American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

Robert admired the setting—so obviously a contrast to his Ethical Culture environment—and in years to come would repeatedly find his way back to this desolate mesa.

“Even in the last stages of senile aphasia I will not say that education, in an academic sense, was only secondary when I was at college. I plow through about five or ten big scientific books a week, and pretend to research. Even if, in the end, I’ve got to satisfy myself with testing toothpaste, I don’t want to know it till it has happened.”

“Although I liked to work, I spread myself very thin and got by with murder; I got A’s in all these courses which I don’t think I should have.” He thought he had acquired a “very quick, superficial, eager familiarization with some parts of physics with tremendous lacunae and often with a tremendous lack of practice and discipline.”

for the first time, he realized that he could learn from others: “Something which for me—more than most people—is important began to take place, namely, I began to have some conversations. Gradually, I guess, they gave me some sense and, perhaps more gradually, some taste in physics, something that I probably would not have ever gotten to if I’d been locked up in a room.”

In 1927, Einstein wrote Born: “An inner voice tells me that this is not the true Jacob. The theory accomplishes a lot, but it does not bring us closer to the secrets of the Old One. In any case, I am convinced that He does not play dice.”

After a particularly grueling day on horseback, Robert wrote a friend wistfully, “My two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It’s a pity they can’t be combined.”

“It is easy for a famous scientist to have lots of students doing the dirty work for him,” said one colleague. “But Opje helps people with their problems and then gives them the credit.”

On occasion he would subject his guests to his potent martini, shaken with elaborate ceremony and poured into chilled glasses. Sometimes he dipped the rims of the martini glasses in lime juice and honey.

The fact that discipline, he argued, “is good for the soul is more fundamental than any of the grounds given for its goodness. I believe that through discipline, though not through discipline alone, we can achieve serenity, and a certain small but precious measure of freedom from the accidents of incarnation . . . and that detachment which preserves the world which it renounces. I believe that through discipline we learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances, and to abandon with simplicity what would else have seemed to us indispensable.” And only through discipline is it possible “to see the world without the gross distortion of personal desire, and in seeing it so, accept more easily our earthly privation and its earthly horror.”

“I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, and war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude; for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.”

Other physicists, among them Ernest Lawrence, George Placzek, Walter Elsasser and Victor Weisskopf, all spent a few days there. All his visitors were surprised by how much their seemingly fragile friend clearly relished the spartan conditions.

The most relevant political fact about Robert Oppenheimer was that in the 1930s he was devoted to working for social and economic justice in America, and to achieve this goal he chose to stand with the left.

Oppenheimer thought that no one could be expected to learn quantum mechanics from books alone; the verbal wrestling inherent in the process of explanation is what opens the door to understanding.

“I’ll never forget that morning,” Compton later wrote in a tone of high drama. “I drove Oppenheimer from the railroad station down to the beach looking out over the peaceful lake. There I listened to his story. . . . Was there really any chance that an atomic bomb would trigger the explosion of the nitrogen in the atmosphere or the hydrogen in the ocean? . . . Better to accept the slavery of the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on mankind.”

“One would listen patiently to an argument beginning, and finally Oppenheimer would summarize, and he would do it in such a way that there was no disagreement. It was a kind of magical trick that brought respect from all those people, some of them superiors in terms of their scientific record. . . .”

On another occasion, he noticed a hole in the fence surrounding Los Alamos—so he walked out the main gate, waved to the guard, and then crawled back through the hole and walked out the main gate again. He repeated this several times. Feynman was almost arrested. His antics became part of Los Alamos lore.

Oppie never saw her again. Eleven years later, he was asked by his interrogators, “Did you find out why she had to see you?” He replied, “Because she was still in love with me.”

To relieve the tension, some of the scientists organized a betting pool— with a dollar a bet to predict the size of the explosion. Teller characteristically bet high, putting his dollar on 45,000 tons of TNT; Oppenheimer bet low, a very modest 3,000 tons. Rabi staked his money on 20,000 tons. And Fermi alarmed some of the Army guards by taking side bets on whether the bomb would ignite the atmosphere.

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

“The war had made it obvious by the most cruel of all arguments, that science is of the most immediate and direct importance to everybody. This had changed the character of physics.”

Modern Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus.”

“The ability to speak in public like that is a poison—it’s very dangerous for the person who has it.” Such a talent might lead a man to think his velvet tongue was an effective political armor.

He was a scientist, he told a reporter disdainfully, not an “armaments manufacturer.” Not every scientist, of course, felt this way. Edward Teller was still promoting the “Super” to anyone with the patience to listen. When Teller asked Oppenheimer to urge that research on the Super continue, Oppie cut him short: “I neither can nor will do so.” It was a reaction that Teller would never forget—or forgive.

However confident Americans might be that their views and ideas will prevail, the absolute “denial of the views and ideas of other people, cannot be the basis of any kind of agreement.”

An early opportunity for a good-faith effort to prevent an uncontrolled nuclear arms race between the two major powers had been lost. It would take the terrors of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the massive Soviet buildup that followed it, before an American administration would propose, in the 1970s, a serious and acceptable arms control agreement. But by then tens of thousands of nuclear warheads had been built.

‘I am ready to go anywhere and do anything [Oppie said], but I am bankrupt of further ideas. And I find that physics and the teaching of physics, which is my life, now seems irrelevant.’ It was this last that really wrung my heart.”

“We know this because in the last war, the two nations which we like to think are the most enlightened and humane in the world—Great Britain and the United States—used atomic weapons against an enemy which was essentially defeated.”

But he now understood that the sacrifices required of the Soviet Union were of another order of magnitude. In a perceptive analysis, he noted: “That is because the proposed pattern of [international] control stands in a very gross conflict to the present patterns of state power in Russia. The ideological underpinning of that power, namely the belief in the inevitability of conflict between Russia and the capitalist world, would be repudiated by a co-operation as intense or as intimate as is required by our proposals for the control of atomic energy. Thus what we are asking of the Russians is a very far-reaching renunciation and reversal of the basis of their state power. . . .”

He knew that the Soviets were not likely to “take this great plunge.” He had not given up hope that in the distant future international controls could be achieved. In the meantime, he had reluctantly decided that the United States had to arm itself. This had led him to conclude—with considerable melancholy—that the principal job of the Atomic Energy Commission would be to “provide atomic weapons and good atomic weapons and many atomic weapons.”

“Man is both an end and an instrument,” Oppenheimer wrote. He reminded MacLeish of the “profound part that culture and society play in the very definition of human values, human salvation and liberation.” Therefore, “I think that what is needed is something far subtler than the emancipation of the individual from society; it involves, with an awareness that the past one hundred and fifty years have rendered progressively more acute, the basic dependence of man on his fellows.”

When Strauss had pressed Einstein to describe the ideal kind of man for the job of director, he had replied, “Ah, that I can do gladly. You should look for a very quiet man who will not disturb people who are trying to think.”

He hoped that he could make the Institute a haven for scientists, social scientists and humanists interested in a multidisciplinary understanding of the whole human condition. It was an irresistible opportunity, a chance to bring together the two worlds, science and the humanities, that had engaged him equally as a young man. In this sense, Princeton would be the antithesis of Los Alamos, and perhaps a psychological antidote to it.

Einstein remarked, “when it’s once been given to a man to do something sensible, afterward life is a little strange.” More than most men ever could, Oppenheimer understood exactly what he meant.

“In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

After receiving his first briefing on nuclear weapons in September 1953, Khrushchev later recalled, “I couldn’t sleep for several days. Then I became convinced that we could never possibly use these weapons.”

“follies can occur only when even the men who know the facts can find no one to talk about them, when the facts are too secret for discussion, and thus for thought.”

In the very near future, he said, “we may anticipate a state of affairs in which the two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own.” And then, in a chilling turn of phrase that startled everyone who heard it, Oppenheimer quietly added, “We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”

Max Born, his former professor in Göttingen, who had made it clear that he rather disapproved of Oppenheimer’s decision to work on the atomic bomb. “It is satisfying to have had such clever and efficient pupils,” Born wrote in his memoirs, “but I wish they had shown less cleverness and more wisdom.” Oppenheimer wrote Born, “Over the years, I have felt a certain disapproval on your part for much that I have done. This has always seemed to me quite natural, for it is a sentiment that I share.”

In 1965, on the twentieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, NBC television aired a documentary, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, narrated by Chet Huntley, which featured Robert’s recollection of the July 16 Trinity test and his recitation from the Bhagavad-Gita: “Now I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.” On another occasion, when an interviewer asked him on camera what he thought of Senator Robert Kennedy’s recent proposal that President Johnson initiate talks with the Soviet Union to halt the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Oppenheimer puffed hard on his pipe and said, “It’s twenty years too late. . . . It should have been done the day after Trinity.”

Walking alone with Kitty around the garden, Lilienthal asked her how he was getting along. Kitty froze, biting her lip; uncharacteristically, she seemed at a loss for words. When Lilienthal bent down and gently kissed her cheek, she uttered a deep moan and began to cry. A moment later, she straightened up, wiped her tears away and suggested they should go back inside and join Anne and Robert. “I have never admired the strength of a woman more,” Lilienthal noted in his diary that evening. “Robert is not only her husband, he is her past, the happy past and the tortured one, and he is her hero and now her great ‘problem.’

Now, I don’t know how to describe my life without using some word like ‘responsibility’ to characterize it, a word that has to do with choice and action and the tension in which choices can be resolved. I am not talking about knowledge, but about being limited by what you can do. . . . There is no meaningful responsibility without power. It may be only power over what you do yourself—but increased knowledge, increased wealth, leisure are all increasing the domain in which responsibility is conceivable.” After this soliloquy, Morgan wrote, “Oppenheimer then turned his palms up, the long, slender fingers including his listener in his conclusion. ‘You and I,’ he said, ‘neither of us is rich. But as far as responsibility goes, we are both in a position right now to alleviate the most awful agony in people at the starvation level.” This was only a different way of saying what he had learned from reading Proust forty years earlier in Corsica: that “indifference to the sufferings one causes . . . is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.”

Far from being indifferent, Robert was acutely aware of the suffering he had caused others in his life—and yet he would not allow himself to succumb to guilt. He would accept responsibility; he had never tried to deny his responsibility. But since the security hearing, he nevertheless no longer seemed to have the capacity or motivation to fight against the “cruelty” of indifference. In that sense, Rabi had been right: “They achieved their goal. They killed him.”

“The whole point of the Exploratorium,” Frank said, “is to make it possible for people to believe they can understand the world around them. I think a lot of people have given up trying to comprehend things, and when they give up with the physical world, they give up with the social and political world as well. If we give up trying to understand things, I think we’ll all be sunk.”

She was beloved throughout the island. “Everybody loved her,” Barlas said, “but she didn’t know that.”