contacted Bureau headquarters “in view of the fact that [the taps] might disclose attorney-client relations.” Washington responded that the taps were “warranted” because Oppenheimer might try to defect. An FBI document notes that the Bureau was “furnishing Strauss [and others] information bearing on the relationship between Oppenheimer, his attorneys and potential witnesses for Oppenheimer.” Strauss for his part expressed his appreciation to the Bureau; the surveillance was “most helpful to the AEC,” he explained, “in that they were aware beforehand of the moves [Oppenheimer] was contemplating.”
Strauss would have extensive access to Oppenheimer's attorney-client discussions in the months ahead. He justified such illegal intrusion on the grounds that the case was of definitive importance to national security. “He felt that if this case is lost,” the FBI paraphrases him, “the atomic energy program and all research and development connected thereto will fall into the hands of left-wingers.’ If this occurs, it will mean another ‘Pearl Harbor’ as far as atomic energy is concerned. Strauss feels that the scientists will then take over the entire program. Strauss stated that if Oppenheimer is cleared, then ‘anyone’ can be cleared regardless of the information against them.” A decade later, Strauss would reveal to Edward Teller the paranoid depths of his dread:
[Oppenheimer] had been instrumental in bringing to Los Alamos a number of men known to him to be Communists. It would be reasonable to suppose that they were doing what Fuchs and others did, viz., passing on to the Soviets everything they could discover. Oppenheimer's later decision, therefore, to do what he could to prevent the United States from developing the Super was a decision reached in the knowledge that such weapon data as we then had were in the hands of men whose leaning to the Soviets he knew. Consequently, if he had been able to block the development of the weapon by the United States, its denial to the Russians was beyond his control. It is hardly conceivable that the consequences of such a condition could have been overlooked by a mind as agile as his.
To Strauss, not only Oppenheimer was subversive; here he extends the slander to include the men and women who developed the thermonuclear at Los Alamos as well. If Strauss feared another Pearl Harbor, Oppenheimer's had already roared in.
The physicist chose a Lincolnesque attorney to represent him, Lloyd Garrison, a leader in the American Civil Liberties Union and a great-grandson of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Faced with the possibility that at least one member of the defense team might not be clearable without extensive investigation, Garrison made the serious error of deciding not to seek a security clearance himself; without clearance he would be barred from reviewing many of the documents on which Oppenheimer would be examined and would even sometimes have to vacate the hearing room and leave his client undefended.[50] Strauss found a seasoned trial lawyer, Roger Robb, an expert at cross-examination, who would turn what was supposed to be an inquiry into a prosecution. Strauss hand-picked the three-man security board as well: Gordon Gray, former Assistant Secretary of the Army, a wealthy North Carolina Democrat who had supported Eisenhower over Adlai Stevenson in 1952 because he considered Stevenson's opposition to Communism insufficiently militant; Thomas Morgan, former president of Sperry Gyroscope, a nonentity who would ask not one question in a month of hearing witnesses; and Ward Evans, a Loyola University chemistry professor who had served on security boards before and who remarked to Gray (as Gray noted) “that in his experience… almost without exception those [accused] who turned up with subversive backgrounds were Jewish.” Evans told Gray before the hearing began that he thought Oppenheimer was guilty. “I was concerned at this note of clear prejudice,” Gray adds, but the security board chairman did nothing about it.
Rabi carried a draft resolution to Strauss from the General Advisory Committee proposing that the entire GAC membership would testify on Oppenheimer ‘s behalf. “Strauss told Rabi he considered this blackmail,” an FBI document reports, “and that he could not be swayed by such action.” Princeton physicist Eugene Wigner, although politically conservative, tried to intercede on Oppenheimer's behalf as well, as did Hans Bethe. Victor Weisskopf, whom Oppenheimer would credit with having helped open his eyes in the late 1930s to the brutality and incompetence of Soviet Communism, wrote the beleaguered physicist “that I and everybody who feels as I do are fully aware of the fact that you are fighting here our own fight… Please think of us when you are feeling low. Think of all your friends who are going to remain your friends and who rely upon you.” One friend Oppenheimer did not hear from was Robert Serber, whom Teller and other informants had denounced as a leftist along with his wife Charlotte, and whose name Roger Robb would invoke often at the security hearing. (Charlotte Serber was active in Spanish relief in the late 1930s and came from a prominent socialist family, but neither she nor her husband had been members of the Communist Party.) “One morning about three a.m. I got a phone call,” Serber remembers sadly. “The guy said he was a lawyer in Garrison's office. Oppie is going to have this loyalty hearing, he told me, and wanted me not to communicate with him because he was sure the phones were going to be tapped and the letters checked. So I didn't communicate with him during that period. Later on, Kitty [Oppenheimer] told me that it wasn't true that Oppie made that request. It all came from Garrison. Oppie didn't know anything about it.” Which meant two old and loyal friends each thought the other had abandoned him.
That winter of 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced the Eisenhower administration's new policy of “massive retaliation,” a Senate subcommittee prepared to hold hearings on charges that McCarthy had abused his authority investigating the Army and a secret Defense Department committee headed by John von Neumann proposed that the US begin building strategic missiles fitted with nuclear warheads. On March 1, Los Alamos and Livermore initiated a new thermonuclear test series at Bikini,
The room-temperature Shrimp device used lithium enriched to 40 percent lithium6; it weighed a relatively portable 23,500 pounds and had been designed to fit the bomb bay of a B-47 when it was weaponized. It was expected to yield about five megatons, but the group at Los Alamos that had measured lithium fusion cross sections had used a technique that missed an important fusion reaction in lithium7, the other 60 percent of the Shrimp lithium fuel component. “They really didn't know,” Harold Agnew explains, “that with lithium7 there was an n, 2n reaction [i.e., one neutron entering a lithium nucleus knocked two neutrons out]. They missed it entirely. That's why Shrimp went like gangbusters.” Bravo exploded with a yield of fifteen megatons, the largest-yield thermonuclear device the US ever tested. “When the two neutrons come out,” says Agnew, “then you have lithium6 and it went like regular lithium6. Shrimp was so much bigger than it was supposed to be because we were wrong about the cross section.”
This time the fireball expanded to nearly four miles in diameter. It engulfed its 7,500-foot diagnostic pipe array all the way out to the earth-banked instrument bunker, which barely survived. It trapped people in experiment bunkers well outside the expected limits of its effects and menaced task force ships far out at sea. “I was on a ship that was thirty miles away,” Marshall Rosenbluth remembers, “and we had this horrible white stuff raining out on us. I got 10 rads[51] of radiation from it. It was pretty frightening. There was a huge fireball with these turbulent rolls going in and out. The thing was glowing. It looked to me like a diseased brain up in the sky. It spread until the edge of it looked as if it was almost directly overhead. It was a much more awesome sight than a puny little atomic bomb. It was a pretty sobering and shattering experience.” Bravo vaporized a crater 250 feet deep and 6,500 feet in diameter out of the atoll rock; Rosenbluth's “horrible white stuff was calcium precipitated from vaporized coral.
A Japanese fishing boat, the
