The Fifties

by David Halberstam

Oppenheimer’s own politics had come a long way since his days as a vaguely radical student and young academic. He had come to recognize the cruelty and brutality of Stalin, and he had little confidence left in Russian intentions. If anything, in the years after the war, he had become something of an establishment figure. He had even apologized lightly for his left-wing days in a 1948 Time magazine cover piece celebrating him as America’s scientist laureate: “Most of what I believed then now seems complete nonsense, but it was an essential part of becoming a whole man. If it hadn’t been for this late but indispensable education I couldn’t have done the job at Los Alamos.” His opposition to the H bomb was a curious blend of moral and pragmatic concerns. On the moral side, he was exhausted and spiritually depleted by the making of the atomic bomb; on the pragmatic side, he, like Conant and Kennan, wondered if the Super might divert energy from more usable weaponry and whether we were devoting too much of our resources to a weapon that might, in the end, turn out to be unusable. It was easier for opponents to challenge his past than his logic.