twenty thousand. John Wheeler, however, had Oppenheimer's essay very much in mind when he wrote to Sterling Cole, “Anybody who says 20,000 weapons are no better than 2,000 ought to read the history of wars.” But nuclear weapons are not cannonballs; how many times could either country be destroyed? And who would venture war in the face of total and redundant destruction?
President Eisenhower examined the same issues in a memorandum for the Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in September 1953, discussing how “to educate our people in the fundamentals of these problems”:
We should patiently point out that any group of people, such as the men in the Kremlin, who are aware of the great destructiveness of these weapons — and who still decline to make any honest effort toward international control by collective action — must be fairly assumed to be contemplating their aggressive use. It would follow that our own preparation could no longer be geared to a policy that attempts only to avert disaster during the early “surprise” stages of a war, and so gain time for full mobilization. Rather, we would have to be constantly ready, on an instantaneous basis, to inflict greater loss upon the enemy than he could reasonably hope to inflict on us. This would be a deterrent…
It was to that point, of course, that the United States had come by 1953, and Stennis's and LeMay's comments testify to the robustness of the deterrent. But deterrence seemed to bring no resolution to the conflict, and Teller, Borden and the others who supported larger and more powerful stockpiles evidently did so because they feared that lack of realism, complacency, the dangerous advice of “professional hand-wringers” or, more insidiously, treasonable deception might allow the Soviet Union to pull ahead. To say it another way, they did not believe that the United States was alert to the danger that its arsenal might be overwhelmed, nor did they believe that a cruel and secretive competitor would accept stalemate.
Eisenhower, instructing Dulles, followed that line of thought out to its logical conclusion:
This would be a deterrent — but if the contest to maintain this relative position should have to continue indefinitely, the cost would either drive us to war — or into some form of dictatorial government. In such circumstances, we would be forced to consider whether or not our duty to future generations did not require us to
Such intense anxiety demanded alleviation. Conveniently, there was a scapegoat at hand to slaughter.
26
In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer
When president Dwight Eisenhower offered Lewis Strauss the chairmanship of the Atomic Energy Commission, in May 1953, the financier told the President that he would accept the appointment on one condition: that Robert Oppenheimer not be “connected in any way” to the agency. Strauss explained to the President that he distrusted Oppenheimer because the physicist had failed to report fully Haakon Chevalier's wartime espionage approaches and because he had continued to oppose the hydrogen bomb after President Truman authorized it. Strauss chose not to tell Eisenhower that he believed Oppenheimer might be “another Fuchs,” as he had implied to William Borden as long ago as August 1951. His discretion evidently represented no change of heart; he had recently informed the FBI of Oppenheimer activities he considered suspicious, and around this time he promised J. Edgar Hoover that he would purge Oppenheimer when he took up the chairmanship of the AEC.
Oppenheimer had already been separated from the General Advisory Committee. If Sidney Souers had recommended that separation to Truman the previous year, as he later recalled, Strauss had probably influenced Souers's recommendation; not long before Oppenheimer was dropped from the GAC, Borden had reported to Brien McMahon as “late gossip” that “Louie Strauss went to the President and urged him not to reappoint Oppie.” The Air Force had also sought to disconnect Oppenheimer from government, suspecting his loyalty and opposing his advice favoring continental defense and the development of tactical atomic weapons to balance strategic bombing. “In 1951,” Herbert York writes, “[USAF] Secretary [Thomas] Finlet-ter and General [Hoyt] Vandenberg gave direct orders to… the two top civilian scientists in Air Force headquarters not to use Oppenheimer as a consultant… and to keep classified Air Force information away from him.” In 1952, Borden reported to McMahon that “the Air Force feels that the removal of Dr. Oppenheimer is an urgent and immediate necessity.” Early in 1953, Stuart Symington encouraged his Red-baiting colleague Joseph McCarthy to investigate the charismatic physicist. Hostility to Oppenheimer had crossed the gulf between Democratic and Republican administrations; during the transition from Truman to Eisenhower, the incoming Department of Defense under Secretary Charles E. Wilson had abolished the Research and Development Board of which Oppenheimer was a member in order to ease him out of office. “We dropped the whole board,” Wilson would brag at a 1954 press conference. “That was a real smooth way of doing that one as far as the Defense Department was concerned.” From nearly full-time participation as a government adviser when he was GAC chairman, Oppenheimer worked only two days as a consultant to the AEC in 1952; in 1953, only four.
Yet the physicist's influence on US policy continued to frighten those who believed the nation was in mortal danger from Soviet Communism. Oppenheimer's stature was such that as recently as February 1953 he had briefed the National Security Council with Eisenhower in attendance on the conclusions of a State Department panel he had chaired on disarmament, conclusions favoring increased candor about the US nuclear arsenal that Strauss vehemently opposed. Worse, Eisenhower appeared to be sympathetic to Oppenheimer's long-standing conviction that the nuclear arms race had to be halted. Immediately after Strauss was sworn in as AEC chairman, the President had taken him aside and told him, “Lewis, let us be certain about
Contributing to nuclear-weapons policy depended crucially on access to classified information. “You had to be inside the government if you wanted to have an influence, especially on these military matters,” I. I. Rabi once noted. “Since there was all that secrecy, you couldn't know what you were talking about unless you were a part of it.” Oppenheimer's top secret Q clearance allowed him to know what he was talking about. It followed that withdrawing Oppenheimer's clearance would eliminate him as effectively as if someone had him shot. Strauss began his purge campaign immediately; on July 7, five days after he was sworn in, he ordered all classified AEC documents removed from the security safe in Oppenheimer's office at the Institute for Advanced Study — ostensibly to save the expense of a security guard.
Harold Green, a young attorney at the AEC at that time, remembers that Strauss typically purged people from government positions by “us[ing] his contacts in industry, foundations and educational institutions to produce career opportunities that the objects of his purges could not turn down.” Oppenheimer was barely a part-time consultant and was already at the top of his profession, in a position Strauss had arranged. Destroying his influence in any case would require shaming him publicly as well as withdrawing his clearance. Strauss turned aside the investigation that McCarthy was preparing by warning Republican Party leader Robert Taft that such an attack would be “ill-advised and impolitic.” In a draft of his letter to Taft he explained that “the McCarthy Committee is not the place for such an investigation, and the present is not the time.” Hoover heard him say that “inquiry into Oppenheimer's activities might be well worthwhile, [but] he hoped it would not be done prematurely or by a group that did not thoroughly prepare itself for the investigation.” Hoover and Vice-President Richard Nixon helped Strauss convince McCarthy to lay off.
In the meantime, William Borden was preparing a brief summarizing what he believed to be Oppenheimer's crimes. Borden's fortunes had declined since Brien McMahon's death. Republicans controlled the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Under Borden's auspices, a member of the committee staff, John Walker, had worked with Princeton physicist John A. Wheeler to prepare a lengthy chronology of H-bomb policy and progress that the JCAE had distributed within the government on January 1, 1953. Walker had continued work during January on a short but detailed review of how Klaus Fuchs might have learned about thermonuclear design principles before he left Los
