Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

area” even though there was ample evidence to the contrary; privately, the AEC chairman told Eisenhower's press secretary dismissively that the boat was probably a “Red spy ship.”

The Castle series continued with tests of an unenriched lithium-deuteride device — Runt, Castle Romeo — which ran away to eleven megatons, three times its predicted yield, for the same reason Bravo had; of Koon, the first thermonuclear out of Teller's new Livermore lab, a device called Morgen-stern with a predicted one-megaton yield that produced only 110 kilotons — a dud; of a radiation- imploded Alarm Clock, Union, that yielded 6.9 megatons; of Yankee, another version of the Runt design that yielded 135 megatons; and of Nectar, a thermonuclear weighing only 6,520 pounds that yielded 1.69 megatons. The Runt was Harold Agnew's project. Jacob Wechs-ler had supervised development of a weaponized version of Mike — Jughead — in case the dry bombs failed; it was supposed to be tested at Castle. After the Romeo success, Wechsler reminisces, “Harold said, Got to send a wire to Norris [Bradbury]. I said, Sure. He said, To kill your Jughead. I said, Yeah? He said, Here's the wire: ‘Why buy a cow when powdered milk is so cheap?’” “The results of Operation Castle,” Raemer Schreiber writes, “left me with the unpleasant job of negotiating the closeout of a sizable cryogenic hardware contract.” Future US thermonuclear weapons would be fueled with lithium deuteride.

After the Bravo shot, Charles Critchfield recalled, Oppenheimer had a first bitter taste of what life would be like outside the circle of secrecy:

Robert had lost his clearance and I remember being in my office for some reason. I got a call from Robert and he had heard about the Bravo shot. All he would say on the phone was, Charles, can you give me a number. I said fifteen. He said thank you. He knew what it meant, of course. I knew I was breaking the law but Robert was an old friend of mine and I wasn't about to tell him, “I can't tell you.”

McCarthy made headlines early in April claiming Communists in government had delayed “our research on the hydrogen bomb” by eighteen months, effectively pressing Strauss and his prosecution team to produce a culprit. The AEC's inquiry “in the matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer” finally came on for hearing on April 12,1954, a cool and sunny day.

AEC Building T-3, near the Washington Monument, was a modified barracks structure left over from the Second World War. An executive office on the second floor had been converted into a small hearing room. The three security board members sat at a table along one wall that formed the lintel of a T. Two tables butted together with the opposing lawyers on either side made the T's upright. A witness chair that faced the security board anchored the upright. Whenever Oppenheimer was not testifying, he chain-smoked cigarettes or a pipe on a leather couch against the wall behind the witness chair. It must have been frustrating not to be able to study the witnesses’ faces as they spoke.

For the first two days of the hearing, Garrison led Oppenheimer through his life, interrupting to interview a friendly witness and to read an affidavit from John Manley. Near the end of Garrison's direct examination, Oppenheimer read a denunciation of Communism from one of his Reith Lectures-. “Perhaps only a malignant end can follow the systematic belief that all communities are one community; that all truth is one truth; that all experience is compatible with all other; that total knowledge is possible; that all that is potential can exist as actual.” The statement was eloquent, but the reading must have fallen flat in that unfriendly courtroom. “From the beginning,” Garrison would recall many years later of the man he was defending,

“[Oppenheimer] had a quality of desperation about him… I think we all felt oppressed by the atmosphere of the time but Oppenheimer particularly so… I found him enigmatic, fascinating of course, with those most beautiful blue eyes, but he was hard to be intimate with… Cold is too strong a word, he wasn't cold but he kept his distance.” Roger Robb, fleshy and intimidating as Joe McCarthy but analytical of mind, believed he already knew the answer to the enigma: “There were so many things in those files that didn't add up unless you applied a theory to them which was that Oppenheimer was a Communist and a Russian sympathizer, and that's the only way I could add it up.”

Garrison finished presenting his client in direct examination on April 14. Then it was Robb's turn to cross- examine, and he had planned exactly how to proceed:

Having begun to pull all these strings together, I had been told that you can't get anywhere cross-examining Oppenheimer, he's too smart. He's too fast and he's too slippery. So I said, “Maybe so, but then he's not been cross-examined by me before.” Anyway, I sat down and planned my cross-examination most carefully, the sequences to it and the references to the FBI reports and so on, and my theory was that if I could shake Oppenheimer at the beginning, he would be apt to be more communicative thereafter.

Neither Oppenheimer nor his defense team were allowed to see the FBI reports, nor were they aware that Boris Pash and John Lansdale had secretly recorded Oppenheimer's revelations about espionage approaches in 1943. With that privileged information and with documents Oppenheimer had not reviewed for more than ten years, Robb was able to drive the physicist to contradict himself repeatedly on his first morning of cross-examination.

In the last hour of the morning, the AEC counsel closed in. He asked Oppenheimer to describe the Chevalier approach. Oppenheimer repeated his 1946 version:

One day… Haakon Chevalier came to our home. It was, I believe, for dinner, but possibly for a drink. When I went out into the pantry, Chevalier followed me or came with me to help me. He said, “I saw George Eltenton recently.” Maybe he asked me if I remembered him. That Eltenton had told him that he had a method, he had means of getting technical information to Soviet scientists. He didn't describe the means. I thought I said “But that is treason,” but I am not sure. I said anyway something. “This is a terrible thing to do.” Chevalier said or expressed complete agreement. That was the end of it. It was a very brief conversation.

Robb then led Oppenheimer through an incriminating catechism:

Q. Did Chevalier in that conversation say anything to you about the use of microfilm as a means of transmitting this information?

A. No.

Q. You are sure of that?

A. Sure.

Q Did he say anything about the possibility that the information would be transmitted through a man at the Soviet consulate?

A. No; he did not.

Q. You are sure about that?

A. I am sure about that.

Q. Did he tell you or indicate to you in any way that he had talked to anyone but you about this matter?

A. No.

Q. You are sure about that?

A. Yes.

So Robb guided Oppenheimer to contradict his 1943 revelations to Boris Pash that “a man attached to the Soviet consul” had approached, “through other people” — meaning at least Chevalier — “two or three people” about transmitting “information” through “a very reliable guy… who had a lot of experience in microfilm.” A few more questions and the hearing adjourned for lunch.

Did Oppenheimer understand by then that Robb had trapped him in criminal contradiction? On the evidence of his testimony that afternoon, and of other information that a volume of the official AEC history brought to light for the first time in 1989, it is clear that he did, although he was probably less concerned about the legal conflict in which he had tangled himself than the personal. The 1946 version of his story — that Chevalier had approached him at his home not to solicit espionage but merely to report a contact and that there was only one such approach — was false and Oppenheimer knew that it was false. He had chosen to affirm it anyway under oath at his security