Christy joined Oppenheimer, Lauritsen and Robert Bacher, who joined the faculty at Caltech in 1949, in Project Vista, a detailed 1951 study on how Western Europe could be defended against the Soviet Union. Christy was distraught at the outcome of the 1954 Oppenheimer security hearing. When he encountered Teller, who had testified against Oppenheimer, at Los Alamos in 1954, Christy publicly refused to shake Teller's hand. "I viewed Oppenheimer as a god", he later recalled, "and I was sure that he was not a treasonable person." Asked about his relationship with Teller in 2006, Christy said: