American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

Decades later, Barbara, by then an embittered ex-wife, wrote a “diary” that adds a somewhat different perspective.

she had tried to persuade her husband not to pursue the matter with Oppenheimer. “The absurd ridiculousness of the situation never occurred to him,” she wrote in her unpublished memoir in 1983. “This innocent teacher of modern French literature to be the conduit to Russians of what Oppie was doing.”

According to Eltenton, he and Chevalier agreed “with considerable reluctance” that Oppenheimer should be approached. Eltenton assured Chevalier that if Oppenheimer had any useful information, Ivanov could get it “safely transmitted.”

the two men confessed that they had talked about funneling scientific information to the Soviets, but each confirmed that Oppenheimer had rejected the idea out of hand.

Eltenton was a Soviet agent who had worked as a recruiter throughout the war.

no one can dispute that he proposed funneling scientific information about a war project to the Soviets. But an investigation of his behavior in 1942–43 suggests that he was more likely a misguided idealist than a serious Soviet agent.

“I would like Russia to win this war, rather than the Nazis, and I would like to do anything I can to help them.”

“I’m going to try to talk to Chevalier or Oppenheimer and tell them that I would be very happy to forward any information that they feel is useful to the Russians.”

Eltenton openly talked about his friends in the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco, and boasted that he could get this information sent to Russia through his contacts at the consulate.

‘You know, we’re fighting on the same side as the Russians, why don’t we help them?’

“I talked to Chevalier and Chevalier talked to Oppenheimer, and Oppenheimer said he didn’t want to have anything to do with this.”

Oppenheimer seemed unaware of the utter chaos that had descended on Los Alamos—although years later, he confessed, “I am responsible for ruining a beautiful place.”

A Quaker by ancestry, Wilson was a pacifist when the European war erupted: “So it was quite a change for me to find in fact that I would be working on this horrible project.” But, like everyone else he knew at Los Alamos, Wilson feared above all the prospect of the Nazis’ winning the war with an atomic weapon. And while privately he still hoped that they might someday prove that an atomic bomb was not possible, he was eager to build it if it could be built.

You drop a bomb and it falls on the just and the unjust. There is no escape from it. The prudent man can’t escape, [nor] the honest man. . . . During the war with Germany, we [in the Rad Lab] certainly helped to develop devices for bombing . . . but this was a real enemy and a serious matter. But atomic bombing just carried the principle one step further and I didn’t like it then and I don’t now. I think it’s terrible.”

Only one thing mattered now to Oppenheimer: building the weapon before the Nazis did.

“I knew that anything he was connected with would be alive,” she recalled, “and I made my decision. I thought to be associated with that person, whoever he was, would be simply great! I never met a person with a magnetism that hit you so fast and so completely as his did. I didn’t know what he did. I thought maybe if he were digging trenches to put in a new road, I would love to do that. . . . I just wanted to be allied and have something to do with a person of such vitality and radiant force. That was for me.”

The breathtaking scenery compensated in part for the utilitarian ugliness of the town. “We could gaze beyond the town, fenced in by steel wire,” wrote Bernice Brode, the wife of physicist Robert Brode, “and watch the seasons come and go—the aspens turning gold in the fall against the dark evergreens; blizzards piling up snow in winter; the pale green of spring buds; and the dry desert wind whistling through the pines in summer. It was surely a touch of genius to establish our strange town on the mesa top, although many sensible people sensibly said that Los Alamos was a city that never should have been.”

“His porkpie hat, his pipe, and something about his eyes gave him a certain aura,” recalled a twenty-three-year-old WAC who worked the telephone switchboard. “He never needed to show off or shout. . . . He could have demanded Priority One with his telephone calls but never did. He never really needed to be as kind as he was.”

Oppenheimer before the war was somewhat hesitant, diffident. The Oppenheimer at Los Alamos was a decisive executive.”

“The power of his personality is the stronger because of the fragility of his person,”

“When he speaks he seems to grow, since the largeness of his mind so affirms itself that the smallness of his body is forgotten.”

“One would listen patiently to an argument beginning, and finally Oppenheimer would summarize, and he would do it in such a way that there was no disagreement. It was a kind of magical trick that brought respect from all those people, some of them superiors in terms of their scientific record.

Everyone, whether in Chicago or Los Alamos or elsewhere, held the sobering thought that if an atomic bomb was possible, the Germans might be ahead in the race to build one. But whereas at Chicago, many of the senior scientists were troubled and even depressed by this realization, at Los Alamos, under Oppenheimer’s charismatic leadership, this awareness seemed only to inspire the men to forge ahead with their work.

Groves needed Oppenheimer’s skills as much as Oppenheimer needed Groves’ approval.

Oppenheimer’s “typical American schoolboy attitude that there is something wicked about telling on a friend.”

MOST OF GROVES’ subordinates did not share his trust in Oppenheimer.

At a formal inquest in February 1944, a jury determined Jean Tatlock’s death to be “Suicide, motive unknown.” The newspapers reported that a $732.50 bill from her analyst, Dr. Siegfried Bernfeld, was found in the apartment, evidence that she had “taken her own troubles to a psychologist.” Actually, as a psychiatrist in training, Jean was required to undergo analysis and pay for it herself.

Jean Tatlock might be considered the first casualty of Oppenheimer’s directorship of Los Alamos.

Los Alamos,

an “island in the sky,”

almost saintly empathy for people.”

Thoughts about the postwar implications of a nuclear-armed world remained dormant until December 1943, when Niels Bohr arrived at Los Alamos.

The making of the atomic bomb was a foregone conclusion, but it was not too soon to consider what would happen after its development. His deepest fear was that its invention would inspire a deadly nuclear arms race between the West and the Soviet Union. To prevent this, he insisted, it was imperative that the Russians be told about the existence of the bomb project, and be assured that it was no threat to them.

Though not himself a Nazi, Heisenberg was certainly a German patriot who had chosen to remain in Nazi Germany. He was undoubtedly Germany’s most eminent physicist; if the Germans had an atomic bomb project, Heisenberg was the obvious candidate to direct it.

Bohr came “most secretly of all,” as Oppenheimer explained, to advance a political cause—the case for openness in science as well as international relations, the only hope to forestall a postwar nuclear arms race. This was a message Oppenheimer was ready to hear.

“a weapon of an unparalleled power is being created which will completely change all future conditions of warfare.” That was the good news. The bad news was equally clear, and prophetic: “Unless, indeed, some agreement about the control of the use of the new active materials can be obtained in due time, any temporary advantage, however great, may be outweighed by a perpetual menace to human security.”

“Knowledge is itself the basis of civilization,” he wrote, “[but] any widening of the borders of our knowledge imposes an increased responsibility on individuals and nations through the possibilities it gives for shaping the conditions of human life.”

Bohr was God and Oppie was his prophet.

For Oppenheimer, the rescue of the Meyerses from the Nazi contagion was important in several respects. It was in the first instance a politically noncontroversial extension of his antifascist activism—and that felt good. Secondly, while a small act of generosity, it was nevertheless a profound and welcome reminder of why he was racing to build a horrific weapon.

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. If that happened, then the next war would almost certainly be fought with atomic weapons.

“Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.”

“we should dedicate ourselves to the hope, that his good works will not have ended with his death.”

The fire bombings were no secret. Ordinary Americans read about the raids in their newspapers. Thoughtful people understood that strategic bombing of cities raised profound ethical questions. “I remember Mr. Stimson [the secretary of war] saying to me,” Oppenheimer later remarked, “that he thought it appalling that there should be no protest over the air raids which we were conducting against Japan, which in the case of Tokyo led to such extraordinarily heavy loss of life. He didn’t say that the air strikes shouldn’t be carried on, but he did think there was something wrong with a country where no one questioned that. . . .”

“our ‘demonstration’ of atomic bombs will precipitate” an arms race with the Soviets.

if a race in the production of atomic bombs should become unavoidable, the prospects of this country cannot be expected to be good.”

Szilard, who later wrote, “I was concerned at this point that . . . we might start an arms race between America and Russia which might end with the destruction of both countries.

“The atomic bomb is shit,” Oppenheimer said after listening to Szilard’s arguments.

“this is a weapon which has no military significance. It will make a big bang—a very big bang—but it is not a weapon which is useful in war.”

at least a vocal minority of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project had opposed the use of the bomb on a civilian target.

decisions on the military use of the bomb would be controlled exclusively by the White House, with no input from the scientists who over the past two years had been building the bomb.