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did not speak with one voice on the issue, but airforce chief of staff Hoyt Vandenberg told a Congressional committee in mid-October ‘that it was the military point of view that the super-bomb should be pushed to completion as soon as possible, and that the general staff has so recommended’. Brien McMahon, the Democratic senator from Connecticut whose name adorned the Bill that had created the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) at the end of 1946, and now chair of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, was not given to subtlety. Regarding the Soviets, ‘what he says adds up to one thing,’ wrote an observer. ‘Blow them off the face of the earth, quick, before they do the same to us—and we haven’t much time.’43

The AEC had a General Advisory Committee made up of scientists and appointed by the president. Oppenheimer was its chair. The GAC met over the weekend of 28 October 1949, amidst the rising volume of alarm over the new strategic situation, to discuss what to do about the Super. Gregg Herken has astutely pieced together an account of the committee’s discussion. The generals in attendance thought the United States needed an H-bomb. Lewis Strauss agreed, while Bethe simply summarized the state of work on the Super and Oppenheimer merely listened. Conant spoke emotionally against the new bomb on moral grounds, and he apparently pulled other committee members with him, notably Rabi and Fermi. On Sunday afternoon Oppenheimer brought the meeting to a close with a report, written by himself and John Manley, who was associate director at Los Alamos. It strongly reflected Conant’s views: ‘We believe a super bomb should never be produced. Mankind would be far better off not to have a demonstration of the feasibility of such a weapon, until the present climate of world opinion changes.’ A majority of committee members signed the report. Rabi and Fermi produced instead a one-page letter, in which they called the Super ‘necessarily an evil thing considered in any light’, though their insistence that the United States not go forward with a program was contingent on other nations also exercising forbearance. Oppie signed the more strongly worded majority report and adjourned the meeting.44

Teller was profoundly discouraged by the GAC recommendation; he told Manley that he now expected to ‘be a Russian prisoner of war in the United States within five years’. Oppie, ‘naively’, thought the H-bomb was scrapped, at least for now. But Brien McMahon was furious. Reading the GAC report at an AEC meeting the night after it had been finalized— Halloween 1949—McMahon declared that its conclusion ‘just makes me sick’ and resolved to pressure the President to reject it and move ahead with the hydrogen bomb. Lobbied in one ear by McMahon, Strauss, and other advocates for the Super, and in the other by Lilienthal and a few other members of the AEC, Truman decided, in mid-November, to appoint a special committee (Committee Z of the National Security Council) to resolve the matter. He chose for its membership Louis Johnson, the Secretary of Defense whom he knew to support the Super, Lilienthal, whom he knew to oppose it, and Acheson, now Secretary of State, whose position was unclear to the President, as it was to Acheson himself. The secretary had far more respect for Lilienthal than for Johnson, and a better working relationship with him. He talked to Vannevar Bush and Oppenheimer. ‘I saw my duty’, he would write in his memoirs, ‘as gathering all the wisdom available and communicating it amid considerable competition.’ That is slightly self-serving. In fact, Acheson believed in the existence of evil, and thought it naive to compromise with it—or, in this case, to hope that forbearance in building an H-bomb would encourage similar forbearance by the Soviets. He would not have said publicly, as Louis Johnson did, that ‘we want a military establishment sufficient to deter [an] aggressor and sufficient to kick the hell out of her if she doesn’t stay deterred’. But neither would he have taken issue with such sentiment.45

Acheson may also have sensed that