Military Work at Berkeley and the Loyalty Oath

Despite the unprecedented and highly productive postwar activity at UCRL in accelerator-based high-energy particle physics, E. O. Lawrence personally never quite demobilized after the end of World War II. He pursued the Calutron electromagnetic uranium enrichment program until the AEC terminated it in 1948. He maintained a skeptical aloofness from the efforts to achieve international control of atomic energy that were to be followed by worldwide prohibition of nuclear weapons. The initiatives of Robert Oppenheimer resulting in the Acheson–Lilienthal Report were converted into the ill-fated Baruch Plan, but Lawrence refused to serve on the advisory committee to Bernard Baruch, notwithstanding that the proposal would have perpetuated the U.S. monopoly on nuclear weapons and was, as expected, rejected by the Soviets.