By that summer, Teller had what he considered yet another example of Oppie’s interference.
In early July, Oppenheimer and other scientists met in Berkeley at the request of the Military Liaison Committee to divine the future of atomic warfare. The “Panel on Long-Range Objectives” had been called into being to forecast likely developments over the next decade in the areas of nuclear weaponry, atomic propulsion, and radiological warfare.77 Under Oppie’s direction, the experts actually ranged further afield into such subjects as the world uranium supply and tactical fission weapons. But the panel gave the Super little attention—and no priority.78
Whereas LA-643 had judged it “not very probable” that the Soviets might develop an Alarm Clock–type weapon, barely a week after Oppenheimer’s latest report Teller forwarded his own new and very different assessment of the future to Bradbury.
Titled “The Russian Atomic Plan,” Teller’s memo argued that the Soviet Union, in its efforts to catch up with the West, might have taken a “surprising and disquieting” alternate course.79 Speculating that the Russians had decided not only to construct but to test their first atomic bomb in secret—“in order not to give us premature warning of their strength”—he hypothesized that large-scale, clandestine production of the ingredients for a Soviet Super had already begun at decentralized sites around the USSR. The implications for U.S. security were obvious. “One may feel less certain about our continued superiority in atomic warfare,” Teller concluded.*80
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The question implicit in “The Russian Atomic Plan”—when would the Soviets have the atomic bomb?—had begun to preoccupy others in Washington, Lewis Strauss among them.
There was already a wide disparity of views as to the answer. Confident that he had cornered the world market on atomic raw materials, Groves thought the American nuclear monopoly might endure for as long as a generation. A few scientists, like Arthur Compton, took a more cautious view, believing it would be a decade or more before the West confronted a Soviet atomic bomb.81 But most of those who had a hand in building the American bomb predicted that the breathing spell would be much shorter, perhaps five to seven years. Only a few jeremiads in the military—members of the Special Study Group in Air Force Intelligence—warned, late in 1947, that the “Russians could conceivably complete the first atomic bomb in summer or fall of 1949.”82
Strauss proved to be even more of an alarmist, arguing in spring 1947 that a Soviet nuclear test might be imminent.83 With the zeal of a dishonored prophet, he appealed to Defense Secretary James Forrestal to be on the lookout for a Soviet bomb.84
Oppenheimer, on the other hand, remained surprisingly complacent. As late as April 1948, he predicted that a Soviet nuclear threat was still “a long time to come.”85
What might have seemed, in calmer days, an honest disagreement or a simple case of bureaucratic inertia took on a more sinister cast to Strauss, who took the GAC’s lack of anxiety concerning the Soviet bomb to be part of an emerging pattern; one in which Oppenheimer or Oppie’s friends were the common element.
In January 1948, Conant’s Committee on Atomic Energy had expressed “grave doubts” about the effectiveness of the long-range detection system that Strauss favored, adding that it seemed “highly improbable any foreign country will detonate an atomic bomb within a period of three years.”86 (Strauss, at the same meeting, said that the air force “urgently needed” $1 million to establish an airborne detection program. When the committee failed to act on his plea, Strauss offered to pay part of the sum out of his own pocket.)87
Strauss had earlier had a run-in with the GAC and its influential chairman over another, unrelated issue. At the Bohemian Grove meeting, Strauss had been the only commissioner to vote against a policy extending the prewar custom of making isotopes freely available to hospitals and research institutes overseas.88 The AEC’s 4-to-1 vote, the first occasion where the commission was not unanimous on an issue, had particularly disturbed Lilienthal, who lost sleep over the incident.89
Nor had Strauss accepted defeat gracefully. Even after Truman announced the new policy, Strauss continued to lobby the State Department and Forrestal in an effort to overturn the decision.
But perhaps most ominous, from Lilienthal’s viewpoint, was Strauss’s reaction when the AEC chairman had tried to salve the wound. After Lilienthal genially suggested that “you just didn’t realize what you were doing,” Strauss’s quick reply had disabused him, he wrote, of that naive notion: “[Strauss] turned and grinned in what seemed a very genuine way and said, ‘No, I’m old enough; I knew exactly what I was doing.’”90
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What Lilienthal described as “this secrecy incubus” was also creating an increasingly oppressive political atmosphere in Washington by 1948. The previous fall, the loyalty hearings begun by HUAC chairman J. Parnell Thomas had spread to both sides of the country. On October 28, 1947, Thomas had notified Hoover in a telephone call that he intended to expand his current hearings—on Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry—to include “the tie-up between the Oppenheimers and the Soviet embassy.”91 As Hoover subsequently informed Attorney General Clark, the focus of the new inquiry would be Frank Oppenheimer—whom HUAC “apparently intends to attack.” Hoover added that Thomas almost certainly had “tap” (that is, transcripts of army or bureau wiretaps) to use as evidence.92
On what was to have been the final day of the Hollywood hearings, Thomas produced a surprise witness. Former FBI special agent Louis Russell was a ten-year veteran of the bureau who had recently joined the staff of the House committee. In testimony prompted by HUAC’s chief investigator, Robert Stripling, Russell described the Chevalier incident as Robert Oppenheimer had recounted it to bureau agents a year earlier.
The link between Russell’s story and
