For Strauss, however, this interference by a second committee on which Oppenheimer served seemed another example of obstructionism bordering on sabotage. Following a briefing in early August 1949 on the Long-Range Detection Program, Strauss wrote the director of AFOAT-1 with a warning that any “failure to detect the first Russian detonation might be fatal.”37
The specter of a Soviet bomb had likewise begun to haunt McMahon and Borden, who wrote to the AEC a week later, asking that they be notified immediately when the commission had evidence of an atomic explosion in the Soviet Union. Borden’s letter was prompted by recent reports in a Paris newspaper of a major seismic disturbance near the Afghan border.38 Picked up by the Associated Press, the story had been reprinted in American papers. “The article is inaccurate in most particulars,” Sumner Pike, the acting AEC chairman, reassured Borden on August 31, 1949.39
* * *
At the time Pike wrote his letter, the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union was already some forty-eight hours old.
Word of the Russian bomb reached Washington at the start of the busy Labor Day weekend. By the early morning hours of September 7, AFOAT-1 analysts had identified an air sample obtained from a B-29 flying between Alaska and Japan as consistent with debris from a fission explosion. When further analysis confirmed this finding, the air force alerted the Truman administration on September 9.40
Official Washington remained skeptical of the news nonetheless.41 The new defense secretary, Louis Johnson, was one of the doubters. Truman’s national security adviser, Admiral Sidney Souers, likewise expressed hope that the radiation had come from a Soviet reactor accident rather than an actual weapon. Even the president himself apparently remained unconvinced that the Russians had the bomb.42
Realizing that there was at least a political need for more proof, the air force hastily assembled a covey of experts to make the case that the atomic monopoly had indeed ended.
The first call went out to Vannevar Bush, who was surprised to be the one picked to head the effort. (“But wouldn’t it be more reasonable for Dr. Oppenheimer to be chairman?” Bush innocently asked. The reply, he later remembered, was “that they prefer it the way it was.”) To Bush, it was the first subtle hint of the trouble to come for Oppenheimer.43
Bush nevertheless decided to include Oppie on the top-secret panel, which met for five hours on September 19 before concluding unanimously that the evidence pointed to a Soviet atomic bomb, subsequently dubbed “Joe-1.”44
The Russian bomb caught many unawares. Oppenheimer had just returned to his Princeton home, Olden Manor, from a week at Perro Caliente when the telephone rang with the summons from Bush.45 On vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, Lilienthal and his wife had been driving back from a dinner in Edgartown when they were startled to see an AEC official suddenly materialize out of the fog, standing by the side of the road. Huddled around a kerosene lamp at Lilienthal’s summer home, drinking beer from an icebox, the two men discussed the Soviet bomb and “the whole box of trouble it portended,” the AEC chairman wrote in his journal. After a night of little sleep, Lilienthal flew back to Washington early the next morning.
Even for those who had long predicted it, the Russian bomb came as something of a shock. Stopped at a traffic light on his way to Yosemite, Lawrence saw a banner newspaper headline heralding the monopoly’s end. Just back from England, Teller learned at the end of a Pentagon briefing on tactical nuclear weapons what everyone else in the room already knew. Acting on impulse, he immediately telephoned Oppenheimer with a desperate query: “What should we do now?” Edward later remembered Oppie’s sharp, almost scolding reply: “Keep your shirt on.”46
* * *
But Teller’s question was nonetheless the one that preoccupied most Americans—Oppenheimer included—in the days to come. Back in Washington, Lilienthal found Oppie “frantic, drawn” and Bacher “deeply worried” not only about the Russian bomb but by the American reaction.47 Oppenheimer’s hope that Truman might use the news to announce an end to “the miasma of secrecy” that enshrouded the subject of atomic energy had been quickly disappointed.48
Others looked to the president to take more tangible—and decisive—action.
Just a few weeks earlier, after much agonizing, Teller had finally decided to accept a teaching offer from UCLA.49 The Soviet bomb now caused him to reconsider his plans. At a recent meeting on new weapons to be developed at Los Alamos, Teller had put the Super at the end of his list—a reluctant concession to the roadblocks in the device’s design, and the persisting stalemate caused by insufficient computing power at the lab.50 But the sudden end of America’s atomic monopoly had him once again actively proselytizing for the Super by that fall.51
At Berkeley, chemist Wendell Latimer cornered Ernest Lawrence over lunch at the Faculty Club to talk about the Super. Like Teller, Latimer believed that the hydrogen bomb was the only logical response to Joe-1. Despite his earlier stand against the H-bomb, Lawrence’s growing anxiety for the future—as well as a nostalgic remembrance of his role in the Manhattan Project—made him sympathetic to Latimer’s appeal. (When, years earlier, Oppie told an MIT audience that physicists had “known sin” because of the atomic bomb, Ernest bristled at the suggestion; there was, he declared, no occasion on which physics had caused him to know sin.)52
Later that day, Alvarez and Lawrence discussed how they might lobby for the hydrogen bomb at an upcoming conference in Washington on radiological warfare. Receiving further encouragement in a telephone call from Teller, the two left Berkeley a day early in order to stop off
