The first helicopter did not return until nearly dusk. That evening, Teller nervously paced up and down the beach while the photographic plates were developed.
Early the next morning, Teller received the news while brushing his teeth in the barracks bathroom. A few minutes later, peering at a tiny strip of film through a microscope in the island’s makeshift lab, he saw proof that, for a mere glimmer of a second, a thermonuclear flame had burned on Earth. Teller turned and hurried out the door. Hopping on a jeep that was headed to the nearby landing strip, Edward flagged down the Piper Cub that had been preparing for takeoff.55 As the little airplane taxied up to him, Teller wordlessly thrust a five-dollar bill through the cockpit window into Lawrence’s open hand.56
Eniwetok, Edward had promised Gordon Dean, would not be big enough for his next bomb.
14
A BAD BUSINESS NOW THREATENING
OPPENHEIMER AND THE General Advisory Committee received word of George while in a meeting called to discuss the future of Lawrence’s Materials Testing Accelerator. “The interesting mixture certainly reacted well,” read the terse telegram sent by a Los Alamos physicist. Oppie announced the news, but the GAC minutes remain silent on the response, if any. Despite Alvarez’s expressions of “optimism,” the committee subsequently voted not to award any money for the Mark II MTA until the Mark I was working. The prototype could still only run for a few seconds before it was shut down by sparking.1
Although the success of George had been widely predicted, the staged-bomb proposal of Teller and Ulam cast the significance of the experiment in a whole new light. Dean called a meeting for mid-June at Princeton’s institute to consider whether to proceed with a full-scale test of the radiation-implosion design, which Teller favored.2
Smyth hoped that Princeton might also be a “meeting of the minds between Teller and Oppenheimer.”3 But, as the gathering approached, the two protagonists were instead seen to be jockeying for position. Oppenheimer encouraged Bacher, Conant, and other early H-bomb opponents to attend. Afraid of being outnumbered by Oppie’s partisans, Teller made sure that his own allies—including Wheeler and Willard Libby, the Berkeley-trained chemist who had meanwhile replaced Seaborg on the GAC—would be in the audience. Believing that Teller would not wish to be identified as a spokesman for Los Alamos, Bradbury deliberately left him off the agenda at Princeton.
Rather than recognizing this as a polite nod to his independence, however, Teller took Bradbury’s gesture as a deliberate snub—and even an effort to silence him.
Barely had the first session begun on June 16, 1951, before Edward became visibly impatient, chafing at progress reports on projects that had long been under way at Los Alamos. His agitation grew when Oppenheimer, the session’s chairman, recognized first Bradbury and then Dean, and neither man mentioned the recent discovery by Teller and Ulam. As he had at Berkeley almost a decade earlier, when he had interrupted Serber’s primer on the atomic bomb, Teller stood up and demanded to be heard.
At the end of his impromptu presentation, even those who had previously opposed the H-bomb—including Fermi and Oppenheimer—seemed “enthusiastic” about the prospects for the new Super, Dean noted. Bethe joined with Wheeler in rejecting further half-steps: the next test in the Pacific, part of Operation Ivy, should be of a prototype superbomb, code-named Mike.4
Wrote Teller to Smyth in triumph: “It is now my conviction that the thermonuclear program is past its ignition point.”5 “The bickering was gone,” confirmed Dean in his diary.
Yet, late that summer, de Hoffmann notified the AEC chairman that Teller was once again talking about leaving Los Alamos. (Dean had grown inured to such tactics. He had come to the conclusion, he wrote in his diary, “that Teller would never be completely happy.”6 A Joint Committee staffer reported from Los Alamos that scientists there had likewise learned to take Teller’s resignation threats “in stride.”)7
Bradbury’s appointment of Marshall Holloway to head the lab’s accelerated H-bomb project had prompted the crisis. As leader of the Theoretical Megaton Group—the Family Committee’s successor, created to spearhead the development of the radiation-implosion bomb at Los Alamos—Holloway refused to agree to Teller’s date of July 1, 1952, for the test of Mike.8 Holloway and Bradbury both believed that the earliest the revolutionary new weapon could be built and tested was late in the year.9 To Teller, the choice of Holloway had been “like waving a red flag before a bull,” de Hoffmann told Dean.
A few days later, Teller sent Bradbury his resignation letter. Edward made preparations to move his piano and his family, once more, to Chicago.10
* * *
Anxious to persuade Dean that he was not “walking out” on the H-bomb project, Teller had told the AEC chairman that were he to stay at the lab, his role there would be minor—merely approving engineering drawings. Teller wrote Strauss that he enjoyed being back at Chicago. But there was another reason, he conceded, why he had decided to make the break.11 Severing his ties with Los Alamos would free him to campaign without hindrance for a second nuclear weapons laboratory, a rival to “Oppie’s lab.”12
Teller had quietly began recruiting scientists for a second lab as early as May 1950.13 The notion of a “separate institute” dedicated to building the H-bomb had been raised by the Joint Committee the following month. (“The profits which might be gained by moving out of Los Alamos now might be more top scientists in the project, faster progress on weapons research projects, and financial economies which would free dollars for bombs instead of water wells and golf courses for Los Alamos,” a staffer had written then.)14 More recently,
