The Age of Radiance (47 page)

Physicist German Goncharov: “An absolutely insane task was set for us not to lag behind the United States by one iota. We had to have everything the Americans had. There couldn’t be the slightest gap. And so as soon as new information arrived about the work in this or that direction, we absolutely had to do the same thing.” On March 1, 1955, Tesla exploded with seven kilotons; on March 7, Turk did forty kilotons; and Russian scientists began voicing the same regrets as had so many from Los Alamos. Sakharov: “When you see the burned birds who are withering on the scorched steppe, when you see how the shock wave blows away buildings like houses of cards, when you feel the reek of splintered bricks, when you sense melted glass, you immediately think of times of war. . . . All of this triggers an irrational yet very strong emotional impact. How not to start thinking of one’s responsibility at this point?” Physicist Nikolay Larionov: “Even if you strike first, you will perish together with the defeated side. That is the paradox of our time.”

Just as with First Lightning, the Soviet’s fusion tests terrified a coterie of American policymakers. A committee headed by General James Doolittle suggested offering the Kremlin two years to come to an agreement, and to launch a nuclear first strike if it refused, while a Joint Chiefs’ study group thought the United States should “deliberately precipitate war with the USSR in the near future . . . before the USSR could achieve a large enough thermonuclear capability to be a real menace to [the] Continental US.” Eisenhower passed on both attempts to jump-start global holocaust. Instead, the president now wanted to offer the Russians Vannevar Bush’s original test-ban agreement. Eisenhower’s AEC director, Lewis Strauss, talked him out of it.

The Doolittle Report paved the way for a new era in American foreign policy as it proposed, “We are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. . . . [American citizens need to] be made acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally
repugnant philosophy.” Even Eisenhower had to agree: “I have come to the conclusion that some of our traditional ideas of international sportsmanship are scarcely applicable in the morass in which the world now flounders. Truth, honor, justice, consideration for others, liberty for all—the problem is how to preserve them . . . when we are opposed by people who scorn . . . these values. I believe that we can do it, but we must not confuse these values with mere procedures, even though these last may have at one time held almost the status of moral concepts.”

The ratcheting levels of American terror in the face of the Soviets’ presumably malevolent intentions can readily be seen in Eisenhower’s 1958 State of the Union address, as Ike was one of the least fearmongering of Cold War leaders: “What makes the Soviet threat unique in history is its all-inclusiveness. Every human activity is pressed into service as a weapon of expansion. Trade, economic development, military power, arts, science, education, the whole world of ideas—all are harnessed to this same chariot of expansion. The Soviets are, in short, waging total cold war.” And Washington’s paranoia escalated all over again when Nikita Khrushchev repeatedly threatened to annihilate the West. In one incident during Senator Hubert Humphrey’s visit to the Kremlin, Khrushchev asked where the American politician was from, then used a blue pencil to mark Minneapolis, explaining,
“That’s so I don’t forget to order them to spare the city when the rockets fly.” In August of 1957 the Soviet Union launched its first intercontinental ballistic missile—ICBM—and then, on October 4,
Sputnik
, the first man-made earth satellite.

But it was all a magnificent bluff. The premier’s rocket-scientist son, Sergei Khrushchev, later admitted,
“We threatened with missiles we didn’t have.” Their long-range bombers could attack the United States, but only as one-way suicide missions, and their missiles couldn’t accurately strike their targets. By the end of 1959, the Soviets had a total of six long-range-missile sites, and each missile needed twenty hours to prepare for launch, meaning that the total number of Soviet missiles available to attack the United States before retaliation was . . . six.

I
n the traditional version of Los Alamos’s black postscript—the history of Robert Oppenheimer’s security-clearance hearings—the founder of the mesa is portrayed as a martyr both to science and to arms control, necessarily atoning for the sin of having created our nuclear plague. Foreign-policy adviser George Kennan summed up this position:
“On no one did there ever
rest with greater cruelty the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength. . . . In the dark days of the early fifties . . . I asked him whether he had not thought of taking residence outside this country. His answer, given to me with tears in his eyes: ‘Damn it, I happen to love this country.’ ”

In 1947, after Oppenheimer was named chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee, the FBI turned over the twelve-pound file of its surveillance to the AEC. Some of the agency’s new board members went through these documents and became so alarmed they went to meet directly with J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover said he was convinced that Oppenheimer had turned away from communism and was worthy of a security clearance . . . but the same assurances could not be made for his brother, Frank. Even so, for eight years after World War II, the FBI, at the personal insistence of Hoover, generated another eight thousand pages or so from its spying on J. Robert Oppenheimer.

On June 7, 1949, Oppie appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and so charmed the congressmen that they all rose from their seats at the end of the session to shake his hand. Two days later, he testified before Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, which was deciding whether the AEC should allow the export of radioisotopes to foreign nations. The sole AEC commissioner who thought this was a peril was the balding, moon-faced Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss—financier at Kuhn, Loeb, aide-de-camp to President Herbert Hoover, “troubleshooter” for Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, cobalt experimenter with Leo Szilard, and board member of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. In testimony employing his patented withering, Oppenheimer showed Strauss to be a fool: “No man can force me to say you cannot use these isotopes for atomic energy. You can use a shovel for atomic energy. In fact you do. You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy. In fact you do. But to get some perspective, the fact is that during the war and after the war these materials have played no significant part and in my knowledge no part at all.” David Lilienthal remembered Strauss’s reaction: “There was a look of hatred there that you don’t see very often in a man’s face.”

Physicist Max Born said that Oppenheimer
“was a man of great talent, and he was conscious of his superiority in a way which was embarrassing and led to trouble. . . . Vast insecurities lay forever barely hidden beneath his charismatic exterior, whence came an arrogance and occasional cruelty befitting neither his age nor his stature.” Lewis Strauss was apparently just the kind of man who brought out Robert’s arrogance, and cruelty. The year
before, Oppenheimer had politically maneuvered to keep Strauss from getting a stronger leadership position at Princeton. The year after, in 1950, at Strauss’s fifty-fourth birthday party, when the financier tried to introduce his children to the father of the atomic bomb, the physicist snubbed them. Strauss had a global reputation for being ruthless and vindictive, which Oppenheimer was possibly unaware of, and his great achievement with Trinity and the resulting public hubbub perhaps inspired him to feel invincible. But such behavior explains why Oppenheimer wasn’t a wholly innocent bystander—or was, at the very least, suffering from a classic level of hubris—in the drama that would end with his public martyrdom.

During this period, Edward Teller wanted to create a Super measured in megatons, not kilotons, and so did nothing further with his workable Alarm Clock fusion bomb design. Instead, his attempt to make the ultimate thermonuclear weapon, pre-Ulam, was going nowhere, and on top of feeling like a failure, Teller interpreted the lack of support of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee and its chief, Oppenheimer, as a brutal rejection. In the spring of 1952, Teller repeatedly went to the Albuquerque FBI office with such information as that
“[Oppenheimer] delayed or hindered development of H-bomb from 1945 to 1950 by opposing it on moral grounds.” Oppenheimer’s opposition, Teller thought, was not due to any subversive intent “but rather to [a] combination of reasons including personal vanity in not desiring to see his work on A-bomb done better on H-bomb, and also because he does not feel H-bomb is politically desirable. Teller also feels [Oppenheimer has] never gotten over the shock of first A-bomb being dropped. . . . A lot of people believe Oppenheimer opposed the development of the H-bomb on direct orders from Moscow. Teller states he would do most anything to see [Oppenheimer] separated from General Advisory Committee because of his poor advice and policies regarding national preparedness and because of his delaying of the development of H-bomb.”

At an interview with AEC public information officer Charter Heslep,
“Teller feels deeply that [Oppenheimer’s] ‘unfrocking’ must be done or else—regardless of the outcome of the current hearings—scientists may lose their enthusiasm for the [nuclear weapons] program,” and Teller told the Joint Committee on Atomic Affairs that “were Robert, by any chance found to be disloyal (in the sense of transmitting information) he could of course do more damage to the program than any other single individual in the country.”

In an aria of threat inflation, Teller then told Lewis Strauss that the Soviets were rapidly moving forward with implosion research and that, any day
now, the United States would cede nuclear superiority to Moscow. This news enraged and terrified Strauss. Strauss told Teller that Oppenheimer “had been instrumental in bringing to Los Alamos a number of men known to him to be Communists. It would be reasonable to suppose that they were doing what Fuchs and others did, viz., passing on to the Soviets everything they could discover. Oppenheimer’s later decision, therefore, to do what he could to prevent the United States from developing the Super [meaning the various times he had voted against Teller along with the rest of the AEC’s committee] was a decision reached in the knowledge that such weapon data as we then had were in the hands of men whose leaning to the Soviets he knew. Consequently, if he had been able to block the development of the weapon by the United States, its denial to the Russians was beyond his control. It is hardly conceivable that the consequences of such a condition could have been overlooked by a mind as agile as his.”

In a speech given on February 17, 1953, Oppenheimer insisted that government secrecy about nuclear science and weapons did not protect anyone; instead, it led to ignorance, fear, magical thinking, gossip, and paranoia, so that “we may anticipate a state of affairs in which the two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. . . . We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.” Here was the Atomic Age’s creator, the most famous scientist in America after Einstein, calling defense policy ignorant and foolish. Eisenhower was nearly alone in Washington in thinking that candor was a good suggestion and the scorpions a good analogy; others thought the speech treasonous and insane.

To those arrayed against Oppenheimer, there had to be a pattern, there had to be meaning. Why was it that the man at the very center of the nation’s atomic weaponry program opposed the ultimate hydrogen bomb, argued against the air force’s nuclear-powered bombers, and called civilian nuclear power plants
“a dangerous engineering undertaking. I was astonished to know that many people were wishing for this proving ground in their state”? Suffering from what is today called conspiracism, some of the capital’s elite began to wonder, was the great hero of Los Alamos actually a traitor, secretly working for the Soviets to ensure they would win the arms race?

On May 25, 1953, when Eisenhower asked Lewis Strauss to replace Gordon Dean as AEC chairman, he accepted on the condition that Oppenheimer would no longer be “connected in any way” to the agency. After Strauss was sworn in, however, the president said, “Lewis, let us be certain
about this. My chief concern and your first assignment is to find some new approach to the disarming of atomic energy. . . . The world simply must not go on living in fear of the terrible consequences of nuclear war.” To the new chief of the AEC, this liberal directive was more evidence of Oppenheimer’s demonic and treasonous influence within the highest levels of Washington.

Lewis Strauss began meeting secretly with the twenty-eight-year-old, square-jawed, all-American William Borden—executive director of Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, who, while a student at Yale, had written a nuclear horror fantasy,
There Will Be No Time
—to amass evidence against Oppenheimer. Strauss arranged for the FBI to dramatically increase its Oppenheimer surveillance, bugging and wiretapping Oppie’s home, his Princeton office, and even his lawyer’s office, such a breach that the FBI Newark supervisor wrote to headquarters questioning the phone taps’ legality, “in view of the fact that [the taps] might disclose attorney-client relations.” Washington responded that it was fine to record Oppenheimer’s conversations with his attorneys since, at any moment, he might defect to Moscow. Strauss then ensured that the resulting transcripts were set to a security clearance higher than that held by Oppenheimer, so that only Strauss and his allies would have access to them.