should not frighten the US into building one, the report insisted, since: ‘Should they use the weapon against us, reprisals by our large stock of atomic bombs would be comparatively effective to the use of a super.’ Finally, Conant and DuBridge wrote: ‘In determining not to proceed to develop the super bomb, we see a unique opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war and thus limiting the fear and arousing the hopes of mankind.’

The second appendix, the ‘minority report’, written and signed by Fermi and Rabi, describes the Super as ‘necessarily an evil thing considered in any light’ and argues that it would therefore be wrong for the US to initiate a programme of building such a bomb without first inviting ‘the nations of the world to join us in a solemn pledge not to proceed’. When questioned about this at Oppenheimer’s security hearing, Fermi said that his view was that, if it turned out not to be possible to get an international agreement to outlaw research into the Super, then the US ‘should with considerable regret, go ahead’. Of this view, however, there is no trace in the report drawn up by him and Rabi.

The GAC recommendations were not reported in the press and could not be, as they remained classified information. The main report had recommended that ‘enough be declassified about the super bomb so that a public statement of policy can be made at this time’, but, for the moment, public discussion of the Super was illegal. Edward Teller, however, was not a man to be deflected from his purpose by such niceties, and he made it his business to find out what the GAC had advised. First, he spoke to Fermi, who, Teller wrote to his friend Maria Mayer, ‘did not tell me what the General Advisory Committee proposed’, but ‘He did tell me what his own ideas are. He said: “You and I and Truman and Stalin would be happy if further great developments were impossible. So, why do we not make an agreement to refrain from such development?”’

Teller added: ‘I have never been so frightened as I am now when I hear his argument of compromise.’ Hearing Fermi’s views produced in Teller the same despondency that listening to Oppenheimer had produced in Alvarez. ‘Washington,’ Teller told Mayer, ‘will try every substitute rather than decide to make an all-out effort . . . What I saw in Washington makes it quite clear that there are big forces working for compromise and for delay.’ On the other hand: ‘There are also forces which work for action.’

Teller got a glimpse of how powerful these latter forces were when he was summoned to Brien McMahon’s office in Washington. ‘Before I could say anything,’ Teller records in his memoirs, ‘McMahon said, “Have you heard about the GAC report? It just makes me sick.”’ McMahon then introduced Teller to William Borden, his aide. ‘If you can’t reach me, talk
to Bill,’ McMahon told Teller. ‘He has my complete confidence.’ As Teller quickly discovered, Borden was a man after his own heart. In fact, he was possibly the only person of influence in Washington who was
more
frightened of the Soviet Union than Teller himself was. In 1946, Borden had published a book called
There Will Be No Time: The Revolution in Strategy
, in which he argued that, unless the US and the Soviet Union united ‘into a single sovereignty’ (which, of course, he considered extremely unlikely), then war between the two was inevitable. Impressed by the German V-2 rockets that had attacked London in 1944 and by the awesome power of the Hiroshima bomb, Borden predicted that future wars would be fought by rockets tipped with nuclear warheads. It followed, he thought, that the US should equip itself with the largest, most powerful nuclear arsenal it possibly could. In January 1949, after McMahon had replaced Hickenlooper as chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, he appointed Borden as the committee’s executive director. After his meeting with McMahon and Borden, Teller must have realised that, with men like this in positions of power, the ‘big forces working for compromise and for delay’ were not going to have it all their own way.

Throughout November 1949 a great and acrimonious battle took place in Washington over the H-bomb, the two sides seemingly evenly matched and the outcome unpredictable. Oppenheimer and Rabi had both believed it to be inevitable that the views of Teller and the Joint Committee would prevail, but, in adding their signatures to the GAC report, they had made such an outcome rather less certain. Another setback for Teller came when he received a phone call from Hans Bethe saying that he would not, after all, be prepared to join Teller’s proposed H-bomb project. Teller, as was his wont, saw in the decision the malignant influence of Oppenheimer, but, just as he was wrong to believe that it had been Oppenheimer who had swung opinion at the GAC meeting, so he was wrong again on this occasion. What had dissuaded Bethe from working on the hydrogen bomb was not Oppenheimer, but a conversation Bethe had had in Princeton with Victor Weisskopf and George Placzek. ‘Weisskopf vividly described to me a war with hydrogen bombs,’ Bethe later said, ‘what it would mean to destroy a whole 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.’ A few days after this conversation, he told Teller he would not join the project: ‘He was disappointed. I felt relieved.’

Another blow to Teller’s position came on 9 November, when the AEC met to consider what course of action they should recommend to the President in the light of the GAC report. The result was a three-to-two majority in favour of the GAC view: Pike and Smyth siding with Lilienthal in opposing the accelerated Super programme, and Gordon Dean supporting
Strauss, who, of course, was strongly in favour of such a programme. More hope for the GAC position came later that day, when the AEC recommendations were presented by Lilienthal to the President. According to John Manley, Lilienthal, after seeing the President, ‘came back feeling happy’ because Truman had said ‘that he was not going to be blitzed into this thing by the military establishment’.

On the other hand, the Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, who had in the past seen eye-to-eye with both Oppenheimer and Lilienthal, was unpersuaded by the GAC’s arguments, particularly those in the ‘majority report’, which, though they had been written by Conant, Acheson asked Oppenheimer to defend. ‘You know,’ Acheson told Gordon Arneson, ‘I listened as carefully as I knew how, but I don’t understand what “Oppie” was trying to say. How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm “by example”?’ Acheson had recently been appointed by President Truman onto a three-man special committee to consider the hydrogen-bomb question, the other members of which were David Lilienthal and the Defense Secretary, Louis Johnson, who was firmly convinced of the need for the United States to acquire the Super as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, Borden drafted a long letter to be sent to Truman on McMahon’s behalf, outlining in urgent tones the case for an immediate crash programme. ‘If we let Russia get the super first,’ the letter insisted, ‘catastrophe becomes all but certain – whereas, if we get it first, there exists a chance of saving ourselves.’

On 2–3 December 1949, the GAC reconvened to consider the issue again, but, Oppenheimer reported to the AEC, none of them wished to change the views they had expressed in October. Lewis Strauss, however, was not going to rely on Oppenheimer to convey his opinion. Instead, he wrote directly to the President, telling him: ‘I believe that the United States must be as completely armed as any possible enemy.’