The Masked Marvel

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Never did so many trust so few so blindly as the people of the U.S. and the rest of the free world trust the members of the Atomic Energy Commission.

These almost unknown men are responsible for making the weapon that holds in check all-out Communist aggression. They spend billions of public funds, tie up a good part of U.S. scientific and business brains, and operate an industrial empire that may be the pioneer of a new technological era. The AEC controls a land area half again as big as Delaware--and is growing more rapidly than any great U.S. business ever did. Its investment in plant and equipment ($2,174,000,000) makes it bigger than General Motors Corp. At the end of its present expansion program, it will be bigger than U.S. Steel Corp. and General Motors combined. AEC will soon ask for (and probably get) another $6 billion. When this chunk of money is spent on new, strange, secret and dangerous equipment, the AEC will be bigger than the Bell Telephone System, now the largest business organization in the U.S.

What does this monstrous five-year-old do with its flooding billions? Does it spend them wisely and honestly? How efficient are its plants? How good are its newest bombs? How alive are its fabulous secret laboratories, on which the future safety of the U.S. largely depends?

In all other cases, such vitally important questions would be asked and answered continuously: in speeches, reports, official investigations and persistent probing by the press. Not so in the case of the AEC. All definite figures about its performance--from laboratories and uranium mines to finished atom bombs--are beyond the reach of the public. The men who possess the facts are forbidden on pain of death (Atomic Energy Act of 1946) to communicate them. For all the taxpayer knows, the AEC may be dropping his money down a bottomless hole.

There is no way around this situation. The fantastic secrecy is all the more fantastic because it is absolutely necessary. Anyone disposed to argue that point has been answered by Klaus Fuchs and his fellow atomic spies. Information given by them to the Russians probably saved months of research and effort on the part of the Kremlin's scientists.

What Can Be Seen. Only a few parts of the vast, weird underground world of atomic research and production stick up above the surface and can be reported.

In front of the white limestone building at No. 1901 Constitution Avenue, in Washington, stands a semicylindrical mirror. Guards sitting at ease inside the door can stare at its coldly gleaming curve and watch the whole face of the building without leaving cover. Along the building's window ledges run beams of infra-red light, each hitched to an alarm system. The windows themselves are intricately wired, and hidden wires thread through walls and partitions. No visitor is admitted to this stronghold except for a very good reason, and once a visitor is inside, he is watched and escorted continuously, even when he goes to the toilet.

No. 1901 Constitution Avenue is HQ of the AEC, headed by Gordon Dean, a 46-year-old lawyer (see box). No scientist, Dean was teaching law and running his 44-acre fruit ranch in California in 1949 when he was called to serve as a member of the commission under David Lilienthal, its first chairman.

Since then, AEC's activities have mushroomed. Latest expansion is the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina, which will cost $1,250,000,000. The engineers who are building it believe it is the greatest construction project in world history: bigger than the Panama Canal or the Great Wall of China. The contrast between the quiet of 1901 Constitution Avenue and the spectacular activity along the Savannah hits any visitor's eye.

47,000 Workers. On the highway southeast of Augusta, Ga., houses are being towed by truck out of the 315 square miles of rundown farmland that must be depopulated. Near the perimeter of the project, 22 miles across, are woods full of trailers. Already there are more than 21,000 workers on the project, and the labor force is expected to peak at 47,000.

Inside the perimeter is vast, antlike turmoil. Old roads are swallowed up overnight; new roads are unrolled. Gigantic machines gnaw through the hills, leaving wounds of bright red earth. Brooks flow no more; they disappear into pipes. "Here's how they build a road in there," said a numbed South Carolinian. "First come bulldozers tearing up the ground. Then come more machines smoothing it down again. Then comes the tar; then come the rollers. It all moves at a good smart pace. Behind comes a little man walking along, painting a white line."

The temporary "construction shacks" are two strange buildings shaped like asterisks. Around them fields are covered with stacked pipe and piled lumber. Widely dispersed among the gentle hills are enormous, bright-red gashes with concrete-mixing machines standing over them on towers. Around each machine is spread its handiwork: vast footings and foundations. Some are a quarter-mile long; some look massive enough to serve as the roots of mountains.

There is a strong presumption that the reactors at the Savannah River Plant will use heavy water instead of graphite as a "moderator." They are designed for flexibility: "They will make materials for A-bombs (plutonium) and H-bombs (tritium) as well as other useful products." What these "others" may be has not even been hinted.

The great plant at Oak Ridge, Tenn., which separates Uranium 235 from natural uranium, is still going strong as in wartime. In fact, it is going stronger. The process has been improved so much that the plant's executives smile smugly about it. A new building, added to the three old ones, has a roof area as big as 16 football fields. Production, is being expanded still more at a cost of $200 million.

Carbide and Carbon Chemicals Co., which runs the plant for the AEC, says that total employment is now about 4,800. This big drop from the wartime peak of 12,000 represents more automatic machinery, not decreased production. Few of the 4,800 workers are actually inside the production plants themselves. The buildings have four floors, each packed with roaring motors and screaming gas pumps. Some workers pedal on bicycles through the earsplitting loneliness. In the whole enormous plant, which runs continuously, there are only 370 men per shift, including the guards and the laboratory staff.

Radiation-Proof Robots. The Hanford plutonium plant at Richland, Wash, is even lonelier. The great reactors themselves are virtually uninhabited. Nothing about them moves; nothing changes visibly. A good part of the Columbia River flows through the cooling ducts, but its passage makes almost no sound.

Hanford separates plutonium from spent uranium, and this must be done by remote control, to avoid death by radiation. Here is a nightmarish glimpse of a future world of machines. The General Electric Co. people who run the plant have developed remote-control apparatus until it can do almost everything. It can knock down, service and put together whole production units that have grown fiercely radioactive. Sometimes the human operatives watch the job through three feet of special glass, sometimes through periscopes, sometimes by means of stereoscopic television. In the latter case, they can work from miles away; the radiation-resistant robots will obey just the same.

Most secret and romantic of all the AEC's plants is that at Los Alamos, operated by the University of California, 35 miles from Santa Fe, N. Mex. From the air it looks rather impressive, set on the brink of a cliff in an almost uninhabited wilderness; but from the ground it looks like a suburban shopping center that has grown too fast. No one would guess from looking at the faces of its 12,500 inhabitants that in the forbidden "technical area" across a deep gulch, the most fearful weapons in the world are being designed.

The weapons work done at Los Alamos is so secret that even a general description is hard to get. A nuclear explosive cannot be tested on small scale, and since full-scale explosions are costly and dangerous, Los Alamos is forced to figure out on paper the effect of every change of design. Some parts of this job demand long campaigns and elaborate equipment.

Sometimes the mathematics involved becomes fantastically complicated. Then Los Alamos broadcasts a frantic call for help, swamping with its rush-rush problems all the great computing machines in the U.S.

What has this work accomplished? No direct answer is possible, but men in a position to know are deeply impressed. After the tests at Eniwetok Atoll in 1948, they say, it looked as if the bomb-improvers of Los Alamos would find little more to do. The original bombs had been improved so much already that only small gains in efficiency could be expected.

New Possibilities. Then things began to happen. Several methods of greatly improving bomb performance showed up in the theoretical calculations. Both the Los Alamos physicists and their bosses back in Washington got excited. They longed to try out the new designs at once, but tests at Eniwetok cost $20 to $100 million, and required a fleet of ships, 9,000 men and several months of time. Why not a test on land and right around home?

President Truman agreed to tests at Frenchman Flat in Nevada, as a place where there was little danger of damaging U.S. citizens.

The Nevada tests, many of which were not bombs but mere "nuclear experiments," were a great success. Their cheapness and quickness allowed Los Alamos to try many "wild ideas" which would not have been proposed at all while a test cost $20 million. Some wild bombs flopped, but others paid off royally, opening whole new fields of experimentation.

The postwar work of the Los Alamos laboratory has increased the value of the U.S. stockpile of fissionable (atom-explosive) material many times. This can mean several things: 1) that the efficiency of the nuclear explosion has increased, giving more energy from the material; 2) that bombs powerful enough for most purposes can now be made with less material; 3) that the new bombs are much lighter, easier to deliver upon an enemy, with a lower rate of wasted bombs.

It is reported that in a live test, one light bomb was actually dropped by a jet plane at low altitude, with great accuracy. The jet was not damaged; it was well out of reach of the blast before the bomb exploded. There will be more tests in Nevada; eventually the AEC hopes to fire an "open shot" witnessed by the press, the newsreels, even by television, if the necessary special circuits are set up in the desert. But to test its really big bombs, it has decided that it must go back to Eniwetok. The reason: "We don't want to blow up the whole state of Nevada."

Laboratory Spirit. In addition to these externals of AEC performance, reporters trying to determine whether the commission is doing a good job can have limited access to another kind of evidence. Atomic weapons are created by men and organizations of men. In the long run, the weapons must reflect the character and spirit of their makers. If the AEC is getting its share of the best U.S. brains and devotion, the chances are that the bombs it produces are plentiful and good.

Judged in this way, the AEC seems to be doing well. Its work is divided into two main parts: 1) research and development, 2) production. Both of these departments show every appearance of high morale and creative vigor.

In the case of research and development, this was not always true. There was a period after the war when U.S. scientists were almost boycotting AEC laboratories. Part of their hostility was due to the very real hardships of wartime life at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge. Probably more important was a widespread feeling of revulsion. The scientists had worked with fanatical fervor to build an atom bomb for use against the Axis powers. They succeeded beyond their expectations, and many of them were haunted for years by the horror of their success. In the words of their leader, Robert Oppenheimer, wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, "they had known sin." At any rate, many of them did not want to give more years of their lives to developing in peacetime even more frightful weapons.

All this has changed, and largely because the scientists believe that in their hands lies the safety of intellectual freedom, which they consider to be the father of all the other freedoms. Scientists have been shocked profoundly by recent developments in the U.S.S.R., where their Russian colleagues seem to have lost all freedom of thought. When the Soviet government began to tell its own scientists how they must think scientifically, it did wonders for the morale and recruitment of U.S. atomic-bomb laboratories. That the scientists had to wait so long for proof of the Soviet character indicates that many scientists are as ignorant in the field of politics as the average politician is ignorant of nuclear physics.

The scientists still work under some special handicaps, heaviest of which is the fact that they cannot freely publish their results. Publication is meat & drink to a scientist; it is the way he normally communicates with his colleagues, the way he wins professional recognition. With this cut off, he must depend on the recognition of a very limited group and on the approval of his administrative bosses of the AEC, most of whom are not scientists. Laboratory morale is good today, but some of the leading U.S. men of science worry about the future, when the AEC may grow to be a clumsy bureaucracy in which the scientific elan will be stifled.

Saintly Behavior. On the production side, the most impressive evidence in favor of the AEC is the character and attitude of the AEC's contractors. Almost the first thing Chairman Dean tells a questioner is that the AEC itself is a rather small organization. It has some 5,700 employees engaged in policymaking, inspection, etc. Almost everything else, from abstract research to the digging of holes in the ground, is done by the 120,000-odd employees of its contractors.

When possible, the AEC makes a lump-sum contract with the lowest bidder, but often the projects are so new and so uncertain that no sane board of directors will make such a guarantee to deliver results. It follows that many contracts must be "cost plus a fixed fee," in spite of the risk to the taxpayer. Since the contractor does not profit by keeping costs down, he is tempted to permit abuses--from loafing to large-scale inefficiency. In shadowy AEC-land, screened with secrecy and rippling with money, a crooked or careless corporation might find easy pickings.

According to available information, this is not happening now. In the first place, the names of the contractors read like the social register of U.S. industry: General Electric, Du Pont, Union Carbide and Carbon, Monsanto, Westinghouse, Western Electric, etc. Such outfits are intensely jealous of their reputations and go far beyond formal correctness. In spite of the lack of profit motive (Du Pont gets $1 for building the $1,250,000,000 Savannah River Plant), they are working with enthusiasm, diligence and enterprise. They comb through their organizations to find the best men to put on AEC jobs. They are careful about security, quality of work, and costs to the Government.

This saintly behavior of hard-boiled corporations is a subject of amazed debate among AEC men. Some maintain that patriotism is an important factor. Others believe the contractors' enthusiasm comes largely from far-sighted self-interest. Under the AEC's blanket of secrecy, a whole new technology is developing, as important as steel or electricity. The only way that an ambitious corporation can find out what is going on is by ducking under the blanket where the secrets are. There is prestige involved, too, and a company that has a big AEC contract finds it easier to recruit the best technical men.

How long this happy state will continue has some AEC men frankly worried. They feel that the AEC's good relations with its contractors depend on its prestige. They fear that even a whiff of improper political influence will break the spell.

Shadow of "Mr. Atom." Chairman Dean's background, although not his character, is sometimes cited as a danger to AEC's political purity. There is no doubt that his appointment was due to his former law partner, Senator Brien ("Mr. Atom") McMahon of Connecticut. The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, of which McMahon is chairman, was created to watch the AEC from inside its screen of secrecy, thus supplying a substitute for normal public scrutiny. This safeguard was destroyed, say critics, when McMahon's friend Dean became head of the AEC. Now that the two groups are joined, they say, nobody watches anybody.

However, to the naked eye (clouded by AEC secrecy), there is no sign as yet of political infiltration. Many sharp watchers (e.g., a friend of former AEC Chairman Lilienthal, a prominent Washington scientist, many Republican members of the Joint Committee) agree. They think the AEC is running smoothly under Dean.

The most violent criticism of Dean and his colleagues comes from the military. None of the brassier brasshats wants to be quoted, but out of the Pentagon's propaganda orifices comes a continuous stream of bitter unofficial protest. It is not against the AEC's scientists. These the Pentagon loves: they think up atom bombs. It is against the AEC itself, a snooty civilian agency that speaks a language which few generals understand, whose power is enormous, and whose lowliest employees are not afraid to talk back to the Pentagon.

Pentagon Maneuvers. All three armed services are struggling to get as many atomic weapons as possible into their separate arsenals. Even subdivisions of the services are constantly maneuvering to protect their atomic interests. General Curtis LeMay, for instance, head of the Strategic Air Command and master of the heavyweight B-36s, is against light "tactical" bombs. "I wouldn't give ten cents," he told a high AEC man, "for a tactical bomb. Make 'em big and powerful, the bigger the better."

Almost in the same class is the demand of the Army for atomic artillery. It is possible, of course, to make an atomic shell, but such a shell would be large, and an effective gun to fire it would probably weigh 150 tons. Scientists have told Army General Joe Collins that this ponderous, conspicuous weapon would be useless in a modern war of motion. For battlefield use, a moderate-range guided missile with an atomic warhead would be sufficiently accurate and much more mobile than a gun.

General Collins, reportedly, will have none of this. The explanation of his attitude given around the Pentagon is that the Army has no combat airplanes, and it shares control of guided missiles with both the Air Force and the Navy. Artillery is the only atomic "vehicle" that would be under the Army's direct control. The struggle between the AEC and the Pentagon will reach a crisis in 1952. Senator McMahon's Joint Committee will soon send to Congress a monumental report on the position of "uranium-derived weapons" in overall national defense.

Decision in Darkness. When the report is made, says one interested authority, "there will be infighting all over town." Congress will ring with bitter debate.

But the vital facts will not reach the public. Scientists, engineers, economists and military men will give their most important testimony in heavily guarded secrecy. The decision will be made secretly. The public will not know whether it was arrived at after serious consideration of the technical facts, or by means of mere jackknife swapping between various armed services and Government agencies.

Most of the AEC men, including commissioners, are deeply concerned about the long-range effect of such secrecy. They realize that in. the blackness, sprinkled with atom bombs, that surrounds their expanding empire, all sorts of unhealthy and startling growths might sprout unobserved. They know well that they hold in their hands the most dread power in the world.

Sumner Pike, who helped to set up the system and who recently resigned as a commissioner, says that to him the commission's job is "somehow revolting." It is, he says, "one of those things that a dictator says is all right in his own hands, but which could do a lot of harm in the hands of any other man."

Chairman Dean is not as much disturbed, but even he has moments of misgiving. "The big problem," he admits, "is that the public is not in it. We make some very important decisions, and we can't, unfortunately, make them all public. There is a heavy responsibility on anyone operating like that."

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