had seen the islanders as a valuable laboratory case of human exposure. The Limited Test Ban Treaty banning atmospheric tests would not be arrived at until 1963, and the U.S. government engage in a series of reevaluations of the health of the islanders, and relocation and economic packages to compensate them, over the next several decades. Strauss and others in the AEC were also dismissive of the dangers Americans faced who were downwind of the Nevada Test Site. The Sputnik crisis of 1957 led Eisenhower to create the President's Science Advisory Committee. Once that body was in place, Eisenhower began to directly receive a broader selection of scientific information; Strauss lost his ability to control scientists' access to the president and his influence within the administration began to recede. While Strauss had maintained his hostility towards Anglo-American cooperation on nuclear matters since becoming AEC chairman, Sputnik gave impetus to renewed cooperation on this front. Strauss visited Prime Minister Harold Macmillan to give a message from Eisenhower to this effect, and subsequent talks and hearings resulted in the 1958 US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement coming into place. As AEC chairman, Strauss was informed regarding U.S. intelligence findings on the Dimona reactor in Israel. He met with Ernst David Bergmann, chairman of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission and a key early force in the Israeli nuclear program (and years later would help Bergmann get a visiting fellowship in the United States). While Strauss's thoughts on the Israeli effort to develop nuclear weapons are not documented, his wife later said that he would have been in favor of Israel being able to defend itself. Strauss and Oppenheimer During his terms as an AEC commissioner, Strauss became hostile to Oppenheimer, the physicist who had been director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project and who, after the war, became a celebrated public figure and remained in influential positions in atomic energy. In 1947, Strauss, a trustee of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, presented Oppenheimer with the institute's offer to be its director. Strauss himself, as a man of high intelligence and financial skills if not higher education, had also been considered for the job; he was the institute's faculty's fifth-ranked choice, while Oppenheimer was their first-ranked. Strauss, a conservative Republican, had little in common with Oppenheimer, a liberal who had had Communist associations. Oppenheimer subsequently was a leading opponent of moving