Free Fifties by David Halberstam Page B

powerful voice within the GAC against proceeding with the Super. He had earlier written Oppenheimer that work would go ahead on the H bomb “over my dead body.” When GAC member Oliver Buckley, the head of Bell Lab, mentioned at one meeting that he did not see any moral difference between the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, Conant strongly disagreed: “There are grades of morality.” The entire discussion, Conant said, “makes me feel I was seeing the same film, and a punk one, for the second time.” As Conant and most of the others saw it, they were already committed to producing a giant fission bomb with a force of 500,000 tons of TNT. How much more power did you need?
    Various witnesses were called before the GAC, including the nation’s top generals. General Omar Bradley testified that there was no longer any recourse but to go ahead. At that point Oppenheimer asked Bradley about the increasing power of the fission bombs, for half-megaton bombs were now in design. Given that kind of force, he asked, what was the military advantage of the Super? “Only psychological,” Bradley answered. Clearly, the issue had moved outside considerations of mere science or even logic. Conant wrote the majority decision, with Oppenheimer, DuBridge, and several others concurring; they called it potentially a weapon of genocide. The minority report, written by Fermi and Rabi, said that the U.S. should not be the first to build the bomb, but that we should reserve the right in case the Soviets proceeded. It suggested we seek some kind of agreement with the Soviets and others and mutually renounce the development of the bomb.
    Teller, of course, was furious with both GAC reports. What the GAC was saying, he noted, was, “as long as you people work veryhard and diligently to make a better bomb you are doing a fine job, but if you succeed in making progress toward another kind of nuclear explosion, you are doing something immoral. To this the scientists at Los Alamos reacted psychologically. They got mad and their attention was turned towards the thermonuclear bomb, not away from it.”
    What the scientists felt no longer mattered. In the opinion of the State Department’s Gordon Arneson, they seemed so spiritually depleted by the consequences of Hiroshima that the politicians were now reluctant to trust their judgment. Acheson later summed up the mood among the creators of the atomic bomb: “Enough evil had been brought into human life, it was argued by men of the highest standing in science, education and government.... If the United States with its vast resources proved that such an explosion was possible, others would be bound to press on to find the way for themselves. If no one knew that a way existed, research would be less stimulated. Those who shared this view were, I believed, not so much moved by the power of its logic (which I had never been able to perceive—neither the maintenance of ignorance, nor the reliance upon perpetual goodwill seemed to me a tenable policy) as an immense distaste for what one of them, the purity of whose motives could not be doubted, described as ‘the whole rotten business.’”
    Acheson understood the politics of the situation. He believed that it was important to keep the decision on the Super and the secret debate out of the newspapers, and he believed that if the issue went to the Congress, the President would be caught, in his words, in a buzz saw. Referring to an idea suggested by the GAC minority—that America could set an example by disarming—he asked, “How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm by example?”
    In November and December of 1949 the pressure on Truman increased. Sensing the power shifting to the conservative side, Lilienthal warned the president to watch out for a blitz on the part of the Congress and others on the Super. “I don’t blitz easily,” Truman answered. Nonetheless there was a need, Truman’s closest aides thought, to make a decision as