Arriving in the predawn hours of October 7, 1949, the duo received a briefing on the current state of thermonuclear research from Teller, Manley, and two physicist-mathematicians at the lab: George Gamow and Stan Ulam. Energized by Ernest’s enthusiasm, Teller followed him and Alvarez back to the Albuquerque Hilton, where the trio talked into the early morning about the newly improved political prospects for the Super. In the room, Lawrence washed one of his new drip-dry shirts in the sink, showing Teller how it could be worn in the morning—a useful trick, he suggested, that would facilitate Edward’s forthcoming role of H-bomb lobbyist.53
Teller endorsed Lawrence’s plan to mobilize support in Washington for the construction of several new heavy-water reactors to produce tritium, since scarcity of that isotope looked to be one of the chief obstacles to the Super. “E.O.L and I said we would get going on that at once,” Alvarez wrote in a diary he began keeping of the trip.54
* * *
At the Capitol, the Soviet bomb had created a mood receptive to the message being borne by Lawrence and Alvarez. In an “emergency” meeting of the Joint Committee on September 23, immediately following Truman’s public announcement of Joe-1, Oppenheimer’s genial assurance that there was no need for drastic action was simply ignored. Senator Eugene Millikin spoke ominously—if elliptically—of taking “therapeutic measures” against Russia in light of the new development. When Lilienthal faced the gauntlet a few days later, McMahon pointedly rejected what he characterized as the AEC chairman’s “doctrine of ‘enough bombs.’” “Why not all-out effort for super-weapon, with help of British?” Borden wrote in a note he passed to the senator.55
Ironically, those in uniform—to the extent that they knew anything of the H-bomb—remained surprisingly ambivalent about the Super.56 By contrast, Joint Committee members, pointing to Joe-1 as evidence of America’s sudden and glaring military weakness, ascribed near superhuman powers to the Russians. Staffers worried aloud that the Soviets, using captured Nazi scientists, might already have an arsenal of the ultimate weapon that Borden had anticipated in his apocalyptic book: a long-range rocket topped with a nuclear warhead.57 In the atmosphere of crisis, the Super was presented as a quick way for the United States to recapture its lost hegemony.
During lunch that afternoon with the National Security Council’s Souers, Strauss was surprised to learn that Truman evidently knew nothing about the H-bomb. Using Souers as his conduit—the two navy men had become friends during the war—Strauss sent the president a memo he had begun composing shortly after Truman’s announcement.58 It argued that the Soviet Union might already be ahead of the United States in the arms race.59 Borrowing a term from physics, Strauss urged Truman to leapfrog the Russians with a quantum jump—a crash effort for the Super.
* * *
Alvarez and Lawrence arrived in Washington on Saturday afternoon, October 8. Not pausing to rest after the flight from New Mexico, the two took a taxi to the AEC building, where they received an encouraging reception from, among others, their former Berkeley colleague Kenneth Pitzer, who had meanwhile replaced Fisk as the commission’s head of research. “Told them what we planned to do and got good response,” wrote Alvarez in his impromptu diary.60
On Monday, the pair had lunch with McMahon and two Californians on the Joint Committee, Carl Hinshaw and William Knowland, who told them of plans to send a scouting party out to Los Alamos and Berkeley later in the month to gauge the prospects for the Super.61 From Capitol Hill, Lawrence and Alvarez returned to AEC headquarters for a meeting with the commissioners. But the session with Lilienthal went badly. Invoking the “spirit of Groves,” Lawrence tried to rally the AEC chairman behind the new reactors and the Super. Instead, Lilienthal wordlessly swiveled his chair and stared silently out the window.62
In New York that evening, the two saw Isidor Rabi at Columbia “and found him,” Alvarez wrote, “very happy at our plans.” Luie found particularly auspicious Rabi’s parting comment: “It’s certainly good to see the first team back in.”63
But crowded skies thwarted their plans for enlisting the aid of America’s allies. Ernest had hoped to persuade the Canadians to let him use their heavy-water pile at Chalk River to make tritium until Berkeley’s new reactors were built. Unable to get seats on a flight to Ottawa, Alvarez returned to Berkeley while Lawrence flew back to Washington. McMahon had scheduled an executive session with the Joint Chiefs of Staff two days hence.
In a meeting the following afternoon with Nichols, who had meanwhile replaced Groves as head of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, Ernest added his voice to those urging the joint chiefs to declare a formal military requirement for the Super.64 Nichols promised to pass Lawrence’s message along to the air force’s chief of staff and “no. 1 bomber man,” General Hoyt Vandenberg. At the Joint Committee meeting on October 14, Vandenberg announced that the air force’s view was that the superbomb should be rushed to completion as soon as possible.65
In the letter that McMahon sent to Lilienthal and the Pentagon later that month, the speculative thesis that Teller had raised the year before in “The Russian Atomic Plan” suddenly achieved the sober status of accepted fact: “As you know, there is reason to fear that Soviet Russia has assigned top priority to development of a thermo-nuclear super-bomb.”66
* * *
While slow to coalesce, opposition to the superbomb was also forming. During the time that Lawrence and Alvarez had been making their rounds in Washington, Oppenheimer was in Cambridge, attending a meeting of the Harvard Board of Overseers with Conant. In private conversation, the quiet chemist had been surprisingly passionate in his denunciation of the H-bomb.
Back in Princeton on October 21, Oppenheimer received a briefing by Manley and Bradbury on the status of thermonuclear research. That afternoon he put his thoughts on superbombs in a letter to Conant.
Despite the fact that “two experienced promoters have been at work, i.e., Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller,” Oppenheimer wrote, his own
