Mutual interest had also made unlikely political bedfellows of Neylan and Lilienthal. In gratitude for his help in brokering the Bohemian Grove deal, the ultraconservative Neylan hosted a dinner for the liberal AEC chairman at the Pacific Union Club that April.59
The morning after the dinner, Lawrence and Lilienthal attended the inaugural meeting of Neylan’s new oversight committee for Los Alamos, in the regent’s law office on Montgomery Street in San Francisco.60 Afterward, Lawrence took Lilienthal on a leisurely drive down the coast to Balboa Island, where the AEC chairman was a weekend guest at the new beach house. Lawrence used the occasion to lobby Lilienthal on his latest enthusiasm: radiological warfare.
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That spring, the AEC and the Pentagon created an ad hoc committee of experts to revisit the subject that had both fascinated and repulsed scientists since the discovery of fission. Lawrence and Alvarez were each asked to join the nine-man panel.61 Since his proposal to the Interim Committee for a noncombat “demonstration” of the atomic bomb in 1945, the idea of making modern warfare less lethal, especially to noncombatants, had been of special interest to Lawrence.62
But Ernest’s advocacy of what he claimed was a humane alternative to atomic bombs failed to find an echo with Lilienthal, who listened politely but later wrote in his journal:
Brimming full of enthusiasm, [Lawrence] said his discovery was a way to make war painless.… The idea was to spread radioactive material in a narrow swath, so that the enemy army just couldn’t get at you; a cordon insanitaire, or radiotaire.… When this [was] first mentioned months ago, it hit me in the pit of the stomach so hard that I was almost sick.63
Subsequently, Lilienthal ordered the AEC’s so-called rad war study redirected, so as to make it “somewhat more endurable.”64
Unable to persuade Lilienthal, Lawrence was surprised to discover even more spirited opposition coming from an old friend.
James Conant had done work for the Army Chemical Corps during the First World War and found the similarities between “RW” and poison gas too depressing. (The AEC, he thought, had “enough urgent problems without attempting to emphasize this one.”)65 At the Committee on Atomic Energy, which he chaired for the Pentagon’s Joint Research and Development Board, Conant resolutely beat back a proposal that would have accelerated research on the subject.66
Throughout the summer and fall, Lawrence labored to change Conant’s mind. During one three-day period in September, Ernest regaled his friend on the humanitarian potential of radiological warfare at the Bohemian Grove, over lunch in Berkeley’s Faculty Club, and during dinner at Trader Vic’s.67 But not even Lawrence’s celebrated charm could sway the Harvard chemist’s resolve.68
When Lawrence and Alvarez raised the subject again, on a drive from Berkeley to San Francisco, Conant protested that he was “getting too old and too tired to be an adviser on affairs of this sort.”
“I did my job during the war,” he said wearily.69
* * *
Following another summer spent at Los Alamos, Teller’s efforts to spark a crash effort on the Super were similarly falling flat. In Washington, his lobbying mostly consisted of briefing Bacher, who had pledged to keep the Joint Committee informed of progress on the hydrogen bomb. (Privately, Teller protested to Maria Mayer that Bacher was “at best a third rate physicist,” yet admitted that there was another reason for disliking the AEC commissioner: “To Oppy he was the ideal yes-man. That, of course, is the main reason of my antipathy.”)70
Concerning the Super, there was, in truth, not much progress to report. Teller had completed another top-secret report on the subject before returning to Chicago. The previous fall, Los Alamos had published LA-643—“On the Development of Thermonuclear Bombs”—which pulled together all the aspects of H-bomb research at the lab to date. Teller’s mood, as reflected in the report, had become decidedly more pessimistic in the eighteen months since the superbomb conference. While Edward still thought the classical Super “probably feasible,” even he now acknowledged that its complexity put it at least several years away.
Unexpected problems with both the Super and the Alarm Clock had surfaced in recent studies at the lab. The latest calculations showed that the Super would require almost twice the amount of tritium Teller had earlier estimated. The availability of tritium—which could only be made at the cost of sacrificing the production of plutonium for atomic bombs—was likely to be “the determining factor in the early construction of any thermonuclear bomb,” LA-643 noted.71
While Teller anticipated no “extremely big difficulties” with the Alarm Clock, this design, too, suffered from some of the same problems that plagued the Super. (Unmentioned in the Los Alamos report was a recent calculation that showed it might take a fission explosion equivalent to 1 million tons of TNT—a megaton—to ignite the device.)72 In an effort to get around these problems, the Alarm Clock had steadily grown to a behemoth weighing between 40 and 100 tons—much too large to be carried by existing aircraft. Teller himself conceded that further work on the design looked unpromising.73
Recognizing that any decision taken at this point was almost certainly going to go against him, Teller recommended postponing a choice between the Super and the Alarm Clock until more detailed calculations could be made on von Neumann’s new digital computer.
Notwithstanding these technical barriers, Teller judged that the greatest obstacle to the Super lay in the realm of politics, not physics. Next to Bradbury, he regarded Oppie and the General Advisory Committee as his most serious adversary. While pronouncing LA-643 “admirable,” the GAC had failed to endorse either increased tritium production or the thermonuclear tests that Teller’s report called for.74
Instead, in June 1948, the committee recommended accelerating work on the
