American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

ever since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer had been harboring a vague premonition that something dark and ominous lay in wait for him.

As the tide of anticommunism rose in postwar America, Oppenheimer became increasingly aware that “a beast in the jungle” was stalking him.

In the 1930s, at the University of California, Berkeley, while building the most prominent center for its study in the United States, he was moved by the consequences of the Great Depression at home and the rise of fascism abroad to work actively with friends—many of them fellow travelers and communists—in the struggle to achieve economic and racial justice.

Those years were some of the finest of his life. That they were so easily used to silence his voice a decade later is a reminder of how delicately balanced are the democratic principles we profess, and how carefully they must be guarded.

“What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life [but] which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?”

The great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture—its logic, its faith, its vision.”

With the end of the Cold War, the danger of nuclear annihilation seemed to pass, but in another ironic twist, the threat of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism is probably more imminent in the twenty-first century than ever before.

The only defense against nuclear terrorism was the elimination of nuclear weapons.

Oppenheimer’s warnings were ignored—and ultimately, he was silenced. Like that rebellious Greek god Prometheus—who stole fire from Zeus and bestowed it upon humankind, Oppenheimer gave us atomic fire. But then, when he tried to control it, when he sought to make us aware of its terrible dangers, the powers-that-be, like Zeus, rose up in anger to punish him.

Oppenheimer’s decision to participate in the creation of a genocidal weapon was “a Faustian bargain if there ever was one. . . . And of course we are still living with it. . . .” And like Faust, Robert Oppenheimer tried to renegotiate the bargain—and was cut down for doing so. He had led the effort to unleash the power of the atom, but when he sought to warn his countrymen of its dangers, to constrain America’s reliance on nuclear weapons, the government questioned his loyalty and put him on trial.

“Robert was doted on by his parents. . . . He had everything he wanted; you might say he was brought up in luxury.” But despite this, none of his childhood friends thought him spoiled. “He was extremely generous with money and material things,” recalled Harold Cherniss. “He was not a spoiled child in any sense.”

One day, Julius gave Robert a professional-quality microscope which quickly became the boy’s favorite toy. “I think that my father was one of the most tolerant and human of men,” Robert would remark in later years. “His idea of what to do for people was to let them find out what they wanted.”

the Ethical Culture Society inculcated in its members a commitment to social action and humanitarianism: “Man must assume responsibility for the direction of his life and destiny.” Although an outgrowth of American Reform Judaism, Ethical Culture was itself a “non-religion,” perfectly suited to upper-middle-class German Jews, most of whom, like the Oppenheimers, were intent on assimilating into American society. Felix Adler and his coterie of talented teachers promoted this process and would have a powerful influence in the molding of Robert Oppenheimer’s psyche, both emotionally and intellectually.

“Zionism itself is a present-day instance of the segregating tendency.”

Robert’s adult political sensibilities can easily be traced to the progressive education he received at Felix Adler’s remarkable school.

In 1921, the year Robert graduated from the Ethical Culture high school, Adler exhorted his students to develop their “ethical imagination,” to see “things not as they are, but as they might be.”

“It’s no fun,” he once told a friend, “to turn the pages of a book and say, ‘Yes, yes, of course, I know that.’ ”

a warm and gentle teacher who somehow always managed to find out what each student was most curious about and then relate it to the topic at hand.

“He loved the bumpy contingent nature of the way in which you actually find out something, and he loved the excitement that he could stir up in young people.”

this same cocoon of security offered by the school may help to explain his prolonged adolescence. He was permitted to remain a child, and allowed to grow gradually out of his immaturity rather than being wrenched abruptly from it.

the slow light betrays us,

Robert persuaded his physics teacher Percy Bridgman to write a letter of recommendation. In his letter, Bridgman wrote candidly that Oppenheimer had a “perfectly prodigious power of assimilation” but that “his weakness is on the experimental side. His type of mind is analytical, rather than physical, and he is not at home in the manipulations of the laboratory. . . . It appears to me that it is a bit of a gamble as to whether Oppenheimer will ever make any real contributions of an important character, but if he does make good at all, I believe he will be a very unusual success.”

he felt so miserable in Cambridge, so unhappy, that he used sometimes to get down on the floor and roll from side to side—he

Perhaps she would not have considered evil to be so rare, so extraordinary, so estranging a state, to which it was so restful to emigrate, had she been able to discern in herself, as in everyone, that indifference to the sufferings one causes, an indifference which, whatever other names one may give it, is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.

Oppenheimer came to speak of Bohr as “his God.”

“When I got to Cambridge,” Robert said, “I was faced with the problem of looking at a question to which no one knew the answer—but I wasn’t willing to face it. When I left Cambridge, I didn’t know how to face it very well, but I understood that this was my job; this was the change that occurred that year.”

He found many Germans “bitter, sullen . . . angry and loaded with all those ingredients which were later to produce a major disaster. And this I felt very much.”

Material possessions were unimportant to him, but the admiration of others was something he sought every day.

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.”

Among his many eccentricities, everyone knew that Robert felt compelled to give away any possession of his that was admired.

By all accounts, Oppenheimer admired Heisenberg and respected his work. He could not have known then that in the years ahead they would become shadowy rivals. Oppenheimer would one day find himself contemplating Heisenberg’s loyalty to wartime Germany and wondering whether the man was capable of building an atomic bomb for Adolf Hitler. But in 1927, he was building on Heisenberg’s discoveries in quantum mechanics.

“Don’t worry about girls, and don’t make love to girls, unless you have to: DON’T DO IT AS A DUTY.

“Oppenheimer was Jewish, but he wished he weren’t and tried to pretend he wasn’t.

In Rabi’s eyes, Oppenheimer was similarly conflicted, but the difference may have been that he was unconsciously obstinate. “I don’t know if he thought of himself as being Jewish,” Rabi recalled many years later. “I think he had fantasies thinking he was not Jewish. I remember once saying to him how I found the Christian religion so puzzling, such a combination of blood and gentleness. He said that is what attracted him to it.”

“Whatever you want to say about Oppenheimer, he certainly wasn’t a WASP.”

“My two great loves are physics and New Mexico. It’s a pity they can’t be combined.”

By focusing on the unsolved problems in physics, Oppenheimer gave his students a restless sense of standing on the edge of the unknown.

Physicists today agree that Oppenheimer’s most stunning and original work was done in the late 1930s on neutron stars—a phenomenon astronomers would not actually be able to observe until 1967.

on September 1, 1939, Oppenheimer and a different collaborator—yet another student, Hartland Snyder—published a paper titled “On Continued Gravitational Contraction.” Historically, of course, the date is best known for Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the start of World War II. But in its quiet way, this publication was also a momentous event. The physicist and science historian Jeremy Bernstein calls it “one of the great papers in twentieth-century physics.” At the time, it attracted little attention. Only decades later would physicists understand that in 1939 Oppenheimer and Snyder had opened the door to twenty-first-century physics.

In his late twenties, Oppenheimer already seemed to be searching for an earthly detachment; he wished, in other words, to be engaged as a scientist with the physical world, and yet detached from it. He was not seeking to escape to a purely spiritual realm. He was not seeking religion. What he sought was peace of mind. The Gita seemed to provide precisely the right philosophy for an intellectual keenly attuned to the affairs of men and the pleasures of the senses.

Jean’s activism and social conscience awakened in Robert the sense of social responsibility that had been so often discussed at the Ethical Culture School. He soon became active in numerous Popular Front causes.

Avram Yedidia, a neighbor of one of Oppenheimer’s students,

“He manifested deep interest in the plight of the unemployed,”

“and showered us with questions on work with migrants who came to this area from the dust bowl of Oklahoma and Arkansas. . . . Our perception then—which I feel was shared by Oppenheimer—had been that our work was vital and, in the language of today, ‘relevant’ while his was esoteric and remote.”

adequate medical care can only be provided by a comprehensive health insurance scheme with federal backing.”

Oppie made the “best martinis in the world,” invariably drunk with his trademark toast, “To the confusion of our enemies.”

Addis

lobbied vigorously for national health insurance, which eventually prompted the American Medical Association to expel him.

“Injustice or oppression in the next street,” wrote a medical colleague at Stanford, “or in the city, or in South Africa or Europe or Java or in any spot inhabited by men was a personal affront to Tom Addis, and his name, from its early alphabetical place, was conspicuous on lists of sponsors of scores of organizations fighting for democracy and against fascism.”

The Communist Party was often in the forefront of such progressive causes as desegregation, better working conditions for migratory farm workers, and the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, and Oppenheimer gradually became active in a number of these causes.