Authors: Brian Van DeMark
Having failed to enlist Fermi, Teller turned next to Bethe. If he could convince someone of Bethe’s stature to work on the superbomb, other physicists could be persuaded to work on it, too. Bethe seldom suffered from hesitation or indecision, but he did when Teller arrived in Ithaca in late September 1949 seeking his help. The two sat up late into the night in the living room of Bethe’s home discussing the issue. Autumn had come early to Ithaca that year and the temperature outside was as cool as it was in the room. “I had very great internal conflicts about what I should do,” Bethe remembered. On the one hand, the superbomb was a seductive technical challenge. It meant working with other top scientists and having access to powerful new electronic computers reserved for military research. It also meant the likelihood of exciting discoveries. And there was a political consideration: Bethe worried that Stalin might blackmail the world if he alone had it. “On the other hand,” as he later said, “it seemed to me that it was a very terrible undertaking to develop a still bigger bomb.”
18
Undecided, Bethe talked things over with his wife, Rose. She reminded him that he had helped make an atomic bomb only because the western democracies were at war with Nazi Germany. Then, motioning toward their two small children, Henry and Monica, asleep in the next room, she asked him if he wanted them to grow up in a world with superbombs. “She felt that the atomic bomb was bad enough, and that increasing its power a thousand times was simply irresponsible,” recalled Bethe. “‘You don’t want to do this.’”
19
But Bethe was unsure. “It seemed to me that the development of thermonuclear weapons would not solve any of the difficulties that we found ourselves in and yet I was not quite sure whether I should refuse.” He decided to call Oppenheimer, whose judgment he respected, for advice. Oppenheimer suggested he and Teller come visit him in Princeton. Two days later, the three of them met in Oppenheimer’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study. It was a far cry from Oppenheimer’s spartan office at Los Alamos, where the three had met together often during the war. The bright, well-appointed room looked out over broad green meadows fringed with trees aflame with the golden tints of autumn. At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer had resembled the enthusiastic leader of a rugged pioneer settlement. Now he reminded Bethe of a restrained country gentleman receiving his guests at a stately manor.
Oppenheimer said nothing as Teller presented his case, either out of caution in Teller’s presence or because he did not want to say anything to influence Bethe—or both. When Teller finished, he and Oppenheimer mildly debated, but Oppenheimer did not mount much of a counterattack, which was unusual for him. Perhaps Oppenheimer believed he did not need to argue what he thought was obvious, but it was, at least with regard to the other guest, a tactical mistake. “I did not get from him the advice that I was hoping to get,” Bethe recalled. “I did not get from him advice to decide me either way.”
20
Teller, who was convinced that Oppenheimer had been using his clout to discourage physicists from working on the superbomb, was elated by his silence. Before going to Princeton, he recalled later, “I had expressed to Bethe the worry that we are going to talk to Oppenheimer, and after that you will not come. When we left the office, Bethe turned to me and smiled and he said, ‘You see, you can be quite satisfied. I am still coming.’”
21
From Oppenheimer’s institute office, Bethe walked over to the university campus, where a conference was underway. When he reached the conference hall, he ran into Szilard, who greeted him by saying, “Ah, here is Dr. Bethe from Los Alamos.”
22
Szilard’s remark was carefully calculated. He knew Bethe was sensitive about his weapons work, and he sought to stir Bethe’s conscience against the superbomb by embarrassing him in front of his peers, many of whom opposed its development. “I protested that I was not at Los Alamos,” recalled Bethe, “and didn’t know if I wanted to go back there.”
MIT theoretical physicist Victor Weisskopf was also at the conference. A close friend of Bethe since prewar days in Europe, “Vicky” Weisskopf had eschewed weapons work since the war. He and Bethe took a long walk around the Princeton campus the next evening. Weisskopf imagined the horrors of a war fought with superbombs for his friend as they crunched through the autumn leaves. “Vicky vividly described to me what it would mean to destroy a whole city like New York with one bomb,” Bethe recalled. “We both had to agree that after such a war even if we were to win it, the world would not be like the world we wanted to preserve. We would lose the things we were fighting for. This was a very long conversation and a very difficult one for both of us.” But it clarified things for Bethe. “Your discussion with me last weekend was most wholesome,” he wrote Weisskopf. “I felt very much better after talking to you.”
23
Bethe’s struggle with his conscience was over. He phoned Teller with his decision. “Edward, I’ve been thinking it over,” said Bethe. “I can’t come after all.”
“I felt relieved,” he recalled later.
24
Teller was sad, disappointed, and angry—but not at Bethe or Weisskopf. As he would increasingly do, with or without evidence, he found his enemy in the form of his former boss. “I knew it after the meeting with Oppenheimer,” he grumbled.
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Bethe explained his decision later. “It seemed to me then and it seems to me now that it was the wrong thing to do, that we should not have escalated. It seems to me now very clear that we should have developed the atomic bomb during the war when we had a desperate situation with the Nazis. But in 1949 vis-à-vis the Russians we still held the cards of greater production [and] greater delivery capability of nuclear weapons. So I think the right direction would have been to say no, we are not going to do it. We may do some further research on it, but let’s not make it a crash program. We really didn’t need it, but when we embarked on it, I think it was one of the many examples of overkill that we indulged in in those days.”
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While Teller sought to enlist Fermi’s and Bethe’s help, Lawrence lobbied for the superbomb in Washington. One of his first stops was Capitol Hill, where he met with the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, including its powerful chairman, Connecticut Democratic senator Brien McMahon. Lawrence warned McMahon that Stalin would go all out to develop a superbomb and that the Soviet Union might be ahead in the race. For the first time in his life, he said, he was afraid that America might lose a war—unless Washington undertook a crash program to build a superbomb. Lawrence also lobbied his high-level contacts at the Pentagon. “It would be disastrous,” he warned those close to the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “if the Soviets produced a hydrogen bomb before the United States.”
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Lawrence’s next stop was New York, where he went to see Rabi at Columbia. Lawrence was accompanied by Rad Lab associate Luis Alvarez, who recounted their meeting with Rabi in his diary that evening. Rabi was “very happy at our plans,” Alvarez wrote. “He is worried, too.” According to Alvarez, Rabi had told them, “It is certainly good to see the first team back in. You fellows have been playing with your cyclotron and nuclei for four years and it is certainly time you got back to work.” Rabi’s recollection was more tentative. “I felt that some answer must be made in some form to regain our lead. There were two directions in which one could look: either the realization of the super or an intensification of the effort on fission weapons.” But Rabi felt Lawrence and Alvarez had already made up their minds:
They were extremely optimistic. They are both very optimistic gentlemen…. They had been to Los Alamos and talked to Dr. Teller, who gave them a very optimistic estimate about the [superbomb]. So they were all keyed up to go bang into it…. I generally find myself when I talk with these two gentlemen in a very uncomfortable position. I like to be an enthusiast. I love it. But those fellows are so enthusiastic that I have to be conservative. So it always puts me in an odd position [where I have to] say, “Now, now, there, there,” and that sort of thing. So I was not in agreement in the sense that I felt they were, as usual, overly optimistic.
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When the meeting ended, Lawrence flew back to Washington and urged the Joint Chiefs of Staff to declare their support for development of the superbomb.
Once Lawrence had brought the superbomb to Washington’s attention, the idea went to the AEC’s General Advisory Committee (GAC) for study and recommendation. Government advisory committees are almost always more show than substance, but the GAC was different. Composed of a panel of nine leading American scientists, the GAC had established itself since its creation in 1947 as the most influential source of advice to the government on atomic weapons.
*
Its chairman was Oppenheimer, who had been chosen unanimously by his colleagues. The GAC was not Oppenheimer’s puppet, however, because its membership also included Fermi and Rabi. Fermi worked hard and conscientiously on the GAC, but without the pleasure that Oppenheimer felt in counseling on policy—he was a scientist, not a politician. Although the atomic bomb had shaken him up, Fermi remained cold and clinical, even a little ruthless, in the way he disdained human emotions and went directly to the facts in deciding any question. Oppenheimer assessed him cogently: “Not a philosopher. Passion for clarity. He was simply unable to let things be foggy. Since they always are, this kept him pretty active.”
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Fermi believed the superbomb could be built if America set itself to accomplishing the task, but he feared the devastating consequences of its potential use. It was far wiser, Fermi thought, to try to outlaw this weapon that did not yet exist.
The afternoon of Friday, October 28, 1949, was gray and drizzly when the GAC convened in a cavernous conference room on the second floor of AEC headquarters at 19th Street and Constitution Avenue on the Mall near the White House.
*
The wood-paneled room looked out on the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial, but no one was in the mood to peer out the windows that day. Oppenheimer began the meeting by stating the matter to be considered: the prospects and implications of developing a superbomb. The GAC spent the rest of the afternoon talking with top experts. George Kennan, director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and an influential and experienced specialist in Soviet affairs, told the committee that it might be possible to negotiate an arms control agreement with Russia. Next they heard from Bethe, who stressed that many technical problems relating to the superbomb remained to be solved. He also talked about his fear that a war fought with superbombs would destroy what it was intended to preserve.
Oppenheimer opened the next morning’s session by reading aloud Seaborg’s letter. He then asked each committee member to express his view about what to do. Not everyone had made up his mind, and Oppenheimer was careful not to lead or to influence them. A member of the GAC recalled:
Dr. Oppenheimer did not express his point of view until after all the rest of the members of the committee had expressed themselves. It was clear, however, as the individual members did express their opinions as we went around the table, that while there were differing points of view, different reasons, different methods of thinking, different methods of approach to the problem, that each member came essentially to the same conclusion, namely, there were better things the United States could do at that time than to embark upon this super program…. Each person took five to ten minutes or thereabouts to express his views.
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Oppenheimer spoke last. “There was a surprising unanimity—to me very surprising—that the United States ought not to take the initiative at that time in an all-out program,” he said. Then: “I am glad you feel this way, for if it had not come out this way, I would have had to resign as chairman.”
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The fact that there
was
a consensus on such a contentious issue underscored the physicists’ moral qualms about building a superbomb. (But there was not unanimity, since Seaborg, in his letter, favored going ahead.)
Four of the five AEC commissioners then joined the GAC at this point.
*
For an hour the two groups discussed the superbomb. It was a soul-searching session. Many GAC members said they could not see how any country could go from one weapon of mass destruction to another a thousand times more destructive and retain any normal perspective with regard to other countries and world peace. They felt as if they were being asked to endorse an undertaking that might prove to bring down the curtain on human civilization.
At 11:00
A.M.
the Joint Chiefs arrived. They came with a very different perspective. Without the superbomb, they asserted, there would be nothing the U.S. military could do to deter or prevent Russia from overrunning Western Europe. They considered a war with the Soviet Union “likely” in four to five years. “Further negotiation with the Russians,” they sniffed, “is useless.” But they had great difficulty articulating the actual military value of a superbomb. When Oppenheimer asked the JCS chairman, army general Omar Bradley, what military advantages he could see in a superbomb over the largest atomic bombs, Bradley answered, “Only psychological.” When Lilienthal asked air force general Lauris Norstad why not simply increase the production of atomic bombs instead of building an even more destructive weapon, Norstad had no answer. The group then broke for lunch.