Sun in a Bottle - Charles Seife [15]
Teller knew just whom to blame. So did Senator Joseph McCarthy. In April 1954, the senator accused Oppenheimer of deliberately delaying the H-bomb by eighteen months. After years of maneuvering—and after Lewis Strauss, a Teller ally, became the head of the Atomic Energy Commission—Oppenheimer’s enemies finally had enough power to break him. The AEC began formal hearings to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance. The charges against him: various associations with Communists, lying to the FBI about Communist meetings, and strong opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb in 1949. Oppenheimer was being punished, in part, for not jumping on the fusion bandwagon.
The Communist associations would probably have been enough to sink Oppenheimer.13 Nonetheless, Teller and his allies hammered the hapless physicist for dragging his feet about the Super project. Mercilessly. Ernest Lawrence, Luis Alvarez, and Kenneth Pitzer expressed their doubts, in testimony or in affidavits, about Oppenheimer’s resistance to building a fusion superbomb. Teller testified, too, and he seemed to relish twisting the knife. “It is my belief that if at the end of the war some people like Dr. Oppenheimer would have lent moral support, not even their own work—just moral support—to work on the thermonuclear gadget . . . I think we would have had the bomb in 1947.” When asked what it would mean to atomic science if Oppenheimer was to “go fishing for the rest of his life,” Teller said that Oppenheimer’s post-Los Alamos work was simply not helpful to the United States. Scientists sympathetic to Oppenheimer would never forgive Teller for his testimony. Teller likened the reception he got from his fellow physicists to his exile from Europe. He wrote: “In my new land, everything had been unfamiliar except for the community of theoretical physicists. . . . Now, at forty-seven, I was again forced into exile.”
The outcome of the Oppenheimer hearing was almost preordained. The panel stopped short of branding Oppenheimer disloyal, but it revoked his security clearance, stating, among other things, “We believe that, had Dr. Oppenheimer given his enthusiastic support to the [Super] program, a concerted effort would have been initiated at an earlier date.” Furthermore, the panel found his opposition to the hydrogen bomb “disturbing.” Oppenheimer was to blame for the slow progress in building the hydrogen bomb.
The scapegoat had been cast out. Oppenheimer’s nuclear career was over.
The bitterness on both sides of the debate would last for decades, but the hawks had won. The weapons project at Los Alamos (and at Livermore) steamed ahead, buoyed by the urgency of keeping out in front of the Soviets. Los Alamos would quickly turn Ivy Mike into a deployable bomb. By 1954, the Castle Romeo test detonated a practical weapon (eleven megatons strong) designed to provide “emergency capability” to U.S. nuclear forces. And there was, in fact, an emergency brewing.
Dwight D. Eisenhower became president in 1953, and like Truman, he threatened to use nuclear weapons against China. In May 1953, American diplomats made veiled but clear nuclear threats that seem to have helped end the Korean War. Even after that conflict was essentially settled, the nuclear saber rattling against China continued. As the United States was drawn into the China-Taiwan standoff, Eisenhower contemplated the use of nuclear weapons. He considered them similar to any other munition, and in March 1955, at the direction of the president, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced that nuclear bombs were “interchangeable with the conventional weapons” used by U.S. forces. Dulles