There were other, less tangible costs. The day following Livermore’s muted celebration, Brookhaven’s Cosmotron began operating, generating the world’s first 1-billion-electron-volt beam. By contrast, Berkeley’s Bevatron remained unfinished.34 Alvarez calculated that work on the machine had been delayed by at least a year because of the focus upon the Mark I and the disruption caused by the loyalty oath.
Alvarez likewise blamed the MTA and the oath controversy for the fact that he was no longer “in the front lines” of physics.35 Feeling isolated intellectually and socially, he avoided the Rad Lab table at the Faculty Club, eating his meals instead with grad students and technicians half his age.
* * *
Across the Pacific, last-minute changes were still being made to Mike, the result of belatedly discovered design flaws, even as discussions continued in Washington about postponing the test.36 But mounting resistance to the standstill had put an end to Bush’s hope that his plan might give Truman’s successor the option of reversing course and canceling the Super.37
From Georgetown Hospital, Brien McMahon sent word to the White House that he would start impeachment proceedings against Truman if Mike was not detonated on schedule. Dean received a telephone call from Strauss, “greatly disturbed—he only calls me when he is disturbed,” wrote the long-suffering AEC chairman in his diary—who complained about Oppenheimer’s continuing interference with the H-bomb.38
Only a few days before the test, Dean dispatched AEC commissioner Eugene Zuckert to Eniwetok to see if Mike might still be postponed.39 But Zuckert found that neither he nor the president could stop the juggernaut that had been set in motion. Reached by telephone at the Chicago hotel where he was making a campaign stop, Truman told Dean that he would not jeopardize the schedule for Operation Ivy by calling a halt to Mike.40
The test that Borden called the “thermonuclear Trinity” took place, as scheduled, on November 1, 1952, three days before the U. S. presidential election. In a few millionths of a seconds, the device that Los Alamos dubbed “the Sausage” vaporized the tiny coral island of Elugelab, digging out of the seabed a crater some 200 feet deep and 1½ miles wide. Mike was half again as powerful as its creators had predicted—more than 10 megatons.41 A passenger, with LeBaron, in an air force plane some 60 miles away, Thomas Murray likened the spectacle to “gazing into eternity, or into the gates of hell.”42
Ironically, neither Teller nor Lawrence was on hand to witness the test. Lawrence, suffering from another colitis attack, was back home. At Griggs’s suggestion, Teller was in the basement of the geology building on the Berkeley campus, staring at a seismograph. Because of the bad blood caused by the battle over the second lab, Edward felt unwelcome at the Pacific test site. Alerted by a telephone call from York when the firing signal for Mike was given, Teller watched as, minutes later, the instrument’s needle moved almost imperceptibly, registering the bomb’s shock wave as it passed through the Earth’s crust. Lawrence was the first to offer congratulations.43
For Borden, too, the moment was one of triumph and vindication. Unwilling to trust the news about Mike to the telephone, Dean invited the Joint Committee staffer to the AEC building to hear the details in person.
But for one prominent veteran of the H-bomb lobby, Mike came too late. McMahon had died some three months before, the superbomb and a vastly expanded U.S. atomic arsenal his legacy.
At Princeton, where Oppenheimer and nine other scientist-advisers to the Pentagon were meeting at the institute’s guest house, the atmosphere was subdued, even grim, a week after the test. Oppie and the members of the Science Advisory Committee to the Office of Defense Mobilization were debating whether to resign en masse. Mike had been only the latest and most spectacular example of how the Truman administration had ignored its experts.44 But the scientists finally decided against such a drastic step, hoping that the next occupant of the White House—Presidentelect Dwight Eisenhower—might be more receptive to their advice.
Another reason for the gloom that hung over those gathered at the house on Battle Road was a “distasteful” rumor that one scientist said was circulating at MIT: the air force, he understood, was lobbying hard to get Oppenheimer’s AEC security clearance revoked.45
* * *
Since Vista, the air force’s “total passion” had been oriented toward ending Oppenheimer’s influence in Washington, an aide reported to Borden.46 For the past several months, the Joint Committee’s executive director had been diligently preparing his own case against Oppenheimer.47
It had long been obvious to Borden that he could not accomplish that task alone. The previous June, he had brought a friend and former classmate down from New York to serve as the committee’s counsel. Like Borden, John Walker was a top graduate of Yale Law School.48 Borden had also hired another staffer, a former FBI agent who had been assigned to Los Alamos after the war. Frank Cotter’s assignment was to spearhead an independent investigation of Oppenheimer.
The first job that Borden assigned Walker had been to craft a forty-page-long “Atomic Program Chronology,” meant to provide evidence for Borden’s claim that delays in the country’s nuclear weapons program could be traced to what was, at best, stunning negligence and at worse deliberate sabotage.49
But, as Dean would note, the real purpose of Walker’s chronology was “to show that the Joint Committee has always been right.”50 Its implicit argument—that the Soviets had drawn abreast, or even moved ahead, of the United States in nuclear research because of Fuchs’s treason—had likewise been a major emphasis in Teller’s Pentagon briefings and was one reason for their extraordinary impact there.
Dean had initially thought to counter Teller’s claim by a careful reading of the British spy’s confession—“what [Fuchs] did say and what he didn’t say”—but finally abandoned the effort as fruitless.51 Instead, the AEC chairman had encouraged Bethe to write a refutation of Teller—one which prompted, in reply, a “rather violent” rebuttal from Edward.52
Borden and Walker likewise remained haunted by the belief that there was another
