thought the world of him and had every reason to,” Hans Bethe recalled. “Frank had every reason to look to him for help, but as soon as Frank had any difficulty, Lawrence forbade him even to come to the lab and visit.” Lawrence, a man of narrow and unquestioning patriotism, was probably stung by the exposure of his laboratory as a wartime hotbed of Soviet espionage. “[Frank] did come to Berkeley,” Robert Oppenheimer told Lawrence's biographer, “and [physicist] Ed McMillan and [his wife] Elsie invited him to dinner and Ernest asked them not to have him. That was sometime in the spring. We were out there during the summer [of 1949] and when we ran into Ernest at one of these infinite parties that someone else was giving, I said something about it. I don't think Ernest minded that, but as is often the case, my wife said something sharper and I think maybe he minded that.” I. I. Rabi thought Lawrence had never forgiven Oppenheimer in any case for leaving Berkeley for Caltech and then the Institute for Advanced Study after the war. Lawrence's abandonment of Frank shredded away all but a vestige of the old friendship between Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer. “I think there was probably warmth between us at all times,” Oppenheimer said later, “but there was bitterness which became very acute in ‘49 and which was never resolved… ”
A chill wind had picked up from the distant storm front of Soviet progress. In January, the CIA had reported to Hickenlooper “fragmentary information… that [the Soviets] are attempting a plutonium bomb.” The intelligence agency knew that the Soviet program had not begun “until late 1945” and that “sufficient uranium was available for the operation of [only] one production pile.” Based on those facts, it concluded that “mid-1950 is the earliest possible date for the Soviets to complete their first atomic bomb, and… mid-1953 is the most probable date for completion.” Depending on which of these dates proved out, the CIA estimated that the Soviets would have a stockpile by 1955 of either fifty or twenty atomic bombs. But the wind out of the East made people nervous. The chemist Wendell Latimer, a fervent anti-Communist who had been at Berkeley since 1919 and who had directed the study of plutonium chemistry there in the early days of the Manhattan Project, remembered feeling as early as 1947 “that it was only a question of time [until] the Russians got the A-bomb… It seemed to me obvious that they would get the A-bomb. It also seemed to me obvious that the logical thing for them to do was to shoot immediately for the super weapon… As time passed, I got more and more anxious… that we were not prepared to meet… a crash program of the Russians… They knew that they were behind us on the A-bomb, and if they could cut across and beat us to the H-bomb or the super weapons, they must do it.” Worries like Latimer's became general among the more militant members of the atomic energy community, Lewis Strauss's aide William Golden recalls:
As the year 1949 came along and as people felt that the Russians were getting nearer to a weapon… there was more thought given to the efforts on the Super… There was a clear scale of interest with Lewis Strauss being on the high side of thinking [that] greater emphasis should be put on it because of the feeling that it would be dreadful if the Russians got it first… It was not that we needed a stronger weapon, but [rather a concern for] what would happen if it could be made — The feeling… was that if it could be made, the United States should have it first. Ernest Lawrence was another who thought so. I'm sure some of the military people did. These feelings, these subsurface rumblings, were [evident] in the spring of 1949… Nothing had catalyzed it and there were strong feelings against it… But the feeling was strong.
William Borden sensed the subsurface rumblings. In a conference later in the summer with the AEC's director of military applications, General James McCormack, Jr., the young JCAE executive director “asked whether or not sufficient emphasis is being placed upon the so-called super bomb and experiments in that connection.” McCormack reassured Borden that work involving “refinement of the existing implosion weapon… is a necessary condition precedent to achievement of the fantastic temperatures necessary to create a thermonuclear reaction… In short, he gave the impression that we were traveling along the road toward a thermonuclear reaction as rapidly as is possible. By the same token, the Soviets will hardly succeed in bypassing extensive work on uranium bombs and moving directly to super bombs.” So the AEC reassured its nervous constituents, but those in particular who were not nuclear physicists continued to doubt. Since the United States did not yet know how to make a thermonuclear weapon, they judged, it could not be certain that the Soviets would not find a shortcut.
Robert Oppenheimer, on the other hand, continued to believe that only diplomacy could avert eventual catastrophe. When the Oak Ridge statistician Cuthbert Daniel wrote him in the spring of 1949 proposing a new course, he responded with a profession of faith:
On the general advantage of unilateral and inspiring example, I cannot be in greater agreement… That the greatest hope lies in what the United States does and can make intelligible, I deeply agree; and that this is a moral, as well as a practical problem, I agree also.
In the midst of his technical duties helping assure the development of the American atomic arsenal, Oppenheimer had not abandoned Niels Bohr's conviction that sacrifice would be necessary before negotiation could begin. A US response to these many menacing uncertainties emerged, as it often does in government, from the canonical precincts of military security. The
Finessing the defense-budget ceiling does not appear among the reasons the JCS gave for increasing the military requirement, but their other reasons were persuasive. They had learned that atomic bombs could probably be used economically against “relatively small targets.” They had learned in the NATO negotiations “the full extent of the military prostration of our Western European allies.” They had concluded with LeMay that “it would be unsound to rely on accelerating production in time of war,” that to the contrary “it was in the national interest to possess on D-Day the fissionable material necessary… to carry out our strategic plans.” They judged to be threatening “the failure of our proposals in the United Nations on the control of atomic energy, coupled with the fact that the time was approaching when the United States would lose its monopoly position in the atomic weapon field.” They settled on 1956 as a target date, since the AEC would have to build new facilities, and probably asked for an arsenal enlarged by one full order of magnitude.[32] They needed the expansion, they argued, not simply to bomb cities, as of yore, but to allow the conduct of:
the air offensive against Soviet industrial potential; a counter offensive against anticipated Soviet atomic forces during the period under consideration; limited atomic operations against offensive Soviet Armed Forces and their lines of communication, as a direct contribution to the defense of the signatory nations of the North Atlantic Pact;
and needed as well
a small general reserve; and an equally small post-hostilities stockpile for the purpose of guaranteeing the peace by serving as a deterrent to aggression.
The US Army, it seemed, was joining what John von Neumann liked to call “this Buck Rogers universe”; for the first time the Joint Chiefs had proposed a requirement for tactical as well as strategic atomic weapons. They did not, however, ask for hydrogen bombs.
Their proposal landed on David Lilienthal's desk by way of the Military Liaison Committee on May 26, 1949. The MLC informed Lilienthal that the AEC would need more production facilities to meet the new national military requirements. How much more only became clear as the AEC commissioners met around the disruptive schedule of Hickenlooper hearings: at least a new gaseous-diffusion isotope separation plant that would cost some $300 million, half again as much as the entire 1948 AEC budget. Lilienthal resented what he took to be an attempt by the military to preempt civilian authority over the atomic stockpile. He wrote the MLC on June 28 that an expansion of such magnitude would require the approval of the President.
