He went to Berkeley in 1929 and by the late 1930s had built—as Hans Bethe put it flatly—“the greatest school of theoretical physics that the United States has ever known.” This was more than an academic matter. Through the 1920s, the best young American physicists studied in Europe, especially Germany. When Oppenheimer returned to the United States, he made it possible for American students to be educated at home. The arrivals of refugees from Hitlerism only strengthened this achievement. When research for the atom bomb seriously began in 1942, American physics, the equal of any in the world, was ready.
There is no end of testimony to Oppenheimer's brilliance, and justly so. His research on quantum physics made him an international force.21 His graduate students, fascinated by him, mimicked the way he spoke, smoked, and gestured. He attracted women, daunted colleagues, and by sheer intellectual speed and range overwhelmed many of his peers. The physicist Emilio Segré said Oppenheimer had the quickest mind he had ever seen—no small praise: Segré had been trained by no less than Fermi himself. The young Edward Teller was overpowered by Oppenheimer's mind and personality.22 To those around him, he glittered.
The inner Oppenheimer was much more complicated and troubled. He had grown up rich, sheltered, and rather spoiled. He could not help using his intelligence to browbeat others. He was feared for his sarcasm, which, unlike Pauli's, seemed personal and even vicious. Certainly, Oppenheimer's taste for humiliating others reflected his own insecurity. He could analyze, criticize, absorb, and penetrate all difficulties with astonishing ease with his “iron memory.” But he never succeeded in producing truly creative work. For someone so gifted, it must have been a bitter failure. The psychological burden seems to have lifted when he directed Los Alamos. There, his critical gifts were exactly what was needed, and his restless energy was wholly occupied. In those years, he was self-confident and at ease with himself.
During his early years at Berkeley, Oppenheimer's private interests were as rarefied as his physics. He describes himself then:
I studied and read Sanskrit with Arthur Ryder. I read very widely, mostly classics, novels, plays and poetry; and I read something of other parts of science. I was not interested in and did not read about economics or politics. I was almost wholly divorced from the contemporary scene in this country. I never read a newspaper or a current magazine like Time or Harper's; I had no radio, no telephone; I learned of the stock market crash in the fall of 1929 only long after the event; the first time I ever voted was in the Presidential election of 1936. To many of my friends, my indifference to contemporary affairs seemed bizarre, and they often chided me with being too much a highbrow.23
In 1936, his interests shifted radically. The exquisite aesthete became a political activist. The transformation was sparked in part by Oppenheimer's growing awareness of Nazi persecutions. It was also encouraged by his affair with the moody, smart, beguiling, and sometimes badly depressed Jean Tatlock. She introduced Oppenheimer to the world of left-wing protest and intrigue, to Communists, union organizers, and Spanish Civil War loyalists. She herself had been a Party member off and on. It was a heady experience for the privileged and precious Oppenheimer. The affair did not last, however. (Four years later, the gifted but troubled Tatlock committed suicide.) In 1940, Oppenheimer married Katherine Puening, whose first husband, Joe Dallet, had died fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Dallet had been a Party organizer; Katherine had been a member herself for several years. By 1939 and the Nazi-Soviet Pact that led to the devouring of Poland, she had become disillusioned. Oppenheimer, too, began to gravitate away from the extreme left.
But his political past returned to haunt Oppenheimer. When General Groves, head of the bomb project, decided that Oppenheimer was the ideal director, he was rebuffed, at first, by the Army. Groves persisted and managed to cow the security-conscious Military Policy Committee.24 Oppenheimer's organizational brilliance surprised many of his colleagues, who were first dismayed to have a young man who had not even won a Nobel Prize leading Los Alamos. Despite his support of Oppenheimer, Groves was intensely security-minded. So guarded was he of atomic secrets that he hesitated to brief agents sent behind Germany lines lest a captured agent unwittingly give away a vital secret.25 Still, Groves could not prevent background checks on Oppenheimer, and throughout 1943 they continued. He was shadowed, his Berkeley neighbors were questioned, and he was interrogated endlessly. FBI reports accumulated. Whenever Oppenheimer was questioned, his answers were recorded. Later, careless errors and contradictions were pointed to as evidence of questionable loyalty. In June 1943, Oppenheimer visited Berkeley and then met Jean Tatlock in San Francisco. The FBI trailed them on leaden feet:
He was met by Jean Tatlock who kissed him. They dined… then proceeded at 10:50 pm to 1450 Montgomery Street and entered a top-floor apartment. Subsequently the lights were extinguished and Oppenheimer was not observed until 8:30 am next day when he and Jean Tatlock left the building together.26
In late 1943, with the supersecret Los Alamos laboratory well under way and awaiting his attention, its director was forced to reveal the name of a friend, Haakon Chevalier, a former colleague at Berkeley. Chevalier had earlier approached Oppenheimer with the name of an engineer who had Russian contacts. Having at first failed to mention the incident to the FBI, he later did so. The admission, and his failure to disclose the conversation immediately, became part of the evidence at his 1954 hearing.
Security dogged Oppenheimer, as it did (and still does) all physical scientists underwritten by a government at war (whether hot or cold, declared or not). In the 1940s, security meant Army G-2 (Intelligence) and the FBI, whose director, J. Edgar Hoover, was rabidly anti-Communist and reflexively anti-Semitic. In the earlier Red Scare of 1919, Attorney General Mitchell Palmer had launched a campaign against “foreign-born subversives and traitors,”27 by which was meant anyone connected to Marxism, socialism, trade unionism, or a myriad of other left-wing inclinations. (It did Hitler no harm among many conservative Americans that he declared himself an enemy of Bolshevism.) Likewise, Palmer's protégé Hoover believed that the Communist threat came from within. When, later, Oppenheimer faced his inquisition, his work at Los Alamos seemed to constitute “means and opportunity.” The motive was a given.
Los Alamos meant the end of Oppenheimer's scientific career. Like all his Los Alamos colleagues, he did no fundamental work during the war. Afterwards, he became a public figure, for better or worse. Yet Los Alamos in turn did much for Oppenheimer. The astute Hans Bethe, who knew him well, later observed:
There was a tremendous change in Oppenheimer from 1940 to 1942, and especially in 1943. In 1940 he was confused, he mumbled, he certainly wouldn't have given anybody any orders…. [H]e was attracted by problems beyond the capacity of anybody to solve, including his…. In 1942 the new personality had gelled. He was much more decisive…. [In 1943] he really came into his own, and he obviously had always wanted to accomplish something definite, something outstanding. And Berkeley and Caltech had not given him that opportunity.28
Inside the esoteric theorist was a man of action, happy to escape into the world. His early political activities had launched him into the arena of action; at Los Alamos, he led. It must have seemed a sublime duty, to ensure the military safety of the United States against the Nazis. He could at once hold his own with the brilliant Fermi and keep in mind every detail from the number and size of the mess halls to the need for code names for Niels Bohr and his son. He bent the rules to bring Feynman's beloved and dying wife to New Mexico. He stood up to his own strong-minded superior, General Groves, who wanted all the physicists commissioned, to keep them under strict Army regulations.
After Hiroshima, Oppenheimer became a national hero. He was the man who had ended the war. His thin, ascetic face was everywhere, in magazines and newspapers and even on TV. To be a “theoretical” physicist suddenly seemed glamorous. Oppenheimer brought his organizational acumen to Princeton as the director of the Institute for Advanced Study. There, he qu
ietly assisted the government in its atomic policy, armed guards watching over a safe near his office.
But even at the height of his power and celebrity, Oppenheimer was vulnerable. With the end of World War II came the Cold War. The Soviet Union, not surprisingly, developed its own bomb (aided by the Los Alamos spy Klaus Fuchs). The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) began hearings in the late 1940s. Charges began to fly. Communist subversives were said to infest the unions, own Hollywood, and have infiltrated the government. Inevitably, the Committee turned to the very laboratories that had produced the American bomb. Oppenheimer was an easy target.
New charges were now brought against Oppenheimer for his refusal to support the hydrogen bomb effort with sufficient enthusiasm. At first, he was too popular and influential to be tackled directly. His former students could be grilled, however. One, Bernard Peters, was named by Oppenheimer himself. In a closed hearing before HUAC, Oppenheimer said that Peters called himself a Communist fighting the Nazis. Oppenheimer concluded that Peters was still “dangerous.” Peters denied the charges vigorously and wrote to his old teacher for clarification. Oppenheimer equivocated.
Close friends reproached Oppenheimer for testifying. Victor Weisskopf wrote to Oppenheimer in dismay: “[W]e are losing something that is irreparable. Namely confidence in you… whom so many regard as our representative in the best sense of the word.”29 Hans Bethe, Edward Condon, and even Edward Teller were horrified. Oppenheimer, confronted by Peters, apologized after a fashion. Writing to Weisskopf, Peters recalled: “He [Oppenheimer] said it was a terrible mistake. He was not prepared for any questions. He had never done anything as wrong.” Peters felt “sad” to see Oppenheimer in such “moral despair.”30
In the 1954 hearing, Oppenheimer himself was finally brought down by his pursuers. One, Lewis Strauss, was a wealthy businessman who had become a rear admiral during the war and then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). Strauss was touchy and vain. Oppenheimer unwisely mocked Strauss's views before Congress. The specific reason for the hearing was to inquire about Oppenheimer's refusal to support building the hydrogen bomb, though he was scarcely the only one to voice opposition—Bethe, Rabi, and James Bryant Conant, the president of Harvard, were also opposed. Oppenheimer's loyalty was not questioned, but he was nonetheless said to suffer a “susceptibility to influence.” Rabi voiced support for Oppenheimer: We built you the A-bomb, “and what more do you want, mermaids?”31 Edward Teller, on the other hand, testified that he did not feel “comfortable” with Oppenheimer's holding a security clearance. Teller was thereafter reviled by a large part of the physics community.
Oppenheimer, forced out of government service, went back to the Institute and physics, more serene in some ways, more troubled in others. He lived little more than a decade longer, dying of throat cancer in 1967. In his blunt way, Rabi insisted that the HUAC hearings were meant to kill Oppenheimer—and did. The Oppenheimer security trial is sometimes said to have inaugurated a new era in governmental suspicion and control of its scientists. Yet Oppenheimer must have known, during those uncomfortable interviews of 1943, that he had met his masters.
Oppenheimer succeeded in building the bomb, and was eventually disgraced. Heisenberg failed, and was received in triumph.
DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE: THE NEW SECURITY ORDER
Einstein no sooner arrived in Princeton in 1933 than the FBI opened a file on him as a suspicious character. To keep him out of the country, the Woman Patriot group, made up of affluent right-wing women living in Washington, D.C., published a sixteen-page screed. They accused Einstein of being the true and “acknowledged world leader” of all Communist activity, outdoing “even Stalin himself” in this effort. Einstein meant to destroy all organized government, promote treason, organize unlawful “acts of rebellion against officers of the U.S. in time of war.” He was also a charlatan; his relativity theory was nonsense; he was moreover an atheist.32 This was the first item in Einstein's FBI file. Einstein read a copy of the publication and thought it so funny he answered it in print lightheartedly. The FBI did not find it amusing; its fantasies would be repeated a thousand times over in that file. The FBI added this warning when it forwarded the file to Army G-2 in 1940:
In view of his radical background, this office would not recommend the employment of Dr. Einstein on matters of a secret nature, without a very careful investigation, as it seems unlikely that a man of his background could, in such a short time, become a loyal American citizen.33
That same year, Einstein became a citizen of the United States. He would contribute to the war effort minimally, as a consultant to the Navy, with his wild hair intact.
Even without Einstein's help, the Americans built the bomb and won the war. But an unexpected result was that a new and lasting conflict broke out around science and within it. Since they alone understood how to build such destructive weapons, physicists became indispensable to their governments as never before. The possession of such incalculably dangerous knowledge made them suspect—top security risks—to the authorities, who now could not do without them, but in many ways did not quite know what to do with them. For the scientists, there was an added sting of self-suspicion: After the bombs had burned away Japanese cities and their people, science itself became suspect to many of its creators, innocent no longer. Modern physics had earned a new and bitter pathos of its own. As early as 1945, Oppenheimer put it eloquently:
We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world. We have made a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And… we have raised again the question of whether science is good for men.34
Until the destruction of Hiroshima, the atom bomb was a project under the tightest wraps. The atom bomb was a weapon that would bring a truly “total” war and threaten the very existence of humanity anywhere on the globe. In the short run, the weapon gave the United States an advantage over rivals such Germany and the USSR.
By 1945, the United States had poured four billion dollars into the atom bomb project, an astonishing sum for that time. The project involved thousands of technicians, vast tracts in Tennessee and Washington, and Los Alamos in New Mexico. It was kept so secret that not even Vice President Harry S. Truman was told about it until he took the oath as president after Roosevelt died. The entire project was set up under control of the Army, with then Brigadier General Leslie Groves in charge. Army security did the obvious things: It surrounded Los Alamos with barbed wire, had sentries patrol the outskirts, set up censorship of mail. But all this was futile unless the physicists were themselves loyal and remained so. How much could these scientists be trusted? Neither security officials nor the scientists were prepared for the complexities involved.
The most valuable physicists were very much a foreign colony of savants. Fermi came from Italy; Wigner, von Neumann, and Teller from Hungary; Bethe from Germany, and Rudolf Peierls from Germany by way of England; Chadwick from England; Bohr from Denmark; Frisch from Austria by way of Denmark; Stanislaw Ulam from Poland; Vera Kistiakowsky from Russia. Their political views could be as puzzling to American security as their accents.
General Groves worried about having to deal with prima donnas, but except for Teller, there were few of those. Nor were there many troublesome political radicals. The Europeans had a closer experience with the extremist left and right and were apt to be politically conservative in the United States—Hungarians like Wigner or von Neumann, for example. Fermi left Italy because its anti-Semitism threatened his Jewish wife; in the United States, he did not bother much with politics. But two important scientists stood on the left. One was Klaus Fuchs, a German émigré to Britain, thereafter assigned to Los Alamos, with access to all secrets. The other was Robert Oppenheimer. The irony was that the Army and the FBI never suspected Fuchs of being a spy, though he passed secrets to the USSR from 1942 to 1949 and gave the Soviets all they needed to know about American know-how and progress; but th
ey continually suspected and hounded Oppenheimer, who in fact did not pass any secrets. A further irony is that without Oppenheimer as director of Los Alamos, it is entirely possible that the atom bomb would never have been built, at least not so soon.
EPILOGUE
The Projects of Science
THE PATHOS OF SCIENCE LIES IN ITS DOUBLE NATURE: The scientist is at once free and strictly confined, individual but ultimately subsumed. This double role begins when the apprentice scientist starts the long and exacting effort to master the findings of that formidable (and always growing) army of predecessors. The energy of the young scientist, the intense interest, busy labor, and excitement of possible discovery naturally block off presentiments of eventually being an old lion in winter—and fortunately so, for the sake of science. Trying to make any sort of advance is strenuous enough without also contemplating being ultimately dislodged. Physics sees itself as a self-erasing discipline, concerned only with the leading edge of research.
Those no longer on the leading edge—whether a few years behind, or centuries—no longer have an independent existence, as, say, Shakespeare and Rembrandt continue to have. Einstein was at the leading edge until 1926, but thereafter became like those he himself had once helped supplant. One might say that scientists have two careers, the living one of progress and discovery, and the posthumous one—and in certain ways, the posthumous career can begin before death occurs.
Needless to say, science never advances very neatly. The time-lines of discovery move at very different speeds, and often in odd directions. While Einstein brought relativity to consummation in 1905, clarity about the atom progressed in fits and starts. The electron was discovered inside the atom in 1897; radioactive matter in 1896; the quantum in 1900. In 1911, Rutherford found the atomic nucleus; in 1913, Bohr showed that the stability of the atom required a quantum explanation. Quantum mechanics arrived in 1925. The physics of the nucleus began to catch up only in the 1930s.
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