THE ATOM: The H-Bomb Delay

More than a year ago, two Washington reporters, piecing together many fragments from the public record of the hydrogen bomb’s history, concluded that: 1) there had been unnecessary delays in the construction of this weapon; 2) part of the delay had been traceable to opposition to the building of an H-bomb; 3) this opposition was not merely technical, but was associated with deep intragovernmental dissension, confusion and indecision over general weapons policy; 4) these struggles, in turn, have been bound up with larger conflicts about the strategic, political and moral aspects of the international scene; 5) as a result of the delay, the U.S. had narrowly missed losing its superiority of atomic weapons, the essential check on Communist aggression.

If these conclusions were right, the two reporters—James Shepley, chief of the TIME-LIFE Washington Bureau, and Clay Blair Jr., military reporter in that bureau—had glimpsed a piece of history that the public should be told. Correspondents Shepley and Blair decided that their account of a complex struggle needed book-length scope.

The Shepley-Blair report, The Hydrogen Bomb, is now the center of a roaring controversy. The book has been denounced by men of weight, including many leading atomic scientists. Certain journalists have said that the book implies a plot on the part of atomic scientists against the U.S. They have said that the book is part of an anti-intellectual wave that is making it impossible for scientists to work for the Government of the U.S.

Such a conflict would be even more serious than the H-bomb delay. For if the U.S. cannot continue to enlist the support of science, if it cannot solve the critical problems of the relationship between the national interest and the pursuit of knowledge, then the U.S. will not survive—and will not deserve to survive. These are not questions for scientists alone or for public officials alone; they affect everybody, and it is wholesome, though painful, that the Shepley-Blair report brings a much larger part of this important argument to public view.

The Limitations. The Shepley-Blair book begins with the following important statement of its own limitations: “A full assessment of the delay in development of the hydrogen bomb and its effect on the survival of the U.S. as a nation and upon the future of mankind will be impossible for some years to come. These reporters have not attempted to do so here, or to ascribe motives to the individuals responsible.”

Essentially, this promise is kept. It is possible to believe everything in the book without finding disloyalty in Robert Oppenheimer or any other man who appears in it (except confessed spies like Klaus Fuchs). In fact, those newspaper and magazine commentators who have mentioned the book without attacking it do not find it a story of a plot or a betrayal. The statement that the book describes or implies a plot comes from the book’s bitter critics. But confusion, indecision and bad judgment can do as much damage as plots. A lot of roads to the dead ends of history have been paved with good intentions.

Sin & Danger. Here is the road the book describes:

Soon after V-J day, the U.S. relaxed with the illusion that universal peace was at hand. In the case of many leading atomic physicists, this national mood was modified by their unique reaction to the atomic bomb that they had produced. Oppenheimer, in an eloquent and memorable sentence, described this feeling: “In some crude sense, which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

Most of the physicists entered the postwar period with 1) an intense desire to drop weapons work and get back to their universities, 2) a deep distrust of “the military” with whom they had been associated under circumstances very hard on the scientists, and 3) a resolve to expiate “the sin of Alamogordo” by influencing national policy in such a way that the atomic weapon would never be used again.

As the nation became more aware of the Communist threat, the main body of atomic-science leaders, Oppenheimer at their head, appear to have become increasingly uneasy about the degree of the free world’s dependence on their (sinful?) weapon. For whatever reasons, no encouragement was forthcoming from Oppenheimer and his leading associates when Physicist Edward Teller, fearing that the Russians would overtake U.S. A-bomb superiority, tried to speed up work on a more powerful kind of bomb.

Teller felt that he was running into objections of a nonscientific nature. There is much evidence in the statements and attitudes of scientists that their distrust of hardening U.S. political-military policies was connected with a fear that a thermonuclear bomb would intensify those policies. During the Gray board hearings, Oppenheimer was confronted with a letter he had written on Oct. 21, 1949 to Harvard President James B. Conant, calling the proposed H-bomb a “miserable thing,” expressing doubts as to its technical or military feasibility. Then he said that it was “really not the technical problem” that concerned him about Teller’s H-bomb proposal, but the danger that it would further “unbalance” war plans, and that it would be mistakenly looked upon “as the way to save the country and the peace.”

The Timetable. It is the Shepley-Blair thesis that the resistance of the scientists—and others—is reflected in the following chronology of events:

July 1945: Teller and Oppenheimer wrote a report that a thermonuclear bomb would be “probably feasible.”

Spring of 1946: A roundup conference of scientists at Los Alamos was titled: “Final Conference on the Super.” Discouraged at the lack of interest, Teller left Los Alamos. (Klaus Fuchs attended the conference.)

August 1949: The Russians achieved their first atomic blast.

Fall of 1949: Strenuous efforts by Teller and other nonconforming physicists to revive interest in a thermonuclear bomb to counter the Russian gain. Among nonscientists who allied themselves with Teller: Lewis Strauss, then a minority member of the AEC; the late Senator Brien McMahon, head of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy; Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson.

October 1949: The AEC’s General Advisory Committee (Robert Oppenheimer, chairman) rejected Teller’s proposal.

November 1949: President Truman asked AEC members for written opinions on whether or not to go ahead with an all-out effort to build a superbomb. He found two for, two against and one astraddle.

November and December 1949 and January 1950: The fight raged on while a special Truman committee—Johnson, Lilienthal and Secretary of State Acheson—failed to act.

January 1950: Klaus Fuchs confessed that he had long been a spy for the Russians.

Jan. 31, 1950: A few days later, Truman’s committee met. Tensely, they discussed the chance that the Russians, briefed by Fuchs, might have a start in thermonuclear development. Acheson and Johnson voted to recommend full speed ahead. Lilienthal voted against. That afternoon President Truman announced his decision to go ahead with the H-bomb.

July 1952: After another hot Washington struggle, a special laboratory for Teller was established at Livermore, Calif.

November 1952: Mike, a cumbersome hydrogen device, was exploded at Elugelab Island in the Pacific.

Aug. 20, 1953: The first Russian H-bomb was exploded.

March 1, 1954: The first droppable U.S. H-bomb was exploded.

The Father of the Bomb. In the months after the President’s order, there is evidence of further delay. After Truman’s order, Oppenheimer never publicly opposed the H-bomb. But other scientists did. Twelve top physicists signed a statement that said: “We believe that no nation has the right to use such a bomb, no matter how righteous its cause.” It is a fact that Teller had great difficulty recruiting scientists in the year after the President’s order.

The book presents Teller as the father of the hydrogen bomb. He broke the almost solid front of scientists who were opposing an all-out effort in the fall of 1949; in 1951 he had the “flash of genius” without which the bomb could not have been made.

But he did not make the droppable H-bomb. The book credits his Livermore laboratory with sparking Los Alamos by “competition,” but the “more mature” group of scientists at Los Alamos made the bomb—finally.

The Attack. Among those who have attacked the book since publication are former AEC Chairman Gordon Dean and many leading atomic scientists, including Enrico Fermi and Hans Bethe. The comment of Dr. I. I. Rabi, present chairman of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, is a sample: “A sophomoric science-fiction tale, to be taken seriously only by a psychiatrist.”

One of the strongest attacks came from Dr. Norris Bradbury, since 1945 head of the Los Alamos laboratories. Resenting the Shepley-Blair charge that Los Alamos had “dragged its feet” on thermonuclear development, Bradbury said that this work from 1946 on was pursued with “the maximum appropriate emphasis,” and that the bomb was in fact produced probably as fast as it could have been. Does this mean that the whole Washington struggle described by Shepley and Blair was nonexistent or irrelevant? Or that the Washington struggle was to decide whether to change the appropriate emphasis? Certainly. Oppenheimer, Teller and other participants in the Washington fight thought that they were engaged in making an important decision about the priorities at Los Alamos. Those on Oppenheimer’s side did not take the position that greater concentration on thermonuclear work was impossible. They said—for a variety of reasons—that it was undesirable.

It would be amazing beyond anything told in the Shepley-Blair story if these widely recognized scientists were consciously lying when they say that the book is basically wrong. Without doubt, they believe what they say, but if history gives another verdict when “all the facts” are in, it will not be the first time that honest men, involved in tense and complex struggles, turned out to be not the best reporters of what they lived through. Military history is full of competent and honest officers who gave accounts of battles that were not fought the way they remembered them.

The Character Assassins. By far the most violent and sustained attack on the book comes from the brothers Alsop, Joseph and Stewart. Their columns in papers throughout the land have carried this sensational piece of news: “Before very long, the Eisenhower Administration is likely to have to answer a short, highly practical question: ‘Do we really need scientists, or can we just make do with Lewis Strauss?’ ” They think that Strauss must go because he confirmed the verdict of the Gordon Gray board which withdrew Oppenheimer’s security clearance—although neither the board nor Strauss reflected on Oppenheimer’s loyalty. That was bad enough—now by silence Strauss seems to confirm the Shepley-Blair book.

Before the Shepley-Blair book appeared, the Alsops, in a long Harper’s article (now about to be published in book form), gave their explanation of the case against Oppenheimer. They said it was a plot, and they showed no reticence about describing the motives of the anti-Oppenheimer plotters. Air Force “zealots” knew —or rather “smelled”—Oppenheimer’s opposition to the doctrine of defense centering on strategic air-atomic striking power. These men knew that he was “vulnerable” because of his past Communist associations, so they decreed his demise. (The Alsops for years have been attacking those who did not agree with their ideas of military strategy—notably their doctrine that more attention should be paid to air defense.)

But this theory of anti-Oppenheimer motive will not account for Admiral Strauss, no Air Force “zealot.” The Alsops supply Strauss with a far baser motive than zealotry. It seems—and this will surprise hundreds of his business, official and intellectual acquaintances—that Strauss is an incredibly vain, arrogant and vengeful man. Years ago, Oppenheimer had the misfortune to humiliate Strauss in an argument about isotopes, say the Alsops, and Strauss never forgot.

The Alsops also compare the Oppenheimer hearings with the Dreyfus case. There are differences. Oppenheimer’s chief “judge” was Gordon Gray of North Carolina, one of the five or ten university presidents in the U.S. most respected by the academic community of the nation. The procedure of the Gray board was scrupulous, and most of the weighty testimony against Oppenheimer came out of his own mouth.

Dreyfus was legally lynched by perjured and forged testimony sustained by a group of reactionary pinheads. There is no dirtier thing that could be said of Lewis Strauss than that he set up a Dreyfus case; that for personal motives of the most picayune sort he sought the ruin of a man to whom the country owes so much.

The Book’s Lesson. The Alsopian myth that the hydrogen-bomb controversy is part of an antiscience, anti-intellectual crusade could do profound damage in this country. There is bound to be—and there is indeed—trouble between intellectual principles and any government of a great modern state. The governments deal with terrible responsibilities of the here and now. The intellectual deals with truths that transcend national boundaries.

The modern state, encouraged over the last century by some intellectuals of the right and left, has assumed monstrous proportions and makes monstrous demands of all its citizens. The U.S. has been and continues to be relatively free of the big-state ideology. But in the presence of the Communist threat, it cannot stop conscripting its young men or the income of its people; nor can it fail to ask the scientists to help—on terms that will be onerous to them. Relief is not in sight —short of the time when a world monopoly of atomic weapons is established in the interest of justice, which both intellectuals and governments are supposed to serve.

Anybody, including an atomic scientist, has a right to press upon the Government his opinion of how to attain this or any other goal. From such pressures a healthy government will know how to derive nourishment for clear, strong, decisive policymaking. The struggles related in The Hydrogen Bomb took place in a Government (and in a nation) that was confused about its own strategic situation and unclear about its aims. A determined pressure group can play havoc in such a situation. To relate the story of how one such pressure group almost did, is not to set up a conflict of science v. the state. It is to warn that feeble top leadership can lead even the most powerful nations into mortal danger.