American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

[I]f he cracks up it will certainly be a great tragedy. I only hope that he does not drag down too many others with him. Peters says the testimony of Oppie about him is full of out-and-out lies on matters where Oppie should know the truth.” Condon told his wife that he had heard from people in Princeton that “Oppie has been in a very high state of tension in the last few weeks . . . he seems to be in a great state of strain for fear he himself will be attacked. Of course he knows that he has so much of a record of leftist activities as is involved in what is brought out against the others from Berkeley. . . . It appears that he is trying to buy personal immunity from attack by turning informer. . .

Oppie agreed to write a letter to the editor of the Rochester newspaper correcting his HUAC testimony. In the letter, published on July 6, 1949, Oppenheimer explained that Dr. Peters had recently given him “an eloquent denial” that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party or had advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government. “I believe this statement,” Oppenheimer said. He went on to make a spirited defense of freedom of speech. “Political opinion, no matter how radical, or how freely expressed, does not disqualify a scientist for a high career in science. . . .” Peters considered the letter “a not very successful piece of double-talk.” Nonetheless, it managed to salvage his job at the University of Rochester. He soon realized, however, that without access to classified research and government research projects, his career in America was at a dead end. Late in 1949, the State Department refused to issue him a passport when he expressed the intention of going to India. The following year, the State Department relented and Peters accepted a teaching position at Bombay’s Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. But in 1955, after the State Department refused to reissue his passport, Peters finally took German citizenship. In 1959, he and Hannah moved to Niels Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen, where he spent the rest of his career.

Lomanitz never seemed to harbor resentment toward Oppenheimer. He didn’t blame him for what the FBI and the political culture of the times had done to him. And yet, there was a lingering disappointment. Lomanitz had once thought of Oppenheimer as “almost a god.” He didn’t think Oppenheimer had been “malicious.” But years later he would say that he had come to feel “sad personally about the man’s weaknesses.

While there was little Oppenheimer could have done to protect his former students, he sometimes behaved as if he was truly frightened of any association with them. Their company represented a link to his political past and therefore a threat to his political future. He was clearly scared.

He had once deeply admired Oppenheimer, and though over the years those feelings had turned to ambivalence, he never held Oppie responsible for his banishment from America. “I think he acted fairly to me as far as he was able to,” Bohm said.

Bohm had a candid conversation with Oppie. He asked why he had said such things about their friend. “He told me,” Bohm recalled, “that his nerve just gave way at that moment. That somehow the thing was too much for him. . . . I can’t remember his words, but that’s what he meant. He has this tendency when things get too much, he sometimes does irrational things. He said he couldn’t understand why he did it.” Of course, it had happened before—in his interview with Pash in 1943 and his meeting with Truman in 1945—and it would happen again during his security hearing in 1954. But, as Bernard Peters observed to Weisskopf, “He [Oppenheimer] was obviously scared to tears of the hearings, but this is hardly an explanation. . . . I found it a rather sad experience to see a man whom I regarded very highly in such a state of moral despair.”

he was aware of Strauss’ concerns. But he did not share them, and he now made it clear that he thought these concerns foolish. “No one can force me to say,” he testified, “that you cannot use these isotopes for atomic energy. You can use a shovel for atomic energy; in fact, you do. You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy. In fact, you do.” At this, the audience murmured with laughter. A young reporter, Philip Stern, happened to be sitting in the hearing room that day. Stern had no idea who was the target of this sarcasm, but “it was clear that Oppenheimer was making a fool of someone.” Joe Volpe knew exactly who was being made a fool. Sitting next to Oppenheimer at the witness table, he glanced back at Lewis Strauss and was not surprised to see the AEC commissioner’s face turning an angry beet-red. More laughter greeted Oppenheimer’s next statement: “My own rating of the importance of isotopes in this broad sense is that they are far less important than electronic devices, but far more important than, let us say, vitamins, somewhere in between.”

The children were barefoot and dressed in rags. “They all looked rachitic and most seemed undernourished. All they had to play with was junk they found in the street. As I sat there reading and listening and looking out the window, I found myself alternately worrying what the Committee was going to try to do to me and getting madder and madder at the fact that I had been called down here so that some fellow could question me about being Un American.”

As if to remind them of their status, FBI agents periodically showed up to question their neighbors. Occasionally they’d visit the Oppenheimer ranch and ask Frank to talk about other people in the CP. Once an agent specifically told him, “Don’t you want to get a job in a university? If you do, you have to cooperate with us.” Frank always turned them away. In 1950, Frank wrote: “Finally, after all these years, I have gotten wise to the fact that the FBI isn’t trying to investigate me, it is trying to poison the atmosphere in which I live. It is trying to punish me for being left wing by turning my friends, my neighbors, my colleagues against me and make them suspicious of me.”

THROUGHOUT THESE YEARS, Oppenheimer was convinced that his phones were wiretapped. One day in 1948, a Los Alamos colleague, the physicist Ralph Lapp, came to Oppie’s Princeton office to discuss his (Lapp’s) educational work on arms control issues. Lapp was startled when Oppenheimer suddenly rose and took him outside, muttering as they went, “Even the walls have ears.”

“No additional information has been obtained or developed concerning Dr. Oppenheimer that would indicate he is disloyal.” Years later, Oppenheimer claimed wryly that, “The government paid far more to tap my telephone than they ever paid me at Los Alamos.”

Harold Cherniss chided him, “The time has come, Robert, for you to give up the political life and return to physics.” When Robert stood silent, seeming to weigh this advice, Cherniss pressed him: “Are you like the man who has a tiger by the tail?” To this Robert finally replied, “Yes.”

“She loved him very much and he loved her very much,” Hobson insisted. But she and other close friends in Princeton knew Kitty had a relentless intensity that drained anyone near her: “What a strange person she was; all that fury and soreness and intelligence and wit. She had a constant state of the hives. She was just tensed up all the time.”

Sherr realized that her friend was “very nervous and unsure of herself.” Kitty could intimidate those who did not know her well. And at times she could seem perfectly animated. But it was all an act. Sherr believed that, when required to put on a performance, Kitty was “really scared out of her wits.”

According to Kitty, he was “overly fastidious.” Kitty was surely right to think him maddeningly aloof and detached. He lived his emotional life introspectively. They were polar opposites. But that had always been the source of their mutual attraction. If their marriage was something less than a healthy partnership, after a decade of marriage—and two children—the Oppenheimers had developed a bond of mutual dependency.

Dyson later observed of his friend that this was a man capable of “rapid and unpredictable shifts between warmth and coldness in his feelings toward those close to him.” It was difficult for the children. “To an outsider like me,” Pais later observed, “Oppenheimer’s family life looked like hell on earth. The worst of it all was that inevitably the two children had to suffer.”

When he was about eleven years old, Peter put on some puppy fat and Kitty couldn’t stop nagging him about his weight. There was never much food around the house, but now Kitty put Peter on a strict diet. Mother and son fought frequently. “She used to make Peter’s life just miserable the way she went on about it,” Hobson said. Sherr agreed: “Kitty was very, very impatient with him; she had absolutely no intuitive understanding of the children.” Robert stood passively by, and if pressed, he invariably took Kitty’s side in these arguments. “He [Robert] was very loving,” recalled Dr. Hempelmann. “He didn’t discipline the kids. Kitty did all that.”

But he never shone in school, and Kitty found this intolerable. “Peter was a terrifically sensitive child,” said Harold Cherniss, “and he had a very hard time in school. . . . [But this] had nothing to do with his ability.” In response to Kitty’s nagging, Peter retreated into himself. Serber recalled that when Peter was five or six years old, “he seemed to be starved for affection.” But as a teenager he was just very solemn. “You’d come into the Oppenheimer kitchen,” Serber said, “and Peter would be a shadow . . . trying not to be noticed—that would be Peter.”

Profoundly disturbed by the ethical implications of a weapon thousands of times more destructive than an atomic bomb, he hoped that the Super would prove technically unfeasible. More horrific than the atomic (fission) bomb, the Super (fusion) bomb would surely escalate the nuclear arms race. The physics of fusion emulated the reactions in the interior of the sun, meaning that fusion explosions had no physical limits. One could get an even larger explosion simply by adding more heavy hydrogen. Armed with Super bombs, a single airplane could kill millions of people in minutes. It was too big for any known military target; it was a weapon of mass, indiscriminate murder. The possibility of such a weapon horrified Oppenheimer as much as it excited the imaginations of various Air Force generals, their supporters in Congress and the scientists who supported Edward Teller’s ambition to build a Super.

Lawrence and Fermi—wrote Henry Wallace and explained, “We feel that this development [the H-bomb] should not be undertaken, primarily because we should prefer defeat in war to victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its determined use.” (emphasis added)

Conant told Oppenheimer that the hydrogen bomb would be built “over my dead body.” Conant was outraged that a civilized country would even consider using such a ghastly, murderous weapon; he thought it nothing less than a genocide machine.

Bethe discussed the H-bomb with his friend Victor Weisskopf, who argued that a war fought with thermonuclear weapons would be suicidal. “We both had to agree,” Bethe said, “that after such a war, even if we were to win it, the world would not be . . . like the world we want to preserve. We would lose the things we were fighting for.

Lilienthal heard Conant, “looking almost translucent, so gray,” mutter, “We built one Frankenstein”—as if it would be madness to build another.

“The use of this weapon will bring about the destruction of innumerable human lives,” Oppenheimer wrote. “It is not a weapon which can be used exclusively for the destruction of material installations of military or semi-military purposes. Its use therefore carries much further than the atomic bomb itself the policy of exterminating civilian populations.”

As the GAC’s report concluded, “a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide.” Even if it was never used, the mere fact that the United States had such a genocidal weapon in its arsenal would ultimately undermine U.S. security. “The existence of such a weapon in our armory,” the GAC majority report stated, “would have far-reaching effects on world opinion.” Reasonable people could conclude that America was willing to contemplate an act of Armageddon. “Thus we believe that the psychological effect of the weapon in our hands would be adverse to our interest.”

Senator Brien McMahon told Teller that the GAC report “just makes me sick.” McMahon had come to believe that war with the Soviets was “inevitable.” He told a shocked Lilienthal that he thought the United States should “blow them off the face of the earth, quick, before they do the same to us. . . .” Adm. Sidney Souers warned, “It’s either we make it [the H-bomb] or we wait until the Russians drop one on us without warning.” Many other Washington officials had similarly apocalyptic reactions. The debate over the Super had thus crystallized the underlying hysteria of the Cold War and divided policy-makers and politicians into two permanently opposed Cold War camps—arms racers and arms controllers.

Adopting Oppenheimer’s perspective, Kennan argued that the atomic bomb was dangerous precisely because it was mistakenly seen as a cheap panacea for the Soviet threat. Echoing Oppie, he wrote that the “military people” had seized upon the Super as the answer to the Russian acquisition of the bomb: “I fear that the atomic bomb, with its vague and highly dangerous promise of ‘decisive’ results . . . of easy solutions to profound human problems, will impede understanding of the things that are important to a clean, clear policy and will carry us toward the misuse and dissipation of our national strength.”

Over the next five decades, the United States would produce more than 70,000 nuclear weapons and spend a staggering $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons programs. In retrospect—and even at the time—it was clear that the H-bomb decision was a turning point in the Cold War’s spiraling arms race. Like Oppenheimer, Kennan was thoroughly “disgusted.” I. I. Rabi was outraged. “I never forgave Truman,” he said.

Oppenheimer considered resigning his position on the GAC. Acheson, fearful that Oppenheimer and Conant would take their appeal to the American public, made a point of telling Harvard’s president, “For heck’s sake, don’t upset the applecart.” Conant told Oppenheimer of Acheson’s warning that a public debate would be “contrary to the national interest.” So once again, Oppie played the role of loyal supporter. As he later testified, it did not seem responsible to resign at that time and “promote a debate on a matter which was settled.”

The very evening of Truman’s announcement, Oppenheimer felt obligated to attend a party at the Shoreham Hotel, celebrating Strauss’s fifty-fourth birthday. Finding Oppenheimer alone in a corner, a reporter walked up to him and said, “You don’t look jubilant.” Oppenheimer muttered in response, “This is the plague of Thebes.” When Strauss tried to introduce his son and daughter-in-law to the famous physicist, Oppenheimer brusquely offered them a hand over his shoulder—and then turned away without a word. Understandably, Strauss was incensed.

Secrecy had become the handmaiden of ignorant policies, and so Oppenheimer decided to speak out against secrecy. On February 12, 1950, Strauss was angered to see Oppenheimer appear on the first telecast of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Sunday morning talk show and openly challenge the manner in which the hydrogen bomb decision had been made. “These are complex technical things,” Oppenheimer told the television audience, “but they touch the very basis of our morality. It is a grave danger for us that these decisions are taken on the basis of facts held secret.”

Oppenheimer’s presentations at GAC meetings were normally impeccably objective. Rarely did he reveal any emotion. One exception occurred when V. Adm. Hyman Rickover briefed the committee on the Navy’s rush to develop nuclear-powered submarines. Rickover complained that the AEC was not working hard enough on reactor development. He challenged Oppenheimer by asking if he had waited until he “had all the facts” before building an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer gave him one of his ice-cold blue-eyed stares and said yes. Though the admiral was notoriously overbearing, Oppenheimer restrained himself until Rickover departed. Oppie then walked over to a table where Rickover had left a small wooden model submarine. Placing his hand around the hull, he quietly crushed it and then silently walked away.

The son of a North Carolina Baptist preacher, Paul Crouch had joined the Communist Party in 1925. That same year, as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army, he wrote a letter to CP officials boasting that he had “formed an Esperanto Association as a front for revolutionary activity.” The Army intercepted the letter and concluded that he had been organizing a communist cell at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. Court-martialed on the charge of “fomenting revolution,” Crouch was sentenced to an extraordinary forty years in prison. At his trial he testified, “I am in the habit of writing letters to my friends and imaginary persons, sometimes to kings and other foreign persons, in which I place myself in an imaginary position.”

Tactical nuclear warheads were a different matter, Oppenheimer had explained. In 1946, he had disparaged such weapons in a letter to President Truman. But after the Soviet detonation of an atomic bomb in 1949, Oppenheimer and his GAC colleagues had urged the Truman Administration to build more such “battlefield” weapons as an alternative to the Super.

Oppenheimer told Mansfield, the military utility of the nuclear arsenal depended more on the “wisdom of our war plan and our skill in delivery, and less on the actual number of bombs.”

Mansfield told Borden, “that Oppenheimer regards war [with the Soviet Union] as unthinkable, a game hardly worth the candle.” I believe that he accordingly stops short of really thinking out the consequences of his policy of temperance and moderation. I also suspect that his fastidious mind finds the whole notion of strategic bombing essentially clumsy and heavy-handed. It is using the sledgehammer rather than the surgeon’s scalpel; it takes no great imagination or sophistication. Couple this with his moral sensibilities of the variety especially pronounced amongst scientists, add on his deep conviction that the Russian people are essentially victims of a tyrannical . . . government, compound this with his distaste for killing noncombatants—and his frequently reiterated stress on the importance of developing tactical uses perhaps becomes more explicable.

Interviewed at Los Alamos, Teller did his best to smear Oppenheimer by innuendo, telling the FBI that “a lot of people believe Oppenheimer opposed the development of the H-Bomb on ‘direct orders from Moscow.’ ” To cover himself, he then said that he did not think Oppie was “disloyal.” Instead, he attributed Oppenheimer’s behavior to a personality defect: “Oppenheimer is a very complicated person, and an outstanding man. In his youth he was troubled with some sort of physical or mental attacks which may have permanently affected him. He has had great ambitions in science and realizes that he is not as great a physicist as he would like to be.” In conclusion, Teller said that he “would do anything possible” to see that Oppenheimer’s services to the government were terminated.

Oppenheimer questioned the sanity of the Air Force’s leadership. He was appalled by their murderous schemes. In 1951, he was shown the Air Force’s strategic war plan—which called for the obliteration of Soviet cities on a scale that shocked him. It was a war plan of criminal genocide. “That was the goddamnedest thing I ever saw,” he later told Freeman Dyson.

Making no effort to disguise his contempt, Oppenheimer was “rude beyond belief.” He had come to loathe these Air Force men with their commitment to building more and more bombs for the purpose of killing more and more millions of people. To his mind, they were so dangerous, so morally obtuse, that he almost welcomed them as political enemies. A few weeks later, Finletter and his people told the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy that it was an open question “whether [Oppenheimer] was a subversive.”

Lovett, a powerful member of the foreign policy establishment, feared that if news of the moratorium idea leaked, Senator Joseph McCarthy would have a field day investigating the State Department and its panel of advisers. Three weeks later, the United States exploded a 10.4-megaton thermonuclear bomb in the Pacific, vaporizing the island of Elugelab. A clearly depressed Conant told a Newsweek reporter, “I no longer have any connection with the atomic bomb. I have no sense of accomplishment.”

Bundy and Oppenheimer conceded that a “nuclear stalemate” between the Soviets and the United States might evolve into a “strange stability” in which both sides would refrain from using these suicidal weapons. But if so, “a world so dangerous may not be very calm, and to maintain the peace it will be necessary for statesmen to decide against rash actions not just once, but every time.” They concluded that “unless the contest in atomic armaments is in some way moderated, our whole society will come increasingly into peril of the gravest kind.”

Russian archival documents have compelled historians to rethink basic assumptions about the early Cold War. The “enemy archives,” as the historian Melvyn Leffler has written, demonstrate that the Soviets “did not have pre-conceived plans to make Eastern Europe communist, to support the Chinese communists, or to wage war in Korea.” Stalin had no “master plan” for Germany, and wished to avoid military conflict with the United States. At the end of World War II, Stalin reduced his army from 11,356,000 in May 1945 to 2,874,000 in June 1947—suggesting that even under Stalin, the Soviet Union had neither the capability nor the intention to launch a war of aggression.

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.”

U.S. ambassador to Moscow Charles “Chip” Bohlen later wrote in his memoirs that Washington’s failure to engage Malenkov in meaningful negotiations over nuclear weapons and other issues was a missed opportunity.

Weinberg admitted to feeling “terrified” and bewildered by what was happening to him. He knew, of course, that he was guilty of having discussed the bomb project with Steve Nelson in 1943, but he did not know that his conversation had been recorded. Nor did he believe that he had committed espionage. Recently, the Milwaukee Journal had published an outlandish story claiming that Weinberg had been a courier for the Soviets—and that he had even passed on a sample of uranium-235. “My God,” he thought, “what connections could they have made to make up such a theory?” For a time, he felt he might crack. “I felt desperate, I felt utterly alone and broken down and beset on every side. I literally trembled. God knows what I could have been made to say if they [the FBI] had followed up.”

“Whatever the outcome of the Weinberg case, Dr. Oppenheimer’s good name will be greatly impaired and much of his value to the country will be destroyed.” Truman replied the very next day: “I am very much interested in the Weinberg-Oppenheimer connection. I feel as you do that Oppenheimer is an honest man. In this day of character assassination and unjustified smear tactics it seems that good men are made to suffer unnecessarily.” Truman, however, gave no indication of what he would do.

The trial ended on March 5, 1953, with Weinberg’s acquittal. In an extraordinary departure from legal norms, U.S. District Court Judge Alexander Holtzoff told the jury that “the court does not approve of your verdict.” He went on to observe that testimony in the trial had unearthed “an amazing and shocking situation existing in the crucial years of 1939, 1940, and 1941 on the campus of a great university in which a large and active Communist underground organization was in operation.”

Ironically, one day when Oppenheimer happened to be up on Capitol Hill he stepped into an elevator and saw Senator McCarthy. “We looked at each other,” Robert later told a friend, “and I winked.”

Looking a decade ahead, he said, “it is likely to be small comfort that the Soviet Union is four years behind us. . . . The very least we can conclude is that our twenty-thousandth bomb . . . will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two-thousandth.”

He also ridiculed a “high officer of the Air Defense Command” for saying, only a few months ago, that “it was our policy to attempt to protect our striking force, but not really our policy to attempt to protect this country, for that is so big a job that it would interfere with our retaliatory capabilities.” Oppenheimer concluded that such “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.”