Lawrence had even recently informed Sproul that he was thinking about stepping down as Rad Lab director, the position he had held for more than twenty years.74 To Birge, already retired, Ernest spoke wistfully of someday returning to LeConte, so that he might putter around again in his own small laboratory.
The loss of close friends and longtime associates had also given Lawrence a heightened sense of his own mortality. The premature death, from cancer, of Bernard Rossi, an early operator of the 60-inch, was seen by many at the Rad Lab as an ominous harbinger of tragedies to come. “It appears that time is beginning to catch up with all of us,” wrote a Berkeley colleague to Joseph Hamilton on the occasion of Rossi’s death.75 Less than a year later, Hamilton, too, was dead, at age forty-nine the victim of leukemia.76 Shortly thereafter, Lawrence advised Molly’s mother against daily x-ray treatments following cancer surgery.77
But the death that affected Lawrence most was that of Mark Mills, the man whom Ernest had chosen to be York’s heir apparent. Mills was killed a week later, in a helicopter crash at the Pacific proving grounds. Fearful that any delay might give opponents an excuse to cancel Hardtack, he had ignored the regulation forbidding nighttime flights in order to fix a diagnostics problems at an outlying atoll: ground zero for the first Hardtack test. The helicopter had run into a sudden squall on the return flight and crashed near a reef. Both pilots and another physicist escaped; Mills, trapped in the craft under twelve feet of water, drowned.78
Concerned that word of Mills’s death might prompt a recurrence of Lawrence’s colitis, Rad Lab colleagues tried, unsuccessfully, to keep the news from him. Shortly after writing John that he felt “fit as a fiddle,” Ernest was struck by an attack of severe bleeding that left him weak and pale. He left Berkeley to spend several days recuperating at the house on Balboa Island, returning in time for Mills’s funeral.79
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While there was no outward sign that Lawrence’s views on the test ban had changed since he, Teller, and Mills appeared before Eisenhower in the Oval Office, at the final meeting of the Alpine task force, in March 1957, only Lawrence and Stassen had sounded an optimistic note. But Ernest, who said on that occasion that he favored a “reasonable limitation” of testing, had yet to define what that was.80
A year later, whatever hopes that Lawrence might have had for putting reasonable limits on testing seemed pinned not on talks in London or Geneva but on personal diplomacy. During the Alpine meetings, Lawrence had spoken to Stassen of “disarming personalities” and a “common sense approach” should formal negotiations fail and the Russians reject the U.S. inspection plan. He told Stassen that a broadening of scientific and cultural exchanges between the two countries might even “break down the Iron Curtain.”81
The possibility that a diplomatic breakthrough could come about from face-to-face contact between American and Soviet physicists was also a subject that Lawrence had discussed with Admiral Chick Hayward, Ernest’s host for a trip around Cape Horn onboard the aircraft carrier Franklin D. Roosevelt in summer 1956. Hayward thought Lawrence not only enthusiastic about but even obsessed with the idea of meeting his opposite numbers in the Soviet Union.82
During subsequent visits to the East Coast, Loomis and Gaither were likewise surprised—and even alarmed—by the intensity of Ernest’s expressions of faith that he could get to the Russians through their scientists.83
At Berkeley, Lawrence had taken to giving visiting Soviet physicists personal tours of the Rad Lab. When the State Department vetoed a planned dinner for the Russians at Trader Vic’s, Ernest barbequed hot dogs at home for his guests. Although Lawrence was forced to turn down a reciprocal invitation from the Soviet Academy of Sciences—to the relief of J. Edgar Hoover—he again played host late in 1957, taking four Russian scientists on a driving tour of the California coast.84 Another visit, by a Soviet chemist in spring 1958, kept such contacts alive.85 He found the Russian scientists “very friendly and normal,” Ernest had informed Stassen.86
Strauss was likewise aware of and disturbed by Lawrence’s contacts with the Russians. But the clipped warning that Donkin sent the AEC chairman on the final Alpine meeting had undoubtedly been a new cause for alarm: “Lawrence et al unanimously agreed that nuclear tests should be limited at earliest date with or without an armament agreement.”87
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In early May 1958, when Khrushchev accepted his proposal for a conference of experts on the test ban, Eisenhower lost no time, instructing Killian to schedule the talks for that summer in Geneva. (He had “never been too much impressed, or completely convinced by the views expressed by Drs. Teller, Lawrence, and Mills that we must continue testing of nuclear weapons,” Ike told his stunned science adviser.)88 On May 21, while on vacation in Yosemite, Lawrence learned that he was one of those chosen by the president to represent the United States.
Ernest was the compromise candidate.89 Although Strauss had campaigned strenuously to have Teller at the talks, Edward was plainly anathema to Eisenhower, Dulles, and Killian. The significance of the choice of the other two scientists picked for the American team was also surely not lost upon Strauss. Robert Bacher and James Fisk, the delegation’s leader, had both testified strongly in Oppie’s defense at the 1954 hearings. Initially disappointed not to be among those chosen for the U.S. delegation—“Adm. Strauss saw to that”—Bethe was nonetheless pleased to be appointed a consultant to the group. Harold Brown was also made a consultant at Geneva, as was Strauss’s personal assistant, Jack Morse.
Still, the AEC chairman looked to the forthcoming talks with undisguised dread. “Nothing good has ever come out of Geneva,” Strauss told journalist Clare Boothe Luce.90
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Strauss, too, was now facing an end of sorts. “Just as a ship too long at sea collects barnacles,” he told the president, “the hostility of a small
