Puzzled by the high feeling in the room, Eisenhower asked whether there was not mutual respect among the atomic scientists. Rabi answered simply that he and Teller had known each other for more than twenty years.
The meeting ended abruptly and inconclusively. While admitting that he was sympathetic to an immediate ban on testing, Eisenhower worried about how such “a complete, sudden reversal in our position” would be greeted by our allies. Ike asked Strauss and Rabi to assemble a blue-ribbon panel of scientists to study the matter further.
“I learned that some of the mutual antagonisms among the scientists are so bitter as to make their working together almost an impossibility,” Ike wrote in his private journal that evening. “I was told that Dr. Rabi and some of his group are so antagonistic to Doctors Lawrence and Teller that communication between them is practically nil.”38
* * *
By early 1958, Eisenhower’s personal science adviser was ensconced in the old Executive Office Building next to the White House. Soft-spoken, pragmatic, and even “disarmingly pleasant,” MIT president James Killian was nonetheless already a Washington insider: Killian had headed the top-secret study that, three years earlier, had recommended both the U-2 spy plane and reconnaissance satellites.
But Killian, too, was surprised to discover how much the ghosts of the past haunted his new office.39 Invited to lunch by Strauss, Killian was stunned when the AEC chairman asked that he promise not to reopen the question of Oppenheimer’s security clearance. (“On matters of this sort, Strauss could become emotional,” Killian wrote in his memoirs.)40
Killian and the inaugural members of what was now, pointedly, the President’s Science Advisory Committee, were prompt to recognize their opportunity. For almost a year, the U.S. negotiating position had been in disarray at Geneva. Following a failed bid for the governorship of Pennsylvania, the unpredictable Stassen had launched an ill-fated diplomatic initiative of his own. The overture succeeded only in alienating U.S. allies and, with them, Eisenhower and Dulles. By the start of the new year, with Ike’s gentle urging, Stassen was preparing to resign.41
At an NSC meeting called on January 6, 1958, to discuss the latest Russian proposal, Killian volunteered PSAC’s help with the test ban—noting that his committee had already started to look into the matter on its own. Eisenhower and Dulles seized the offer like a life preserver in heavy seas.42
Killian’s choice to lead PSAC’s study was Bethe, who was instructed to look not only at the wisdom and feasibility of a test ban but also at its potential impact upon the nuclear labs. (Warned by Strauss and the Pentagon that a test ban would turn Los Alamos and Livermore into “ghost towns,” Eisenhower had responded acidly that he “thought scientists, like other people, have a strong interest in avoiding nuclear war.”)43
Bethe did not hesitate to blame the AEC and Livermore for putting obstacles in the way of the test ban. He and Killian had already advised Stassen that U.S. negotiators “had been sold a bill of goods” by Lawrence’s task force.44
In early April, Bethe and Killian reported to the president and the National Security Council on the results of the PSAC study.45 What Bethe proposed was a far more modest and less intrusive inspection system than that outlined by Lawrence. Instead of several hundred monitoring stations, manned by thousands of inspectors, Bethe’s “practical detection system” called for an even 100 stations worldwide, 70 of which would be behind the Iron Curtain. Augmented by aircraft, orbiting satellites, and a handful of ships, his system, Bethe argued, would make it possible to detect any militarily significant nuclear explosions underground, underwater, or in space.46
The next day the Russians, as expected, declared that they were suspending nuclear tests indefinitely and invited the United States to do the same. While Eisenhower felt compelled to publicly dismiss the Soviet overture as “a side issue” and “a gimmick,” a few days later he proposed that both sides send technical experts to Geneva, to discuss methods of monitoring a test ban.47
While PSAC and Bethe’s panel had thus far avoided giving advice on whether a test ban or moratorium was in the nation’s interest—believing the question to be more political than technical in nature—Killian argued that Eisenhower deserved the advice of those he called “his scientists” on such an important matter. In order to discuss that question away from the pressures of Washington, the science adviser scheduled the next gathering of PSAC at Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico.
On April 17, 1958, following the Ramey meeting, Killian reported to Eisenhower and the NSC that a test ban would be “greatly to the advantage of the United States.”48 While the president’s scientists thought it impractical to cancel the next series of U.S. nuclear tests—Operation Hardtack was scheduled to begin in just four days—PSAC urged Ike to seek a moratorium on testing immediately upon Hardtack’s conclusion.49
Voting for the first time on a question before them, PSAC members at Ramey had been all-but-unanimous in endorsing a ban. Only York—de facto the labs’ representative on the committee—abstained. After a day of coaxing by other PSAC members, however, York, too, voted for a ban. At Livermore, Teller branded York’s turnabout “traitorous.”50
* * *
Rumors that Eisenhower might cancel Hardtack before it began sparked a near panic at the California lab.51 Less than a week after Sputnik, the Pentagon had restored funds cut from the budget for Polaris, the navy’s new submarine-launched ballistic missile. As the Nobska study had predicted and Polaris proved, a second generation of intercontinental-range missiles—smaller, more concealable, and quicker to fire—was already waiting in the wings.52
Work at Livermore on the miniature warhead for the Polaris, the W-47, had likewise been sped up.53 Development tests of the device dominated the Livermore shots scheduled for Hardtack and
