For Teller, it was the beginning of his third and final exile. Having fled the Communists in Hungary and then the Nazis in Germany, he suddenly found himself shunned by friends, like Bethe, who had been his companions in the European diaspora. Ironically, Edward was no less isolated than Oppie, but with fewer sympathizers.*
More than just mental anguish, the hearings also took a physical toll—and Teller was not the only victim. For almost a year, Teller and Lawrence had been seeing the same specialist for treatment of ulcerative colitis. In July, following a brief remission, Ernest’s attacks returned.30 Bradbury later recalled an emotional Lawrence unburdening himself on the subject of Oppenheimer at a Bohemian Grove encampment that August.31 Physicist James Brady, a former Rad Lab colleague, likewise remembered Ernest being “bitter, very bitter” that Oppie had lied to wartime security officials. (“I got Oppenheimer that job in the first place,” Lawrence had complained to Brady. “Of course, we’ve got a better man around here now.” “Who’s that?” Brady asked. “Teller,” Lawrence replied.)32
Barely two months after the Oppenheimer hearings, Lawrence was approached by another former colleague—Martin Kamen—with a request that he testify in Kamen’s libel suit against the Washington Times-Herald and the Chicago Tribune. David Teeple was compelled to admit at the trial that he had given the newspapers the picture of Kamen arm-in-arm with Soviet diplomats outside Bernstein’s Fish Grotto.33 The papers had reported that Kamen was a spy.
Lawrence agreed to testify only if Kamen guaranteed that he would not be subject to cross-examination—plainly, an impossible condition in a trial. Instead, Cooksey wrote a deposition on Kamen’s behalf. After he won a settlement from the newspapers the following spring, Kamen thanked Cooksey for rising above “the failures of men of fatal timidity.”34
As a result of the hearings, both Teller and Lawrence wound up on a kind of scientists’ blacklist. Even though Oppie himself subsequently nominated Ernest to the editorial board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Lawrence’s name was quietly scratched from the list after Bethe objected that his views might “lead to a watering down of the contents of the Bulletin.”35
But Strauss need not have feared that the hearings would result in the wholesale refusal of the American scientific community to carry out defense work. Although Los Alamos scientists fired off their weapon of choice—a petition with 288 signatures, which they sent to the AEC, condemning the verdict—the National Academy of Sciences pointedly refused to issue a strong statement in support of Oppenheimer.36 As Strauss wrote to Neylan in July, “[I am] very contented with the attitude of the scientists with whom I talked. Their position has been very much misrepresented to the public by a few prejudiced columnists.”37
* * *
Spurred, in part, by Lawrence and Enrico Fermi—who, dying of cancer, made his request a kind of last wish—Teller that fall agreed to try to heal the rift created by his testimony, and, in the process, rehabilitate his own reputation.38 In “The Work of Many People,” an article published in February 1955 by Science magazine, Teller gave Ulam credit for the “imaginative suggestion” that led to the radiation-implosion breakthrough on the H-bomb.39
In time, Teller’s own health slowly began to improve. Old friends lost over the Oppenheimer imbroglio were replaced with new ones found at Livermore. That winter, Edward exulted to Maria Mayer: “Going to California was like going to a new country.… I never worked as hard as now and, incidentally, I am establishing a reputation that I never fight and am always pleasant … a thoroughly new existence.”40
Livermore itself, however, remained in serious trouble, the legacy of its back-to-back failures in Nevada and the Pacific. In late September 1954, Bradbury had sent a top-secret memo to the AEC’s Division of Military Application suggesting that the second lab be made subordinate to Los Alamos. As Bradbury hardly needed to remind the commission, “The brilliant new ideas have not appeared.”41
The General Advisory Committee, now under Rabi’s leadership, was also raising questions about the future of Livermore. At a GAC meeting shortly after the Oppenheimer verdict was announced, Rabi described the effort there as “amateurish,” adding, ominously, that Teller’s lab did not have responsibility for any “necessary” part of the weapons program.42 After Koon’s failure, the AEC had canceled its order for Ramrod, to Teller’s chagrin.43 (Stung by the move, Teller told the GAC that he had plans for a 10,000-megaton bomb—something that Rabi and colleagues dismissed as “an advertising stunt.”)44
That winter, York began experiencing sudden, inexplicable fevers that caused him to be absent from the lab for long periods. By December, Rabi was wondering aloud at GAC meetings whether Livermore would ever “really be an important laboratory.”45
* * *
Despite the failure of the hydride bomb and Koon, Teller remained a dominant presence at Livermore. Lawrence had recently arranged for Edward’s promotion to full professor at Berkeley, where he remained one of the few theorists left in the physics department.
But Livermore had also acquired a new group of young and ambitious physicists, and their efforts were beginning to have an impact.46 At twenty-four, Harold Brown was already a three-year veteran of the Rad Lab as head of A Division, which designed thermonuclear weapons. The leader of B Division, John Foster, was a thirty-two-year-old physicist whose Canadian father, a longtime friend of Lawrence, had built the first cyclotron at McGill University. The junior Foster rode a motorcycle to the lab, where he and a half dozen others designed small atomic bombs and the fission primaries for Brown’s still hypothetical, multimegaton H-bombs.47
One of Foster’s first projects at Livermore was an innovative approach to an admittedly old idea:
