American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

Oppie complained bitterly that Secretary of State Byrnes “felt that we could use the bomb as a pistol to get what we wanted in international diplomacy.” Oppenheimer insisted that this would not work. “He says the Russians are a proud people and have good physicists and abundant resources. They may have to lower their standard of living to do it but they will put everything they have got into getting plenty of atomic bombs as soon as possible. He thinks the mishandling of the situation at Potsdam has prepared the way for the eventual slaughter of tens of millions or perhaps hundreds of millions of innocent people.”

his scientists were “enormously concerned” about a possible war with Russia. He had thought that the Roosevelt Administration had worked out a plan to communicate with the Soviets about the bomb. This hadn’t happened, he suspected, because the British had objected. Still, he thought Stimson had a very “statesmanlike” view of the whole matter, and he referred approvingly to the secretary of war’s September 11 memo to President Truman which, he said, had “advocated turning over to Russia . . . the industrial know-how as well as the scientific information.” At this point, Wallace interrupted to say that Stimson’s views on this point had never even been introduced at a Cabinet meeting. Obviously disturbed to hear this news, Oppenheimer said that his scientists back in New Mexico were completely disheartened: “. . . all they think about now are the social and economic implications of the bomb.”

Wallace subsequently noted in his diary: “The guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.”

As for Truman, a man who compensated for his insecurities with calculated displays of decisiveness, Oppenheimer seemed maddeningly tentative, obscure—and cheerless. Finally, sensing that the president was not comprehending the deadly urgency of his message, Oppenheimer nervously wrung his hands and uttered another of those regrettable remarks that he characteristically made under pressure. “Mr. President,” he said quietly, “I feel I have blood on my hands.” The comment angered Truman. He later informed David Lilienthal, “I told him the blood was on my hands—to let me worry about that.” But over the years, Truman embellished the story. By one account, he replied, “Never mind, it’ll all come out in the wash.” In yet another version, he pulled his handkerchief from his breast pocket and offered it to Oppenheimer, saying, “Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?”

Afterwards, the President was heard to mutter, “Blood on his hands, dammit, he hasn’t half as much blood on his hands as I have. You just don’t go around bellyaching about it.” He later told Dean Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again.” Even in May 1946, the encounter still vivid in his mind, he wrote Acheson and described Oppenheimer as a “cry-baby scientist” who had come to “my office some five or six months ago and spent most of his time wringing his hands and telling me they had blood on them because of the discovery of atomic energy.”

secretary of war, wrote in his diary that the president was “a simple man, prone to make up his mind quickly and decisively, perhaps too quickly—a thorough American.” This was not a great president, “not distinguished at all . . . not Lincolnesque, but an instinctive, common, hearty-natured man.” Men as different as McCloy, Rabi and Oppenheimer all thought Truman’s instincts, particularly in the field of atomic diplomacy, were neither measured nor sound—and sadly, certainly were not up to the challenge the country and the world now faced.

What they had done was no less than an “organic necessity.” If you were a scientist, he said, “you believe that it is good to find out how the world works . . . that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values.” Besides, there was a “feeling that there was probably no place in the world where the development of atomic weapons would have a better chance of leading to a reasonable solution, and a smaller chance of leading to disaster, than within the United States.” Nevertheless, as scientists, Oppenheimer told them, they could not escape responsibility for “the grave crisis.” Many people, he said, will “try to wiggle out of this.” They will argue that “this is just another weapon.” Scientists knew better. “I think it is for us to accept it as a very grave crisis, to realize that these atomic weapons which we have started to make are very terrible, that they involve a change, they are not just a slight modification.

But if war had become intolerable, then very “radical” changes were required in the relations between nations, “not only in spirit, not only in law, but also in conception and feeling.” The one thing he wished to “hammer home,” he said, was “what an enormous change in spirit is involved.”

He thought he had what he called an “interim solution.” First, the major powers should create a “joint atomic energy commission,” armed with powers “not subject to review by the heads of State,” to pursue the peaceful applications of atomic energy. Second, concrete machinery should be set up to force the exchange of scientists, “so that we would be quite sure that the fraternity of scientists would be strengthened.” And finally, “I would say that no bombs be made.”

The atomic bomb, Truman had said, would be held by the United States as a “sacred trust” for the rest of the world, and “we shall not give our approval to any compromises with evil.” Oppenheimer said he disliked Truman’s triumphalist tone: “If you approach the problem and say, ‘We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,’ then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed . . . you will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster.”

The world had changed; Americans would behave unilaterally at their peril.

Lilienthal noted in his diary, “making funny ‘hugh’ sounds between sentences or phrases as he paced the room, looking at the floor—a mannerism quite strange. Very articulate. . . . I left liking him, greatly impressed with his flash of mind, but rather disturbed by the flow of words.” Later, after spending more time in his company, Lilienthal gushed, “He [Oppenheimer] is worth living a lifetime just to know that mankind has been able to produce such a being.

After cocktails and dinner, he stood by a small blackboard, chalk in hand, and lectured his host and McCloy on the intricacies of the atom. As a visual aid, he drew little stick figures to represent electrons, neutrons and protons chasing one another about and generally carrying on in unpredictable ways. “Our bewildered questions seemed to distress him,” Acheson later wrote. “At last he put down the chalk in gentle despair, saying, ‘It’s hopeless! I really think you two believe neutrons and electrons are little men!’

Oppenheimer believed that in the long run, “without world government there could be no permanent peace, that without peace there would be atomic warfare.” World government was obviously not an immediate prospect, so Oppenheimer argued that in the field of atomic energy all countries should agree to a “partial renunciation” of sovereignty. Under his plan, the proposed Atomic Development Authority would have sovereign ownership of all uranium mines, atomic power plants and laboratories. No nation would be permitted to build bombs—but scientists everywhere would still be allowed to exploit the atom for peaceful purposes. As he explained the concept in a speech in early April, “What is here proposed is such a partial renunciation, sufficient, but not more than sufficient, for an Atomic Development Authority to come into being, to exercise its functions of development, exploitation and control, to enable it to protect the world against the use of atomic weapons and provide it with the benefits of atomic energy.” Complete and total transparency would make it impossible for any nation to marshal the enormous industrial, technical and material resources necessary to build an atomic weapon in secrecy. Oppenheimer understood that one couldn’t uninvent the weapon; the secret was out. But one could construct a system so transparent that the civilized world would at least have ample warning if a rogue regime set about making such a weapon.

The sense of urgency that everyone came to share was reflected in the plan’s endorsement by businessmen like Monsanto’s Charles Thomas and the Republican Wall Street lawyer John J. McCloy. Herbert Marks later remarked, “Only something as drastic as the atomic bomb could have got Thomas to suggest that the mines be internationalized. Don’t forget he’s the vice president of a hundred-and-twenty-million-dollar firm.” Soon afterwards, Oppenheimer’s report—which became known as the Acheson-Lilienthal Report—was submitted to the White House. Oppenheimer was pleased; surely, the president would now understand the urgent need to control the atom. But his optimism was misplaced. While Secretary of State Byrnes made a pretense of saying that he was “favorably impressed,” he was, in fact, shocked by the sweeping scope of the report’s recommendations. A day later, he persuaded Truman to appoint his (Byrnes’) longtime business partner, the Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, to “translate” the Administration’s proposals to the United Nations. Acheson was appalled. Lilienthal wrote in his diary, “When I read the news last night, I was quite sick. . . . We need a man who is young, vigorous, not vain, and who the Russians would feel isn’t out simply to put them in a hole, not really caring about international cooperation. Baruch has none of these qualities.” When Oppenheimer learned of this appointment, he told his Los Alamos friend Willie Higinbotham, by then president of the newly cre...

For advice, he turned to two conservative bankers, Ferdinand Eberstadt and John Hancock (a senior partner at Lehman Brothers), and Fred Searls, Jr., a mining engineer and close personal friend. Both Baruch and Secretary of State Byrnes happened to be board members and investors in Newmont Mining Corporation, a major company with a large stake in uranium mines. Searls was Newmont’s chief executive officer. Not surprisingly, they were alarmed by the idea that privately owned mines might be taken over by an international Atomic Development Authority. None of these men seriously contemplated internationalizing the newly emerging nuclear industry. And, as far as atomic weapons were concerned, Baruch thought of the American bomb as the “winning weapon.”

Why, Baruch asked, was there no provision for the punishment of violators of the agreement? What would happen to a country found to be building nuclear weapons? Baruch thought a stockpile of nuclear weapons should be set aside and automatically used against any country found in violation. He called this “condign punishment.” Herb Marks said such a provision was completely inconsistent with the spirit of the Acheson-Lilienthal plan. Besides, Marks pointed out, it would take a renegade nation at least a year to prepare atomic weapons, and that would provide the international community time to respond.

Oppenheimer’s anger led to depression. He wrote Lilienthal after it was all over to say that he was “still very heavy of heart.” Once again demonstrating his political perspicacity, Oppenheimer predicted, accurately as it happened, how the whole process would unfold: “The American disposition will be to take plenty of time and not force the issue in a hurry; that then a 10–2 report will go to the [Security Council] and Russia will exercise her veto and decline to go along. This will be construed by us as a demonstration of Russia’s warlike intentions. And this will fit perfectly into the plans of that growing number who want to put the country on a war footing, first psychologically, then actually. The Army directing the country’s research; Red-baiting; treating all labor organizations, CIO first, as Communist and therefore traitorous, etc. . . .” As he talked, Oppenheimer paced back and forth in his frenetic style, speaking, Lilienthal later noted in his diary, in a “really heart-breaking tone.”

Oppenheimer had taken his case to the public by publishing a long essay in the New York Times Magazine that explained the plan for an international Atomic Development Authority in layman’s language. It proposes that in the field of atomic energy there be set up a world government. That in this field there be a renunciation of sovereignty. That in this field there be no legal veto power. That in this field there be international law. How is this possible in a world of sovereign nations? There are only two ways in which this ever can be possible: One is conquest. That destroys sovereignty. And the other is the partial renunciation of that sovereignty. What is here proposed is such a partial renunciation, sufficient, but not more than sufficient, for an atomic development authority to come into being; to exercise its functions of development, exploitation and control; to enable it to live and grow, and to protect the world against the use of atomic weapons and provide it with the benefits of atomic energy.

“What do we do if this effort in international control fails?” Oppie pointed out the window and replied, “Well, we can enjoy the view—as long as it lasts.”

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. Oppenheimer and many of his colleagues always blamed Baruch for this missed opportunity. Acheson angrily observed later, “It was his [Baruch’s] ball and he balled it up. . . . He pretty well ruined the thing.” Rabi was equally blunt: “It’s simply real madness what has happened.”

I think that if we had acted in accordance, wisely and clearly and discreetly in accordance with his views, we might have been freed of our rather sleazy sense of omnipotence, and our delusions about the effectiveness of secrecy, and turned our society toward a healthier vision of a future worth living for.”

“He is really a tragic figure,” Lilienthal wrote in his diary, “with all his great attractiveness, brilliance of mind. As I left him he looked so sad: ‘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.”

Oppenheimer’s anguish was real and deep. He felt a personal responsibility for the consequences of his work at Los Alamos. Every day the newspaper headlines gave him evidence that the world might once again be on the road to war. “Every American knows that if there is another major war,” he wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on June 1, 1946, “atomic weapons will be used. . . .” This meant, he argued, that the real task at hand was the elimination of war itself. “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.”

MacLeish published an astonishingly bitter essay in the Atlantic Monthly, “The Conquest of America,” in which he attacked the country’s postwar descent into an atmosphere of dystopia, of a utopia gone awry. Although America was the most powerful nation on the globe, the American people seemed seized by a mad compulsion to define themselves by the Soviet threat. In this sense, MacLeish wryly concluded, America had been “conquered” by the Soviets, who were now dictating American behavior. “Whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse,” MacLeish wrote. He harshly criticized Soviet tyranny, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism.

“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.”

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. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER

Flexner hailed the “usefulness of useless knowledge.” But by the 1940s, the Institute was in danger of acquiring a reputation for coddling brilliant minds with forever unfulfilled potential. One scientist described it as “that magnificent place where science flourishes and never bears fruit.”

Earlier in their relationship, Bohm had had tremendous regard for Oppenheimer. But over time he found himself agreeing with another friend who had worked with Oppenheimer, Milton Plesset, who expressed the view that Oppie was “not capable of genuine originality, but that he is very good at comprehending other people’s ideas and seeing their implications.”

In the fall of 1946, Oppie had found the time to coauthor a paper with Hans Bethe, published in Physical Review, on electron scattering. That year he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics—but the Nobel committee evidently hesitated to give the award to someone whose name was so closely associated with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

He persuaded Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, Hideki Yukawa, George Uhlenbeck, George Placzek, Sinitiro Tomonaga and several other young physicists to spend occasional summers or sabbaticals at the Institute. In 1949, he recruited Chen Ning Yang, a brilliant twenty-seven-year-old who would win the 1957 Nobel in physics with T. D. Lee, another Chinese-born physicist Oppenheimer brought to the Institute. “This is an unreal place,” Pais wrote in his diary in February 1948. “Bohr comes into my office to talk, I look out of the window and see Einstein walking home with his assistant. Two offices away sits Dirac. Downstairs sits Oppenheimer. . . .” It was a concentration of scientific talent like no other in the world . . . except, of course, Los Alamos.

Oppenheimer loved to talk about things psychological. Bruner found him “brilliant, discursive in his interests, lavishly intolerant, ready to pursue any topic anywhere, extraordinarily lovable. . . . We talked about most anything, but psychology and the philosophy of physics were irresistible.”

Oppenheimer strongly believed it was essential that the Institute remain a home to both science and the humanities. In his speeches about the Institute, Oppenheimer continually emphasized that science needed the humanities to better understand its own character and consequences.

The Institute was as idyllic and comfortable as Los Alamos was spartan. Particularly for its lifelong members, it was a Platonic heaven. “The point of this place,” Oppenheimer once said, “is to make no excuses for not doing something, for not doing good work.” To outsiders, the Institute sometimes had the appearance of a pastoral asylum for the certifiably eccentric.

Einstein eventually acquired a grudging respect for the new director, whom he described as an “unusually capable man of many-sided education.” But what he admired about Oppenheimer was the man, not his physics. Still, Einstein would never count Oppenheimer as one of his close friends, “perhaps partly because our scientific opinions are fairly diametrically different.” Back in the 1930s, Oppie had once called Einstein “completely cuckoo” for his stubborn refusal to accept quantum theory. All of the young physicists Oppenheimer brought to Princeton were wholly convinced of Bohr’s quantum views—and uninterested in the questions that Einstein posed to challenge the quantum view of the world. They could not fathom why the great man was working indefatigably to develop a “unified field theory” to replace what he saw as the inconsistencies of quantum theory. It was lonely work, and yet he was still quite satisfied to defend “the good Lord against the suggestion that he continuously rolls the dice”—his thumbnail critique of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, one of the foundations of quantum physics. And he didn’t mind that most of his Princeton colleagues “see me as a heretic and a reactionary who has, as it were, outlived himself.”

What distressed Einstein about quantum theory was the notion of indeterminacy. And yet it had been his own work on relativity that had inspired some of Bohr’s insights. Oppenheimer saw this as highly ironic: “He fought with Bohr in a noble and furious way, and he fought with the theory which he had fathered but which he hated. It was not the first time that this had happened in science.”

Robert still loved to be the bearer of lavish gifts. Knowing of Einstein’s love of classical music, and knowing that his radio could not receive New York broadcasts of concerts from Carnegie Hall, Oppenheimer arranged to have an antenna installed on the roof of Einstein’s modest home at 112 Mercer Street. This was done without Einstein’s knowledge—and then on his birthday, Robert showed up on his doorstep with a new radio and suggested they listen to a scheduled concert. Einstein was delighted.

AS PHYSICISTS, Oppenheimer and Einstein disagreed. But as humanists, they were allies. At a moment in history when the scientific profession was being bought wholesale by a Cold War national security network of weapons labs and universities increasingly dependent on military contracts, Oppenheimer had chosen another path. Though “present at the creation” of this militarization of science, Oppenheimer had walked away from Los Alamos, and Einstein respected him for attempting to use his influence to put the brakes on the arms race.

The arguments could become extraordinarily petty. “The Institute is an interesting Paradise,” observed his perceptive secretary, Verna Hobson. “But in an ideal society, when you remove all the everyday frictions, the frictions that are created to take their place are so much more cruel.”

“Oppenheimer was a wholly frustrated personality, and his amusement was to make people quarrel with each other. I’ve seen him do it. He loved to have people at the Institute quarrel with each other. He was frustrated essentially because he wanted to be Niels Bohr or Albert Einstein, and he knew he wasn’t.” Weil was typical of the bloated egos Oppenheimer encountered at the Institute. These were not the young men he had easily led in Los Alamos by the force of his personality. Weil was arrogant, acerbic and demanding. He took an almost roguish delight in intimidating others, and he was furious that he could not intimidate Oppenheimer.

“He really flattened me,” Dyson recalled. “I saw him at his most fierce. It was bad. I really felt like a worm; he convinced me that I had really betrayed all the trust that he’d ever had in me. . . . That’s the way he was. He wanted to run things his own way. The Institute was his own little empire.” At Princeton, the abrasive streak in Oppenheimer that was so rarely seen at Los Alamos would sometimes appear with a ferociousness that startled even his closest friends. To be sure, most of the time Robert charmed people with his wit and gracious manners. But sometimes he seemed unable to contain his fierce arrogance. Abraham Pais recalled several occasions when Oppenheimer’s unnecessarily biting comments caused young scholars to come into his office, sobbing.

“The young physicists,” observed Dr. Walter W. Stewart, an economist at the Institute, “are beyond doubt the noisiest, rowdiest, most active and most intellectually alert group we have here. . . . A few days ago I asked one of them, as they came bursting out of a seminar, ‘How did it go?’ ‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘Everything we knew about physics last week isn’t true!’

If one is saying, for the benefit of the rest of the audience, things that he knows already, he cannot resist hurrying one on to something else; then when one says things that he doesn’t know or immediately agree with, he breaks in before the point is fully explained with acute and sometimes devastating criticisms. . . . he is moving around nervously all the time, never stops smoking, and I believe that his impatience is largely beyond his control.” Some were unnerved by another of his tics—he’d bite the tip of his thumb, clicking his front teeth, again and again.

“but still he didn’t really know what was going on!” And he was often perplexed by Oppenheimer as a man, his odd combination of philosophical detachment and driving ambition. He thought of Oppie as the kind of person whose worst temptation was to “conquer the Demon and then to save mankind.” Dyson saw Oppie as guilty of “pretentiousness.” Sometimes he simply couldn’t understand Oppenheimer’s delphic pronouncements—and this reminded him that “incomprehensibility can be mistaken for depth.” And yet, despite it all, Dyson found himself attracted to Oppenheimer.

Rabi knew Oppie too well to be angry with him, and he knew that one of his friend’s weaknesses was “a tendency to make things sound mystical.” Oppenheimer’s former teacher at Harvard, Professor Percy Bridgman, told a reporter, “Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. . . . If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there.”

By August 1945, Blackett argued, the Japanese were virtually defeated; the atomic bombs had actually been used to forestall a Soviet share in the occupation of postwar Japan. “One can only imagine,” Blackett wrote, “the hurry with which the two bombs—the only two existing—were whisked across the Pacific to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just in time, but only just, to insure that the Japanese Government surrendered to American forces alone.” The atomic bombings were “not so much the last military act of the Second World War,” he concluded, “as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress.”

“He Couldn’t Understand Why He Did It” He told me that his nerve just gave way at that moment. . . . He has this tendency when things get too much, he sometimes does irrational things. DAVID BOHM

Frank Oppenheimer was standing on the brink of a rewarding career. First at the University of Rochester and now at the University of Minnesota, he was doing innovative experimental work in particle physics. By 1949, he had a reputation among his fellow physicists as one of the country’s foremost experimentalists, studying high-energy particles (cosmic rays) at high altitudes.

Peters left wondering what Oppenheimer had told the Committee the previous day, so on his way back to Rochester, he stopped off in Princeton to see his mentor. Oppie quipped that “God guided their questions so that I did not say anything derogatory.” One week later, however, Oppenheimer’s closed-session testimony was leaked to the Rochester Times-Union. The headline blared: “Dr. Oppenheimer Once Termed Peters ‘Quite Red.’ ” Peters’ colleagues at the University of Rochester read that their colleague had escaped from Dachau by “guile” and had once criticized the American Communist Party as insufficiently dedicated to armed revolution. Peters knew immediately that his job was at risk. Only the previous year, similar HUAC testimony had leaked and when the Rochester Times-Union published a story headlined “U of R Scientist May Face Spy Probers,” Peters had sued the paper for libel. He won an out-of-court settlement of $1. With this history, Peters understood what was at stake if the allegations were resurrected. Peters promptly denied Oppenheimer’s allegations, telling the Rochester Times-Union, “I have never told Dr. Oppenheimer or anybody that I had been a member of the Communist Party because I have not; but I did say that I greatly admired the spirited fight they put up against the Nazis . . . and also that I admired the heroes who died in the concentration camp at Dachau.” Peters admitted that his political views, even today, were “not orthodox,” citing his strong oppositi...

Oppenheimer heard from his brother Frank, Hans Bethe and Victor Weisskopf, all of them expressing pained astonishment that Oppie would attack a friend that way. Both Weisskopf and Bethe wrote that they could not understand how he could have said such things about Peters, as Weisskopf put it, and they urged him to “set this record straight and do what is in your power to prevent Peters’ dismissal. . . .” Bethe wrote him that “I remember you spoke in the most friendly terms to me about the Peterses, and they certainly have considered you their friend. How could you represent his escape from Dachau as evidence for his inclination to ‘direct action’ rather than a measure of self-defence against mortal peril?”