Pandora's Keepers (41 page)

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.”
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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?”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.

CHAPTER 9

The Superbomb Debate

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.

Fearing a national panic, Oppenheimer urged Washington to preempt Moscow’s announcement of the test by breaking the news to the U.S. people first. Many Americans, including those in high places, had great difficulty believing that the Soviets could achieve such a technological feat on their own. Truman, dubious, grudgingly accepted the scientists’ conclusion and released news of the Soviet bomb on September twenty-third. That same evening, Oppenheimer received a call from Teller, who was back at Los Alamos doing consulting work. “What should we do now?” Teller asked Oppenheimer excitedly. “Just go back and keep working,” said Oppenheimer. Then, after a long pause, he added: “Keep your shirt on.”
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Teller’s anxious “What should we do now?” became the question of the day in Washington as well. The Russian bomb fed fears triggered by earlier Soviet actions: the occupation of Eastern Europe and the use of the Red Army to install governments controlled by local communist parties in East Germany, Hungary, Romania, and Poland. While the United States and its Western European allies made their own contributions to Cold War tensions, the Soviet Union under Stalin readily appeared to be a dangerous totalitarian regime. Coming at a time when the Cold War was rapidly worsening—the Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia, the Berlin Blockade, and Mao’s victory in China had all happened within the past year—Russia’s atomic test seemed the latest and most spectacular setback for the West against what it saw as a monolithic, aggressive communist axis stretching across Eurasia, encompassing half of the world’s people and threatening the rest. Combined with the Soviets’ development of long-range aircraft capable of reaching the United States, a Soviet atomic bomb promised to end America’s historic sense of invulnerability. Contributing to this vulnerability were fresh memories of Pearl Harbor. These anxieties about nuclear vulnerability fed American fears of the Soviet Union.

The answer that came back from many quarters within the American government and the American scientific establishment was to embark on a crash program to develop the superbomb. In the current crisis atmosphere, the superbomb seemed the best means for the United States to regain its lost nuclear supremacy.
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The destructive power of a superbomb was as revolutionary in respect to the atomic bomb as the latter was to conventional weapons. Unlike an atomic bomb, which used the explosive energy of fission (the splitting of uranium and plutonium isotopes by neutrons), a superbomb would use the explosive energy of
fusion
, in which the nuclei of two light atoms (usually isotopes of hydrogen such as deuterium or tritium)
^*
combined to form one, heavier nucleus. This combining, or thermonuclear fusion, of two atomic nuclei into one occurred only at extraordinarily high temperatures and pressures (for example, those found at the center of the sun) and released enormous—theoretically unlimited—amounts of heat, energy, and radiation, far greater even than fission.

Advocates of a superbomb, led by Teller, argued that it was only a matter of time before Russia developed one; America
must
have its own in order to avoid falling behind or being blackmailed. They further contended that the superbomb was morally no different from the atomic bomb, or any other weapon for that matter; it all depended on what policy makers did with them. Teller had voiced this view as far back as 1945. Terming moral opposition to the superbomb “a fallacy,” he had written to Fermi in October of that year: