Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

ended the war and now let's just lock everything up and forget about it. Really one had to live with this situation from here on.” But even that seemingly obvious conclusion was debatable. “We all felt that, like the soldiers, we had done our duty,” Hans Bethe writes, “and… deserved to return to the type of work that we had chosen as our life's career, the pursuit of pure science and teaching… Moreover, it was not obvious… that there was any need for a large effort on atomic weapons in peacetime.” Ernest Lawrence, James Chadwick, Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory director Arthur Compton and Robert Oppenheimer had attended a dinner with General Groves at Los Alamos before the end of the war where postwar developments had been discussed. Groves had worried about maintaining US military strength in peacetime. People had talked about developing nuclear power. “And Fermi,” Oppenheimer writes, “said, thoughtfully: ‘I think it would be nice if we could find a cure for the common cold.’” Bethe went back to Cornell University; Fermi accepted a professorship at the University of Chicago, where he had worked during the war. Both men continued to serve Los Alamos as consultants.

Richard Feynman, who had driven his roommate Klaus Fuchs's old Buick down to Albuquerque the previous June, in the midst of the final effort to finish the bombs, to keep vigil with his young wife Arlene while she died of tuberculosis, found himself lost between worlds. Before he left Los Alamos he had thought about what the bomb meant and had made some notes. He had calculated that Little Boys in mass production would cost about as much as B-29s. “No monopoly,” he had written. “No defense.” And: “No security until we have control on a world level… Other peoples are not being hindered in the development of the bomb by any secrets we are keeping… Soon they will be able to do to Columbus, Ohio, and hundreds of cities like it what we did to Hiroshima. And we scientists are clever — too clever — are you not satisfied? Is four square miles in one bomb not enough? Men are still thinking. Just tell us how big you want it!” The twenty-six-year-old widower may have seen too much of death. He sat in a bar in Manhattan one afternoon in the months after the war looking out the window at all the people going by and shaking his head, thinking how sad it was that they didn't realize they had only a few years to live. On Bethe's recommendation, Cornell snapped him up, but creative work eluded him in that time of grieving until he took to heart the advice that the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann had tendered him at Los Alamos during the war. “We used to go for walks on Sunday,” Feynman recalls. “We'd walk in the canyons… It was a great pleasure. And von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in.” He had not been able to fix Arlene; why should he presume he could fix the world?

Robert Oppenheimer had directed the work at Los Alamos to spectacular success, but after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki he seems to have fallen into a period of doubt and even of guilt. Tall, rail-thin, chainsmoking, “an extraordinary man,” as a colleague would describe him in 1947, “who worked very hard and always seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown,” Oppenheimer faltered for a time between personal burden and visionary advocacy. “You will believe that this undertaking has not been without its misgivings,” he wrote an old friend two weeks after the end of the war; “they are heavy on us today, when the future, which has so many elements of high promise, is yet only a stone's throw from despair.” He had supported and even promoted using the bombs. “We were concerned,” he told an audience a year later, “we were rightly and somewhat desperately concerned, that these weapons… should be manifest to all men to see and understand, that they might know what future war would be…

It would not have been a better world if the unrealized possibility of these terrible weapons had been a secret shadow on our future.” Edward Teller had carried a petition into Oppenheimer's Los Alamos office in July 1945 opposing use, and had come away bearing just that message, advising the petitioner, his fellow Hungarian Leo Szilard, that “our only hope is in getting the facts of our results before the people. This might help to convince everybody that the next war would be fatal. For this purpose actual combat-use might even be the best thing.” The advice was pure Oppenheimer, and for the rest of his life Teller would resent having parroted it, even claiming in old age that doing so had been a ruse, “not very nice… but we had censorship in Los Alamos, and I felt sure that Oppenheimer would see the letter… and I did not care to contradict Oppenheimer too strongly.” In fact, Teller sent the letter to Oppenheimer for approval with an obsequious cover note.

The weekend after the Nagasaki bombing, Oppenheimer met at Los Alamos with the three other members of the scientific panel — Lawrence, Arthur Compton and Fermi — that advised the Interim Committee that Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, had assembled to consider the postwar disposition of the atomic enterprise. Lawrence found Oppenheimer weary, guilty and depressed, wondering if the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not luckier than the survivors, whose exposure to the bombs would have lifetime effects. The four men worked to prepare a letter that went to Stimson on August 17; it warned that the new weapon that seemed so absolute in monopoly would eventually, when it got around, pose a threat not only to an enemy but also to the United States. “We are convinced,” the scientists wrote, “that weapons quantitatively and qualitatively far more effective than now available will result from further work on these problems… Nevertheless we have grave doubts that this further development can contribute essentially or permanently to the prevention of war. We believe that the safety of this nation… cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible.” If the letter was not clear enough on the urgency of a political solution, Oppenheimer personally carried it to Washington at the end of the month and elaborated on its message to whoever would listen, as he reported to Lawrence:

I… had an opportunity… to explain in more detail than was appropriate in a letter what our common feelings were in this all important thing. I emphasized of course that all of us would earnestly do whatever was really in the national interest, no matter how desperate and disagreeable; but that we felt reluctant to promise that much real good could come of continuing the atomic bomb work just like poison gases after the last war… In the end this will have to be based on a national policy which is intelligible in its broad outlines to the men who are doing the work… I do not come away from [i.e., I still feel] a profound grief, and a profound perplexity about the course we should be following.

Before he left Washington, Oppenheimer heard from Jimmy Byrnes that “in the present critical international situation there was no alternative to pushing the program full steam ahead.”

Oppenheimer disagreed. During September and October he communicated his disagreement forcefully to officials at the highest levels of the US government. He was certainly secure in his conviction, but he was also inevitably gauging the political influence of his authority as the magus who had guided the invention of the miraculous bombs. From obscurity before the war and invisibility during the war years he would soon appear in Time magazine, celebrated as “the smartest of the lot.”

On September 24, the forty-one-year-old physicist met with Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Stimson aide George L. Harrison. “Dr. Oppenheimer philosophized at great length about the work of the scientists,” Harrison dictated afterward for the record, “their objectives, their prejudices and their hopes. There is distinct opposition on their part to doing any more work on any bomb… He says that much of the restiveness in his laboratory is not so much due to the delay in [atomic energy] legislation as to a feeling of uncertainty as to whether they are going to be asked to continue perfecting the bomb against the dictates of their hearts and spirits. This is true particularly in terms of a better one, but the feeling persists even as to continuing the manufacture of the present one. Mr. Acheson seemed much interested in this.” A tough-minded patriot, Acheson took the threat of a revolt of the scientists in stride. Harrison caught on and started filling behind him the hole Oppenheimer was opening; after he shepherded the physicist to a meeting with Robert Patterson, the Undersecretary of War, he advised Patterson to talk to Groves “and obtain his views which are quite different from those of the scientists.”

A month later, Oppenheimer got a chance to present his case to the President himself. Intricate urbanite and blustery farmer, Harvard elitist and Midwestern autodidact, they repelled each other snappishly. “In the winter of 1945-46,” Oppenheimer told an interviewer two decades later, “hysteria centered on our hypercryptic power and the hope of retaining it. I saw President Truman and he told me he wanted help in getting domestic legislation through. “The first thing is to define the national problem,’ he said, ‘then the international.’ I said, ‘Perhaps it would be best first to define the international problem.’”

“I feel we have blood on our hands,” Oppenheimer remembered adding, and Truman replying, “Never mind. It'll all come out in the wash.” Closer to their meeting, Truman still felt indignant at Oppenheimer's presumption, writing Acheson in 1946 that Oppenheimer was a “‘cry baby’ scientist… [who] came to my office… and spent most of his time [wringing his hands and telling me they had blood on them because of the discovery of atomic energy.”