HANS BETHE'S SILENT WHISTLE

...By these standards we declare that the Government is engaged in an illegal and immoral activity, namely the production and deployment of nuclear weapons...

...That's the most interesting aspect of these revelations about the history of the hydrogen bomb...

...Not at all, says Bethe...

...Partly for this reason, some members of the British Atomic Energy team, already working in the United States on other aspects of the Manhattan District [atomic bomb] project, were brought to Los Alamos and asked to help with this problem...

...The Soviets did not successfully test their first deliverable H-bomb until late in 1955...

...one of them wrote to me...

...America and the world have paid dearly for their silence...

...Remember Klaus Fuchs...

...That's the way the game is played in most organizations in and out of government...

...That was the model Hans Bethe gave fellow dissenters who remained with him inside the H-bomb circle...

...Why...

...In Bethe's case, the watering down took the form of a twenty-nine-year delay—long enough to cool his passion, long enough to usher his argument from the stage of political action to the archives, long enough to hold his point in suspense until it could safely be dissipated as a footnote setting the record straight and stirring nostalgic memories of some remote, obscure historical event...

...Every nuclear weapon is...

...There were public debates about the H-bomb in the early 1950s, the antiballistic missile (ABM) in the late 1960s, the MX missile in recent times...

...He says a U.S.-Soviet mutual ban on H-bomb development and testing would have been readily verifiable...

...The project had a high priority at Los Alamos, and scientists there were enthusiastic about following Teller's lead even in the face of growing evidence that his early theories would not work...

...The decision to build the hydrogen bomb was clearly wrong, Bethe seemed to be saying in 1954...

...it was calamitously wrong because, as he correctly foresaw, it introduced a new arms race that would ultimately threaten humanity with annihilation...

...We make the same assertion to the Soviet government and all other nations that possess or intend to produce nuclear weapons...

...Therefore, we cannot and will not collaborate with it...

...It is both illegal and immoral to organize the killing of every child in the Soviet Union in the name of national security...

...is a contributing editor of The Progressive, former editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and free-lance author and lecturer based in Madison, Wisconsin...

...In keeping silent, in failing to confront the fraudulence of such acts of suppression as those which affected Bethe himself in 1950, 1954, and 1979, the atomic scientists who followed Bethe's example forfeited the opportunity to educate the American people by sharing the full measure of their fears and misgivings—and thus to foment the kind of grass-roots reappraisal of nuclear warfare that now seems at long last to have begun despite them...

...Did Oppenheimer and his followers at Los Alamos allow their philosophical misgivings about the H-bomb to color their technical judgment and their professional advice to the policy makers...

...A pity the world's H-bomb stockpile had to grow to 60,000-plus before Bethe's warning was delivered...

...And until our Government decides to adopt this legal and moral course, we urge our fellow Americans to follow a policy of noncollaboration...

...Teller looks more and more like a madman—erratic, obsessed...

...That reputation undergoes a vigorous buffeting in the current revelations by Bethe, an acknowledged partisan of Oppenheimer who commands credibility because of the leading role he has played in U.S...

...Far from hastening U.S...

...Absolutely not, says Bethe...

...He points out that the first successful H-bomb test on November 1,1952, and all the tests that followed in the next few years were entirely the work of Los Alamos...

...He offers a clue to the answer in his 1954 history of the H-bomb: "In summary, I still believe that the development of the H-bomb is a calamity...

...Why had he waited so long...

...Every nuclear weapon is its own Auschwitz...

...Department of Energy asked him to help it suppress an article by free-lance writer Howard Morland in The Progressive concerning H-bomb secrecy...

...He acknowledges that Teller can't be faulted for this because the computers of that day were still primitive...

...The article in question was headed Rewriting the History of the H-Bomb...

...In 1950, the Atomic Energy Commission stopped the presses of Scientific American and destroyed several thousand copies of an issue containing an article by Bethe about thermonuclear fusion...

...He is by no means alone...

...They were written almost thirty years ago...

...But Bethe's point is that the caution urged by Oppenheimer and the Los Alamos laboratory in the early 1950s proved to be a sounder and surer way toward the H-bomb than the crash programs Teller had advocated...

...Their omissions have been a more powerful propellant of the nuclear arms race than the ragings and the ravings of any individual—even of a "madman" like Edward Teller...

...Popular wisdom (fed by many books and magazine articles) holds that Teller, a Hungarian refugee scientist who helped design the atomic bomb in World War II, had to overcome formidable obstacles in order to get America's hydrogen bomb program into high gear in the 1950s...

...We deeply believe that the nature of nuclear war, including the concept of deterrence, violates the legal norms established at Nuremberg...

...Another trophy was Oppenheimer's scalp...

...The group included The Progressive's senior editor, Sidney Lens, and several others who have contributed to this magazine—Philip Berri-gan, Frank Collins, Marcus Raskin, David McReynolds, Michael Parenti, and John M. Swomley Jr.—as well as Norma Becker, Richard Deats, Michio Kaku, Elizabeth McAlister, Saul Mendlovitz, Jim Rice, and Molly Rush...

...The article was stamped "Secret" by the AEC...

...hydrogen bomb program was still in its infancy, the Soviets were still more than a year away from their first successful H-bomb test, and the Oppenheimer security case was still a burning issue when Hans Bethe wrote his H-bomb history in 1954...

...Was a second laboratory needed, as Teller insisted, to get the H-bomb program off the ground...

...It read, Nobel Laureate Hans Bethe says technical errors by Edward Teller, not political opposition by Robert Oppenheimer, hindered work on the superbomb...

...I did and still do this because it seems to me that once one is engaged in a race, one clearly must endeavor to win...

...One of Teller's victory trophies was establishment of a rival laboratory at Livermore, California, where his influence would be unchallenged, to spur development of the H-bomb...

...There it was—an account of a recently published article by Cornell University physicist Hans A. Bethe, a highly respected figure in and out of the nuclear weapons community, challenging some of the folk history that credits Edward Teller with being "the father of the hydrogen bomb...

...Publisher Gerard Piel charged the AEC with "suppressing information which the American people need in order to form intelligent judgments," but Bethe declined to complain about it...

...Bethe believed the book required "an immediate answer...

...Bethe argues strenuously that the United States should have thought long and hard before leading the world across a new threshold of destructive capability vastly greater even than the atomic bomb...

...The Atomic Energy Commission, to which Bethe had dutifully submitted his article for security clearance, believed otherwise...

...We call on our nation and all other nuclear nations to ban the bomb, meet human needs...

...This led to some interesting consequences: "Since the theoretical division was very shorthanded, it was necessary to bring in new scientists to do the work that Teller declined to do," Bethe writes...

...The leader of the British theoretical group was Rudolf Peierls, and another very hardworking member was Klaus Fuchs...

...He himself has said so many times...

...The U.S...

...There was no demonstrable U.S...

...What made the case of Hans Bethe and other reluctant H-bomb designers a little different—in addition to the cosmic nature of the issues and their consequences—was that when the Government gained their cooperation it also won their silence...

...Their technical cautiousness arose out of technical problems, some of which were created by Teller himself...

...A point well made...

...Ironically, the article was by Edward Teller—and the same sketches appeared later in another encyclopedia accompanying an article by Bethe himself...

...Bethe's answer—"we must win the race"—seems wildly out of place on the lips of an eminent physicist, a specialist in thermonuclear physics, who knows better than most that there can be no winners in a nuclear arms race or in a nuclear war...

...For many who follow the politics of nuclear weaponry, and especially for those who follow the politics of nuclear weaponry from a liberal perspective, the news was exhilarating: "Have you seen the November issue of Science...

...development of the hydrogen bomb, Teller unwittingly led Los Alamos designers into a blind alley with impetuous calculations that proved to be inaccurate and incomplete, Bethe contends...

...I still believe that it was necessary to make a pause before the decision to consider this irrevocable step most carefully...

...Why did Bethe acquiesce in such highhanded measures to muzzle himself and others...

...Did Oppenheimer and the others drag their heels once President Truman gave the order to proceed with H-bomb development...

...He wrote "The Afrikaner Bomb" in the September 1982 issue...

...Atomic Energy Commission's decision to topple Oppenheimer from power by stripping him of his security clearance— the all-important access to secret atomic information...

...Auschwitz' The planning, possession, and production of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery are crimes against humanity, as defined by the Nuremberg trials in which our Government played a major role...

...Their statement continued: If the Nazi slaughter was a violation of international law, surely nuclear holocaust even more fundamentally violates the rule of law...

...Russia has to follow the tune or be a second-class power...

...I am delighted...

...Too bad the country didn't hear that message when it would have done the most good...

...A shame that Americans weren't privy to the facts of the H-bomb debate at a time when they could have participated...

...Allegations that he had dragged his feet against the H-bomb figured heavily in the U.S...

...At the Department's urging, Bethe signed an affidavit supporting the Government's contention that the article disclosed secret concepts, even though the concepts were derived from such readily available sources as sketches accompanying an article in the Encyclopedia Americana...

...security need for an H-bomb, Bethe writes, but "once we announced we would go ahead, the Russians clearly had no choice but to do the same...

...In the field of atomic weapons, we have called the tune since the end of the war, both in quality and in quantity...

...The Agenda includes proposed acts of noncollaboration ranging from conferences, marches, and demonstrations to tax refusal, draft registration resistance, and creation of nuclear-free zones...

...The Teller-Oppenheimer struggle split the American scientific community and continues to divide it to this day...

...Far from it, says Bethe...

...One senses that what he really meant was the simple maxim that when the boss decides—right or wrong—the debate ends and the team closes ranks...

...What about the larger question of whether it was wise to have developed the hydrogen bomb...

...Nor did he challenge the nuclear weapons bureaucracy in 1979, when the U.S...

...And yet, once the decision was made and the technology seemed sound, he felt it was his duty to cooperate...

...at the Los Alamos, New Mexico, weapons laboratory, who shared his misgivings about thermonuclear escalation of the atomic arms race...

...On such victories rests Teller's reputation as the man who put America ahead in the H-bomb race...

...While giving credit to Teller as a genius who contributed brilliant ideas to the development of the hydrogen bomb, Bethe also pictures him as a prima donna who thought himself too gifted to participate in mundane teamwork with other scientists and who flatly refused to shoulder his share of the load in designing the wartime atomic bomb...

...Much of the problem, according to the Teller legend, stemmed from the squeamishness of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the nation's ranking atomic weapons scientist, and his followers Samuel H. Day Jr...

...The irony of Edward Teller, arch-anticommunist, having unwittingly opened the door to the spy who became the Soviet Union's principal pipeline to the U.S...

...One glance at the subtitle was enough to explain my friend's glee...

...Bear in mind that Hans Bethe's inside expose of the political machinations of the H-bomb players, his informed discussion of how an H-bomb race could be avoided, and his eloquent plea for reconsideration while there was still time all are warnings that went undelivered until twenty-nine years after the fact...

...Readers who wish to subscribe to the statement or obtain more information about it should write to: John M. Swomley Jr., 5123 Truman Road, Kansas City, MO 64127...

...His article was intended as a response to a glowingly pro-Teller book, Hydrogen Bomb: The Men, the Menace, the Mechanism, by two stridently anti-Oppenheimer journalists, James R. Shepley and Clay Blair Jr...

...nuclear weapons program is one that needs no elaboration by Bethe...

...Hans Bethe, insistent upon getting along by going along, upon collegiality at all costs, even in the making of H-bombs, was the principal collaborator in his own suppression...

...But once the decision was made to go ahead with the program, and once there was a sound technical program, I cooperated with it to the best of my ability...

...Why did Hans Bethe wait until now, one may well ask, to blow his whistle...

...Those words are from "An Agenda for Noncollaboration" drafted by veteran antiwar activists who met in Washington late last November to inaugurate a new campaign of nonviolent resistance to the nuclear arms race...

...First you debate the options, and when a decision is made you cooperate...

...We promise to participate in and support actions of noncollaboration ranging from moderate ones that involve minor risk to major nonviolent acts of civil disobedience...

...It is true, of course, that Bethe and other pillars of the nuclear weapons establishment have been heard in public from time to time when differences over one issue or another could not be contained within the inner circle...

...But invariably these expressions of dissent have been muted and diluted to the degree deemed necessary by those who set the rules for these debates and who have a heavy stake in the outcome—the managers of the nuclear weapons program...

...nuclear weapons development since the beginning of the atomic age...

...It did not see the light of day until last fall, when, prompted by some historical mistakes in a new book, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Shatterer of Worlds, by Peter Goodchild, Bethe was moved to press for its declassification so he could publish a revised version in Los Alamos Scientist, a quarterly publication of the laboratory...

...I still believe that the possibility of an agreement with Russia not to develop the bomb should have been explored...

...The 1954 suppression of his political and scientific views was not Bethe's first encounter with official censors...

...It was as if a dissenter had disappeared briefly into his closet, closed the door, shouted loudly, and then returned to work...