Anderson had already made it plain that Strauss would face an uphill confirmation battle should he be reappointed by the president.92 Strauss told Ike that he planned to step down at the end of June. Eisenhower picked engineer and investment banker John McCone to replace him.93
Strauss, however, had not so much yielded the field as simply decided to direct his campaign against the test ban from a different vantage point: behind the scenes. At his request, he was appointed a special consultant to the Atoms for Peace program by Eisenhower, a role that allowed him to attend NSC meetings whenever nuclear matters were discussed.
By that summer, there may also have been a nagging concern in Strauss’s mind about where Lawrence’s ultimate loyalties lay. With the start of the Geneva talks and the end of his own government service only a week away, he sent Lawrence this “parting thought”: “No matter how eminent the Russian scientists are or how persuasive, never let yourself forget that they are the envoys of men who are cold-blooded murderers. Deal with them with reserve.”94
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Although left exhausted by the travel and late-night briefings required as preparation for the technical talks at Geneva, Lawrence ignored the entreaties of Molly and John that he decline the president’s summons for reasons of health.95 Indeed, as the prospect of meeting with his Soviet counterparts neared, Ernest’s enthusiasm and vitality actually seemed to return. “I don’t think we’ll have any trouble with the Russians,” he told a Rad Lab colleague before embarking on his last trip to Washington.96
Stopping off en route to see Arthur Compton, in a St. Louis hospital recuperating from a heart attack, Lawrence justified his unscientist-like willingness to see limits put on nuclear experiments as the price that had to be paid for control of the arms race.97 In Washington, Lawrence paid a visit to his boyhood friend, Carnegie Institution physicist Merle Tuve. “We helped start this and have to do what we can about it,” he told Tuve.98 On June 27, 1958, Ernest and Molly boarded a Swissair flight for Geneva.
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Hardtack had meanwhile gotten off to an inauspicious start, while preparations for the Geneva conference were still under way.99 Nearly half of the devices exploded in April and May had given lower-than-expected yields. Two of the prototype clean bombs fired by Los Alamos and Livermore had been outright fizzles.100
Reporting on Hardtack’s failures to Eisenhower in mid-June, Bethe noted that they “may show that we are close to the limit of what we can attain in ‘cleanness’ of weapons.”101 He also informed the president of what was surely, for both, a much keener disappointment: the most recent Russian tests had fixed the previous flaw in Soviet ICBM warheads. The opportunity for deploying Rabi and Bethe’s missile defense shield had passed.
Hardtack’s troubles even extended to Pinon, the proposed clean-bomb demonstration. After only five of the fourteen invited countries agreed to send observers, Pinon had been postponed to the end of July.102 In late June, four AEC division heads wrote to the commission’s general manager urging that the test be canceled. As they pointed out, the so-called clean bomb would produce many times the fallout of the weapon that had been dropped on Hiroshima. But fallout was not their only—or even their primary—concern:
The Pinon weapon is so large that it clearly will not illustrate the cleanliness of tactical defensive weapons, development of which we have stressed in reference to Hardtack and in other statements of policy with respect to testing. What Pinon will do is to show not how “clean” is a nuclear weapon, but rather how “dirty” is a high yield thermonuclear weapon.103
As the AEC’s head of public relations warned Starbird, Pinon would “disclose that we have made essentially no progress in our attempts to reduce substantially the size of feasible clean weapons.”104
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At Geneva’s Palais de Nations, eleventh-hour demands by the Russians had raised doubts whether the Soviet delegation would even show up. The test-ban negotiations were set to begin in an atmosphere “of no nonsense, no politics, and not much hope,” Time magazine reported on July 1, 1958. Still travel weary, Lawrence felt well enough by that weekend to attend a reception sponsored by CERN, Europe’s nuclear research center.
In the garden of the Hotel du Rhône, Ernest encountered Robert Oppenheimer, in Geneva for the CERN meeting. The unexpected meeting, while brief, was neither strained nor unpleasant for either man, Oppie later remembered: “There was, I would say, a sense of disengagement, but certainly not hostility.”105 It was the last time the two men would see each other.
At Gaither’s expense, Lawrence had brought along a Russian-speaking engineer from Berkeley, Leo Tichvinsky. Ernest hoped to use Tichvinsky as a facilitator as well as a translator in his personal meetings with the Russians. Lawrence most looked forward to meeting his opposite number on the Russian side, physical chemist Nikolai Semenov, the sole Nobel prize–winner on the Soviet delegation.106
In an effort to persuade the Russians not to walk out of the talks, Lawrence had drafted a so-called break statement—a brief speech to be used in the event that negotiations seemed about to collapse. He planned to address his plea to Semenov, asking the Russian, as a fellow Nobel laureate, not to abandon the negotiations for the sake of both their countries, and the world.107
Ernest’s appeal turned out to be unnecessary; the Russians stayed. But his attitude was already a concern to Ron Spiers, the foreign service officer whom the State Department had appointed a liaison with the U.S. delegation. Spiers cabled Washington: “Lawrence is like a little boy, indiscriminately enthusiastic. When the Russians handed their agenda across the table, they gave copies to Fisk and Lawrence. The latter quickly glanced over it, nodded his head happily and said ‘that’s good. Very good.’ I shuddered and tried to get a copy.”108
Although relieved that his prepared speech
