The Plesset-Hitch-Brodie briefing on the “Implications of Large-Yield Nuclear Weapons” was a hit on the Washington national-security circuit. As Plesset had predicted, nearly everyone with a “need to know” wanted to hear it—members of the Air Staff, Secretary of the Air Force Finletter, Chief of Staff Vandenberg. It was an extremely secret and sensitive matter. In March 1952, after the briefing had been delivered a few times, Brodie discreetly wrote to Air Force General Roscoe Charles Wilson, who knew about the project: “Ernie Plesset and I have been on the road with a show advertising the merits of Supersuds Soap. There has been a large demand for both our act and our product among those who need the latter for polishing considerable brass fittings.”
That month, without the presence of Hitch or Brodie, Ernie Plesset briefed Secretary of Defense Robert Lovett and, after that, Secretary of State Dean Acheson and AEC Commissioner Gordon Dean. Plesset gave them the entire briefing, and then told them something that made the H-bomb more attractive stilclass="underline" that the weapon did not require tritium, the heavy hydrogen isotope, H3, which was so difficult and expensive, at the time, to squeeze out and which most people with some knowledge of the H-bomb thought was absolutely critical to its workings. (Plesset had not told this to Hitch or Brodie: their security clearances did not entail access to information so sensitive as that.)
Acheson had previously opposed the H-bomb, but now—after realizing the magnitude of it and hearing that it would work and be relatively cheap to manufacture—changed his mind. Later that month, Larry Henderson, RAND’s vice-president in Washington, who had sat in on several of the briefings and by now knew it very well, delivered the briefing to President Harry Truman.
Few who heard the briefing took to heart Bernard Brodie’s deepest point—that strategic bombing no longer had any purpose. However, many were quite taken with his idea that the thermonuclear weapon could be invaluable in stopping the Red Army on the battlefield. The portions by Plesset and Hitch were seen as nothing less than stunning: the calculations revealing the immense blast damage, the fireball that could burn up an entire city, the intense heat, the incredibly massive damage that could be done to a modern industrial economy by just a few dozen bombs in a few short seconds.
The briefings constituted a major coup for the fledgling RAND Corporation. They helped muster a great deal of support for a go-ahead decision on the H-bomb, and also helped to overcome a major obstacle. The obstacle, curiously, was Los Alamos. The scientists at the weapons lab were unenthusiastic about the H-bomb. They held Robert Oppenheimer in almost godlike awe, and Oppenheimer, as head of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, had recommended halting the hydrogen-bomb project, believing that the H-bomb would be far more destructive than any military considerations might require and that it might prompt the Soviets to build one, too.
In battle with Oppenheimer was Edward Teller, pushing the case for the H-bomb as if his life depended on it. Teller was a Hungarian refugee, an almost fanatical anti-Communist with particular loathing for the Soviet Union. He was an ingenious man, impatient, furious, driven, constantly seeking the bigger-than-life problems, the ultimate mind-bending puzzle. In the early 1930s, when Teller was in his twenties, he and fellow physicist and friend Otto Frisch spent a weekend in the country with physicist Niels Bohr. On the train ride back, Teller—not having worked for two days—grew extremely restless. He kept pestering Frisch: “Have you got a problem for me to solve?” Finally, Frisch gave him a problem: put eight queens on a chessboard in such a way that none could take another. Teller thought for twenty minutes, then called out the squares on which the queens should be placed. “Do you have another problem for me?” he asked Frisch. Then another, and another.
Teller was almost obsessively attracted to the grand problem of fusion, the process that would make a bomb of theoretically limitless size implode. Teller had worked on the Manhattan Project. By 1944, the physics of the A-bomb had essentially been solved; the rest was an engineering problem. That held no fascination for Teller. At his own initiative, against the wishes of his colleagues, Teller started a project experimenting with fusion, many months before even the fission bomb had proved successful.
After the war, Teller continued to lobby hard for fusion, making important connections within the Air Force and key congressional committees. Teller was still at Los Alamos, but finally quit, disturbed by the lab’s slow progress on the H-bomb. Teller decided to launch a second weapons lab, one that could competitively force Los Alamos into the H-bomb business or, failing that, develop the H-bomb all on its own.
Ernie Plesset was an ally of Teller’s in this endeavor, as were many in the RAND physics division. A split was rupturing the entire nation’s scientific community—big bomb versus small bomb, Teller versus Oppenheimer. The RAND physicists, respectful as they were of Oppenheimer, sided with Teller. The rupture came to a climax in 1953, when Oppenheimer was declared a “security risk,” and had his clearances stripped. This scandalous blackballing was set in motion initially by Air Force reaction to Oppenheimer’s stance against the H-bomb and his opposition to bombing Soviet cities, in short his opposition to the mission of the U.S. Air Force.
When Oppenheimer demanded hearings the following year and the Atomic Energy Commission obliged, two of the main witnesses testifying against him were Edward Teller and the former director of the RAND physics division, David Griggs. It was Griggs who, as Air Force chief scientist in 1951–52, had first found out about what Oppenheimer’s Project Vista was up to (“bring the battle back to the battlefield”), a discovery that—as Griggs testified at Oppenheimer’s hearings—prompted him to entertain “serious questions as to the loyalty of Dr. Oppenheimer.”
Ernie Plesset, Charlie Hitch and Bernard Brodie were horrified by the implications of this new weapon that they were the first to analyze systematically. Yet their study and their briefings helped build and solidify political support for the approval of the H-bomb and of Teller’s proposal to build a special laboratory to manufacture it. If, as Robert Oppenheimer had remarked, “the physicists have known sin,” the social scientists now became active collaborators.
In September 1952, the new lab was established in Livermore, thirty-three miles southeast of Berkeley, under the auspices of the University of California. On November 1, the first hydrogen bomb—produced at Los Alamos—was exploded, as part of codeword Operation Ivy, off the Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific. They called the bomb Mike. It exploded with the power of twelve megatons, causing the tiny island of Elugelab, the site of the blast, to vanish from the face of the earth.
Teller “watched” the explosion on a seismograph machine at Berkeley. In a fit of joy, he wired a three-word telegram to Norris Bradbury, director of Los Alamos: “It’s a boy.”
6
THE VULNERABILITY STUDY
FOR BERNARD BRODIE, as well as many others who examined its effects and implications, the hydrogen bomb made nuclear war between the superpowers a most unlikely event. If in 1946 Brodie had concluded that the atomic bomb would deter aggression so long as the United States maintained an ability to “retaliate in kind,” then the H-bomb, compressing as much as 1,000 times the explosive power of the Nagasaki bomb into a single weapon, would deter nuclear aggression to a still greater degree.