Advising on the Super

Abstract

This chapter looks into the business of campaigning for or against nuclear development. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and its committees were at the epicenter of this debate. Here, the array of advice and potential pressure on the question of the Super as it existed in late 1949 offered no clear direction to the president. Powerful congressional opinion challenged the advice of the most powerfully placed scientists, but that had not yet been sufficient to swing Truman behind the Super's development. His views, however, began to take shape in mid-January after receiving a report on the military aspects. Furthermore, the scientific General Advisory Committee (GAC), chaired by the former Los Alamos laboratory director J. Robert Oppenheimer, enjoyed a privileged position that it used to block, as it seemed, further activity beyond the theoretical work already accomplished at Los Alamos.