Puzzled by the commissioners’ conflicting views, the president asked Souers to reconvene a special NSC committee—consisting of Lilienthal, Johnson, and Acheson, its chairman—which had earlier advised him on the production of fissionable material.24
Sensing that the tide was beginning to turn in his favor, Teller, ebullient, wrote to Mayer that the current situation reminded him of the earlier debate on whether to proceed with the atomic bomb: “I wonder to how many people it happens that they are set back where they have been before and that they get a second chance.… But this time I love the job I am going to do—I shall even love to fight if it must be.”25
McMahon’s resolve, too, had stiffened when he learned from a Los Alamos briefing by Manley that an “orderly, step-by-step” program at the lab might not deliver an H-bomb until 1960. Lawrence had previously told the senator that a crash effort could succeed in as little as two years.26 Teller, on the other hand, was warning the Joint Committee’s Henry Jackson that the Russians might test a Super sometime in the next eighteen months.27
Borden spent three days drafting an argument that he and McMahon hoped would prove persuasive to Truman. McMahon sent the result, a letter almost 5,000 words long, to the president on November 21. “The profundity of the atomic crisis which has now overtaken us cannot, in my judgment, be exaggerated,” it began. Using language reminiscent of the Incendiary Document and There Will Be No Time, the letter’s conclusion was suitably apocalyptic: “if we let Russia get the super first, catastrophe becomes all but certain—whereas, if we get it first, there exists a chance of saving ourselves.”28
Four days later, Strauss sent Truman his own, briefer but still emotional rejoinder to the GAC. “A government of atheists is not likely to be dissuaded from producing the weapon on ‘moral’ grounds,” he argued.29 Goaded by Nichols and Borden, the joint chiefs, too, had finally weighed in, adding their voices to the growing chorus. The country “would be in an intolerable position if a possible enemy possessed the [Super] and the United States did not,” Bradley wrote.30
During the next six weeks, McMahon and Borden would send three more letters to the White House—two in one day. Lilienthal had warned the president of a possible ‘blitz’ on the Super. “I don’t blitz easily,” Truman replied with a grin.
But the president had not expected this concerted a campaign, and it was also clear that a choice could not be postponed much longer. Following a gaffe by Colorado senator Edwin Johnson, a Joint Committee member—Johnson mentioned in a television interview that the United States was working on a superweapon 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb that had destroyed Hiroshima—McMahon began urging Truman to make his decision soon, and to make it public.31
* * *
Returning to Washington after the holiday recess, McMahon brought the Joint Committee together on January 9, 1950. Reading the GAC report aloud amid interruptions—“Let me get through this if you don’t mind,” he snapped at one point—McMahon could not refrain from adding his own editorial comments. On the hope that the Russians might renounce the Super, he hooted: “That is certainly a joke. Suppose they did? Who the hell would believe them?”32
His meeting with the president had left the impression, McMahon told his colleagues, that “Missouri common sense” would compel Truman to go ahead with the H-bomb. (“Brien, it is not an easy thing to order the development of a weapon that will kill ten million people,” the president had told him, McMahon said. His rejoinder had been: “You know damn well that [the Russians] are busy at it right now.”)
Strauss, too, was pressing hard for a positive verdict. In a telephone call to Souers, he noted that three months had passed since Acheson’s committee had been given its task. “It may be later than we think,” Strauss warned.33
Since the October GAC meeting, the initiative had plainly passed to the H-bomb’s proponents. In a meeting that January between the commission and the Joint Committee, Strauss read his latest letter to Truman amid congratulatory murmurs while Lilienthal sat glum and silent in the background.34 Not a single commissioner spoke up to defend the scientists’ position.35 Hoping to persuade the Joint Committee to send its own unanimous but unbidden endorsement of the Super to the White House, McMahon scheduled a meeting for January 30 to discuss the issue.
Unexpectedly, Oppenheimer, in town for another GAC meeting, also attended the session. (“I thought it would be cowardly for me not to come up here and let you disagree and raise questions where you thought we had missed the boat,” he told the committee.)36 Asked by a congressman if a war fought with superbombs might make the planet uninhabitable—“Pestiferous, you mean?” Oppie interjected—the physicist said that he was actually more worried about the species’s “moral survival.”
As Oppenheimer probably realized, his was an effort to sweep back the tide. Just the day before, encountering Teller at a meeting of the American Physical Society in New York, Oppie had conceded that it looked as though his and the GAC’s advice would be ignored. When Teller asked if Oppenheimer would then be willing to work on the Super, the answer had been a prompt and unqualified “No.”37
Acheson—grumbling that he had grown “impatient with obscure argument”—scheduled a final meeting of his NSC committee for January 31.38 The secretary of state not only held the tie-breaking vote on the committee but also wielded the most influence with Truman. Acheson had at one point toyed with the idea of proposing
