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Compare Oppenheimer to Teller? You can’t compare their character any more than you can compare an orchid to a dandelion. An orchid is more finely designed and built and delicate and subtle and aromatic. And a dandelion is something you kick up with the heel of your shoe if it’s going to take over your grass.
—Dorothy McKibbin, who ran the Manhattan Project’s office at 109 East Palace in Santa Fe
Oppie shook his head in amazement as he walked around the spacious grounds, more than a mile on a side. Although the theoretical physics community had largely turned its back on Edward Teller, the government clearly adored the Hungarian, giving him everything he’d been dreaming of: his own richly funded lab, here in Livermore, California, an hour southeast of Berkeley. Once the Soviets tested their first fission bomb, back in 1949, based in part on secrets stolen from Oppie’s mesa by Klaus Fuchs, Washington was desperate for something even more destructive, and Teller was happy to lead the way.
Teller and Ernest Lawrence had founded this facility in 1952. Herbert York had served as director for the first six years, and now Teller himself was in his second year as director of the lab, which currently employed 3,000 people and had an annual budget of $65 million. And, unlike at Los Alamos—a compound that still existed but was very much in the shadow now of this newer one—at Teller’s facility, fusion-bomb research held center stage.
Oppenheimer made his way into the main building and found Teller’s office. His secretary had Oppie wait in a wooden chair, and he whiled away the time looking at the latest issue of The Magnet, the lab’s employee newsletter. At last, the secretary said, “Dr. Teller is ready for you.”
Oppie rose, swallowed, and headed into the inner sanctum. He’d seen Teller occasionally since the security-board hearings, but not alone, not one-on-one. As he entered the wood-paneled office, he tried to sound warm. “Edward! So good to see you!”
Teller rose and made his way around from behind his wide, cluttered desk. “Robert,” he said. Not Oppie. Robert. “You’re well?”
He coughed. “Yes.”
“And Kitty?”
Oppie dropped his gaze. He and Kitty had had a fight before his trip out here. In a drunken rage, she’d accused him of wanting to take a trip to Livermore not because he needed to see Teller but to see her—“her” being Jean, who had lived nearby. But Jean had been dead for fourteen years now. When Oppie had, gently, he’d thought, pointed that out to Kitty, she’d thrown her drink glass at him.
“She’s fine,” Oppie said. “And Mici?”
“She’s doing well. She sends her love, of course.” Of course.
“Very kind of her.”
Silence. Teller looked him up and down, then: “And now that the pleasantries are properly discharged, Robert, what in the hell do you want?”
#
“So, if I may try to sum up,” said Teller, in his ponderous, deep voice, each syllable a rumble, “you feel the best way to get humans from earth to Mars is not by using von Braun’s chemical rockets but rather through this Orion design?”
“Yes,” replied Oppenheimer.
“And Orion requires fusion bombs be ejected from its rear, and uses the explosive force of them pressing against a metal plate for propulsion?”
“Yes.”
“And it will take thousands of fusion bombs to propel the ship over interplanetary distances?”
“That’s right.”
“So the key to saving humanity is ...”
“Yes?” said Oppie, waiting for the Hungarian to finish.
“No, I prefer for you to fill in the blank. The key to saving humanity is ...”
Oppie blinked. “... is the fusion bomb.”
“Also known as ...?”
Oppie crossed and uncrossed his legs. “The thermonuclear hydrogen bomb.”
“Or, you know, more colloquially ...?”
“The super.”
“The super!” agreed Teller. “The same bomb you told me after Hiroshima that you could never work on. The same bomb whose development you did everything you possibly could to slow for over a decade now. The same bomb I have devoted my career to perfecting.”
Oppie took a long pull on his pipe then let the smoke escape from his lungs. “The irony isn’t lost on me, Ed.”
“Irony!” The word exploded from Teller’s mouth. “Irony, is it? I’ve been shunned for four years now, ever since your god-damned security trial!”
“I shook your hand, Ed.”
“You did—but not Christy! Not Rabi! Not dozens of others. You lie to the government and are—what? Martyred? But I tell the truth and am ostracized.”
“I understand how you—”
“Don’t!” snapped Teller. “Don’t you dare say you understand how I feel. You couldn’t possibly. Born rich and safe here in the United States? I’ve been exiled three times! When I was eighteen—a boy, a boy with one foot!—I had to run from my home in Hungary because there was no hope of a university career for a Jew. And when I was thirty-three, I had to flee Germany, the Nazis, Hitler. All that time you were sitting pretty, dabbling with Communism and sleeping with other people’s wives. And then, because you demanded a security-board hearing even though you knew that you’d lied repeatedly, I end up being exiled from most of the physics community!”
“Edward, you’re being—”
“Unfair? Tell me, Oppie, how does that taste? Irony, indeed, eh? And now you want my help!”
“The world wants—needs!—your help. And, come on, you owe ...”
“What?”
“No, nothing.”
“Say it.”
Oppie sat silently.
“Say it!” roared Teller.
“All right, damn it. The last time the world was in danger—the Second World War—you sat it out. We needed the A-bomb, and you wouldn’t help. I coddled you at Los Alamos, letting you pursue your own project and—”
“And now that project is the key to mankind’s salvation, eh? Right?”
Oppie took a deep breath and exhaled noisily. “Right,” he said meekly.
“Well, then,” Teller said, “for me to function, you must rehabilitate my reputation.”
“Ed, you know I have no power left.”
“Ah, but you do! What did you create in honor of Einstein’s seventieth birthday?”
Oppie nodded, understanding dawning. “The Einstein Award.” Bestowed by the Institute for Advanced Study, it went to a recipient chosen by a committee Oppie chaired. The award had been given twice so far: jointly to Kurt Gödel and Julian Schwinger in 1951 and to Dick Feynman in 1954; that year, the New York Times had declared the award “next only to the Nobel Prize” in prestige.
“So,” said Teller, folding arms in front of his chest, “it’s been four years since the last laureate. Time for another.”
Ironically—how much that word applied today!—the gold medal and $15,000 in prize money were provided by a memorial foundation named for Lewis Strauss’s parents. The award was always given on Einstein’s birthday, which was March 14; this year’s recipient would be the first since the great man had passed away.
Oppie frowned. They’d planned to give the award to Willard Libby, a Manhattan Project alumnus whose development of radiocarbon dating had revolutionized archaeology and palaeontology. “It isn’t just me on the committee,” he said.
“It wasn’t just you at Los Alamos,” replied Teller, “but your way prevailed. It wasn’t just you on the board of consultants for the international control of atomic energy, but we all know that the Acheson-Lilienthal Report was virtually dictated by you. Even now, where you go, for good or ill, others follow.”
“All right, Edward. All right. I’ll make it happen; you’ll get the medal.”
“Good,” declared the Hungarian. He paused, then nodded in satisfaction. “Now, there is work to be done. To the stars by H-bomb, eh? Let’s get to it!”