· Web viewLecture V In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer Robert Oppenheimer was an extraordinary man, highly intelligent and perceptive about intellectual issues. He did not,

Lecture V

In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Robert Oppenheimer was an extraordinary man, highly intelligent and perceptive about intellectual issues. He did not, however, understand the weaknesses of other people very well and he could appear cold and callous. His remarks could often feel cutting and demeaning. One of the people who took exceptional umbrage to Oppenheimer was the former AEC Commissioner Lewis Strauss. A man without much formal education, Strauss had amassed a considerable fortune but it went along with a very thin skin. Oppenheimer had got under this skin and Strauss resented him. He had left the AEC by 1951 but was offered the Chairmanship in 1953 by President Eisenhower. Oppenheimer was already out of his position in the General Advisory Committee but Strauss accepted the position on the condition that Oppenheimer have no connection whatsoever with the AEC. Strauss had learned that Oppenheimer had been untruthful back in 1943 when he discussed the overtures made to him by Haakon Chevalier. He focused on this and started to believe that Oppenheimer was another Klaus Fuchs. Understanding little or no science, he could not believe that the Soviets had managed to build such weapons without espionage. And who better to spread such information abroad than the man who, he felt, had belittled him publicly. Strauss was careful and plotted for a long time to assuage his suspicions and, very likely, hurt feelings. Despite being removed from most AEC positions, Oppenheimer continued to be called upon for advice and counsel. In February 1953 he had briefed the National Security Council, the highest advisory group to the President, on the conclusions of a State Department panel he had chaired on disarmament. Eisenhower appeared to be sympathetic to Oppenheimer’s long-standing conviction that the nuclear arms race needed to be halted. The President had even said to Strauss that his chief concern was a new approach to the disarming of atomic energy. This was anathema to Strauss. The military and the AEC rejected any advice from Oppenheimer but other agencies, and even the President continued to seek it. The way to destroy his hated enemy was to remove his security clearance. This was called a Q-clearance and removal would eliminate him entirely from giving advice to anyone. He would know nothing about secret important matters.

Joseph McCarthy was preparing to attack Oppenheimer with his committee but Strauss thought the time was not ripe and got J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, and Vice-President Richard Nixon to convince the Senator to back off for the time being. It is difficult today to grasp the atmosphere of the early 50s, a period that many people who did not live through them, look back upon as some Golden Era. It was, of course, an era in the United States of extraordinary fear, even paranoia. The decade ended with a trend toward conformity, the so-called man in the Grey Flannel Suit.

To most physicists today, and as clearly evident from all of the things I have said, Oppenheimer is considered a hero and Teller a villain in the eyes of the physics community. The atmosphere of the early 50s was such that innuendo gave rise to suspicions which in turn gave rise to certainties and then to action. A young man I mentioned before, who had been counsel to the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, William Borden, heartily disliked Oppenheimer and was quite convinced he was a Soviet agent. He had lost both his position and most of his influence but he was also well aware of Strauss’s dislike of the physicist and his suspicions of espionage. Borden was still a staff member of the Joint Committee although no longer chief. He wanted to regain his influence and had convinced another staff member, John Walker, to work with the Princeton physicist and strong advocate of the hydrogen bomb, John Wheeler, to prepare a lengthy chronology of H-bomb progress. It also contained a discussion of how much information Fuchs had gained about the fusion bomb programme. Fuchs, of course, left before the invention of the Teller-Ulam idea which was part of the reason that the Soviets did not yet have it. This Walker document was full of highly classified information but Walker posted it to John Wheeler who promptly lost it. It was never found but the empty envelope in which is had been carried turned up in Wheeler’s office later. When Eisenhower learned of this disaster he was furious and raged at the AEC Commissioners. Both the President and Vice-President suspected espionage and demanded that both Borden and the entire AEC staff be investigated, and that the Joint Committee staff be reorganised so that such a thing could never happen again. Borden, described as the most indiscreet person the FBI had ever met, left the Committee in May 1953.

Before he left Washington, Borden approached Lewis Strauss, knowing that the Head of the AEC also disliked and suspected Oppenheimer. He was not offered a job, as he had hoped. In October, Borden drafted a letter to J. Edgar Hoover, urged on by the execution of the Rosenbergs and the testing of Joe-4, the sloika bomb in August 1953. In the letter Borden stated that, “more probably than not, J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union,” a completely untrue and shocking statement without any foundation.. Borden listed factors which led him to this, his financial contributions to the Communist Party in the 1930s, his brother Frank who had been a Party member at that time, the relationship with Jean Tatlock whose husband had fought and died in Spain, the contradictory evidence concerning Haakon Chevalier, and “his tireless work to retard the United States H-bomb programme.” Hoover was not impressed, had heard these charges before, and considered them distorted. But Borden also sent the letter to the Secretary of Defence, Charles Wilson, former Head of General Motors and famous for the statement that “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” Wilson was shocked and intrigued. He had Eisenhower’s ear of course and the President took this report seriously. He instructed the Attorney General, the chief lawyer of the country, to erect a blank wall between Oppenheimer and all areas of government operations and requested advice on whether action, prosecutorial or otherwise, should be taken. Eisenhower was concerned about politics even more than security. McCarthy was very powerful at the time and the President worried about what might happen if the Senator or his counsel, Roy Cohn, got wind of these charges. It would not take much of a leak from the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy to the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations to cause the President much political grief. Ah, politics!

One important question was how to build such a wall. Hoover had lots of information which he “couldn’t use” because it had been obtained illegally. There was concern about too much publicity and making Oppenheimer, a popular figure with the public, into a martyr. His Q-clearance was to be suspended and this was kept quiet, as Oppenheimer was in England at the time and they seriously thought he might flee behind the Iron Curtain. So Oppenheimer was not notified of the suspension but Teller, on the other hand, certainly was told. Strauss’s solution was to follow AEC security procedures, bring a formal list of charges, and then Oppenheimer could request a security hearing or resign. Strauss hoped he would resign of course. In December 1953 then the AEC counsel got to work. The problem they faced was that they could not cite the H-bomb controversy since dissenting on policy was not a crime. And the other charges had been gone over and cleared as far back as 1947 by the AEC, including Lewis Strauss. The idea advanced was not to question his advice but rather to compare various positions and look for inconsistencies which, it was claimed, would indicate treachery on his part.

The FBI had interviewed Teller in May 1952 and the grievances he held against Oppenheimer had really festered by then. This interview will come to matter a great deal. Amongst the direct lies, or stretches of the truth that he intimated, was that Oppenheimer had opposed the H-bomb since 1945 and, without such opposition, the bomb would have been a reality by 1951 or even sooner. That this was a direct lie is apparent in that Ulam had not yet made his initial discovery. Teller alleged a cascade of devious tactics. Teller also made attacks on Oppenheimer’s psyche, claiming he had great ambitions in physics and was hurt that he was not as great a scientist as he wanted to be. Rather a question of the pot and the kettle perhaps. Teller was a clever man and found ways to imply that Oppenheimer was loyal but managed also to call that loyalty into question. Teller stated that he would do almost anything to separate Oppenheimer from any important secret information. The AEC attorneys had amassed nearly forty separate charges, all about the H-bomb and all based on Teller’s secret FBI testimony. Again, it mattered.

Oppenheimer returned form England to the US and was handed this list of charges by Strauss, who fished for his resignation, but without directly calling for it. Like many cowards, when faced directly with an important situation, the backed off. Oppenheimer was, of course, well aware of the poisonous times and the horrible atmosphere of anti-Communist paranoia in Washington, but he really seemed to think that the issue of his loyalty had been laid to rest years before, given his twelve years of service to the government. He could not have been more wrong. He told Strauss that he could not resign as this would be an admission that he was unfit to serve the US government. The AEC’s response was, “why go through with all of this? Let’s turn it over to McCarthy.” Strauss, however, knew better than to turn Oppenheimer into a martyr. Oppenheimer hired a lawyer, the FBI tapped his phone and listened, illegally of course, to confidential lawyer-client conversations. Strauss told Teller that he was sure that Oppenheimer had brought numerous left-wingers to Los Alamos and therefore put knowledge of atomic weapons directly into the hands of the Soviets. He was clearly beyond the edge of paranoia when it came to this man he truly hated. Not only was Oppenheimer a subversive but he had brought spies into Los Alamos as well.

Oppenheimer’s lawyer, William Lloyd Garrison, was a distinguished figure but, in this case, politically naive. He did not ask the AEC for security clearance which meant he could not review the documents about which his client would be questioned and would even have to leave the room at times. He finally did request clearance just three weeks before the hearing but the AEC did not grant it in time. Strauss picked a board of three men to be the judges in this case. One of them was a Southern Democrat who had supported Eisenhower over Stevenson as he thought Stevenson was not sufficiently militant about Communism. A second never opened his mouth in the entire month of hearings, and the third remarked that “everyone with subversive backgrounds has been Jewish.” Even the AEC lawyers felt these people were biased but Strauss insisted on them.

The physics community, with the obvious exception of Teller of course, rallied strongly to Oppenheimer’s defence. This was now winter 1954 and the US was in turmoil. The new Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, had announced that the military policy of the US was “massive retaliation,” thereby threatening the continued existence of life on the planet. The US began to consider building Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM’s) with nuclear warheads on them. The US Senate was preparing to hold hearings on charges that Senator McCarthy had abused his authority in his investigations of the US Army. This led, eventually, to the famous line from the attorney Joseph Welsh after McCarthy attacked one of Welsh’s associates “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” These hearings, in June 1954, were broadcast live on national television, and led to McCarthy’s eventual censure by the Senate and the end of his career.

The US, in early 1954, initiated the development and testing of a new design of thermonuclear weapons. The Ivy Mike test had demonstrated that the idea could work, but the use of liquid deuterium meant a device too big to be used as a deliverable weapon. This liquid was chosen because it seemed guaranteed to work. Now that the principle was proven, a solid fuel and a reasonable sized weapon was necessary. The solution was available with Lithium, the element used in all of our phone batteries these days. It is a remarkably versatile element and usually comes as Li7 with the three protons that makes it Lithium and four neutrons. This isotope is usually between 94% and 96% in abundance, with the other isotope Li6 with the three protons and three neutrons comprising the remaining or so 6%.

SLIDE 1 Reaction with Li6.

Tritium is a difficult element to create as it does not occur naturally. But with Li6, the copious neutrons from fission will create Tritium by bombardment as shown. Using a solid material means no more refrigeration problems. If it worked, and it does of course, then a smaller bomb, deliverable by airplane, would be possible. The problem was separating out this relatively rare isotope, but the US had extensive experience in isotope separation from the Oak Ridge plants during the war.

The US military prepared an enormous effort at Bikini, having decimated Eniwetok with the Mike test. This new test series, to be called Castle Bravo. They had enriched the lithium to about

40% Li6 and the device weighed about 10,000 kg, a load easily carried on the new B-47 jet bomber.

This explosion was set off on March 1, 1954 and was supposed to be between 5 and 7 megatonnes. But the scientists had missed an important reaction which made the explosion much more powerful.

SLIDE 2 Li7 reaction

The Kinetic Energy produced plus Tritium, which then proceeds to interact further with deuterium, increased the yield.The bomb expected to yield maybe 7 Megatonnes exploded with a force of about 15 Megatonnes instead, the largest single explosion ever created by the United States. This had very serious effects and caused serious international consequences.

It made a crater over 1.5 km wide and over 60 metres deep. That day the sun rose in the West. Within a second the fireball was some 5 km across and was seen over 400 km away by military on Kwajalein. The scientific personnel who fired the shot were 23 km away in a concrete building with walls a metre thick. As they waited for the shock wave to arrive, the entire building began to move so badly that they became seasick. It took a while for them to realise, but what they experienced was a ground shock wave. Vibrations travel faster in solids than they do in air. But these waves are attenuated by the soil and were never felt. This explosion was so great that the ground waves were still strong at 23 km. Within a minute the fireball reached an altitude of 15 km and a stem of width 600 metres. within 10 minutes the cloud was 45 km wide and reached an altitude of 34 km, in the Earth’s troposphere.

SLIDE 3 100 mile wide cloud from Castle Bravo

SLIDE 4 More of the Same

SLIDE 5 Such a bomb over Chicago

SLIDE 6 The bomb over London

Compounding this problem was a sudden shift in wind direction. As at Eniwetok, the wind was blowing northerly which would carry the fallout over empty ocean. Instead, it shifted suddenly to the east, dropping fallout on the various ships and personnel in the area. One of the physicists on a ship 50 km away received a radiation dose equivalent to about 10 X-rays. The various islands in the atoll were evacuated. Even worse from the view of news reports was a Japanese fishing vessel, the Fukuryu Maru, which was working just outside the 130 km wide exclusion zone. The ship reached Japan ten days later with its twenty-three crew members all ill with radiation sickness. To irradiate Japanese, after the experience of World War II, was a disaster. Japan exploded in fury, made even more intense when one of the sailors died. The operation was called the “nightmare of radiological safety test operations.” Everything and everyone in the northern Marshall Islands had become radiologically contaminated. The Bikini test site was abandoned for the remaining tests in the series.

Back in Washington, Lewis Strauss claimed that the testing was never out of control, that the fishing boat had been within the exclusion zone (completely untrue), and that the boat was probably a Russian spy ship. Such lies are not the sole property of the current US President.

There were further tests conducted as well, which also exceeded their design yield for the same reason. 11 Megatonnes, 7 Megatonnes and 13.5 Megatonnes all exploded in the Pacific. One device, the first from Teller’s new California lab, was a version of the Alarm Clock (or sloika) design. It was predicted to yield a Megatonne but was “only” 110 kilotonnes. That did not improve Teller’s mood at all.

Oppenheimer had lost his security clearance and could not know of these test results. He did know of the Bravo shot and called a friend, asking only if he could be given a number. Unwilling to deny a man he had known for so long a time, the reply was Fifteen. It was a number well understood by the lonely physicist.

In April, 1954 McCarthy claimed Communists in government had delayed “our research on the hydrogen bomb” by eighteen months. So there was considerable political pressure as well as personal animus on the part of Strauss and others. The Oppenheimer security hearing began on April 12, 1954.

This was meant to be a hearing and not a trial. It was not a legal proceeding as such but turned into a dreadful witch hunt. The first two days were direct examination with interviews of Oppenheimer by his lawyer, William Garrison and several supporting witnesses. There were numerous physicists, both inside and outside Los Alamos who spoke strongly on Oppenheimer’s behalf. They had previously interceded with the AEC to persuade Strauss not to proceed with this nonsense, but all to no avail.

The AEC had chosen Roger Robb as their lawyer and it was now his turn to cross-examine Oppenheimer. He had read all of the security reports and thought there were so many contradictions in them that his conclusion was that Oppenheimer must be either a Communist or a Russian sympathiser, as he put it.

None of Oppenheimer’s lawyers were allowed to see the FBI reports nor were they, or Oppenheimer, aware that his interviews with the FBI back in 1943 had been secretly recorded. Using these documents Oppenheimer had not seen for over ten years and these secret recordings. Robb was easily able to get contradictions in testimony early in the proceedings. Robb got Oppenheimer to contradict things he had said in 1943, which soon trapped him in a criminal contradiction. He had been interviewed again in 1946 and what he said at the time was false and Oppenheimer knew it was false. If he lied and said the 1946 version was true, his 1943 statement was a criminal offence but that was over 10 years ago and fell under the Statute of Limitations. But the 1946 statement, which he could say was correct but knew was not, was within ten years and thus he could be indicted. He was trapped and he knew it. Robb tore him to shreds right in the hearing room. He turned white as a sheet, wrung his hands, and he broke.

Why did he lie at all? Certainly Haakon Chevalier, who had broached the subject of giving out information back in 1942 was a friend and Oppenheimer hoped to protect him. But many years later, it emerged that his brother Frank, who had been a member of the Communist Party in the 30s as many people were, was involved as well. Frank had already lost his job back in 1947 when news of his 1937-1939 Party membership became known and was unable to find another position for a decade. By 1957, after McCarthy’s disgrace and the lessening of the Red scare, he was able to teach high school physics in Colorado and eventually hired by the University of Colorado. By this time he had developed a serious interest in science education and won a grant form the National Science Foundation which resulted in the now famous Exploratorium science museum in San Francisco, one of the best such museums in the world.

Had the hearing stopped at this point, it would have been an almost serious affair and have been justified. Everything Oppenheimer admitted to was already on the public record and basically know to the security services if not the public. But the series of charges against him, developed mostly by Strauss, concerned his conduct during and after the divisive H-bomb debate and these had to be addressed. The former Chairman of the AEC Gordon Dean testified in his favour along with great minds such as Hans Bethe, I I Rabi, David Lilienthal, Norris Bradbury, Lee DuBridge, Vannever Bush, and even George Kennan. Robb managed to find various holes in all of their testimony, mostly involving people who had, unknowingly, used Klaus Fuchs, a real spy, or Frank Oppenheimer and Philip Morrison, former member of the Communist Party in the 30s when it was not unpopular to do so.

What had started as a hearing was quickly turning into a trial. Oppenheimer was described as a Svengali, able to exert enormous influence over the opinions of others. There was military jealousy also when the Air Force testified against him because of his opposition, on technical grounds, to developing a nuclear powered airplane but not a nuclear powered ship. The fact that no such airplane is possible has been proven by the fact that there are still none in existence while nuclear powered ships are common in militaries throughout the world. But what really changed the entire event was the testimony of Edward Teller.

A complex man, Teller had brooded for a long time over his testimony. He told people at the AEC that Oppenheimer’s “unfrocking” must be done or else - regardless of the outcome of the current hearing- scientists may lose their enthusiasm for the nuclear weapon’s programme.

SLIDE 7 This Teller statement

I mentioned that Teller had been interviewed secretly by the FBI just a few years earlier and had listed all of his venom again Oppenheimer. This had started back at Los Alamos when he was not given the job as Head of the Theory Division during the war, exacerbated when he was denied yet again for the H-bomb development, and had only grown with Oppenheimer’s opinion that nuclear technology should be openly shared and made international, all anathema to the virulent anti-Russian feeling of Teller. Even though Oppenheimer had publicly criticised Communism, when he said said that any society that believed a single ideology could function for the entire world could never possibly work in real life, such a statement was not sufficient for Teller.

SLIDE 8 Oppenheimer’s Reith lecture statement

Teller had told Robb that he wanted to testify in Oppenheimer’s presence. The result of that was that he recited a somewhat tamer version of the more scurrilous remarks he had made to the FBI. He testified that Oppenheimer was loyal to the US but

“In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act - I understand that Dr. Oppenheimer acted - in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more. In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.”

SLIDE 9 This testimony

SLIDE 10, 11 More of the same

He then said, when asked to be more specific, that with regard to intent, Oppenheimer should be granted clearance. But with regard to wisdom and judgment, he should be denied clearance.

Of course, all of this was aggressive, unpleasant, and unnecessary nonsense. Oppenheimer was a consultant and, if you didn’t want to consult him, then you didn’t have to. But Strauss and Teller had had their feelings badly hurt by Oppenheimer and they wanted to destroy him. And they did.

The hearing Board recommended that his clearance be permanently suspended. He appealed to the entire AEC but Strauss, of course, dominated in turning that down. Moreover, Strauss leaked the entire testimony of the hearing to the press, which resulted in Oppenheimer’s felonious admission becoming public. But it also revealed Teller’s testimony. Physicists at both Los Alamos and Livermore were appalled. He was shunned by the physics community, basically for the rest of his life. That this clearly dismayed him is shown by the fact that he wrote to Strauss, trying to recant his testimony. That, not surprisingly, got nowhere and Strauss and Robb refused to let him do so. Nor did he.

Oppenheimer was devastated and it broke his spirit. Running the Institute for Advanced Study was an easy job for him. Being “in on things” gave him a sense of meaning and importance in his life. This was now gone, he was now fifty years old and suddenly looked much older than that. Perhaps he got some satisfaction five years later from the public humiliation of Lewis Strauss who had to undergo two gruelling months of hearings before the US Senate. His appointment as Head of the AEC had expired and Eisenhower wanted to appoint him as his Secretary of Commerce, a Cabinet position. As such he needed Senate confirmation and he was pilloried for his arrogance and rigidity. He too never recovered from this, and so finally, he and Oppenheimer had something truly in common.

Oppenheimer, on the other hand, was lauded throughout the world. He was asked to speak in Europe, South America, Japan, and other places. John Kennedy planned to give him the Enrico Fermi medal, the highest possible award from the AEC, an agency that still denied him a security clearance. Scheduled for 2 December, 1963, the award had to be presented by Lyndon Johnson as Kennedy, of course, had been murdered shortly before. The award consisted of a medal and fifty thousand dollars.

Teller’s made an attempt at reconciliation with Oppenheimer but the wound was too deep and the attempt went nowhere. Oppenheimer retired from the Institute in Princeton in 1966 as he was terribly ill. He died on 18 February, 1967 from throat cancer, almost certainly due to his incessant smoking.

Teller became about as popular with his colleagues as Richard Nixon was in politics after Watergate. A typical comment came from I I Rabi.

SLIDE 12 Rabi’s statement

Many physicists were furious about his testimony but the people at Los Alamos were especially upset because they knew that delays in the US H-bomb development were due, in fact, to Edward Teller and not Robert Oppenheimer. He caused delays by insisting, from the beginning, on a megatonne device.

SLIDE 13 The Mauldin cartoon.

But the only bomb possible before Ulam’s discovery was a multi-kilotonne device, such as his own Alarm Clock or Sakharov’s Sloika, basically the same thing. The Russian considered what they could do with a version of the Trinity bomb and they got half a megatonne, more than twenty times Nagasaki. Joe-4 was a Sloika bomb, at half a megatonne and gave the Soviets a militarily useful bomb of great power. Teller avoided doing this because he had such grandiose ideas. Had he gone along with the Alarm Clock, the US would have had an enormous advantage in 1949 when the Soviets tested Joe-1. A great deal of ugly division in the political and scientific communities could have been avoided.

Throughout the years of the Korean War, Curtis LeMay turned the Strategic Air Command into a weapon that could destroy any nation in a single night. Deterrence was his formal strategy but he prepared other, darker, ideas should deterrence fail. SAC had priority in the defence budget and the number of Soviet targets drove the numbers of bombs to be made. In 1945 the Air Force identified 66 targets but by 1952 the number had become five or six thousand. Cities, nuclear production facilities, airfields, military bases, oil production, electricity power stations, and all sorts of industrial facilities. By 1955, the US was spending more on building bombs than the total investments of General Motors, US and Bethlehem Steel Corporations, Alcoa Aluminium Company, Dupont and Goodyear Rubber all combined, over $9 Billion, over $80 Billion in today’s money. Not just strategic bombs were created but artillery shells, anti-aircraft missiles, submarine depth charges, and missiles of all ranges. 298 bombs in 1950 became 2400 in 1955, 18,600 by 1961 and, during the Cuban missile crisis 27,100. The SAC air fleet became nearly 700 nuclear-carrying bombers and 1000 transport and refuelling planes. LeMay always preferred offence to defence as he was sure some bombers would always get through, as in the film Dr. Strangelove. There were serious discussions about preventive war in the early 1950s and an Air Force committee recommended giving the Soviet Union a two year ultimatum to come to some terms dictated by the US, with an attack if it refused to do so. Eisenhower quickly vetoed this nonsense. By late 1953, the Air Force reported to the President that retaliation - a second strike as opposed to a first - would mean disaster in a nuclear war, with the US willing to accept a catastrophe. The Air Force proposed the deliberate precipitation of a war with the USSR in the very near future and before the Soviets had a large enough thermonuclear capability to be a real threat to the US. Eisenhower’s response was an official policy statement that “the United States and its allies must reject the concept of preventative war or acts intended to provoke war.” Forbidden from a preventive war, the Air Force planned instead for a preemptive war.

SLIDE 14

The CIA estimated it would take the Soviets about a month to launch an attack. SAC would “beat them to the punch” if intelligence indicated they were planning to attack. LeMay laughed at the month since his bombers could deliver about 750 bombs in a few hours. He said that Russia would be a smoking ruin in two hours!

LeMay was a power unto himself. By 1954 he began secret covert operations covertly and extra-legally. Because his bomber crews would need information about Soviet defences, fighter bases, radar frequencies, etc, LeMay wanted overflights of Soviet territory. The US had been sniffing around the borders with its planes since the late 40s but SAC needed more. Already in 1950 a US plane, probably flying over Soviet territory, had been shot down and so Truman ordered overflights banned. But LeMay wanted radar pictures of targets and so he made a secret deal with the British. LeMay and the Joint Chiefs gave the newest jet aircraft they possessed, the B-45, and in return the RAF would fly over target sites in the Soviet Union, photograph them, and share the results with the Americans. Overflights are an official act of war which is why Truman banned them. But they continued in this fashion. The RAF started such flights in 1952 after Churchill became Prime Minister again and he approved them.

The Soviets thought the planes were American and by 1954 most of them were. Flights continued, using a variety of aircraft including the U-2 of Gary Powers. That plane was shot down over the southern Urals, photographing the various installations there, from Mayak to the city of Snezhinsk, which was the second major weapons laboratory after Sarov and corresponded to the US Livermore Labs.

The Soviets had no way of knowing these were just reconnaissance aircraft carrying cameras or they could be bombers carrying nuclear weapons. Had they flown such missions over the US, SAC would have bombed the Soviet Union. But the Soviets had no adequate response and so the intrusions continued. Le May was emboldened by this lack of reaction. His reaction, years later in recalling these overflights, was quoted as saying “Well, we’d have been a hell of a lot better off if we’d got World War III started in those days.”

SLIDE 15

Soviet capability was growing, bombers would always got through, and the time would soon come when SAC could no longer guarantee them victory. Both sides would be mutually deterred, a situation which greatly distressed LeMay. Oppenheimer had realised this already in 1953 when he wrote

“We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilisation and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at risk of its own life.”

SLIDE 16 Oppenheimer quote

To LeMay such a situation was intolerable. It basically made SAC a useless asset. By 1957 he had control of the bombs, which were supposed to be under civilian control. The bombs were not yet fitted with an electronic safety feature called the Permissive Action Link (PAL, see your handout sheet) which did not appear until the 1960s. But even then LeMay had the codes needed to release them. These are the codes contained in the so-called “football” to which now only the US President has access.

In 1957, a civilian committee Eisenhower appointed discussed the situation with LeMay. His response was “I have reconnaissance planes flying over the Soviet Union 24 hours a day. If I see that the Russians are amassing their planes for an attack, I’m going to knock the shit out of them before they take off the ground.” When told this was not US policy, again he replied “I don’t

care, it’s what I’m going to do.” This information was kept quite for over thirty years.

SLIDE 17 LeMay’s statement

The sloika bomb had been tested in 1953. By November 1955, barely two years later, the Soviets tested a two-stage bomb, fuelled by lithium deuteride, and air dropped, making it a deliverable weapon, that was designed for 3 Megatonnes. To reduce fallout, they cut it to 1.3 Megatonnes, but they were clearly catching up. They had discovered the Ulam-Teller configuration apparently by themselves and without any espionage. Again, there are no secrets in science. As with the Americans, the Soviet scientists were shocked by this huge power released.

Nuclear diplomacy became more common. In the 1956 Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of the Suez, Khrushchev threatened Britain and France. Eisenhower then said that any attack on his allies would force a US response and he put SAC on alert In 1958 during the US invasion of Lebanon, SAC was again put on alert. In that year, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles said that the US was prepared to use nuclear weapons against the People’s Republic of China over the contested islands of Quemoy and Matsu, that Taiwan was claiming. Khrushchev countered by saying that an attack on China was an attack on the Soviet Union and would bring a response. The situation in East Germany, where thousands were fleeing to the West, and the increased number of Soviet weapons only increased the pressure. So did the launching of the first satellite, Sputnik in 1957.

The Cuban Missile Crisis

The Cuban revolution of 1959 brought a Communist government within 90 miles of the US. In January 1961, John Kennedy succeeded Eisenhower and put SAC on 15-minute alert. At least twelve of the new huge B-52 bombers were to be airborne at all times. The Soviets countered by staging military exercises with tactical nuclear weapons and then by erecting the Berlin Wall.

By 1961, overflights of Soviet territory were no longer necessary as the US had spy satellites in orbit. They showed that the Soviets had fewer delivery systems than the US had thought. They had 44 ICBMs and 155 heavy bombers. The US had 156 ICBMs, 1300 strategic heavy bombers and 144 Polaris submarine launched missiles. Despite the political nonsense during the 1960 Presidential campaign of a missile gap, the US was well ahead.

Warnings to the Soviets that the US was actually well ahead in nuclear armaments were delivered in 1961. The US installed fifteen Jupiter intermediate range ballistic missiles in Turkey on the southern border of the Soviet Union. These missiles had a range of 2400 km and were armed with nuclear warheads. Such aggressive behaviour was well understood by Khrushchev and must have been worrying. This may be part of the reason that Khrushchev decided to install nuclear missiles in Cuba. Cuba was the only Communist regime in the western hemisphere and the US had sponsored an invasion in April during the Bay of Pigs debacle. Before they had missiles in Cuba, it was doubtful that the Soviets could launch a nuclear attack on US territory. But with missiles 90 miles from Florida that situation was completely changed. Now the Soviets had deliverable nuclear capacity and the US felt desperately threatened.

The Soviets started building military capacity in Cuba early in 1962. By August the CIA was reporting that they might have medium range missiles on the island. Then a U-2 flight on 14 October photographed missile sites on Cuba’s western end. Kennedy ordered a naval blockade of Cuba on 22 October and there following probably the most harrowing week in human history. The two nuclear powers verged on full-scale nuclear war. The world held its breath and those of us old enough to remember most likely remember it well. I was in graduate school at the time and we spent a week of serious revels thinking that was the end of life. We called them “Kiss your arse goodbye,” parties.

The week following that Monday, October 22, was a very harrowing one. The US has five levels of preparedness from DefCon 5 which is business as usual to DefCon 1 which is the end of the world. They moved that night to DefCon 3 during Kennedy’s nationwide speech that Monday night.

Curtis LeMay had been promoted to the Chief of Staff of the US Air Force and the command of SAC had passed to Thomas Power. He was, if possible, even worse than LeMay, called a genuine sadist by his own staff. He was even more keen to start World War III and he knew, he KNEW, that he had the authority to order a nuclear strike if he could not contact the President.

Kennedy had already been advised that any submarine commander, faced with an increasing Soviet threat, could launch an attack, start a nuclear holocaust, and likely end civilisation. On that Monday fifty four SAC bombers, each loaded with as many as four nuclear weapons joined the twelve bombers that were always in the air. Sixty six aircraft, some circling the Mediterranean, some circling North America. some circling in the Arctic. Polaris submarines with nuclear missiles put to sea. SAC put nuclear bombs aboard many of the rest of its aircraft and began dispersing them around the country, many to civilian airfields as well as military. 136 intercontinental missiles, Atlas and Titan as they were called, were armed and readied for launch. Kennedy and Khrushchev exchanged increasingly belligerent messages. Kennedy and his advisers met almost continuously and they considered numerous alternatives. Options went from blockade to air strike on the island to an actual invasion. Kennedy said afterwards that the purpose of all this alert was to deter a Soviet response to whatever military action the US might take in the Caribbean. But that was not the Air Force’s notion. Power said “This action by the nation’s primary war deterrent force gave added meaning to the President’s declaration that the US would react to any nuclear missile launched from Cuba with a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union itself.”

SLIDE 18 Power’s Statement

That was simply untrue. Kennedy was thinking of a regional conflict, The Air Force was thinking of a global war. It was predicted then that such a war would result in 100 Million American casualties and more than 100 Million Soviet ones. And this number is conservative. Unbelievable numbers bandied about.

On Wednesday October 24 the US went to DefCon 2, the first, and only, time the situation has ever become that critical. SAC had 2,952 nuclear bombs on alert, armed and ready and the total destructive force exceeded seven thousand Megatonnes. The Soviets had several thousand themselves. In 1984, the World Health Organisation calculated that a nuclear exchange of some 10,000 Megatonnes, the amount visualised in 1962, would result in an estimated 1.15 Billion dead and 1.1 Billion injured. That was 2.25 Billion casualties. In 1962, the population of the entire world was 3.1 Billion so we are talking about death and destruction for 2/3 of the entire world.

So many terrifying things happened,some of which were known at the time and some only revealed more than forty years later, that it is quite amazing that we survived. SAC had arranged the test of an Atlas missile from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Given the nature of the crisis, it would have been sensible, to say the least, to postpone such a dangerous thing as a missile launch. SAC did nothing of the sort but deliberately, provocatively, fired the missile at the scheduled time. At the height of the crisis, at 4 AM on the 26th of October, they fired the missile which had originally been programmed with Soviet targets. The Soviets had no way of knowing that the programme had been changed to fire it over the Pacific. It was a very serious and unfortunate thing to do.

There were fighter planes armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles that were scrambled in the middle of the night on 25 October. They did not know that SAC bombers were overhead and, had they taken off, could have shot down their own airplanes. The alert was due to a guard hearing someone breaking into the airfield through an exterior fence. This saboteur turned out to be a bear.

There were two truly dangerous, horrible events which brought the world to the edge of such a catastrophe. The first was LeMay’s belief that Kennedy was a coward, and he kept urging the President to take more forceful action; bomb Cuba, take out the missile sites, and get the Communists out of Cuba forever. He said, years later, that the Soviet Union could have been

obliterated with normal expectable SAC losses on our side.

On October 27, 1962, the USS Beale had tracked and was dropping signalling depth charges (the size of hand grenades) on a Soviet submarine. Unknown to the US, it was armed with a 15-kiloton nuclear torpedo. The submarine commander thought these were meant to sink his ship, but they were actually far too small to do so. Running out of air, the Soviet submarine was surrounded by American warships and desperately needed to surface. An argument broke out among three officers on the B-59 submarine, all of whom had to agree on any military action, These three were the submarine captain, the chief political officer and the Deputy commander Captain 2nd rank Vasili Arkhipov. The captain became furious and ordered that the nuclear torpedo on board be made combat ready. Arkhipov convinced the captain and the political officer that these depth charges were small, were dropped on both sides of the submarine when they knew exactly where it was, and therefore they were meant only to force the sub to the surface. He was both right and courageous and they surfaced rather than sinking several US ships with a nuclear torpedo. In 2002, Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, said, "A guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.”

One result of this crisis was the establishment of a hot line communications system between the Kremlin and the White House,and such a horrific situation has never recurred. A similar hotline with North Korea might cool heads a bit.

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