main Super problem was an elaborate calculation, which Ulam had prepared with Gamow, von Neumann and Los Alamos theoretical physicist G. Foster Evans, to determine if Teller's Super design would propagate thermonuclear burning. Without such a calculation, no conclusive test was possible; if a test failed, they would not know whether it had failed because a thermonuclear was not feasible or merely because the particular design was wrong or had malfunctioned. That was why Teller himself, in 1947, had proposed waiting to develop the Super further until sufficient computing power was at hand to run the problem. It would not be at hand until the MANIAC was finished, a year or more away.
Teller was nevertheless sanguine about the prospects for his Super design. “I was going on the assumption that [it]… would work,” he says, based on the optimistic conclusions of the April 1946 Super Conference. Although much evidence had accumulated since then that Teller's Super design was problematic (“Every time he reported,” GAC member Lee DuBridge comments, “we thought he'd taken a step backwards”), Teller's endorsement was good enough for Lawrence, always an optimist himself in the business of building new machines. “Ernest told me, under those conditions, you just have to work on it.” But it was not yet clear what Lawrence and Alvarez could do to help. To pursue that question, Teller accompanied the two Berkeley physicists on their flight back to Albuquerque, where they continued talking in Lawrence's hotel room until bedtime, Lawrence frugally using the occasion to wash out his shirt. (“Now you will have to do a lot of traveling,” Teller recalls Lawrence instructing him, “and you won't be able to do it unless you learn to wash your shirt!”) “We agreed that a conference should be called at [Los Alamos] next month,” notes Alvarez's diary, “to see what should be done. LA. had been talking about one for early next year. We can't wait too long.” During the evening, Teller mentioned tritium production and the problem of trading plutonium for tritium in the AEC's existing graphite reactors. “Ernest and I… decided we would get going at once,” Alvarez writes in his memoirs, “to start a project to build production-scale heavy-water reactors for the AEC.” Teller returned to Los Alamos that night; Lawrence and Alvarez flew on to Washington before dawn with a cause they could fight for.
By Monday, October 10, the two men had talked to AEC staff including Kenneth Pitzer, a priggish Berkeley chemist who was AEC director of research, and General McCormack, had discussed their plans at length with Robert LeBaron, the chairman of the Military Liaison Committee, and had attended Lawrence's radiological warfare panel. Lawrence, Alvarez explains, “had made serious proposals in the Defense Department that warfare could be waged effectively by the use of radioactive products.” The radwar panel decided on Sunday that its program would require what Alvarez called in his diary a “gram of neutrons,” a requirement he thought “ties in well with our program” for tritium production, which also needed neutrons. “Heavy water piles,” Alvarez testified, “would provide, we hoped, considerably more than a gram of neutrons. Therefore, we would have available either tritium or [if the thermonuclear proved unfeasible] radioactive warfare agents.” In the midst of his Sunday radwar discussions, Lawrence learned that his wife had just given birth to their sixth child.
Monday, Lawrence and Alvarez had lunch with two members of the JCAE, Brien McMahon and California Republican Congressman Carl Hinshaw, with William Borden on hand taking notes:
The two scientists expressed keen and even grave concern that Russia is giving top priority to the development of the thermonuclear super-bomb. They pointed out that the Russian expert, Kapitza, is one of the world's foremost authorities on the problems involving the light elements. This fact, along with the logic that Russia might experience great difficulty in competing with us in the production of “conventional” atomic bombs, means that she has every incentive to concentrate on being first to acquire the super-bomb. [34] Drs. Lawrence and Alvarez even went so far as to say that they fear Russia may be ahead of us in this competition. They declared that for the first time in their experience they are actually fearful of America's losing a war, unless immediate steps are taken…
The Berkeley scientists proposed convincing Canada to convert its heavy-water reactor at Chalk River to tritium production while they built a production-scale heavy-water reactor in California. Lawrence criticized the existing Super program as well, grandly building a feasible thermonuclear in the heady congressional air: “Dr. Lawrence said that not nearly enough is being done on the super-bomb at present; that the contemplated Booster test in 1951 is only a mincing step; and that given an all-out effort to produce tritium on the necessary scale, an actual super-bomb test — rather than a mere preliminary experiment — might be held.” For good measure, Lawrence warned “that the British have a committee actively engaged in work on the super-bomb project, and that [they]… too, may possibly be ahead of us.”
The congressmen were impressed. “They were very happy to see some action in the field of thermonuclear weapons,” Alvarez writes; “they both told us they thought we were doing the right thing.” McMahon had already started to campaign for the Super. On October 1, a Saturday and the day of the founding of the People's Republic of China (a further Communist threat that many believed to be directed out of Moscow in monolithic conspiracy), the influential chairman of the JCAE had called a meeting at his house to discuss the Soviet bomb and the possible US response. Hinshaw would be making the rounds of the laboratories that month as part of a subcommittee of the JCAE to assess AEC technical resources. The two congressmen offered Lawrence and Alvarez their support; Hinshaw told them he would see them in Berkeley in ten days’ time.
David Lilienthal gave the two physicists a colder reception that afternoon. The AEC chairman was waiting dispiritedly to hear Truman's decision on the proposal of the Special Committee the President had appointed that the US invest $319 million in expanding production of atomic bombs to meet the Joint Chiefs’ increased military requirement. “We keep saying, ‘We have no other course,’” an exhausted Lilienthal noted in his diary; “what we should say is ‘We are not bright enough to see any other course.’” The day, he went on, “has been filled, too, with talk about supers, single weapons capable of desolating a vast area.” At that point, Lawrence and Alvarez arrived. Alvarez remembered that Lilienthal was unwilling even to consider what they had to say. “I must confess that I was somewhat shocked about his behavior. He did not even seem to want to talk about the program. He turned his chair around and looked out the window and indicated that he did not want to even discuss the matter. He did not like the idea of thermonuclear weapons, and we could hardly get into conversation with him on the subject.” Lilienthal, for his part, recoiled from what he took to be fanatic enthusiasm: “Ernest Lawrence and Luis Alvarez in here drooling over the [superbomb]. Is this all we have to offer?” After the two physicists left his office, Lilienthal heard that Truman had decided not to request a supplemental appropriation. The AEC chairman was relieved and impressed: “This despite the unanimous recommendation of [the] Joint Chiefs of Staff, etc., etc. He makes his
The Berkeley men saw Strauss and the other AEC commissioners after they left Lilienthal; Strauss learned then not only of their enthusiasm for the Super but also of Teller's. Their next stop was New York, whence they hoped to book seats to Ottawa to visit Chalk River. Seats were unavailable, so they took the opportunity to run up to Columbia University to talk to Rabi. In his contemporary diary, Alvarez wrote that they found Rabi “very happy at our plans. He is worried too.” In testimony five years later, Alvarez added that 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 remembered a more provisional exchange. “Following announcement of the Russian explosion,” he testified, “… I felt that somehow or other 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… to get a large variety and very great military flexibility.” But Lawrence and Alvarez had already made up their minds, Rabi felt:
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 thing… 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 a 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.
Alvarez flew home to Berkeley that night. Lawrence returned to Washington. He had another idea, perhaps evolved from learning about the success of the Joint Chiefs’ move to increase the military requirement for atomic
