Authors: Jennet Conant
Oppenheimer resumed his professorship at Caltech. He took up his old research in cosmic rays, but found it hard to shut the door on the exciting world of international postwar policy, and all too soon was drawn back into the fray. Looking back on that time, he admitted that teaching had lost its luster compared with the chance to play a pivotal role in the mounting conflict between the United States and Russia. “I was asked over and over both by the Executive and Congress for advice on atomic energy,” he said, sounding the part of the reluctant bride. “I had a feeling of deep responsibility, interest and concern.”
His opportunity came in January 1946, when the United Nations General Assembly convened in London and Russia voted along with the rest of the world to exchange atomic information and to establish the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission (UNAEC). Secretary of State James Byrnes wanted a committee to formulate American policy. Byrnes asked Undersecretary Dean Acheson to head it and appointed Bush, Conant, Groves, and John J. McCloy as members. Acheson persuaded David Lilienthal, then head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, and a superb administrator, to chair an advisory panel on all the facts bearing on international arms control. Oppenheimer’s name was immediately put forward as a logical choice.
Herbert S. Marks, a brilliant legal aide to Acheson, was to assist the panel, and he introduced Oppenheimer to Lilienthal. Marks, who would soon marry Oppie’s pretty young secretary, Anne Wilson, arranged for Lilienthal and the physicist to meet at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C. The erudite Los Alamos director immediately struck Lilienthal as “an extraordinary personage,” as he noted in his journal: “He [Oppie] walked back and forth making funny ‘hugh’ sounds between sentences and phrases … a mannerism quite strange, very strange…. I left liking him, greatly impressed with his flash of mind, but rather disturbed by the flow of words.” After another meeting the next day, Lilienthal was so impressed with Oppenheimer he later gushed: “He is worth living a lifetime just to know mankind has been able to produce such a being. We may have to wait another hundred years for the second one to come off the line.”
Oppenheimer was recruited to join what became known as the famous Lilienthal board of consultants. On January 28, 1947, the group went to work. Oppenheimer acted as the advisory panel’s tutor and began what amounted to an intensive course in nuclear physics. By March 7, after long and hard labor, they had completed what came to be called the Acheson-Lilienthal report, though it was largely authored by Oppenheimer. Oppie rejected earlier proposals suggested after Hiroshima that all nations outlaw the bomb and create international inspectors to ensure no nation was manufacturing one. Instead, he argued that the only workable system of safeguards required an international agency with authority over all atomic energy work, including the construction of reactors, separation plants, and laboratories, as well as the raw materials needed to make bombs. In typical Oppie fashion, he swayed everyone to his way of thinking, and the committee advanced his proposals with almost complete unanimity. After thorough discussion, and the incorporation of a number of changes, Acheson endorsed the report as “a foundation on which to build,” and the plan was adopted as official U.S. policy.
Groves, who had objected to the scientific panel in the first place, knew exactly what he was up against. He had utilized Oppenheimer’s persuasive powers to his advantage in the past, and now found himself in the unfortunate position of arguing against him on the issue of international control. “Everyone genuflected,” he complained later. “Lilienthal got so bad he would consult Oppie on what tie to wear in the morning.” Groves regarded the plan as overly optimistic and unworkable. It recommended “step-by-step co-operation with the other powers rather than for the first steps to be taken by the United States,” Groves noted, adding, “This was not our usual diplomatic approach.”
Even though the response to the Acheson-Lilienthal report was overwhelmingly favorable, with Alfred Friendly of
The Washington Post
writing that the statesmanlike report offered hope for lifting the “Great Fear” that had descended over the world since Hiroshima, it came in for some sharp criticism. Conservatives denounced the plan as a transparent scheme to hand over atomic secrets to the Russians. The columnist Dorothy Thompson dismissed Oppenheimer’s vision of an international authority as an “Elysian daydream” and suggested he was better suited to those mythical fields than the real-world business of making new law.
Much to the Acheson-Lilienthal group’s dismay, President Truman appointed the feisty seventy-five-year-old financier Bernard Baruch to present the plan to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission. A respected, conservative elder statesman, Baruch had little or no knowledge of the technical complexities of the subject. He immediately proceeded to introduce changes that distorted Oppenheimer’s whole plan, minimizing the joint task of developing atomic power for peaceful uses and emphasizing the punishment of violators of the control treaty. Oppenheimer, who advocated a conciliatory approach to Russia, was so distressed by the choice of the hard-liner Baruch that he refused to act as his chief scientific advisor. “That was the day I gave up hope,” he said later, “but that was not the time for me to say so publicly.”
Making matters worse, just two weeks after Baruch unveiled the American plan for international control on June 14, dramatically announcing to the delegates of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission that they were gathered there “to make a choice between the quick and the dead,” the United States went ahead with the first of two atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, in the Pacific. Oppenheimer had objected as soon as the tests were announced and wrote Truman a strongly worded memo questioning the wisdom of conducting the tests while simultaneously trying to seek military control. He argued that the trials were both counterproductive and a waste of money. The Bikini tests would cost $100 million, and for less than a million the scientists could simulate the blast’s effect on a warship. But after Hiroshima, the navy had convinced the administration that it was vital that they learn exactly what a nuclear weapon could do to their fleet, and the president had agreed. So on July 1, 1946, eleven and a half months after Trinity, America dropped an atomic bomb over a group of warships anchored in the lagoon of Bikini Atoll. Somewhat disappointingly, the first test bomb—which produced the classic purple mushroom cloud form—succeeded only in sinking a destroyer and two transport vessels. A beneath-the-surface test followed on July 25, producing a huge column of water that was reportedly far more impressive to the official observers, including military experts, congressmen, scientists, foreign dignitaries, and an entire shipload of journalists.
However ill timed the Bikini tests were, Oppenheimer regarded Baruch as an even greater threat to the success of the negotiations. Baruch’s dogmatic approach, and his insistence upon the principle that violators of the treaty should have no power of veto to protect themselves from punishment, stalemated the talks. He insisted all decisions had to be carried by a majority vote, or the organization would become “no more than a debating society.” The Russians may never have accepted the agreement, but Baruch’s heavy-handed tactics gave them the excuse they needed to say that the Americans were negotiating in bad faith. They dug in their heels, refusing to consider the removal of the veto—and privately counted the months until they could duplicate what the Manhattan Project had produced. The Soviets, thanks to Klaus Fuchs’ funneling of Los Alamos’s atomic secrets, were confident the American monopoly on nuclear weapons was only temporary. Baruch did not succeed in forcing a decision. When the delegates of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission finally voted on the plan on the last day of December, the Soviet Union abstained.
Oppenheimer sat on the sidelines at the first meeting of the UN Atomic Energy Commission, held in the gymnasium of Hunter College, and watched the proceedings with a sinking heart. He knew the Russians would reject the plan as presented and saw his last slim hope of warding off a nuclear arms race disappear. America would keep building more and better bombs, assuring itself of its military superiority in the transition period, until a treaty could be ratified. It would continue to hold tight to its atomic secrets in the vain belief that they actually were secrets and that other countries would not soon catch up. Disarmament looked to be a hopeless cause. Oppenheimer’s dream of controlling his creation, and using it to build a lasting world peace, was all but dead.
Tired and disillusioned, he returned to his ranch in the Pecos for solace. During his weeklong holiday, Dorothy joined him and Kitty for dinner one night at La Fonda. At one point, Oppie had to leave the table to take an important call from Washington. When he returned, he had lost his appetite. The caller had just informed him of the Soviets’ latest obdurate stance at the United Nations. “It’s finished,” he said with disgust, pushing his plate away. “Russia wants world conquest.”
Over the previous year, Dorothy and the remaining members of the laboratory staff had followed Oppenheimer’s adventures in Washington with both admiration and trepidation. They had applauded his efforts to control weapons of mass destruction and prevent future wars, quoted from his speeches and interviews with pride, and blamed his failures on the political climate. Many of the old guard, like Dorothy, had come to regard Oppenheimer as the patron saint of the mesa, spreading the word that physicists should leave behind the “devil’s work of making armaments” and get back to their “real work—the sober, consecrated task of penetrating the unknown.” But while he was off doing God’s work, Los Alamos had gone into a steady decline, and it was hard for some not to feel that their former leader had abandoned them. As 1945 came to a close with no clear resolution, and no congressional vote on atomic energy legislation, people began to question the laboratory’s reason for being. The division leaders had all left for greener pastures, to the promise of better salaries and housing, leaving only a few experienced hands to man an operation that was seriously shorthanded. Army interference had increased, and there was widespread discontent.
By early 1946, Los Alamos was on the brink of collapse. The infrastructure of the hastily constructed town was failing. The generators were on their last legs, and the power outages became more frequent than when the laboratory was in full gear. The water shortage, a chronic problem in the war years, had worsened. The winter had been particularly cold, and the plastic pipeline carrying the water from Guaje Canyon to the post, which for reasons of economy had been laid on the surface of the ground, had frozen. The army instituted its usual conservation orders, and for weeks the use of all toilets and bathing facilities was suspended. At the height of the emergency, trucks had to haul untreated water up the mountain from the Rio Grande, and the army doled it out in pails. Doc Barnett, who had been dispensing typhoid booster shots at the post hospital, finally phoned Washington and warned that he would not be held responsible for the public health consequences if something was not done at once.
Before it was over, the crisis caused both the army and Los Alamos authorities considerable embarrassment, and wrecked a long-planned celebration formally introducing the secret community to Santa Fe society. Dorothy, working with a Santa Fe citizens’ committee, had helped arrange the special evening at the Museum of Anthropology, opposite her house. There was a program of speeches featuring Phil Morrison and Victor Weisskopf, to be followed by a question-and-answer period and an elegant dinner in one of the museum rooms. Afterward, the scientists were besieged with invitations to come to the homes of the city’s cultivated benefactors, who were fascinated by the atomic scientists who had been kept under wraps for so long. As usual, Dorothy acted as go-between, sending word that two dozen scientists and their wives had been invited to a dinner, and posting sign-up sheets on the bulletin board of the ALAS office.
To reciprocate, Rose Bethe and Jean Bacher persuaded security to allow them to throw a party and treat a group of Santa Fe’s leading citizens to a tour of their mystery town. “When permission was given, Dorothy McKibbin helped us make out the list of guests and phoned them from her office at 109 East Palace,” recalled Bernice Brode. Dorothy briefed the visitors on security and the pass system, and arranged transportation. Then the water shortage became acute, and with the taps dry and toilets out of order, the party had to be canceled. Dorothy, who had to be the bearer of the bad news, reported back that the good citizens of Santa Fe were crushed. Feeling thoroughly chastened, the Hill wives decided to make the best of a bad situation and go ahead with the planned festivities. Their visitors would have to take them as they were, unbathed and unshaven. Dorothy called everyone back to say the party was on again, and the Santa Feans started arriving at the East Gate for their promised tour and cocktails at the Tellers’. Another of the project stars, Johnny von Neumann, was on hand to charm the old ladies.
As it turned out, Los Alamos made quite an impression. “All the guests had been so appalled at our town that they were in a state of shock,” recalled Brode. One woman told her, “I can’t get over it. Such nice people living in such a place all this time. Incredible, my dear, unbelievable, we had no idea.” But Dorothy made everyone on the Hill feel much better when she phoned a couple of days later with an update. “The city of Santa Fe was now divided into two parts,” she reported, “those who had seen and those who had not seen.”
To remedy the situation, Groves ordered the construction of wells, pipelines, and pumping stations to bring water to a new one-million-gallon steel storage tank. He also got approval for the construction of three hundred units of commercial-grade housing, so the laboratory scientists could move out of their hovels. This was the first step in what would be a long process to turn the hodgepodge military installation into a civilized town with sidewalks, paved roads, planned business centers, and utilities. His move precipitated by several months an executive order, issued on the last day of 1946, ensuring that the Los Alamos site would become permanent. It was decided the routine military work of producing bombs and preparing them for Bikini bomb tests, which had drained the lab’s resources for the past year, would no longer be handled by the laboratory. Los Alamos would be devoted to research on atomic bombs, as well as the prospects for more powerful weaponry, including Teller’s Super. For reasons of morale, there would also be studies on applications of atomic energy for peaceful uses. The lab would still be doing classified work, but security would not be as stringent as during the war.