But Borden also had some good news to report: the Joint Committee had a new, powerful—and secret—ally in its campaign for the second lab.
David Griggs was a Harvard-educated geophysicist who had taught at Caltech and worked for the RAND Corporation. The previous September, Griggs had been appointed the air force’s chief scientist.51 Smart, conservative, and energetic to the point of fanaticism, Griggs combined a bulldoglike tenacity with unorthodox thinking. (In 1952, Griggs proposed overflying the Iron Curtain with an ultralight spy plane powered by radioactive polonium. The idea advanced far in RAND and air force circles until it was pointed out that a crash would make a large area almost permanently uninhabitable, and that one-third of the nation’s reactor capacity would be required to make the plane’s fuel.)52
A quick and early convert to the campaign for a second lab, Griggs volunteered to keep the Joint Committee surreptitiously informed of developments at the Pentagon. Since Griggs’s relationship with the civilian committee was illicit, Borden identified him as “Mr. X” in memos to McMahon.53
Within days of Griggs’s arrival at the Pentagon, Strauss had brought the young scientist and Teller together.54 When Edward agreed to join the air force’s Science Advisory Board, Griggs introduced him to its most senior member, General James “Jimmy” Doolittle, hero of the famed thirty-second raid on Tokyo. After spending only a few hours with Teller during an advisory board meeting in Florida, Doolittle, too, had become an active partisan for the second lab.55
That spring, Doolittle and Griggs arranged for Teller to brief top officials in the Pentagon. Except for members of the Military Liaison Committee, most of those in uniform had thus far remained silent on the question of the second lab. The air force’s civilian secretary, Thomas Finletter, had yet to enter the fray. Defense Secretary Robert Lovett, on the other hand, wrote McMahon in March that he thought taking H-bomb research away from Los Alamos was a “move in the wrong direction.”56
A few days earlier, Teller had given Finletter an hour-long briefing on the new Super. Assisted by RAND physicist Ernie Plesset and a collection of colored charts, Teller spoke of the blast and radiation effects of hypothetical 5-megaton and 25-megaton hydrogen bombs.57 At first silent and seemingly distracted, Finletter grew animated as Teller explained how such weapons could be used to wipe out an entire enemy army group and stop a Soviet invasion of western Europe.58 A more detailed presentation by Teller and Plesset got an even more enthusiastic reception from the Air Council five days later. At Finletter’s suggestion, Teller briefed Lovett and the service secretaries on March 19, 1952.59
The impact of Teller’s whirlwind briefings was prompt and decisive. Lovett and the service chiefs urged that the question of the second lab be brought before the National Security Council as soon as possible.60 Alerted to this sudden change of fortune by a telephone call from Arneson at the State Department, Gordon Dean reacted less with anger than bemusement.61 Dean promised Arneson that he would expose Teller’s next audience “to a few facts of life.”62
Instead, the AEC chairman sat silent and grim-faced in a Pentagon office on April 1 while Teller recounted a brief and one-sided history of the H-bomb project which emphasized delays, missteps, losses due to espionage, and ended with a frank plea for the second lab. After Teller had left the room, Dean urged Acheson and Deputy Defense Secretary William Foster to withhold judgment until they had heard “the other side of the question.”63
Ironically, Finletter and Foster had recently gone to Los Alamos and done just that. But Bradbury’s ill-advised effort to exclude Plesset from the meeting and an unusually laconic briefing on H-bomb progress by Theoretical Division leader Carson Mark had instead made the visitors determined converts to the second lab.64 Warned by Acheson that Teller’s next audience was likely to be the president, Dean yielded. He promised to explore the possibility of a second lab with Lawrence.65
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Thus far, not even the lobbyists for the second lab agreed on its location or its scale. Griggs and the air force favored the University of Chicago’s Midway Laboratory, where the Pentagon already had a classified project under way.66 But Teller was still sensitive to Fermi’s moral qualms about the H-bomb.67 For his part, Libby feared that Berkeley bore the taint of the loyalty oath controversy, which would make recruiting for Livermore difficult. Teller told LeBaron that he worried more about Lawrence than Livermore. “If EOL project is started, things will go in grand style but with little understanding,” LeBaron wrote in his diary following a meeting with Edward.68
After a visit to the Rad Lab in early March, however, Murray had come away persuaded that Livermore was the location and Lawrence the man to lead the effort.69 Only a few weeks earlier, during a meeting at the Bohemian Club, the regents had unanimously approved a five-year extension of the university’s contracts with the AEC. With the war in Korea still raging, the issue had occasioned little debate.70
Murray telephoned Lawrence in early April to report “the first break in the long battle.”71 Ernest hoped that a decision by the AEC to put the new lab at Livermore might also rescue his embattled MTA. He promised Murray that, if needed, he would return to Washington “at a moment’s notice.”72
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Back in Washington by mid-April to give his now well-practiced H-bomb briefing to the State Department and the NSC, Teller stopped off at the AEC building to see Dean. No longer feeling obliged to be conciliatory, Teller told him he had rejected any possibility of “piecemeal” solutions in his discussions with the Joint Committee, where he had insisted upon the “most vigorous sort of competitive and unified second laboratory.”73 Were the committee to now ask the Pentagon brass whether they wanted a second laboratory, Edward boasted, “the answer would be entirely different.”74
The second-lab issue had “suddenly come to a boil,” Borden notified McMahon. The military, he wrote, “bought Teller hook, line and sinker.”75
Emboldened by his debut at the
