By contrast, the “open shot” of a clean bomb that Lawrence proposed to carry out before a crowd of international observers was regarded with a mixture of disdain and amusement by weaponeers at both labs. (“If you require Japanese lanterns or potted palms as part of the decor please let us know,” a sympathetic Los Alamos physicist wrote his counterpart at Livermore.)55 Bradbury hardly bothered to hide his contempt for what he decried as an empty public relations exercise and a “Roman holiday.”56
Because of the need to test the W-47’s components, Hardtack had grown to thirty-five shots—ten more than the number that “appalled” Eisenhower when Strauss had outlined the series the previous summer. Two of the recently added tests were multimegaton, high-altitude explosions that Lawrence had requested to try out new detection techniques for Alpine.57
Another series of experiments, deemed both vital and urgent, was meant to be the trial of yet another concept for an emergency missile defense, the brainchild of Nick Christofilos—a brilliant but eccentric Livermore physicist whom colleagues described as an “idea factory.” Christofilos theorized that enemy missiles might be rendered harmless in flight if hundreds of nuclear weapons were exploded above them, in space, where a temporary cordon sanitaire of high-energy electrons would scramble the missiles’ warheads and delicate electronics.58
Operation Argus—the test of the so-called Christofilos effect—would be carried out in secret, partly as a trial of Teller’s hypothesis that nuclear explosions could go undetected in space.59
So busy was Livermore with the W-47, the clean-bomb demonstration, and Argus, that Starbird worried the workload at the lab might be “approaching criticality.”60 Adding to the stress was the fact that York, virtually on the eve of Hardtack, had left the lab to head up a newly created civilian research office at the Pentagon.
York’s departure prompted Teller to ask Lawrence for permission to take over leadership of the California lab until Hardtack was completed. Lawrence agreed to let Edward take the reins, on the condition that he yield them after a year to Mark Mills, whom Ernest had already picked as York’s successor.61 In early April 1958, Teller officially assumed the role that many believed he had occupied de facto since the start of the lab: director of Livermore.62
* * *
That spring at Los Alamos, Bradbury was complaining that his laboratory had “lost control of its destiny in the weapon business”—largely because of Livermore.63 His chief worry, Bradbury advised Starbird, was that unless Los Alamos transformed itself into “a factory-sort of business,” it would be judged “less ‘enthusiastic’” than Livermore: “We can do the weapons described in the laboratory program, but is it really the right thing for the country? I don’t know.”
Bradbury’s crisis of confidence caused him to take an altogether different view of a temporary ban on testing than Teller and Livermore. For his lab, Bradbury wrote, “the thought of a moratorium, cast in the proper context, is not too painful.”
The ennui at Los Alamos found a mirror in Lawrence’s situation at Berkeley. Although it had been several months since his last serious bout with colitis, the disease had taken a visible toll. Not quite fifty-seven, Lawrence’s shock of blond hair, while still full, had turned gray. Ernest’s famous grin, though undiminished, was set in a face going slack and jowly.
Perhaps the most notable change, however, was the fading of Lawrence’s legendary energy. Longtime friends were stunned to hear him talk of retirement. (Asked by Ernest and John to scout out some land in northeastern California for a ranch, a friend was struck by its barrenness: “It wouldn’t raise three jackrabbits an acre. They only liked it because it reminded them of South Dakota.”)64
Ernest had also been forced to abandon his dream of riches from his color-TV invention when Paramount sold the Chromatics production facility in Emeryville to Litton, which promptly converted it to making military radars. The venture that had begun with such enthusiasm and the financial support of Loomis and Gaither never produced a commercial product.*65
Even at Livermore, Lawrence had begun to seem only a detached spectator—a victim of changing times. As was now evident to all, research that produced weapons was of far more interest to Lawrence’s government patrons than the basic science that went on at Berkeley.66 The man who had long been Ernest’s biggest booster on campus—Jack Neylan—had resigned from the regents in 1955, following a final row with Sproul over the handling of a labor dispute at Livermore.67
The GAC had meanwhile decreed, pointedly, that machines costing tens of millions of dollars to build and $1 million or more annually to operate were “too large for single universities.”68 An AEC-sponsored report on the future of the national labs might have had Lawrence in mind when it warned about the aging of the laboratory directors.69
Lawrence’s fatigue was reflected as well in his changed attitude toward physics. When a twenty-year veteran of the Rad Lab asked Ernest what he had in mind to supplant the Bevatron, the answer surprised him. The era of big machines was probably over, Lawrence reflected, since the energies employed were already “so far beyond human scale.”70 “I’m in favor of doing the science but you should do it more slowly,” Lawrence had told York during a recent visit to Washington.71
At the Rad Lab itself, the political passions aroused a decade earlier by the loyalty oath had also long since cooled. All of the nonsigners fired during the controversy had been quietly offered their jobs back—including even David Feldman, the physicist whom Lawrence had once accused Oppenheimer of trying to “plant” on him. Like Feldman, not all accepted the invitation.72
Ironically, Alvarez, once Lawrence’s protégé, had lately become one of his most vocal critics at the lab. Angered when his own experiments did not receive priority on the Bevatron, Luie hinted darkly about reporting his former mentor to the AEC for misappropriating federal funds. Upset as well by what he viewed as Ernest’s increasing conservatism in science, Alvarez had formed an alliance instead with Stanford’s Pief Panofsky, one of
