found gloom even in the bright day. “When I came out of the water to stand on the white sands of the beach, I told Lawrence that I thought the experiment had been a failure. He thought otherwise, and bet me five dollars… ” Rosen sought Teller out the next morning and passed along a first result but swore him to silence; Teller came up with a work-around that conformed to the letter of his vow, caught Lawrence on the airstrip later that morning preparing to leave and silently handed the Berkeley physicist a five-dollar bill. Allred and Rosen measured neutrons with energies of 14 million electron volts (MeV), one unique signature of the reaction of D + T.[44] Of George's 225 KT, its fission component, the largest yet exploded, probably accounted for 200 KT. The small DT capsule — less than an ounce of deuterium and tritium — yielded the remaining 25 KT, twice the destructive force released over Hiroshima. Los Alamos physicist Jane Hall telexed Robert Oppenheimer on May 10 that “the interesting mixture [i.e., the fusion capsule] certainly reacted well.” Teller's gloom veered to optimism; he remarked to Dean “that Eniwetok would not be large enough for the next one.”
When the task force returned to the United States, Dean decided “it was high time that we got together all the people who had any kind of a view on H weapons… I talked… to two or three of the [AEC] commissioners and said wouldn't it be good if we could get them all around a table and make them all face each other and get the blackboard out and agree on some priorities.” Oppenheimer issued invitations to the meeting, to be held at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in mid-June, as chairman of the Weapons Subcommittee of the GAC, and chaired it when it convened on Saturday and Sunday, June 16–17,1951.
Teller had “very considerable misgivings” about attending the Princeton meeting in the first place, he testified in 1954, “… because I expected that the General Advisory Committee, and particularly Dr. Oppenheimer, would further oppose the development” of the H-bomb. He maintained for the rest of his life that he was snubbed at the meeting and the Teller-Ulam invention slighted until he insisted on being heard. “The report on the hydrogen bomb [presented at the conference] did not mention [radiation implosion],” he wrote incorrectly in 1982. “When I asked to speak, Bradbury denied me the opportunity. Although there were several people present who knew about [radiation implosion], including Bethe and Oppenheimer, none chose to speak about it. However, AEC commissioner Smyth, who believed that the other side of the argument should be heard, made my presentation possible. In the developments that immediately followed, this proved to be decisive.”
No one else who attended the meeting — the AEC commissioners and managers, the members of the GAC, Bethe, von Neumann, Robert Bacher and the management of Los Alamos — shared Teller's melodramatic recollection. Darol Froman had prepared and circulated an agenda to guide the discussion which Teller had seen beforehand. It began with the
Teller spoke with passion and eloquence about the promise of the new design. Bethe contributed to the presentation. Oppenheimer remembered that Fermi, who “knew nothing of these developments,” was “quite amazed.” According to Teller, Oppenheimer “warmly supported this new approach.” The GAC chairman thought the meeting accomplished three things. First, “We agreed that the new ideas took top place and that although the old ones should be kept on the back burner, the new ones should be pushed… ” Second, the AEC agreed to begin producing lithium deuteride as a possible fuel for both the equilibrium thermonuclear and a radiation-imploded Alarm Clock. Third, said Oppenheimer, they debated “the construction and test schedules for these things… ” Teller, among others, argued for moving swiftly and directly to a full-scale test of the equilibrium thermonuclear; an opposing point of view favored testing “components,” meaning the various individual inventions that made up the Teller-Ulam breakthrough. Oppenheimer remembered as the consensus of the meeting “that unless the studies of the summer passed out on the feasibility of it, one should aim directly at the large-scale explosion… ”
Gordon Dean had wanted a meeting of the minds at Princeton and thought he got it:
At the end of those two days we were all convinced, everyone in the room, that at last we had something for the first time that looked feasible in the way of an idea.
I remember leaving that meeting impressed with this fact, that everyone around that table without exception, and this included Dr. Oppenheimer, was enthusiastic now that you had something foreseeable. I remember going out and in four days making a commitment for a new plant [to produce lithium]… The bickering was gone.
No one had debated morality this time around. Though it should deliver megaton yields, the equilibrium thermonuclear was evidently not “an evil thing considered in any light,” as Fermi and Rabi had condemned the classical Super before the President had ordered work on an H-bomb to proceed. Oppenheimer thought the difference lay in the differing technical promise of the two conceptions:
It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb. I do not think anybody opposed making it; there were some debates about what to do with it after it was made. I cannot very well imagine if we had known in late 1949 what we got to know by early 1951 that the tone of our [October 1949 GAC] report would have been the same.
Why technical promise should decide questions of politics and morality, Oppenheimer did not explain, but he said on the same occasion that the world would be a safer place if the development of thermonuclear weapons could have been avoided, and he knew very well that Soviet scientists were as capable of brewing something technically sweet as US scientists had been. Another and important difference was Korea, which seemed more than a regional threat; Bethe returned to Los Alamos full-time that summer, still heavy with misgivings, because he was concerned that the conflict might spread to Europe. “I was totally opposed to the H-bomb,” he recalls. “But the Teller-Ulam invention made it very likely that it could be done. In fact, it was so good that it seemed that the Russians could also do it… and I figured that if they could, they probably would. Then I figured if we did it first and did it better — that was really the argument. And then there was the Korean war. Europe seemed threatened.”
“Princeton settled that we should go ahead on the hydrogen bomb,” Teller concludes. Yet he continued to believe that shadowy forces worked behind the scenes to thwart his dream of a thermonuclear weapon, forces allied with Robert Oppenheimer. Despite Oppenheimer's enthusiasm at the Princeton meeting, Teller would claim, the GAC chairman's recommendations in general “were more frequently… a hindrance than a help… ” Nor was Teller alone in his suspicions. William Borden spent an evening with Lewis Strauss later that summer and heard the former AEC commissioner express “fear and concern over Oppenheimer. He agreed that it would probably be impossible to confirm or deny these fears through the use of any intelligence methods.” Borden “pointed out the parallel thinking which had taken place elsewhere on the same subject,” meaning Borden's own growing suspicion that Oppenheimer might be a Soviet spy, “and the feeling of utter frustration about the possibility of any definite conclusions.” Both men agreed that they found the recent testimony of a former Communist Party official in California that Oppenheimer had attended Party meetings “inherently believable.” Strauss, Borden noted, “is quite sure that another Fuchs may be turned up (if not in the US, then in Britain) but he had no more ideas than we ourselves have been able to generate as to what to do about it. He did like the notion of [using] the lie detector at Los Alamos… ” (Borden at this time was prompting Brien McMahon to urge Truman to increase the AEC's industrial capacity sufficiently to build tactical nuclear weapons “numbered in the tens of thousands” in addition to a full strategic arsenal.)
