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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.