Thousands of miles and many time zones away, in the South Atlantic, one test was awaited with particular eagerness. In the early morning hours of August 27, a rocket carrying the first Argus experiment lifted off the deck of the navy support ship Norton Sound. Rising slowly at first, the missile disappeared through broken clouds. Minutes later, its 2-kiloton warhead detonated, some 100 miles up.
While the final results would not be known for several days, it was immediately evident that the “Christofilos effect” had fallen short of expectations. An orbiting American satellite detected no signs of any new and deadly radiation belt.122 Like the grin of the Cheshire cat, the prospective shield against attacking missiles had simply and silently faded into space. There would be no magical defense against the nuclear weapons already in U.S. and Soviet arsenals, or those about to be added.123
Nine weeks later—following a final, furious volley of tests by both sides—the proving grounds in the Soviet Union, the Pacific, and the American desert fell suddenly silent.
EPILOGUE: “AS STREAMES ARE…”
As streames are, Power is; those blest flowers that dwell
At the rough streames calme head, thrive and do well
But having left their roots, and themselves given
To the streame’s tyrannous rage, alas are driven
Through mills, and rockes, and woods, and at last, almost
Consum’d in going, in the sea are lost.
—John Donne, Satyre III
THE MORATORIUM ON nuclear testing lasted barely 1,000 days. On September 1, 1961, the Soviet Union conducted a low-yield test and the following month set off the biggest bomb in history—a mammoth 58-megaton explosion. Khrushchev strongly defended his action, arguing that the West—that is, the French—had been first to violate the test ban, and that the United States had failed to carry through on promises made at the 1958 conference of experts.1 Unmentioned by the Soviet leader was the fact that he was also under pressure from his own generals to catch up with the United States, which had pulled further ahead in the arms race with Hardtack. Among the weapons tested by the Russians that fall would be the warhead for a Soviet submarine-launched ballistic missile.2
The Geneva talks on a permanent test-ban treaty had broken down suddenly in January 1959, after the U.S. delegation announced that some of the assumptions on which the moratorium was based were in error. A new “decoupling theory”—proposed by David Griggs and scientists at Livermore—of how the Russians might cheat by testing underground, and a subsequent reanalysis of seismic data from the Nevada Test Site, had forced a reappraisal of the U.S. negotiating position.3 The result was a nearly tenfold increase in the number of inspection stations to be located on Soviet territory.4
Although Livermore’s theory was later discredited, America’s diplomatic votre-face produced “the most violent reaction imaginable” from the Russians, the U.S. ambassador in Geneva later remembered, and “spread a pall over the negotiations from which they never completely recovered.”5
Nearing the end of his presidency, Eisenhower was forced to abandon his goal of putting an end to nuclear testing. Killian’s successor as science adviser, George Kistiakowsky, would attribute a little-noticed line in the president’s farewell address—which warned about “the unwarranted influence of a scientific-technological elite”—to Ike’s fury with Teller and Livermore over the fate of the test ban.6
Lewis Strauss had hoped to carry on the fight against communism as Eisenhower’s commerce secretary.7 But Strauss’s enemies in the Senate, led by Clinton Anderson, conspired to deny him that post. Like the ghost at the banquet, the Oppenheimer case haunted Strauss’s confirmation hearing.8
For Oppie’s defenders, the humiliation of the so-called Tugboat Admiral was poetic justice. “It’s a lovely show—never thought I’d live to see my revenge,” telegraphed the wife of a Berkeley physicist to Oppenheimer from the capital. “In unchristianly spirit, enjoy every squirm and anguish of victim. Having wonderful time—wish you were here!”9
Edward Teller resigned as Livermore director in 1960, the better to oppose without hindrance the test-ban treaty that was soon to be pursued by President John Kennedy. Ironically, Teller’s opposition was based on the argument that testing needed to continue in order to develop a defense against ballistic missiles.10 Stalemated by the same intractable technical disputes which had bedeviled Eisenhower, Kennedy finally settled for a less ambitious goal—one previously dismissed by Killian as a mere “propaganda step”: a test-ban treaty that forbade nuclear testing everywhere but underground. While it pushed public concern with fallout from the headlines, the 1963 Limited Test-Ban Treaty had little or no restraining effect upon the nuclear arms race, which continued, and even accelerated, despite the agreement.11
In April 1963, Kennedy announced that Robert Oppenheimer would be the next recipient of the Enrico Fermi medal. Edward Teller had received the prize the year before. Subsequent attempts by PSAC scientists to restore Oppie’s security clearance were quietly turned back by Kennedy’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, who feared rekindling emotions over the case.12
Barely a week after the assassination in Dallas, Texas, President Lyndon Johnson hung the Fermi medal around Oppenheimer’s neck at a brief ceremony in the cabinet room. During the reception, Teller stepped up to shake Oppenheimer’s hand. For David Lilienthal, who was also present, the occasion was “a ceremony of expiation for the sins of hatred and ugliness visited upon Oppenheimer.”13
But the event reawakened strong emotions nonetheless. From his farm at Brandy Rock, in retirement, Strauss wrote Life magazine that the honor visited upon Oppenheimer had “dealt a severe blow to the security system which protects our country…”14 “Justice sometimes moves slowly—but it does move, and sometimes it arrives,” wrote Birge to Oppenheimer from Berkeley.15 Rabi, on the other hand, thought there “too much history for simple rejoicing.”16
For some, it was too late for either reconciliation or expiation. Lilienthal remembered the time, a few years before, when Oppenheimer had stopped by his house in Princeton to talk. Lilienthal thought it remarkable that his friend expressed no
