While the breakup of the USSR late in 1991 would fulfill the prophecy of John Foster Dulles—who had forecast, forty years earlier, that the United States would exhaust its adversary if it were simply “able to run the full mile”—only at the end of the nuclear arms race could its material cost be calculated: $5.5 trillion.32 Whether the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union might have been cheaper, safer, and ended sooner, before some 125,000 nuclear weapons were built by both sides, is a question that will remain forever unanswerable.33
After waging a campaign throughout the 1970s and 1980s to remove her husband’s name from the Livermore laboratory—on the grounds that Ernest would not want to be remembered for a “bomb factory”—Molly Lawrence abandoned her efforts when the end of the Cold War prompted Livermore to announce that it was shifting its focus away from weapons work.34
Although Edward Teller retired from Livermore in 1975, he remained an éminence grise there long afterward. Even in his nineties, Teller was still active, proposing a way to intercept Earth-destroying asteroids and reportedly seeking a solution to the problem of global warming.
Having known both notoriety and influence, what Teller sought was vindication. In the mid-1960s, he had hoped to prove the feasibility of his original H-bomb concept by simulating the explosion of a hypothetical Super, using one of Livermore’s early supercomputers.35 When the Persian Gulf War erupted in 1991, Teller warned Washington that Saddam Hussein might be building a uranium-hydride bomb.36 Fifty years after the imaginative breakthrough that led to radiation implosion, Teller was again denying Ulam a role in the invention.37
But on one subject—Oppenheimer—vindication always eluded Teller.38 When Oppenheimer died, Oppie’s long-time friend, Hans Bethe, assumed the mantle of the scientist of conscience in this country.39 Like Jefferson and Adams, Teller and Bethe would live on into the new century which they and their colleagues had done so much to shape. They brought with them an old and unresolved conflict.40
In 1983, when Teller rose at a White House reception to applaud Reagan’s SDI announcement, Bethe was next to stand and denounce Star Wars as folly. In response, Edward subsequently published an “open letter,” appealing to scientists to join the missile defense crusade.41 Although he addressed the letter to Bethe, Teller’s message might well have been directed to Oppenheimer’s ghost:
The one regret I have about the atomic bomb is that we missed the opportunity to attempt to end the war by a demonstration of the bomb to the Japanese.… Oppenheimer persuaded me on that occasion that it was not the business of a physicist to give advice on such matters of policy. I was too easily persuaded. Later I learned that Oppenheimer gave advice on that very question, recommending that the atomic bomb should indeed be dropped. Not much later, Oppenheimer made his famous statement that “physicists have known sin.”
At the end of Edward’s letter was a decades-late rejoinder. “I would say,” Teller wrote, “that physicists have known power.”
NOTES
The notes published here are an abbreviated version of a much longer and more comprehensive set of endnotes, which were edited for reasons of space. Those original notes, containing additional information and citations, may be accessed at the Web site www.brotherhoodofthebomb.com and downloaded without charge. A copy of the original notes—along with copies of most of the documents cited in the notes, as well as transcripts of personal interviews recorded by the author—will also be deposited with the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
Abbreviations Used in the Notes
AEC/NARA
Records of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, RG 326, National Archives, College Park, Md.
AECP
Committee on Atomic Energy Commission Projects, University of California archives
Army/NARA
Records of the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, RG 319, National Archives, College Park, Md.
CFBM
Committee on Finance and Budget Management, University of California archives
CIC/DOE
Coordination and Information Center, U.S. Department of Energy, Las Vegas, Nev.
CINRAD
“Communist Infiltration of the Radiation Laboratory, University of California,” file no. 100–190625, FBI Reading Room
COMRAP
“Comintern Apparatus,” file no. 100–203581, FBI Reading Room
EOL
Ernest Orlando Lawrence papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
FAECT
Federation of Architects, Engineers, Chemists, and Technicians, file no. 61–7231, FBI Reading Room
FRUS
U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States
GAC
General Advisory Committee, U.S. Atomic Energy Commission
Groves/NARA
Papers of General Leslie Groves, RG 200, National Archives, College Park, Md.
HUAC
House Un-American Activities Committee
ITMOJRO
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer
JCAE
Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, RG 128, National Archives, Washington, D.C.
JRO
J. Robert Oppenheimer papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
JRO/AEC
Records of the Personnel Security Board, AEC Division of Security, RG 326, National Archives, College Park, Md.
JRO/FBI
J. Robert Oppenheimer, file no. 100–17828, FBI Reading Room
LANL
Los Alamos National Laboratory archives, Los Alamos, N. Mex.
LBL
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory archives, Berkeley, Calif.
LLNL
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory archives, Livermore, Calif.
LLS/HHPL
Lewis Strauss papers, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, West Branch, Iowa
LLS/NARA
Lewis Strauss AEC papers, National Archives, College Park, Md.
MED/NARA
Records of the Manhattan Engineer District, RG 77, National Archives, College Park, Md.
NARA
National Archives, Washington, D.C., and College Park, Md.
OSD/NARA
Records of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, RG 330, National Archives, College Park, Md.
OSRD/NARA
Records of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, RG 227, National Archives, College Park, Md.
PSAC
Records of the President’s Science Advisory Committee, RG 359, National Archives, College Park, Md.
SBFRC
Federal Records Center, National Archives, San Bruno, Calif.
TEM
Thomas E. Murray papers, Rockville, Md.
TWPC
U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Thermonuclear Weapons Program Chronology
UC
Records of the University of California, Oakland, Calif.
USAF/NARA
Records of Headquarters, U.S. Air Force, RG 341, National Archives, College Park, Md.
USDS/NARA
Records of the U.S. Department
