That Princeton embraced a military research project at all is astonishing, and that it happened so swiftly is a seeming miracle. Here was one stubborn scientist (Wheeler), backed up by another stubborn scientist (Teller), arrayed against the massive inertial blocks of the Los Alamos lab; its patron, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC); and Princeton University, with its policy against secret work. (Fortunately, the United States Congress wasn’t involved. The AEC seemed to have all the money it needed and then some. The University of California, another inertial block, also played no role except pro forma when there was a contract to be signed.) Going from the expression of an idea to the reality of a satellite lab took less than six months.
How did it happen? Mostly, I conclude, because of the tenor of the times. One after another, events of 1948–1950 brought home the reality of the Cold War and stoked fears of a hot war. The Berlin Blockade (1948–1949) put an end to any Soviet-American partnership and seemed to make real the “Iron Curtain” cited by Winston Churchill in 1946. The first Soviet nuclear explosion (August 1949, announced in September) ratcheted up fear of war, and led eventually to children being asked to practice cowering under their desks. Truman’s January 1950 statement, widely interpreted as authorizing a crash program to build an H Bomb, added to the nervousness. When Klaus Fuchs was arrested in February 1950 for transmitting nuclear secrets to the Soviets (he had confessed in January), Americans felt even more vulnerable. Then came the Korean War in June and Chinese intervention in it in October, leading to President Truman’s declaration of a National Emergency on December 16, 1950.{6} (In Don Hamilton’s February 1951 memo to President Dodds supporting the Wheeler proposal,{4} he cited the “present state of emergency,” expressing a perspective that was showing up in other university memoranda of the period.)
At the same time, our elected officials in Washington and in State Houses around the country were doing their part to foment an almost hysterical anticommunism, feeding fear that our entities of government, federal and state, were being infiltrated under guidance from Moscow. The worst of the lot was Senator Joe McCarthy, who in February 1950 brandished a list of supposed Communists in the State Department, and went on to ride the nation’s paranoia right through an easy reelection in Wisconsin in 1952, until his final censure by his Senate colleagues in 1954. State governments did their part by requiring loyalty oaths such as the ones I encountered in California (actually in New Mexico) and Massachusetts. In Washington, the House of Representatives, through its Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), went on a witch hunt starting with Hollywood personalities in 1947 and progressing to physicists in 1949.
Because the anticommunist fervor of the times was so significant in making Wheeler’s Princeton project possible, I address its effects on academia and, in particular, on one physicist, in the next chapter.
While working at the University of Chicago’s Met Lab in World War II, as I mentioned in Chapter 8, John Wheeler often declined invitations from his fellow scientists to go out to lunch, so that he could sit at his desk with a sandwich, doing his “Princeton physics.”{7} This dogged commitment to pure physics remained with him in Los Alamos and at Project Matterhorn. It was what accounted for the three desks he wangled from the Zia Company for his Bathtub Row home in 1950. And accounted for his delight when, in May 1952, in the midst of managing Matterhorn and helping to plan for the “Mike” test, he gained approval to introduce and teach a new course on relativity that fall. I recall seeing Wheeler in September 1952 with a copy of Peter Bergmann’s textbook on relativity in one hand and a sheaf of computer printouts on H-bomb calculations in the other. (Later, with two of his former students, Wheeler wrote what was for many years the definitive textbook on the subject, Gravitation.{8})
It was not surprising, then, when Wheeler decided in the fall of 1950 that he and his two students at the time, John Toll and I, should submit papers to be presented at the December 1950 meeting of the American Physical Society in Los Angeles. APS then held its biggest meeting of the year in New York in late January (at that time a semester break at many universities)—understandably known simply as the New York Meeting. Preceding it by a month each year was a west-coast meeting held in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, alternating between northern and southern California. In 1950 UCLA was the host. (I should add that simultaneous sessions were then a thing of the future. One lecture hall sufficed for the sequential sessions that December.)
So, in the fall of 1950, in went three abstracts, two by Wheeler and Toll (one talk to be delivered by each of them) and one by Wheeler and me, with me as the presenter. The Wheeler-Toll papers grew out of Toll’s dissertation in progress, and dealt with topics as esoteric as the deflection of one photon of light by another.[63] The Wheeler-Ford paper was a quantum extension of classical work that I had done two years earlier in Wheeler’s course, and dealt with what we called the “quite possibly mythological entity,” the magnetic monopole. In short, our papers had nothing to do with thermonuclear burning.{9}
Teller decided to join the party, although, as far as I can determine, without submitting an abstract or delivering a paper. He may have just wanted to recharge his intellectual batteries; or to spend more time talking privately with Wheeler about H-bomb prospects; or simply to take a break. He and Wheeler decided to take their wives along to Los Angeles and make a bit of a vacation out of the trip (or the wives decided to come along). They also wanted to see more of New Mexico, Arizona, and California than could be glimpsed from a train window. But they didn’t feel they could spare the time to drive in both directions. That is where Toll and I entered the picture. We junior members of the team would drive the wives to Los Angeles while the husbands took the train and talked about thermonuclear reactions. The husbands and wives would drive back to Los Alamos together while Toll and I would ride back by train. It worked out as planned. What I remember most about the return trip was that we boarded the train in Pasadena on New Year’s day after watching the Rose Bowl Parade.
What I remember most about the trip out was the cold. Janette Wheeler, Mici Teller, John Toll, and I decided to make it a two-day trip, breaking midway by camping out at the Grand Canyon. We turned north from Flagstaff well after dark on the first day and had no trouble at all finding a deserted spot on the high mesa just south of the Canyon. There was nothing else but deserted spots. We got out our sleeping bags, undressed, got into the bags, and had a good night’s sleep. Getting going in the morning was a little more challenging. The temperature was surely below zero. The few minutes it took to get out of the sleeping bags, into our clothes, and into the Wheelers’ Chevrolet seemed agonizingly long. Fortunately, a lodge with a roaring fire in its fireplace was not far distant. Never have I enjoyed a breakfast more.
