Lovett, a powerful member of the foreign policy establishment, feared that if news of the moratorium idea leaked, Senator Joseph McCarthy would have a field day investigating the State Department and its panel of advisers. Three weeks later, the United States exploded a 10.4-megaton thermonuclear bomb in the Pacific, vaporizing the island of Elugelab. A clearly depressed Conant told a Newsweek reporter, “I no longer have any connection with the atomic bomb. I have no sense of accomplishment.”
