Oppenheimer would testify later, “was unclear whether his mandate and therefore mine extended to fiddling with this next project. I so reported to the people in the laboratory, who were thinking about it.” Teller, frustrated, suspected his colleagues had “[lost] their appetites for weapons work.” Some had. Most simply wanted to go home. “We all felt,” Hans Bethe remembers, “that, like the soldiers, we had done our duty and that we 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 in [1945 and] 1946 that there was any need for a large effort on atomic weapons in peacetime.”
Teller passionately disagreed. “He expressed himself as terribly pessimistic about relations with Russia,” Bethe remembers of a conversation the two theoreticians had that winter. “He was terribly anti-communist, terribly anti-Russian. Now I knew that he had been anti-communist during the communist takeover in Hungary when he was about eleven, but now it came out in a much more forceful way. Teller said we had to continue research on nuclear weapons… it was really wrong of all of us to want to leave. The war was not over and Russia was just as dangerous an enemy as Germany had been. I just couldn't go along with that. I thought it was more important to go home and get the universities restarted, to train young physicists again.”
Bethe was returning to Cornell. Oppenheimer had offers from every direction; he turned down Harvard in late September, believing, he wrote James Bryant Conant, “that I would like to go back to California for the rest of my days.” Fermi had accepted appointment to the faculty of the University of Chicago. Teller had been invited to work at Fermi's side. Leaving Los Alamos would mean leaving the Super to others, but staying at Los Alamos would mean becoming part of what Oppenheimer, free once more to indulge in casual cruelty, was calling the second team.
Norris Bradbury, the vigorous Berkeley-trained Navy physicist who had organized the assembly of the Trinity bomb, was replacing Oppenheimer as director. “In the months immediately following the war,” Bradbury recalled in 1948, “the Laboratory struggled for existence and there is no better way to put it”:
Here was Los Alamos in September, 1945. The senior civilian scientists, weary of living under wartime conditions, under wartime security, on a wartime Army post, and under conditions of wartime urgency, thought longingly of their academic laboratories and classrooms. The more junior civilians thought of the academic degrees they did not have and the further education they ought to have…
There was even no agreement as to what sort of future should be planned for Los Alamos. There was one school of thought 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. Another group looked with increasing pessimism on the deterioration of our international relations and contended that Los Alamos should become a factory for atomic weapons. The majority agreed that, for the present at least, the United States required a research laboratory devoted to the study of fundamental nuclear physics and chemistry and their possible application to military use.
Bradbury asked Teller to continue at Los Alamos as head of the Theoretical Division, the position Teller had believed he deserved when the laboratory was founded and that Oppenheimer had given to Bethe. Teller would sign on only if Bradbury promised major commitment in return. “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 said he would like to see either program, but that neither was reaUstic. There no longer was governmental support for weapons work. No one was interested.” Either the new director was misinformed or Teller misrepresents his position; Jimmy Byrnes had charged Oppenheimer only a few weeks earlier to maintain “full steam ahead.” The immediate postwar problem at Los Alamos was not lack of support but lack of authority. The Army had run the Manhattan Project in wartime. Now the work needed congressional authorization and funding, and that was slow in coming because it depended on legislation dealing with atomic energy, a revolutionary new field. “To demand, as Teller did as a condition of his staying,” writes Bethe, “that Los Alamos tackle the super-bomb on a large scale, or plan for twelve tests a year on fission bombs, was plainly unrealistic to say the least.”
Teller went looking for Oppenheimer, “seeking his advice and support”:
I told him about my conversation with Bradbury, and then said: “This has been your laboratory, and its future depends on you. I will stay if you will tell me that you will use your influence to help me accomplish either of my goals, if you will help enlist support for work toward a hydrogen bomb or further development of the atomic bomb.”
Oppenheimer's reply was quick: “I neither can nor will do so.”
It was obvious and clear to me that Oppenheimer did not want to support further weapons work in any way. It was equally obvious that only a man of Oppenheimer's stature could arouse governmental interest in either program. I was not willing to work without backing, and told Oppenheimer that I would go to Chicago. He smiled: “You are doing the right thing.”
Deke Parsons gave a party that night. Teller says Oppenheimer sought him out and asked him, “Now that you have decided to go to Chicago, don't you feel better?” Teller complained that he did not feel better; he felt that their work had been only a beginning. “We have done a wonderful job here,” Oppenheimer countered, “and it will be many years before anyone can improve on our work in any way.” The insensitivity of the remark rankled Teller as its ambiguity confused him. He would quote it frequently in the years after 1945, always to demonstrate its self- deception. It might have meant: the Soviets will not soon build a bomb. Or it might have meant: the Oppenheimer team had accomplished in fission development what a Teller team could not soon improve in thermonuclear development. Teller would read it both ways and like neither reading.
His immediate response was to take his problem to Fermi. Fermi apparently argued with him, consistent with the Interim Committee Scientific Panel letter of August 17, that the solution to the problem of nuclear weapons must be a political solution. Fermi thought Teller was overly optimistic as well about the early prospects for a successful thermonuclear. Not only was thermonuclear burning itself a hard problem; the atomic bomb would also have to be better understood and considerably improved before it could be made efficient enough to serve as a thermonuclear trigger. But the two men were good friends, and Fermi encouraged Teller to write him a letter expressing his dissent; he would be happy to pass it along to the Secretary of War for the Interim Committee file.
A year earlier, in the midst of war, James Bryant Conant had visited Los Alamos and talked to Teller about the Super. Teller had predicted then, as Conant reported to Vannevar Bush, that the Super 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 Fermi's. Now, in October 1945, Teller set it as an upper limit. He also first stated for the record many of the arguments for pursuing technological security that he would elaborate in the decades to come.
“When,” he asked in the question-and-answer format he adopted, “could the first super bomb be tried out?” 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 superbomb? Faster than the United States, Teller apparently thought, despite his adopted nation's commanding technological and industrial 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 that civil defense measures such as the dispersal of cities might prove effective against atomic
