Oppenheimer’s mood was reflected as well in the remarks he made that morning, in an address that seemed more jeremiad-like than valedictory. Using language that would later come back to haunt him, Oppenheimer taunted: “If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”85
Almost as an afterthought, Oppenheimer told Sproul that he had already accepted an offer from Caltech. But Oppie nevertheless asked that his leave of absence from the university be extended for another year—thus keeping alive the hope that he might someday return to the campus.86
Back at Berkeley, stung by this rejection, Lawrence and Birge urged Sproul not to honor Oppenheimer’s request; both men offered names for a replacement.87 But Sproul, overruling them, decided to yield to Oppenheimer’s wishes. With more good grace than he felt, Ernest telephoned Oppie with assurances that his office in LeConte was still waiting—“your old hat is on the rack, your desk hasn’t been cleaned out.”88
* * *
Another reason for Oppenheimer’s bitterness was the news he had received in Washington, where the bomb was already caught in the grip of larger events. In the few months that he had been president, Truman had given little indication of what his postwar policy would be toward either nuclear weapons or the Soviet Union. But press accounts of his tense meeting with Stalin at Potsdam, and rumors of a looming showdown with the Russians over the Soviet occupation of Poland, made it plain that the wartime grand alliance was in tatters. Moreover, newspaper columnists and editorial writers across the country were quick to point out the obvious: America’s atomic monopoly would soon be the only counterweight to the massive Red Army, given the country’s rapid demobilization.
Despite Byrnes’s early rebuff of his overture for international control, Oppie had returned to the capital in late September to proselytize on behalf of his newfound cause. In a series of whirlwind meetings with senior government officials—including Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Stimson’s successor as secretary of war, Robert Patterson—Oppenheimer’s efforts had met with decidedly mixed results.89
At the State Department, Oppenheimer told Acheson that the atomic scientists as a group opposed doing any more work on weapons—“not merely a super bomb but any bomb”—as being “against the dictates of their hearts and spirits.”90 Meeting with Truman a day or two later, Oppie badly misjudged his audience. The thin, haunted-looking physicist had shocked the plain-speaking president by declaiming, melodramatically, that he had “blood on his hands.” Truman replied that any blood spilt was on his hands. In the awkward silence that followed, the president reassured Oppenheimer that, in any event, he would be raising the issue of postwar control with the British in just a few weeks.91
While still in Washington, Oppenheimer had also called the Scientific Panel together again to complete the report on future research that Stimson had requested.92 More than 100 pages long, the study drew upon the work of dozens of scientists and covered topics ranging from biomedical research using radioactive isotopes to possible countermeasures against atomic bombs. A section some 5 pages in length, written mostly by Fermi, dealt with the Super.93
Oppenheimer delivered the highly classified report to the Interim Committee at the end of the month. In his executive summary, he chose to focus upon the hydrogen bomb. Noting that successful development of superbombs was not assured, he gauged the task of determining the Super’s feasibility as comparable in difficulty to building the atomic bomb: “It is our recommendation that no such effort should be invested in this problem at the present time, but that the existence of the possibility should not be forgotten, and that interest in the fundamental questions should be maintained.”94
This was a dramatic turnabout from the view that Oppenheimer had expressed to the Tolman Committee just a year earlier—when he had said that the Super should be “pursued with vigor and diligence, and promptly”—and was no doubt, in part, a reflection of the psychological impact of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.95
But, as Oppenheimer also realized, the Scientific Panel’s report had already been overtaken by events in any case. By the time that the document was presented to the Interim Committee, the seventy-eight-year-old Stimson was already gone from the administration, having made a last—and unsuccessful—appeal of his own for international control as his final act in government. The committee’s acting head, George Harrison, recommended that the panel’s report be held “in escrow,” until such time as Congress could take up the twin issues of domestic legislation and cooperative control.96
Oppenheimer and Compton—perhaps anticipating this possibility—had already secretly conspired to move discussion of the Super to a higher level.
On September 27, 1945, Compton sent Commerce Secretary Henry Wallace his own brief summary of the Scientific Panel’s report. Acknowledging that there was a “reasonable chance” that a superbomb could be built, Compton wrote that he and his colleagues had nonetheless decided to recommend against proceeding with the weapon. Unlike the lukewarm position that the panel had taken on thermonuclear research in its formal report, Compton’s letter to Wallace left no doubt where the panel stood on the Super: “We feel that this development should not be undertaken, primarily because we should prefer defeat in war to a victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its determined use.”97
It was as though Compton and Oppenheimer had turned the clock back to their lakeside walk in Michigan three years earlier and, glimpsing the future more clearly this time, had chosen a different path.
As a courtesy, Compton sent copies of the letter to Groves, Harrison, and Bush, admonishing each to treat its contents—and especially the paragraph concerning the Super—as “highly secret.”98 Compton obviously hoped that enlisting Wallace’s support might help to kill the superbomb, just as Wallace’s endorsement had been crucial—in Compton’s eyes, at least—to ultimate development of the atomic
