The plan encountered immediate resistance when it was submitted to Eisenhower and the NSC that December. State Department representatives protested that Lawrence’s task force had an “exaggerated idea” of what was required to verify a test ban. An internal AEC study had recently concluded that 7,500 inspectors—not the 20,000 to 30,000 proposed in Lawrence’s report—would be required for the job. (The authors of the AEC report lamented, ironically, that no one from “the Oppenheimer camp” had been on Lawrence’s panel to counter the anti-ban sentiment there.)96
Dulles’s response to the plan was even less diplomatic. The secretary of state told Stassen that Lawrence’s “all-or-nothing proposition,” with its divisions of inspectors and armadas of aircraft and helicopters, “would make the United States a laughing stock” at Geneva.97 Disheartened, Dulles and Eisenhower urged Stassen and Lawrence to “refine” their inspection plan.
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In rejecting Lawrence’s plan, the president observed that there had been “too much talk about too little.”98 Temperamentally at least, Ernest seemed inclined to agree. Moreover, on at least one subject—the Russians—he had begun to split from Strauss.
During an Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva the previous summer, Lawrence and another Alpine recruit, Glenn Seaborg, had invited Soviet physicist V. I. Veksler to dinner at Perle du Lac, a French restaurant near the Palais des Nations.99 Veksler was in Geneva to announce that Russia would soon complete a particle accelerator with twice the power of Berkeley’s Bevatron.100 Ernest and the Russians had gotten on so well that Lawrence urged Veksler to make a long-deferred visit to the Rad Lab.101
Lawrence also surprised colleagues by not lobbying the AEC for an accelerator at Berkeley to match or exceed the Russians’. But age, and illness, had muted Lawrence’s enthusiasm for empire.102 Because of the MTA fiasco, moreover, Brookhaven’s Cosmotron was already more powerful, better funded, and hence more likely to yield the next big discoveries in particle physics.103 Sitting together at a café on the shore of Lake Geneva, drinking beer, Lawrence and his erstwhile collaborator-turned-rival, Stan Livingston, reminisced fondly about times long past.104
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Strauss, by contrast, was feeling besieged. Early in 1956, the AEC chairman found himself under attack by the press, the public, and Congress. “For the first time in my life, I have enemies,” he confided to a friend.105
The midterm election victory that had returned control of Congress to the Democrats had also made Clinton Anderson, a senator hostile to Strauss, the new chairman of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Anderson was openly critical of Strauss for favoring private industry in awarding AEC contracts for nuclear power plants. For Anderson, moreover, there was an even more important issue literally closer to home: radioactive fallout. The New Mexico senator believed that Strauss had shown a cavalier disregard for scientists’ warnings about the harmful effects of nuclear testing in the American Southwest.106
The AEC’s spokesman in the fallout debate was chemist Willard Libby, whom Strauss had picked to replace Smyth on the commission the previous year. Despite Libby’s repeated assurances that radiation from U.S. nuclear tests presented “no basis for concern,” his claims were so often contradicted by other scientists—and, occasionally, by the AEC’s own press releases—that Libby quickly lost effectiveness in the role.107
Even more worrisome to Strauss than his critics outside the commission was the man he viewed as the enemy within: Thomas Murray. The long-simmering tension between the crusading commissioner and the AEC chairman had come to a boil over the same conflict-of-interest issue that irked Anderson: the awarding of AEC contracts. Murray considered the so-called Dixon-Yates deal—in which the commission agreed to buy power in the Southeast from two private utility companies rather than the TVA—another instance where Strauss had exceeded his authority as chairman.108 Verbal exchanges between Murray and Strauss at AEC meetings had become so heated that the secretary sometimes felt compelled to clear others from the room.109
Murray’s latest enthusiasm was an “Atomic Summit,” which he hoped might awaken world leaders to the as-yet-unappreciated consequences of a global thermonuclear war. Murray had urged Eisenhower to invite “an audience representative of all the peoples of the world” to Eniwetok for the next series of U.S. tests, so that they might witness, as he had, the effects of a large H-bomb detonation close up. Libby and Strauss opposed Murray’s demonstration idea as likely to give the Russians vital clues as to the design of America’s weapons.110
After Strauss and Libby beat back Murray’s efforts to amend a blanket AEC pronouncement that testing was safe, the maverick commissioner made the case for his H-bomb test ban before a closed session of Anderson’s Joint Committee.111 Six weeks later, Murray went public with his appeal in open testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Basing his argument unabashedly upon ethics rather than strategy, he claimed that the targeting of Russian cities and civilians was morally unjustifiable.112
Murray’s testimony infuriated Strauss, particularly when Adlai Stevenson, Eisenhower’s likely opponent in the upcoming presidential election, adopted the test-ban issue as his own less than two weeks later.113 Stevenson echoed Murray’s call for a unilateral end to multimegaton H-bomb tests.114 Desperately seeking a way to counter Stevenson’s initiative, Eisenhower announced a few days later that the next series of U.S. nuclear explosions in the Pacific—Operation Redwing—would include tests aimed at perfecting the clean bomb.
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Like a Wild West shoot-out, Redwing would also determine which of the two nuclear labs would get the assignment to develop the warhead for the country’s first intercontinental-range ballistic missile, the Atlas. Strategists were already calling the hypersonic, H-bomb-tipped ICBM the “ultimate weapon.”115
Bradbury showed little heart for the coming contest. The previous fall the Los Alamos director had given the AEC notice that, in his view, the art of nuclear weapons design had already entered a rococo phase. Indeed, Bradbury thought the future of the bomb looked “unrewarding.”116
Livermore, on the other hand, anticipated Redwing with unbridled enthusiasm. Ignoring Eisenhower’s injunction that the United States would never again have a nuclear
