The only new structures to be erected at the site were both devoted to Project Whitney, the weapons program at Livermore.70 The dimensions of the cinder-block Fabrication and Assembly Building had been dictated by the requirements of the 21-ton radiation-implosion Alarm Clock, the first device that York planned to build at the lab. A second building was reserved for Livermore’s Univac computer, to be used in designing the new Alarm Clock and other weapons.71
As part of Livermore’s unwritten promise not to compete with or draw resources from Los Alamos, the emphasis at the new lab was upon daring innovation and “bolder” designs.72 (York joked that a Livermore-designed primary could be any shape but Fat Man–round.)73 In a compromise meant to placate Teller, York appointed the mercurial physicist to the lab’s six-member Steering Committee and gave him sole veto power over its decisions on laboratory programs. That the Ramrod was now the first priority of Project Whitney was one result. Another was the fact that a modernized version of the hydride would be the first atomic weapon designed and tested by the lab.
In a jury-rigged blockhouse built within the drill hall, no more than 100 yards from York’s office, a two-man team of scientists worked late into the night, mixing uranium with deuterated polyethylene and compressing the mixture in the breech of a 16-inch artillery piece.74 Teller’s hydride bomb was to be tested in the Nevada desert that spring.
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Except for unannounced weekly visits, Lawrence was a curiously missing presence at the lab he had helped to create. Early in 1953, Ernest and Molly, their daughter, Margaret, and the family’s doctor sailed as passengers onboard a Standard Oil tanker to the Middle East and Europe, for a ten-week tour brokered by Neylan. Like the landscape painting that Lawrence had also recently taken up, at Molly’s urging, the cruise was a welcome and needed distraction. John Lawrence hoped it might be a cure for his brother’s worsening bouts of colitis.
But Ernest had meanwhile found another diversion—an invention—which put new demands on his time. For almost a year, Lawrence had been working on a new type of picture tube for color television, a technology then in its infancy.75 Ernest hoped that his invention, conceived in spare moments spent on the beach at Balboa, might also make him rich, the equal of those wealthy businessmen he admired. Rowan Gaither and Alfred Loomis bankrolled the founding of a new corporation, which Lawrence christened “Chromatics.” A dilapidated Oakland warehouse was readied as an assembly line for the day when the picture tube was perfected.76
Meanwhile, turning the garage of a vacation home that he bought on the slopes of Mt. Diablo, near Livermore, into a makeshift workshop, Lawrence brought Alvarez and others from Berkeley to tinker with the device on nights and weekends. Suffused with the sickly-sweet smell of melted solder, the tiny, crowded garage recaptured for Ernest some of the innocent camaraderie of the early Rad Lab.
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On Monday, March 30, 1953, workers at the Nevada Test Site put the final touches on a 300-foot steel tower—three times the height of Trinity’s—for Teller’s uranium-hydride bomb. On the eve of the test, code-named Ruth, Los Alamos veterans had come to regard the confident young upstarts from the rival weapons laboratory with a mixture of curiosity and disdain. (Los Alamos scientists transported their bombs to the test site in custom-made containers of finely machined metal, painted army olive-drab. By contrast, the boxes that contained Livermore’s bomb were made of silver-painted plywood. “Ours looked like it came from a garage,” said one California physicist enviously.)77
Early Tuesday morning, the countdown for Ruth began. It ended a short time later with a pregnant pause and what one Livermore weaponeer described as a “sickeningly small” explosion. When the dust and smoke cleared, most of the tower remained standing; only the top portion had disappeared, remnants of it hanging down at weird angles. The ensuing silence was finally broken by hoots of derisive laughter from Los Alamos physicists; one of whom observed, sotto voce, that next time Livermore should build either a bigger bomb or a smaller tower.
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In Washington that spring, President Eisenhower was still becoming accustomed to the world that Mike had made. Briefed by Dean even before the inauguration on the results of the H-bomb test, Ike had visibly paled when the island of Elugelab was described as “missing” following the explosion.78
Thomas Murray was another whose thinking had been fundamentally changed by the superbomb. After he witnessed Mike, Murray’s memos to the president on the subject of nuclear weapons assumed even more of a religious fervor. In a draft letter that he asked Truman to give to Eisenhower, Murray urged the president-elect to make a new overture at international control—offering “the Russians a last clear chance to avoid a likely doomsday.”79
In the wake of Dean’s briefing, Ike proved surprisingly receptive to Murray’s message. Whereas Acheson had counseled that the 1952 disarmament panel’s report should be withheld from the public as too disturbing, Eisenhower wholeheartedly agreed with the report’s conclusion; namely, that there was an urgent “need for candor about the arms race.” Inviting Oppenheimer and Bush to personally make the case for greater openness before the National Security Council that May, Ike afterward told his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, that one of his administration’s goals would be to inform the public about the growing destructiveness of nuclear weapons and, specifically, about the dangers of an unrestricted arms race.80
The fact that Oppenheimer was once again advising a president infuriated and depressed Borden, who learned that Oppie had even scheduled a personal meeting with Ike—“on an urgent matter that he would reveal to no one but [Eisenhower]”—for the end of May; coincidentally, Borden’s last day on the Joint Committee.81 In frustration, Borden turned to Strauss, who had provided some of the material for Borden’s ill-fated H-bomb chronology from his
