Oppie’s former students met a similar fate. Bohm was suspended from teaching by Princeton while his trial for contempt of Congress wound its way through the courts; his contract would not be renewed when it expired the following year.16 Lomanitz’s contract at Fisk was likewise allowed to lapse even though he, like Bohm, had received enthusiastic praise from colleagues, students, and peers. Bernard Peters—whom Robert Oppenheimer had identified in his HUAC testimony as “quite a Red”—was forced to leave the University of Rochester after portions of Oppie’s executive session testimony were leaked to the Rochester Times-Union.17 Oppenheimer’s efforts to get the school to renew Peters’s contract were unavailing.18
But Oppie himself seemed little affected by the ordeal. He and Kitty spent the weekend at the Chevaliers’ beach house just a few weeks after the HUAC hearings ended. FBI agents waited in cars on the road outside. Other G-men, monitoring a hidden listening device, strained to hear conversations above the sound of breaking waves.
For Frank and Jackie, the future was more problematic. Having recently sold a van Gogh he had inherited from his father to buy an 800-acre spread in Blanco Basin, near Pagosa Springs, Colorado, Frank looked forward to a new life as a cattle rancher. But the land, at an elevation of nearly 10,000 feet, had only a small cabin made of rough-hewn logs. During the long winter, the neighboring ranchers would move their cattle to land they owned at a lower elevation—an option not open to Frank and Jackie.
In early spring, the couple piled blankets near the door and heated water on a wood stove. Sitting near a window in the darkened house, watching with binoculars the cattle standing in snow-covered fields, they waited for the first calves to be born.19
* * *
Having survived HUAC’s interrogation with both his reputation and his career intact, Robert Oppenheimer was relaxed and confident when he appeared before the Joint Committee barely a week later. Oppie had been called to testify in hearings begun by Hickenlooper, who was engaged in a last-ditch effort to hamstring David Lilienthal. The Iowa senator had charged the AEC chairman with “incredible mismanagement.”20 Unlike HUAC’s closed sessions, the Joint Committee hearings took place under klieg lights, with reporters present.21
Still hoping to overturn the commission’s ruling on the export of isotopes, Strauss volunteered to speak on that issue as an example of Lilienthal’s alleged malfeasance. Strauss had already testified twice in executive session about a request for radioactive iron that had come from a group of Norwegian scientists, one of whom was suspected of being a Communist.
Asked about the potential for misuse of such material, Oppenheimer responded with the kind of quick and casual brutality for which he had become infamous among faculty colleagues at Berkeley. His target this time, however, was Strauss. Deadpan, Oppenheimer compared the military significance of isotopes to that of bottled beer, a shovel, or vitamins. As laughter broke out in the hearing room, even some committee members joined in. Volpe, watching from the sidelines, saw the color rise in Strauss’s face and the latter’s jaw muscles clench.22 Afterward, when Oppie asked him, “How did I do, Joe?” Volpe, shaking his head, answered: “Too well, Robert, much too well.”23
* * *
The deteriorating international situation had been a factor in Teller’s decision at the end of 1948 to return to Los Alamos full-time for a year.24 Since 1946, he had been shuttling between the lab and Chicago during summers and holiday breaks. The previous spring, a Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia had dragged one more country behind the Iron Curtain. That summer, a war scare ensued after the Russians cut off Allied access to Berlin. In China, as the new year began, Mao’s armies were advancing on all fronts. It is “quite clear that I am needed in Los Alamos more than I am needed in Chicago,” Teller wrote Maria Mayer, adding, “being necessary is an extremely important thing for me.”25
Edward planned to devote the coming year to work on the Super and other bombs. Anxious to accommodate the temperamental Hungarian, Bradbury had created the Committee for Weapons Development, on which Teller served, and had also made him an assistant director of the lab.26 At the committee’s first meeting, Teller proposed testing four new devices by mid-1951: an advanced implosion bomb, the hydride, the Booster, and a prototype fission trigger for the Super that was dubbed “Little Edward” at the lab.27
Initially, his return to the New Mexico lab seemed to have the desired tonic effect. “I think I have a right to feel at home and I do,” Teller exulted to Mayer.28 But just a few weeks later the familiar ennui was back. “The amount of physics I am not doing here is considerable,” Edward wrote.29
What Teller complained was his “hibernation” at Los Alamos was a reflection of the frustrations he was encountering at the lab. His colleagues remained, as ever, unenthusiastic about Teller’s original hobbyhorse—the hydride bomb, which the GAC had recently voted to deemphasize—while the Super seemed as far from realization as ever.30
So morose had he become about the future, Teller wrote Mayer, that he proposed sending a rocket to Mars loaded with algae and bacteria as “insurance in case an atomic war terminates life on Earth.”31
* * *
American setbacks in the Cold War had also given new importance to the question of when the Russians would get the bomb. Ironically, as time passed without producing evidence of Soviet progress toward a weapon, complacency grew.32 In July 1948, the Central Intelligence Agency had estimated mid-1950 as “the earliest date by which it is remotely possible that the USSR may have completed its first atomic bomb.” The agency believed mid-1953 to be “the “most probable date.”33 A year later, CIA analysts still held to 1953 as the most likely year but added a curious hedge: they now predicted the Russians’ first bomb “cannot be completed before mid-1951.”34
By spring 1949, the United States was flying specially equipped B-29s along the periphery of the Soviet Union, part of a long-range detection system
