It is more difficult to write about recent events; the perspective is poorer, the separation of the characteristic or the important from the fortuitous is more difficult. My story of the past fifteen years or so will therefore be contracted and will concern activities and people even more arbitrarily chosen than the reminiscences and reflections of the earlier chapters.
Returning to Los Alamos in 1957 after a year's leave of absence at MIT, I was asked by Bradbury to accept one of the two newly created positions of research advisor to the director of the laboratory. The other advisor was to be John Manley, a physicist who had held important administrative posts at Los Alamos during the war and wanted to return to New Mexico after a long absence as professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Administratively, research advisors were to be on the same level as division leaders, and their duties were to oversee the research activities through-
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out the laboratory, in the various divisions: theoretical, physics, chemistry and metallurgy, weapons, health, "Rover" (nuclear rocket), and others. Together we tried to influence the various programs of the lab. This was an arduous and many-sided task, and talking with many people about their research activities enabled me to broaden my own interests. I held this position until 1967 when I retired from Los Alamos and joined the mathematics department at the University of Colorado in Boulder. In laboratory jargon, Manley and I were respectively known as RAJM and RASU.
In my administrative role in Los Alamos and later as chairman of the mathematics department in Boulder, I came to understand and appreciate better and also commiserate with friends and acquaintances who had become fully occupied by administrative duties. In my younger years I had had the usual skeptical attitude towards most chairmen of departments, deans, presidents, directors, and the like. There had been exceptions, of course. One of these was J. Carson Mark, leader of the theoretical division in Los Alamos since the middle forties. Mark is a Canadian mathematician who came to Los Alamos towards the end of the war with the British Mission. He became an American citizen some years later. He bore the brunt of the difficulties with Teller with remarkable calm and objectivity; he is one of the few mathematicians I know who have an understanding for the problems of physics and associated technology in a broad sense. His direction of the theoretical division was an example of intelligent management of a scientific group without exercising undue pressures for programmatic work. He was able to encourage free scientific pursuits in areas which were only indirectly related to the tasks of the laboratory, and he supported theoretical physics and applied mathematics in the best sense. (Incidentally, he was also a regular participant of our poker sessions. From 1945 until now I cannot recall a single occasion when he refused to come or missed one of our games. These by now have considerably slowed in frequency. From weekly they became monthly and now occur only occasionally, mainly when I happen to be visiting Los Alamos.)
After the war it had become clear that science and technology had become so crucial for national affairs that the governments of the Western world had to devote enormous amounts of time and huge budgets to them. Famous scientists were called upon to enter the inner circles of government to help direct their countries' scientific activities, not only for the arms race but for technological advancement. Churchill had had Lord Cherwell; De Gaulle, Francis Perrin; America, her Scientific Advisory Committees. Beginning with Bush and Conant, Oppenheimer, von Neumann, and many others became government "sages." Government science peaked and committees proliferated under the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, and even I found myself called upon. Until then I had always resisted being drawn into any kind of organizational position; for years I could claim that my only administrative job had been on the Wine Tasting Committee of the Society of Fellows back in my early Harvard days.
A few years before Johnny's death and increasingly so after, as a result of my work on the hydrogen bomb, I became drawn into a maze of involvements. These had to do precisely with government science and with work as a member of various Space and Air Force committees. Also, in some circles I became regarded as Teller's opponent, and I suspect I was consulted as a sort of counterweight. Some of these political activities included my stand on the Test Ban Treaty and testimony in Washington on that subject. The cartoonist Herblock drew in the Washington Post a picture of the respective positions of Teller and me in which I fortunately appeared as the "good guy."
Since I never have kept notes or diaries of any kind, I may not always be entirely correct about the chronology of events or how things and people were connected during these busy years of scientifico-technological activities.
Washington committees, I soon noticed, were often very envious of new ideas, with their members exhibiting the well-known ''not invented here" syndrome of rejecting proposals or ideas only because of the vested interests of committee members. This feeling was a greater obstacle to the development of new projects than the concern about their cost and the amounts of money they would require. Decisions also seemed sometimes dictated, not so much by objective evaluation as by the usual academic rivalries and envy of scientific fame. Had I not been already quite old and cynical this would have made me leave governmental science altogether. I remembered how in Los Alamos Johnny remarked on several occasions that it was not easy to introduce new things; one had to persuade every janitor, he said. But once something was accepted it became a sort of bible and it was equally hard or even impossible to change it or get rid of it. This national situation has become even worse now, partly because of the recent spreading skepticism regarding the value of science and its benefits, and a kind of general passivity so removed from the traditional traits of American enterprise, energy, and spirit of cooperation.
The idea of nuclear propulsion of space vehicles was born as soon as nuclear energy became a reality. It was an obvious thought to try to use its more powerful concentration of energy to propel vehicles with a very large payload for ambitious space voyages of exploration or even for excursions to the moon. I think Feynman was the first in Los Alamos during the war to talk about using an atomic reactor which would heat hydrogen and expel the gas at high velocity. A simple calculation shows that this would be more efficient than expelling the products of chemical reactions.
I became involved with two such projects, one in an advisory capacity, with the other more directly. The first was Project Rover, a nuclear-reactor rocket which was being designed in Los Alamos already quite a few years before the Russian Sputnik, but with very limited funds. The second was a space vehicle, later named Orion. Around 1955 Everett and I wrote a paper about a space vehicle propelled by successive explosions of small nuclear charges. The idea has even been patented by the AEC in our names. This method could be much more powerful than Rover and is a very ambitious but efficient way to undertake space explorations with a vehicle able to travel at high speeds with high payloads and an extremely good ratio of payload to total initial weight. The spaceship could transport hundreds or thousands of people. When Kistiakowski was President Eisenhower's Scientific Advisor I informed him about such possibilities, but his reception of it was not enthusiastic. But more about Orion later.
Soon after John Kennedy's election in November 1960, I received a telephone call from Jerry Wiesner from Cambridge. I had met Wiesner the year I was at MIT as a visiting professor; we had seen each other several times and had had good conversations about science projects, national programs, education, and so on. We had talked also about the Teller business. Wiesner was wary of the Edwardian brand of politics. I was not too surprised when I received this call. It must have lasted more than half an hour and Jerry informed me that President Kennedy had appointed him chairman of a task force on science and technology. He asked what my ideas were about the nationally important scientific or technological projects the President should know about and consider for the country. "How about going to the moon?" I asked. I imagine dozens of other people had made the same kind of suggestion. In his inaugural address Kennedy proposed a national project to put a man on the moon. My involvement with the space effort began in earnest with that conversation. I became consultant to Wiesner's Scientific Advisory Committee and visited Washington frequently.