Teller's suspicions found seeming confirmation immediately after the Princeton meeting, back at Los Alamos, when he and Bradbury negotiated a thermonuclear program. “Teller made an offer to stay [at Los Alamos] if he had administrative responsibility over that part of the program only… and could actually help it along,” Gordon Dean learned from de Hoffmann, but “that led to a deadlock.” The negotiation deadlocked because Bradbury had no intention of appointing Teller to head thermonuclear development and offered the physicist either an assistant directorship or a consultancy. Teller waffled through the rest of the summer, threatening to leave, traveling to Washington at one point with de Hoffmann to lobby his cause. Borden invited the scientists to dinner at the Metropolitan Club and convinced McMahon to join them “to make the senator's shoulder available for crying and talk [Teller] into staying [at Los Alamos].” On Henry Smyth's authority, Borden told Dean that “Teller requires a great deal of ‘crying on the shoulder’ time.”
The final straw for Teller was Bradbury's decision to appoint experimental physicist Marshall Holloway, the slim, sometimes imperious director of weapons development at Los Alamos, to head the thermonuclear program. “[Bradbury] was too smart to let [Teller] have any administrative authority,” Raemer Schreiber comments. “Edward was a brilliant but erratic theoretical physicist who had magnificent concepts, some of which were virtually impossible to translate into actual hardware… Edward could argue vehemently in support of wild and impractical ideas. He also had more than his share of the traditional wild Hungarian temperament: things were either very black or very white — no gray areas.” Bradbury gave Teller an ultimatum, Los Alamos engineer Jacob Wechsler remembers:
Here's Edward marching along and every time you turned around he wanted to change things. It kept getting worse and worse and finally Marshall said, we've got to get him out of here. You can't tell Edward not to be there. Norris went to do it and Edward really blew his stack. That was when he said, well, either Holloway is going to run this or I'm going to. He wasn't running it anyhow, but he felt like he was. He wasn't in charge of it; he was just blowing out his ideas. Norris said, Edward, if you can't fit the mold, leave.
Appointing Holloway, de Hoffmann told Dean, was “just like waving a red flag before a bull.” Teller and Holloway had clashed more than once; Teller also believed Holloway “was a consistent opponent of the Super.” Oppen-heimer thought the appointment put Teller “in a bad mental way,” and agreed to sound out Bradbury on returning to Los Alamos himself, but was not surprised to find that the Los Alamos director “gave no signs of wanting to have the ex-director back and said that he had full confidence in [Holloway], and that was the end of that.” A week after Bradbury announced Holloway's appointment on September 17,1951, Teller resigned. He left “in a huff,” says Schreiber. On his way out, Wechsler reports, “he said to Marshall [Holloway], I bet you a dollar it won't work.” Carson Mark thought the dispute turned on the question of authority, not of differences over design. Teller had similarly refused to work under Bethe at Los Alamos in 1944, Mark would observe, had “cut out and started working on something else.” Now Teller was cutting out again.
“Edward's tragedy was that he left at the wrong time,” Bradbury said later:
Just as the going got tough — in spite of all Edward's protestations about national need and so on — Edward quits, because I wouldn't give him control of the program.
If I'd given him control of the program, I'd have [had] half my division leaders quit, two-thirds of them quit, wouldn't work for him. I couldn't either; I knew him too well. Edward couldn't follow one course of action for two consecutive days — jump here, jump there… I couldn't put him in charge of the program here. I had to tell him so…
I wished he would stay. I tried to persuade him to stay, but I couldn't put him in charge… and I wouldn't put him in charge. Oppie hadn't put him in charge. Oppie knew him just as well as I did, perhaps better…
“A lot of us were really teed-off at Edward,” Mark concludes, “because if he would have sat down and applied himself to the job, it would of course have gone faster.” As it turned out, the job went fast enough, faster certainly than Edward Teller expected. “Had he imagined that Los Alamos could really do this,” Mark quotes one of Teller's friends, “he would never have left.”
In March 1951, while Stanislaw Ulam and Edward Teller invented the hydrogen bomb and the Korean War escalated, the world had followed the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Morton Sobell. Young Roy Cohn assisted prosecutor Irving Saypol in presenting the government case, contriving to introduce a Jello box panel into evidence to represent the Jello box signal Harry Gold had carried with him to Albuquerque. Gold with his remarkable memory made an effective witness. David Greenglass had pled guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage on October 18, 1950, and appeared as a witness as well, as did Ruth Greenglass, who was never charged. The Greenglasses, who assumed that their testimony would merely corroborate other information that the FBI had already acquired, provided the only evidence against Ethel Rosenberg. They were horrified, many years later, to learn that they were responsible for bringing Ethel to trial, but reaffirmed her complicity. “I know she had to know,” Ruth told Ronald Radosh in 1979. “I know there are husbands and wives where they never know what they are doing. But this was not the case with them.” David had not hesitated to sacrifice his sister to protect his wife. “I got two children,” he told Radosh. “If the choice was between [Ruth] and my sister, I'll take [Ruth] any day. That was the choice that I thought I had. In my mind, all [his sister and brother-in-law] had to do was have a conversation [with the FBI], the same as I had a conversation.” The Rosenbergs steadfastly maintained their innocence, frequently taking the Fifth.
Judge Irving R. Kaufman was ambitious for appointment to the US Supreme Court and favored the government during the trial, communicating improperly
I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-bomb, years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb, has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding fifty thousand and who knows but what that millions more innocent people may pay the price of your treason. Indeed, by your betrayal, you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country.
Espionage, not treason, was the crime of which the defendants had been convicted, but Kaufman sentenced Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death. Morton Sobell got Saypol's requested thirty years. On April 6, Kaufman gave a shocked David Greenglass fifteen years, a term Saypol had also requested. The previous fall, when Kaufman had presided at the trial of Abe Brothman and Miriam Moskowitz, he had commented that his sentencing powers were “almost Godlike” (he gave Brothman and Moskowitz the maximum sentence permitted by law for their crimes, seven years). Harry Gold, sentenced before another judge in December 1950 after pleading guilty, got thirty years.
Morris and Lona Cohen disappeared from New York sometime late in 1950, after the Rosenberg arrests. (A decade later they turned up in England, living under assumed names, still working at espionage.) Donald Maclean disappeared from London with Guy Burgess on May 25,1951; on June 7 the press reported that they had defected to the Soviet Union.
Gold wrote a chronicle of his life in the first months after he went to prison. In it, he reported having “a horrible sense of shame and disgust, which I can never ever lose, concerning my deeds… I am aware of the hard fact that, before anything else can transpire, I must be punished, and punished well, for the terribly frightening things I have done. I am ready to accept this penalty. There shall be no quivering, trembling or further pleas for
