Finding his voice at last, Lawrence chimed in with a suggestion: Eisenhower might wish to invite UN observers to a future clean bomb test in the Pacific, so that the world could see the progress that was being made.17
While no one could disagree with the technical points they had made, Ike told the group, opposition to testing at home and abroad was gathering momentum. He feared that the country risked being “crucified on a cross of atoms.”18
The impact of the physicists’ visit was evident in a telephone call that Eisenhower made to Dulles the next morning. Complaining that Teller had make “it look like a crime to ban tests,” Ike said he had been persuaded that the “real peaceful use of atomic science” depended upon clean bombs.19 Later that day, Dulles sent an “eyes only” cable to Stassen, in London for the latest disarmament talks, apprising him of the changed situation in Washington: “You should know that this conversation made deep impression on President and that since then he has had serious mental reservations as to the correctness of our proposal to suspend testing.”20
Teller and Strauss had once complained that whenever they opened a door in Washington they found Oppenheimer behind it. Wrote Lilienthal in his diary that fall: “Teller’s is now the featured face (instead of Oppenheimer’s) in the role of Scientific Statesman.”21
* * *
Jubilant that “everything has worked out as we had hoped it would,” Strauss sent a letter congratulating the Livermore scientists for their “performance.”22 Strauss’s aide, navy captain Jack Morse, echoed this praise in his own personal note to Teller and Lawrence: “The situation called for over-selling rather than under-selling, particularly when a simple statement could not possibly cover all the complexities involved.”23
That the trio had oversold the clean bomb was hardly subject to doubt. Memos that York had been sending to the AEC for months indicated that a typical reduced-radiation weapon would have only half the yield of a standard H-bomb but would weigh considerably more.24 Lawrence, Teller, and Mills had neglected to inform Eisenhower of a dirty little secret behind the clean bomb: its increased size and decreased yield made it no better suited for tactical use on the battlefield—the very role that promoters like Murray envisioned—than old-fashioned fission bombs.25
Likewise worried that the Livermore physicists had exaggerated the clean bomb’s potential, the head of the AEC’s Division of Military Application, Army General Alfred Starbird, interrogated York for several hours on the subject immediately following the June 24 meeting. “He is the man who must develop the weapon and is a man who is generally most optimistic,” Starbird subsequently wrote Strauss in a secret report.26 But even York had warned that a tactical clean bomb was still several years away—and “this would be based on very lucky breaks.”
There was a “great danger,” Starbird cautioned Strauss, that the public “will get mistaken ideas as to how soon we shall have clean weapons and in what types.”27
* * *
But Strauss was no longer the only one to whom Ike could turn for advice on the bomb. After stepping down from the General Advisory Committee, Rabi had become chairman of the Science Advisory Committee of the Office of Defense Mobilization when DuBridge resigned that post the previous year. Once almost moribund, its members on the verge of resigning, the committee had experienced a resurgence of influence under Rabi’s leadership.28 While president of Columbia University, Ike had learned to rely upon the street-smart Rabi to mediate disputes between the administration and the faculty.29
Moreover, that fall an unexpected event caused the stock of the fifty-nine-year-old Rabi and his committee to soar.
The Soviets’ launch of the first Earth-orbiting artificial satellite on October 4, 1957, caught most of official Washington flat-footed.30 Informed by a young AEC aide that the Russians had a new satellite, Strauss initially thought that the Soviets had added another country to their empire. “Where?” he asked, ashen-faced. “There,” replied the aide cheerily, pointing skyward.31
Belated and clumsy efforts by the administration to dismiss the Soviet achievement as a “neat technical trick” and a “silly bauble” only heightened public concern. Asked at a congressional hearing what he expected to find on the Moon, Teller replied with sullen insolence: “Russians.”32
Official disclaimers aside, however, Sputnik had provoked a surprisingly prompt and decisive response from Eisenhower. Following an Oval Office meeting in mid-October, the president asked Rabi to draft the charter for a new advisory committee of scientists, one that would report to him directly.33
* * *
Before he would complete that task, Rabi and Hans Bethe sent Eisenhower an “eyes only” memo on October 28, outlining plans for an impenetrable shield in space against Russian rockets. Rabi’s prospective missile shield relied upon a recently discovered vulnerability in Soviet thermonuclear warheads. This fatal flaw had been uncovered in the analysis of debris from the most recent Russian explosions by Bethe, who headed the committee that analyzed foreign nuclear tests for the AEC. If the United States detonated its own nuclear bombs in the path of incoming Soviet missiles at a critical point in their trajectory, Rabi explained in the memo, enemy warheads could be made to explode prematurely, and harmlessly, in space.34
Bethe’s remarkable discovery justified not only “priority development” of the emergency anti-ICBM system he described, Rabi argued, but also consideration “of securing immediately a world-wide moratorium on nuclear explosions.”35
Old wounds that had never healed were reopened when Eisenhower summoned Rabi and Strauss to his office the following morning to discuss the proposal. Rabi’s space shield was temporarily forgotten as emotions that had lain dormant since the Oppenheimer hearing came to the fore.36 Ignoring Strauss, Rabi told Eisenhower that “it had been a great mistake for the President to accept the views of
