In one of his last acts as AEC chairman, Lilienthal grimly reported on the results of a quick “damage assessment” carried out by Bethe, Oppenheimer, and others.54 The report reaffirmed that the spy knew the details of the Booster, the Alarm Clock, and the Super up to the time he left Los Alamos.55 (“That man knew everything,” Conant moaned.)56
Oppenheimer, however, discounted the value of what Fuchs might have told the Soviets. Believing the spy’s knowledge of the U.S. atomic stockpile dated, and Teller’s concept of the Super unworkable—for the Russians, as well as for Teller—Oppie told Pentagon and State Department officials that the Soviets “were marvelous indeed” if they had made any advances based on the secrets obtained from Fuchs.57
A week or so later, in early March, Oppenheimer would give the Joint Committee a guarded account of his own, previous leftist leanings. His apologia ended with the proclamation that he was now “a resolute anti-Communist, whose earlier sympathies for Communist causes would give immunity against further infection.” Still, Hoover’s almost casual mention of the Chevalier incident in his testimony was the first that many in the committee had heard of the affair, and rekindled doubts about Oppie.58 In his lecture on Soviet espionage, Hoover had spent more time talking about Oppenheimer than Fuchs.59
Casting about for ways to speed up work on the Super, the Military Liaison Committee met with the commission early in the month.60 A testy exchange between Pike and LeBaron, the Pentagon’s most outspoken advocate for haste, made the commissioners defensive. Who, Pike inquired skeptically, was suggesting that the H-bomb program could proceed more expeditiously?
“Lawrence,” LeBaron replied.61
* * *
Since the scuttling of his dreams for the Benicia reactors, Ernest had hit upon another way to make the tritium that the superbomb required. His inspiration, in fact, had come just a few days before Alvarez returned to Berkeley carrying the bad news from the GAC.
While briefing a visiting delegation of Joint Committee staffers, Lawrence had made the “somewhat startling suggestion” that the necessary tritium could be created by a gigantic new type of particle accelerator; one modeled after Alvarez’s Linac but many times its power and size. (“A cross between a note of hysteria and a tremendous enthusiasm seemed to underline this part of the discussion,” the staffers reported to Borden.)62
The beauty of what he called his “neutron foundry,” Ernest pointed out, was that it made something out of nothing: using spent uranium to create plutonium, making tritium out of deuterium, and turning other, nonstrategic elements into radiological warfare agents.
Hoping to confound Russian spies, Lawrence called his new machine the Materials Testing Accelerator, or MTA.63
On New Year’s Day, 1950, Lawrence had sent Pitzer plans for a 25-million-electron-volt MTA costing $7 million. Before the week was out, Ernest was already talking about a 350-MeV production version, dubbed the Mark II. More than a quarter-mile long and costing perhaps $150 million, the bigger machine would be able to turn dross into the precious tritium.
The commission approved the more modest version of Lawrence’s MTA on February 8, before he had even told the university of his plans. (“I am being informed at a rather late date,” grumbled Sproul.) Berkeley’s comptroller learned of the project only when Ernest advised him that another half-million-dollar building was needed on campus. But under Neylan’s prodding the university once again acceded to Lawrence’s wishes. “I made my recommendation, surrounded it with an aura of mystery, and secured the necessary approval,” Sproul wearily advised Underhill.64
* * *
Before construction of the first MTA could be started, however, Lawrence was distracted by a growing political controversy at Berkeley.
Fearful that the Tenney Committee was about to impose a loyalty oath upon state employees, Sproul had decided to preempt the move by voluntarily adopting a watered-down version of the oath at the university.65 The president assumed that the measure would be uncontroversial and so was stunned when the faculty rebelled. At protest rallies on campus and in late-night faculty meetings, owlish professors likened themselves to the maquis of the French Resistance. The oath’s foremost defender among the regents, Neylan, became a particular target of the “nonsigners’” ire.66
At the Rad Lab, Lawrence was quickly disabused of the notion that his trademark pep talks might defuse the issue. That winter, a former Rad Lab employee, David Fox—one of the grad students whom Oppie had hired during the war to work on the bomb—became a lighting rod for the debate. Called before HUAC, Fox took the Fifth when asked if he had ever been a Communist. Although Fox subsequently admitted his early membership in the party and even signed the loyalty oath, he was fired from his teaching position in the physics department nonetheless, upon Neylan’s order.67
Using Fox’s firing as a rallying point, three tenured professors at the Rad Lab joined the ranks of the nonsigners.68 Two were theoretical physicists closely identified with Oppenheimer—including the man who had been hired to replace him, Gian Carlo Wick.69 During a tense confrontation in Lawrence’s office, Ernest had demanded that Wick surrender his security pass to campus guards.70 Shortly afterward, Wick’s teaching assistant was fired following a similar contretemps with Alvarez.71
To Lawrence, no less ominous than the loss of Berkeley’s theorists was the prospect that Teller, too, was about to be driven away by the oath controversy. Still agonizing over whether to take the job he had been offered at UCLA, Edward wrote to his confidante that the university’s recent decision to fire thirty-one professors because of the oath made him “perversely happy. If they are such s.o.b.s I do not have to go there and I might come back to Chicago.” Teller had already inquired of the department chairman at Chicago whether his resignation letter might be withdrawn.72
The turning point had come when Neylan bragged to faculty members that Teller’s appointment was proof the oath was not driving good people away. As Teller wrote Mayer, a last-minute effort to talk him out of withdrawing from the UCLA job backfired:
You know that I planned
