Conant's intervention. Conant said he just wouldn't have this, and pointed out that a firm stand could be expected to meet with the approval of various groups, [including] churches.” Hartley Rowe, on the other hand, felt strongly from the outset that the Super was wrong:
It was a pretty soul-searching time, and I had rather definite views… I may be an idealist, but I can't see [how]… any people can go from one engine of destruction to another, each of them a thousand times greater in potential destruction, and still retain any normal perspective in regard to their relationships with other countries and also in relationship with peace… If a commensurate effort had been made to come to some understanding with the nations of the world, we might have avoided the development… I think I arrived at my conclusions even before the discussion came before the committee.
Four of the five AEC commissioners joined the GAC then — Lilienthal, Strauss, Gordon Dean and physicist Henry Smyth, the author of the Smyth Report and Robert Bacher's recent replacement on the commission. Conant was grim with righteousness, Lilienthal saw. “A dramatic setting: Oppenheimer at the end of the table. Conant looking almost translucent, so gray.” For an hour, the minutes report, the committee discussed “the super-bomb program” with the commissioners. “Campbell's,” Lilienthal coded the Super in his diary (“standing for ‘soup,’ that is, ‘super,’” he explains). “Subject,” he introduces his notes on that weekend: “what now, centering around ‘Campbell's.’” At eleven a.m. the Joint Chiefs arrived trailing LeBaron, Norstad and lesser aides in their wake; Alvarez had watched their progress through the lobby, “the famous military men whom I recognized from their pictures… ” In Lilienthal's diary summary the Chiefs told a curious tale. They “no longer favor[ed] ‘outlawing’ the bomb… because without it… there is nothing we can do to prevent or deter Russia taking over Europe…” Some of their strategists believed “that war [with the Soviet Union] is inevitable… [The Joint Chiefs themselves], however, do not go so far; they believe it's ‘likely’ in a relatively short time, four to five years… [In their view] ‘Further negotiation with the Russians is useless.’” But Omar Bradley was hard-pressed to explain what military value a thermonuclear weapon might have, Manley writes:
The reaction of the highest ranking military person [who attended the meeting], General Bradley, was most interesting. Instead of being infatuated with the possibility of a bomb 1,000 times as powerful as our first A-bombs, he thought such a weapon would be useless against most military targets and that its value would be mostly “psychological.”
Lilienthal also reports Bradley's estimate that “[the] chief value of such a weapon [would be] ‘psychological,’” but adds significantly that “‘Campbell's’ made the[ir] eyes light up.” What about simply increasing production of atomic bombs? Lilienthal asked the military leaders. “No answer; Norstad came to me later to say, ‘We've got no answer; we are studying it once each six months.’”
By the time the Chiefs paraded out it was twelve-thirty. People went off in small groups to lunch. Serber, small and wiry, joined tall, ruddy Alvarez standing outside the AEC building and then Oppenheimer came along and swept them both up. He knew an intimate restaurant nearby. “That was the first time I heard Robert's views on the building of the hydrogen bomb,” Alvarez writes. “He told me he didn't think the United States should build it. The main reason he gave was that if we built a hydrogen bomb then the Russians would build a hydrogen bomb, whereas if we didn't build a hydrogen bomb then the Russians wouldn't build a hydrogen bomb. I thought this point of view odd and incomprehensible. I told Robert that he might find his argument reassuring but that I doubted if he would find many Americans who would accept it.” Oppenheimer would testify that he was reporting to Alvarez what the sense of the meeting was becoming, not expressing his own position. “I said [that] quite strongly negative things on moral grounds were being said.” But he would add that these views “were getting to be” his views “in the course of our discussion.” Alvarez concluded that the reactor program he and Lawrence had proposed “was dead”; after lunch, without waiting to hear the outcome of the GAC meeting, he left to return to California.
The full discussion unfolded in the afternoon. Lilienthal sketched it im-pressionistically in his diary that evening:
Conant flatly against [the Super] on moral grounds. Hartley Rowe, with him: “We built one Frankenstein.” Obviously Oppenheimer inclined that way. Buckley sees no difference] in [the] moral question
Conant wanted the subject opened up to public debate, Lilienthal continues. “I said [the] President certainly could announce it if he wished to…
Cyril Smith strong for the Conant point, as was I. Lewis quite dubious, evidently.” Conant, perhaps a man with a guilty conscience, felt a wave of deja vu. “Conant says, ‘This whole discussion makes me feel I was seeing the same film, and a punk one, for the second time.’”
Smyth and Gordon Dean both judged that the scientists were reacting viscerally. It had been one thing for the members of the General Advisory Committee to invent and deliver a weapon of unprecedented power in wartime, when they believed their most implacable enemy, Nazi Germany, with whom they were actually at war, might be racing to invent and deliver such a weapon first; it would be quite another to invent and deliver a weapon of no definable military use, a weapon of mass destruction, into a world not at war. But even setting aside their moral qualms, they could see no sense in it, as their conclusions made clear.
They came to those conclusions by drafting statements, late Saturday evening, and revising and concerting those statements on Sunday. Oppenhei-mer and Manley drafted the two-part main report. Conant and DuBridge drafted what came to be called (because Buckley, Oppenheimer, Rowe and Cyril Smith also signed it) the “majority annex.” Rabi and Fermi drafted a “minority annex.”
The main report embodied their technical recommendations. They recommended exploiting lower-grade ores and building more reactors and isotope-separation plants. They thought the AEC should work harder to make available tactical atomic weapons. They endorsed the production of neutrons, “a gram per day,” not by the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory but at the Argonne National Laboratory, which had experience building reactors. They advised that this flood of neutrons should be used to make U233, to produce radiological warfare agents, to test reactor components, to convert U238 to plutonium, to make polonium for initiators, to produce tritium for boosting fission bombs and, last of all on their list, “for super bombs.” Even within this descending series they recommended that “the super program itself should not be undertaken.” Nor did they recommend building reactors uniquely to make tritium for the Super.
Part II of the main report concerned “super bombs.” It stated specifically what they were discussing: “the question of whether to pursue with high priority the development of the super bomb.” It stated what they recommended: “No member of the Committee was willing to endorse this proposal.” Their reasons, it said, “stem in large part from the technical nature of the super and of the work necessary to establish it as a weapon.” What that technical nature was in October 1949, and what work the most distinguished and knowledgeable body of scientific advisers available to the US government believed remained to be done “if the super bomb is to become a reality,” Part II then specified, beginning with a description of the bare idea:
The basic principle of design of the super bomb is the ignition of the thermonuclear DD [i.e., D + D] reaction by the use of a fission bomb, and of high temperatures, pressure, and neutron densities which accompany it. In overwhelming probability, tritium is required as an intermediary, more easily ignited than the deuterium itself and, in turn, capable of igniting the deuterium.
Thus Edward Teller's “Super,” “classical Super,” “runaway Super,” the only design under consideration. To make the Super a reality, the GAC report continues, would require manufacturing tritium “in amounts perhaps of several hundred grams per unit.” (No one really knew how much tritium the Super would need. “Edward promised
