Believing that Oppenheimer was the prime candidate for this “second Fuchs,” Borden next gave Walker the task of reviewing Oppie’s classified correspondence going back to the war, as well as the minutes of every GAC meeting.55
But McMahon’s death had meanwhile removed Borden’s sponsor and protector, while the results of the 1952 election had returned the Senate to the Republicans. McMahon’s successor, New York congressman Sterling Cole, let Borden know that he should begin looking for a new job.
Borden intended his own legacy to be an even lengthier “H-bomb Chronology,” also written by Walker, who had begun working late into the evening and weekends in order to finish the ninety-one-page document in time for Eisenhower’s inauguration.56
For Walker, there was still a nagging question that the committee’s documents had been unable to answer: how much had the Russians actually learned about the American H-bomb from Fuchs? Although the British spy had attended the 1946 Los Alamos conference on the H-bomb, the focus there had been upon Teller’s original Super—since thought to be unworkable. If the Russians had followed Teller’s lead, as Oppenheimer and Bethe believed, they might still be traveling down the wrong path.
But Teller claimed that radiation implosion—the key concept behind Mike—had also been discussed at the Los Alamos meeting. Bethe disagreed, and the question remained unresolved.57 Walker had summed up the conundrum neatly in a memo to Borden: “Our entire H-bomb program rests, viz-a-viz the Russians, on a gigantic assumption—that we have a short cut and that they are blindly following the 1946 information given them by Fuchs.… Under the circumstances, the only point missing is radiation-implosion.”58
Hoping to shed light on the mystery, Borden had asked Hoover for a copy of the bureau’s interview with Fuchs, but the request was denied.59 Finding the AEC similarly uncooperative, Walker finally turned for help to Princeton’s John Wheeler, who had been the committee’s ally on the H-bomb and in the second-lab debates. Walker sent Wheeler four pages of his draft chronology, plus two pages taken from a classified Los Alamos history.60 The six-page sheaf of top-secret documents contained references to the 1946 superbomb conference, details of the design of the Mike device, and a précis of the two dueling chronologies prepared by Bethe and Teller.61
On the evening of January 6, 1953, Wheeler and a colleague set out from Princeton by overnight train for a meeting with Walker in Washington. When the physicist arrived at the Capitol early the following morning, he telephoned Borden in a panic to announce that he had lost the document on the train en route, presumably during a trip to the lavatory. After dismantling Wheeler’s briefcase with a pocketknife on the committee’s conference table, without results, Borden notified the FBI. The bureau ordered the Pullman car in which Wheeler had been riding put on a separate siding and minutely examined, while other agents walked the tracks all the way back to Trenton, New Jersey, and interviewed the car’s passengers. But no trace of the lost document was found.62
Informed of the incident, Eisenhower immediately suspected an “inside job” and wondered aloud whether Borden might actually have been colluding with Fuchs all along.63 Incredulous that so much sensitive information could be treated so carelessly, Ike summoned the AEC commissioners—“like errant schoolboys,” one said—before him in the Oval Office. The Joint Committee was next to feel what one member called the “unshirted hell” of the president’s ire.64
Nor was the irony of the situation lost upon Borden. With chagrin he learned that the “Wheeler incident,” as he thought of it, was regarded as the “Borden incident” by the commission and the White House.65 Rather than drawing attention, as Borden had intended, to Oppenheimer and the AEC’s supposed malfeasance in the matter of the Super, the H-bomb chronology had inadvertently identified Borden himself as a security risk. Called on the carpet by Cole and the Joint Committee in executive session, the staffer miserably volunteered, “Shoot me or fire me.”66
* * *
Livermore had formally opened for business on September 2, 1952, the day after Labor Day. Early that morning, a gaggle of a half-dozen scientists—dubbed “Teller’s Flying Circus” by the guards—arrived at the gate, eager to begin work. But Edward was “miffed” that Lawrence had named Herbert York, not him, to head the new lab.67
The x-ray room of the dispensary was pressed into service as York’s office. In keeping with the hurried atmosphere of the place, workmen simply covered the black, lead-lined walls with white paint and laid new linoleum. The bathroom, the only place with running water, was transformed into a makeshift chemistry lab; drums of corrosive chemicals, to be used in the analysis of airborne debris from nuclear tests, were stored in shower stalls. The base morgue was converted into a classified documents vault. The old drill hall, the only building large enough to accommodate all 123 of the lab’s scientists and engineers, doubled as an auditorium and makeshift machine shop.68
The laboratory was afflicted with the usual problems common to any new enterprise, as well as some that were unique. Scientists complained of an inadequate number of desk lamps and telephones, and no mail service. Two physicists shared a single office in a shower. Draftsmen in the un-air-conditioned barracks were sent home when 100-degree temperatures caused sweat to smear the drawings. Especially sensitive discussions were held in an automobile parked at the end of the runway. Engineers hunting rabbits with bows and arrows at lunchtime posed an occasional hazard.
But there was no longer any doubt about the real purpose of Livermore when Lawrence, Teller, and York met with commission members at AEC headquarters on September 8. While Lawrence spoke vaguely of pursuing “promising new concepts,” Teller outlined for the commission—in detail and with prepared sketches—his idea for a radically different type of H-bomb, called “Ramrod.”69
