FOUR

RICKOVER AND WEINBERG

On August 9, 1945, the American bomber Bock’s Car flew over the southern island of Kyushu and dropped an atomic bomb that engulfed the city of Nagasaki in a nuclear fireball. Fat Man, as the bomb was nicknamed, was 60 percent more powerful than the one that had devastated Hiroshima three days earlier. At that time Hyman Rickover was an obscure Navy captain in charge of the ship repair base at Baten Ko on Okinawa, where Bock’s Car stopped briefly for refueling on its flight back to the American base at Tinian. Hardly a World War II hero, he would become a major actor in the Cold War, the father of the nuclear submarine, the Navy’s longest-serving admiral, and an unrelenting hawk whose belief in absolute, overwhelming nuclear force—based on the nuclear subs that he devised and helped design—never wavered. He died in 1986.

Also in August 1945 Alvin Weinberg had just moved from the University of Chicago, where he worked in the Metallurgical Laboratory devising reactors to produce the plutonium for the Fat Man bomb, to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to help build the nation’s premier lab for nuclear physics. Weinberg would become the research director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1948 and director of the entire facility in 1955. Along with his mentor, Eugene Wigner, Weinberg worked out the basic design of the light-water reactor, which became the de facto standard for the world’s nuclear plants. He would become one of the first public scientists in the United States, an eloquent proponent of nuclear power, and one of the harshest critics of the nuclear power industry, coining such phrases as “Faustian bargain” and “nuclear priesthood” to describe the insoluble dilemmas presented by conventional, uranium-based nuclear plants.

In the 1950s and 1960s these two men—a career naval engineer and a nuclear-physicist-turned-lab-director—helped shape the future of nuclear power in the United States and around the world. At times collaborators and ultimately adversaries, Rickover and Weinberg parted ways over the best path forward as nuclear power emerged as a major source of electricity: Weinberg, foreseeing that the first nuclear era (he used the phrase as the title of his memoir) eventually would stall, pushed for an entirely different and radical machine, the molten salt reactor (MSR), and for the use of thorium to power it. Rickover, and the men who followed him, favored conventional solid-core uranium-based light-water reactors, which as a by-product produced plutonium that could be refined for nuclear weapons.

The parallels between the two men run deeper than simple opposition, though. Both were born in the early twentieth century, Rickover in 1900 and Weinberg 15 years later. Both were the sons of immigrants from the easternmost reaches of the Old World: Weinberg’s parents were Russian, Rickover’s Polish. Both grew up near Chicago and were educated at the preeminent institutions of their chosen professions: Rickover graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Weinberg from the University of Chicago. Both Jews, they were by definition outsiders in midcentury America, which had only just begun to rid itself of the anti-Semitism that had consumed European Jewry. Both transformed the organizations they came to lead and in the process inspired, promoted, and championed a generation of followers and protégés. And both were ultimately fired, dismissed by the country they’d spent their lives serving. Their entwined stories tell the history of the origins of nuclear power, and of the mistakes and missteps that got us into the energy mess in which we find ourselves now, in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

Where we find ourselves, of course, is with a stalled nuclear power industry that could provide a much larger portion of our baseload energy demand without carbon emissions. The problem is not with nuclear energy per se; it’s with uranium-based nuclear reactors. How they came to dominate the emerging nuclear industry is the subject of the next three chapters. Uranium’s victory was a triumph of military uses of science and technology over humanistic ones, of the Pentagon over the scientific community, bureaucracy over individual initiative, technological stasis over inspiration and innovation. It was a triumph for Rickover’s worldview of an unrelenting competition between implacable nuclear-armed enemies over Weinberg’s vision of a peaceful and prosperous age fueled by beneficial, broadly shared nuclear technology, specifically using thorium. And it would determine the shape of today’s nuclear power industry, which has not come close to fulfilling the promise it showed at the dawn of the Atomic Age.

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ADMIRAL RICKOVER LEFT BEHIND FEW personal accounts of his life, refusing several times to write his memoirs and tightly controlling the disposition of his papers at the end of his life. An intensely impersonal man, abrasive and opaque even to those closest to him—including his long-suffering wife, whom he dragged on a series of grueling, overland journeys across prewar Southeast Asia in the mid-1930s as he moved between postings—Rickover is an elusive figure. It’s hard to know what, at any moment in his eventful life, he was feeling or thinking, other than impatience and disdain for the fools who surrounded him.

Hyman Rickover was born in January 1900 (according to his official Navy biography and his tombstone; local school records have the date as August 24, 1898, a two-year discrepancy that a man like Rickover would not have been eager to correct) in Maków Mazowiecki in northeastern Poland. Poland at that time was under the boot heel of the Russian czar, and the Rick-overs lived in the Pale of Settlement, the region on the western fringe of the Russian empire where Jews were allowed permanent residency.¹

Rickover’s father, Abraham, was a tailor, and around the turn of the century he emigrated to New York City. A few years later—the chronology is hazy—he had scraped together enough money to invest in an apartment building in Brooklyn, and he sent for his family. Hyman, his mother, and his sister, Fanny, boarded a ship bound for the United States from one of the ports along Europe’s northern seaboard, Antwerp, Bremen, or Hamburg. By 1945, four decades later, the Jewish communities of the Pale had been eradicated in the Holocaust.

Rickover had a hardscrabble childhood on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and, after Abraham moved the family again, in Chicago. The Rick-overs lived in Lawndale on Chicago’s west side, a neighborhood that would eventually be the most heavily Jewish part of the city. Rickover’s intelligence and determination showed themselves early; he first went to work at age nine, making three cents an hour assisting in his neighbor’s mechanic shop, and he attended John Marshall High while delivering telegrams for Western Union.

Rickover’s application to the U.S. Naval Academy in 1918 succeeded only through the intervention of influential connections. His sense of being an outsider was heightened at Annapolis. Rickover was despised by his fellow midshipmen, in part because he was a Jew but more because he was a grind. Graduating 107th in his class of 540, he hardly seemed to be a future admiral when he was commissioned as an ensign on the destroyer USS La Vallette in 1922.

Rickover had a genius for organization, though, and it revealed itself in his early postings as engineering officer on a series of ships in the 1920s, including the USS Nevada. He spent a year at the Naval Postgraduate School in Annapolis, earning his master’s in electrical engineering. Rickover then studied at Columbia, where he met his wife, a grad student in international law. Foreseeing the future of undersea warfare, Rickover applied for a position as an engineering officer on a submarine at the end of the decade. Again, he was denied (ostensibly because of his age—he was 29, considered too old for sub duty) until an older man intervened. C. S. Kempff, his commanding officer on the Nevada and by then a rear admiral, ran into Rickover outside the Bureau of Navigation in Washington, D.C., learned what happened, and interceded on Rickover’s behalf. In October 1929 Rickover reported for duty aboard the submarine S9.

At that time submarine duty had not acquired the patina of glamour it would have in the Cold War. Subs were cramped, smelly, and greasy from diesel oil. Crews of the 1920s called them pig boats. For Rickover, though, sub duty presented a unique challenge: powered by electrical motors (which tended to fail and limited their undersea range), submarines had changed little since World War I. The young engineering officer believed he could play a role in advancing the science of underwater propulsion; he likely also saw the submarine corps as a relatively quick path to command of his own vessel.² His sub service lasted only four years. His only command, on the minesweeper USS Finch, resulted in near mutiny, as the crew chafed under Rickover’s authoritarian style. After less than three months, he was relieved in October 1937; two years later he was promoted to lieutenant commander and became the assistant chief of the Electrical Section of the Navy’s Bureau of Ships in Washington. He never commanded a ship again.

By December 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States entered World War II, Rickover was chief of the electrical section, a powerful post in a period that saw the United States create the largest and most formidable fleet in the history of warfare. Once again Rickover saw himself as battling ignorance, incompetence, and bureaucratic action in order to accomplish his aim: to create an invincible modern Navy. He became one of the most effective of the Navy’s wartime officers, respected by his superiors and feared, if not admired, by his men. But he would never forget, or be allowed to forget, that he was not a front-line commander.

“Sharp-tongued Hyman Rickover spurred his men to exhaustion, ripped through red tape, drove contractors into rages,” commented a Time magazine reporter in a postwar profile. “He went on making enemies, but by the end of the war he had won the rank of captain. He also won a reputation as a man who gets things done.”³

To Rickover, “it seemed as if he had to fight to get anything done. Rickover became mad at the Navy, and it would be an anger that would never cease.”⁴

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IF HYMAN RICKOVER HAD AN UNPARALLELED skill for making enemies and antagonizing superiors, Alvin Weinberg went in the opposite direction in his personal relations. He inspired admiration among his peers and something like love in the people who worked under him. It’s impossible to find anyone who has written anything negative about him. His “special gift” was “his ability to communicate, even inspire,” and his memoir, The First Nuclear Era, is a marvel of even-handedness: he treated gently even men who thwarted him out of personal or political motives.⁵ “I have always admired Rick’s courage,” Weinberger wrote of Rickover, the nuclear admiral, “ . . . though I did not like his autocratic methods.” Those methods, Weinberg remarked, “made it impossible for people of the very highest caliber . . . to work very long with him.”⁶ Though Weinberg was unquestionably of the very highest caliber, he managed to work with Rickover for longer than most; unfortunately, their collaboration was not completely to the benefit of Oak Ridge, the future of nuclear power, and the country they both served.

Like Rickover, Weinberg was a product of the eastern European Jewish diaspora. Also like Rickover, he was the son of a tailor. Born in Chicago to Russian immigrant parents, Weinberg was 15 years younger than Rickover and enjoyed a smoother path to success. A graduate of Roosevelt High School, which had opened in 1922 (and which has produced a string of notables, including the writer Nelson Algren), Weinberg was only 16 when he enrolled at the University of Chicago. His first choice was Stanford, but the Great Depression had taken hold, and Weinberg lived at home during his first couple of years in college. At the university Weinberg, a gifted chemist and physicist, became part of the Chicago School of eminent physicists, many of them émigrés, who helped propel the United States to leadership of the new nuclear era—and to the building of the first atomic weapons—in the 1930s and 1940s. He also came under the influence of Alfred Korzybski, an influential psychologist who founded what became known as General Semantics, a midcentury field based on the premise that “our moods, our perceptions of each other, indeed, our mental health, are determined by the structure of our language.”⁷ To a degree unusual among scientists, Weinberg understood the power of language in shaping not only perceptions but public policy.

In the interwar decades, the University of Chicago had not yet become the right-wing hotbed it would during the Cold War—Weinberg later liked to joke that, at the time, everyone at the university was, if not an outright communist, at least a fellow traveler. Though he played a key role in helping build the nuclear arsenal that ultimately helped bring about the collapse of communism, his leftist tendencies—more specifically, his liberal humanism—never left him.

Weinberg’s early career focused more on the life sciences than on nuclear physics. While obtaining his Ph.D. in cell biology, Weinberg gained a deep understanding of classical diffusion theory, the science that describes how particles spread and disperse through apparently random motion. Diffusion equations lie at the heart of the analysis of nuclear reactors—a subject on which Weinberg would become the world’s leading expert.

Weinberg’s rise to the first rank of American physicists was swift. Still in his midtwenties, he was part of the team under Enrico Fermi at Chicago that built the first nuclear reactor—or pile, as reactors were universally known at the time. Weinberg also became an honorary member of the extraordinary generation of physicists who emerged from Hungary in the early twentieth century, a group of pioneers that included Leo Szilard (who first foresaw the awesome potential of a nuclear chain reaction and patented the concept in 1934), Oskar Klein (who helped originate the idea of extra dimensions, beyond the three apparent in the physical world), John von Neumann (conceiver of the implosive lens design of the Fat Man bomb), Edward Teller (the arch anticommunist and father of the hydrogen bomb), and Weinberg’s mentor, Eugene Wigner.

Wigner himself played a formative role in the history of thorium power. A native of Budapest, a 1963 Nobel Prize winner, the coauthor of the Wigner-Eckart Theorem (the earliest general theory of nuclear reactions), and the first research director of Clinton Laboratories (later Oak Ridge National Laboratory), he helped pioneer the earliest designs for thorium reactors. Wigner first met the young Weinberg in 1942 in Chicago. Weinberg was a junior scientist on what would become the Manhattan Project, and Wigner had already made important contributions in nuclear physics and quantum mechanics. The two hit if off quickly; Weinberg realized that Wigner was the most gifted theorist he would ever work with, while Wigner saw in the younger man a tireless and brilliant calculator who could give mathematical flesh to Wigner’s flashes of insight.

Even before the United States entered the war on December 8, 1941, an influential group of scientists, many of whom had fled the Nazi terror, had begun thinking about and doing preliminary research on an atomic bomb. Albert Einstein’s famous letter to President Franklin Roosevelt, dated August 2, 1939, and warning of the possibility that America’s enemies might develop an atomic weapon, had not immediately resulted in a concerted national effort to develop nuclear weapons, but the attack on Pearl Harbor, along with the realization that Germany was almost certainly working on an atomic bomb of its own, lent urgency to the nuclear weapons research that was already underway at several institutes and universities around the country.⁸ In less than a year the Army officially set up the Manhattan Project, with specific components of the bomb program assigned to designated facilities. A team at the University of California at Berkeley under Robert Oppenheimer worked on the actual design of the bomb; the study of the nuclear chain reaction and the production of plutonium and enriched uranium for the bomb’s core were assigned to the Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab) at Chicago.

Led by Arthur Compton, winner of the 1927 Nobel Prize in physics, the Met Lab represented the most remarkable gathering of scientific minds since Niels Bohr’s legendary Copenhagen conferences in the early 1930s. On hand were Fermi, Wigner (who had joined Enrico Fermi at the University of Chicago in 1942⁹), Szilard, John Wheeler, Edward Teller, Glenn Seaborg, and, of course, Weinberg. The Met Lab was both a cover name and something of an inside joke; the scientists, after all, were focused on the separation of different forms of metallic elements, but there was not a real metallurgist among them. They devised code words to refer to the top-secret materials for the bomb. “Plutonium was ‘copper,’ U235 was ‘magnesium,’ uranium, generically in the nonsensical British coinage, ‘tube alloy.’”¹⁰

Weinberg’s primary role at the Met Lab was making calculations of neutron economy—the number of neutrons produced on average for each fission event in various combinations of fissile elements and moderators—and of the appropriate size of a pile in order to sustain a chain reaction. While neutron economy is usually expressed as η by physicists, Weinberg and his colleagues in Chicago used κ. Weinberg and his team were the “custodians of κ.” Although he led the effort to carry out these critical calculations, Weinberg was not among those who were invited to the signal event of the early World War II atomic effort: the first chain reaction, carried out in Fermi’s “Chicago pile” (CP–1), on December 2, 1942. Decades later the omission still rankled, but Weinberg, as ever, was diplomatic about it: “I felt a little left out.”¹¹

Although producing plutonium was the singular goal, there were multiple theories as to the best way to get there. At first the Met Lab scientists had few certainties; one was that they had to find a way to enrich natural uranium so that the percentage of the fissile isotope U-235 rose to at least 3 percent; another was that they needed pure plutonium in quantities large enough to make a bomb. Refining or enriching uranium was one thing; the basic processes were understood. Uranium can be enriched in several ways: gaseous diffusion (where the uranium is gasified and forced through a membrane); forcing atoms through a magnetic field so that they disassociate according to mass, a method called electromagnetic isotope separation (in which charged particles traveling in a magnetic field are deflected by varying amounts that are determined by their mass) and centrifugal separation, which uses large arrays of spinning tubes in which the heavier U-238 molecules are driven toward the perimeter of the tube.

Acquiring plutonium was a challenge of a different order altogether. Identified only in 1940, the mysterious element had never been refined in more than microscopic amounts. Wigner and his team of theorists were confident that by irradiating uranium they could obtain pure plutonium; doing it on an industrial scale was a speculative endeavor at best. A large dedicated pile would have to be built. So focused on the wartime goal were the scientists of the Met Lab that few other considerations were allowed to interfere— including the notion that the piles, or reactors, the group was designing to produce plutonium for atomic bombs might one day produce vast amounts of usable energy to power civilizations, or that those power reactors would prove dangerous to operate. “We were so intent on getting something that produced plutonium with the smallest inventory of scarce uranium, that such issues simply didn’t emerge.”¹²

Because the Americans believed they were in a race with Germany to build an atomic weapon, they were determined to build both uranium and plutonium bombs, in case the former didn’t actually work. To obtain the enriched uranium, plants for both electromagnetic separation and gaseous diffusion were built as well (later, centrifuge arrays would become the prevalent method). The plutonium production facility was located at Hanford on the Columbia River in central Washington State. The entire town was condemned and the 3,000 inhabitants relocated. But first a pilot plant was needed to prove that it could be done. The trial pile, along with the gaseous diffusion plant and an electromagnetic system for uranium enrichment, were built at a site in the hilly woodlands along the Clinch River, near Knoxville, Tennessee. Originally called the Clinton Laboratories, for the nearby town of the same name, the Tennessee facility would be one of the three primary sites of the Manhattan Project—along with Hanford and Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bombs were actually assembled.

The first research director of the Clinton Labs was Eugene Wigner, who brought with him Alvin Weinberg and a cadre of the best nuclear scientists from the Met Lab. After the war it would become Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

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HYMAN RICKOVER HAD A USEFUL and distinguished war, if not a glorious one in battle. He helped oversee the most massive shipbuilding program in the history of the world, and his energy, rigor, and appetite for new ideas helped shake up the traditionalist culture of the Navy. He won a Legion of Merit, the Navy’s highest noncombat honor, for “exceptionally meritorious conduct . . . as Head of the Electrical Section of the Bureau of Ships.” At war’s end, though, he found himself effectively out of a job. The story of Rickover’s rise, in less than a decade, from obscurity to one of the most powerful admirals in the history of the U.S. Navy is one of implacable personal ambition, bureaucratic knife fighting, and remarkable achievement. But it’s also the story of the Navy’s evolution in the first two decades of the Cold War.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did more than demonstrate to the world that the United States now possessed a devastating new weapon, one that for a brief time made America effectively invincible in war. It also changed the very nature of war. Since the earliest Portuguese sea captains, under Prince Henry the Navigator, began exploring the western coast of Africa in the early fifteenth century, power on a global scale had meant supremacy at sea. The greatest nations had the greatest fleets. The British Empire ruled over much of the known world primarily because of its great navy. “Upon our naval supremacy stands our lives and the freedom we have guarded for nearly a thousand years,” Winston Churchill declared in November 1911.¹³

This began to change in the great wars of the twentieth century, fought across broad fronts on the European landmass. But the navies of the Allies played a decisive role in both conflicts. D-Day, of course, was the largest naval invasion in history, involving five thousand ships. The turning point of World War II in the Pacific was the Battle of Midway, called by the historian John Keegan “the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare.”¹⁴

The Battle of Britain (the fight for air superiority over the British Isles) and the massive firebombing raids on Germany and Japan were what truly signaled the shift in the balance of war from the sea to the air. With the twin developments that resulted in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the creation of the atomic bomb and the development of long-range bombers—that balance decisively tipped, never to shift back.

This shift was immediately understood by war planners in Washington, D.C., and Moscow. “The plane gave man great range, gave him the ability to leap over terrain barriers and seas, to pass above the struggling surface forces and to strike directly the enemy’s cities, industries, communications and will to resist,” wrote the military analyst Hanson W. Baldwin days after the Japanese surrender. “But the plane was a vulnerable and expensive instrument. Tremendous destructive power could be obtained only by the use of tremendous numbers, and heavy bombers, with all their appurtenances, are among the most expensive and complicated instruments of war ever invented.”¹⁵

The dawning of the Atomic Age meant that one plane, one bomb would suffice. And the perfection of intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 1950s reduced that equation further: one missile, multiple warheads = incomparable destructive power. Advances in the technology of warfare led to an inescapable conclusion: great naval battles were tableaux from the past, and the value of naval supremacy was reduced to the fleets’ ability to convey fighter planes and deliver nuclear-tipped missiles to the enemy’s heart: its cities. The U.S. Navy that Hyman Rickover had known and helped to create, designed to win set-piece battles at sea, suddenly looked obsolete.

This shift brought with it not only the realignment of war-fighting priorities but also the reorganization of the U.S. Armed Forces themselves: The military aviation arm, the U.S. Army Air Forces, had since its inception been part of the Army. In 1947 it was elevated to a separate branch, the Air Force, and it commanded a growing share of strategic importance, and funding, through the early Cold War years. Overnight, The Bomb had made most military strategy obsolete, and naval strategists saw their mighty fleets, which had essentially won the war in the Pacific, becoming glorified freighters. The new age would be ruled by terror from above.¹⁶

This shift was not lost on the Navy’s top officers, including Rickover. No new ships would be designed in the immediate postwar decade, and few new ships would be built at all. With 23 years of active service behind him, Rickover was a temporary captain eligible for retirement. He could have moved on, like many of his contemporaries, to a lucrative second career at one of the defense contractors that were already proliferating, like parasitic organisms, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. After the surrender of Japan, his assignment was inspector general of the Nineteenth Fleet, responsible essentially for mothballing ships. “When the ship-repair base [at Okinawa] lay in ruins and was declared superfluous to the Navy, Rickover, as commander of the ruins, seemed equally so.”¹⁷

For a man of his restless temperament, sharp intellect, and powerful resentments, this was obviously an intolerable situation. If there was to be a war, hot or cold, he was going to be in it. Setting out to find a place for himself in the Navy of the future, Rickover soon turned his eye to the only part of the Navy that seemed likely to grow: the submarine fleet.

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WHEN ALVIN WEINBERG CAME TO OAK RIDGE in 1945, there was little to indicate that the place would become one of the foremost nuclear energy labs in the world. “A sprawling collection of one-story wooden buildings,” in Weinberg’s description, it was a makeshift industrial plant dominated by the 70-foot-high black barn that housed the X-10 reactor—the pilot plant for plutonium production that had given birth to the much larger reactor complex at Hanford. The wilds of central Tennessee had not been an obvious choice. Opponents of the site noted that no great universities were nearby—the main campus of the University of Tennessee, 30 miles down the road in Knoxville, apparently didn’t merit that designation—and the area had few cultural or scientific institutions, “little independent intellectual life,” as Weinberg himself noted.¹⁸

What Oak Ridge did have was the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had been founded in 1933 and offered ample electricity, generated by dams on the Tennessee River and its tributaries, including the Clinch. David Lilienthal, the head of the TVA (and later the first chief of the Atomic Energy Commission), vocally opposed the choice of Oak Ridge. He was overruled by Arthur Compton, head of the Met Lab. The site also had the support of powerful politicians from the region and that of Eugene Wigner, for whom the hills and rivers of the area held a mysterious appeal.

“Arbitrary bureaucracy, made doubly powerful by military secrecy, had its way,” Lilienthal recalled.¹⁹ That description could apply to the entire course of the early nuclear power industry.

Spread along the valleys of the Clinch River and its tributaries, the Oak Ridge area had for generations sheltered small hill communities like Wheat, Elza, and Scarborough. Farmers along the Appalachian foothills still plowed with mules, and electricity was a relatively recent innovation. Hundreds of families were relocated, their property condemned, after the Army Corps of Engineers took over the site in 1942. In less than two years, at a cost of about $1.2 billion, three of the major operating plants for the Manhattan Project were carved from the forest. To the west was the gaseous diffusion plant, K-25, which covered more ground than any structure in history. South rose Y-12, where U-235 was separated using electromagnetism, and southwest was X-10, built in nine months, the first large functioning nuclear reactor in the world.

For the scientists and their families, used to the urban delights of Chicago, life at Clinton Labs was spartan. Most employees lived in military-style barracks; more comfortable brick homes for families were constructed only after the war. In the early days, a borrowed circus tent served as the cafeteria and an old schoolhouse as both office space and dormitory. In an early instance of the blending of private-sector technology with military aims, operation of the facility was turned over to the chemical giant DuPont, whose executives continually butted heads with Wigner during the war and the first years of peace.

Weinberg brought his wife, Margaret, and their two-year-old son Richard on the Louisville & Nashville train from Chicago to Knoxville. They arrived in May 1945, and he lived and worked in the area for most of the rest of his life.

Charged with providing the basic fissile material for the atomic bombs detonated at the Trinity test site in New Mexico, and subsequently dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Clinton Labs had succeeded brilliantly. But at war’s end, Weinberg, like Rickover, found himself attached to a beleaguered institution—one that, unlike the Navy, had to justify not only its continued preeminence but its very existence. The X-10 reactor and the uranium separation plants had been constructed for one purpose: to make possible the atomic bombs that ended the war. What would be their role in postwar America?

In the days after the war, “staff members drifted about Clinton Laboratories, gathering and talking, seemingly bereft of energy. ‘Everyone,’ admitted one scientist, ‘felt a sense of disorientation, of slackness, of loss of direction.’”²⁰

Responsibility for the nation’s nuclear arsenal had been shifted to Los Alamos, Hanford, and Argonne, outside Chicago. Generating electricity from nuclear fission was still just an idea, one that many experts believed would never be economically feasible. Much of the postwar military leadership, including Leslie Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project, believed that Clinton should simply be shut down. They failed to reckon with the energy and vision of Eugene Wigner.

As early as 1944, Wigner—who followed his disciple Weinberg to Tennessee in 1946—had drawn up a plan for an extensive postwar nuclear research facility, staffed by as many as 3,500 people and dedicated to devising new, peaceful applications for the fearsome power that had devastated two Japanese cities. As one of the architects of the Manhattan Project, Wigner had unquestioned status with Congress and the White House, as well as a keen sense of the fears and desires of American politicians. Science and industrial might, along with the dogged courage of the troops, had won the war for the Allies. Preserving the nation’s technological preeminence was a primary goal of the postwar leadership, which foresaw that the secrets of building the bomb would not remain exclusive indefinitely (though predictions of how soon the Soviet Union could build its own bomb proved to be off by a decade or more). A system of national laboratories seemed like a good hedge against future nuclear competitors. While at this time the concept of a nuclear power reactor had yet to be proven (and not everyone believed that it would ever be), the scientists who had harnessed nuclear power for unprecedented destruction—and who, faced with the carnage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were already haunted by remorse—had a powerful urge to harness the atom for peaceful purposes.

Future reactor development had already been taken from the Oak Ridge scientists—stolen from them, in their view, and reassigned to Los Alamos and Argonne. Weinberg refused to believe that Clinton had no role to play in nuclear power going forward; the home of reactor technology for the Manhattan Project, Wigner and Weinberg argued, should become a center for advanced research into chemical metallurgy, radioisotopes, and nuclear chemistry. And it could become the primary training ground for future nuclear physicists. In 1949 Oak Ridge National Laboratory was created, along with its associated graduate school, the Oak Ridge School of Research Technology—the Clinch College for Nuclear Knowledge, the scientific wags called it.

In the next decade the school would provide instruction into the atom’s mysteries to a generation of postgrad physicists, visiting students from friendly foreign countries, and a succession of military officers, including Hyman Rickover.

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THE SECOND HALF OF THE 1940S was an odd interregnum in U.S. history, a brief, sunny period of hope and optimism soon darkened by the growing clouds of the Cold War.

In the late 1940s the rush of wartime science and technology research gave way to advances that would benefit humanity instead of killing men and women. At Bell Labs in New Jersey, the Solid State Physics Group under William Shockley developed the solid state transistor, leading to the semiconductors that would fuel the information revolution. In 1947 Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the experimental aircraft Bell X-1, and the Russian defector George Gamow carried out the calculations that explained the big bang theory of the origins of the universe.²¹

And at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Wigner and his team explored the future of nuclear reactors. Even before the war’s end, having accomplished their main Manhattan Project task, the proof-of-concept for the Hanford plutonium-producing reactors, the scientists had time to think about the future of nuclear power. The New Piles Committee was formed to develop ideas. It considered many different types of piles, including an “aqueous homogeneous” system that could bombard a blanket of thorium-232 to create fissile U-233 in its core, dreamed up two years earlier by Eugene Wigner.

“Crazy ideas and not-so-crazy ideas bubbled up,” Weinberg later wrote, “as much as anything because the whole territory was unexplored—we were like children in a toy factory.”²²

They were working in a time of great political ferment as well. There was a moment after the war when it seemed that leaders in the East and the West might avert a nuclear weapons competition rather than plunge the world into a nightmarish arms race that carried the threat of mutually assured destruction. Haunted by the possibility of annihilation unveiled at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a group of scientists and senior figures in the Truman administration—and, for a time, the president himself—argued forcefully for freely sharing the secrets of nuclear energy with the communist adversary. In a series of memos to the president, Secretary of War Henry Stimson outlined the fateful choices facing the only nation to have exploded a nuclear weapon. Nuclear power, Stimson wrote, “caps the climax of the race between man’s growing technical power for destructiveness and his psychological power of self-control and group control—his moral power.” The question of sharing nuclear technology “becomes a primary question of our foreign relations,” Stimson declared, adding that a proposal should be made to Moscow “just as soon as our immediate political considerations make it appropriate.”²³

Truman’s “official policy initiatives through 1948 focused exclusively on the goals of establishing civilian control over American nuclear resources . . . and seeking international control of atomic energy in the United Nations.”²⁴

That moment passed. In an address to Congress in March 1947, President Harry Truman laid out what would become known as the Truman Doctrine: it must be “the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” The world was now divided into two camps at perpetual war with each other, and, as expressed in a document written by Truman’s aide Clark Clifford and clearly supported by the president, “the United States must be prepared to wage atomic and biological warfare.”²⁵

Two years later, about a decade earlier than U.S. experts had predicted, the USSR tested its first atomic bomb, and the nuclear arms race was on. Born in the fires of World War II and proven in the utter destruction of two ancient cities, nuclear power was now the primary instrument of an implacable conflict between the two most powerful nations the world had known. The prospects for the peaceful development of clean, safe nuclear power were eliminated. Uranium, and the bomb, had won.

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IN OAK RIDGE, MEANWHILE, the euphoria of victory in war gave way quickly to the disillusionment and disarray of peace. Eugene Wigner returned to his post at Princeton in 1947, and several prominent scientists turned down the position of laboratory director. Once the source of much of the science that fueled the Manhattan Project, Oak Ridge became a backwater. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), formed in 1946 with former TVA president David Lilienthal as its first chair, had designated Los Alamos as the nation’s primary weapons laboratory and Argonne as the site for all reactor work. After Wigner’s departure almost a year went by with no official director of the Clinton Lab. No one wanted to take over a place that seemed “destined for extinction.”²⁶

Inevitably scientists began leaving for more attractive posts at the other national labs and at universities eager to build up their physics departments. When the AEC named the Carbide and Carbon Chemicals Company, which had run the gaseous diffusion and electromagnetic enrichment plants at Oak Ridge during the war, to take over management of the entire laboratory, “all hell broke loose,” and the lab faced a mass exodus. Renamed Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in 1948, the place was caught in a downward spiral of controversial decisions, questionable management, and an uncertain mission.

Weinberg remained characteristically steadfast. He didn’t share his colleagues’ mistrust of the Carbide company, and he had come to love the area. He set about trying to broker a truce between the researchers and the managers, and in March 1948 he was asked to take over. Wary of the administrative duties and the political land mines of the director’s office, Weinberg agreed instead to become associate director. He would become the research director a year later and full director in 1955, and he essentially defined the laboratory and its mission for the next quarter century.

Weinberg believed that Oak Ridge had a future as a center for nuclear reactor research: “I didn’t think that the decision to concentrate all reactor development at Argonne could be carried out.”²⁷ What’s more, he had in mind a specific mission for ORNL: building a homogeneous (liquid fuel) breeder reactor based on thorium and its fission offspring, U-233. Weinberg had come to believe that liquid fuel thorium reactors would transform the nation’s energy supply. He spent the next 20 years attempting to bring that vision to reality. The story of his failure is told in chapter 5; here I will examine the forces that combined to shape the nuclear power industry in the Pentagon’s image.

In 1945–46 Weinberg led a campaign to institute civilian control over the new AEC, lobbying for a bill sponsored by Senator Brien McMahon, a Democrat from Connecticut, that would establish a five-member civilian commission and a general manager who was also a civilian. The Pentagon lobbied hard for the competing May-Johnson bill, which would effectively keep development of nuclear power under military control. The scientists won; the McMahon bill passed, but it was an illusory victory. After pressure from conservatives forced several major revisions to the bill to appease the military, Truman signed it as the Atomic Energy Act of 1946. The act did not “in any respect diminish the dominance of the military in nuclear affairs,” Weinberg would write.²⁸

With the explosion of the first Soviet nuclear weapon at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan in August 1949—almost precisely four years after Hiroshima— that dominance reached into other parts of American industry, commerce, and culture. “The Pentagon was the center of an implicit and . . . profound militarization of society” that combined “economic, political, martial, academic, scientific, technological and culture forces,” James Carroll wrote.²⁹ To men like Edward Teller, Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis LeMay, and George Kennan, a chief architect of the hawkish U.S. foreign policy based on supposed supremacy in nuclear weapons, it was inconceivable that the primary object of this ultimate power source could be anything but war. Civilian nuclear power was a distant second; and the makeup, goals, and decisions of the AEC all would reflect this. David Lilienthal was hardly a doctrinaire cold warrior, but the commission he chaired had no illusions about the real identity of its masters. “The requirements of national defense thus quickly obscured the original goal of developing the full potential of the peaceful atom,” wrote Alice Buck in an official history of the AEC commissioned by the Department of Energy in 1983. “For two decades military-related programs would command the lion’s share of the Commission’s time and the major portion of the budget.”³⁰

National defense requirements imposed three basic limitations on Weinberg and the others who sought to develop a peacetime nuclear power base: All scientific data relating to nuclear technology was classified, severely restricting information flow. Innovation in nuclear power was subservient to the maintenance of superiority in the arms race; of premier importance was ensuring a sufficient supply of weapons-grade uranium and plutonium at a time when the world’s available reserves of uranium were believed to be scarce. Finally, reactor development, in both the short and long term, was channeled into programs that would directly benefit military operations— meaning, in the first case, submarine propulsion.

Those limitations would eventually doom Weinberg’s dream of a thorium-based homogeneous breeder. But they would pave a broad way for the dream Hyman Rickover brought with him to Oak Ridge: a nuclear-powered submarine armed with atomic bombs. The ultimate attack vehicle: the USS Nautilus.