* * *
By the end of the month that saw the destruction of two cities by nuclear weapons, the future that Oppenheimer despaired of was already taking shape. A week after Japan’s surrender, Groves apprised Marshall of the postwar production schedule for atomic bombs. The head of the Manhattan Project anticipated that by year’s end there would be twenty Fat Man plutonium bombs in the nation’s nuclear arsenal.26
Groves’s colleagues in the Army Air Force had already identified new targets for America’s nascent nuclear stockpile. Less than two weeks after Japan’s surrender, the AAF sent Groves its draft of a plan for a possible future war with the Soviet Union. The plan identified fifteen cities—including Moscow and Leningrad—as aiming points for atomic weapons.27
* * *
For Teller, too, the future seemed full of foreboding—but for reasons altogether different from Oppenheimer’s. Having decided, upon Oppie’s urging, not to sign Szilard’s petition, Edward appeared eager to distance himself from the consequences in a letter he wrote to Maria Mayer: “The week in which we waited whether we have to drop a third baby and go on with this nasty business was horrible. Now I am very happy (even having had little to do with all this). But the confusion is still as great as it ever was.”28
Teller urged Mayer to continue her work on opacity until the army contract lapsed at the end of the year. But he also warned her not to share the results with anyone: “I think you should not show it to the boys. It is better not to disturb them while there are no decisions.”29
For Teller, as for Groves and Oppenheimer, a great unknown was the Soviet Union. A childhood spent in Hungary, in part under the short-lived regime of Béla Kun, had left Edward with a profound distrust of communism—an impression reinforced by the experiences of his Russian physicist friends. (During his first few weeks at Los Alamos, Teller had read Arthur Koestler’s antiauthoritarian novel, Darkness at Noon. “That really settled my mind.”)30
Barely a week after Japan’s surrender, a friend from Princeton, physicist John Wheeler, wrote to Teller from Hanford with a grim inquiry: now that Japan was defeated, should they not begin preparing for a war with the new enemy, the Soviet Union?31
His own plans, Teller informed Wheeler, depended largely upon the still-unresolved question of whether Oppenheimer and Los Alamos would decide to pursue the Super. Edward hoped to convince Wheeler to come to the lab to work on the new bomb, and likewise to persuade Hans Bethe to stay at Los Alamos.32 Bethe was surprised at Teller’s dark vision of the future—and particularly the latter’s “terribly anticommunist, terribly anti-Russian” views.33
But Edward’s recruiting efforts had met with little success; most of his colleagues were simply eager to return home.34 Concerning Oppie’s plans for the future, the Los Alamos director had thus far remained silent in Teller’s presence.35
* * *
For Lawrence, on the other hand, the postwar world seemed suddenly bright with possibilities.36 The only dark cloud on the horizon that he forecast—in an impromptu speech to the regents on the morning after V-J day—was competition from Berkeley’s archrival, the University of Chicago.37 To preempt that threat, he asked Sproul for faculty salary increases across the board in the physics and chemistry departments, as well as a $250,000 boost in the annual Rad Lab budget.38
But Lawrence’s plans also hinged importantly upon Oppenheimer, which was why he had been so upset at Oppie’s vacillating. “Above all,” Lawrence had written Groves, “we are looking forward to the return of Professor Oppenheimer to resume direction of research and teaching in the theoretical physics, and it goes without saying that I am counting on him to share with me direction of the Laboratory program.”39
The army and Groves were, of course, likewise an indispensable part of Lawrence’s postwar plans. Two days after Japan’s surrender, Nichols notified Underhill that the army wished to extend its contracts with the university for another six months.40 With the end of the war, Underhill and Sproul had been expecting to transfer the administration of Los Alamos to the government. Behind the scenes, however, Lawrence was already working to ensure that his highly lucrative partnership with the army continued.
Ernest’s secret ally in this battle was sixty-year-old John Francis Neylan, chairman of the university regents. Neylan was a former newspaper reporter, born in New Jersey, who had come to California in 1909 to cover Hiram Johnson’s bid for governor. Neylan had stayed to manage Upton Sinclair’s unsuccessful gubernatorial campaign on the socialist ticket a generation later. Earning a law degree at night school, Neylan had become one of the most successful lawyers in the state—as well as the personal counsel and confidant of conservative publisher William Randolph Hearst.41 In the course of his rise to power, the young Neylan’s progressivism had gradually given way to a strident, even fanatical, anticommunism.42
Neylan had met Lawrence early in the latter’s career and was immediately enthralled by his knowledge as well as his naive enthusiasm. The head regent soon became Lawrence’s biggest promoter on campus, as well as his unofficial political adviser.
On August 24, 1945, Neylan departed from the agenda of an emergency meeting of the regents—he had called the session to discuss the problem of overcrowding in Berkeley’s dormitories—to urge creation of a “Special Committee on the Los Alamos Project.”43 Although the committee’s ostensible purpose would be to safeguard the university’s rights in patent matters, its charter was actually open-ended. In fact, Neylan and Lawrence intended the committee to become the university’s instrument for running postwar Los Alamos.
After the measure was quickly approved with little discussion, Neylan appointed himself the special committee’s chairman. Sproul and two other regents, to be picked by the president and serve on a rotating basis, were its other members.
* * *
Long after the victory parades had ended and life had begun to return to routine at Berkeley, another kind of war silently raged on, in Washington and across the Bay. Five days after the Japanese
