people in Washington [at this time] that they'd get by with a certain amount,” Carson Mark observes. “He had no particular basis for the amount that he mentioned except that it didn't appall them. He chose an amount that had that property. It didn't necessarily have the property of starting the reaction.”) The Super also needed further theoretical studies — the MANIAC calculations — as well as design engineering and tests. The report warned that only a test could determine if a given model would or would not work and that many tests might be required. As a first estimate, the committee proposed that “an imaginative and concerted attack on the problem has a better than even chance of producing the weapon within five years” — that is, by 1954. (“When you are talking about something as vague as this particular thing,” Rabi interpreted that estimate later, “you say a fifty-fifty chance in five years… It was a field where we really did not know what we were talking about, except on the basis of general experience. We didn't even know whether this thing contradicted the laws of physics… [Teller's Super] could have been altogether impossible.”)
The report then emphasized the single most distinctive characteristic of a thermonuclear as opposed to a fission weapon: that if it could be built — if a runaway thermonuclear reaction could be initiated in deuterium — it would have essentially unlimited explosive potential. “This is because one can continue to add deuterium… to make larger and larger explosions… ” This characteristic distinguished it sharply from even such horrific weapons as atomic bombs. In deducing what followed from the superbomb's unique destructive potential, Oppenheimer and Manley staked out principled ground free of Conant's contentious moralizing:
It is clear that the use of this weapon would bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives; it is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations.
If the GAC had stopped there, it would have discharged its statutory and its ethical responsibilities admirably. But feeling had been running high that weekend and the eight men had stayed up late Saturday night drafting their annexes. The majority annex — Conant and DuBridge's language that Buckley, Oppenheimer, Rowe and Cyril Smith also signed — foresaw “possible global effects of the radioactivity” and feared that “a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide.” It answered Omar Bradley's “psychological” justification by arguing that “reasonable people the world over would realize that the existence of a weapon of this type… represents a threat to the future of the human race,” which would make “the psychological effect of the weapon in our hands… adverse to our interest.” The majority annex urged that “a super bomb should never be produced… To the argument that the Russians may succeed in developing this weapon, we would reply that our undertaking it will not prove a deterrent to them.” Should they use such a weapon against the US, we had a “large stock of atomic bombs” with which to reply. “In determining not to proceed to develop the super bomb,” the majority annex concluded, “we see a unique opportunity of providing by example some limitations on the totality of war and thus of limiting the fear and arousing the hope of mankind.”
Fermi and Rabi, who had favored working on the Super at the outset of the weekend discussion, opposed the project now, but thought the President should announce the US renunciation and “invite the nations of the world to join us in a solemn pledge” not to build thermonuclear weapons. The two physicists judged it “highly probable” that a thermonuclear test could be detected “by available physical means.” Rabi clarified later what they meant. “Fermi and I said that we should use this as an excuse to call a world conference for the nations to agree, for the time being, not to do further research on [thermonuclear weapons]… [We] felt that if the conference should be a failure and we couldn't get agreement to stop this research and had to go ahead, we could then do so in good conscience… Some of the others, notably Conant, felt that no matter what happened it shouldn't be made. It would just louse up the world.”
But Fermi and Rabi also condemned their friend Edward Teller's Super in the strongest language that appears anywhere in the nine pages of the GAC report:
Necessarily such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide.
It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country. It is evident to us that this would be the view of peoples in other countries. Its use would put the United States in a bad moral position relative to the peoples of the world.
Any postwar situation resulting from such a weapon would leave unre-solvable enmities for generations. A desirable peace cannot come from such an inhuman application of force. The postwar problems would dwarf the problems which confront us at present…
The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light.
One way or another, most of the men on the General Advisory Committee had worked for international control of atomic energy. On the evidence of their October report, they had not left that intention so completely that they now viewed the Soviet Union as an obdurate, remorseless enemy. But those who urged racing to build the Super — Teller, Strauss, McMahon, Borden — did view the Soviet Union that bleakly. To Lilienthal, the men at Berkeley might appear to be “a group of scientists who can only be described as drooling with the prospect and ‘bloodthirsty.’” In fact, their enthusiasm masked a profound fear. They were afraid of an enemy which was evidently ruthless, which had hidden itself and its intentions behind minefields and barbed wire, which fielded large and powerful armies and which had just successfully tested an atomic bomb. So were McMahon and Borden afraid; so were the Joint Chiefs, men whose responsibility it was to protect the nation. When the GAC argued that building the Super might unleash unlimited destruction, then, it unwittingly enlarged the scope of its opponents’ fears and encouraged them to pursue the project with even greater urgency, because they immediately translated the weapon's destructive potential into a threat and imagined the consequences if the enemy should acquire it first. An arms race is a hall of mirrors.[35]
The GAC might also have weighed the impact of the strong language it used in its reports on those who disagreed with its conclusions. “Genocide” and “evil” are fighting words; “genocide” was even a new word then, coined only in 1944 and still fresh in its application to the Nazi destruction of the European Jews. Teller had lost members of his own family in the late sweep of the Holocaust through Hungary; Strauss was a prominent Jewish lay leader. It was not clear to either man how the GAC distinguished between an atomic bomb and a thermonuclear bomb in regard to mass destruction. Oppenheimer would be asked that question a few years later in the context of the October GAC report, and his answer, while profoundly ironic, hardly does justice to the destructiveness of the atomic weapons devised under his direction at Los Alamos during the Second World War:
Q. In fact, Doctor, you testified, did you not, that you assisted in selecting the target for the drop of the bomb on Japan?
A. Right.
Q. You knew, did you not, that the dropping of that atomic bomb on the target you had selected, [would] kill or injure thousands of civilians, is that correct?
A. Not as many as turned out.
Q. How many were killed or injured?
A. Seventy thousand.
Q. Did you have moral scruples about that?
A. Terrible ones…
Q. Would you have supported the dropping of a thermonuclear bomb on Hiroshima?
A. It would make no sense at all.
Q. Why? A. The target is too small.
The confusion and fear, the passionate intensity of proponents and opponents both, flooded the prudent
