Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin

by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

  Over the years, critics of Oppenheimer’s 1946 proposals for international control have charged him with political naïveté. Stalin, they argue, would never have accepted inspections. Oppenheimer himself understood this point. “I cannot tell,” he wrote years later, “and I think that no one can tell, whether early actions along the lines suggested by Bohr would have changed the course of history. There is not anything that I know of Stalin’s behavior that gives one any shred of hope on that score. But Bohr understood that this action was to create a change in the situation. He did not say, except once in jest, ‘another experimental arrangement,’ but this is the model he had in mind. I think that if we had acted in accordance, wisely and clearly and discreetly in accordance with his views, we might have been freed of our rather sleazy sense of omnipotence, and our delusions about the effectiveness of secrecy, and turned our society toward a healthier vision of a future worth living for.”

  Later that summer, Lilienthal visited Oppenheimer in his Washington hotel room and the two men talked late into the night about what had happened. “He is really a tragic figure,” Lilienthal wrote in his diary, “with all his great attractiveness, brilliance of mind. As I left him he looked so sad: ‘I am ready to go anywhere and do anything [Oppie said], but I am bankrupt of further ideas. And I find that physics and the teaching of physics, which is my life, now seems irrelevant.’ It was this last that really wrung my heart.”

  Oppenheimer’s anguish was real and deep. He felt a personal responsibility for the consequences of his work at Los Alamos. Every day the newspaper headlines gave him evidence that the world might once again be on the road to war. “Every American knows that if there is another major war,” he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on June 1, 1946, “atomic weapons will be used. . . .” This meant, he argued, that the real task at hand was the elimination of war itself. “We know this because in the last war, the two nations which we like to think are the most enlightened and humane in the world—Great Britain and the United States—used atomic weapons against an enemy which was essentially defeated.”

  He had made this observation earlier in a speech at Los Alamos, but to publish it in 1946 was an extraordinary admission. Less than a year after the events of August 1945, the man who had instructed the bombardiers exactly how to drop their atomic bombs on the center of two Japanese cities had come to the conclusion that he had supported the use of atomic weapons against “an enemy which was essentially defeated. ” This realization weighed heavily on him.

  A major war was not Oppie’s only worry; he was concerned too about nuclear terrorism. Asked in a closed Senate hearing room “whether three or four men couldn’t smuggle units of an [atomic] bomb into New York and blow up the whole city.” Oppenheimer responded, “Of course it could be done, and people could destroy New York.” When a startled senator then followed by asking, “What instrument would you use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in a city?” Oppenheimer quipped, “A screwdriver [to open each and every crate or suitcase].” There was no defense against nuclear terrorism—and he felt there never would be.

  International control of the bomb, he later told an audience of Foreign Service and military officers, is “the only way in which this country can have security comparable to that which it had in the years before the war. It is the only way in which we will be able to live with bad governments, with new discoveries, with irresponsible governments such as are likely to arise in the next hundred years, without living in fairly constant fear of the surprise use of these weapons.”

  AT THIRTY-FOUR seconds after 9:00 a.m. on July 1, 1946, the world’s fourth atomic bomb exploded above the lagoon of Bikini Atoll, a part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. A fleet of abandoned Navy vessels of all shapes and sizes were either sunk or exposed to murderous radiation. A large crowd of congressmen, journalists and diplomats from numerous countries, including the Soviet Union, witnessed this demonstration. Oppenheimer had been one of many scientists invited to see the show, but he was conspicuously absent.

  Two months earlier, his frustrations mounting, Oppenheimer had decided he would not attend the Bikini tests. On May 3, 1946, he wrote President Truman, ostensibly to explain his decision. His real intent, however, was to challenge Truman’s entire posture. He began by outlining his “misgivings,” which he asserted were shared “not unanimously, but very widely” by other scientists. Then, with devastating logic, he decimated the whole exercise. If the purpose of the tests, as stated, was to determine the effectiveness of atomic weapons in naval warfare, the answer was quite simple: “If an atomic bomb comes close enough to a ship, even a capital ship, it will sink it.” One need only determine how close the bomb had to be to the ship—and this could be deduced from mathematical calculations. The cost of the tests as planned might easily reach $100 million. “For less than one percent of this,” Oppenheimer explained, “one could obtain more useful information.”

  Likewise, if the tests hoped to obtain scientific data on radiation’s effects on naval equipment, rations and animals, this information too could be obtained more cheaply and more accurately “by simple laboratory methods.” Proponents of testing argued, Oppenheimer wrote, that “we must be prepared for the possibility of atomic warfare.” If this was the true purpose behind the tests, then surely everyone understood that “the overwhelming effectiveness of atomic weapons lies in their use for the bombardment of cities.” By comparison, “the detailed determination of the destruction of atomic weapons against naval craft would appear trivial.” Finally—and this was undoubtedly Oppenheimer’s fiercest objection—he questioned “the appropriateness of a purely military test of atomic weapons, at a time when our plans for effectively eliminating them from national armaments are in their earliest beginnings.” (The Bikini tests were being conducted virtually simultaneously with Baruch’s presentation at the United Nations.)

  Oppenheimer concluded that he could have remained on the presidential commission to observe the Bikini tests—but that perhaps the president might think it “most undesirable for me to turn in, after the tests are completed, a report” critical of the whole exercise. Under the circumstances, he wrote, perhaps he could better serve the president elsewhere.

  If Oppenheimer thought his letter might persuade Truman to postpone or cancel the Bikini tests, he was mistaken. Instead of focusing on the substance of Oppenheimer’s dissent, the president remembered his first encounter with him. Affronted by the letter, Truman now forwarded it to Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson with a short note in which he described Oppenheimer as that “cry-baby scientist” who had earlier claimed to have blood on his hands. “I think he has concocted himself an alibi in this letter.” Truman misunderstood. Oppie’s letter was actually a declaration of personal independence, and through it, once again, he further alienated the president of the United States.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “Oppie Had a Rash and Is Now Immune”

  He [Oppenheimer] thinks he’s God.

  PHILIP MORRISON

  OPPENHEIMER WENT ABOUT TEACHING physics at Caltech, but his heart wasn’t in it. “I did actually give a course,” he later said, “but it is obscure to me how I gave it now.... The charm went out of teaching after the great change in the war.... I was always called away and distracted because I was thinking about other things.” Indeed, he and Kitty never set up house in Pasadena. Kitty remained in the Berkeley house on Eagle Hill and Robert commuted, staying one or two nights a week in the guest cottage behind the home of his old friends Richard and Ruth Tolman. But the phone calls from Washington never stopped, and as the months passed, this arrangement proved to be awkward. Late in the spring of 1946, in the midst of his peripatetic negotiations in Washington, New York and Los Alamos, Oppenheimer announced his intention to resume his teaching post at Berkeley in the autumn.

  Though truly disheartened by the moral and intellectual fiasco of the “Baruch Plan,” Oppenheimer and Lilienthal continued to work together. On
October 23, the FBI overheard the two men discussing who should be named to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which had been created by the August 1 passage of the McMahon Act. Oppenheimer told his new friend, “I owe you a statement which I haven’t thought it discreet to make until tonight, and that is, in a very grim world since I last saw you, I have not been a despondent man. I just can’t tell you, Dave, how I admire what you are doing and how it has changed the whole world for me.”

  Lilienthal thanked him and remarked, “I think we’re going to get a hold of this damn thing yet.”

  That autumn, President Truman appointed Lilienthal chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and, as required by Congress, he created a General Advisory Committee (GAC) to assist the AEC commissioners. Despite Truman’s dislike of Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb” could hardly be kept off such a committee. So, following the recommendations of a variety of advisers, Truman appointed him together with I. I. Rabi, Glenn Seaborg, Enrico Fermi, James Conant, Cyril S. Smith, Hartley Rowe (a Los Alamos consultant), Hood Worthington (a Du Pont company official), and Lee DuBridge, who had recently been appointed president of Caltech. Truman left it up to these men to choose their own chairman. But when a news report wrongly implied that Conant would chair the committee, Kitty Oppenheimer huffily asked Robert why he hadn’t been named chairman. Robert assured his wife that “it is not a major issue.” In fact, DuBridge and Rabi were quietly lobbying behind the scenes for Oppenheimer. By the time the GAC gathered for its first formal meeting in early January 1947, the fix was in. Delayed by a snowstorm, Oppenheimer arrived late, to learn that his colleagues had unanimously elected him their chairman.

  By then, Oppie was disillusioned with both the Soviet and American positions. Neither country seemed prepared to do what was necessary to avoid a nuclear arms race. As a result of both the broadening of his despair and his new responsibilities, his views began to change. That January, Hans Bethe came to visit him in Berkeley, and Oppie confessed in several long conversations that he had “given up all hope that the Russians would agree to a plan.” The Soviet attitude appeared inflexible; their proposal to ban the bomb seemed designed to “deprive us immediately of the one weapon which would stop the Russians from going into Western Europe.” Bethe agreed.

  Later that spring, Oppenheimer used his influence as chairman of the GAC to toughen the American negotiating position. In March 1947, he flew to Washington, where Acheson gave him a preview of the president’s soon-to-be-announced Truman Doctrine. “He wanted me to be quite clear,” Oppenheimer later testified, “that we were entering an adversary relationship with the Soviets, and whatever we did in the atomic talk we should bear that in mind.” Oppenheimer acted on this advice almost immediately; soon afterwards, he met with Frederick Osborn, Bernard Baruch’s successor at the United Nations atomic energy negotiations. To Osborn’s surprise, Oppenheimer told him that the United States should withdraw from the UN talks. The Soviets, he said, would never agree to a workable plan.

  Oppenheimer’s attitude toward the Soviet Union was now following the general trajectory of the emerging Cold War. By his own account, during the war he had already begun to turn away from his left-wing internationalist enthusiasms. He was also troubled by a speech Stalin gave on February 9, 1946; Oppenheimer—like most observers in the West—characterized it as a reflection of Soviet fears of “encirclement and their need to keep their guard up and to rearm.” In addition, he was disheartened by what he was learning about Soviet wartime espionage. According to an FBI informant—identified as “T-1,” an administrator on the Berkeley campus— Oppenheimer returned from receiving a 1946 briefing in Washington “terribly depressed.” “T-1 reported that an unnamed government official had “given Oppenheimer ‘the facts of life’ concerning the Communist conspiracy, and as a result Oppenheimer had become thoroughly disillusioned with Communism.”

  The briefing Oppenheimer received pertained to a Canadian spy scandal, precipitated by the defection of Soviet code clerk Igor Gouzenko which led to the arrest of Alan Nunn May, a British physicist working in Montreal who had spied for the Soviets. Oppenheimer was genuinely shaken by this evidence of “treachery” on the part of a fellow scientist, and later that year, when the FBI came to interview him about the Chevalier affair, he “commented on the fact that often Communists in various countries outside of the Soviet Union could be led into situations where they would be acting, either knowingly or unknowingly, as spies for the Soviet Union.” He could not “reconcile the treachery employed by them [the Soviets] in their international relationships with the high purposes and the democratic aims ascribed to the Soviets by the local [American] Communists.”

  The failure of the Baruch Plan had made things worse. The dream of international control would have to await a change in geopolitical circumstances. He understood now that the ideological differences between the United States and the Soviet Union were unlikely soon to be reconciled. “It is clear,” he told an audience of Foreign Service and Army officers in September 1947, “that, even for the United States, proposals of this kind [international controls] involve a very real renunciation. Among other things, they involve a more or less permanent renunciation of any hope that the United States might live in relative isolation from the rest of the world.”

  He knew that the diplomats of many other countries were “genuinely goggle-eyed” at the sweeping nature of his proposals for international control. They involved radical sacrifices and at least a partial renunciation of sovereignty. But he now understood that the sacrifices required of the Soviet Union were of another order of magnitude. In a perceptive analysis, he noted: “That is because the proposed pattern of [international] control stands in a very gross conflict to the present patterns of state power in Russia. The ideological underpinning of that power, namely the belief in the inevitability of conflict between Russia and the capitalist world, would be repudiated by a co-operation as intense or as intimate as is required by our proposals for the control of atomic energy. Thus what we are asking of the Russians is a very far-reaching renunciation and reversal of the basis of their state power. . . .”

  He knew that the Soviets were not likely to “take this great plunge.” He had not given up hope that in the distant future international controls could be achieved. In the meantime, he had reluctantly decided that the United States had to arm itself. This had led him to conclude—with considerable melancholy—that the principal job of the Atomic Energy Commission would be to “provide atomic weapons and good atomic weapons and many atomic weapons.” Having preached the necessity of international control and openness in 1946, Oppenheimer by 1947 was beginning to accept the idea of a defense posture supported by a multitude of nuclear weapons.

  TO ALL APPEARANCES, Oppenheimer was now a member in good standing of the American Establishment. His credentials included the chairmanship of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, a coveted “Q” (atomic secrets) security clearance, the presidency of the American Physical Society and a member of Harvard University’s Board of Overseers. As a Harvard Overseer, Oppenheimer rubbed shoulders with such influential men as the poet Archibald MacLeish, Judge Charles Wyzanski, Jr., and Joseph Alsop. On a warm, sunny day in early June 1947, Harvard awarded Oppenheimer an honorary degree. During the graduation ceremonies, he listened as his friend Gen. George C. Marshall unveiled the Truman Administration’s plan to pour billions of dollars into a program for European economic recovery—what soon became known as the Marshall Plan.

  Oppenheimer and MacLeish grew particularly close. The poet took to sending him sonnets and they corresponded frequently. He and Robert shared similar liberal values, values that they had come to believe were equally threatened by the communists on the left and the radicals on the right. In August 1949, MacLeish published an astonishingly bitter essay in the Atlantic Monthly, “The Conquest of America,” in which he attacked the country’s postwar descent into an atmosphere of dystopia, of a utopia gone awry. Although America was the most po
werful nation on the globe, the American people seemed seized by a mad compulsion to define themselves by the Soviet threat. In this sense, MacLeish wryly concluded, America had been “conquered” by the Soviets, who were now dictating American behavior. “Whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse,” MacLeish wrote. He harshly criticized Soviet tyranny, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism.

  MacLeish asked Oppenheimer what he thought of the essay. Robert’s reply revealed the evolution of his own political views. He thought MacLeish’s description of the “present state of affairs” was masterful. But he was troubled by MacLeish’s prescription—a call for a “redeclaration of the revolution of the individual.” This familiar exhortation to Jeffersonian individualism seemed somehow inadequate and not very fresh. “Man is both an end and an instrument,” Oppenheimer wrote. He reminded MacLeish of the “profound part that culture and society play in the very definition of human values, human salvation and liberation.” Therefore, “I think that what is needed is something far subtler than the emancipation of the individual from society; it involves, with an awareness that the past one hundred and fifty years have rendered progressively more acute, the basic dependence of man on his fellows.”