arsenal that now approached 169 atomic bombs would find itself in a hopeless situation if its enemy tested a prototype of a larger weapon, Teller did not specify. The Hungarian-born physicist proposed an “all-out” effort to build a Super, provided that the laboratory could “marshal the necessary support from Washington for a really vigorous program.”
After meeting with the AEC in Washington, Bradbury and Manley stopped in at the Institute for Advanced Study on October 20 to brief Oppenheimer. The GAC chairman knew the lab had been working on thermonuclear theory and basic physical measurements since his own tenure as director. He would have heard about the calculation problems. He probed the progress of Teller's Super design to see if four years of work had improved it. The lab's political position, as Bradbury explained it several years later, was that “we did not wish to enter into the debate as to whether or not this course was wise or moral or politically sound. We regarded ours [to be] the technical responsibility to know as much as it was possible to know and as rapidly as it was possible to know it about what was broadly called the H-bomb.”
That afternoon, or Friday morning, Oppenheimer wrote Conant to prepare him for the forthcoming GAC meeting scheduled for October 29–30 and for a meeting booked with Truman immediately afterward (which never took place). Playing the good son to powerful older men to cultivate their approval, Oppenheimer routinely saluted Niels Bohr in correspondence as “Uncle Nick” (derived from Bohr's Manhattan Project cover name, Nicholas Baker); now the forty-five-year-old physicist addressed the cool, formal fifty-six-year-old Harvard president as “Uncle Jim.” He reminded Conant of their earlier discussion, then subtly moved to distance himself from his previous inclination that the Super might be relevant:
On the technical side, as far as I can tell, the Super is not very different from what it was when we first spoke of it more than seven years ago; a weapon of unknown design, cost, deliverability and military value. But a very great change has taken place in the climate of opinion. On the one hand, two experienced promoters have been at work, i.e., Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller. The project has long been dear to Teller's heart; and Ernest has convinced himself that we must learn from Operation Joe that the Russians will soon do the Super, and that we had better beat them to it.
Worse, Oppenheimer went on, “the joint Congressional committee, having tried to find something tangible to chew on ever since September 23, has at last found its answer: We must have a Super, and we must have it fast.” The Joint Chiefs had signed on. Even “the climate of opinion among the component physicists” was showing “signs of shifting” — shifting presumably in favor of pushing the thermonuclear. Oppenheimer then moved fully into congruence with Conant's position as far as strategy was concerned, though he did not yet know or was not yet prepared to commit to Conant's moral position as well:
What concerns me is really not the technical problem. I am not sure the miserable thing will work, nor that it can be gotten to a target except by ox cart. It seems likely to me even further to worsen the unbalance of our present war plans. What does worry me is that this thing appears to have caught the imagination, both of the Congressional and of military people, as the answer to the problem posed by the Russian advance. It would be folly to oppose the exploration of this weapon. We have always known it had to be done; and it does have to be done, though it appears to be singularly proof against any form of experimental approach. But that we become committed to it as the way to save the country and the peace appears to me full of dangers.
Oppenheimer had lunch Friday with LeBaron and McCormack and explored the military's position further. In the afternoon, Hans Bethe and Teller arrived together to discuss whether or not Bethe would return to Los Alamos to work on the Super.
Since meeting with Lawrence and Alvarez, Teller had gone on the road, though he probably did not wash out his own shirts, pilgrimaging to Cornell to try to convince Bethe to return to Los Alamos. “Bethe,” he recalls unambiguously, “said he would come.” Bethe remembered to the contrary having “the greatest misgivings when Teller first approached me… ” Teller tempted Bethe with Super improvements, “some… technical ideas which seemed to make technically more feasible one phase of the thermonuclear program. I was quite impressed by his ideas. On the other hand, it seemed to me that it was a very terrible undertaking to develop a still bigger bomb, and I was entirely undecided and had long discussions with my wife.” Rose Bethe, like her husband a refugee from Nazi Germany, had challenged him similarly in 1942 when they had first heard of Teller's thermonuclear vision. “What should I do?” Bethe continues. “I was deeply troubled what I should do. It seemed to me that the development of thermonuclear weapons would not solve any of the difficulties that we found ourselves in, and yet I was not quite sure whether I should refuse.” Teller testified that Oppenheimer called at that point and invited the two physicists “to come and discuss this matter with him in Princeton.” Unless Oppenheimer could read minds, the more likely circumstance would have been that Bethe called Oppenheimer.
In Princeton, Bethe says, they found Oppenheimer “equally undecided and equally troubled in his mind about what should be done. I did not get from him the advice that I was hoping to get. That is, I did not get from him advice… to decide me either way… He mentioned that… Dr. Conant was opposed to the development of the hydrogen bomb, and he mentioned some of the reasons which Dr. Conant had given.” Teller remembered Oppenheimer quoting Conant to the effect that the US would build a thermonuclear “over my dead body,” but he conceded that Oppenheimer himself “did not argue against any crash program. We did talk for quite a while… At least one important trend in this discussion… was that Oppenheimer argued that some phases of exaggerated secrecy in connection with the A-bomb were perhaps not to the best interest of the country, and that if he undertook the thermonuclear development, this should be done right from the first and should be done more openly.” Bethe, says Teller, “reacted to that quite violently” because he thought thermonuclear work should be done secretly. (Notice also that Oppenheimer, in Teller's recollection, was considering
Teller went one way then, Bethe another. Leo Szilard, the maverick Hungarian emigre theoretical physicist who had first conceived the idea of using a physical chain reaction to release the energy of the atomic nucleus, had organized an Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, with Albert Einstein as chairman, which was meeting at Princeton University that weekend. Bethe, a founding member of the ECAS, went over from the Institute for Advanced Study to the university to attend the meeting. “I remember that I walked into the meeting room and Leo Szilard greeted me by saying, ‘Ah, here comes Hans Bethe from Los Alamos.’ I protested that I was not at Los Alamos and didn't know if I wanted to go back there.” Bethe's good friend Victor Weisskopf, an Austrian emigre theoretician, attended the meeting. Walking together on the university grounds that autumn weekend, the two men imagined together the horrors of a thermonuclear war. “Weisskopf vividly described to me a war with hydrogen bombs — what it would mean to destroy a whole city like New York with one bomb, and how hydrogen bombs would change the military balance by making the attack still more powerful and the defense still less powerful.” “We both had to agree,” Bethe added at another time, “that after such a war, even if we were to win it, the world would not be… like the world we want to preserve. We would lose the things we were fighting for. This was a very long conversation and a very difficult one for both of us.” Bethe and Weisskopf continued their difficult conversation on the drive up to New York with another physicist, the sharp-tongued Bohemian emigre George Placzek. “In this conversation,” Bethe remembers, “essentially the same things were confirmed once more.” The issue engaged the three men so intensely that Bethe missed his plane back to Ithaca and Weisskopf and Placzek inadvertently traded coats. Bethe's conversations with his two friends and with his wife decided him against working on the thermonuclear. “A few days later,” he says, “I told Teller over the phone that I would not join the project. He was disappointed. I felt relieved.”
In Chicago on Monday, on his way southwest, Teller met Enrico Fermi at the airport. The Italian emigre Nobel laureate was exhausted after a long flight from Europe. Teller appealed to him to return to Los Alamos to help build the Super. Teller remembered in 1994 that Fermi “refused out of hand.” But Alvarez heard from Teller by phone that day in 1949 and noted in his diary that Fermi had “no reaction.” Teller also told Alvarez that he “felt Oppie was lukewarm to our project and Conant was definitely opposed.”
