Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (104 page)

On 17 February, Teller had written to Oppenheimer from Los Alamos, asking him to join the project. ‘Things have advanced to a desperate urgency here,’ he told him, ‘and I should be most anxious indeed if you could come and help us.’ Oppenheimer was not to be persuaded. He might be chairman of the advisory panel to the US body charged with implementing the policy of pushing ahead with the hydrogen bomb, but, such were the complications of those times, it did not follow that he himself would be prepared to work on the project.

While Teller was having trouble persuading his fellow scientists to work on the H-bomb, the urgency of beating the Soviets to it was deeply felt by politicians. On 10 March, Truman issued an order to the AEC for the thermonuclear weapons programme to be ‘regarded as a matter of the highest urgency’; specifically, the production of such weapons was to receive greater priority than the stockpiling of atomic weapons. Truman’s order set a goal of producing ten thermonuclear bombs a year.

In April 1950, the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
published an article by Bethe, who was, after all, the world’s greatest authority on thermonuclear processes, which contained a timely reminder that certain basic scientific problems needed to be solved before hydrogen bombs could be built, and that it was not at this point at all clear that those problems would be solved:

Talking of producing ten H-bombs a year, the subtext went, looked a little premature. It was as if, in 1939, before anyone knew whether an
atomic bomb could possibly be built, the US President had publicly announced a crash programme to build one, and then in 1944, before any tests had been carried out, the President had ordered Groves to pursue a goal of producing ten implosion bombs a year. The rest of Bethe’s article concentrated on the moral questions raised by the H-bomb, as did an article published in the May issue of the
Bulletin
by Robert Bacher. The following month, however, something happened to change Bethe’s mind: communist North Korea invaded South Korea.

Back in February, Bethe had written to Norris Bradbury, Oppenheimer’s successor as director of Los Alamos, explaining why he would not work on the hydrogen bomb. Even though it was, after Truman’s announcement, national policy to develop the H-bomb, Bethe told Bradbury: ‘I still believe that it is morally wrong and unwise for our national security to develop this weapon.’ Nevertheless, he concluded this letter by saying: ‘In case of war, I would obviously reconsider my position.’ True to his word, after the Korean War broke out, he decided, after all, to join Teller at Los Alamos to work on the H-bomb.

By the time Bethe joined the H-bomb project, Teller had succeeded in recruiting some extremely able people, including John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam and John Wheeler, all of whom were delighted by the arrival of Bethe. ‘With his wonderful virtuosity in mathematical physics,’ Ulam wrote, ‘and with his ability to solve analytical problems of nuclear physics, he helped significantly.’ The Los Alamos team was at that time in need of all the help they could get, since they had still not solved their main problem: how to create the enormously high temperatures needed to initiate the fusion process.

Bethe had not gone to Los Alamos hoping to solve the problem, but rather to prove that it could not be solved. The best possible outcome, he believed, would be that a hydrogen bomb turned out to be against the laws of physics. Indeed, in the summer of 1950 there was some reason to believe that the Super could not be made. For instance, it had been demonstrated mathematically that Teller’s design – what became known as the ‘classical Super’ – would not work. In March 1950, Ulam and his friend and colleague Cornelius Everett had presented Teller with the results of a long and tedious set of calculations they had performed, which gave the classical Super very little hope of initiating fusion. Teller, Ulam recalls, ‘was not easily reconciled to our results. I learned that the bad news drove him once to tears of frustration.’ Things got worse, from Teller’s point of view, when von Neumann reported that he had done the same set of calculations on his new computer in Princeton and the results tallied with those of Ulam and Everett. One day, when Ulam was visiting von Neumann at Princeton, they called on Oppenheimer, who had heard about these mathematical results and, according to Ulam, ‘seemed rather
glad to learn of the difficulties’. Despite everything, Teller, von Neumann and Ulam still believed that they could solve the initiation problem and that an H-bomb could be built. They scheduled for the following year a series of important experiments called the Greenhouse Tests. These would not test a bomb – they were still a very long way from having a bomb to test – but would have the more limited goal of trying to achieve the initiation of the fusion process.

Oppenheimer – no doubt because, like Bethe, he
hoped
an H-bomb could not be built – was convinced that the technical problems were insoluble, or, anyway, that it would take a long time to solve them. Much of what he said and did in these years, including the things that struck his opponents as evidence of disloyalty, was based on that conviction. One example is the work that he did, starting in the autumn of 1950, for something called the Long Range Objectives Panel. This was a committee set up by Robert LeBaron, the Deputy Secretary of Defense for atomic-energy matters and chairman of the Military Liaison Committee (whose job it was to liaise between the AEC and the military). Its purpose was to examine and report on the long-term role that nuclear weapons might play in foreign policy and in the formation of military tactics and strategy. Also on the panel were fellow H-bomb sceptics Robert Bacher and Charles Lauritsen, and several enthusiasts for the H-bomb, including Luis Alvarez, General Nichols of the army and General Wilson of the air force.

Both Alvarez and Wilson remember being shocked during the discussions of this panel at Oppenheimer’s attitude towards the hydrogen bomb. Alvarez remembers Oppenheimer saying: ‘We all agree that the hydrogen bomb program should be stopped, but if we were to stop it or to suggest that it be stopped, this would cause so much disruption at Los Alamos and in other laboratories where they are doing instrumentation work that I feel that we should let it go on, and it will die a natural death with the coming tests.’ When those tests failed, Alvarez remembers Oppenheimer saying, that ‘will be the natural time to chop the hydrogen-bomb program off’. Much less specifically, Wilson remembers:

So concerned was General Wilson about what he saw of Oppenheimer during these panel meetings that ‘I felt compelled to go to the Director of Intelligence to express my concern over what I felt was a pattern of action that was simply not helpful to national defense.’

The panel’s report, written by Oppenheimer and delivered in February 1951, emphasised – as Oppenheimer’s GAC report of the previous October had emphasised – the importance of tactical atomic weapons, which, it was claimed, were (as opposed to hydrogen bombs) theoretically sound, made efficient use of fissile material and were militarily more effective, both offensively and defensively. The feasibility of hydrogen bombs, the report pointed out, had not yet been demonstrated, and so the H-bomb programme had to be seen, despite the President’s public announcement of a crash programme and his urgent command to the AEC to make that programme its top priority, as a long-term project. ‘In fact,’ Oppenheimer wrote, ‘we believe that only a timely recognition of the long range character of the thermonuclear program will tend to make available for the basic studies of the fission weapon program the resources of the Los Alamos Laboratory.’

These words may have been written by Oppenheimer, but the report containing them was signed by all members of the panel, leading, some months later, to an enraged Teller demanding of Alvarez: ‘Luis, how could you have ever signed that report, feeling the way you do about hydrogen bombs?’ When Alvarez replied that he thought it was a harmless statement about the importance of small atomic bombs, Teller told him:

At about the same time as the Long Range Objectives Panel report was delivered, Oppenheimer published in the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
an article entitled ‘Comments on the Military Value of the Atom’, which, subject to the restraints of official secrecy, made available to the public the thinking that had gone into the report. ‘To the first impression that the atomic weapon was a decisive, an absolute military power,’ he begins, ‘there was a reaction: it is another weapon, it is “just another weapon”.’ Without once mentioning the hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer then seeks in this article to undermine the entire thinking behind strategic bombing (thereby undermining the only conceivable use the hydrogen bomb might have). When we think of the atomic bomb, Oppenheimer writes, we think ‘of the specific use that was made of it against Hiroshima and Nagasaki’:

As against this conception of the military use of atomic bombs, Oppenheimer rather cleverly quotes from a statement given in 1949 by Admiral Ralph Ofstie, in which he expresses the opinion that ‘strategic air warfare, as practiced in the past and as proposed in the future, is militarily unsound and of limited effect, and is morally wrong, and is decidedly harmful to the stability of the postwar world’. These views, Oppenheimer points out, were expressed before the Korean War, and now, because of that war: ‘Much of what was clear to Admiral Ofstie then has become clear to all of us today.’ He then goes on to suggest that using atomic bombs against military rather than civilian targets, though certainly not as desirable as the avoidance of war itself, was at least preferable to ‘the extreme form of the atom bomb as a strategic weapon’. The article ends with an account of Oppenheimer’s meeting with Nehru, India’s Prime Minister, during the latter’s visit to the United States in May 1950. When Oppenheimer took the opportunity to ask Nehru whether he had found any appreciation during his time in the States of the Hindu notion of control, or restraint, Nehru replied: ‘I cannot believe that any great people would be without it.’ The article ends with Oppenheimer’s declaration: ‘I believe the American people are a great people.’

In opposing the very concept of strategic bombing, Oppenheimer was setting his face against the prevailing trend of US military thinking and exposing himself to the wrath of some of the most powerful people in the US. A few months after the publication of this article he was given a chance to dig himself deeper into that hole when he was invited to join a research programme called ‘Project Vista’. This was a project that had grown out of exactly the kind of thinking that Oppenheimer had recommended in his
Bulletin
article. In September 1950, the much-decorated and very popular US army general James Gavin was charged with the task of investigating ‘the possible tactical employment of nuclear weapons’. This was three months into the Korean War, and the clear implication was that General Gavin would identify some way of using tactical atomic weapons in the Korean conflict. Gathering together a group of experts, among whom was Charles Lauritsen, Gavin and his group went to Korea to review the situation. On their return to the States, Lauritsen suggested forming a ‘study group of top scientists and military men’ to look into the possibility of using nuclear rockets to provide tactical air support to the troops on the ground.

At the same time Lee DuBridge had been approached by the air force
to consider the possibility of using the scientific expertise at Caltech to address both strategic and tactical problems faced by airmen. After discussing this with some of his colleagues, including Lauritsen, the ‘Caltech group’, as DuBridge put it in a letter to Willie Fowler, ‘expressed the feeling that it was not qualified or greatly interested in the strategic air problem, but that the tactical air problem, particularly the problem of close support of ground troops, was more nearly in line with our interests, and the group agreed to give the matter further thought’.

The result was an extraordinarily lucrative contract for Caltech: in return for a fee of $600,000, Caltech would conduct a nine-month research project, lasting from April to December 1951, to look into the problems of tactical warfare, both on the ground and in the air. Though the contract was with the army, all three services would be involved. Willie Fowler was appointed director of the project, and the base of operations was to be the Vista del Arroyo Hotel in Pasadena.

Although it grew out of the Korean conflict, Project Vista concentrated more and more of its attention on Europe, particularly after the beginning of what would turn out to be long and drawn-out armistice negotiations with the North Koreans in July 1951. What the scientists involved in Project Vista hoped to achieve was to divert US military thinking away from strategic bombing and towards the use of atomic weapons to provide tactical support. ‘All of us,’ Fowler recalled, ‘were rather opposed to strategic bombing, that is, to a complete dependence on SAC [Strategic Air Command] and were determined to acquaint the DOD [Department of Defense] with the fact that there were other ways of defending Europe.’