importance of the work on the atomic bomb. I fully realize the menacing international situation and I believe that the United States must develop its military strength to the utmost if we are not to succumb to the danger of communism. This is the main reason why I consider to interrupt my scientific work in Chicago in spite of the fact that I cannot hope to work as happily and with as much immediate satisfaction in a field of applied science… ”
Teller was disturbed by the Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia, by the Berlin blockade and by the impending Communist victory in China. A more personal tribulation was the fate of Hungary. As a child in the years immediately after the First World War, he had lived through the first Communist revolution in his native country, and it had scarred him. “Russia was traditionally the enemy,” Teller's Hungarian colleague John von Neumann explained. “… I think you will find, generally speaking, among Hungarians an emotional fear and dislike of Russia.” In the wake of the Second World War, the Central European nation had briefly experienced democratic government as a republic under the protection of an Allied Control Commission. But the Red Army had remained in occupation and by 1948 the Communist Party had maneuvered itself into power. A one-slate election on May 15, 1949, finished the job. Teller's father, mother, sister and nephew had survived the destruction of Hungarian Jewry and still lived in Budapest. Now they were cut off from him. Intending to spend a year on leave of absence from Chicago, Teller returned to rejoin the Los Alamos staff in July.
Another alarmed and influential participant that winter and spring of 1949 was a twenty-eight-year-old Yale College and Yale Law graduate and former bomber pilot named William Liscum Borden — a small man with a square jaw, blond, with blue eyes. Bright, ardent and Utopian, Borden had been an isolationist who had converted to interventionism shortly before Pearl Harbor. He had enlisted in the US Army immediately after graduation in 1942, volunteering to fly bombers, and saw three years’ service flying out of England with the Eighth Air Force. He had lost a college roommate and a relative to the war. Of the “men who died,” he wrote angrily in the months after victory, “many of them would be alive today had a little more honest realism been displayed before Pearl Harbor.” The honest realism Borden had in mind was “to think realistically about the worst that could befall as well as the best.” He had seen a V-2 rocket “streaming red sparks and whizzing past us” on its way to London one night in 1944 when he was returning in his B-24 from a mission to Holland. Hiroshima had a further “galvanic effect,” he said later, and he had “decided instantly that this was the most important thing in the world.” Between his military discharge and his entry into law school, Borden began writing a book that would “think straight about the strategic implications of the new weapons.” He called it, urgently,
The title of the second chapter of Borden's book summarized its essential argument: “The Certainty of War Amidst Anarchy.” The anarchy the young strategist had in mind was the international anarchy of contending nation-states. “War,” Borden wrote, “is the inescapable by-product of a system based on separate sovereignties.” Others might argue that “war has become so horrible… that no people will turn aggressor for fear of retaliation; or, to phrase the contention in more sophisticated language, possession of atomic bombs by both potential belligerents will act as a mutual deterrent.” Borden did not agree. To the contrary, he argued:
We are witness… to a momentous race between World War III on the one hand and a voluntary world federation on the other. Unless a federation intervenes in time, war is certain and inevitable. The two great rivals in the post-Hiroshima world are Soviet Russia and the United States. If these two remain dominant — and unless they can unite into a single sovereignty — war between them is as inescapable as the physical law that oil and water do not mix.
And if not Soviet Russia, Borden went on, then China or India later, or even Germany or Japan once they recovered. “The essential point is that an armed peace cannot persist indefinitely, that either war or voluntary federation must resolve the truce.”
What follows if you believe that atomic war is inevitable? It followed, Borden thought, that the United States had to become as strong as possible. He believed that “giving away atomic information is a form of unilateral disarmament” and he excoriated the “group of American liberals [which he believed had] argued that other nations should be given our atom-bomb secret, no strings attached.” There was safety only in superior arms. Like LeMay, Borden understood that productive capacity had been the United States's most important resource in wartime; now, Borden wrote, “as wartime weapons, cities and industries are obsolete. Their mission must be accomplished before the fighting begins, or not at all.” War in the future would begin with a “rocket Pearl Harbor.” But paradoxically, military preparation might deflect the blow: “If the United States is strong, no cities will be damaged. The initial targets will all be fortresses on land, warships at sea, and our island outposts.” The enemy, that is, attacking with “many hundreds of intercontinental rockets, each carrying an atomic warhead,” would first strike US retaliatory systems.
Beyond this point, Borden's imagination failed him. He thought preventive war proposals “quixotic” for the simple reason that “the American people will never strike first,” but he could imagine no more decisive resolution to his scenario than the very deterrence he had dismissed at the outset. American strength would at least postpone Armageddon, Borden prayed, and “who knows what hopes the passage of time may bring to realization?” The Soviet Union might become “sufficiently industrialized to create consumer goods on a vast scale,” permitting “a more liberal regime.” Or, when it acquired atomic bombs of its own, it “may be so impressed by their destructive force as to reevaluate plans for stringent international control.”
Borden published
Darker than these movements to arms was Washington's gathering mood of suspicion. Hickenlooper attacked the Atomic Energy Commission unmercifully in spring 1949, even demanding David Lilienthal's resignation; the attacks led to JCAE hearings beginning in late May into what Hickenlooper called the AEC's “incredible mismanagement.” At one of those hearings, in early June, Lewis Strauss repeated his complaints about distributing radioisotopes abroad for research. A week later, at another session with Strauss in attendance, Robert Oppenheimer countered with his patented brand of arch ridicule. “No man can force me to say you cannot use these isotopes for atomic energy,” he testified. “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.” Lilienthal would remember Strauss's reaction: “There was a look of hatred there that you don't see very often in a man's face.” Hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee that June, Frank Oppenheimer testified (in FBI paraphrase) “that he joined the Communist Party in 1937 in Pasadena, California, under the name Frank Fulsom. He stated that he dropped his Party membership in 1940 or 1941.” Frank's wife Jackie testified similarly. Exposing Robert Oppenheimer's brother may have been a way of chastening the GAC chairman; more likely it meant HUAC judged him too powerful to challenge. Robert himself had appeared before HUAC the previous week and the committee had let him off with easy questions. Young HUAC Congressman Richard Nixon had even praised him for his work, saying they were all “tremendously impressed… and… mighty happy we have him in… our program.” The University of Minnesota had hired Frank Oppenheimer as an assistant professor of physics two years previously after he had taken a loyalty oath denying that he had ever been a Communist. An hour after Frank testified, the university asked him to resign.
HUAC had been investigating the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, the institution Ernest O. Lawrence had founded and still led, and Frank Oppenheimer had seen his troubles coming. Before the hearings got around to him, he had applied for reappointment to the laboratory where he had spent part of the war working hard for Lawrence on electromagnetic isotope separation, Lawrence's extravagant contribution to the Manhattan Project. “Lawrence
