As well, McMahon’s Senate committee had meanwhile expanded to include nine members from the House.73 Like the Military Liaison Committee, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy constituted another set of eyes—and interests—to keep watch over the civilian commission. In late July, the day before signing the McMahon bill into law, Truman picked the first of five commissioners for the AEC.
Lewis Strauss, fifty, was a self-made millionaire—a former shoe salesman turned investment banker. Strauss had also been a personal aide to President Herbert Hoover. Commissioned a rear admiral in the Bureau of Ordnance during the Second World War, he worked on procurement and served as an assistant to the navy secretary.74
Early on, Strauss had a special stake in atomic energy. The loss of both parents to cancer awakened an early interest on his part in the therapeutic uses of radiation.
Truman’s interest in Strauss—a Jew and a lifelong Republican—stemmed from the president’s need to appear nonpartisan as well as ecumenical in his appointments to the commission. Overlooked in the choice was Strauss’s personality, which combined extraordinary vanity and stubbornness with a vindictive streak.75 (Oppie, not yet aware of the latter trait, observed of Strauss in a wiretapped conversation with another physicist: “He is not greatly cultivated but will not obstruct things.” It was a rare and fateful misjudgment on Oppenheimer’s part.)76
The lone scientist to be picked to serve on the commission was Los Alamos veteran Robert Bacher.77 Truman chose David Lilienthal to chair the AEC after James Conant and Karl Compton each turned down the post. (Lilienthal confided to his journal that he feared only “frustrations, neurotic scientists, and insensitive Trumanites.”)78
The acolytes had a quick familiarization tour. In November, the group visited Manhattan Project sites in a commandeered army C-47 which Lilienthal dubbed “the Flying Neutron,” accompanied by an armed guard and a coffin-sized box of top-secret documents.79 After Los Alamos, where Teller was predictably sanguine about prospects for the Super, Lilienthal saw—for a second time—the room-sized vault where the nation’s atomic arsenal was stored. In Berkeley two days later, following drinks and dinner at Trader Vic’s, Lawrence enthused about the commercial possibilities of civilian atomic power reactors.
The only sour note on this grand tour was sounded by Groves, whom Patterson would soon appoint to the Military Liaison Committee. (He felt like a mother hen seeing strangers take her chicks away, Groves remarked plaintively to the entourage.)80 The general made it plain that he considered himself, not Lilienthal, the one best suited to watch over the nation’s interests with regard to nuclear energy.
Rather than surrender the Manhattan Project’s laboriously compiled personnel security records to the AEC and Lilienthal, Groves that summer had given some of the files to Hoover and the FBI.81 But the so-called investigation files that Groves had kept in his own personal safe during the war—on the Oppenheimer brothers, Weinberg, Nelson, and others—he took with him to the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, where he became the director in early 1947. (“General Groves’ instructions were that these files were to be wrapped and sealed, and that no person other than himself was to open them,” wrote his secretary in a note appended to the files after the war.)82
Under the provisions of the McMahon Act, responsibility for atomic energy passed to the civilian AEC at midnight on December 31, 1946. In March 1947, Lilienthal and the commission moved into their new headquarters, the art-deco Public Health Building across Constitution Avenue from the Reflecting Pool.
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One unintended consequence of the McMahon Act had been to return Robert Oppenheimer to a position of influence in Washington. The legislation that created the AEC had also established the General Advisory Committee, appointed by the president, to assist the commissioners on technical and scientific matters. There was never any question but that Oppie would be a member of what the press called the AEC’s “atomic brain trust.” Conant, Fermi, Rabi, and Seaborg also served on the GAC. By the time that Oppenheimer, delayed by a snowstorm, arrived in Washington on January 8, 1947, a day late to the committee’s inaugural meeting, he had already been unanimously elected chairman.83
The GAC was almost immediately embroiled in controversy. Shortly after assuming office, Lilienthal and the other commissioners had been amazed to discover that America’s vaunted atomic arsenal consisted of only a few weapons.84 Not one of the plutonium pits or uranium cores in the vault at Kirtland Air Force Base was currently usable as a bomb, Bacher reported; it might take as long as two weeks to assemble a single weapon.85
Given such a dire situation, the army was exasperated at the lack of enthusiasm shown by the GAC for radiological warfare, a concept once again in vogue with that service, which was promoting “rad war” as a more humane alternative to Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapons.86 The navy, for its part, objected to recently published remarks by Oppenheimer concerning the obsolescence of its big ships—an issue that had come to the fore during Operation Crossroads, the atomic tests at Bikini atoll in summer 1946.87 (Oppenheimer had expressed “misgivings” about the navy-sponsored tests in a personal letter to Truman, requesting that he be dropped from a panel of scientists asked to analyze the results.)88 Oppie and Conant would even offend the newest service—the U.S. Air Force—by deprecating the technical feasibility and military worth of a favorite blue-suit project: the nuclear-powered bomber.89
But easily the most controversial advice to come from Oppenheimer and his colleagues concerned the Super.
At their second meeting, in February, members of the GAC discussed progress toward the superbomb. They urged the AEC to “assign a higher urgency to this work,” in part “as a stimulation to improvement” of atomic bombs by Los Alamos.90 At that same meeting, however, committee members recommended that reactors rather than superbombs be given priority at the lab. Since “rapid progress was not anticipated” on the Super, wrote Oppenheimer that April, he and his colleagues recommended that Los Alamos simply make regular progress reports on the most promising designs.
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Such halfhearted affirmation evoked
