American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

It is not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that in order to succeed, at age thirty-nine, Robert Oppenheimer would have to remake a significant part of his personality if not his intellect, and he was going to have to do all this in short order.

Bethe worked in Oppenheimer’s headquarters, the T-Building (“T” for “Theoretical”), a drab two-story green structure that quickly became the spiritual center of The Hill. Nearby sat Dick Feynman, who was as gregarious as Bethe was serious. “For me,” Bethe recalled, “Feynman sort of materialized from Princeton. I hadn’t known about him, but Oppenheimer had. He was very lively from the beginning, but he didn’t start insulting me until about two months after he came.” The thirty-seven-year-old Bethe liked to have someone around who was willing to argue with him, and the twentyfive-year-old Feynman loved to argue. When the two of them were together, everyone in their building could hear Feynman yelling, “No, no, you’re crazy,” or “That’s nuts!” Bethe would then quietly explain why he was right. Feynman would calm down for a few minutes and then erupt again with “That’s impossible, you’re mad!” Their colleagues soon nicknamed Feynman “The Mosquito” and Bethe “The Battleship.”

AS HARRY TRUMAN moved into the White House, the war in Europe was nearly won. But the war in the Pacific was coming to its bloodiest climax. On the evening of March 9–10, 1945, 334 B-29 aircraft dropped tons of jellied gasoline—napalm—and high explosives on Tokyo. The resulting firestorm killed an estimated 100,000 people and completely burned out 15.8 square miles of the city. The fire-bombing raids continued and by July 1945, all but five of Japan’s major cities had been razed and hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians had been killed. This was total warfare, an attack aimed at the destruction of a nation, not just its military targets.

Stalin ran a cruel police state, but economically and politically it was a totalitarian state in decay. When Stalin died in March 1953, his successors, Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, began a process of de-Stalinization. Both Malenkov and Khrushchev also had a sound appreciation for the inherent dangers of a nuclear arms race. Malenkov, a technocrat with an interest in quantum physics, stunned the Politburo in 1954 with a speech in which he said that the use of the hydrogen bomb in war “would mean the destruction of world civilization.”