“Oppie wanted it to work,” explained Rabi.33
On March 7, 1946, Acheson’s committee and the Board of Consultants assembled at Georgetown’s Dumbarton Oaks to vote on Oppie’s plan. In a room dominated by an El Greco painting, medieval tapestries, and an alabaster cat from Byzantium, the plan received almost unanimous support.34 The single prominent naysayer was Groves. (The general had protested against appointing a Board of Consultants in the first place—on the grounds that he, Bush, and Conant already knew more about atomic energy “than any panel that could be assembled.”)35 Groves objected that denaturing would not work and that the ADA would be unable to enforce an effective monopoly of the world’s atomic raw materials.36
In meetings that lasted till midmonth, other critics surfaced. Bush and Conant complained that implementation of the plan lacked specific stages. Oppenheimer revised the report to include them—the first stage being a comprehensive, worldwide survey of raw materials. A suggestion from McCloy that the survey also be used to spy on the Soviets was politely rebuffed by the board.37
Mindful of the danger that their grand vision might be nibbled to death by endless revision, Lilienthal and Acheson gave the committee an ultimatum on March 17: accept the plan as revised, or they would forward it to the secretary of state without a recommendation. To Lilienthal’s surprise, the committee unanimously approved the report and sent it on to Byrnes that same day.38
The response of atomic scientists to the so-called Acheson-Lilienthal report bordered on ecstatic. Returning to California for a brief vacation, Oppie boasted to Frank that the report was the best thing the U.S. government had ever done.39 Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Edward Teller hailed it as “the first ray of hope that the problem of international control can, actually, be solved.”*40 The Federation of Atomic Scientists—no longer battling the army over civilian control—suddenly had a new cause to champion. “We clasped the new Bible in our hands and went out to ring doorbells,” FAS president Willie Higinbotham later recalled.41
* * *
In fact, the fate of Oppenheimer’s plan was already sealed. The day before Byrnes received the report, he and Truman had picked Bernard Baruch, a seventy-five-year-old financier and self-described presidential adviser, to present the plan to the Russians at the United Nations.
Truman as well as Byrnes soon came to regret their choice. (“[Baruch] wants to run the world, the moon and maybe Jupiter—but we’ll see,” the president wrote in his journal that night.)42 To the Board of Consultants, the mistake was clear. “When I read this news last night, I was quite sick,” Lilienthal confided to his diary.43 “We’re lost,” Oppie had told Higinbotham the day that Baruch was appointed.44
Oppenheimer’s worst fears were realized when Baruch appointed a coterie of conservative businessmen and longtime cronies to help him “fine-tune” the Acheson-Lilienthal report. “It is the old crowd,” Lilienthal lamented. “Wall-Streeters,” sniffed Bush.
Barely a week after taking the job, the temperamental Baruch was already threatening to resign, after a description of the Acheson-Lilienthal report appeared in the press.45
Over the next fortnight, Baruch and his associates transformed Oppenheimer’s vision into something that the Board of Consultants had resolutely rejected from the outset: an updated version of the age-old call for the outlawry of war. Behind the public relations facade of the Baruch plan, moreover, were signs of a more sinister agenda. “They talk about preparing the American people for a refusal by Russia,” wrote Lilienthal.46
Oppenheimer and the Board of Consultants had deliberately avoided specifying the type of sanctions that violators would encounter—believing it a matter best left up to the United Nations and the ADA. Baruch and his cronies, on the other hand, spoke vaguely but ominously of “condign punishment” for transgressors.47 (Asked their opinion of the plan, the Joint Chiefs of Staff politely observed that the bases where Baruch was proposing to stockpile atomic bombs to use against would-be aggressors were “all too obviously pointed at the U.S.S.R.”)48
Baruch’s principal ally in rewriting Oppenheimer’s plan was Groves, whom the septuagenarian had appointed his “interpreter of military policy.”49 Believing that he was wanted merely for window dressing, Oppenheimer twice turned down Baruch’s offer to make him the delegation’s science adviser. Bush and Lawrence likewise refused. Finally, at Groves’s urging, Robert Bacher agreed to become a part-time consultant, and Cal-tech physicist Richard Tolman joined Baruch and his team in New York—against Oppie’s advice.50
In talks that he gave on college campuses, Oppenheimer was careful to temper his public criticism of the Baruch plan.51 But any doubt about Oppie’s personal views ended in late May, when Hoover sent to Baruch and to Byrnes—“as of possible interest”—the transcript of a recent telephone conversation between Oppenheimer and an unidentified physicist.52 The wiretap was revealing not only of Oppie’s attitude toward Baruch but of the lengths to which the physicist was prepared to go to counter the new plan.
I just want to watch this side of it and see if anything can be done. I think that if the price of it is that I have to live with the old man and his people, it may be too high.… I don’t want anything from them and if I can work on his conscience, that is the best angle I have.… It is very hard for me to tell if there is harm, little good, or some good, in my getting in touch with those European scientists.
A few days later, Hoover passed to Baruch the transcript of another wiretapped call, in which Oppie spoke of mobilizing public opinion against the plan, in “an attempt to box the old guy in.”53
On June 14, 1946, Oppenheimer, Bacher, and Arthur Compton sat silent and glum in the gymnasium of Hunter College, temporary headquarters of the United Nations, in the Bronx, New York, as the Baruch plan was introduced to the world.54 “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead,”
