natural phenomena far beyond anything we can at present imagine.”
By the time he wrote his letter to Fermi, Teller had already talked to Norris Bradbury about the future of the lab. “I said we either should make a great effort to build a hydrogen bomb in the shortest possible time or develop new models of fission explosives and speed progress by at least a dozen weapons tests a year.” Bradbury knew he would have his hands full simply keeping Los Alamos alive; at the moment it was foundering in legal limbo. The authority of the US Army had officially terminated with the war, and Congress was then in the midst of debating what legal entity might assume it. The new director told Teller neither of his programs was realistic.
Teller decided to leave. “I was not willing to work without backing,” he writes. He had an offer to go with Fermi to the University of Chicago. Oppenheimer encouraged him, telling him, “You are doing the right thing.” At a farewell party Oppenheimer added, “We have done a wonderful job here, and it will be many years before anyone can improve on our work in any way.” The insensitivity of Oppenheimer's remark rankled Teller, as its ambiguity confused him; he quoted it repeatedly in the years to come, always to demonstrate its lack of foresight. It might have meant: the Russians will not soon build a bomb. Or it might have meant: the Oppenheimer team had accomplished in fission weapons what a Teller team could not soon improve in fusion. Teller would read it both ways. “It was obvious and clear to me,” he concluded, “that Oppenheimer did not want to support further weapons work in any way.” Teller left for Chicago in February 1946.
How many years it would be before anyone matched the work of the Manhattan Project was crucial to the question of what role Los Alamos should play now that the war was over. Though good intelligence was lacking on where the Soviet project stood, no one in authority felt much urgency. The public statement that the Los Alamos civilian staff had signed in September had argued:
The development of the atomic bomb has involved no new fundamental principles or concepts; it consisted entirely in the application and extension of information which was known throughout the world before intensive work started. Furthermore, deposits of basic materials for atomic bombs have been found, even before the war, in many parts of the world and new deposits will undoubtedly be discovered. It is therefore highly probable that with sufficient effort other countries, who may in fact be well underway at this moment, could develop an atomic bomb within a few years.
Henry Stimson had commented similarly, in an August 29 memorandum to Truman on atomic arms control, that US possession of the atomic bomb would “almost certainly stimulate feverish activity on the part of the Soviets] toward the development of this bomb, and there is evidence to indicate that such activity may have already commenced.” Citing scientific authority, Stimson told Truman “that it is as certain as any future pronouncement can be that the method of manufacture of these bombs as now known by the United States, cannot be preserved as a secret from other nations beyond a relatively short time.”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff Joint Intelligence Staff, in a report on “Soviet Capabilities,” quantified that “short time” in November 1945. The intelligence staff found that Soviet control of Eastern Europe would “probably remain high during the next several years,” that “the Soviet economy will probably remain incapable of alone supporting a major war during the next five years” and that the Soviet Union was therefore “likely to avoid the risk of such a war during that period.” But, concluded the intelligence staff, “the Soviets are believed to be capable of developing atomic weapons within five to ten years, and will make every effort to do so as soon as possible.” This conclusion, so much more conservative than that of the young Los Alamos scientists, followed from a pessimistic assessment of Soviet industrial capability. “The evidence in Soviet industrial history,” the military intelligence staff believed, “does not warrant the assumptions[: ] that the USSR can accomplish the research, planning and designing stages with modern technical efficiency; that they can execute a huge construction program without appreciable delays; or that they will be able promptly to eliminate the bugs in initial production which impede full-scale manufacture.”
Of even these conservative conclusions Groves was not convinced. The Manhattan Project commander asked his assistant, Brigadier General T. F. Farrell, to review the question of Soviet capability with some of the industrialists and engineers who had developed the uranium isotope-separation installations for the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Farrell reported back on October 12, 1945, that “starting now in an ‘all-out’ effort, [the Soviet Union] could successfully make an atomic bomb in a relatively few years.” The likeliest Soviet approach, Dobey Keith of the Kellex Corporation thought, was plutonium production via an operation like Hanford. Another Kellex man thought the Soviets would develop uranium isotope separation by gaseous diffusion, which a third Kellex man thought they could achieve within three and a half years. But Groves held out for a much longer interval of US atomic monopoly. Whenever asked, year by year after the war, he always said “Twenty years.”
Groves based his argument partly on an extremely conservative assessment of world resources of high-grade uranium ore and the Combined Development Trust's success at cornering the existing world reserves of that ore. In April 1944, Alvin Weinberg remembers, Los Alamos physicist Philip Morrison had reported “that not more than 20,000 tons of uranium was in sight in the whole world.” It was generally assumed within the Manhattan Project, says Weinberg, that
Groves understood that ore supplies were plentiful at lower percentages for any country which chose to invest in refining them. Far more significant from his point of view was what he believed to be the primitive state of Soviet industrial technology. The Soviet Union, he wrote dismissively in the
Soviet mistrustfulness would get in the way as well, Groves thought. If the US had shipped “the complete blueprints of the Manhattan Project to Russia on V-J Day, they would waste a couple of years searching suspiciously for a gimmick in the plans, which, they would be confident, some American had fiendishly inserted to assure Russia the privilege of blowing herself off the map.” He was more right than he knew, but his timetable was off. A fair portion of the complete blueprints had been shipped well before victory in Japan, and the couple of years that Stalin's and Beria's suspicions had cost the Soviets had already expired.
Nor was Soviet technological and industrial ability taken seriously elsewhere within the US government in the late 1940s. Herbert York, who worked on electromagnetic isotope separation at Oak Ridge as a graduate physics student during the war, remembers a joke popular in Washington in those days. The Russians couldn't deliver an atomic bomb in a suitcase, the joke went, because they didn't know how to make a suitcase.
Norris Bradbury's vigorous advocacy saved Los Alamos. “He was a very complex man,” Raemer Schreiber describes him. “In outward appearance, he was not particularly impressive. Medium build, rather on the skinny side if he kept his tendency toward a pot belly under control, rather craggy features, hair short, grayish-blond and sparse, clothes casual and tending toward bagginess. Even in casual conversation he was not very exciting; he was not good at small talk. But when he was on laboratory business, the words came out pell-mell and his brain generated them faster than he could articulate… He could also sit back patiently and let people argue at great length… He was no orator, but spoke with quiet self-confidence.”
Bradbury encouraged people to stay. He told them they were needed. “The use of nuclear energy may be so catastrophic for the world that we should know every extent of its pathology,” he said. “How bad
