by Peter Byrne
Purging atomic science
Two weeks before Hiroshima was scheduled to be eradicated, 69 Manhattan Project scientists, including the project’s chief physicist, Leo Szilard, signed a petition to President Harry Truman stating that with the recent defeat of Germany, the use of the atomic bomb against Japan could not be justified. The petitioners begged Truman to give Japan an opportunity to surrender before dropping the bomb:
A nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for destructive purposes may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.17
Neither Wheeler, von Neumann, nor Feynman signed the petition.
And regarding Bohr’s call for the sharing of nuclear secrets, Wheeler said, “I lacked the personal passion to push for Bohr’s concept of an open world and did not join in promoting it. I could not convince myself that it was workable in practice.”18
But other Manhattan Project physicists were so upset by the post-war militarization of science that they formed national organizations to work for disarmament and to protect science from politicization. One such group was the Atomic Scientists of Chicago, which created the famous Doomsday Clock ticking inexorably toward nuclear midnight. Leading atomic physicists, such as Wiener, declined to participate in nuclear weapons research. They gave interviews to the media on the dangers of nuclear armament. They wrote scary books, such as One World or None, a collection of essays by Einstein, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Wigner and other scientists dismayed by the violence of the nuclear age they had midwived.
But as McCarthyism and hysterical red-baiting created and fed upon paranoia, formerly outspoken scientists started to keep their heads down, fearing for their jobs. Many were shocked at the callous treatment of the war-hero Oppenheimer by the Atomic Energy Commission, and appalled by Princeton’s firing of the radiantly intelligent David Bohm. Members of the Federation of Atomic Scientists, which called for disarmament, were surveilled by informants and FBI agents. Government agents wire-tapped even slightly dissident scientists, harassed them at their jobs, searched their homes and offices for evidence of conspiratorial intent.19
Heroically, Everett’s game theory mentor, Harold Kuhn, came out in the national media in defense of Bohm, after he was pilloried by the House Un-American Activities Committee. When asked to finger supposedly left-leaning associates, Bohm had taken advantage of his constitutional right to plead the Fifth Amendment, which was the only way to avoid criminal contempt charges. Consequently, he was fired by Princeton, and blacklisted by physics departments in the United States. He moved to Brazil to work. After the United States restricted his passport privileges,20 he became a Brazilian citizen, eventually moving to England.
Regarding the persecution of Bohm, Wheeler recalled,
I found it hard to accept Bohm’s decision to shield those who adhered to Communist ideology … The university was gauche in its manner of dealing with Bohm, yet I could sympathize with its goal, to preserve its reputation as a center of unbiased scholarly inquiry, not the home of blind loyalty to one ideology or another.21
It is estimated that a fifth of the witnesses called before congressional and state “internal security” committees were professors and graduate students, and that half of those were scientists. According to science historian, Jessica Wang, Most American colleges and universities fired professors, tenured and untenured, who refused to cooperate with HUAC [House Un-American Activities Committee] and other committees on the ostensible grounds that their lack of candor [by invoking the Fifth Amendment right guaranteed under the Constitution] was incompatible with the openness required by scholarly life…. By the 1950s, there was no place to hide…. For younger scientists in the throes of trying to establish stable careers, it was hard to avoid the conclusion that the best way to protect one’s livelihood was to follow the dictates of the Cold War political consensus and steer clear of controversial political activities altogether.22
Carrots and sticks were used to herd scientists into military work during the Cold War:
As political elites whose expertise was essential to the military basis for Cold War foreign policy, scientists had, in theory, more freedom of action than other groups to defy the politics of anticommunism…. [But] Cold War liberalism … denied the importance of popular politics and insisted that all social problems were amenable to nonideological negotiation through guidance by responsible elites.23
Like many Cold War scientists working for the military, Wheeler and Everett lived inside a political, cultural, and ethical feedback loop which admitted no contradictory ideological data; indeed, operations researchers, in particular, often seemed convinced that nuclear weapons research was an ideologically neutral act. Despite creating the tools and methods of species-extinction, they assumed that smart people like themselves held a monopoly on good intentions toward mankind and were, therefore, worthy of respect, responsibility, and remuneration.
Rising stars
The Cold War turned many American scientists into businessmen. According to Wheeler,
The rising star of science in the postwar firmament (perhaps it should be called the stardom of science) affected me personally, as it affected many of my friends. I received invitations to give talks, write articles for the general public, advise the government, and sit on boards.24
In fact, Wheeler was a military, industrial, and scientific super star.
In 1957, C. Wright Mills, in his (now-classic) study of the post-war “power elite,” observed a sea change in the sociology of science:
Scientific and technological development, once seated in the economy, has increasingly become part of the military order, which is now the largest single supporter and director of scientific research in fact, as large dollar-wise, as all other American research put together. Since World War II, the general direction of pure scientific research has been set by military considerations, its major finances are from military funds, and very few of those engaged in basic scientific research are not working under military direction…. Some universities, in fact, are financial branches of the military establishment.
The top scientific minds, said Mills,
have become deeply involved in the politics of military decisions, and the militarization of political life…. As part of the military ascendancy, there is the felt need of the warlords for theory, the militarization of science, and the present ‘demoralization’ of the scientist in the service of the warlord.25
Wheeler cheerfully served the warlords. He regularly consulted for armament manufacturers, such as Du Pont, General Atomics, General Electric, Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation (Convair), and Lockheed, (consultation rates were typically $200 per day, plus expenses). And for 30 years, he was a trustee of the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, a nonprofit military think tank through which many billions in government contracts have flowed. For decades, Battelle has co-managed national laboratories where weapons of many varieties are designed and tested. “I think the effect of the war was to make people appreciate, who were in the field of physics, that you can get money to do physics, you could do it in a big way, and you don’t have to be a worm,” said Wheeler.26
Post-war, Du Pont executives set up a private research fund for Wheeler. The company also paid him a monthly retainer, which got the top-secret-cleared physicist into hot water with his bosses at Los Alamos.
It upset [Norris] Bradbury [director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory] to have me with this connection with Du Pont along with Los Alamos…. I recall his catching me in the corridor one day, drawing me into his office, and there were two or three other of the higher members of the Los Alamos hierarchy there, and he started quizzing me about this relationship with Du Pont—how much time I spent and how much I got paid—which was a little embarrassing for me, and finally insisting that I should give it up, which I did.
[But] my Du Pont friends had a pretty good idea of what I must be doing. Dale Babcock w
as the member of their staff I was closest to, and I recall one day saying to him, ‘It’s crazy for us to shoot off our atomic bombs as separate things because they’re just match sticks to light the real thing and we should be think of getting on with something like a H bomb.’ He was very sympathetic to that, although we certainly didn’t talk about any details.27
Returning to academia after the war years, Wheeler secured funding from the Office of Naval Research to build and operate a futuristic laboratory at Princeton. He was in charge of experimental research using cosmic rays (barrages of elementary particles arriving from the far reaches of the universe); and he wrote several papers showing how magnetic fields generated by planets affect these particle showers. He participated in a famous conference at Shelter Island, Long Island conference in 1947. Gathered at the Rams Head Inn were the most inventive Americans in quantum physics—Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, Isador Rabi, Willis Lamb, Abraham Pais, Julian Schwinger, Feynman—many of them eager to get back to theoretical research after having spent the war years designing such new technologies as radar, microwave devices, analogue computers, and atom bombs.
Cold warrior
Wheeler continued working with Bohr to map the subtleties of atomic structures and, in 1950, he joined forces with his good friend, Edward Teller, to develop the hydrogen bomb. The task was unappealing to many alumni of the Manhattan Project who had seen the ferocious result of their collective brainstorm. But Wheeler had no qualms: “The antagonism I felt from some of my colleagues did nothing to shake my conviction that I was doing the right thing.”28
Wheeler testified to Congress that the Soviet Union could be ahead of the United States in building a hydrogen bomb. “Our secrecy keeps secret how little we are doing, not how much we are doing.” He scoffed at Oppenheimer’s warning that the age of nuclear overkill had arrived.29
In Wheeler’s world, building bigger and better nuclear bombs was a service to truth:
As a matter of survival the truth about thermonuclear explosions must be known…. How remarkable that today we can … predict in advance the fantastic explosion history of a nuclear device never before seen…. This idea of pinning numbers to ideas … is such a new one that we haven’t found out how to pass on the pure delight and wonder of it.30
In conjunction with the Atomic Energy Commission, he convinced Princeton to let him set up and operate a hydrogen bomb research laboratory, called Matterhorn B, on land owned by the university a few miles off-campus. For the next several years, Wheeler and his hand-selected team (including several of his students) commuted between Los Alamos and Princeton designing the system for igniting the bomb’s hydrogen fuel and calculating its explosive potential.
The first hydrogen bomb, nicknamed “Ivy Mike,” was exploded on October 31, 1952 at Eniwetok, a dreamy atoll in the Pacific Ocean. That island paradise was gradually torn to pieces by successive test shots that polluted the atmosphere of the globe with radioactive fallout. Wheeler watched the first test from afar through dark glasses:
First a black spot on the horizon, then this opening into brilliance as if the sun had just come into view. Then this getting covered up by a churning mass of clouds. My first reaction was simple relief. It worked. I’m glad I was there. I am ashamed to say that the energy release was about thirty percent more than we figured.31
Within a year, the Soviets exploded a similar bomb, and the race for nuclear dominance was on. Wheeler’s assessment:
I am sometimes asked to name the most important peacetime use of nuclear energy. My answer is simple: a nuclear device to keep the peace.32
After building the H-bomb, Wheeler consulted for Convair Corporation on the design of the Atlas missile, which was intended to carry nuclear warheads. In 1955, he freelanced for Lockheed Corporation’s missile division. But one of his main tasks as a leader in the new industry of militarized operations research was to find and recruit the best scientific minds in academia to design a boutique line of nuclear arms and supersonic delivery systems. Consequently, he was involved in creating several Ivy League-sponsored organizations to do exactly that—steering scientists toward war work and warriors toward scientific solutions.
In the summer of 1958, he convened a group of mostly physicists to address military problems. Out of this effort grew a group of militarist scientists called JASON that, for many years, advised the Secretary of Defense on the feasibility of developing futuristic weapons systems, such as nuclear-powered airplanes and electronic battlefields. Wheeler also worked closely with the Institute for Defense Analyses, which operated JASON33 and employed Everett in its top secret Weapons Systems Evaluation Group (WSEG) after he left Princeton. And he spent a lot of time, in association with Princeton colleagues, Eugene Wigner and Oskar Morgenstern, lobbying government officials to create an advanced research projects weapons laboratory (separate from the new Advanced Research Projects Agency) that would initially specialize in missile development.
As the Cold War wore on, Wheeler’s public role increasingly intersected with his private consulting work. Lobbying for the creation of the missile lab, Wheeler erroneously claimed that the Soviet Union was ahead of the United States in missile R&D and manufacture and deployment. And he angered his colleagues when, just as approval of the missile lab was on the political horizon, he dropped out of the project, saying he preferred to base himself in academia—an action that killed the lab.
Princeton physicist Marvin Goldberger, who was very close to Wheeler while working on the advanced projects lab, wrote to Wigner,
I must say, however, that my reservations about John’s being director, which I’m sure you sensed from our earlier discussions, were reinforced by seeing him in action as a leader. He has many great virtues and his halo is the finest gold. There is however an amorphous quality about him both in his reception of ideas and in his transmission of information to others. I find myself wanting to shake him to make him say something straight out and incisively. I have difficulty putting this into words, but Oskar [Morgenstern] described his own feelings to me in a similar way.34
Goldberger’s candid assessment sums up an aspect of Wheeler that many of his associates, including Everett, found infuriating: his tendency to play both sides of a game. Of course, in the heyday of game theory, insincerity was often considered to be a tactical virtue. In that light, it was not irrational for Wheeler to recalibrate his political and scientific agendas according to shifts in the balance of power.
In 1959, Wheeler and Morgenstern joined forces with Henry Kissinger, a consultant to the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group, where Everett was employed. Convair Corporation hired the trio of physicist, game theorist, and political scientist to write “A Doctrine for Limited War,” which advocated for fighting small nuclear wars. Years later, Wheeler said,
In the end Convair decided not to publish it, because they feared that it would bring down upon them the wrath of people of the kind who had chanted after World War I, chanted about American defense contractors, ‘merchants of death.’ They didn’t want to be called merchants of death.35
Kissinger later published an influential book on the doctrine of limited warfare, which allowed for the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the pursuit of “national self interest.” Wheeler found Kissinger’s book to be “absolutely marvelous.” In subsequent years, Wheeler was a super-hawk for invading, bombing, defoliating, and trying to occupy Vietnam. He favored the Kissinger-crafted assassination of President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973, falsely claiming that Allende was a communist; and he asserted that Chile became more democratic under the brutal rule of the military dictator, Augusto Pinochet.36 During the Cold War, Wheeler advocated for building the anti-ballistic missile systems and multiple nuclear war head missiles (MIRVs) that kept the arms race pumped up and profitable for the arms manufacturers and war contractors he worked for, especially Battelle Memorial Institute.
Despite his long time devotion to the task of proliferating nuclear weapons,
Wheeler was awarded the Niels Bohr International Gold Medal in 1982 for contributions to the peaceful use of atomic energy. (He had helped develop the idea of building nuclear reactors within a containment facility.) Like so many people with access to political power and wealth, Wheeler operated according to a fine-tuned sense of self-interest, sans a sense of irony as he flip-flopped from one agenda to another. That he could take credit for working for peace while building the engines of war is not a tribute to him, but a sign of the times. Wang observes,
The Cold War left the United States with an impoverished form of liberalism that viewed policy as driven by process and banished ideals from politics.37
It is hard to label Wheeler. He was conservative in his politics and radical in his physics. And he was often of two minds about important matters. Attracted to the “efficiency” of Hitler’s national socialism, he eschewed it when Roosevelt efficiently mobilized industry and science against the Axis powers. He made globe-destroying bombs, while remaining a devoted family man. He was a good friend to all, and he had an agenda for all of his friends, whether they knew it or not. He was in love with the idea of truth and beauty, and he cheerfully sold his learning for fees and access to government and corporate power. He vacillated between preaching the absolute truth of the Copenhagen interpretation and praising Everett’s anti-Copenhagen theory. In these ways, he was an embodiment of the superposition principle.