Strauss, too, had been uncharacteristically quiet during the long meeting on October 30—interrupting only once to ask, incredulously, whether the scientists actually meant to abandon work on the Super even if the Soviets declared they would not go along. Oppie refused to be baited by Strauss’s hypothetical question, answering only that he believed the Russians would not decline.9
Back at Berkeley, Serber had naively tried to put a positive face on the GAC’s recommendations in his own report to Lawrence. “Oh, Bob, don’t be a damn fool!” Ernest erupted impatiently.10 Alvarez, having meanwhile learned that Oppenheimer had indeed prevailed at the GAC, unceremoniously moved his files back to his old office.11
Except for Lilienthal and Strauss, the commissioners seemed unwilling or unable to take a clear stand on the Super. Such indecisiveness was a growing frustration to the AEC chairman, who noted in his journal—with concern—that his own opposition to the weapon “has not proven contagious.”12
Sumner Pike still waffled at an AEC meeting on November 3. Henry Smyth, while opposed to a crash effort, worried that any decision taken in the current international climate might prove irreversible.13 Gordon Dean favored a lawyerly approach—a secret diplomatic overture to the Soviets, offering to renounce the Super if the Russians followed suit. Should the Soviets refuse, Dean argued, the road would then be clear for the all-out effort.
Matters were no closer to resolution four days later, when Lilienthal brought the commissioners together with GAC members who were still in town. Conant, Manley wrote admiringly, had not lost the courage of his convictions—“giving it straight from the shoulder to the Commission, not only including his views on the action that they should take but also the remark that if ever there was a point to a civilian commission this was now the one.” But Manley feared that the Harvard president’s lecture had little impact: “I think that this point that he made was rather lost.”14
Strauss, on his way to Los Angeles to give a speech, missed the November 7 commission meeting. But the following morning, McMahon—en route between Los Alamos and Hanford, on the Joint Committee’s inspection trip—stopped by Strauss’s suite at the Beverley Hills Hotel with the welcome news that Dean was wavering on the Super. In a telephone call, the two urged McMahon’s former law partner not to yield to pressure from Lilienthal and Oppenheimer.15
The H-bomb lobby was becoming a cabal.
* * *
For Strauss, opposition to the Super was less a case of mistaken judgment than a crime. Nor was he alone in believing that there was a campaign under way to sabotage the hydrogen bomb. Teller thought it suspicious that a second Los Alamos conference on the superbomb, planned for early November, had been suddenly canceled on October 31 by Bradbury, citing “scheduling complications.”16 The final straw was when Bethe had telephoned to say that he would not be coming to Los Alamos after all.17
But Strauss was also privy to a secret that few others in the government knew: the FBI had recent, firm evidence that Soviet agents had penetrated the Manhattan Project.18
Some two weeks before the GAC meeting, Strauss had learned from Charles Bates, the FBI agent whom Hoover had assigned as liaison with the AEC, that decrypted Soviet messages revealed the presence of a spy at wartime Los Alamos.19 Bates informed Strauss and AEC security chief John Gingrich that “Bureau Source 5” pointed to British physicist Klaus Fuchs.20 Bates added that there was also reason to believe other atomic spies had been operating at the lab, and that secrets of the superbomb had probably been compromised as well.21
Without notifying the other commissioners, Strauss had immediately launched his own clandestine campaign to unmask the next spy—or, failing that, to find a scapegoat.
On October 13, 1949, Strauss had telephoned Groves with questions about the British mission at Los Alamos. Following an hour-long meeting with Hoover a few days later, Strauss called Groves again, asking for more details. His queries this time concerned not only British scientists at the lab but some American ones as well—specifically, Frank and Robert Oppenheimer.
Thus alerted that an espionage investigation was under way, Groves wrote a letter to Strauss on November 4 that was an apologia for not having acted on what he knew about the Chevalier incident at the time: “It is true that Robert was very reluctant to disclose the details of the Frank-Haakon situation and I am not sure whether we ever did learn the whole truth about it all. It was finally revealed to me under conditions which made it impossible to do much and it was very difficult to tell just how much Frank was involved and how much Robert was involved.”
“Summing it up,” Groves wrote, “I believe that it is quite clear that Frank was sponsored, protected and otherwise looked out for by Robert and that this was done knowing full well the background and (at least previous) sympathies of Frank and, particularly of Frank’s wife (Jackie).”22
Strauss did not tell Groves what he intended to do with the information on the Oppenheimers. But he had already obtained from Nichols a copy of the letter that Oppie’s Scientific Panel had sent to Wallace in September 1945—in which panel members had stated that they would rather see the United States defeated in war than victorious at the cost of using superbombs. When Strauss wrote back to Nichols a few weeks later, asking next for a copy of Szilard’s petition to Truman, it was clear that the noose was tightening: “Do you suppose your files could locate that document? I would be interested to see who signed it and the nature of the arguments advanced.”23
* * *
Unable to make a unanimous recommendation to the president, the commissioners finally decided to put their separate views in writing. Lilienthal delivered the letters to the White House
