Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

yields possible in a device of any reasonable size. (Whether such yields were necessary for national defense or deterrence is another question.) Joe 4 was more than a table thumper, but it was not a weapon that could be much more than doubled in yield.

The fact that the Soviet Union tested such a limited thermonuclear system should have reassured the H- bomb enthusiasts that Soviet scientists had not yet discovered the Teller-Ulam configuration. Until the USSR made that breakthrough, the United States would continue to hold a preponderant advantage in nuclear firepower, which the enthusiasts believed to be a meaningful measure of national security. By August 1953, Los Alamos was actively preparing to test (in 1954) a lighter, lithium-deuteride-fueled successor to Mike that could be weaponized quickly for delivery by air, as well as an emergency-capability, cryogenic, weaponized, air-deliverable version of Mike. The laboratory had proven its ability to produce results. It should have been evident that the US nuclear-weapons program was “ahead” — ahead in tested thermonuclear invention and in numbers of stockpiled atomic bombs.

Mississippi Senator John Stennis of the Senate Armed Services Committee confirmed the US advantage to Stuart Symington (now a senator from Missouri) in October 1953 after touring US Strategic Air Command bases in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East:

I was tremendously impressed and encouraged at the enormous striking power that we could put into action on many fronts in a matter of hours should we be attacked. This is not power on paper; it is actual, real, and to an extent, ready… Russia is rimmed by lines of bases three deep…

Recent statements of possible atomic or hydrogen bombs on us have emphasized the power of our potential enemies. Some speak as though other powers had the bombs and we had none. I do not discount one bit the terrible destruction involved should such an attack come on us and I know no absolute defense is possible. At the same time, we now have tremendous striking power on our own, which is growing daily, and any nation that commits an atomic attack on us, in my opinion, is committing a suicidal act unless it should wipe us out at the first blow. This is, of course, impossible. Great as our problems of defense may be, Russia's problems are far greater and our own striking power is far greater than hers. She is bound to recognize our overwhelming power of retaliation.

Symington sent Stennis's letter to Curtis LeMay for comment. “I am in general agreement with the comments made by Senator Stennis throughout his letter,” LeMay responded, adding, “The balance appears to be tipped in our favor today.”

The H-bomb enthusiasts were not convinced by such arguments, however authoritative. They continued to perceive the nation to be endangered and to suspect sabotage. The scientists among them, at least, were men trained in assessing evidence carefully and in discarding hypotheses such evidence falsified. What threatened them so dreadfully that they retreated from that training to unsupported convictions?

Republican US Representative Sterling Cole of New York, Brien McMahon's successor as chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, wrote a number of scientists in November 1953 asking them to assess the relative status of the US and Soviet thermonuclear weapons programs. Despite the evidence of the Joe 4 test and the robust success of Mike, John von Neumann responded anxiously to Cole's question about how much the Soviets were behind the US in thermonuclear development. “I… no longer think that the time lag… is as much as two years in our favor,” the distinguished mathematician wrote. “Actually, I would think that it is more probable that it is about a year, and it may very well be zero. Indeed, in some parts of the field the Soviets may be ahead of us.” Von Neumann thought that “from 1945 to 1949 there was a uniform time lag of about four years between us and the Soviets in our favor… This time lag seems to me to be now hardly more than one year… So the Russians would seem to have made up in four years at least three years’ time. Yet, by all evidence available to us, their technical and scientific manpower does not yet exceed ours.” Their industrial capacity averaged only 30 percent of ours, von Neumann estimated. He concluded that the Soviets had made up the time because they started earlier on their thermonuclear and because “the level of ability on the part of Soviet scientists, engineers and technicians is very high. This must have been the really decisive factor.” Yet von Neumann, with his Hungarian background, was in a position to know better than many native-born Americans that Soviet abilities and education were not superior to Western and that a police state is not conducive to sustained creative work or even to exceptional industrial productivity. The very fact that the Soviets had needed espionage to accelerate their program argued against his assessment of their abilities.

Worse, von Neumann believed that SAC was “highly vulnerable to an enemy's surprise attack… It is most depressing to contemplate how badly the efficiency of this operation might deteriorate in the case of surprise attack. It might easily endanger the functioning of SAC altogether.” Von Neumann thought SAC ought to be dispersed and even go underground. Indeed, he believed that urban and industrial America ought to decentralize and disperse. “I think that the only choice that we have is whether this necessary readjustment will occur after a general disaster, under the conditions of shock, or in an orderly and planned fashion.”

John Archibald Wheeler, a distinguished American theoretical physicist who had worked with Niels Bohr in 1939 to elucidate the theory of nuclear fission, had contributed importantly to the design and successful operation of the plutonium production reactors at Hanford, had recently helped Los Alamos calculate the hydrodynamics of the equilibrium thermonuclear and was now a member of the General Advisory Committee, responded even more stridently to Cole's questions. “I know of no evidence,” he began, “that would exclude [the Soviets] being substantially ahead of us in production of TN [i.e., thermonuclear] weapons.” Wheeler was clear about whom to blame:

If we had started our effort in 1946 instead of 1950, I see no good reason why we could not have been four years ahead of where we are now. The professional hand-wringers who kept us from getting under way for those four years have much to answer for. But I am even more concerned about the great inertia of those who right now fail to recognize that we are engaged in the most deadly and important armaments race in human history. Our secrecy keeps secret how little we are doing, not how much we are doing. Responsible men like you are all too few… We need to rouse this country to our danger of falling way behind — Is our own hydrogen effort adequate? In my opinion it is shamefully inadequate…

In contrast, 1.1. Rabi, Robert Oppenheimer's successor as chairman of the GAC, judged that there was no real time lag between the two nations’ nuclear-weapons programs any longer, “no more than I would say that there is a time lag in tanks or aircraft. We are each pursuing an independent program as laid out by our military planners.” He did not feel unduly threatened by that parallelism. It was clear that the Soviets were “still stressing their fission program” and Rabi believed “our thermonuclear effort is in excellent shape.” He believed “that we could not have undertaken a major thermonuclear program until we had some good ideas of how to proceed. In my judgment, these ideas did not appear before about early 1950… One of the most important factors in our advance was the demonstration by Dr. Ulam of Los Alamos that the plans of 1946 were scientifically unsound.” Rabi thought Soviet thermonuclear progress was “based on the fission bomb techniques,” confirming that informed government officials were aware that Joe 4 was an HE-imploded rather than a radiation-imploded design.

All these men had reason to know, deeply and personally, the ferocious destructiveness of nuclear weapons. The difference between Stennis's, Rabi's — and Oppenheimer's — confidence and von Neumann's, Wheeler's — and Teller's, William Borden's and Lewis Strauss's — dread and foreboding would appear to be their different weighing of the deterrent value of those weapons. In the summer of 1953, Oppenheimer had published a memorable essay in the journal Foreign Affairs, “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” in which he had ridiculed the proponents of ever-larger and more powerful nuclear arsenals. “The very least we can say,” the former GAC chairman wrote, “is that, looking ten years ahead, it is likely to be small comfort that the Soviet Union is four years behind us, and small comfort that they are only about half as big as we are. The very least we can conclude is that our twenty-thousandth bomb, useful as it may be in filling the vast munitions pipelines of a great war, will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two-thousandth.” The JCAE had in its files a recent and chilling assessment by a member of the committee staff of how many ten-megaton thermonuclear weapons it would take to destroy totally the eight most productive industrial states in the US. Fortuitously, the estimate confirms Oppenheimer's numbers: 2,010 bombs for New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, California, New Jersey, Indiana and Massachusetts. Double that number to allow for duds and total misses and it is still closer to two thousand than to