Lawrence died of frustration, Robert as much as said, because of the long strain of over-reaching ambition, culminating in his efforts to torpedo the talks in Geneva concerning the ending of the bomb tests. I said I was surprised; that E.O. Lawrence had always seemed to my observation to be a very picture of the extrovert, the satisfied man, the man of bounce and buoyancy. “No,” Robert said, “I have know him longer and closer than you; his fears that he was being, or might be, undermined in his position were a terror for him.”17
Oppenheimer declined to take part in the national debate over nuclear weapons policy and rarely spoke thereafter of his loyalty hearing.18 Asked to speculate on what Lawrence might have said had he testified in 1954, Oppie answered: “It would have been hard for Ernest but it would have been good. I know that there were several fatalities in a sense with this business. All sorts of directors and myself.”19 Oppenheimer’s voice trailed off in the interview, and he left the sentence unfinished.
When David Bohm wrote to him in December 1966, asking whether he felt any regret over the bombing of Hiroshima, Oppie wrote back: “My own feelings about responsibility and guilt have always had to do with the present, and so far in this life that has been more than enough to occupy me.”20 Oppenheimer died a few weeks later, on February 18, 1967, of throat cancer.
But Oppenheimer lived long enough to see the fulfillment of the prediction he had made in his 1953 Foreign Affairs article on candor. When the United States built its 20,000th bomb, in 1960, that weapon did not—“in any deep strategic sense”—offset the Soviet Union’s 2,000th bomb, built perhaps the year before.
Instead, for the next thirty years the nuclear arms race would dominate the fears and drain the resources of both superpowers, a competition mirrored, in microcosm, by the unceasing rivalry of Livermore and Los Alamos. By the time that Norris Bradbury retired, in 1970, the laboratory that he had originally agreed to run for six months had designed more than sixty different nuclear weapons, ranging from a subkiloton “backpack” bomb to the 15-megaton Bravo.21
Over the next twenty years, Livermore would make similarly impressive additions to the U.S. arsenal, among them the so-called enhanced-radiation weapon, or neutron bomb. An ironic and unintended spawn of the lab’s clean weapons program, the neutron bomb was designed to kill people while leaving buildings intact. Livermore director Harold Brown puckishly dubbed it “the capitalist bomb.”22
The technical advances that began with Livermore’s W-47 also made it possible, starting in the early 1970s, to place several nuclear warheads on a single missile. Further improvements, subsequently matched in lockstep by the Soviet Union, led to rapidly growing arsenals on both sides and, in response, to a nuclear freeze movement by the early 1980s.
In March 1983, President Ronald Reagan’s announcement of a Strategic Defense Initiative—a space-based shield promising to make nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete”—was inspired in part by Teller’s claims for a so-called third generation of bombs being developed at Livermore.23 The centerpiece of early “Star Wars” planning was a nuclear-pumped x-ray laser heavily promoted by Teller and his allies in Washington. When underground tests in Nevada raised doubts about the performance of the x-ray laser, Teller and a young protégé at the lab proposed Brilliant Pebbles, a nonnuclear alternative that became the new focus of SDI.24
Four and a half decades of unrelenting Cold War would test the faith of even true believers, leaving some doubting, some confirmed in their beliefs, and some simply transformed.
Although Haakon Chevalier was unwilling to jump off what he called “the socialist ‘train’” during the Hungarian uprising in 1956, his faith in communism had been severely shaken. He continued to ask himself, Chevalier wrote in an unpublished memoir, “whether what was wrong was deep rooted and ineradicable or a condition that could and would disappear.… The answer that the future gave, in August, 1968, was Czechoslovakia.”25
Chevalier also informed friends that he was writing “a final book, a short one, on Oppenheimer: I’ve recently discovered, if I’m not completely off my rocker, something which completely changes the estimate of Oppenheimer and his integrity.”26 Chevalier’s book remained unfinished at the time of his death, on July 4, 1985.27
George Eltenton and Frank Oppenheimer had both attended Chevalier’s eightieth-birthday celebration in Berkeley a few years earlier.28 Eltenton’s widow, Dorothea, waited until she was ninety-four and living in England to publish Laughter in Leningrad, a nostalgic account of the couple’s life in Russia during the 1930s.
Steve Nelson lived long enough to witness the collapse of the Soviet Union and the political system to which he had devoted much of his life.29 Nelson quit the party in 1957, after Khrushchev confirmed Stalin’s crimes, but he remained true to the cause at a more local and personal level. Shortly before his death, at ninety, Nelson was active in lobbying on behalf of low-income housing for the community of Truro, Massachusetts, where he lived.
Lloyd Lehmann, the Young Communist League organizer whose 1942 conversation with Nelson had given the Federal Bureau of Investigation its first evidence of spies in the Manhattan Project, was hounded by FBI agents, HUAC investigators, and the Tenney Committee throughout the 1950s. Unable to find a job, Lehmann taught himself carpentry and eventually got a contractor’s license. By the late 1990s, he and his family owned several apartment buildings in Oakland, California.30
Joseph Weinberg, likewise unable to find work in his chosen field, went on to specialize in a different branch of physics—optics—heading a research laboratory for the Spero House of Vision in Rochester, New York. Among the inventions in which Weinberg reportedly would have a part was the lineless bifocal lense. While neighbors in upstate New York during the 1990s, Joe Weinberg and Rossi Lomanitz attended concerts by the local symphony orchestra, in which Rossi’s wife, Josephine, played recorder.31
After failing as a rancher and
