Eisenhower in 1954. As chairman of the AEC in the late 1940s, during the early years of the Cold War, Lilienthal played an important role in managing relations between the scientific community and the U.S. Government. The AEC was responsible for managing atomic energy development for the military as well as for civilian use. Lilienthal was responsible for ensuring that the Commander-in-Chief would have the use of a number of working atomic bombs. Lilienthal did not have as much enthusiasm for this task as some in Washington, and in particular he received steady criticism from Senators Brien McMahon and Bourke B. Hickenlooper, the chairman and ranking member of the United States Congress Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, for not pursuing the task with sufficient vigor. Indeed, in 1949 Hickenlooper raised charges that Lilienthal had engaged in "incredible mismanagement" and tried to have him removed as chairman; Lilienthal was cleared of wrongdoing but was left politically weakened within Washington. Once the Soviet Union had successfully tested its own atomic bomb, Lilienthal became a central figure in the August 1949–January 1950 debate within the U.S. government and scientific community over whether to proceed with development of the hydrogen bomb. President Truman appointed a three-person special committee, composed of Secretary of State Dean Acheson and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson in addition to Lilienthal as head of the AEC, to formulate a report to him on the matter. Lilienthal was opposed to development, stating among other reasons that the proposed weapon lacked a clear political or strategic rationale and that being overly dependent upon nuclear forces (rather than maintaining strong conventional forces) was an unwise security posture. But Lilienthal failed to marshal bureaucratic support for his position, in part due to the limitations of secrecy preventing him from finding allies and in part due to his repeated arguments losing their effectiveness. The three-person committee made its recommendation to proceed to Truman in a meeting on January 31, 1950, and the president so ordered. (Lilienthal ended up appearing to support the recommendation on the surface while trying to register a dissent as well, a confused situation that only became more so with additional memoranda filed after the fact and with conflicting recollections among the participants in years to follow.) In his 1963 book, Change, Hope and the Bomb, Lilienthal criticized nuclear developments, denouncing the nuclear industry's failure to have addressed the dangers of nuclear