Oppenheimer's Bomb and His Falling out

AMERICAN PROMETHEUS: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Knopf, 2005, 721 pages, $35 (ISBN 0375412026)

Don't let them bomb through clouds or through an overcast. Got to see the target. Don't let them detonate it too high. The figure fixed on is just right. Don't let it go up [higher] or the target won't get as much damage. J. Robert Oppenheimer, chain smoking and pacing nonstop, instructed the officers in charge of the bombing run over Hiroshima on delivering his baby right. That was July 23, 1945.

Nine years later, on May 25, 1954, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) Lewis Strauss told President Dwight D. Eisenhower that he could not do his job at AEC if Oppenheimer was connected in any way with the program. On June 29, 1954, an AEC commission denied Oppenheimer's security clearance--one day before it would have expired anyway. The commission voted 4 to 1 that he was both loyal and a security risk.

Cancer killed Oppenheimer early in 1967. He was 62. Sen. J. William Fulbright asked the Senate, and the country, to remember not only what his special genius did for us; let us also remember what we did to him.

Here we have the elements of a seemingly implausible life. A wall is put between the scientific leader of the Manhattan Project, the extraordinary and successful race to build atomic bombs, and government secrets. The story already has been told many times in books, plays, magazines, on television and radio, and now even as an opera titled Doctor Atomic. Add in that this past summer, 60 years on, remembrances of what happened leading up to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relived around the world. What does Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's new book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer add?

It is a thorough and well-researched account of Oppenheimer's life. While the book is sometimes numbing in details, such as the meticulous recounting of Oppenheimer's left-wing associations beginning in the 1930s, I think these details matter a great deal in understanding the lasting impact that his life and fate have had on science and politics.

That life was not always heroic. After all, once upon a time a young Oppenheimer offered, literally, a poisoned apple to Patrick M. S. Blackett, his mentor at the University of Cambridge. That boggling episode brought his father to England on the double and the demand by Cambridge that Oppenheimer seek the services of a Harley Street psychiatrist or be expelled. He somehow got past that occurrence, and after stops at other European meccas of 1930s physics, such as the University of Gttingen, in Germany, he returned to the U.S. to proselytize for the new quantum physics.

In the late 1930s, with appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, and California Institute of Technology, he became entangled in left-wing causes, forming friendships with, among others, members of the local Communist Party. Although he contributed money, he never joined the party--a distinction that later maddened his pursuers but still didn't save him.

While he was at Los Alamos during the war years, the FBI stalked him through surveillance, wiretaps, and informants. It continued after the war, including much of his two decades as director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. That he was made the scientific leader of the Manhattan Project despite chronic suspicions of his politics is a tipping point of history. Los Alamos might have succeeded without him but certainly only with much greater strain, less enthusiasm, and less speed, is the appraisal by Nobel physicist Hans Bethe, as quoted by the authors.

Yet, even as Los Alamos was racing at a brutal pace in mid-1945 to build the bomb, the case for doing so was collapsing. The war in Europe was over, and gone was the maniacal fear of U.S. scientists that the Germans would build a bomb first. The Japanese were trying to find a way to surrender but still keep their emperor. Oppenheimer wasn't told of this until later, but that information surely would have forced its way into the open if the bomb had taken a few more months to complete.

Oppenheimer was the evangelical force behind the bomb. For those working on the mesa at Los Alamos, it was, as Bethe said, the great time of their lives. That this was true of Los Alamos was mainly due to Oppenheimer. He was a leader. Yet this was the same leader who, two months after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, told President Truman, I feel that I have blood on my hands. Truman's reaction was vintage: He told Secretary of State Dean Acheson, I don't want to see that son of a bitch in this office ever again.

On this important occasion, Bird and Sherwin quite rightly note, the composure and powers of persuasion of the usually charming and self-possessed Oppenheimer had abandoned him. His habit of relying on spontaneity worked well when he was at ease, but, time and time again, under pressure he would say things that he would regret profoundly, and that would do him serious harm.

Oppenheimer had sought the meeting with Truman to try to persuade him to support international control of atomic energy. The goals were political and not scientific, and Oppenheimer was out of his element, totally misreading Truman's temperament.

The 1954 AEC hearing on The Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer turned on that weakness, which was an inability to understand that his enemies had little appreciation for fairness and nuanced argument, that their pursuit was both personal and political, that it was take no prisoners. The hearing is conventionally seen as the paranoid suspicions about Oppenheimer's past left-wing associations amplified by the McCarthyism hysteria over supposed Communist spies in government. But, as I think American Prometheus shows, those past associations were simply convenient weapons for Oppenheimer's enemies. Oppenheimer was pilloried because AEC's Strauss hated him for personal reasons and because Oppenheimer sharply questioned the hydrogen bomb program.

The hearing was a sham. Strauss picked the members of the commission. The FBI recorded Oppenheimer's privileged conversations with his lawyers, and transcripts were given to Strauss and the lead prosecutor. Oppenheimer's attorney was given neither a witness list nor a security clearance so he could see in advance the documents that would be used against his defendant. Oppenheimer was a terrible witness, resorting to delicate and at times evasive responses to a prosecutor bent on destroying him. Eisenhower read and then burned interim reports on the hearing Strauss sent him. Any objective legal review of how the hearing was conducted would result in its nullification, said the sole AEC commissioner who voted against conviction, Henry D. Smyth.

ALSO OF INTEREST

109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos, by Jennet Conant, Simon & Schuster, 2005, 432 pages, $26.95 (ISBN 0–7432–5007–9)

The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race, by Priscilla J. McMillan, Viking, 2005, 384 pages, $25.95 (ISBN 0–670–03422–3)

Doctor Atomic, an opera by John Adams and Peter Sellers, world premiere held on Oct. 1 in San Francisco (doctor-atomic.com)

American Prometheus labels the fiasco the triumph of McCarthyism without McCarthy himself. And Bird and Sherwin go on to draw a wider lesson: With Oppenheimer's defrocking, scientists knew that in the future they could serve the state only as experts on narrow scientific issues. The trial represented a watershed in the relation of the scientist to government. The narrowest vision of how American scientists should serve their country had triumphed.

I think that's about right. But, oddly, Oppenheimer's story has left a durable and positive legacy: Once time had salved scientists' bitterness at what was done to one of their own, they came to understand that politics is a contact sport. If you oppose the goals of the politically powerful, make triply sure that the science is right, strap on armor, and get ready for some figurative letting of blood, including your own.

That legacy of Oppenheimer's life now has a rich history of major battles fought on scientific-political fronts: acid rain, stratospheric ozone, the perils of supersonic transport, global warming, and more. And Oppenheimer's warnings of the peril of nuclear weapons are much at the scientific-political front today.

For example, George W. Bush and John Kerry agreed during a 2004 presidential debate that our single most dangerous peril is the suitcase nuclear weapon that might be smuggled into the country and set off, say, in Manhattan. Oppenheimer, asked during a closed Senate hearing in 1946 what was needed to defend against a suitcase bomb, prescribed a screwdriver to open each and every crate and suitcase that might come along. Detection means have gotten better since then, but the point Oppenheimer was making with his tongue-in-cheek answer is still firm: The danger is real and defenses seemingly meager.

President and Mrs. John F. Kennedy welcomed Oppenheimer to the White House in 1962, and in 1963 President Lyndon B. Johnson gave him the Fermi Prize. The award ceremony with Johnson was described by a witness quoted in the book as expiation for the sins of hatred and ugliness visited upon Oppenheimer.

On a cold and wet evening after returning from the meeting with Truman in 1945, Oppenheimer talked to his wartime colleagues about the fix we are in. He said that what had happened forced us to consider the relation between science and common sense. Edith Warner, a neighbor whose meals made a trip off the Los Alamos mesa to her adobe house extraordinarily rewarding for the scientists, including Oppenheimer, later wrote to Mr. Opp that she had a copy of the speech. She said she thought of him as the song of the river comes from the canyon and the need of the world reaches even this quiet spot.

Norman Metzger is retired as executive director of the National Research Council's Commission on Physical Sciences, Mathematics & Applications. His books include Men and Molecules.