Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

bombs. He looked up Kenneth Nichols of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project and encouraged him to approach the JCS about establishing a military requirement for hydrogen bombs as well. The Joint Chiefs were scheduled to meet with the JCAE on October 14. McMahon also approached Nichols about the JCS position. Nichols decided he should brief the Joint Chiefs before they testified. He went to see Lauris Norstad, who took him to see General Vandenberg, who was scheduled to be the JCS spokesman at the JCAE hearing. Like Truman, it turned out, the USAF Chief of Staff had never heard of the hydrogen bomb. “I think I spent about two hours with Vandenberg,” Nichols recalled, “and I explained as well as I could from the information I had what the thermonuclear weapon would be. Vandenberg wanted to know if it could be delivered and I said, well, it might take a B-36 that you might have to drone in [unmanned], but I was pretty certain it wouldn't be bigger.”

The JCS were meeting that day, October 13, in preparation for the forthcoming JCAE hearing. Vandenberg sent Nichols with Norstad to talk to the other Chiefs:

He said he couldn't go, tell General Bradley that he was for the development of the H-bomb… I briefed the Joint Chiefs… General [Omar] Bradley [Army Chief of Staff] said, “Nichols, why haven't you been around here before, advocating it?” I said, “Well, General, the reason I haven't been around is that before the Russian explosion, I was under the impression that it would be very difficult to organize a real effort at Los Alamos.” There just weren't enough scientists to work on it. I told him Edward Teller was interested, but to organize an effort before the Russian explosion would have been well nigh impossible. But I said I've been following it all these years, and… now I think enough scientists will be willing to work on it. And after a few more questions, General Bradley finally announced his opinion… that it would be intolerable for the Russians to have it first… This was his first reaction, that if it can be done, that it would be intolerable to have us sit on our butts, not do anything, if the Russians should get it first.

The next day, according to a summary Nichols wrote, a handsome, confident Hoyt Vandenberg told the congressional committee authoritatively:

One of the things which the military is pre-eminently concerned with as a result of the early acquisition of the bomb by Russia is its great desire that the Commission reemphasize and even accentuate the development work on the so-called super-bomb. General Vandenberg discussed this subject briefly and stated that it was the military point of view that the super-bomb should be pushed to completion as soon as possible, and that the general staff had so recommended. In fact, his words were, “We have built a fire under the proper parties” — which immediately brought forth Senator Hickenlooper's comment, “Who are the right parties?” General Vandenberg replied that it was being handled through the Military Liaison Committee. He further stated that having the super weapon would place the United States in the superior position that it had enjoyed up to the end of September 1949 by having exclusive possession of the [atomic] weapon.

John Manley had been new to the ways of Washington at this time of Super debate. What he learned from the experience, he would comment sardonically many years later, was that, “quite contrary to the way I thought things were… you don't do staff work and then make a decision. You make a decision and then do the staff work.”

On the weekend when Lawrence and Alvarez had traveled to Washington, Robert Oppenheimer had gone up from Princeton to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend a meeting of the Harvard University Board of Overseers, of which he was a member. He stayed at Harvard President James Bryant Conant's house, where they had what Oppenheimer in a subsequent letter called a “long and difficult discussion having, alas, nothing to do with Harvard.” Almost certainly they discussed the Soviet test and what to do about it. “When we last spoke,” Oppenheimer would write Conant two weeks later, having not spoken to Conant in person in the interim, “you thought perhaps the reactor program offered the most decisive example of the need for policy clarification. I was inclined to think that the Super might also be relevant.” At the outset of the Super debate, that is, Robert Oppenheimer considered the development of a hydrogen bomb one possible response to the Soviet test.

Conant's response — probably his contribution to the “long and difficult discussion” in Cambridge on October 9 — had been sharp. Oppenheimer was in some doubt about the matter, the IAS director confirmed later, and had not made up his mind. “Conant told me he was strongly opposed to it… He told me what his views were before mine were clearly formulated.” If it ever came before the General Advisory Committee, Conant told Oppenheimer, “he would certainly oppose it as folly.”

The influential Harvard administrator based his opposition, as he testified later, “on a combination of political and strategic and highly technical considerations.” Conant thought US reliance on atomic and potentially thermonuclear weapons “was sort of a Maginot Line psychology being pushed on us.” The better answer, he believed, “was to do a job and revamp our whole defense establishment, put in something like universal military service [and] get Europe strong on the ground, so that [the US atomic deterrent] would not be canceled out [by the Soviet development of atomic weapons].” Conant, that is, believed that US reliance on a nuclear arsenal for cheap defense gave the nation a false sense of security, as the Maginot Line of fortified defenses had given France a false sense of security prior to the Second World War, and that pushing for a thermonuclear without a corresponding build-up in conventional forces would simply compound the mistake.

More deeply even than his strategic concerns, Conant believed that building the thermonuclear would be morally wrong. He had accepted the necessity of poison gas in the First World War and atomic bombs in the Second because, as he wrote in 1943, “the battlefield is no place to question the doctrine that the end justifies the means.” When the war was over, however, he continued, “let us insist, and insist with all our power, that this same doctrine must be repudiated.” War, he had repeated in the Atlantic Monthly as recently as January 1949, “is always totally different morally from peace.” If someone attacks you, Conant meant, you were justified in doing whatever you had to do to defend yourself. Such a distinction might have made sense in an age of traditional war. Curtis LeMay and William Borden would have disputed its relevance to the new atomic age. In their view, the destructive-ness of atomic weapons made it improbable that a nation could add to its arsenal after war began; any new weapons, however immoral, would have to be developed and stockpiled in peacetime or not at all.

Whether Conant discussed the morality of thermonuclear weapons with Oppenheimer at Cambridge is unclear. The GAC chairman learned of Conant's moral position soon enough as he began organizing a special meeting of his committee that Lilienthal had asked him to call in response to Strauss's “quantum jump” proposal. In the meantime he spoke with John von Neumann, whose experience of war, Communist revolution and fascist counterrevolution as a young man in Hungary left him in no difficulty about morality or strategy. “I remember von Neumann saying at this time,” Oppenheimer testified: “‘I believe there is no such thing as saturation. I don't think any weapon can be too large. I have always been a believer in this.’ He was in favor of going ahead with it.”

Also in response to Strauss's proposal, the AEC asked Norris Bradbury to appear before it in Washington on October 19 to discuss the Los Alamos program. Bradbury called a major meeting of laboratory staff on October 13 to prepare for his appearance. Teller and Manley both wrote open letters for that Thursday meeting. Manley argued that the laboratory had “tacitly assumed that [a Soviet test]… would not occur before 1952, a date beyond the expected 1951 fruition of current programmatic work [i.e., the Greenhouse tests of a boosted fission weapon and of thermonuclear ignition scheduled at Eniwetok in 1951]. At the very least, therefore, the laboratory should consider that it has lost some three years of time” on thermonuclear work. Nor could it assume that the Soviets would progress no faster than the US had been and was progressing. It followed, Manley concluded, that “we should no longer assume any time scale for their developments but rather choose our action so as to strengthen our position as rapidly as possible.” Manley stopped short of endorsing an all-out program to build the Super, however.

Teller took up that agenda in his open letter, outlining “why it is essential for us to develop a Super bomb at the earliest possible time or else be able to say with reasonable confidence that the Super is not feasible.” Referring as Manley had to the question of the Soviet rate of progress, he went further and criticized the laboratory for its conservatism: “If the Russians continue to make actual progress faster and if we lose the atomic armament race, it will make little difference whether the reason has been the particular brilliance of Russian scientists or the exaggerated caution and thoroughness of our own group.” Going further still, Teller argued emotionally that a thermonuclear breakthrough was indispensable to survival regardless of any other consideration: “If the Russians demonstrate a Super before we possess one, our situation will be hopeless.” Why a nation with a burgeoning