development would be included in the Livermore program from the outset, and a renewed commitment on the part of Teller to join the laboratory.
Sometime after Teller agreed to join Livermore, a friend of I. I. Rabi's encountered the Hungarian-born physicist on a Denver street and asked him about the move. “I am leaving the appeasers to join the fascists,” Teller told Rabi's friend sardonically.
Robert Oppenheimer's term as a member of the General Advisory Committee came to an end on August 8, 1952; he was not reappointed. Neither were James Conant and Lee DuBridge. “I recommended to the President that he not reappoint those three,” Sidney Souers would recall. “I suggested that he not do it because… they had been with us too long. I thought it well to bring in new blood and state that as the reason. I felt we should just drop all three and appoint three others who believed in the policy of the President with respect to the H-bomb. At that stage a number of people were talking disloyalty about Oppenheimer to Q. Edgar] Hoover, who passed the information on to me to pass to the President, but I dismissed it.”
One H-bomb enthusiast left the field forever that summer. On July 28, after a brief illness, Brien McMahon died of cancer. He was not yet forty-nine years old.
Oppenheimer had written to Niels Bohr a year earlier — in June 1951 — that “in spite of all the disappointments and tragedies that have occurred since last we talked, I am still one who does not take a wholly melancholy view… It may seem curious to you that we in this country have been so slow to recognize where lay our true hope and our great danger. I have not despaired that we shall yet have learned in time.” With the approach of the Mike shot in 1952, the senior scientists who had opposed the development of the H-bomb in 1949 saw one more opportunity to negotiate a moratorium on thermonuclear weapons with the USSR.
Vannevar Bush went directly to Dean Acheson in the spring of the year to propose postponing Mike. Nineteen fifty-two was a presidential election year. After losing the New Hampshire primary, Truman had decided not to run and had endorsed Adlai Stevenson, the governor of Illinois, as the Democratic candidate; the Republicans reluctantly chose Dwight Eisenhower. The November election would be held only three days after the Mike shot. “I felt that it was utterly improper,” Bush testified, “… for that test to be [conducted] just before [the] election, to confront an incoming President with an accomplished test for which he would carry the full responsibility thereafter. For that test marked our entry into a very disagreeable type of world.” Bush's second reason for proposing that Mike be postponed was even more compelling:
I felt strongly that that test ended the possibility of the only type of agreement that I thought was possible with Russia at that time, namely, an agreement to make no more tests. For that kind of an agreement would have been self-policing in the sense that if it was violated, the violation would be immediately known… I think history will show that was a turning point… [and] that those who pushed that thing through to a conclusion without making that attempt have a great deal to answer for.
Oppenheimer advanced similar concerns; so did Conant. Bethe wrote Gordon Dean that a test would “undoubtedly give food to the Communist propaganda machine” and that “there may be rapid and unpredictable political repercussions, especially in Europe”; he proposed that someone like Oppenheimer be delegated to brief the two presidential candidates and win their approval to postpone Mike until November 15- Bethe had checked with Bradbury at Oppenheimer's request to confirm that a postponement would not threaten the test series; Bradbury was agreeable, but hoped he could get the men home for Christmas.
The AEC commissioners, Lewis Strauss no longer among them, were sympathetic to the idea of delaying the test. Gordon Dean pursued the idea through the National Security Council in mid-August; the word came back from Truman, says the official AEC history, “that the President would not change the date, but he would certainly be pleased if technical reasons cause a postponement.” In October, the commissioners decided to send one of their number, Eugene Zuckert, a former assistant secretary of the Air Force, out to Eniwetok to see if “technical reasons” might turn up. Dean solicited the approval of both the President and the Secretary of Defense, Robert Lovett, for his fellow commissioner's mission.
Zuckert remembered playing a larger role; in his recollection it was he who had alerted the President to the problem in the first place:
Gordon came back and he said, “The President agrees with you.” He said, “You go out there and see if you can get that shot stopped.” So I got my fanny in an airplane, out to the West Coast, which in those days was prop airplanes…
Then I was given some admiral's plane — I ranked some admiral out of his airplane in Honolulu and churned out to Kwajalein and then to Eniwetok, and I spent many days there and tried to see if we could get that shot postponed. And finally they gave me the responsibility of determining what should happen. Well, finally I decided — I guess the day before — that because of the weather predictions, we should permit them to go ahead.
The President decided, not Zuckert, but Dean only reached Truman on the campaign trail in Chicago on October 29, two days before the scheduled test date on the other side of the International Date Line. A nuclear test requires the explosion of nuclear material, which only a President can approve. Zuckert's memory of the date of that decision at least was correct; approval of the
The atoll of Eniwetok, in the northwestern quadrant of the Marshalls about three thousand miles west of Hawaii, is an oval ring twenty miles long and ten miles wide of forty small islands. Like all such ocean structures, it was built up of coral around a submerging volcanic seamount. The United States captured Eniwetok from the Japanese in February 1944 along the way to invading the Marianas, a thousand miles closer to Japan, from which Curtis LeMay's B-29s launched the firebombing of Japanese cities.
After the war, the US had designated Eniwetok along with Bikini (two hundred miles east) as a testing ground for atomic weapons and had removed the atoll's native inhabitants. It had already served as a site for the 1948
The task force chose Elugelab, true north on the compass of the atoll, for the Mike shot island. The small, spade-shaped outcrop of coral and sand was opposite and far away from the large atoll island, Parry, where the technical and scientific missions were based. It had islands east and west close enough to support shot instrumentation, and prevailing winds favored blowing contamination out to sea. Task force construction crews bulldozed sand and coral onto Elugelab to raise its elevation to improve lines of sight, then built a six-story open-air shot cab — Mike's zero point — big as an aircraft hangar. Auxiliary buildings surrounded the shot cab for subassembly and repair work, tritium storage and telemetering. A 375-foot antenna would receive and transmit radio and television control signals; seven enclosed mirrors arrayed in a semicircle would reflect early bomblight to streak cameras in a heavily reinforced bunker two miles away on Bogalua. One of the turbine-driven streak cameras was capable of photographing 3.5 million frames of film per second.
More than five hundred scientific stations on thirty islands instrumented the Mike shot. Some were reinforced-concrete bunkers banked with sand; others were no more than small targets of exotic materials that Mike neutrons of various energies would activate — tantalum, gold, sulfur, arsenic, cadmium and indium — planted in a line out from ground zero linked by cables that could be hauled in to retrieve what was left of them after the blast. The most remarkable installation (after Mike itself) was an eight-by-eight-foot, nine-thousand-foot-long
