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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Prologue: Dead Files
Part One: Temples of the Future
1. The Cyclotron Republic
2. A Practical Philosopher’s Stone
3. A Useful Adviser
4. An Adventurous Time
Part Two: Inside the Wire
5. Enormoz
6. A Question of Divided Loyalties
7. Break, Blow, Burn
8. A Stone’s Throw from Despair
Part Three: Scientists in Gray Flannel Suits
9. A World in Which War Will Not Occur
10. Character, Association, and Loyalty
11. A Rather Puzzled Horror
12. A Desperate Urgency Here
Part Four: Sorcerer’s Apprentice
13. Nuclear Plenty
14. A Bad Business Now Threatening
15. Descent into the Maelstrom
16. Not Much More than a Kangaroo Court
Part Five: All the Evil of the Times
17. The Good Deeds a Man Has Done Before
18. Like Going to a New Country
19. A Cross of Atoms
Epilogue: “As streames are…”
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Also by Gregg Herken
Praise for Brotherhood of the Bomb
About the Author
Copyright
For Ben
Who can be wise, amaz’d, temperate and furious, Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man
—Macbeth, Act II, Scene III
It takes an error to father a sin.
—Letter, Robert Oppenheimer to his brother, Frank, March 12, 1930
PROLOGUE: DEAD FILES
“THE GREAT DAY when the F.B.I. gives up its dead file is worth looking forward to. We shall then learn … what bastards everybody used to be,” wrote Nuell Pharr Davis in Lawrence and Oppenheimer, a 1968 book on the two physicists and their times. What Davis could not have known—or imagined—is that, some thirty years later, the sources available to historians would include not only the Bureau’s “dead files,” with its verbatim transcripts of wiretapped conversations, but thousands of pages of declassified U.S. government documents, the intercepted and decrypted secret cables sent between Moscow and its spies in wartime, and even official Communist Party records, released from Moscow’s archives following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Supplemented by private papers and numerous personal interviews, the historical record now available makes it possible to piece together and to tell, for the first time in detail and with some authority, the story of that turbulent time. The record does indeed reveal “bastards,” but it also shows more than a smattering of real heros.
The physicists who are the subject of this book—Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller—were among the most influential scientists of the twentieth century. Theirs is a story that encompasses not only the making of the atomic bomb and its far more destructive successor, the thermonuclear “Super,” but allegations of treason and the political trials that resulted in a Cold War at home.
Much that has happened since—from the nuclear arms race, to the relationship between scientists and their government—has its roots in those days.
Although Oppenheimer’s loyalty hearing took place at the same time as the televised army-McCarthy hearings that brought down the Wisconsin senator, it was Oppenheimer’s trial behind closed doors that had perhaps the greater and more lasting effect: forty years later, Teller would blame his difficulties in recruiting scientists for “Star Wars,” Ronald Reagan’s missile defense campaign, upon the outcome in the Oppenheimer case.
It is also, and no less, a human story. For the three who are its focus, putting their science in the service of the state brought great power but, with it, wrenching choices—forcing each to decide, for example between the interests of his nation, his patron, or his friend. It is, among other things, a tale of overweening ambition and the surprising love and loyalty of a brother; one which shows that there can be nobility even in the making of bombs.
Not surprisingly, it is the kind of story that dramatists as well as historians have been drawn to. Yet is it not Faust but another of Goethe’s works that the plot perhaps most closely resembles. Like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, it is a cautionary tale of arrogance, betrayal, and unforeseen consequences; of what comes from invoking forces—both political and physical—that one neither fully understands nor controls.
PART ONE
TEMPLES OF THE FUTURE
Take interest, I implore you, in those sacred dwellings which one designates by the expressive term “laboratories.” … These are the temples of the future—temples of well-being and happiness.
—Ernest Lawrence, commencement address, 1938
1
THE CYCLOTRON REPUBLIC
EARLY IN 1939, Ernest Orlando Lawrence, the Berkeley physicist and inventor of the cyclotron, was planning a machine to change the world. It would be the largest and most expensive instrument thus far dedicated to scientific research. Requiring enough steel to build a good-sized freighter and electric current sufficient to light the city of Berkeley, Lawrence’s latest “atom-smasher” would, in theory, accelerate elementary particles to an energy of 100 million electron volts, enough to break the bonds of the atom and penetrate to its heart, the nucleus.
Almost a year after German scientists had first observed the fissioning of uranium, the atomic nucleus remained the unexplored ultima Thule of twentieth-century physics. Striking to its heart required giant machines capable of generating energies close to that of cosmic rays traveling from space. At such energies, charged particles, or neutrons, colliding with an atom broke it apart, laying bare its inner workings. The cyclotron was, in effect, a means of replicating the elemental forces of Nature.
Lawrence’s first atom-smasher had been an unimpressive glass contraption barely 4 inches across, covered with red sealing wax against vacuum leaks. By 1939, that original cyclotron hung, like a trophy, above the entrance to one of the new laboratories on the Berkeley campus. Unprepossessing, it was yet the stuff of which the dreams of alchemy were made: a twentieth-century philosopher’s stone, promising its possessor the ability to transform the elements of matter, once thought immutable.
But, beyond smashing atoms, exactly what the new machine would do remained mysterious even to Lawrence. The prospect he held up to Robert Gordon Sproul, the patrician president of the University of California, was worthy of a pre-Columbian explorer
