The idea of a “new establishment” likewise appealed to Strauss, who, feeling bored and unappreciated as a financial adviser to the Rockefeller Foundation, had welcomed a recent invitation from Truman to serve on a blue-ribbon panel overseeing procurement for the Korean War.16 Although no longer formally affiliated with the AEC, Strauss used his new position in Washington to lobby his former colleagues or their recent replacements at the commission.17
Strauss’s fear was that Oppenheimer would continue to use his behind-the-scenes influence to thwart progress on the new Super. Meeting with Dean the previous winter, Strauss had shown the AEC chairman the draft of a long memorandum, titled “The Russians May Be Ahead of Us.” In his memo, Strauss blamed Oppenheimer for delaying the H-bomb program and likened the GAC chairman “to a commander who did not want to fight.”18 When Dean requested that he leave the draft memo and accompanying notes behind, Strauss instead made a show of burning the documents in the fireplace. A few days later, Dean learned that Strauss had originally intended the memo for Truman.
Except for Libby, the scientists of the GAC had thus far expressed little enthusiasm for a “second Los Alamos,” which the majority rejected as “neither necessary nor in any real sense feasible.”19 The idea had yet to find any supporters on the commission, either. Early in 1951, however, that situation had begun to change.
* * *
Thomas E. Murray was a New York industrialist whom Truman had named in March 1950 to serve out the remainder of Lilienthal’s term. Murray, trained at Yale as an engineer, was the holder of more than 200 patents and had been in charge of New York City’s subway system during the Second World War. His interest in nuclear power had been awakened by the prediction of a physicist visitor to his office in 1940 that the subways of the future would run on atoms rather than coal.20
But perhaps the most crucial fact about the 59-year-old Murray was not on his résumé: a prominent Catholic layman, the brother of a Jesuit priest, Murray considered religious faith more important than politics or ideology. Before accepting the post at the AEC, he had consulted several prominent theologians on the question whether the use of nuclear weapons was morally justified in time of war. Taking an almost Manichaean view of the Soviet Union, his tentative conclusion—that waging nuclear war was not only “something we are morally permitted to do; it may be something we are morally obliged to do”—was an issue that Murray continued to wrestle with privately, in frequent visits to the holy shrine at Fatima, Portugal.21
At his first GAC meeting, in September 1950, Murray had been surprised that there was not more eagerness to push the H-bomb program. The new commissioner told the stunned scientists that the situation with the Super reminded him of the fate that had befallen one of his father’s inventions—which he said an industrial rival had bought the rights to and then simply put “on the shelf.”22
The GAC meeting was not the first time that Murray had heard of the H-bomb. The superbomb project was being deliberately “sidetracked” at Los Alamos, Strauss had warned him early in his tenure, suggesting that Murray see Teller for the details.
In February 1951, Murray met with Teller, who promptly “left no doubt as to the fact that he would prefer a separate director, a separate group and conditions preventing continual interference with the work.”23 Teller also singled out “Robert Oppenheimer and Associates” for impeding the nation’s military buildup.
Three days after the Princeton conference, Murray wrote to Dean, urging immediate creation of a new laboratory, independent of Los Alamos and dedicated to building the new superbomb.24 Dean had agreed to study the question. When the verdict that autumn turned out to be negative, Murray assumed Strauss’s role of the iconoclast in commission meetings. His was consistently the sole vote in favor of a second lab.25
* * *
On Capitol Hill, McMahon and Borden were also busily promoting the argument that Los Alamos would benefit from competition. The Connecticut Democrat had recently announced his own presidential bid, under the slogan “McMahon’s the Man,” and had seized upon what he hoped would be a potent issue for his campaign: the need for speeding up work on the Super.26 Borden had written recently of using super-bombs to “cauterize Soviet global aggression.”27
Thus far, however, neither McMahon nor Murray had been able to enlist the military in their crusade. Despite prodding from both men, the joint chiefs’ poker-faced chairman, Omar Bradley, steadfastly refused to set a military requirement for a specific number of superbombs or to endorse the call for a second lab.28
But pressure was building. On September 28, 1951, the AEC’s director of intelligence informed Dean that the Soviets had tested a second atomic bomb. Although he was initially reassured by the fact that Joe-2 received smaller headlines than the World Series playoff game, Dean’s sense of relief proved short-lived. In late October, the Russians exploded a third bomb; this one, dropped from an airplane, had twice the yield of Fat Man.29
The Soviets’ feats inspired renewed calls for a speedup in the H-bomb program, as well as increased pressure for a second lab. Murray raised both issues that fall with Truman, who remained noncommittal, however.30 Dean was likewise resisting the importunings of his former law partner and McMahon’s zealous staffer. In a letter to Borden, the AEC chairman expressed serious reservations about another “across-the-board weapons research lab.”31
* * *
Visiting Princeton that fall, Teller persuaded Oppenheimer to let him make the case for the second lab in person at the next meeting of the General Advisory Committee. On December 13, 1951, Oppie presided over an unusually tense meeting of the GAC in Washington, with Murray present. Reading from a six-page statement, Teller outlined a surprisingly modest effort. The lab he proposed would employ no more
