By 1954, Robert Oppenheimer had become a target of various conservative groups, not merely because of his security lapses in the thirties and forties, but because of his virtually unchallenged position in the political scientific world and because he was emerging as a powerful opponent to administration policy on the hydrogen bomb. He was not, in the vernacular of the time, on the team. He offended not just the political conservatives but also, increasingly, the Air Force, which saw itself as the nuclear delivery arm of the military.
