US Air Force when it could kill the nation with blast, fire and radioactivity from atomic bombs delivered by strategic bomber.
Teller looked forward to the
I think that the decision whether considerable effort is to be put on the development of the Alarm Clock or the Super should be postponed for approximately 2 years; namely, until such time as these experiments, tests and calculations have been carried out.
At a briefing for AEC, MLC and Laboratory managers a week later, Norris Bradbury noted other obstacles that the Super program imposed. (Truman had ordered that the “scale and rate of effort” of thermonuclear development be determined jointly by the AEC and the Defense Department; the Los Alamos meeting was an informal preliminary to that determination.) Even the booster looked doubtful at that point, Bradbury said, primarily because the modifications to the implosion system necessary to insert the mixture of deuterium and tritium gas into the bomb's core caused a loss of fission yield that the increased yield from fusion barely overcame. (The gases tended to diffuse into the U235 shell that enclosed them, a problem Los Alamos eventually overcame by sequestering them within a copper shell liner.) The lab would go ahead and use up the few grams of available tritium for a booster test at
More serious from Bradbury's point of view was the cost in time and fissionable material that the Super program imposed. They would have to withhold four to five hundred kilograms of fissionable material from the stockpile for experiments at Los Alamos and would use several hundred kilograms for experiments at Eniwetok. They would forgo creation of much more fissionable material when they began making tritium at Hanford. They were “abandoning research and leadership in important areas [of weapons development] except for that which is immediately applicable to a thermonuclear weapon.” Overall, Bradbury thought, it would take “fantastic good luck for a period of time on the order of, say — three years — before a device can be produced which might ignite [deleted; probably “a cubic meter of”] D2.” Teller, after ritually warning of “grave danger that we have lost or are losing the atomic armaments race,”[39] described several experimental models of thermonuclear devices and “emphasized his agreement with Dr. Bradbury's observations as to the unpredictability of time and development in this field.” Informing the world that you were planning to build a superbomb was one thing; evidently, building it was quite another.
While Los Alamos scraped its way to the bare realities, alarmist prognostications further terrorized Washington. Brigadier General Herbert B. Loper, a member of the MLC, disturbed by the Fuchs revelations, sat himself down and proceeded to estimate what he called “a measure of the outside bracket of Russian capabilities” on the assumption that the Soviets had begun “a nuclear energy development project” by 1943 at the latest that had benefited from espionage. To get to his “outside bracket,” Loper assumed (despite good CIA information to the contrary from returning German scientists and engineers who had been Soviet prisoners of war) that the Soviets had begun exploring and mining in 1943 and had begun building isotope-separation and reactor facilities in 1945. It might follow, he thought, that the Soviets had established “the theoretical basis for developing the thermonuclear weapon” by 1945 and had tested an atomic
Loper's speculations, to which Kenneth Nichols lent his credibility in concurrence and which Loper sent along to MLC chairman Robert LeBaron, would not have stood up to even superficial scrutiny at Los Alamos, but no one at the weapons laboratory seems to have vetted the document. (“If [the Soviets] had been able to make any [H- bomb] advances on the basis of information given them by Dr. Fuchs,” Robert Oppenheimer quipped at a meeting of the State-Defense Policy Group on February 27, “they were marvelous indeed.”) LeBaron added further to the Loper memorandum's authority when he passed it to the Secretary of Defense by pointing out that even though it contained estimates that were much higher than the latest CIA estimate (which projected a Soviet arsenal of a hundred twenty-kiloton atomic bombs by “sometime during 1953”), “there are areas in Russia that are not covered by our agents… ” Louis Johnson alerted Truman to Loper's ideas and asked the Joint Chiefs for their response. They recommended, in Johnson's words, “an all-out program of hydrogen bomb development if we are not to be placed in a potentially disastrous position… ” (“Los Alamos has always been in a crash program,” Norris Bradbury would grumble. “The word crash means merely everybody works just as hard as he can. This we have been doing since 1943.”) Truman referred this latest imbroglio to the NSC Special Committee he had come to rely upon for military atomic energy decisions, with Henry Smyth now representing the AEC. The committee warned the JCS that they would have to accept reduced atomic-bomb production if they wanted a crash program for the Super and they agreed. On March 9, the Special Committee advised the President that Los Alamos was already going “all-out,” but recommended he approve the principle that “the thermonuclear weapons program is regarded as a matter of the highest urgency” and a production goal of ten thermonuclear weapons per year using a total of one kilogram of tritium even though “the total estimated cost of these weapons, spread over a period of two or three years, will be on the order of 30 or 40 fission bombs.” Truman did so the next day. Around this time James Conant wrote Bernard Baruch, “When I am in Washington, it seems as though I were in a lunatic asylum, but I am never sure who is the attendant and who the inmate. Nor am I even sure whether I am a visitor or a potential patient. However, I am trying to keep my sanity… ”
Klaus Fuchs came on for trial at the Old Bailey at 10:30 a.m. on March 1, 1950. He was not allowed a jury. His judge was Lord Goddard, the Lord Chief Justice of England, a rugged conservative in scarlet robes who believed in retribution. His prosecutor, Sir Hartley Shawcross, was the Attorney General and had been the chief British prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. The Duchess of Kent and the Mayor of London came to watch, as did two men from the American Embassy and representatives of some eighty newspapers and news services, including Tass. J. Edgar Hoover had hoped to send an FBI observer, but the British kept the Americans at arm's length to limit as much as possible public awareness of the appalling security breach; Fuchs would be charged with passing secrets in Birmingham, New York, Boston and Berkshire but not in Santa Fe. Until minutes before the trial began, the stoic physicist assumed the maximum penalty for his crimes was death. His barrister, who proposed to plead him guilty, corrected him sharply: since the Soviet Union had not been an enemy at the time of Fuchs's espionage, treason was excluded and the maximum penalty was fourteen years.
Shawcross went through Fuchs's career and fulminated at length on the evils of Communism. Fuchs's counsel, Derek Curtis-Bennett, protested that Fuchs was a human being with a divided mind and relied on Fuchs's confession to claim that the physicist “would only tell [the Soviets] things he found out himself.” Lord Goddard interrupted Curtis-Bennett to declare that “a man in this state of mind is one of the most dangerous that this country could have within its shores,” leaving no doubt where he stood. Fuchs, in a brown suit, with pens and pencils handy in the handkerchief pocket of his jacket, got a final chance to say his piece, and confessed to having “committed certain crimes for which I am charged, and I expect sentence. I have also committed some other crimes which are not crimes in the eyes of the law — crimes against my friends — and when I asked my counsel to put certain facts before you, I did not do it because I wanted to lighten my sentence. I did it in order to atone for those other crimes.” The trial, he concluded, had been “fair.” (Before his trial, Fuchs had written to Genia Peierls, who had accused him of betrayal, that he had failed to consider the harm he would cause his friends. “I didn't,” he agonized, “and that's the greatest horror I had to face when I looked at myself. You don't know what I had done to my own mind. I thought I knew what I was doing, and there was this simple thing, obvious to the simplest decent creature, and I didn't think of it.” To another friend he observed, “Some people grow up at fifteen, some at thirty- eight. It is more painful at thirty-eight.”)
Expressing fear that Fuchs might “at any other minute allow some curious working in your mind to lead you
