American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

“I WAS AN UNCTUOUS, repulsively good little boy,” Robert remembered. “My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.” His sheltered home life had offered him “no normal, healthy way to be a bastard.”

She never thought of him as shy in the usual sense, only distant. He bore a certain “hubris,” she thought, of the kind that carries with it the seeds of its own destruction.

He thought such foolhardiness on Robert’s part bordered on the suicidal. In all his dealings with Robert, Smith sensed that this was a boy who wouldn’t allow the prospect of death to “keep him from doing something he much wanted to do.”

And perhaps it was also reassuring, particularly for an intellectual, that Robert could tell himself that it was a book—and not a psychiatrist—which had helped to wrench him from the black hole of his depression.

Later he realized that some physicists rely almost exclusively on mathematical language to describe the reality of nature; any verbal description is “only a concession to intelligibility; it’s only pedagogical. I think this is largely true of [Paul] Dirac; I think that his invention is never initially verbal but initially algebraic.” By contrast, he realized that a physicist like Bohr “regarded mathematics as Dirac regards words, namely, as a way to make himself intelligible to other people. . . . So there’s a very wide spectrum. [At Cambridge] I was simply learning and hadn’t learned very much.” By temperament and talent, Robert was very much a verbal physicist in the style of Bohr.

Robert later recalled that he still had “very great misgivings about myself on all fronts, but I clearly was going to do theoretical physics if I could. . . . I felt completely relieved of the responsibility to go back into a laboratory. I hadn’t been good; I hadn’t done anybody any good, and I hadn’t had any fun whatever; and here was something I felt just driven to try.”

And yet, despite his occasional cutting remarks, Robert often displayed a sense of humor. Upon seeing Karl Compton’s two-year-old daughter pretending to read a small red book—which just happened to be on the topic of birth control—Robert looked over at the very pregnant Mrs. Compton and quipped, “A little late.”

But Robert lived comfortably in worlds beyond Dirac’s comprehension and so was merely amused by his friend’s urgings, during their long walks around Göttingen, to abandon the pursuit of the irrational.

Quantum mechanics seems to study that which doesn’t exist—but nevertheless proves true.

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.”

“Robert’s blackboard manners were inexcusable,” said Leo Nedelsky, one of his earliest graduate students. Once, when questioned about a particular equation on the blackboard, Oppenheimer replied, “No, not that one; the one underneath.” But when perplexed students pointed out that there was no equation underneath, Robert said, “Not below, underneath. I have written over it.”

“He was always very kind and considerate to anybody below him,” recalled Harold Cherniss. “But not at all to people who might be considered his intellectual equals. And this, of course, irritated people, made people very angry, and made him enemies.”

“Oppie was extremely good at seeing the physics and doing the calculation on the back of the envelope and getting all the main factors. . . . As far as finishing and doing an elegant job like Dirac would do, that wasn’t Oppie’s style.” He worked “fast and dirty, like the American way of building a machine.”

“his work is apt to be full of mistakes due to lack of care, but it is work of the highest originality

“His physics was good, but his arithmetic awful.”

Robert did not have the patience to stick with any one problem very long. As a result, it was frequently he who opened the door through which others then walked to make major discoveries.

“The work is fine,” Oppenheimer wrote to Frank in the autumn of 1932. “Not fine in the fruits but the doing.

As a theorist who understood what the experimentalists were doing in the laboratory, he had that rare quality of being able to synthesize a great mass of information from disparate fields of research. An articulate synthesizer was exactly the kind of person needed for building a world-class school of physics.

To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.”

Like many Western intellectuals enthralled with Eastern philosophies, Oppenheimer the scientist found solace in their mysticism.

By then, Robert was about to become a father. Their child was born on May 12, 1941, in Pasadena, where Oppenheimer was on his regular spring teaching schedule at Caltech. They christened the boy Peter—but Robert impishly nicknamed him “Pronto.” Kitty told some of her friends, tongue in cheek, that the eight-pound baby was premature.

For Weinberg and others, “being in a course with Oppie was like experiencing lightning flashes five or ten times in an hour, so brief that you might’ve missed them. If you were scrounging formulas off a blackboard, you might very well not have known they were there at all. Very often these flashes were basic philosophical insights that placed physics in a human context.”

Oppenheimer himself had been six months in Los Alamos when his secretary reminded him one day that he had not yet received a salary check.

Scientists accustomed to working with limited resources and virtually no deadlines now had to adjust to a world of unlimited resources and exacting deadlines.

“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.”

“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.”

Late in the summer of 1943, Oppenheimer explained his views on security to a Manhattan Project security officer: “My view about the whole damn thing, of course, is that the [basic] information we are working on is probably known to all the governments that care to find out. The information about what we’re doing is probably of no use because it is so damn complicated.” The danger, he said, was not that technical information about the bomb might leak to another country. The real secret was “the intensity of our effort” and the scale of the “international investment involved.” If other governments understood the resources America was throwing into the bomb effort, they might attempt to duplicate the bomb project. Oppenheimer didn’t think even this knowledge would “have any effect on Russia,” but “it might have a very big effect on Germany, and I am as convinced about that . . . as everyone else is.”

Richard Feynman, an incorrigible practical joker, had his own way of dealing with security regulations. When the censors complained that his wife, Arline, now a patient at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Albuquerque, was sending him letters in code and asked for the code, Feynman explained that he didn’t have the key to it—it was a game he played with his wife to practice his code-breaking. Feynman also drove security personnel to distraction when he went on a nighttime safecracking spree, opening the combination locks for secret file cabinets all over the laboratory. 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.

Medical care was free. So many young couples had babies—some eighty births were recorded the first year, and about ten a month thereafter—that the small seven-room hospital was labeled “RFD,” for “rural free delivery.” When General Groves complained about all the new babies, Oppenheimer wryly observed that the duties of a scientific director did not include birth control.

Bohr also displayed a drawing of what he said was a bomb, allegedly sketched by Heisenberg himself. One glance, however, persuaded everyone that the sketch depicted, not a bomb, but a uranium reactor. “My God,” Bethe said when he saw the drawing, “the Germans are trying to throw a reactor at London.”

When Oppenheimer took the floor and began speaking in his soft voice, everyone listened in absolute silence. Wilson recalled that Oppenheimer “dominated” the discussion. His main argument essentially drew on Niels Bohr’s vision of “openness.” The war, he argued, should not end without the world knowing about this primordial new weapon. The worst outcome would be if the gadget remained a military secret.

He pointed out that the new United Nations was scheduled to hold its inaugural meeting in April 1945—and that it was important that the delegates begin their deliberations on the postwar world with the knowledge that mankind had invented these weapons of mass destruction.

“Various types of targets and the effects to be produced” were discussed, and then Secretary Stimson summarized what seemed to be a general agreement: “. . . that we could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we should seek to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible.” Stimson said he agreed with James Conant’s suggestion “that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” Thus, with such delicate euphemisms, did the president of Harvard University select civilians as the target of the world’s first atomic bomb.

Among other things, he was unaware that military intelligence in Washington had intercepted and decoded messages from Japan indicating that the Japanese government understood the war was lost and was seeking acceptable surrender terms.

James Conant had expected a relatively quick flash of light. But the white light so filled the sky that for a moment he thought “something had gone wrong” and the “whole world has gone up in flames.”

At one point in their conversation, Truman suddenly asked him to guess when the Russians would develop their own atomic bomb. When Oppie replied that he did not know, Truman confidently said he knew the answer: “Never.”

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.”

On this occasion he had had the opportunity to impress the one man who possessed the power to help him return the nuclear genie to the bottle—and he utterly failed to take advantage of the opportunity.

Then the discussion broke apart completely over the question of “penalties.” 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.

Early that summer, Oppenheimer ran into his former student Joe Weinberg, who was still teaching physics at Berkeley. When Weinberg asked him, “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.”

Oppenheimer committed another indiscretion in 1948 when he quipped to Time magazine that, while the Institute was a place where men could “sit and think,” one could only be sure of the sitting.

Oppenheimer was not, of course, the only scientist to harbor such thoughts. That year his former Cambridge tutor, Patrick M. S. Blackett (of the “poisoned apple” affair), published Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy, the first full-blown critique of the decision to use the bomb on Japan. 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.”

But Compton—speaking for himself, Oppenheimer, 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)

“Robert was stunned by the news,” recalled Wilson. On the other hand, he suspected that Fuchs’ knowledge about the Super was probably confined to the less-than-practical “oxcart” model. That same week he told his Institute colleague Abraham Pais that he hoped Fuchs had told the Russians all he knew about the Super, because that “would set them back several years.”

One member of the Gray Board, Dr. Ward Evans, interpreted this to mean that “all gifted individuals were more or less screwballs.” Kennan politely demurred: “No, sir; I would not say that they are screwballs, but I would say that when gifted individuals come to a maturity of judgment which makes them valuable public servants, you are apt to find that the road by which they have approached that has not been as regular as the road by which other people have approached it. It may have zigzags in it of various sorts.”

Why was his conduct with respect to the hydrogen bomb program disturbing? Oppenheimer had opposed a crash program to develop a hydrogen bomb, but so had seven other members of the GAC; and they all had explained their reasons clearly. What Gray and Morgan were actually saying was that they opposed Oppenheimer’s judgments and they did not want his views represented in the counsels of government.

Strauss was relieved that the panel had narrowly handed down the equivalent of a guilty verdict—but now he feared the possibility that Evans’ dissent could persuade the AEC commissioners to reverse it. The verdict, after all, was only a recommendation, which the AEC commissioners had the option of confirming or rejecting.

IN THE LONG RUN, however, Strauss’ strategy backfired; the transcript revealed the inquisitorial character of the hearing, and the corruption of justice during the McCarthy period. Within four years, the transcript would destroy the reputation and government career of Lewis Strauss.

The broadcaster Eric Sevareid noted, “He [Oppenheimer] will no longer have access to secrets in government files, and government, presumably, will no longer have access to secrets that may be born in Oppenheimer’s brain.”

AT THE APEX of the McCarthyite hysteria, Oppenheimer had become its most prominent victim. “The case was ultimately the triumph of McCarthyism, without McCarthy himself,” the historian Barton J. Bernstein has written.