Serber spoke next of Lawrence’s plans for tritium-producing reactors. Challenged by Fermi why Berkeley should spearhead the effort—of all the AEC-funded laboratories in the country, the Rad Lab was the only one without experience in reactors—Serber replied that Lawrence saw the need as so great that he was willing to divert the efforts of his boys to meet it. Smyth let it be known that he looked upon this latest evidence of Lawrence’s selflessness with a gimlet eye.
Oppenheimer began Saturday morning’s session by reading Seaborg’s letter.86 Lilienthal and the commissioners arrived shortly afterward. Worried by reports that the AEC was cool to the idea of the Benicia Laboratory, Alvarez had decided to make an eleventh-hour appearance at AEC headquarters but was able to get no farther than the lobby.87 He remained there, like an island in the torrent, as the joint chiefs and others summoned by Oppenheimer hurried past.
By acclamation, the committee decided to focus the next two days upon the Super. Disillusioned by the brevity and shallowness of previous GAC meetings, Conant had suggested holding “the equivalent of hearings … bringing in as witnesses people as far down the line as we like.”88 Oppenheimer agreed, promising committee members “an opportunity to come to grips with some questions which long have eluded us.”89
Speaking for the military, the joint chiefs’ chairman, General Omar Bradley of the army—“very G.A.R.-ish, countryman’s accents,” noted Lilienthal—surprised all by arguing that the Super’s principal value might be chiefly “psychological.”90 (“A useful thing to have around the house,” Lilienthal wrote contemptuously.) General Lauris Norstad, head of air force planning, echoed Bradley’s point but had no answer to Lilienthal’s question: why not simply increase atomic bomb production instead of building a fearsome new weapon?
Still stuck in the lobby, Alvarez was reduced to searching people’s faces for clues to what was going on upstairs. Shortly after noon, he caught Oppenheimer’s eye as Oppie and Serber paraded past. During lunch at a nearby restaurant, Alvarez was surprised to hear Oppenheimer argue that the Russians might follow suit if the United States decided not to develop the Super. The last time he could remember discussing the Super with Oppie, in 1943, Oppenheimer had held out the prospect of work on the H-bomb as an inducement to come to Los Alamos.
Realizing that the Benicia Laboratory was doomed if, as it appeared, Oppenheimer and the GAC decided to oppose the Super, Alvarez did not bother to return to his vigil in the lobby but instead booked a flight home. Back in Berkeley, he made a final entry in his diary: “Particularly interesting talk with Oppie.… Pretty foggy thinking.”
* * *
At the AEC conference room on Saturday afternoon, the mood of the meeting subtly began to change.91 Rabi and Fermi had come to Washington believing that a decision to proceed with the Super was probably foreordained, if only for reasons of domestic politics. But a quiet protest by Hartley Rowe, an engineer who had been at wartime Los Alamos—“We built one Frankenstein,” Rowe muttered—sparked a contentious and unexpected debate over the morality of the Super.
When Strauss spoke up to remind the group that the decision on the Super would not be made by popular vote, Conant—“looking almost translucent, so gray,” Lilienthal thought—replied that Strauss had missed the point, since “whether it will stick depends on how the country views the moral issue.” As for his own views, Conant left no doubt. “This whole discussion makes me feel I was seeing the same film, and a punk one, for a second time,” he announced to the meeting.
The intensity of Conant’s convictions began to sway the skeptics, Rabi and Fermi included. Although practical objections were also raised—the scientists thought the chances better than even that a successful Super could be built within five years—it was the ethical argument that held sway. When the meeting adjourned that evening, its participants broke into small groups to draft their recommendations. Oppenheimer and Manley agreed to write the overall report. With DuBridge’s help, Conant crafted the portion that dealt specifically with the Super. Believing that a recommendation simply not to proceed would be ignored, Rabi and Fermi searched for a more practical approach. Their hope, Fermi said later, was “to outlaw the thing before it was born.”92
Early on Sunday morning, October 30, Oppenheimer reconvened the GAC and the various drafts were read aloud. Lilienthal, joining the discussion, was surprised to discover that the committee, which he had thought evenly split on the crash effort the night before, now seemed uniformly opposed to the Super. The AEC chairman returned to his office shaken, canceling a previously scheduled trip to the Midwest: “Some terrible and deeply important things to work out in my mind,” he wrote in his journal.93
Others in the room also noticed the change of mood. Attorney Gordon Dean thought the language used by GAC members surprisingly emotional, evoking “visceral reactions.”94 Even the normally inscrutable Fermi seemed curiously “worked up,” Manley recollected.95 Genocide, a relatively new word, appeared twice in the drafts.
After lunch, the committee set about finalizing its report; by three o’clock the task was done. Conant’s summary reflected the passion that had flared in the conference room on Saturday afternoon:
We believe a super bomb should never be produced. Mankind would be far better off not to have a demonstration of the feasibility of such a weapon, until the present climate of world opinion changes.… In determining not to proceed to develop the super bomb, we see a
