The following year, the Truman administration approved Project Screwdriver, which rounded up experts at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge national laboratories to report on the latest A-bomb detection methods. Oppenheimer’s comment about crates and basements took on new relevance after the Soviets exploded their first test bomb in August 1949. Soviet diplomats (not pictured) routinely joined the throngs entering the United States on international flights coming into Idlewild Airport. I think that just walking by, swinging a little gadget, would not give me the information.” If you hired me to walk through the cellars of Washington to see whether there were atomic bombs, I think my most important tool would be a screwdriver to open the crates and look. Oppenheimer offered little hope: “The nature of the radioactivity is such that it is not very penetrating, and in many of the designs that I think reasonable the active material would be so thoroughly buried inside a mass of other junk that the evidence radioactivity might be very slight. That day, Senator Eugene Millikin of Colorado asked Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the Manhattan Project’s atomic-weapons laboratory, if the United States had radiation detectors able to catch such weapons if they were smuggled across the border. The idea that raw material for one or more of those nuclear devices might be smuggled into the United States is a worry that stretches back to the onset of the cold war and was the topic at a closed hearing of the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy on December 5, 1945.
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