THE OPPENHEIMER
CASE
617
witnesses than by Dr. Oppenheimer himself-the result of a crash
program for a thermonuclear weapon would be that both the public
and the government would tend to substitute military thinking for
political thinking, with disastrous effect on our democratic allies.
In other words, neither pacifism nor tenderness for the Soviet
Union animated Dr. Oppenheimer's moral and political consider–
ations. And in every reason for
his
opposition to the crash program
he was supported by persons of the greatest variety of political atti–
tudes and background. Whereas before I read the transcript I had
supposed that it was only the "liberal-progressives" among the sci–
entists, all of them more or less formed by the same political culture
which had bred Dr. Oppenheimer, who joined him
in
his opposition
to the super weapon, the record convinces me that this was not so.
There was Oliver Buckley, for instance, the now retired Chairman
of the Board of the Bell Telephone Laboratories and previously
President of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, who opposed produc–
tion of the H-bomb in 1949 solely on the ground that you do not
pursue a production program before you know there is something
producible. There was Dr. Robert Bacher, an upstate Republican,
who after helping assess the Russian atomic explosion still believed
that an H-bomb was little addition to our arsenal. There was Hartley
Rowe, Vice President and Director of the United Fruit Company,
who opposed a crash program for the super weapon until we should
more nearly have perfected the military potentialities of the A–
weapons and who also took the position that no people can go from
one awful weapon to another without losing all normal perspective
on their relations with other countries. There was Sumner T. Pike,
Chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Maine, who was
against the H-bomb because at the time we had no knowledge the
military needed such a weapon, because of the cost of producing
tritium, because a smaller weapon might get more efficiency and
because there are benefits as well as destruction to be got from
fission but only destruction from fusion. The list can be extended.
The weight of evidence, in short, is conclusive that it was
perfectly possible to oppose the H-bomb without being influenced
either by Dr. Oppenheimer himself, great as his powers of persuasion
are said to be, or by Soviet sympathy. This is not to say, of course,
that Dr. Oppenheimer
could
not have come to his own views for
