DuBridge, Rowe, Cyril Smith, and Bell Laboratories president Oliver Buckley added their signatures to what the committee considered its “majority report.”
Standing apart from Conant’s draft was a single-page letter written by Rabi and Fermi, titled “An Opinion on the Development of the ‘super.’” Arguing that any decision on the H-bomb had to be linked to national policy, the two denounced the Super in moral terms even stronger than those used by Conant. “It is clear,” they wrote, “that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country.”
Going on to describe the hydrogen bomb as “necessarily an evil thing considered in any light,” Rabi and Fermi proposed what they hoped would be seen as a workable alternative between a crash program and outright renunciation: a promise not to go ahead with superbombs provided other nations exercised similar restraint. Key to the plan was their faith that the tests necessary to the development of an H-bomb would be detectable “by available physical means”—that is, the same technology that had tipped the United States off to Joe-1. Privately, Lilienthal deemed it a “rather thin proposal.”96
Before adjourning, Oppenheimer offered each member an opportunity to express a final, personal view. Only then did he thank his colleagues, admitting that he would have felt compelled to resign from the GAC had they not rejected the all-out approach to proceed with the Super.97 Offering to affix his signature to either Conant’s draft or the letter by Rabi and Fermi, Oppie finally signed only the so-called majority report, with its unequivocal rejection of the Super.98 Evidently forgotten was his earlier admission to Conant that it would be “folly” to oppose the new weapon.
The summary that Oppenheimer and Manley prepared for Lilienthal endorsed the increase in neutron production to the 1-gram-a-day level that Lawrence had sought. But the extra neutrons were to be used to make radiological agents, plutonium for atomic bombs, and the Booster, not tritium for the Super. Almost as an afterthought, the GAC also recommended that any new reactors be built at Argonne, not Berkeley. Thus did Lawrence’s dream of the Benicia Laboratory evaporate, as Alvarez had feared.
Late that afternoon, Oppenheimer returned to the AEC building to see Lilienthal once more before catching the train back to Princeton. His concern, Oppie told Manley, was that the AEC chairman no longer had the “drive, stamina and courage left to get enthused about the matter of the super-bomb and carry it through.”99 Although the Hickenlooper hearings had ended two weeks earlier with Lilienthal’s exoneration, the effects of the ordeal obviously lingered. Moreover, the showdown over the Super could not be postponed: McMahon was scheduled to meet with the commissioners the following afternoon, Monday, October 31.
For Oppenheimer, the three-day meeting had been a heady time, reminiscent of the optimism that followed the Acheson-Lilienthal report. Back at Princeton, he wrote Niels Bohr: “In fact, it would not seem to me out of the question that great and hopeful changes could occur within the next months.”100
But Kay Russell, Oppie’s secretary at the GAC, had a more realistic view when she handed the majority report back to Oppenheimer for signing. “This will cause you a lot of trouble,” she predicted.101
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A DESPERATE URGENCY HERE
REACTION TO THE General Advisory Committee’s report was not long in coming. Manley recalled a “rather violent discussion” between Lilienthal, the scientists, and McMahon on Monday evening, Halloween. “What [McMahon] is talking is the inevitability of war with the Russians, and what he says adds up to one thing: blow them off the face of the earth, quick, before they do the same to us—and we haven’t much time,” Lilienthal wrote in his journal afterward.1 The senator dashed off a letter to Truman the next day, asking for a personal meeting.2
On Tuesday morning, November 1, Lilienthal and a somber and reflective Acheson discussed the GAC report on a flight to South Bend, Indiana. When he had first learned of the Super, in 1946, the weapon had seemed but a remote prospect, Acheson said. Now it seemed that the Russians, too, would probably have it in time, unless superweapons were banned.3 “What a depressing world it is,” Acheson reflected.
The secretary of state had asked Lilienthal for the names of people to consult on the Super.4 But Acheson already had a list in mind. At its top, not surprisingly, was Oppenheimer.
Yet Acheson remained unpersuaded by Oppenheimer’s logic when they discussed the GAC report a few days later. “You know, I listened as carefully as I knew how,” he told aide Gordon Arneson, “but I don’t understand what Oppie was trying to say. How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm ‘by example?’”5
Teller had headed east from Los Alamos almost immediately after the GAC meeting. Stopping off in Chicago, he found Fermi unwilling to discuss the report in detail but coyly hinting at its contents. (“You and I and Truman and Stalin would be happy if further great developments were impossible. So, why do we not make an agreement to refrain from such development?” Fermi asked rhetorically.)6 Edward wrote Maria Mayer that he had been “thoroughly frightened” by what Fermi disclosed, and barely able to control his anger: “Enrico does not know what I think of him. But—unfortunately—he has an inkling.”
Going on to Washington, Teller learned more about the GAC report from McMahon. (“It makes me sick,” said the senator, succinctly.) “What I saw in Washington makes it quite clear that there are big forces working for compromise and delay,” Teller wrote Mayer on the flight back to New Mexico. For the first time, he asked her to burn the letter after she had read it.
Back at the lab, Manley showed Teller the majority report and the letter written by
