by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
As a measure of just how far his thinking had evolved, by 1952 Oppenheimer was heard speculating aloud about the possibility of preventive war, an idea he had abhorred only three years earlier. To be sure, he never actually advocated it, but on several occasions he broached its possibility. In January 1952, Oppenheimer had a discussion with the Alsop brothers, and Joe Alsop noted that “Oppie’s line, to put it bluntly, was something damned close to preventive war; we can’t just sit by while a potential enemy builds up the means of our certain destruction.”
In February 1953, Oppenheimer gave a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations and was asked if the notion of preventive war had any meaning under present conditions. He replied, “I think it does. The general impression I have is that the United States would physically survive, damaged, but physically survive a war that not only started now, but didn’t last too long. . . . That does not mean that I think it is a good idea. I believe that until you have looked the tiger in the eye you are going to be in the worst of all dangers, which is that you will back into it.”
By 1952, Oppenheimer was generally fed up with Washington. President Truman had ignored his counsel so often that he now took steps to walk away from the whole business of policy-making. Early in May, he lunched at Washington’s Cosmos Club with James Conant and Lee DuBridge. The three friends commiserated and gossiped about their standing in Washington. Afterwards, Conant noted in his diary: “Some of the ‘boys’ have their axe out for three of us on the GAC of AEC. Claim we have dragged our heels on H bomb. Dark words about Oppie!” In June, frustrated by more than a decade of dealing with “a bad business now threatening to become really bad,” and aware that there was a movement afoot to remove them from the GAC, all three men submitted their resignations from that advisory committee. Oppenheimer wrote his brother that he now intended to devote himself to physics: “Physics is complicated and wondersome, and much too hard for me except as a spectator; it will have to get easy again one of these days, but perhaps not soon.”
But it wasn’t that easy to walk away from Washington. Even as he resigned from the GAC, the AEC’s Gordon Dean persuaded him to remain available as a contract consultant. This automatically extended his top-secret Q clearance for another year. And that was not all. In April, he had agreed to Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s request that he sit on a special State Department Panel of Consultants on Disarmament. Serving with him were Vannevar Bush, Dartmouth College president John Sloan Dickey, CIA Deputy Director Allen Dulles, and Joseph Johnson, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. As usual, the panel elected him chairman.
Acheson also recruited McGeorge Bundy—then a thirty-three-year-old professor of government at Harvard—to serve as the panel’s recording secretary. “Mac” Bundy was the son of Henry Stimson’s righthand man, Harvey Bundy, and he was eager to meet Oppenheimer. Bundy was smart, articulate and witty. As a Junior Fellow at Harvard, he had coauthored Stimson’s 1948 memoir, On Active Service in Peace and War. And as the ghostwriter of Stimson’s famous Harper’s magazine essay of February 1947 defending the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—“The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb”—Bundy was already familiar with some of the imponderables associated with nuclear weapons. At their first meeting, Oppenheimer took an instant liking to the precocious young Boston Brahmin. Afterwards, Bundy wrote an uncharacteristically humble note to his new friend, saying, “I find it hard to thank you enough for the patience with which you undertook my education last week; I only hope that somehow I can be useful enough to make it worth your effort.” In no time at all, the two men were exchanging handwritten notes to each other addressed as “Dear Robert” and “Dear Mac,” in which they discussed everything from the merits of Harvard’s physics department to the health of their wives. Bundy thought Robert was “marvelous, fascinating and complicated.”
Bundy would soon learn that controversy stalked his new friend. In one of their early meetings, Oppenheimer and his fellow panelists agreed that their primary question was the “problem of survival” in which the United States and Russia faced a “scorpion stalemate—which might or might not involve active war without the use of stings. . . .” Oppenheimer knew that Teller and his colleagues were hoping to test an early design for the hydrogen bomb later that autumn. So he was intrigued when Vannevar Bush suggested that before this threshold was crossed, perhaps Washington and Moscow should agree to a complete ban on the testing of any thermonuclear devices. Such a treaty would require no inspections, since any violation of the ban would immediately be detected. And without tests, the H-bomb could not be developed into a reliable military weapon. A thermonuclear arms race could be stopped before it began.
The Oppenheimer panel continued their discussions in June at a meeting hosted by Bundy in his Cambridge home, a rambling nineteenth-century house within bicycling distance of Harvard Square. James Conant joined them as an unofficial participant. Conant had soured on nuclear weapons; according to Bundy’s notes, Conant complained that the “ordinary American” thought of the bomb as a weapon threatening the Soviets, “while the more significant fact was that now and in the future such blows could be delivered by others on the United States.” Even without the H-bomb, Conant argued, all but the largest of U.S. cities could easily be wiped out with a single atomic weapon. No one in the room disagreed.
The public’s ignorance was bad enough, but even worse, Conant said, was “the attitude of the leaders of the American military establishment.” Our generals were relying almost exclusively on these weapons as “their principal hope of victory in the event of all-out war.” If the country built up its conventional forces, “it would become possible for the United States to dispense with its present reliance on atomic bombs.” But for this to happen, Conant said, the generals “must be persuaded that atomic weapons in the long run are on balance a danger to the United States.”
Without any prompting from Oppenheimer, Conant proposed what would become known two decades later as a “no-first-use policy.” The United States, he said, should “announce officially that we would not be the first to use atomic weapons in any new war.” He also agreed with Bush’s proposal to announce a tacit moratorium on the testing of a thermonuclear bomb. Oppenheimer endorsed both ideas. The panel’s argument on behalf of a moratorium was particularly compelling. They told Acheson: . . . it seems to us almost inevitable that a successful thermonuclear test will provide a heavy additional stimulus to Soviet efforts in this field. It may well be true that the Soviet level of effort in this area is already high, but if the Russians learn that a thermonuclear device is in fact possible, and that we know how to make it, their work is likely to be considerably intensified. It is also likely that Soviet scientists will be able to derive from the test [by analyzing the fallout] useful evidence as to the dimensions of the device.
Oppenheimer and his colleagues knew that the first test of a thermonuclear device—code-named “Mike”—was scheduled for the coming autumn, and that any attempt to stop it would be vigorously opposed by the Air Force. Though convinced of the soundness of their ideas, they had no means of making their views public. A veil of secrecy was tightly draped over all atomic matters, and they could not speak about their concerns without violating their security clearances. So they tried once again to convince Washington’s foreign policy establishment that current nuclear weapons policies were a dead end. But on October 9, 1952, Truman’s National Security Council flatly rejected the Oppenheimer panel’s proposal for a moratorium on the testing of the H-bomb. Defense Secretary Robert Lovett angrily said that “any such idea should be immediately put out of mind and that any papers that might exist on the subject should be destroyed.” Lovett, a powerful member of the foreign policy establishment, feared that if news of the moratorium idea leaked, Senator Joseph McCarthy would have a field day investigating the State Department and its panel of advisers.
Three weeks later, the United States exploded a 10.4-megaton thermonuclear bomb in the Paci
fic, vaporizing the island of Elugelab. A clearly depressed Conant told a Newsweek reporter, “I no longer have any connection with the atomic bomb. I have no sense of accomplishment.”
A week later, Oppenheimer sat grimly with nine other members of yet another panel—the Science Advisory Committee to the Office of Defense Mobilization—debating whether or not they ought to resign in protest. Many scientists felt the “Mike” test demonstrated that the government simply had no intention of listening to their expert advice. Oppie’s old friend Lee DuBridge circulated a draft resignation letter. But in the end, the faint hope that the next administration might change course persuaded them to set the letter aside. They knew the odds were against them. At one point, James R. Killian, president of MIT, leaned over to DuBridge and whispered, “Some people in the Air Force are going to be after Oppenheimer, and we’ve got to know about it and be ready for it.” DuBridge was shocked. He naïvely thought everyone still regarded Oppie as a hero.
In the meantime, Oppenheimer worked with Mac Bundy on drafting a final report for the State Department’s disarmament panel. This document was forwarded to departing Secretary of State Acheson just as Dwight D. Eisenhower moved into the White House. At the time, of course, this paper was highly classified and circulated among only a handful of Eisenhower Administration officials. Had it been released in 1953, it surely would have created a firestorm of controversy. While Bundy was the document’s wordsmith, many of the ideas were Oppenheimer’s: Nuclear weapons would soon threaten all civilization. In just a few years, the Soviet Union could have 1,000 atomic bombs, and “5,000 only a few years further on.” This constituted “the power to end a civilization and a very large number of people in it.”
Bundy and Oppenheimer conceded that a “nuclear stalemate” between the Soviets and the United States might evolve into a “strange stability” in which both sides would refrain from using these suicidal weapons. But if so, “a world so dangerous may not be very calm, and to maintain the peace it will be necessary for statesmen to decide against rash actions not just once, but every time.” They concluded that “unless the contest in atomic armaments is in some way moderated, our whole society will come increasingly into peril of the gravest kind.”
In the face of such peril, the Oppenheimer panelists promoted the idea of “candor.” A policy of excessive secrecy had kept Americans complacent and ignorant of the nuclear peril. To rectify matters, the new administration “should tell the story of the atomic danger. . . .” Astonishingly, the panelists even recommended that “the rate and impact of atomic production” should be revealed to the public, “and that it should direct attention to the fact that beyond a certain point we cannot ward off the Soviet threat merely by ‘keeping ahead of the Russians.’ ”
The notion of “candor” was directly inspired by Niels Bohr, who had always insisted that security was inextricably linked to “openness.” In this, Oppie was still Bohr’s prophet. He no longer put any stock in the long-deadlocked UN disarmament talks. But he hoped that a new administration would see that “candor” could both alert the American people to the real perils of relying on nuclear weapons and signal to the Soviets that Americans did not intend to use these weapons in a preemptive first strike. In addition, the Disarmament Panel urged direct, continual communication with the Soviets. The Kremlin should know roughly the size and nature of the American nuclear arsenal—and that Washington strongly favored bilateral talks to reduce this arsenal.
If the recommendations of the Oppenheimer panel had been accepted by the Eisenhower Administration in 1953, the Cold War might have taken a different, less militarized trajectory. This tantalizing speculation was later advanced by Bundy in his 1982 essay in the New York Review of Books, “The Missed Chance to Stop the H-Bomb.” And in the years since the demise of the Soviet empire, Russian archival documents have compelled historians to rethink basic assumptions about the early Cold War. The “enemy archives,” as the historian Melvyn Leffler has written, demonstrate that the Soviets “did not have pre-conceived plans to make Eastern Europe communist, to support the Chinese communists, or to wage war in Korea.” Stalin had no “master plan” for Germany, and wished to avoid military conflict with the United States. At the end of World War II, Stalin reduced his army from 11,356,000 in May 1945 to 2,874,000 in June 1947—suggesting that even under Stalin, the Soviet Union had neither the capability nor the intention to launch a war of aggression. George F. Kennan later wrote that he “never believed that they [the Soviets] have seen it in their interest to overrun Western Europe militarily, or that they would have launched an attack on that region generally even if the so-called nuclear deterrent had not existed.”
Stalin ran a cruel police state, but economically and politically it was a totalitarian state in decay. When Stalin died in March 1953, his successors, Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, began a process of de-Stalinization. Both Malenkov and Khrushchev also had a sound appreciation for the inherent dangers of a nuclear arms race. Malenkov, a technocrat with an interest in quantum physics, stunned the Politburo in 1954 with a speech in which he said that the use of the hydrogen bomb in war “would mean the destruction of world civilization.” Khrushchev, an erratic, mercurial leader, sometimes frightened Western audiences with his blustery rhetoric. But in practice he pursued the kind of foreign policy that would later become associated with détente, and even exhibited the first glimmers of glasnost. He renewed arms control talks with the West in 1955 and by the end of the 1950s he had sharply cut the Soviet defense budget. After receiving his first briefing on nuclear weapons in September 1953, Khrushchev later recalled, “I couldn’t sleep for several days. Then I became convinced that we could never possibly use these weapons.”
It would have required extraordinary efforts to persuade Khrushchev to embrace the kind of radical arms control regime Oppenheimer’s panel envisioned. But the Eisenhower Administration never even tried to go down that path. Yet no less a Sovietologist than the highly regarded U.S. ambassador to Moscow Charles “Chip” Bohlen later wrote in his memoirs that Washington’s failure to engage Malenkov in meaningful negotiations over nuclear weapons and other issues was a missed opportunity.
By 1953, the Cold War had frozen the policy options in Washington at least as hard as they were frozen in Moscow, and Oppenheimer’s persistent efforts to somehow keep the nuclear genie attached to the bottle, if not in it, ran against the current of powerful forces at home. Now that a Republican was president, these political forces were determined to put Oppenheimer into a bottle—and throw him out to sea.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
“Scientist X”
He [Oppie] had had enough of me and I had had enough of him too.
JOE WEINBERG
BY THE SPRING OF 1950, Oppenheimer had every reason to think that the FBI, HUAC and the Justice Department were all closing in on him. Hoover was telling his agents that Oppenheimer might be indicted for perjury, and they had to continue to investigate him vigorously. Twice that spring, FBI agents had interviewed him in his Princeton office. The agents noted that while he had been “entirely cooperative,” he had also “expressed great concern over the possibility of allegations concerning his past affiliation with the Communist Party being made a matter of public trial.” He was deeply worried that his name would be linked to Joe Weinberg—whom the Crouches and HUAC had identified as “Scientist X,” a Soviet spy. Oppenheimer had last seen Weinberg at a Physical Society conference in 1949, shortly after Weinberg’s troubles with HUAC had commenced. On this occasion, Weinberg sensed a coolness in their relationship. “So there was a cloud over our relationship at that point,” Weinberg recalled. “The cloud would be that Oppie wouldn’t know just what I was going to do. He would have to worry that the pressure on me might eventually be turned against him in some way. . . . It was clear that he felt that there were things that were damaging to him that I could be made to say, whether or not I knew them, if I were in some way weak.”
Weinberg admitte
d to feeling “terrified” and bewildered by what was happening to him. He knew, of course, that he was guilty of having discussed the bomb project with Steve Nelson in 1943, but he did not know that his conversation had been recorded. Nor did he believe that he had committed espionage. Recently, the Milwaukee Journal had published an outlandish story claiming that Weinberg had been a courier for the Soviets—and that he had even passed on a sample of uranium-235. “My God,” he thought, “what connections could they have made to make up such a theory?” For a time, he felt he might crack. “I felt desperate, I felt utterly alone and broken down and beset on every side. I literally trembled. God knows what I could have been made to say if they [the FBI] had followed up.”
Fortunately for Weinberg, the authorities were moving slowly. That spring a federal grand jury in San Francisco was weighing a perjury indictment against him. But the Justice Department had very little usable evidence. Weinberg had testified under oath that he had never been a Communist Party member and that he had never even met Steve Nelson. But the FBI wiretap was illegal and, therefore, inadmissible in court, and there was no other evidence that Weinberg had been a CP member. By April 1950, the Bureau had interviewed eighteen present and former Communist Party members in the San Francisco area, and none of them was able to link Weinberg to the Party. In the absence of the the wiretap evidence, the grand jury failed in 1950 to return an indictment against Weinberg.
Undeterred by this setback, the Justice Department convened a second grand jury in the spring of 1952. Their only other evidence against Weinberg was Paul Crouch’s testimony that he had seen Weinberg at a Party meeting talking to Nelson. Prosecutors were well aware that Crouch’s testimony might be unreliable—but they may have calculated that a trial would shake loose further evidence against Weinberg, and perhaps even Oppenheimer. By that time, Weinberg had mustered the courage to stick it out. “They were fools,” Weinberg later said of his antagonists. “They waited until I got a little bit less desperate and a little bit hardened.” Interviewed by the grand jury, he refused to tell them anything—and certainly nothing about Oppie. “I was not going to get Oppie into this at all,” Weinberg said. “That was the thing that would happen over my dead body.”