Still bitter about the fate of Vista, Oppenheimer had deliberately avoided becoming too closely identified with the standstill.14 But he had discussed the details with Bush during the train ride down to Princeton for the panel’s first meeting and had later inquired of Bradbury whether a postponement of Mike would seriously interrupt Operation Ivy. In his diary, Dean expressed concern at Oppenheimer’s “undue interest in postponement of that operation.”15
Bush had also discussed the standstill idea with Conant. But the Harvard chemist, with less than a week to serve on the GAC, had evidently had enough of lost causes.16 Rabi, who was about to replace Oppenheimer as chairman of the General Advisory Committee, was similarly cautious.
There was no such ambivalence at the Pentagon, however—where Arneson reported “very strong feelings” against the standstill.17 Lovett even urged the panel to destroy Bush’s memo and all its supporting documents, lest the group become the next target of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
* * *
Even as the standstill idea was being debated in Washington, the question of creating a rival to Los Alamos still hung in the balance. That spring, fate had intervened to remove two of the project’s most vocal supporters from the scene. In March, McMahon had been diagnosed with terminal cancer.18 Although the senator and Borden tried to keep his illness a secret, the disease kept McMahon bedridden during a critical time. In early May, Lawrence was hospitalized with ulcerative colitis, a debilitating disease exacerbated by stress. Once out of the hospital, he was off to Balboa and Yosemite for two weeks of rest, canceling a planned visit to Washington.19
Fearful that the air force on its own was about to establish a second Los Alamos at Chicago, Dean on June 9, 1952, decided to preempt that possibility by asking the regents of the University of California to approve a new laboratory at Livermore.20 But the AEC chairman had defiantly rejected Teller’s plea for a written charter spelling out that Livermore’s first and principal job would be building bombs.21
In Lawrence’s absence, York had continued his delicate balancing act. When describing the new lab to Bradbury, he emphasized diagnostic experiments.22 Two weeks later, however, York told the Rad Lab’s business manager that Livermore’s “primary objective” would be developing thermonuclear weapons.23
Ernest returned to Berkeley long enough to have York brief him and the AEC’s head of military application on the real mission of Livermore. Lawrence was stunned at York’s matter-of-fact description of an ambitious, independent laboratory that would begin designing nuclear weapons from its first day.24 Just a few weeks earlier, an aide had reported to Borden that Lawrence remained reluctant “to get fully into the weapons field” and seemed interested, instead, “in instrumentation, research, and [fusion energy.]”25 Understandably confused about Livermore’s real reason-for-being, Dean ordered a showdown meeting in Berkeley to settle both the second-lab question and the fate of the MTA.
On the morning of July 17, Lawrence confronted the issue of Livermore with Bradbury, York, and Teller in his Rad Lab office. Ernest emphasized that the second lab “was to be additive to the Los Alamos effort and that it was the furtherance of the over-all program that was the objective.”26 When he asked if anyone disagreed, Teller instantly spoke up. His fear, Edward said, was that Livermore would become “nothing but a service organization,” unless the new lab’s charter specifically allowed it not only to design and build nuclear weapons but to test them in Nevada and the Pacific.27
The impasse continued into the evening with a cocktail party at Berkeley’s posh Claremont Hotel, where the group was joined by Dean. At the bar overlooking the tennis courts, Teller—with a “lugubrious face,” York later recalled—announced loudly that he had changed his mind and was not coming to Livermore after all. “Let him go, we’ll be better off without him,” Lawrence told York in disgust.
Following dinner, however, a peacemaker—Admiral Hayward—intervened. Persuading Dean to return to Lawrence’s office, Hayward had drafted a letter that would, he hoped, break the stalemate. An exasperated Dean agreed to sign the letter but insisted upon addressing it to Lawrence, not Teller. The key phrase spoke of “an additional and broad effort” at Livermore.28
While Hayward’s letter fell short of an explicit charter for the lab, the compromise proved acceptable to both Lawrence and Teller.29 The following morning, Ernest, suffering another colitis attack, returned to Balboa, leaving the details of organizing the work at Livermore up to York and Teller. In a telephone call, Lawrence passed the good tidings along to Murray, who rejoiced that “the race was on, not only on an international scale, but within the boundaries of the United States as well—and between the best in the scientific fraternity.”30
Teller’s joy was more modulated. He had already asked for and received a year’s leave of absence from Chicago and had recently informed the Joint Committee that—“either rightly or wrongly”—he was going to Livermore.31 (Fermi and von Neumann had each urged him not to take the job.) But an ironic comment may have reflected a dawning realization on Edward’s part of the price he would have to pay for his victory: “I have quit the appeasers and joined the fascists,” he glumly told a friend of Rabi’s.32
* * *
Almost as an afterthought, Dean and the commission voted to cancel the Mark II shortly after the Claremont meeting. At the Rad Lab, Alvarez greeted the decision with something close to relief.33 Luie—who had once boasted to the Joint Committee that the MTA would produce a half-ton of plutonium annually—had long since come to view the giant machine as an albatross around his neck. The trouble-plagued Mark I had finally achieved a sustained beam in late May. But, tellingly, the occasion was celebrated without Lawrence, who remained bedridden by his illness. Altogether, the AEC had spent some $45 million on the
