Almost three months would pass before Branigan and Cassidy talked to Oppenheimer, who now freely admitted that the original story he had told Pash in 1943 was a “fabrication.”17 Oppie said that he had been the only person approached by Chevalier and that he had quickly dismissed the idea as “treason” or “close to treason.”18 Nothing more had come of it, he claimed.
But Oppie declared that he “would be reluctant to appear as a witness in any hearing involving Chevalier,” and also that he “ha[d] never personally disclosed to Chevalier that he had mentioned his name in connection with the incident under investigation.” In their report, Branigan and Cassidy noted that they had to ask the same questions several times during the interview, since Oppenheimer’s answers were “indirect or oblique.” Neither Oppenheimer—nor Chevalier—had made any mention of Frank.
Evidently forgetting what he had said to Lansdale back in 1943, Oppenheimer expressed surprise upon being told by the agents that Joseph Weinberg was a Communist. Oppie also said that he had never been asked for information about the bomb project by Steve Nelson—a claim that Nelson’s recorded conversation with “Joe” flatly contradicted.19
Across the Bay, Weinberg, too, was getting the third degree that afternoon. He denied meeting with Steve Nelson at the latter’s home or even knowing Nelson.20
In the early fall, Hoover sent copies of the interviews to the Justice Department. The FBI director obviously hoped and expected that the attorney general would issue indictments under the espionage statutes of all those involved in the Chevalier incident, which was mentioned for the first time in Hoover’s report.21 Instead, a few weeks later, Clark informed Hoover “that after consideration of all the facts presently available, it has been decided that no prosecution will be authorized.”22
* * *
For a few brief weeks early in 1946, Oppenheimer’s pessimism had lifted when he believed that the bomb might actually be removed as a threat to humanity’s future.
In January, Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson was appointed head of a special committee to study the prospects for the international control of atomic energy.23 Although Truman had committed the nation, at least temporarily, to maintaining its atomic monopoly, the president also promised to strive for the bomb’s cooperative control.24
Joining Acheson and the inevitable Bush, Conant, and Groves on the committee was a former Stimson aide and investment banker, John McCloy. Acheson himself chose the five members of a so-called Board of Consultants, which would offer technical advice and draft the actual plan for international control. He made an experienced administrator—former TVA director David Lilienthal—the group’s chairman and appointed Robert Oppenheimer its chief scientist. The other members of the board were all from industry: Monsanto vice president Charles Thomas, who had stood alongside Lawrence on Compania Hill; Chester Barnard, president of New Jersey Bell; and Harry Winne, a vice president at General Electric.
Acheson’s first impression of Oppenheimer was that of a smart but hopeless idealist. Following drinks with the physicist at the Shoreham hotel, Lilienthal wrote of Oppie in his journal: “I left liking him, greatly impressed with his flash of mind, but rather disturbed by the flow of words.”25
Acheson’s committee and its technical experts met for the first time in late January at the American Trucking Associations’ building in Washington, former OSRD headquarters. Standing once again at a blackboard with chalk in hand, Oppenheimer gave the Board of Consultants a two-day tutorial on atomic theory and nuclear physics. So absorbed was the group that, as night fell, they sent out for sandwiches and shooed away a persistent cleaning lady. (Lilienthal thought it “a soul-stirring experience” to have “the terrible facts of nature’s ultimate forces cooly laid before [one] as on an operating table, almost feeling them warm and stirring under one’s probing fingers.”)26
A familiarization tour of Manhattan Project facilities followed—including the gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge and the nuclear weapons vault outside Albuquerque—to introduce the previously uninitiated to the bomb.27
Oppenheimer also used the primer to expound on his own ideas about international control. The scheme that he described over the next several weeks was, in fact, the so-called pilot plant for international collaboration that he had spoken of in his speech to ALAS the previous November. The ultimate aim, he had told the scientists then, should be “a world that is united, and a world in which war will not occur.”
Oppenheimer had a draft plan prepared by early February, circulating it for discussion by the board.28 Originally, Lilienthal had thought to offer Acheson’s committee a series of possible alternatives, with varying degrees of government interference. Oppie, however, persuaded the group to submit just a single option, the one he had outlined. Once again, force of personality and sheer power of intellect had made Oppenheimer the dominant figure in a group.
The central feature of Oppenheimer’s plan was a provision that vested control over all aspects of atomic energy—isotopes, civilian reactors, and bombs—in an international Atomic Development Authority. From the mining of atomic raw materials to the final disposal of the radioactive waste products, the ADA would have suzerainty over the so-called harmless as well as the dangerous aspects of the atom. As such, it came perilously close to being—as Oppenheimer fully realized—a kind of world government.
Another key part of Oppenheimer’s plan was the idea of “denaturing”: deliberately adding contaminants to weapons-grade uranium and plutonium in order to render them useless for making bombs. Fissionable materials that had been denatured by the ADA, the plan argued, could be returned to national hands and used in peaceful applications, such as power reactors.29
The problem with denaturing was that fissionable materials could be all too easily “renatured.”30 Outside scientists on whom Oppie tried the idea out were openly skeptical. (Rabi later remembered a Christmas Day conversation at his apartment, where the two men stood at the window, looking out at the Hudson River. “We were watching the ice drift down the river in the sunset, turning pink. Oppie ruined the
