Despite the great flurry of excellent experiments and the thermonuclear explosion itself, Teller continued to be dissatisfied and engaged in multiple activities in an effort to put still more of the work under his control. He expressed great unhappiness with the way Los Alamos handled the developments, though Bradbury and other senior members of the laboratory could see no other rational way of doing things. The rift grew so large that Teller put on all the political pressure he could muster to start a rival laboratory. Thanks largely to his influence with Lewis Strauss and the Commission in Washington, he obtained funds and authorization to start and staff another laboratory in Livermore, California, at about the time of the very successful "Mike" test which more than confirmed the possibilities. So Los Alamos went on to build the first H-bomb without him, while some of the first designs emanating from Livermore were quite unsuccessful. Johnny was aware of the feeling between the two laboratories. After the first unsuccessful Livermore try at a thermonuclear explosion in the Pacific proving grounds he laughed and said to me: "There will be dancing in the streets of Los Alamos tonight."
Contrary to those people who were violently against the bomb on political, moral or sociological grounds, I never had any questions about doing purely theoretical work. I did not feel it was immoral to try to calculate physical phenomena. Whether it was worthwhile strategically was an entirely different aspect of the problem — in fact the crux of a historical, political or sociological question of the gravest kind — and had little to do with the physical or technological problem itself. Even the simplest calculation in the purest mathematics can have terrible consequences. Without the invention of the infinitesimal calculus most of our technology would have been impossible. Should we say therefore that calculus is bad?
I felt that one should not initiate projects leading to possibly horrible ends. But once such possibilities exist, is it not better to examine whether or not they are real? An even greater conceit is to assume that if you yourself won't work on it, it can't be done at all. I sincerely felt it was safer to keep these matters in the hands of scientists and people who are accustomed to objective judgments rather than in those of demagogues or jingoists, or even well-meaning but technically uninformed politicians. And when I reflected on the end results, they did not seem so qualitatively different from those possible with existing fission bombs. After the war it was clear that A-bombs of enormous size could be made. The thermonuclear schemes were neither very original nor exceptional. Sooner or later the Russians or others would investigate and build them. The political implications were unclear despite the hullabaloo and exaggerations on both sides. That single bombs were able to destroy the largest cities could render all-out wars less probable than they were with the already existing A-bombs and their horrible destructive power.
After completing this theoretical work I considered my job done and decided to change surroundings for a while. I accepted an invitation to spend a semester at Harvard as a visiting professor. It was the summer of 1951. The Fermis lived in the other half of our duplex. We saw them often. In September, as I was preparing to leave, I was packing and working on correspondence, books and papers and forgot to attend an important evening meeting in Bradbury's office on the planning of future work and experiments. The next morning I learned that there had been a series of heated exchanges between Teller and Bradbury, and that some acrimonious remarks by other scientists present had been directed at Teller's rather wild accusations. As I commented on this to Fermi, he replied with his usual serene imperturbability: "Why should you care, you are going away the day after tomorrow." Some of my friends were greatly impressed by this display of olympian detachment. Rabi in particular admired Enrico's logically calm attitudes.
The Oppenheimer Affair, which grew out of the violent hydrogen-bomb debate-even though the animosity between Strauss and Oppenheimer had personal and perhaps petty origins — did greatly affect the psychological and emotional role of scientists.
Once I asked Johnny whether he thought that Einstein would have actively defended Oppenheimer during the latter's troubles. Johnny replied that he believed not; he thought Einstein had had genuinely mixed feelings about some of Oppenheimer's actions and about the Affair.
It is hard to guess another's motives. They may be the result of long-held convictions, political orientation, or even pet scientific or philosophical ideas. I believe, for example, that perhaps some of the reasons for Oppenheimer's opposition to the development of the H-bomb were not exclusively on moral, philosophical, or humanitarian grounds. I might say cynically that he struck me as someone who, having been instrumental in starting a revolution (and the advent of nuclear energy does merit this appellation), does not contemplate with pleasure still bigger revolutions to come.
Anatole France tells somewhere that one day in a park in Paris he saw an old man sitting on a bench reading a newspaper. Suddenly a group of young students appeared, marching in parade formation and shouting revolutionary slogans. The old man became very agitated, shaking his cane and shouting: "Order! Police! Police! Stop!" France recognized the old man; in the past he had been a famous revolutionary.
Oppenheimer had many unusually strong, interesting qualities; but in some way he was a very sad man. The theoretical discussion which he proposed of the so-called neutron stars is one of his great contributions to theoretical physics, but its verification with the discoveries of pulsar stars, which are fast-rotating neutron stars, came years after his death.
It seems to me this was the tragedy of Oppenheimer. He was more intelligent, receptive, and brilliantly critical than deeply original. Also he was caught in his own web, a web not of politics but of phrasing. Perhaps he exaggerated his role when he saw himself as "Prince of Darkness, the destroyer of Universes." Johnny used to say, "Some people profess guilt to claim credit for the sin."
Many accounts of these events have been written. Some are exaggerated or distorted; others, like the official history of the AEC, are rather objective. But none can be complete yet, and of course the events as seen by the participants appear in different lights. This is my own account of the history of the H-bomb as I lived it and to the extent that I was directly involved in it.
Chapter 12. The Death of Two Pioneers
After the somewhat frantic work on the ''super" first with Everett then with Fermi, and my return from the semester's leave of absence at Harvard renewing contacts with old mathematical friends, my pre-occupations turned to other and more purely scientific problems.
Computers were brand-new; in fact the Los Alamos MANIAC was barely finished. The Princeton von Neumann machine had met with technical and engineering difficulties that had prolonged its perfection. The Los Alamos model had been luckier, for it was in the capable hands of James Richardson, an engineer in the Metropolis group.
As soon as the machines were finished, Fermi, with his great common sense and intuition, recognized immediately their importance for the study of problems in theoretical physics, astrophysics, and classical physics. We discussed this at length and decided to attempt to formulate a problem simple to state, but such that a solution would require a lengthy computation which could not be done with pencil and paper or with the existing mechanical computers. After deliberating about possible problems, we found a typical one requiring long-range prediction and long-time behavior of a dynamical system. It was the consideration of an elastic string with two fixed ends, subject not only to the usual elastic force of strain proportional to strain, but having, in addition, a physically correct small non-linear term. The question was to find out how this non-linearity after very many periods of vibrations would gradually alter the well-known periodic behavior of back and forth oscillation in one mode; how other modes of the string would become more important; and how, we thought, the entire motion would ultimately thermalize, imitating perhaps the behavior of fluids which are initially laminar and become more and more turbulent and convert their macroscopic motion into heat.