that right is essential in a democracy; he was pleased that the AEC had not allowed the issue of the quality of Oppenheimer's advice to influence its decision to revoke his security clearance.
Teller sent the draft statement to Lewis Strauss, saying he felt now that his testimony was seriously in error. He had not testified that a man's opinion could make him a security risk, he told Strauss, but he had clearly implied it and had come much too close to saying it. The issue was crucial to his colleagues and he would be crushed if they turned away from him. Hence, he wrote, his proposed statement. What did Strauss think of it?
Strauss was more than willing to serve as Teller's conscience. The last thing he wanted was a public recantation by his star witness. He told Teller that the right word for his colleagues’ reaction was “misinterpretation,” not “misunderstanding.” He proposed that Teller consult with Roger Robb. To make sure that Teller did so, Strauss sent the physicist's statement and letter on to the attorney. Robb immediately advised Teller to stand by his testimony, which had required “courage and character” and had performed “a public service of great value.” Teller complied.
Robert Oppenheimer was predictably devastated by the withdrawal of his clearance. “I think it broke his spirit, really,” Serber reflects. “He had spent the years after the war being an adviser, being in high places, knowing what was going on. To be in on things gave him a sense of importance. That became his whole life. As Rabi said, he could run the Institute with his left hand. And now he really didn't have anything to do.” Bethe felt “he was not the same person afterward.”
Of the hearing and its consequences for Robert Oppenheimer, Rabi had much to say. During the hearing itself, near the end of his hearing testimony, angrily, he put the government's narrow focus on Oppenheimer's early associations and contradictions in sane perspective:
I never hid my opinion from Mr. Strauss that I thought that… the suspension of the clearance of Dr. Oppenheimer was a very unfortunate thing and should not have been done. In other words, there he was; he is a consultant, and if you don't want to consult the guy, you don't consult him, period. Why you have to then proceed to suspend clearance and go through all this sort of thing — he is only there when called, and that is all there was to it. So it didn't seem to me the son of thing that called for this kind of proceeding at all against a man who had accomplished what Dr. Oppenheimer has accomplished. There is a real positive record, the way I expressed it to a friend of mine. We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it, [deleted] and what more do you want, mermaids?
Rabi elaborated on this testimony many years later in a conversation with Bill Moyers that ought to stand as the last word on the destruction of Robert Oppenheimer after he helped the United States end a war and build an unsurpassed arsenal of nuclear weapons:
I was indignant. Here was a man who had done so greatly for his country. A wonderful representative. He was forgiven the atomic bomb. Crowds followed him. He was a man of peace. And they destroyed this man. A small, mean group. There were scientists among them. One reason for doing it might be envy. Another might be personal dislike. A third, a genuine fear of communism. He was an aesthete. I don't think he was a security risk. I do think he walked along the edge of a precipice. He didn't pay enough attention to the outward symbols. He was a very American person of a certain kind. A certain kind of intellectual, aesthetic person of the upper middle classes… [In 1955] we had this [international] conference on the peaceful uses of atomic energy. And Lewis Strauss asked me, whom should we have for president of this conference? And I said, I guess we killed Cock Robin.
27
Scorpions in a Bottle
Through the years of the Korean War and the development of the hydrogen bomb, Curtis LeMay honed the Strategic Air Command into a weapon capable of killing a nation overnight. “The idea was to have overwhelming strength so that nobody would dare attack us,” he would explain in retirement — “at least that was my idea of it, and what I attempted to accomplish out at SAC… ” Deterrence was LeMay's formal strategy. He also prepared darker strategies against the hazard that deterrence might fail.
Parochial Air Force politics facilitated and fortuitously reinforced those darker strategies. The Air Force discovered that it could link its expansion to the enlarging nuclear arsenal, a linkage that the other military services sarcastically derided as “bootstrapping” — the Air Force lifting itself by its own bootstraps. First it gained a veto over the official US list of bombing targets. LeMay then began withholding his Basic War Plans from JCS review, arguing imperative secrecy. (He kept SAC targeting plans secret even within the Air Force. In 1952, for example, when Lauris Norstad had become commander of the USAF in Europe, Norstad's staff asked for a list of SAC's atomic targets in order to coordinate plans. LeMay wrote Norstad directly, waving him off: “I keep our target lists from everyone who does not have a real need to know them.”) By 1955, SAC essentially controlled its own target planning.
Simultaneously, the Air Force linked target and stockpile numbers to delivery systems. Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg argued the linkage to the other Joint Chiefs as early as the autumn of 1952:
It must be pointed out that if we do not provide an air force tactically strong enough to deliver atomic weapons on target with a high degree of reliability (and we thereby run out of delivery capability while appropriate targets and unexpended bombs remain) we will have committed a military blunder which will defy logical explanation to the American people. We will have failed to make provision to exploit our one military advantage over the USSR.
The Joint Chiefs accepted Vandenberg's argument and gave SAC priority in the defense budget. “The Fiscal Year 1953 defense budget included an Air Force objective for June 1954 of 143 wings, 48 more than had been proposed [previously],” writes historian David Alan Rosenberg, “… with no corresponding increases in Army and Navy force objectives.” President Truman cut the JCS request to 133 wings, but the Air Force nevertheless won more than 40 percent of defense funds that year, and comparable amounts through the decade.
In the first JCS war plans that incorporated atomic weapons, the number of atomic targets had depended on stockpile numbers because the atomic arsenal was small. As the AEC began to acquire plentiful ore supplies after 1950, and as improved bomb design reduced the amount of fissile metal required per bomb, the logic reversed and targets began to drive stockpile numbers. From sixty-six Soviet cities in 1945, Vandenberg would brief Truman in 1952 that the Air Force had identified “perhaps five or six thousand Soviet targets which would have to be destroyed in the event of war.” (These were no longer simply city centers; they included the Soviet nuclear production complex, airfields and military bases, oil production and refining and electrical power systems as well as industry.) Truman responded dutifully by regularly approving major increases in funding for the Atomic Energy Commission's enlarging industrial empire.
Just as the United States began a major expansion of its conventional military forces during the Korean War, so also did it expand its nuclear production capacity. A first AEC expansion was authorized in October 1950, a second, larger program in January 1952. Oak Ridge and Hanford doubled in size. Two vast gaseous-diffusion plants came on line, drawing more power than the Tennessee Valley Authority and Hoover, Grand Coulee and Bonneville dams could have delivered in concert; by 1957, the AEC consumed 6.7 percent of total US electrical power. Heavy- water reactors for tritium production at Savannah River required tens of thousands of gallons of the exotic liquid. Building the new production complexes required more than 11 percent of annual US nickel production, 34 percent of stainless steel, 33 percent of hydrofluoric acid. From $1.4 billion in 1947, AEC capital investment increased to almost
