Big Science: Chapter 16–Epilogue

The hearing progressed inexorably to the point when Ernest Lawrence would be called to testify.

He considered himself a hardened veteran of security theater; scientists like himself who held security clearances during the war, he observed, were inured to “the kind of irrationality and lack of privacy inherent in personnel security measures.”

Neylan concluded that Hurley was prevaricating—“he was the smart-alec type,” he observed later—and ordered him fired, only to learn subsequently that Latimer had quietly rehired him.

For all its undoubted sincerity, Oppenheimer’s letter displayed a brazen disingenuousness, perhaps its author’s chief character flaw.

Panofsky, who had risen precociously in his two years at Berkeley to the rank of associate professor, detested the very idea of the oath, but signed—“reluctantly,” as he put it later.

It had taken Joseph Stalin’s physicists just four years to reach nuclear parity with the United States—about the time frame predicted by Robert Oppenheimer.

They “even went so far as to say that they fear Russia may be ahead of us in the competition,” scribbled the committee’s hawkish executive director, William Borden, who was on hand to take notes.

Meanwhile, he returned to Washington to meet with Kenneth Nichols, Groves’s former military adjutant and now the head of weapons development at the Pentagon, to urge that the Joint Chiefs of Staff designate the hydrogen bomb as a military requirement, which would help to obtain funding on Capitol Hill.

Plainly skeptical but unwilling to engage in a colloquy with a wheedling Teller, Fermi pleaded that he was too tired from the flight to give him a hearing, much less a commitment.

He arrived in Princeton without a firm idea of the purpose of his trip, for he had been so deeply immured in the Rad Lab echo chamber that he assumed East Coast physicists were just as enthusiastic about the Super as Lawrence, Alvarez, and Teller.

Under the circumstances, scientists’ fealty to military and political orthodoxy trumped their honest scientific judgment.

Alvarez tried desultorily to argue that Americans would find it hard to see the logic of Oppie’s position.

“Ernest loved technical extrapolation, and we had fun drawing such an accelerator.”

In the spring of 1951, the lab staged Project Greenhouse, a test of thermonuclear technology at the South Pacific coral atoll of Eniwetok.

A few weeks before Greenhouse, Bradbury had tried to mollify the willful physicist by creating a semi-autonomous thermonuclear division at Los Alamos, giving Teller authority over 25 scientists.

The AEC chairman could not imagine how a bifurcated weapons program would operate or how the reduction in responsibility for the Super would affect morale on the New Mexico mesa.

His most important question was whether the mercurial and messianic Teller could manage anybody.

Their approaches to physics were divergent: Lawrence was an experimentalist nonpareil, Teller a profoundly intuitive theorist.

Lawrence’s position as doyen of the Rad Lab and Teller’s as the indispensable genius of thermonuclear technology made compromise impossible.

Lawrence, for his part, was inclined to call Teller’s bluff, for his putative partner was already proving entirely too fractious for his taste.

But the AEC’s dream of thermonuclear research blooming via a collegial relationship between Los Alamos and Livermore proved chimerical.

Livermore defended its flop as the not-unexpected product of vigorous innovation, on the theory that one can often learn more from mistakes than from easy successes.

His determination to remove Oppenheimer from the high councils of government went quiescent after his retirement from the AEC in February 1950, when he recognized that Truman’s decision to pursue the Super marked the successful completion of his long campaign for this leap forward in national security.

The articles suited the tenor of the moment established by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s febrile accusations of Communist influence in every corner of government.

Oppenheimer’s dissembling would be exploited by Strauss and Robb to discredit virtually his every word, becoming a linchpin of the campaign to destroy him.

As he explained over the long-distance line, he dreaded that his testimony, combined with the distinctly anti-Oppenheimer mindset of the other Berkeley witnesses and of the Livermore-based Edward Teller, “would seem to reflect a sort of cabal.”

(Instead, he had crisply reproached the board for attacking Oppenheimer “because he expressed strong opinions,” adding, “When a man is pilloried for doing that, this country is in a severe state.”)

A great deal of obloquy fell on Lawrence and his colleagues at the Rad Lab, who had stood united, and virtually alone, against Oppenheimer.

Within a few months, he had rigged up an improved tube, which he showed to Alfred Loomis, who contributed a few minor technical suggestions, and to Alvarez and McMillan, who reacted with unease to Ernest’s enthusiasm for what they considered a most unprepossessing project.

An impeccably groomed and proper San Francisco lawyer with extensive connections on Wall Street and in Washington, Gaither was a habitue of the worlds of finance and of technology.

He tried to maintain his usual breezy mien, but it often cracked, producing outbursts of temper over even minor problems.

They were feted by premiers and emirs and entertained at embassies and consulates as they made their way back west to Palermo, Sicily, where they boarded another tanker for the homeward passage.

In 1954 he visited Geneva to consult on the establishment of an international high-energy physics lab under the aegis of CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research

in time, this facility would host two linear accelerators, three synchrotrons, and the Large Hadron Collider, all of them technological offspring of that original, wax-slathered accelerator Ernest had held in his hand nearly a quarter century earlier.

While Adlai Stevenson assembled PhDs to talk about the risk of elevated cancer rates and “uncontrollable forces that can annihilate us,” Strauss deployed his own cadre of scientists to dismiss these statements as lurid propaganda and depict the threat of radiation damage as minor.

There his words went unbroadcasted and almost unnoticed, until AEC commissioner Willard Libby issued a public riposte that served chiefly to bring Schweitzer’s statement to Americans’ attention despite the blackout.

The meeting ended with Eisenhower tabling Stassen’s plan, ostensibly for the moment.

They exchanged a few anodyne words—“it certainly was not unpleasant,” recalled Oppenheimer, who stayed only briefly and left first.

The passing of American science’s greatest and most influential cohort occurred just as demand burgeoned for new accelerators, and as doubts about their necessity began to be heard even among physicists.

Hordes of scientists today scamper about the landscape of public affairs, eager to grapple with an increasing range of questions, given free reign by politicians dazzled by the brilliant achievements of science, disturbed by the often esoteric nature of science, and bothered by the Soviet challenge in science.