United States Atomic Energy Commission Volume VIII; In the Matter Of: J. Robert Oppenheimer

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UNITED STATES ATOMIC ENERGY COARUSS!ON In the Matter of Atomic Energy Commission, The abo•·e entitled matter came on for hearingr PERSONNEL SECURITY BOARD: ROGER ROBB 0 and LLOYD Ko GARRISON, SAMUEL J. SILVERMAN, and ALLEN Bo ECKER, Counsel for Jc Robert Oppenheimer. HERBERT Sa !1v.\RKS, Co-Counsel for Jo Robert Oppenheimer.

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Uitm:is;:; Direct Cross Redirect Ee cross HORMAN FOSTER RAMSEY: JR. 1453 1465

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MR. GRAY: The proceeding will resume. tm. Pike, do you wish to testify under oath? You are not required to do so. r.m. PIKE: I would rather testify under oath. rvm. GRAY: What is your full name, sir? .MR. GRAY: Sumner T. Pike, do you SWClll.. that the testimony you are to give the Board shall be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God? r~. GUAY: Will you be aettted 1 please, Eir. Mny I, perhaps unuocessarily, call you attention to the existenco of the perjury statutes. I am sure you are familiar with them. ! should like to request that if in the course of your testi1non;,i,' it becoues necessary for you to discuss or disclose restricted data you will notify the chairman in advance so we can take necessary steps under those circumnm. PIKE : I may have to ask Mr. Bolander whether things are restricted or not because I have been away from this thing for two and a half years and I don't know what has been released. ~m. GRAY: Please be free to malte any inquiry about

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MB. GRAY: '.fhe other thing I should like to oay to you, si , is that we treat these proceedings as a confiden~ial matter between the Commission and its officials and Dr. Oppenheimer and his representatiYes and witnesses. The Commission will initiate no releases with respect to this proceeding. We are expressing the hope that each witness will take the same attitude. MR. PIKE: It bothers me a little bit in case there should be leaks as to what attitude shall I take, but as far as it seems reasonable and possible, I will go along with your feeling on it. I will be the source of no leaks. ~m.. GRAY: I have simply'stated the position of Mr. Garrison, would you proceed. was called as a witness, having been duly sworn, was examined and testified as follows: A I am Chairman of the Public Utilities Commission in the State of r.7aine.

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Q Appointed to that by the Governor? A Yes. The Council follows very much the same confirmation procedure as the Senate. Q Are you engaged in business in Maine, also? A Yes. I am a part owner of a couple of businesses. Q You served on the Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to the end of 1951, did you not? A Exactly to December 15, 1951. Q You were acting Chairman the last four months? A No. It was between tts time Mr. Lilienthal left which I think was in February, 1950, until Gordon Dean was appointed, I believe, in July of that same year, for a few Q During this period you were well acquainted with Q Would you say something about the nature and extent A I first met Dr. Oppenheimer, I think, at ·,~he first meeting of the General Advisory Committee -- I don't remember the date of that. -- during that pGiri.od, which must have

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5 been late 1946 or early 1947 until the day I left. It happens to be the day that they were meeting. I also saw him when they met in l'l:-1shington, which was, I think, oftener than the statutory minimum of four times a year. I sometimes saw h:l.m outside of the meetings and I sometimes saw him when he was in Washington not at a meeting of the ComHe was in town at times as a member of other boards and committees and sometimes perhaps as just an individual. Outside of the office I saw him -- well, let me see, there was a period I think during the summer of 1947 when we boarded at the Bohemian Grove Forest out in California. We were there three or four days. A The Commission, its laboratory heads, some of the Wigner. I don't remember whether he was a laboratory head or not at that time. At that period we were put around at the various cottages and Dr. Oppenheimer, Mr. Lilienthal and I were put in the same cottage. There were other times, once perhaps, or oftener, when the committee was here I had them up to dinner between A The GAC, yes. I saw Dr. Oppenheimer, I think, at

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G Dr. Smyth's house. I believe that day Ileft I was going to see him again but there was a bad snowstorm and nobody could get to Dr. Smyth•s. I have not seen him from then until Q The relations between the Atomic Energy Conwission and the GAC were of a fairly close character, would you say? A Yes, I should think so. Q Did you attend meetings of the GAC? A Yes. Their custom was to ask us in, usually once or twice during their meetings, and then almo.st invariably at the end of their meetings, at which time Dr. Oppenheimer would give us an oral review of the things thnt they had been taking up and the results they arrived at. Later, as I remember it, he would send a written summary. I don't think there was any meeting they had here that I did not attend in part, except possibly when I was away on vacation or on Commission business. Q Did you attend a meeting in Princeton in the early summer of 1951 over which Dr. Oppenheimer presided? The purpose of that meeting was to push forward It was to pull together, as I remember it, various ideas that had developed about hydrogen or fusion weapons. It was quite a substantial meeting. As I remember it lasted

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7 the better part of two days. Q Mr. Pike, there has been a good deal of testimony here about the work of the GAC, and I am going to try to avoid duplicating the record, so I will just ask you a Based on your observations and of the knowledge of the work of the GAC and of Dr. Oppenheimer's chairmanship of it, did you form any impression as to his own contribution to strengthening the country in the six years that you have been talking about? A Yes; I think theGAC under his chairmanship made a major contribution to the work of the Commission and the Commission, I take it, was trying to work for the good of Q You have read the Commission's letter of December 23, 1953, which initiated these proceedings, containing the A Yes, I read the New York Times which I take it gave the full letter. Q On the basis of your knowledge of Dr. Oppenheimer and your·experiences with him, what is your opinion as to A I never had any question about his loyalty. I think he is a man of essential integrity. I think he has been a fool several times, but there was nothing in there that

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3 shook my feeling. As a matter of fact, it was a pretty good summary, it seemed to me, of the material that was turned over to us early in 1947 by the F.B.I., all except the last thing about the hydrogen bomb. Ofcourse, that was not in then. Q The letter and, I assume, the file contained data about past associations of his. Q In your judgment is his character and the associations of the past and his loyalty such that if he were to continue to have access to restricted data, he would not endanger the common defense or security? A No, 1· don't think he would endanger the common defense or security the least bit. Q You read about the Chevalier incident in the Q It is not clear as to how much of that story was in the file that you went over in 1947. I assume you went over whatever the file was? Q And participated in the discussions with the other

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Q Do you or do you not have any clear recollection of the Chevalier incident as of that time? If you don't, A I don't think I have much beyond the summary of the letter of last week, which was published last week. There was a lot more there. It was a pretty thick file, but I don't remember exactly what was.in the file. Q May I put to you a hypothetical question which I put to you, I think, last night in order that you might have an opportunity to reflect on it. Supposing that it were established in addition to the description of the incident as it appears :Jn the Commission's letter that after the conversation between Chevalier and Dr. Oppenheimer in which Chevalier had informed him that Eltenton was in a position to tra~smit secret data to Russia that for several months Dr. Oppenheimer failed to report the matter to the security officers; that thereafter he did on his own initiative report to the security officers, but revealed only the name of Eltenton, and declined when pressed to do so to reveal the name of Chevalier, was not frank in describing the exact circumstances of what had taken place, added to the story about Chevalier without mentioning many certain facts which were not in the picture; that later when again pressed to

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10 Groves asked him to reveal the uame and he said he would not do so unless ordered; that General Groves said he didn't want to order him to do it, asked him to think it ovor and met with him again and said he would have to order him unless Dr. Oppenheimer would tell him the name and D~. Oppenheimer finally revealed the name of Chevalier. Assuming that this were established would this alter the opinion that you have expressed here to the Board about your present views of Dr. Oppenheimer's loyalty and the propriety of his having continued access to restricted Q Do you want to say why it wouldn't alter your A I think it was a bad incident. Taken alone it would have bothered me very much. I suspect I have been party to incidents in my life that I rather not have certainly taken out of context. This, woven into the context, however, of performance under closer observation for him, many years and achievements of such size as to warrant the gratitude of this country, I don't think it should be given much weight at all. Q Turning to another topic of the H-bomb for a moment, without going into the details about which there is a great deal in the record, as I understand it in reporting

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11 to the President the views of the Atomic Energy Commission about whether to go forward with an all out H-bomb program or not, following the Russian explosion in the fall of 1949, there were several separate reports, were there not? A There were. I think there were four. Q Would you just say what they were? I mean who made these four reports? A Strauss made one definitely for going ahead; Dean made another in which he recommended some prior -- Q He already has testified. A Smyth and Lilienthal made another. Q Mr. Lilienthal has testified about that. A .I agreed with them that this was not the time to go on an all out effort but put in a supplementary memorandum which, as I remember, I had to put in somewhat later on account of being on the Coast. I had to take a trip at Q You went to the Coast after the discussion? A After the discussion. I don't think I put in my separate memorandum until I got back. That must have been about the middle of November. Q That was about ten days after the meeting or some-

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A Yes. \Vhether it went to the Security Council or the President, I don't know. I have to perhaps say here that I had not realized that I had any access to records so I have not looked at any records since I left the Commission in 1951 and, of course, took none with me. I am relying co~ pletely on my memory as to the time and dates. Q Do you remember the substance of the points that you made in that memorandum? A One of them was that we had no knowledge that the military needed such a weapon. Another one was that the cost of producing tritium in terms of plutonium that might otherwise be produced looked fantastically high -- 80 to 100 times, probably, gram for gram. The third one, and this sort of tied into the first, was, as we all know, that the damage power of the bomb does not increase with the size of the explosion, and it seemed that it might possibly be a wasted effort to make a great big one where some smaller ones would get more I think I put in another one.: That as between the fission work we were doing and the fusion thing in question here, there were some good things about the f~ssion tbings. Up to that time and up to the present nobod.y has

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13 brought up anything useful for mankind out of the fusion. A The fusion. In other words, I have never yet heard of any possibility of anything beneficial coming from the hydrogen end of it. A Other than as a weapon. Again I am going entirely from memory, but I think that is what I put in my memorandum. Q These were your own independent views? A They were my own. They could not be completely independent beca'u:se the Lord knows we had been talking and discussing and, let us say, arguing for well over a month at that time, possibly nearer two months.. So the views were the result of a great deal of discussion. I think they were my own. I came with a slightly different set of reasons than the others, although I did come out with the same recommendation as Lilienthal and Smyth did. r.m. GARRISON: I think that is all, l\fr. Chairman. MR. ROBB: I have no questions. MR. GRAY: I have some questions, Mr. Pike. I have been in the course of these proceedings pursuing something that has been illusory and evasive as far as I am concerned, and it may be just because I don't comprehend what has been said. This perhaps invc•lves a matter of recollection on your part, so, ·Of course, you can testify

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J.I,': only v.rhat you recall about it. In Dr. Oppenheimer's reply, dated March 4, to General Nichols' letter, he referred to the October 29, 1949 meeting of the General Advisory Committee and indicated that this meeting was called …