Dean summoned Oppenheimer and Volpe to his office three days later. Oppenheimer, steadfastly denying that the Kenilworth Court meeting had ever taken place, reaffirmed that he had never been a member of the Communist Party.98 Following a telephone conversation later that day between Dean and the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, the government’s lawyer agreed to temporarily drop the Kenilworth Court incident from the Weinberg indictment.99 On May 23, 1952, the indictment handed down in Washington’s district court made no mention of Oppenheimer or the incident.
Although he had escaped being dragged into the Weinberg trial, Oppenheimer realized that he might yet be called to testify in the case. For Oppie, this latest sword hanging over his head may have been sufficient reason to take the step that he had been contemplating anyway. On June 12, Oppenheimer informed Dean that he intended to resign from the GAC before the question of his reappointment came before the president.100
Conant and DuBridge were also stepping down. Conant’s ebullient diary entry of June 14, following his last GAC meeting, clearly showed his relief: “Lee DuBridge and I are through as members of the GAC!! 10½ years of almost continuous official conversations with a bad business now threatening to become really bad!!”101
Oppenheimer’s own feelings were more bittersweet. In July, Oppie wrote to Frank that he hoped someday to return to his first love: “Physics is complicated and wondersome, and much too hard for me except as a spectator; it will have to get easy again one of these days, but perhaps not soon.”102
15
DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM
EVEN AFTER FORCING him off the GAC and blacklisting him with the air force, Oppenheimer’s foes discovered that they were still not rid of the physicist. On June 27, 1952, just before trooping over to the White House with Oppie to deliver what the physicist was calling his and Conant’s “swan song” to the president, Dean approved a contract extending Oppenheimer’s top-secret Q clearance. Oppie was to remain a consultant to the commission for another year.1
Oppenheimer also continued to advise the army and the navy on military matters. It was in that capacity that two old friends, Robert Bacher and Lee DuBridge, called upon him to settle a dispute that had arisen in a Pentagon-funded Caltech study known as Project Vista.2 Vista’s blue-ribbon panel of scientists had disagreed over the role that tactical nuclear weapons might play in countering a Soviet invasion of western Europe. The task of writing that portion of the top-secret report fell to Oppenheimer.
Griggs’s fear that Vista would downplay the importance of the Strategic Air Command and the H-bomb was confirmed in preliminary briefings by the Caltech panel.3 (“We have found no great new weapons—and we believe we can get along with those we have,” read the controversial chapter, written by Oppenheimer.)4 Griggs’s anxiety had risen to near-panic in December 1951, when Oppenheimer and DuBridge eluded an air force ban and gave a briefing on Vista to General Dwight Eisenhower, NATO’s supreme commander in Europe.5 In desperation, Finletter ordered all copies of the Vista report returned to his office and destroyed, on the pretext that it contained security violations.6
What was supposed to have been a fence-mending meeting between Griggs and Oppenheimer, subsequently arranged by Rabi, ended instead in mutual recrimination: Oppie accused Griggs of setting Vandenberg and Finletter against him; Griggs charged Oppenheimer with spreading a libelous tale—that Finletter had boasted of using the H-bomb to rule the world. An attempted rapprochement with the air force secretary, over lunch in Finletter’s private dining room in the Pentagon, ended just as badly. Oppie sat stone-faced throughout the meal, virtually ignoring Finletter and his aides—who afterward told the Joint Committee that they thought it a legitimate question “whether [Oppenheimer] was a subversive.”7
* * *
Whereas Vista had further poisoned Oppenheimer’s relations with the air force, Griggs believed that the physicist was behind a far more nefarious plot: a campaign to stop the Mike test.
For Oppie’s foes, the first sign of trouble had been Acheson’s appointment of Oppenheimer to the State Department’s Panel of Consultants on Disarmament in late April 1952.8 Inevitably, Oppie was promptly elected the panel’s chairman. Oppenheimer, in turn, persuaded a reluctant Vannevar Bush, since returned to Washington’s Carnegie Institution, to join the group.
At their inaugural meeting, in mid-May, Bush had spoken vaguely but earnestly—and with “some urgency,” the note taker recorded—of a “test case” that would determine, once and for all, whether the United States and the Russians were serious about reining in the thermonuclear genie.9 In sessions to come, Bush outlined a radical proposal: a joint Soviet-American ban on thermonuclear tests. Similar to the idea that Rabi and Fermi had put forward almost three years earlier, Bush’s proposal likewise required no inspection, since any violation would be quickly detected by the same methods that had ferreted out Joe-1. Without an actual test, Bush argued, neither side could be assured that its H-bomb would work. Bush dubbed his plan a nuclear “standstill.”10
The disarmament panel honed the standstill idea over the summer, in discussions at Princeton, Harvard, and the Cosmos Club. Not least of the arguments in favor of postponing Mike was the fact that Soviet scientists, too, were likely to find valuable data in fallout from the test—including details about the design of the radiation-implosion device. Testing Teller’s bomb, ironically, would give its secret away.11
The standstill idea also received support, initially, from Acheson and the State Department. Gordon Arneson
