stepped down from the Atomic Energy Commission. He and AEC Chairman David Lilienthal wanted a physicist to replace Bacher, and they ultimately recommended Smyth for the position. President Harry Truman nominated Smyth to the AEC later that year, prompting Smyth to resign as Physics Department chairman. (His old colleague Allen Shenstone took up the post.) Smyth was the commission's only scientist. He spent his first weeks in the position attending hearings of the U.S. Congress's Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Led by Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, the hearings inquired into a small amount of uranium that was alleged to be unaccounted for in AEC labs. Smyth later condemned the hearings as grounded in misconceptions about the work of nuclear scientists. Following the Soviet Union's successful atomic bomb test in August 1949, the United States was considering a crash course to develop a hydrogen bomb. The AEC's nine-member General Advisory Committee, chaired by J. Robert Oppenheimer, recommended unanimously in October 1949 against such a course. Although Smyth did not think that committee's report was well-constructed, he also initially opposed an H-bomb program. In early November he became one of three of the five AEC commissioners to take a stance in opposition. After looking at how the proposed weapon might be used and at what the domestic and international reaction would be to any use, Smyth felt that the H-bomb would be of little utility, and instead favored reopening discussions towards the international control of nuclear weapons. But by late January 1950, Smyth's position on the question was wavering towards being in favor of moving forward with development. In any case, on January 31, 1950, Truman decided to authorize a hydrogen bomb program. Smyth became a supporter of the weapon, and in February 1950, endorsed a specific program for the future production of H-bombs. In his autobiography, Smyth's Princeton colleague John Archibald Wheeler recalled that Smyth recruited him to the hydrogen bomb project and expressed support for the project in response to the Soviet test. Indeed, by the time of that test Smyth was looking for ways to use a successful thermonuclear explosion's psychological impact to benefit American foreign policy aims. Urged by a journal editor to publish his recollections of the H-bomb decision, Smyth drafted several attempts at an article but eventually abandoned it. Nonetheless, in subsequent years Smyth became defensive about his shift in position on the hydrogen bomb, saying that