(5 of 7)
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).