by Ray Monk
Oppenheimer and Lilienthal first met on 22 January 1946, when Oppenheimer came to Washington to attend the first meeting of the Board of Consultants. They met in Oppenheimer’s hotel room, where, Lilienthal recorded in his diary, Oppenheimer ‘walked back and forth, making funny “high” sounds between sentences or phrases as he paced the room, looking at the floor.’ ‘I left liking him,’ he added, ‘greatly impressed with his flash of a mind.’ The next day, when he saw Oppenheimer in action in a meeting of Acheson’s committee (the members of which included Conant, Bush and Groves), Lilienthal’s admiration was unrestrained. Oppenheimer, he wrote, was ‘an extraordinary personage’ and ‘a really great teacher’ – his evidence to the committee being, for Lilienthal, ‘one of the most memorable intellectual and emotional experiences of my life’. He later told the lawyer Herbert Marks that it was ‘worth living a lifetime just to know that mankind has been able to produce such a being’ as Oppenheimer.
Nor was Lilienthal alone in his admiration of Oppenheimer. ‘All the participants, I think,’ Dean Acheson later wrote, ‘agree that the most stimulating and creative mind among us was Robert Oppenheimer’s.’ Not that Oppenheimer’s influence was universally welcomed. Groves, in particular, looked on in dismay at the way things were going. He had not wanted to appoint a Board of Consultants, believing that he, Conant and Bush ‘knew more about the broad aspects of the problem . . . than any panel that could be assembled’, and did not like the composition of the board that was, against his advice, appointed. Lilienthal, Groves remarked, ‘had little or no knowledge of the subject whatever’, and he was rather scathing about the reverence for Oppenheimer that prevailed among the members of the board. ‘Everybody genuflected,’ he sniffed, ‘Lilienthal got so bad he would consult Oppie on what tie to wear in the morning.’
Not only was Oppenheimer the most respected person on the Board of Consultants, but he was also the only scientist. He therefore had little trouble imposing his views on the other members and turning the whole process of framing a proposed international policy on atomic energy into a vehicle for advancing the views that Bohr had developed during the war and that he and Rabi had discussed on Christmas Day. The first meeting of the Board was on 23 January, and from then until the Board submitted its report to the Secretary of State on 16 March, the business of drafting the proposal took up all of Oppenheimer’s time. He later described the first few weeks like this:
The way it worked is that we met and in the first few weeks, a week or two, my job was that of teacher. I would get back at the blackboard and say you can make energy this way in a periodic table, and that way and that way. This is the way bombs are made and reactors are made. I gave, in other words, a course. I gave parts of this course also to Mr Acheson and Mr McCloy at night informally. Then we listened to parts of it that I didn’t know anything about, where the raw materials were, and what kind of headache that was. Then everybody was kind of depressed, the way people are about the atom, and we decided to take a recess.
On 2 February, Oppenheimer sent Lilienthal a long memo that became the foundation of the board’s report. Its central idea was very radical. What Oppenheimer proposed was that a single international agency, the Atomic Development Authority, should be established with extremely far-reaching powers. It would not only have responsibility for all aspects of the development and control of atomic energy, including the power to inspect the atomic facilities in any nation in the world, but would also actually own all the uranium and every atomic-energy plant in the world. Under the terms of Oppenheimer’s proposal, no nation would be allowed to build atomic bombs and no nation would be able to build atom bombs, since all the materials necessary for such bombs would be in the hands of the Atomic Development Authority.
On 7 March, Acheson’s committee, together with its associated Board of Consultants, met to discuss and vote on a plan that was substantially drawn from Oppenheimer’s memo. Remarkably, all except one voted in favour of the plan. Predictably the one exception was Groves, who was implacably opposed to the idea of giving up the US monopoly of atomic weapons and handing over to the United Nations America’s uranium, its separation plants, its plutonium plants and its advanced knowledge. Despite Groves’s opposition, however, the plan was approved, and, after a few revisions and amendments were made, was sent to Secretary of State Byrnes on 16 March. To Groves’s horror, the State Department authorised publication of the report, which became known as the ‘Acheson–Lilienthal Plan’. Acheson’s committee had advised against publication, Groves says in his autobiography, since ‘we did not feel it wise to disclose to the Russians just how far the United States was willing to go in sharing its knowledge before negotiations had even been arranged for’.
In fact, the United States government was not willing to go as far as the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan proposed, and quickly took steps to ensure that it would not be required to do so. On 5 March, just two days before the Acheson committee met to consider Oppenheimer’s plan, the thinking that would dominate the policy of both the US and the UK was expressed with great force by Winston Churchill in a speech he gave in Fulton, Missouri. The speech, which is generally regarded as marking the beginning of the Cold War, famously described the growth of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe as the descent of an ‘iron curtain’, behind which was ‘the Soviet Sphere’. The spread of Soviet influence, he urged, must be contained by – if necessary – military force. The view put forward by Churchill could not have been more antithetical to Oppenheimer’s. Indeed, at times he gave the impression of arguing directly against the views that were embodied in the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan:
It would nevertheless, ladies and gentlemen, be wrong and imprudent to entrust the secret knowledge or experience of the atomic bomb, which the United States, Great Britain and Canada now share, to the world organisation [the UN], while it is still in its infancy. It would be criminal madness to cast it adrift in this still agitated and un-united world. No one in any country has slept less well in their beds because this knowledge and the method and the raw materials to apply it are at present largely retained in American hands.
Having lost the last election to Clement Attlee, Churchill was not at this time Prime Minister and was not, officially at any rate, speaking for the UK or the US government. But any doubts that the views of Truman and Byrnes accorded better with those of Churchill than with those advanced in the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan would soon be removed.
On the very day that he received the plan, Byrnes appointed as his spokesman at the United Nations on the international control of atomic energy a seventy-five-year-old financier called Bernard Baruch, who, he knew, would be opposed to its proposals. ‘That was the day I gave up hope,’ Oppenheimer later said. As well as being politically conservative and sceptical about international control of atomic energy, Baruch had a vested interest in not surrendering ownership of uranium, having investments in a company that had a stake in uranium mines. As soon as he was appointed, Baruch set to work on ‘revising’ the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan, turning it into, as Byrnes put it to Acheson, ‘a workable plan’. To help him in this aim, Baruch chose a team of politically right-wing advisors that included two bankers, a mining engineer and, as ‘interpreter of military policy’, General Groves.
Three months separated the appointment of Baruch on 16 March and his appearance at the United Nations, where he presented the US proposal for international control of atomic energy on 14 June. During those months the proposal underwent fundamental changes that altered completely its character as an expression of the Bohr–Rabi–Oppenheimer philosophy of international cooperation. Also during those months Oppenheimer’s personal position as a trusted and prestigious advisor to the US government was fatally compromised by an increasingly vicious campaign against him, led by powerful figures in the US political establishment.
Chief among those figures was J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, whose opinion that Oppenheimer was a dangerous and subversive communist had been entirel
y unaffected by the fame and celebrity that Oppenheimer had acquired as ‘Father of the Atom Bomb’. On 26 April 1946, Hoover wrote to the Attorney General, Tom C. Clark, recommending ‘technical surveillance’ (that is, wire tapping) of Oppenheimer ‘for the purpose of determining the extent of his contacts with Soviet agents, and for the additional purpose of identifying other espionage agents’. Permission was granted, and a bug was installed on Oppenheimer’s phone on 8 May. It did not take the Oppenheimers long to work out that they were being listened to. Every phone call was transcribed and sent by the FBI San Francisco office to Hoover, including a conversation between Oppenheimer and Kitty on 10 May that included the following exchange:
JRO: . . . Are you there, dear?
KO: Yes
JRO: The FBI must just have hung up.
KO: (Giggles)
Two days later, the FBI summary of another conversation between Oppenheimer and Kitty included the following: ‘At this point there was a clicking sound and Oppenheimer asked, ‘Are you still there? I wonder who’s listening to us?’ Kitty replies lackadaisically, ‘The FBI, dear.’
The transcripts of Oppenheimer’s phone calls were forwarded to Byrnes, who would have taken special interest in the disparaging way in which Oppenheimer discussed Baruch – whom he invariably called ‘the old man’ – in these conversations.
Relations between Oppenheimer and Baruch during this time went from bad to worse. They first met early in April, at a time when Baruch was trying to recruit Oppenheimer as a scientific advisor. The meeting, reminiscent of Oppenheimer’s encounter with Truman the previous October, was a disaster. Baruch forced Oppenheimer to admit that his proposals, with their emphasis on openness and cooperation, were fundamentally incompatible with the character of Stalin’s Soviet regime. Baruch also horrified Oppenheimer by revealing some of the ways in which he wanted to amend the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan. The United Nations, Baruch thought, should authorise the US to keep a stockpile of atomic bombs to serve as a deterrent. He also wanted to restrict the power of the proposed Atomic Development Authority in two crucial ways: first, it should not own and control uranium mines; and second, it should not have power over the development of atomic energy. Oppenheimer left the meeting convinced that he could not possibly work with Baruch, and turned down the invitation to act as his scientific advisor.
In what was possibly a tactical error, Oppenheimer did not confine himself to private expressions of his views on international control of atomic energy; he also gave public lectures on the subject. Wherever he lectured there was sure to be an FBI agent in the audience, who would send Hoover a summary of what he had said. In one such lecture, given at Cornell on 15 May, Oppenheimer told his audience grimly: ‘Mark my words, if there is no international control of atomic energy, the next war will be fought to prevent an atomic war, but it will not be successful.’ In another, given in Pittsburgh the following day, he talked of his proposed international Atomic Development Authority as a ‘world government’, remarking that what the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan amounted to was the ‘renunciation of national sovereignty’.
In the burgeoning FBI file on Oppenheimer, these views were duly recorded and cited when the Bureau was called upon to justify its continued surveillance of Oppenheimer. That surveillance, an FBI report states, ‘has from day to day kept this office aware of Dr Oppenheimer’s travels about the country and the subject matter of many of his speeches as well as information as to his opinions on highly controversial matters concerning the atom bomb’. The report concludes:
In view of the above recommendation of the San Francisco Field Division and the further fact that through Oppenheimer’s telephone conversations with other scientists working on a draft of an international plan for the control of atomic energy, it is helpful in determining Oppenheimer’s actual views on this subject, it is recommended that this technical surveillance be continued.
The FBI file also contains a letter to the Secretary of War, Robert Patterson, from a certain Gregory C. Bern, dated 3 June 1946, describing the atomic bomb as ‘the United States’ top military secret’ and castigating those atomic scientists who were ‘engaged in treasonable activity to transfer our military secret to our greatest enemy, the Soviet government’. ‘Of course,’ Bern goes on, ‘this plot is concealed in their so-called “bomb-control” idea via the media of the UNO, of which the Soviet government is a member.’ ‘It must be noted that Robert Oppenheimer is a member of two Communist Front organizations and therefore his agitation for the plan which would place us at the mercy of Soviet war criminals is easily explainable.’
The view, expressed by almost all competent atomic scientists, that there was no ‘secret’ about how to build an atomic bomb was thus not only rejected by influential people in the US political establishment, but was regarded as a treasonous plot. Whereas the scientists knew that their counterparts in Russia and elsewhere would be able to work out how the energy from fission could be used to make a bomb, many politicians and military leaders – to most of whom the physics of fission was an utter mystery – shared Truman’s view that the Russians were incapable of penetrating that mystery. Among them was General Groves, who, on 14 March 1946, just two days before the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan was sent to the State Department, gave a talk at the Waldorf Hotel in New York, in which he was reported by the writer Merle Miller as telling his audience ‘that the United States didn’t need to worry about the Russians ever making a bomb. “Why,” he said, smiling, “those people can’t even make a jeep.” You should have heard the applause; thunderous is the only way to describe it; a great many people stood and cheered.’ This was the man on whom Baruch was relying for military advice. On that advice Baruch added to his panel of consultants Edgar Sengier, a Belgian mining magnate who had worked with Groves on supplying the Manhattan Project with uranium ore, and who had an even greater stake than Baruch himself in ensuring that ownership of uranium was not transferred to an international agency.
On 17 May, the day after his lecture in Pittsburgh, Oppenheimer was back in Washington to attend a meeting with Baruch that had been arranged by Acheson, who was hoping to bring all sides together. In response to Oppenheimer’s lectures and newspaper interviews, Baruch had complained to Acheson about being undercut. Oppenheimer himself remembered: ‘Mr Baruch told me that I had scooped his speech that he was going to make at the opening of the UN. That was not true.’
At the meeting Baruch made it clear to Oppenheimer just how far his own views diverged from those that had informed the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan. Unsurprisingly, given the vested interests of himself and at least one of his advisors, Baruch was not prepared to advocate the international ownership of uranium. He also insisted on building into the plan some procedures for punishing nations that violated its terms. The punishment he had in mind, it turned out, would be administered by the US, using its stockpile of atomic weapons. He also announced at this meeting that he would be proposing that the Soviet Union should give up its right to veto the actions of the new international atomic authority. In short, what Baruch was preparing to propose at the United Nations was exactly what Oppenheimer had wanted to avoid: the continuation of the US monopoly of atomic weapons, the preservation of national ownership of the means of making atomic weapons and the imposition by force of a policy of preventing other nations from acquiring such weapons. This was not a proposal motivated by internationalism, but one that sought to preserve the national interests of the United States.
To nobody’s surprise, when the ‘Baruch Plan’ (as it was now known) was presented to the United Nations Energy Commission at its meeting in New York on 14 June, it was emphatically rejected by the Soviet Union. On 19 June, the Soviets countered with their own proposal that all existing stockpiles of atomic weapons should first be destroyed and then a committee should be established to discuss the exchange of scientific information. This, in turn, was rejected by the United States. For several months afterwards negotiations continued, without any real hope
of coming to an agreement.
Meanwhile the FBI continued its close surveillance of Oppenheimer, listening to his phone conversations, following him everywhere he went and making a note of everything he did and everyone he spoke to. Almost daily, Hoover would receive reports from the San Francisco office, detailing Oppenheimer’s activities. As evidence that Oppenheimer ‘would place us at the mercy of Soviet war criminals’, however, these reports were, to say the least, unconvincing. Whenever called upon to justify their suspicion of Oppenheimer, the FBI invariably resorted to repeating what was already known: that Oppenheimer had belonged to several Communist Party front organisations in the 1930s, that he had several friends who were members of, or sympathetic to, the Communist Party and, most damningly of all, that Oppenheimer, by his own admission, had been approached by his friend Chevalier to leak information about the atomic-bomb project to the Soviet Union.
This last piece of ‘derogatory information’ is repeated over and over again in the FBI file, as if it held the key to a major conspiracy. And when, on 4 June, Chevalier himself came to Oppenheimer’s house, FBI agents were there, eager to report to Hoover that ‘the Oppenheimers were friendly with the man believed to be Chevalier’. Hoover was also sent a transcript of a phone conversation between Chevalier and Kitty that took place when Oppenheimer himself was away on 13 June, and of an unsuccessful attempt by Chevalier to contact Kitty on 18 June.
About a week later, on 26 June, Chevalier, who had only been back in Berkeley for about a month, received an unexpected and extremely unwelcome visit at his home from two FBI agents, who demanded that he accompany them to their San Francisco office. Once there, Chevalier was subjected to a tough, eight-hour-long interview, focusing on his relationships with George Eltenton and Oppenheimer. Every now and then, Chevalier later recalled, one of the agents would speak ‘in monosyllables and brief, enigmatic phrases’, to someone on the telephone. It turned out that he was speaking to another agent based in the FBI office in Oakland, where George Eltenton was being interviewed. Eventually one of the FBI agents said to Chevalier: ‘I have here three affidavits from three scientists on the atomic bomb project. Each of them testifies that you approached him on three separate occasions for the purpose of obtaining secret information on the atomic bomb on behalf of Russian agents.’