Boasting that it bred racehorses—compared to Los Alamos’s workhorses—Livermore particularly looked forward to the debut of its candidate for the clean bomb, a test code-named Zuni.
Zuni was detonated in the predawn hours of May 28, 1956. The bomb gouged a half-mile-wide crater out of Bikini atoll’s Eninman Island and cast some 3 million cubic yards of vaporized rock and coral into the stratosphere. Although the test was considered successful—more than 80 percent of the bomb’s yield came from fusion—Zuni still rained radiation over a broad expanse of ocean. In what at first seemed likely to be a repeat of the Lucky Dragon incident, another Japanese vessel, the freighter Mizuho Maru, and its crew were downwind of the explosion and received a dusting of fallout.119
* * *
Hoping to make political capital from the clean bomb test, Strauss announced in a press release that Redwing had produced “much of importance not only from a military point of view but from a humanitarian aspect.”120 To the AEC chairman’s dismay, his comment created its own firestorm. Murray cited it as further evidence that Strauss intended to ignore the opinions of the other commissioners.121 Test-ban supporters publicly ridiculed the notion of “humanitarian H-bombs.”122
Eisenhower, too, was becoming increasingly disenchanted with the man whom Stevenson had identified as Ike’s “chief atomic energy adviser.”123 Pressed by his Democratic rival again on the test ban that fall, Eisenhower scolded Strauss for not coming up with new ideas: “We’ve just got to get going here. And you haven’t done much.”124
But Strauss remained secure in the knowledge that there seemed little alternative to the status quo. Stassen’s ill-timed support of a “dump Nixon” movement had alienated Eisenhower as well as the vice president. Testifying before Congress that spring, the AEC chairman had stubbornly refused even to discuss what inspection measures might be necessary for a test ban, citing security as his reason.125
While Lawrence and his experts had meanwhile made some progress, reducing the number of on-site inspectors to a fraction of their original estimate—6,890 to be exact—it was still too large a force to likely be accepted by the Russians.126 The day after Zuni, Lawrence and other members of his task force met with Stassen in Washington to discuss the upcoming strategy for Geneva.
Flanked by Teller and Mark Mills, an associate director at Livermore, Lawrence informed Stassen without preamble that the task force “had not changed its views at all” and still opposed setting any limits to testing.127 Teller reminded the group of Livermore’s continuing work on the clean bomb. Although he challenged Teller’s assumption that any limitations on testing would necessarily benefit the Russians, Stassen reluctantly agreed not to raise the test ban as a separate issue with the Soviets at Geneva.
It was Stevenson who made the test ban an unavoidable issue in the presidential campaign a few weeks later. In a speech to the American Legion’s annual convention, the Democratic nominee cited Murray in support of his claim that the United States could already detect H-bomb tests “anywhere.”128
Anxious to counter Stevenson, who had already received endorsements from Smyth and other prominent scientists, Strauss issued a press release claiming that the fallout threat was “vague, unproven,” and in any case secondary to “the more immediate and infinitely greater dangers of defeat and perhaps obliteration” at the hands of the Russians.”129
Conceding that voters might find a response by experts more persuasive, Strauss and Cutler enlisted the aid of a dozen scientists, led by Libby, who met with Eisenhower in late October. The group subsequently issued their own press release, lamenting “the injection into a political campaign of statements and conclusions which extend beyond … existing scientific evidence.”130
But Strauss was not content to stop there.131 Mindful of the merciless moot-court grilling he had undergone from Neylan years earlier, Lawrence had hitherto refused to make any public statements on the test ban or the fallout debate, although his own views on radiation had hardly changed in that time. (Ernest continued to shun routine dental and medical x-rays. Molly, who shared his concerns, had recently led a successful campaign to ban the portable x-ray machines that were popular with children in Bay Area shoe stores.)132
But Lawrence may also have felt a residual debt to Strauss, particularly in light of his last-minute failure to testify in the Oppenheimer case.
On the evening of November 4, 1956, Lawrence summoned the head of the university’s press office, Dan Wilkes, to his Berkeley home. Wilkes was surprised to encounter another visitor, Teller. Ernest—who was “feeling no pain,” Wilkes later recalled—asked the former newspaperman to draft a press release in response to Stevenson. Teller’s version, Wilkes and Lawrence both agreed, was “too long and said too much.”133
Lawrence and Teller finally signed a brief statement which Wilkes wrote and telephoned to the wire services that night. It appeared in newspapers around the country the following morning, election day. In three numbered points, the statement proclaimed that there were “no sure methods of detecting nuclear weapons tests,” that continued testing was necessary to maintain the country’s arsenal, and that the radioactivity produced by nuclear testing was “insignificant.”134
19
A CROSS OF ATOMS
TWO WEEKS AFTER his victory in the 1956 election, Eisenhower endorsed a new initiative by Stassen to separate the test-ban negotiations from the seemingly interminable disarmament talks.1 With Stevenson’s defeat, the most outspoken advocate in Washington of a ban on the testing of big bombs remained Thomas Murray.
In his latest crusade, the evangelical commissioner sought to amend the AEC’s Weapons Effects Handbook, the most recent version of which described the explosion of a hypothetical 100-megaton superbomb. Murray hoped to discourage even consideration of such a
