“He has more elbows than an octopus,” noted a colleague. The thin-skinned Strauss didn’t forget slights easily. “There was a look of hatred there that you don’t see very often in a man’s face,” AEC chairman David Lilienthal recalled. Senate hearing, leaving Strauss flush with rage. Oppenheimer perceived Strauss as a meddler and mocked the amateur physicist’s opposition to exporting radioisotopes for medical purposes at a U.S. Strauss Orchestrates Oppenheimer’s BlacklistingĪfter Strauss appointed Oppenheimer as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1947, the relationship had quickly frayed. Strauss agreed on one condition-that Oppenheimer no longer serve as a consultant to the commission. Months later, Eisenhower asked Strauss to chair the AEC.

Strauss, who had been a major donor to Eisenhower’s presidential campaign, wielded considerable power as all federal agencies were required to clear their atomic-related activities with him.

Eisenhower appointed him as an atomic energy adviser in February 1953. detonated the world’s first H-bomb, only to have the Soviets follow suit 10 months later.Īfter leaving the AEC in 1950, Strauss re-entered government when newly elected President Dwight D. Strauss successfully lobbied Truman, who publicly announced his decision to develop the hydrogen bomb on January 31, 1950. Fearing the hydrogen bomb would only accelerate a dangerous Cold War arms race, Oppenheimer also argued for more openness about the size and capabilities of America’s nuclear arsenal, which Strauss thought would only benefit the Soviets. Robert Oppenheimer, the chairman of the AEC’s general advisory committee who led the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Strauss found his support for a hydrogen bomb doggedly opposed by physicist J. “I am thinking of a commitment in talent and money comparable, if necessary, to that which produced the first atomic weapon. “The time has now come for a quantum jump in our planning,” he wrote. With the United States no longer the world’s sole nuclear superpower, Strauss vigorously supported a massive program to develop a thermonuclear “super bomb” that would be 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Strauss urged the Pentagon to establish an atmospheric monitoring system, which successfully detected the Soviet Union’s own first atomic bomb test within days of its detonation in August 1949. nuclear program from the Manhattan Project, the top-secret wartime research and development team that built America’s first atomic bomb. Truman appointed Strauss as one of the first five commissioners of the newly established Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which assumed control of the U.S. History Shorts: How the Atomic Bomb Was Used in WWII Strauss Champions U.S. Navy during World War II, Strauss emerged at the forefront of America’s Cold War nuclear program. After working administrative jobs with the U.S. That philanthropic work deepened his relationships with physicists working on discovery of nuclear fission. Strauss so impressed Hoover that he became the future president’s personal secretary before joining a New York investment banking firm in 1919 and eventually earning more than $1 million a year.Īfter both his parents died of cancer, Strauss established a fund that financed the use of radium as a treatment. “It was clear that to have a hand in feeding the hungry and clothing the naked in Belgium and northern France was to have a hand in history,” Strauss recalled. Instead of toting textbooks, Strauss lugged trunks of shoe samples across the Southeast as a traveling salesman until he volunteered to help with World War I relief efforts spearheaded by Herbert Hoover. He devoured books on radiation and wave mechanics in high school, but his dreams of studying physics in college after graduation yielded to the reality of his father’s struggling footwear business. Born into a horse-and-buggy world in 1896, he first developed an interest in physics as a boy when he used a vibrating tuning fork to make waves in a bowl of mercury while waiting for a dentist to repair his tooth. Strauss took an unlikely path to his perch as atomic policy czar. He also became known for his role in the dramatic downfall of the A-bomb's chief developer, physicist J.

A Wall Street financier who skipped college to sell shoes, Lewis Strauss became one of America's most important atomic-energy advisers during the Cold War.

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