A Matter of Energy

(See Cover)

The radioactive air mass from Siberia, floating westward over the Pacific Ocean one day last month, carried an international thunderclap. To the high-patrolling U.S. bombers, which scooped up samples of its fine dust, the radioactivity was obvious evidence of some kind of Russian atomic blast. To the scientists who analyzed the samplings, it was clear proof that the Russians had exploded a thermonuclear superbomb, a remarkably exact duplicate of the U.S.'s own. To the political leaders of the U.S., the air mass was one more ominous sign that the time was close when the Russians might have enough atomic strength to destroy the U.S. power of resistance or retaliation.

To a quiet, courtly Virginian of deep religious faith and independent character, the cloud was a vindication of a rather lonely fight--a vindication he was the last to want. When he heard the news about the Russian explosion of a "thermonuclear device," Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, 57, new chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, informed the other four AECommissioners, and then started working day & night to speed the U.S.'s own thermonuclear bomb production program. Not much was said, but AEC was keenly aware of two fateful facts of U.S. history: 1) had it not been for Lewis Strauss's persistence in 1947, the U.S. might now have no means of detecting the Russian atomic explosion; and 2) had it not been for Strauss's personal conviction about Russian intentions, back in late 1949, the U.S. might have had no thermonuclear superbomb of its own. Conceivably, the new Russian bomb could have been hurled on the world as an unchallengeable ultimatum, could by this week have changed the political balance of power around the world.

Sensitive Dissenter. The age of sophistication raises an eyebrow at any such Hairbreadth Harry interpretation of history. But the U.S.'s awakening to the twin perils of Communist intentions and Communist scientific capabilities has been a hairbreadth affair. Like his late great friend, James Forrestal, Lewis Strauss (rhymes with saws) was one of a little band of men in Government who caught the threat of Communism when others heard only what they wanted to hear, who was motivated by a single-minded patriotism when patriotism was a drug on the one-world market. For years, Strauss was virtually unknown, a sensitive dissenter, pained by each dissent and drowned out by a noisy majority.

Harry Truman nominated Strauss to the first Atomic Energy Commission in 1946. From the first meeting, there were signs of the ideological struggle to come. Strauss's fellow commissioners were an Iowa editor, an atomic physicist, a former Securities & Exchange commissioner. The chairman was David Eli Lilienthal, known for his good and peaceful works at the Tennessee Valley Authority. The commission met in a time of hope and confusion--hope that Russia would agree to international control of atomic energy, confusion over moral questions raised by the bomb. Many of the scientists who had created the A-bomb were filled with paralyzing ethical doubts. They had wrested the bomb from the military and deposited it (under the McMahon Act) in the hands of the civilian AEC. Strauss stepped into this general atmosphere of baseless hope and emotional hand-wringing with a sense of purpose and humility: a devout Jew, he suggested that the first meeting begin with a silent prayer. Lilienthal agreed. But after that, Strauss and Lilienthal found themselves at the poles of arguments basic to U.S. security.

David Lilienthal had come into public life as a protege of Wisconsin's Governor Phil La Follette. Franklin Roosevelt chose him to run TVA, and he fought and won most of TVA's bitter ideological battles. To the infant atomic energy program, this liberal background was invaluable because the atomic scientists trusted Lilienthal, and he was able to get them to stay on in the laboratory instead of following their urge to return to the campus. But Lilienthal was an idealist who rebelled inwardly at the job of making bombs, who traveled the land to deliver esoteric speeches lamenting secrecy, urging the public to be more curious about the atomic program.

"Take Off Your Coat." Lewis Strauss came to AEC along a quite different path. After graduating in 1913 from John Marshall High School in Richmond, he took to the road as a shoe drummer for his father's wholesale firm. By day he displayed his 14 trays of shoes, by night he read Ovid and Horace, studied law and physics.

One day in 1917, Strauss, at 21, left his job in the shoe firm and rode the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad to Washington. He hiked over to the Willard Hotel, where he buttonholed Herbert Hoover and asked for a job on Hoover's Belgian Relief Commission. "When can you go to work?" asked Hoover. "Right away," said Strauss. "Take off your coat," said Hoover.

By 1919, Hoover was director general of the Allied Supreme Economic Council, and Lewis Strauss was his personal secretary. The job whirled the Richmond shoe drummer into the world of Wilsonian diplomacy and European intrigue. It also brought him two contacts of lifetime importance: he 1) struck up a friendship with Robert Alphonso Taft, who was serving as assistant counsel for Hoover; 2) caught the eye of Hoover's visitor, Mortimer Schiff, millionaire member of the Wall Street investment banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb & Co.

In September 1919, at age 23, Strauss went to work for Kuhn, Loeb. There, between wars, he piloted the financing of dozens of major industrial projects, e.g., Great Lakes Steel, Kodachrome film, Studebaker Corp., married Alice Hanauer, the daughter of a Kuhn, Loeb partner, and wound up occupying the office of old Otto Kahn himself.

Lewis Strauss was greying and considerably thinner in thatch when he headed back to Washington at the outbreak of World War II. A reserve lieutenant commander, he first took a berth in the Navy's Bureau of Ordnance. But both his business-world connections and his abilities were above his rank and billet. Fellow Wall Streeter Jim Forrestal installed Strauss on his staff as a special assistant.

Strauss irked regular Navy brass by his quiet wit, his lighthearted breaches of standard operating procedure, and his continual defense of the Navy reserves. But he came out of the war a well-decorated rear admiral (D.S.M., Legion of Merit with Gold Star and Oakleaf Cluster). His chairborne specialties: contract termination, the Navy's rejuvenated inspection system, the new Office of Naval Research, and the important new Interdepartmental Committee on Atomic Energy.

A Question of Observation. Early in his first term on Truman's Atomic Energy Commission, Strauss was shocked to discover that the U.S. had set up no system of detecting Russian atomic explosions. Detection involved no insoluble scientific problems; it was simply a question of manning observation posts around the world. Strauss argued his point before a meeting of AEC, but no action was taken on the ground that a detection system had not been budgeted for. Strauss turned to his friends in the Pentagon. They agreed to foot the bill if AEC would provide the technical apparatus and instruction. The detection system (consisting of a secret combination of methods including high-altitude patrols and seismographic checks) was rushed into operation by the fall of 1947, got a successful test run during the 1948 U.S. bomb tests at Eniwetok.

In most of his major 4-1 battles, Strauss had outside allies. Defense Secretary Forrestal was generally on his side. So were powerful members of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy; in fact, Strauss was frequently blamed for contributing to a succession of Joint Committee investigations of Lilienthal. Within the AEC staff, Strauss had one important friend who shared his fear that the U.S. was not enforcing atomic secrecy strictly enough. This friend was AEC's director of security, Rear Admiral John Gingrich.

Erasure by Telephone. One day in 1948, Navyman Gingrich came to Strauss in high excitement. One of AEC's top-ranking physicists, Dr. Cyril Smith, was in England for an atomic conference with British scientists. Gingrich had just come upon a copy of a letter from an AEC staffman authorizing Dr. Smith to discuss with the British "the basic metallurgy of plutonium." To Admiral Gingrich, and to Strauss, this meant that the U.S. was about to reveal a vital detail of the explosive material in the latest type of atomic bomb--a clear violation of the McMahon Act. Lilienthal and two other commissioners were out of town. Acting Chairman Sumner Pike refused to get excited. So Strauss rounded up Michigan's Senator Arthur Vandenberg and Iowa's Bourke Hickenlooper, persuaded them to go to Forrestal. Forrestal. for his part, checked with his scientific consultant, .Dr. Vannevar Bush, then telephoned Pike that the Defense Department "regarded the conveyance of this information as extremely serious and to be halted if humanly possible."

Pike caught Dr. Smith by transatlantic telephone before the conference had begun, and ordered him to erase the item from the agenda. Later proof of the laxity of British security gave Strauss ample justification for his fight. Nonetheless Lilienthal partisans were furious and still pooh-poohed the alarm.

On with the Super. Washington got its first atomic jolt in early September 1949, after the detection apparatus picked up indisputable evidence that the Russians had set off their first atomic explosion (now dubbed "Joe I"). The scientists had been warning all along that the U.S. monopoly was a highly perishable item, but this proved that it was even more perishable than they had thought. The evidence showed that the Russian explosion was not just an evolutionary "model T" bomb like Alamogordo. It was a plutonium bomb, demonstrating that the Russians must already have built a large atomic plant rivaling some of those in the U.S.

To Lewis Strauss, Joe I meant just one thing: the U.S. must get to work, on a "crash" basis, on building the "super." The super's vast explosive potentialities were based not on splitting atoms (as with the fission, or A-bomb), but in fusing atoms of one element to form another (e.g., hydrogen into helium) through in tense heat. AEC Physicist Edward Teller figured out in 1945 that a superbomb was theoretically possible. In 1947 he came within one step of working out the theoretical mechanics (at a seminar in Los Alamos attended by Dr. Klaus Fuchs, who was at the time passing information to the Russians). But there the superbomb had rested because nobody (in the U.S.) could mobilize the intellectual and moral energy necessary to make the decision to go ahead with it.

Business as Usual. On Oct. 5, Strauss sent a memo to Chairman Lilienthal recommending all-out effort on the superbomb. The Atomic Energy Act had set up a General Advisory Committee of scientists to advise the President and AEC on scientific matters. Strauss urged that the GAC be called into special session to advise the commission how to proceed. On Oct. 29, the GAC met in a regularly scheduled session. After one day's deliberation, it reported its recommendation: the U.S. should not try to build a thermonuclear bomb.

GAC Chairman J. Robert Oppenheimer, as spokesman, advanced two principal reasons: 1) a thermonuclear bomb would divert personnel and raw material from the A-bomb program, and hence the U.S. was giving up a known, certain thing to try an uncertainty; and 2) the U.S. should try again to negotiate a disarmament program with the Russians. The report's key passage said, approximately: Not one of us thinks the thermonuclear bomb should be made. The President should tell the people that the bomb is fundamentally and ethically wrong.

This last was not a technical or scientific argument. It was evidence that 1947's paralyzing combination of vague hope and moral confusion persisted into 1949.

Weapon's Advocate. Strauss stood alone, facing a 4-1 vote in the AEC, and an 8-0 decision from the scientists. On Nov. 9, Commissioner (later Chairman) Gordon Dean came over to Strauss's side, and, in a letter to the President, went on record as favoring the crash program. But Commissioners Lilienthal, Pike and Henry D. Smyth (the Smyth Report) wrote Truman advising against the bomb. Strauss found himself all but alone in advocating the greatest weapon of mass destruction that man could conceive. He was deeply distressed by doubts.

Just before Christmas 1949, he dropped from sight in Washington. Confiding his destination only to his family and secretary, he flew to Southern California to be alone in his mother-in-law's cottage at the Beverly Hills Hotel. "If I am wrong about this," he told himself, "I am wrong about everything." On his fifth day, the telephone rang in his cottage. On the line was Connecticut's Senator Brien McMahon, chairman of the Joint Committee, who had tracked him down. "Where are you?" asked Strauss. "I'm calling from the hotel lobby," said McMahon, "and I want to see you and tell you that you are right."

Back in Washington, Strauss, McMahon and Dean found allies. Defense Secretary Louis Johnson sent Truman a paper backing the superbomb as both technically possible and militarily vital. Secretary of State Dean Acheson sent over a memo stating that previous atomic negotiation with the Russians had proved futile and a waste of time. Lilienthal made one last argument in high councils; he had, he said, a "visceral feeling that this is wrong." On Jan. 31, 1950, Harry Truman announced that he had ordered work begun on the superbomb. Lilienthal resigned, effective Feb. 15. Two months later, resisting pleas to stay on, Strauss resigned (and went back to Manhattan to be financial adviser for the Rockefellers).

Time Out for Reluctance. Five months were wasted between the first Russian explosion and Truman's order to build the superbomb. Then more valuable time was needlessly lost; not until Chairman Gordon Dean succeeded Lilienthal's successor and disciple, Acting Chairman Sumner Pike, in July 1950 did the job really get under way. The main job of finding scientific answers was turned over to Physicist Teller, a disarrayed genius, who came up in short order with some brilliant solutions to the bomb problems.*

The first preliminary experiments took place in the spring of 1951 at Eniwetok; the first superbomb (no longer called the H-bomb by scientists) was touched off with awesome results (TIME, Nov. 17) last fall--almost three years after Harry Truman's go-ahead signal.

Was this a speedy accomplishment? No layman can possibly answer the question. But the impressive fact is this: the U.S. Government, divided and troubled by misgivings, took seven years and three months between the first A-bomb at Alamogordo and the superbomb explosion. Troubled by no such internal conflicts and helped by espionage, the Soviet Union did the job in just four years (see diagram).

Wasting Lead. When President Eisenhower installed Lewis Strauss as AEC chairman last July, Strauss was reluctant to take up residence once again behind the guards and electronic safety devices in the Atomic Energy Commission's headquarters at 1901 Constitution Avenue. He knew well that the free world's military defense against Communism depends heavily on the U.S. atomic lead to offset the Russians' overwhelming strength in ready ground forces. He had helped to hold that lead by his long minority battle, but the U.S., still vaguely hopeful and confused, had not used the extra time to clarify its policy or to harness the bomb to a political program for getting and keeping a peace. Now, it is only a matter of years (most experts guess three) before the Soviet Union will have a stockpile of atomic and superbombs large enough to cripple the U.S. After that point, the U.S. lead in quantities of bombs will mean much less than it does now.

More conscious of the situation than perhaps any other U.S. citizen, Lewis Strauss once again feels that he is in the old minority position, this time on a broader battlefield. In neither Washington nor the tight-packed industrial targets across the land does he detect signs of concern, signs that the U.S. is energetically using its dwindling atomic advantage to head off the apparently inevitable.

The real solution, if any is to be found, will lie largely outside Strauss's province. One kind of proposal would counter the Russian atomic challenge by: 1) strengthening the U.S. strategic air arm so that the threat of certain and swift retaliation might postpone Russia's Dday; 2) building a deep radar and interceptor defense network between the U.S. and the pole; or 3) dispersing U.S. industrial targets so the Russians would need a larger stockpile to insure a crippling attack. But even those plans (and of the three, only the retaliatory air force stands much scrutiny) would only push the deadline of 1956 into 1957 or 1958. The time would still come when two completely atom-armed nations would face each other across the pole, with enormous advantage to the one that strikes first.

Conceivably, the atomic bomb might become a weapon that both sides would fear to use even if they went to war with other weapons. It is possible that limited wars such as Korea and Indo-China will be fought without atomic bombs. The balance of non-atomic forces, unimportant as they might become in total war, will still affect political calculations, and the U.S. must be prepared to fight non-atomic as well as atomic wars.

Does the armed free world just sit and wait for the clock to strike in 1956 or 1957 or 1958? It can, but it doesn't have to. Outside the Iron Curtain there is immense room for improvement--in unity, economic progress, political order--which could alter the power balance as effectively as superbombs. Inside the Iron Curtain there is unrest and division which can be increased. In both these fields, opportunity for U.S. action is greater, and the risk less, today than it will be after the clock reaches the 1956 deadline.

It is even possible to imagine the mobilization of enough anti-Communist strength to get--and keep--an agreement against international crime, atomic or otherwise. Back of such a mobilization would lie the free world's present armed strength, a strength in which Lewis Strauss's activities still play a critical role.

* And demonstrated other talents in a trans atlantic rhyme debate over the atomic bomb with the New Statesman and Nation's Sagittarius. Sagittarius, addressing the U.S., wrote: . . . Your thirst for righting wrongs we comprehend, We know the bomb's despatched but to preserve us, But, just between ourselves, as friend to It makes us rather nervous.

Frankly, we are not quite So anxious--seated on the launching site --As you, to see the atom dropped for Right . . .

Replied Physicist Teller, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: . . The atom now is big, the world is small.

Unfortunately, we have conquered space.

If war does come, then war will come to all To every distant place . .

You rhyme the atoms to amuse and charm us--Your counsel should inspire, and not disarm us.

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