American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

Oppenheimer would explain to his interrogators in 1954, “my interests began to change. . . . I had had a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany. I had relatives there [an aunt and several cousins], and was later to help in extricating them and bringing them to this country. I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.”

In 1934, Peters had written a 3,000-word account of the horrors he had witnessed in Dachau. He described in sickening detail the torture and summary execution of individual prisoners. One prisoner, he reported, “died in my hands a few hours after the beating. All skin was removed from his back, his muscles were hanging down in shreds.” Peters no doubt shared his graphic account of Nazi atrocities with his friends when he arrived on the West Coast. Whether Oppenheimer read Peters’ report on Dachau or merely heard him talk about it, he must have been deeply moved by these stories.

Oppie and Jean Tatlock frequently socialized with Hannah and Bernard Peters. Although the couple always insisted that they never joined the Communist Party, their politics were clearly left-wing. By 1940 Hannah had a private practice in a poverty-stricken district of downtown Oakland, and this experience “strengthened a conviction that had been growing for some years, namely that adequate medical care can only be provided by a comprehensive health insurance scheme with federal backing.” Hannah also insisted on racial integration in her practice, accepting black patients at a time when few other white physicians did so. Both views stamped her as a radical—and the FBI concluded that she was a member of the CP.

Chevalier had visited France, where he managed to meet such left-wing literary figures as André Gide, André Malraux and Henri Barbusse. He returned to California convinced that he was destined “to witness the transition from a society based on the pursuit of profit and the exploitation of man by man to a society based on production for use and on human cooperation.” By 1934, he had translated André Malraux’s acclaimed novel of the Chinese uprising of 1927, La Condition Humaine (Man’s Fate) and his Le Temps du Mépris (The Time of Contempt), novels inspired by what Chevalier thought of as “the new vision of man.”

As for so many on the left, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War was a turning point for Chevalier. In July 1936, right-wing factions in the Spanish army rose against the democratically elected left-wing government in Madrid. Led by General Francisco Franco, the fascist rebels expected to overthrow the Republic within weeks. But popular resistance was tenacious, and a brutal civil war ensued. The United States and the European democracies, suspicious of communist influence in the Spanish government, and encouraged by the Catholic Church, declared an arms embargo against both sides. This handed a distinct advantage to the fascists, who received generous aid from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Only the Soviet Union aided the besieged Republican government. In addition, volunteers from around the world, mostly communists but also other leftists, joined international brigades to defend the Republic. During the years 1936–39, the defense of the Spanish Republic was the cause célèbre in liberal circles everywhere. Over these years, some 2,800 Americans volunteered to fight the fascists by joining the communist-sponsored Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

The late 1930s, he wrote, were “a time of innocence. . . . We were animated by a candid faith in the efficiency of reason and persuasion, in the operation of democratic processes and in the ultimate triumph of justice.” Like-minded men such as Oppenheimer, he wrote, believed that abroad the Spanish Republic would triumph over the winds of fascist Europe, and at home, the reforms of the New Deal were clearing the way for a new social compact based on racial and class equality. Many intellectuals had such hopes—but some also joined the Communist Party.

He had heard, however, through the Berkeley grapevine, that this brilliant young physicist was now “anxious to do something more than read about the problems that beset the world. He wanted to do something.”

It was Tatlock’s passionate nature to push Oppenheimer to move from theory to action. One day he commented that while he was certainly an “underdogger,” he would have to settle for being on the periphery of these political struggles. “Oh for God’s sake,” protested Jean, “don’t settle for anything.” She and Oppenheimer soon began organizing fund-raisers for a variety of Spanish relief groups.

In 1935, Addis attended an academic conference of the International Physiological Congress in Leningrad and he returned from his visit to the Soviet Union with glowing accounts of the socialist state’s progress in public health. He was particularly impressed that Soviet doctors had experimented with human cadaveric kidney transplants as early as 1933. Thereafter he lobbied vigorously for national health insurance, which eventually prompted the American Medical Association to expel him.

Some sensed that Oppenheimer’s politics were always driven by the personal. “Somehow one always knew he felt guilty about his gifts, about his inherited wealth, about the distance that separated him from others,” observed Edith Arnstein, a friend of Tatlock’s and a Party member.

Erikson’s work on the problem of “identity formation” in young adults. A prolonged adolescence, Erikson argued, accompanied by “chronic malignant disturbance,” was sometimes an indication that an individual was having trouble shedding fragments of his personality that he finds undesirable. Seeking “whole-ness,” and yet fearing a threatened loss of identity, some young adults experience such a sense of rage that they strike out at others in arbitrary acts of destruction. Oppenheimer’s behavior and problems back in 1925–26 had conformed in significant ways to this thesis. He had thrown himself into theoretical physics, carving out for himself a robust identity. But the scars remained. As the physicist and science historian Gerald Holton has observed, “Some psychological damage remained, however, not least a vulnerability that ran through his personality like a geological fault, to be revealed at the next earthquake.”

She called him a “delta function,” a mathematical device used by physicists in which delta is defined as zero—except at a specified place or time, at which point it becomes infinity. When called upon, Frank always possessed an infinite reservoir of goodwill and cheer. Years later, Robert himself said of his brother, “He is a much finer person than I am.”

And now a final word of advice: try to understand really, to your own satisfaction, thoroughly and honestly, the few things in which you are most interested; because it is only when you have learnt to do that, when you realize how hard and how very satisfying it is, that you will appreciate fully the more spectacular things like relativity and mechanistic biology. If you think I’m wrong please don’t hesitate to tell me so. I’m only talking from my own very small experience.”

Inevitably, an investigative file was opened on Oppenheimer which would eventually grow to some 7,000 pages. That same month, Oppenheimer’s name was put on a list of “persons to be considered for custodial detention pending investigation in the event of a national emergency.”

The elementary test of a good society is its ability to keep its members alive. It must make it possible for them to feed themselves and it must protect their persons from violent death. Today unemployment and war constitutes [sic] so serious a threat to the well being and security of the members of our society that many are asking whether that society is capable of meeting its most essential obligations. Communists ask much more of society than this: they ask for all men that opportunity, discipline, and freedom which have characterized the high cultures of the past. But we know that today, with the knowledge and power that are ours, no culture which ignores the elementary needs, no culture based on the denial of opportunity, on indifference to human want, can be either honest or fruitful.

The bottom line is that Robert always wished to be, and was, free to think for himself and to make his own political choices. Commitments have to be put in perspective to be understood, and the failure to do that was the most damaging characteristic of the McCarthy period. 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.

ON SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 1939, Luis W. Alvarez—a promising young physicist who worked closely with Ernest Lawrence— was sitting in a barber’s chair, reading the San Francisco Chronicle. Suddenly, he read a wire service story reporting that two German chemists, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, had successfully demonstrated that the uranium nucleus could be split into two or more parts. They had achieved fission by bombarding uranium, one of the heaviest of the elements, with neutrons. Stunned by this development, Alvarez “stopped the barber in mid-snip, and ran all the way to the Radiation Laboratory to spread the word.” When he told Oppenheimer the news, his reply was, “That’s impossible.” Oppenheimer then went to the blackboard and proceeded to prove mathematically that fission couldn’t happen. Someone must have made a mistake. But the next day, Alvarez successfully repeated the experiment in his laboratory. “I invited Robert over to see the very small natural alpha-particle pulses on our oscilloscope and the tall, spiking fission pulses, twenty-five times larger. In less than fifteen minutes he not only agreed that the reaction was authentic but also speculated that in the process extra neutrons would boil off that could be used to split more uranium atoms and thereby generate power or make bombs. It was amazing to see how rapidly his mind worked. . . .”

There was, he said, a “grown-up way to do this kind of problem,” and he suggested that Weinberg should get onto it right away. Weinberg duly spent the next three months laboring to produce an elaborate calculation. In the end, he had to report back that he could find no trace of the empirical relationship that he had predicted from his initial and very simple-minded argument. “Now you have learned a lesson,” Oppenheimer told him. “Sometimes the elaborate, the learned method, the grown-up method is not as good as the simple and childishly naïve method.”

The day Weinberg arrived at Berkeley, he happened to mention to Phil Morrison that Bohr’s book was one of the few volumes he had thought worth bringing along. Phil burst out laughing, because at Berkeley, among those in Oppenheimer’s tight-knit circle, Bohr’s little book was considered the Bible. Weinberg happily realized that at Berkeley, “Bohr was God and Oppie was his prophet.”

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. He never gave the same lecture twice. “He was very keenly aware,” Weinberg recalled, “of the people in his class.” He could look into the faces of his audience and suddenly decide to change his entire approach because he had sensed what their particular difficulties were with the subject at hand. Once he gave an entire lecture on a problem he knew would pique the interest of just one student. Afterwards, that student rushed up to him and said he wanted permission to tackle the problem. Oppenheimer replied, “Good, that’s why I gave the seminar.”

One day when Weinberg was in Oppenheimer’s office, he began rummaging through papers stacked on the trestle table in the center of the room. Picking out one paper, he began reading the first paragraph, oblivious to Oppie’s irritated look. “This is an excellent proposal,” Weinberg exclaimed, “I’d sure as hell like to work on it.” To his astonishment, Oppenheimer replied curtly, “Put that down; put it back where you found it.” When Weinberg asked what he had done wrong, Oppenheimer said, “That was not for you to find.” A few weeks later, Weinberg heard that another student who was struggling to find a thesis topic had begun work on the proposal he had read that day. “[The student] was a very genial, decent man,” Weinberg recalled. “But, unlike a few of us who enjoyed the kind of challenge that Oppie threw out like sparks, he was often baffled and nonplussed and ill at ease. Nobody had the courage to tell him, ‘Look, you’re out of your depth.’ ” Weinberg now realized that Oppie had planted this thesis problem for this very student. It was a distinctly easy problem, “But it was perfect for him,” Weinberg said, “and it got him his Ph.D. It would have been difficult for him to get it with Oppie if Oppie had treated him the way he treated me or Phil Morrison or Sid Dancoff.” Instead, Weinberg insisted years later, Oppie nurtured this student as a father would have treated a baby learning to walk. “He waited for him to discover that proposal accidentally, on his own terms, to pick...

“We were all close to communism at the time,” Bohm recalled. Actually, until 1940–41, Bohm didn’t have much sympathy for the Communist Party. But then, with the collapse of France, it seemed to him that no one but the communists had the will to resist the Nazis. Indeed, many Europeans appeared to prefer the Nazis to the Russians. “And I felt,” Bohm said, “that there was such a trend in America too. I thought the Nazis were a total threat to civilization. . . . It seemed that the Russians were the only ones that were really fighting them. Then I began to listen to what they said more sympathetically.”

Hawkins recalled being struck by Oppenheimer’s eloquence and sympathetic demeanor: “He was very persuasive, very cogent, elegant in language and able to listen to what other people said and incorporate it in what he would say. I had the impression that he was a good politician in the sense that if several people spoke he could summarize what they said and they would discover that they had agreed with each other as a result of his summary. A great talent.”

“Everyone sort of regarded him very affectionately as being sort of nuts,” Kamen said. “He was very brilliant, but somehow superficial. He had the approach of a dilettante.” At times, Kamen thought Oppie’s eccentricities were calculated performances. Kamen recalled going with him to a New Year’s Eve party at Estelle Caen’s home. On the drive over, Oppie said he knew Estelle lived on a particular street, but he had forgotten the number of the house. He remembered only that it was a multiple of seven. “So we drove up and down the street,” Kamen recalled, “and finally found Number 3528, a multiple of seven, all right. Thinking about it now, I wonder sometimes whether he wasn’t pulling everybody’s leg a little bit. . . . He had this overwhelming temptation just to snow you.”

He then explained, “I went to see Lawrence, and Lawrence blew a gasket.” Lawrence—whose politics had become increasingly conservative over the years—was incensed that a communist-backed union was trying to organize the people in his laboratory. When he demanded to know who was behind this, Oppenheimer insisted, “I can’t tell you who they are. They’ll have to come tell you themselves.” Lawrence was furious, not only because he was violently opposed to his physicists and chemists joining a union, but because the incident demonstrated that his old friend was still wasting his precious time on left-wing politics. Lawrence had repeatedly scolded Oppenheimer about his “leftwandering activities” but once again Oppie argued with his usual eloquence that scientists had a responsibility to help society’s “underdogs.”

OPPENHEIMER BACKED OFF from the union in the autumn of 1941, but the notion of organizing the scientists in the Rad Lab did not die. A little more than a year later, in early 1943, Rossi Lomanitz, Irving David Fox, David Bohm, Bernard Peters and Max Friedman, all Oppenheimer students, did join the union (FAECT Local 25). The usual motivations for forming a union were conspicuously absent. Lomanitz, for one, was making $150 a month at the Rad Lab—more than double his previous salary. No one had complaints about the working conditions; everyone in the lab was eager to put in as many hours as they could. “It seemed like a dramatic thing to do,” recalled Lomanitz. “It was kind of a thing of youth. . . . It was a ridiculous reason for forming a union.” Friedman was persuaded by Lomanitz and Weinberg to be the organizer within the Radiation Laboratory. “It was a title, I never did anything,” he recalled. But he thought in principle it was a fine idea to form a union. “Partly we were afraid of what the atom bomb might be used for. That was part of it. And part of it was that we thought the scientists shouldn’t just be [working on the bomb project] without any voice in what happens to their effort.”

By 1943, however, Oppenheimer had long since turned his back on union organizing. He did so not because he had changed his political views but because he had come to the realization that unless he followed Lawrence’s advice he would not be allowed to work on a project that he believed might be necessary to defeat Nazi Germany. During their arguments in the autumn of 1941 over his union-organizing activities, Lawrence had told him that James B. Conant, the president of Harvard University, had rebuked him for having discussed fission calculations with Oppenheimer, who was not then officially in the bomb project.

a New York politician, State Senator F. R. Coudert, Jr., was using his position as co-chair of New York’s Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate the Public Educational System to orchestrate a highly publicized witch-hunt against alleged subversives in New York City’s public universities. By September 1941, City College alone had dismissed twenty-eight staff members, some of whom were members of the New York branch of the Teachers’ Union—the same union to which Oppenheimer belonged in Berkeley. The American Committee for Democracy and Intellectual Freedom (ACDIF), to which Oppenheimer also belonged, published a statement condemning the dismissals. In response, Senator Coudert accused the ACDIF of having ties to communists, and a New York Times editorial lent support to Coudert’s attack. Into this political thicket waded Oppenheimer with a strongly worded protest. His letter of October 13, 1941, was by stages polite in tone, witty, ironical and then cuttingly sarcastic. Oppenheimer reminded the senator that the Bill of Rights guaranteed not merely the right to hold any belief, however radical, but the right to express that belief in speech or in writing with “anonymity.” The activities, he wrote, of “teachers who were communists or communist sympathizers consisted precisely in meeting, speaking their views, and publishing them (often anonymously), in engaging, that is, in practices specifically protected by the Bill of Rights.” Concluding on a note of defiance, he observ...

Oppenheimer and many other physicists around the country had known as early as February 1939 that an atomic bomb was a real possibility. But arousing the government’s interest in the matter would take time. A month before war broke out in Europe (September 1, 1939), Leo Szilard had persuaded Albert Einstein to sign his name to a letter (written by Szilard) addressed to President Franklin Roosevelt. The letter warned the president “that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may be constructed.” He pointed out that “a single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory.” Ominously, he suggested that the Germans might already be working on such a bomb: “I understand Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines which she has taken over. . .

So in May, Oppenheimer was formally appointed S-1’s director of fast-neutron research with the curious title Coordinator of Rapid Rupture.

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.” In the event, Bethe soon ran further calculations that convinced both Teller and Oppenheimer of the near-zero possibility of igniting the atmosphere. Oppenheimer spent the rest of the summer writing up the group’s summary report. In late August 1942, Conant sat reading it and scribbled notes to himself headed “Status of the Bomb.” According to Oppenheimer and his colleagues, an atomic device would explode with “150 times energy of previous calculation”—but it would need a critical mass of fissionable material six times the previous estimate. An atomic bomb was entirely feasible, but it would require the marshaling of massive technical, scientific and industrial resources.

“He’s a genius,” Groves later told a reporter. “A real genius. While Lawrence is very bright, he’s not a genius, just a good hard worker. Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well, not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn’t know about. He doesn’t know anything about sports.”

By the end of 1942, when Oppenheimer began recruiting some of his students, it was pretty clear to everyone that a very big weapon was going to be built. “Many of us thought,” said Lomanitz, “ ‘My God, what kind of a situation it’s going to be to bring a weapon like that [into the world]; it might end up by blowing up the world.’ Some of us brought this up to Oppenheimer; and basically his answer was, ‘Look, what if the Nazis get it first?’

A tail was put on Lomanitz, and one day in June 1943 he was observed standing just outside U.C. Berkeley’s Sather Gate with several friends. They were posing, with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders, for a photographer who routinely sold his services to students on campus. After the photo was taken and Lomanitz and his friends walked away, a government agent walked up to the photographer and bought the negative. Lomanitz’ friends were quickly identified as Joe Weinberg, David Bohm and Max Friedman—all of them Oppie’s students. From that moment on, these young men were marked as subversives. Lieutenant Colonel Pash testified that his investigators “determined in the first place that these four men I mentioned were very frequently together.” Without divulging “investigative techniques or operational procedures,” Pash explained that “we had an unidentified man and we had this photograph. As a result of our study we determined and were sure that Joe was Joseph Weinberg.” He also claimed that he had “sufficient information” to name both Weinberg and Bohm as Communist Party members. Pash was convinced that he had stumbled upon a sophisticated ring of wily Soviet agents, and he felt that any means necessary should be used to break the suspects. In July 1943, the FBI field office in San Francisco reported that Pash wanted to kidnap Lomanitz, Weinberg, Bohm and Friedman, take them out to sea in a boat and interrogate them “after the Russian manner.” The FBI noted that an...

IN THE SPRING OF 1943, just as David Bohm was trying to write up his thesis research on the collisions of protons and deuterons, he was suddenly told that such work was classified. Since he lacked the necessary security clearance, his own notes on scattering calculations were seized and he was informed that he was barred from writing up his own research. He appealed to Oppenheimer, who then wrote a letter certifying that his student had nevertheless met the requirements for a thesis. On this basis, Bohm was awarded his Ph.D. by Berkeley in June 1943. Although Oppenheimer personally requested the transfer of Bohm to Los Alamos, Army security officers flatly refused to give him clearance. Instead, a disbelieving Oppenheimer was told that because Bohm still had relatives in Germany, he couldn’t be cleared for special work. This was a lie; in fact Bohm was banned from Los Alamos because of his association with Weinberg.

As they parted, Robert commented that it was too bad the Spanish Loyalists hadn’t managed to hold out a little longer “so that we could have buried Franco and Hitler in the same grave.” Writing later, in his memoirs, Nelson noted that this was the last time he ever saw Oppenheimer, “for Robert’s connection with the Party had been tenuous at best, anyway.”

Eltenton, Chevalier reported, had solicited him to ask his friend Oppenheimer to pass information about his scientific work to a diplomat Eltenton knew in the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. By all accounts—Chevalier’s, Oppenheimer’s and Eltenton’s—Oppie angrily told Hoke that he was talking about “treason” and that he should have nothing to do with Eltenton’s scheme. He was unmoved by Eltenton’s argument, prevalent in Berkeley’s left-wing circles, that America’s Soviet allies were fighting for survival while reactionaries in Washington were sabotaging the assistance that the Soviets were entitled to receive.

Eltenton talked earnestly about the war and its still uncertain outcome. The Soviets, he pointed out, were bearing the brunt of the Nazi onslaught—four-fifths of the Wehrmacht was fighting on the Eastern Front—and much might depend on how effectively the Americans aided their Russian allies with arms and new technology. It was very important that there be close collaboration between Soviet and American scientists.

Oppenheimer seemed unaware of the utter chaos that had descended on Los Alamos—although years later, he confessed, “I am responsible for ruining a beautiful place.”

He so wanted Rabi aboard that he offered him the associate directorship of the laboratory—but to no avail. Rabi had fundamental doubts about the whole notion of building a bomb. “I was strongly opposed to bombing ever since 1931, when I saw those pictures of the Japanese bombing that suburb of Shanghai. You drop a bomb and it falls on the just and the unjust. There is no escape from it. The prudent man can’t escape, [nor] the honest man. . . . During the war with Germany, we [in the Rad Lab] certainly helped to develop devices for bombing . . . but this was a real enemy and a serious matter. But atomic bombing just carried the principle one step further and I didn’t like it then and I don’t now. I think it’s terrible.”

Rabi also gave a less practical but more profound reason for not joining: He did not, he told Oppenheimer, wish to make “the culmination of three centuries of physics” a weapon of mass destruction. This was an extraordinary statement, one that Rabi knew might well resonate with a man of Oppenheimer’s philosophical bent. But if Rabi was already thinking about the moral consequences of an atomic bomb, Oppenheimer, in the midst of this war, for once had no patience for the metaphysical. He now brushed aside his friend’s objection. “I think if I believed with you that this project was ‘the culmination of three centuries of physics,’ ” he wrote Rabi, “I should take a different stand. To me it is primarily the development in time of war of a military weapon of some consequence. I do not think that the Nazis allow us the option of [not] carrying out that development.” Only one thing mattered now to Oppenheimer: building the weapon before the Nazis did.

“OPPENHEIMER AT LOS ALAMOS,” Bethe said, “was very different from the Oppenheimer I had known. For one thing, the Oppenheimer before the war was somewhat hesitant, diffident. The Oppenheimer at Los Alamos was a decisive executive.” Bethe was hard-pressed to explain the transformation. The man of “pure science” he knew at Berkeley had been entirely focused on exploring the “deep secrets of nature.” Oppenheimer had not been remotely interested in anything like an industrial enterprise—and yet at Los Alamos he was directing an industrial enterprise. “It was a different problem, a different attitude,” Bethe said, “and he completely changed to fit the new role.”

Robert Wilson felt similarly: “In his presence, I became more intelligent, more vocal, more intense, more prescient, more poetic myself. Although normally a slow reader, when he handed me a letter I would glance at it and hand it back prepared to discuss the nuances of it minutely.” He also admitted that in retrospect there was a certain amount of “self-delusion” in these feelings. “Once out of his presence the bright things that had been said were difficult to reconstruct or remember. No matter, the tone had been established. I would know how to invent what it was that had to be done.”

Pauli had written that their former German colleague, the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, had just been appointed director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute, a nuclear research facility in Berlin. Moreover, Pauli had learned that Heisenberg was scheduled to give a lecture in Switzerland. Weisskopf reported further that he had discussed this news with Hans Bethe, and the two men had agreed that something should be done immediately: “I believe,” Weisskopf wrote Oppenheimer, “that by far the best thing to do in this situation would be to organize a kidnapping of Heisenberg in Switzerland. That’s what the Germans would do if, say you or Bethe would appear in Switzerland.”

An idealist with strong civil-libertarian instincts, Condon believed that good science could not come without a free exchange of ideas, and he lobbied vigorously for regular contacts between physicists at Los Alamos and the other labs around the country. Inevitably, he quickly attracted the ire of General Groves, who heard repeated reports of security infractions from his military representatives in Los Alamos. “Compartmentalization of knowledge, to me,” Groves insisted, “was the very heart of security.”

The Army’s relations with the scientists and their families were always shaky. General Groves set the tone. In private with his own men, Groves routinely labeled Los Alamos civilians “the children.” He instructed one of his commanders: “Try to satisfy these temperamental people. Don’t allow living conditions, family problems, or anything else to take their minds off their work.” Most of the civilians made it clear that they found Groves “distasteful”—and he made it clear that he didn’t care what they thought.

had in mind several other conversations about the notion that the Soviets ought to have access to new weapons technology. And why not? Many of his friends, students and colleagues worried daily about a fascist victory in Europe. They understood, quite correctly, that only the Soviet army could prevent such a calamity. Many of the physicists then working in the Rad Lab were not joining the Army only because they had been convinced—in quite a few cases by Oppenheimer himself—that their special project would materially contribute to the war effort. These men often discussed whether their government was doing everything it could to help those bearing the brunt of the fascist onslaught. Surely, Oppenheimer had heard many of his colleagues and students giving voice to the desire to help the beleaguered Russians—at a time when, after all, the Soviets were being promoted in the American press as heroic allies.

On the dining room table, he found an unsigned suicide note, scribbled in pencil on the back of an envelope. It read in part, “I am disgusted with everything. . . . To those who loved me and helped me, all love and courage. I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow. I tried like hell to understand and couldn’t. . . . I think I would have been a liability all my life—at least I could take away the burden of a paralyzed soul from a fighting world.” From there the words ran into a jagged, illegible line.

“For you were never starved for affection—your insatiable hunger was for creativity. And you longed to find perfection in yourself, not out of pride but in order to have a good instrument to serve the world.

Phil Morrison later wrote, with a lyricism that reflected the emotional attachment to the land that seized many residents. “We found that on the mesas and in the valley there was an old and strange culture; there were our neighbors, the people of the pueblos, and there were the caves in Otowi canyon to remind us that other men had sought water in the dry land.” LOS ALAMOS was an army camp—but it also had many of the characteristics of a mountain resort. Just before arriving, Robert Wilson had finished reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and sometimes he now felt as if he had been transported to that magical dominion. It was a “golden time,” said the English physicist James Tuck: “Here at Los Alamos, I found a spirit of Athens, of Plato, of an ideal republic.” It was an “island in the sky,” or, as some new arrivals dubbed it, “Shangri-La.”