At Odds with Oppenheimer: Los Alamos and the H-Bomb Decision

During the height of the Red Scare in the 1950s, high-level officials of the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the powerful government body that managed the US nuclear stockpile, weaponized classified nuclear knowledge for political ends. The fact that AEC officials seized on former Los Alamos lab director J. Robert Oppenheimer’s past opposition to H-bomb development to discredit him publicly and to remove him from government-advising roles is relatively well-known thanks to popular books and cinema. Less well-known is that, even before the notorious AEC hearing that stripped Oppenheimer of his security clearance, Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL), birthplace of the Atomic Bomb, faced false accusations from within government of having colluded with its former director to delay or even sabotage its own H-bomb effort following the first Soviet atomic test in 1949. These accusations were intended to force the creation of a second AEC weapons lab and to shift US nuclear policy in favor of the H-bomb. Both of these goals succeeded, and the narrative that Los Alamos obstructed or slowed H-bomb development in the early 1950s, which the AEC fed to the public through politically sympathetic media outlets, persists to the present.

This presentation uses formerly classified archival sources from Los Alamos and the Department of Energy to argue that, far from colluding, Oppenheimer and Los Alamos’ postwar leadership strongly disagreed on H-bomb policy, but AEC officials exploited controls on classified nuclear information to ensure that the implicated parties could not openly challenge the accusations they faced. As a consequence, false claims made for political ends during the McCarthy era continue to shape current understanding and debates on US nuclear history and the H-bomb.