Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb

It was Truman, after all, who had decided to drop the bomb and had blood on his hands.

Truman's indignation disguised his own great uneasiness about bombs that destroyed entire cities. In the last days of the war, Los Alamos had cast a third plutonium core for shipment out to Tinian, where a Fat Man high- explosive assembly was ready to receive it. Truman decided not to authorize its use and told his Cabinet why; Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace noted the President's reason in his diary: “Truman said he had given orders to stop the atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn't like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’”

In October, not long before his confrontation with Oppenheimer, already impatient with Soviet intransigence in Eastern Europe, Truman had complained to his budget director, Harold D. Smith, “There are some people in the world who do not seem to understand anything except the number of divisions you have.” Smith had rejoined in the Jimmy Byrnes mode, “Mr. President, you have an atomic bomb up your sleeve.” And Truman had concluded somberly, “Yes, but I am not sure it can ever be used.”

Oppenheimer decided to leave Los Alamos and return to teaching and research. He had offers from at least Columbia, the Institute for Advanced Study, Berkeley, Caltech and Harvard; he chose Caltech, but he soon found himself traveling to Washington almost weekly as the government discovered his talent for advice.

On his last day as director, October 16, at an outdoor ceremony that nearly everyone on the mesa attended, he received a certificate of appreciation for the laboratory from Groves on behalf of the Secretary of War, expressed pride in the work the laboratory had done, and then shadowed the bright day with strong words about the potential consequences. “Today that pride must be tempered with a profound concern,” he told the men and women who had teased the prepotent mechanisms into existence. “If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and of Hiroshima. The peoples of this world must unite, or they will perish.” By their works, he said, they were committed, “committed to a world united, before this common peril, in law, and in humanity.” That the peril of atomic war was common to all the nations of the world was an idea Niels Bohr had brought to Los Alamos; the charismatic Oppenheimer was fast becoming Bohr's spokesman.

Was there, in fact, opposition at Los Alamos to working on the bomb, as Oppenheimer had warned Acheson and Patterson? Most of the civilian staff at the laboratory signed a public statement early in September warning of the danger of an atomic arms race and urging efforts at international control, but that is not the same thing as opposition. Norris Bradbury, the vigorous, Berkeley-trained Navy physicist whom Oppenheimer nominated in September to take over the laboratory's direction, offered the only report of opposition the record contains, and it sounds like Oppenheimer's. “There was one school of thought,” Bradbury said, “which held that Los Alamos should become a monument, a ghost laboratory, and that all work on the military use of atomic energy should cease.” Anyone who might have been opposed was free to go, of course, and presumably, like Oppenheimer, did so. Those who stayed remember primarily confusion and insecurity. There was “continual uncertainty about the future,” says John Manley, who had helped Oppenheimer organize and run the place. “… It was a miserable time.” Manley recalls that “Oppenheimer thought I should leave at the end of the war. I didn't take his advice.” Whatever he was advising privately, in formal council Oppenheimer stressed the need for continuity, as two British observers reported: “Oppenheimer made it clear that any large exodus would be a limitation on the future freedom of action of the Project and should be avoided.”

Edward Teller remembers Oppenheimer encouraging him to leave. The first team was going, Oppenheimer needled his fractious colleague. Teller did not want to see Los Alamos close up shop. Bethe proposed that he consider taking over the Theoretical Division and Teller poured out his frustrations. “In this conversation,” Befhe remembers, “for the first time in my recollection, he expressed himself as terribly pessimistic about relations with Russia. He was terribly anti-Communist, terribly anti-Russian… Teller said we had to continue research on nuclear weapons… It was really wrong of us all to want to leave. The war was not over and Russia was just as dangerous an enemy as Germany had been.”

Without question, Edward Teller was consistently and vocally anti-Communist throughout his long life. Reading Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon at Los Alamos soon after the laboratory opened its doors in the spring of 1943 finished the process of determining him in that conviction. But he also had a personal stake in seeing Los Alamos continue its work postwar: he had passionately championed the development of a thermonuclear explosive — a “superbomb” based on hydrogen fusion that might be a hundred or a thousand times more destructive than the atomic bombs had been — since Enrico Fermi first suggested the idea to him at Columbia University one afternoon in September 1941. And about the superbomb in particular, the scientific leaders of the Manhattan Project were clear. Although the scientific panel, in its report to Stimson on August 17, found “quite favorable technical prospects of the realization of the superbomb,” Oppenheimer told George Harrison the next day that (in Harrison's paraphrase) “the scientists prefer not to do that… unless ordered or directed to do so by the Government on the grounds of national policy.” In a long report finished on September 28 proposing research and development in the field of atomic energy, the scientific panel recommended “that no such effort [comparable to the Manhattan Project] should be invested in [the thermonuclear] problem at the present time, but that the existence of the possibility should not be forgotten, and that interest in the fundamental questions involved should be maintained.” Which, translated, meant research into the basic physics of thermonuclear fusion but no development. Arthur Compton put the matter even more plainly in a letter to Henry Wallace summarizing the panel's findings. “We feel that this development should not be undertaken,” Compton wrote, “primarily because we should prefer defeat in war to a victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its determined use.” The Nobel laureate physicist suggested reassessing the question in ten years — that is, in 1955. “Perhaps there may be then, an international government adequate to make its development under world auspices safe or perhaps unnecessary for further consideration.” Even Groves, according to Oppenheimer, thought his mandate did not reach so far. “General Groves told me very briefly that he had been told by Byrnes… that, with things as they were, the work at Los Alamos ought to continue, but this did not apply to the Super.”

Fermi knew that Teller, who had led thermonuclear research at Los Alamos during the war, disagreed with the scientific panel's findings, and encouraged the Hungarian physicist to write him a letter of record summarizing his position. Teller did so on October 31. In 1944, Teller had briefed James Bryant Conant on the superbomb. Conant, who was supervising atomic-bomb development, reported following that briefing that a hydrogen bomb was “probably at least as distant now as was the fission bomb when… I first heard of the enterprise.” That estimate — between four and five years — was already optimistic compared to the estimate generally accepted at Los Alamos, partly because the thermonuclear looked like a hard case, partly because fission bombs would have to be better understood and considerably improved before they could be made efficient enough — hot enough — to serve as thermonuclear detonators. Now, in late 1945, framing his dissent, Teller altered his estimate, formulating for the first time in a report many of the arguments for pursuing technological security that he would elaborate through the decades to come.

“When could the first super bomb be tried out?” the Hungarian physicist asked rhetorically. He answered with two numbers, the second an early example of what has come to be called threat inflation:

It is my belief that five years is a conservative estimate of this time. This assumes that the development will be pursued with some vigor. The job, however, may be much easier than expected and may take no more than two years. In considering future dangers it is important not to disregard this eventuality.

How soon could another country produce such a bomb? Faster than the United States, apparently, despite his adopted country's lead: “The time needed… may not be much longer than the time needed by them to produce an atomic bomb.” What about moral objections? They were meaningless before the onrush of technology:

There is among my scientific colleagues some hesitancy as to the advisability of this development on the grounds that it might make the international problems even more difficult than they are now. My opinion is that this is a fallacy. If the development is possible, it is out of our powers to prevent it.

Teller thought defensive measures such as the dispersal of cities might prove effective against atomic bombs but “very much less so against superbombs.” He could not yet offer detailed plans for the peaceful use of thermonuclear explosives. “But I consider it a certainty that the superbomb will allow us to extend our power over