* * *
Frustrations that had welled up for more than a year spilled out at the meeting in Souers’s office on the morning of January 31. The Super was “straight gadget-making,” Lilienthal objected.40 But his protest was largely pro forma, as he himself likely recognized. Acheson had already drafted a recommendation for Truman that would direct the AEC “to proceed to determine the technical feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon.” Johnson successfully lobbied to have the statement amended to allow the mass production of H-bombs once the weapon’s feasibility had been determined. In a desperate rearguard move, Lilienthal argued that any decision should be delayed until after a State Department policy review ordered by Acheson had been completed.41 But that, too, was rejected. At a little past noon, the three, accompanied by Souers and another presidential aide, trooped across the street to the White House with Acheson’s draft in hand.
Lilienthal had barely begun to recite his arguments in the Oval Office when Truman abruptly cut him off, announcing that he intended to go ahead with the Super. Because of the way the Russians were behaving, the president said, he had no other choice. Outside the door, Lilienthal checked his watch; the meeting with Truman had lasted only seven minutes. It was, he wrote later that day in his journal, like saying “‘No’ to a steamroller.”42
That afternoon, Lilienthal informed Oppenheimer and the GAC of Truman’s choice, and also advised them that they were forbidden from making any public comment on the decision: “It was like a funeral party—especially when I said we were all gagged.”43 Adding to the sense of gloom was the realization that it was now too late to make the personal appeal to the president that Oppie and Lilienthal had once discussed. Bitter talk of a mass resignation was scotched by the AEC chairman, who himself only had a few weeks left in the government.
The president’s decision made the Joint Committee’s meeting late that day “somewhat academic,” McMahon conceded. Asked his opinion of what the next step should be on the Super, Strauss was quick to answer: “I would give it the maximum expedition, Senator.”44
* * *
Truman’s radio address that evening brought an end to what Oppenheimer would later call “our large and ill-managed bout with the Super.” But doubts lingered—even among those who supported the president’s decision.45 “You know, we make these weapons so that we may never use them,” Gordon Arneson remembered a “very solemn” Acheson telling him. Yet Arneson sensed a note of uncertainty in the secretary of state’s voice.46
For Strauss, on the other hand, Truman’s decision was a long-sought-for vindication. Since the AEC’s creation, the commissioners had failed to reach unanimity only a dozen times. On each of those occasions, Strauss had been the lone dissenter. A few weeks earlier, he had told Truman that he intended to follow Lilienthal into retirement by early spring.
By coincidence, the party at the Shoreham Hotel that Strauss scheduled for January 31—his fifty-fourth birthday—also became a victory celebration for champions of the Super. Having accepted Strauss’s invitation weeks before, Oppenheimer and the GAC felt compelled to attend. Reporters at the party found Oppie alternately distraught and defiant. To one uncomprehending newsman, the physicist compared the superbomb decision to “the plague of Thebes.” Long remembered by the host of the event, however, was an unforgivable snub: when Strauss had walked over to introduce his son and daughter-in-law to Oppenheimer at the party, the physicist, not bothering to speak or turn around, had simply proffered a hand thrust over his shoulder.47
* * *
The following day, February 1, 1950, Hoover telephoned Strauss to announce a second triumph: Fuchs had confessed to espionage in London. The spy’s confession was tangible proof of Strauss’s long-derided contention that there were traitors in the nation’s midst. Moreover, FBI evidence indicated that other spies might still be at large. (“We have got to put more bolts and locks on what we discover from this time forward, and give a very thorough screening,” Strauss had told the Joint Committee.)48 Later that day, Strauss wrote Truman that the Fuchs case “only fortifies the wisdom” of the president’s decision, since the “individual in question had worked on the super-bomb at Los Alamos.”
The H-bomb decision and Fuchs’s arrest heralded a subtle but significant shift in the constellation of power in Washington. Instructed by Hoover to tell only his fellow commissioners about the damage caused by the British spy, Strauss opened an AEC meeting on February 2 by instructing Carroll Wilson to leave the room. After announcing the news about Fuchs, Strauss asked his stunned colleagues to approve an investigation of the commission’s general manager for allowing the British into the building.49
* * *
The news of Fuchs’s arrest—announced in the United States on February 3—was bound to make American scientists henceforth more circumspect about what they said in public, Strauss had told Hoover.50 Lilienthal’s assessment was no less blunt. Following his own farewell party at the AEC a few days earlier, he foresaw “witch-hunts” and “anti-scientists orgies.” Truman, too, worried about the political fallout from the spy scandal—telling Souers to “tie on your hat.”51
The storm broke less than a week later. On February 9, Senator Joseph McCarthy announced that he had a list of more than 200 Communists who had infiltrated the State Department. The recent perjury conviction of Alger Hiss in January had already propelled espionage into the headlines.
The Joint Committee spent the first week of February in executive session, trying to gauge the harm done by Fuchs. In separate appearances, Groves and Hoover blamed the debacle upon laxness by the British and the AEC.52 As if confirming this judgment, Carroll Wilson sent McMahon a list of thirty-two
