American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

However confident Americans might be that their views and ideas will prevail, the absolute “denial of the views and ideas of other people, cannot be the basis of any kind of agreement.”

“there must be two things: It [the bomb] must be under international control, because if it was under national control there was bound to be rivalry; [second,] we also believed in nuclear energy, that the continuation of this industrial age would depend on it.”

“without world government there could be no permanent peace, that without peace there would be atomic warfare.”

Oppenheimer understood that one couldn’t uninvent the weapon; the secret was out. But one could construct a system so transparent that the civilized world would at least have ample warning if a rogue regime set about making such a weapon.

in the field of atomic energy there be set up a world government.

a renunciation of sovereignty.

to protect the world against the use of atomic weapons and provide it with the benefits of atomic energy.

It would take the terrors of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the massive Soviet buildup that followed it, before an American administration would propose, in the 1970s, a serious and acceptable arms control agreement. But by then tens of thousands of nuclear warheads had been built.

in the last war, the two nations which we like to think are the most enlightened and humane in the world—Great Britain and the United States—used atomic weapons against an enemy which was essentially defeated.”

A major war was not Oppie’s only worry; he was concerned too about nuclear terrorism. Asked in a closed Senate hearing room “whether three or four men couldn’t smuggle units of an [atomic] bomb into New York and blow up the whole city.” Oppenheimer responded, “Of course it could be done, and people could destroy New York.” When a startled senator then followed by asking, “What instrument would you use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in a city?” Oppenheimer quipped, “A screwdriver [to open each and every crate or suitcase].” There was no defense against nuclear terrorism—and he felt there never would be.

AT THIRTY-FOUR seconds after 9:00 a.m. on July 1, 1946, the world’s fourth atomic bomb exploded above the lagoon of Bikini Atoll, a part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

The cost of the tests as planned might easily reach $100 million. “For less than one percent of this,” Oppenheimer explained, “one could obtain more useful information.”

this was undoubtedly Oppenheimer’s fiercest objection—he questioned “the appropriateness of a purely military test of atomic weapons, at a time when our plans for effectively eliminating them from national armaments are in their earliest beginnings.” (The Bikini tests were being conducted virtually simultaneously with Baruch’s presentation at the United Nations.)

“Man is both an end and an instrument,”

might be Alvarez. Eltenton replied that he knew only Oppenheimer, and not very well. But he volunteered that he had a friend who was close to Oppenheimer. The Russian

Strauss was “a man with an active mind, definitely conservative, apparently not too bad.” Both assessments underestimated Strauss. He was pathologically ambitious, tenacious and extraordinarily prickly, a combination that made him a particularly dangerous opponent in bureaucratic warfare. One of his fellow AEC commissioners said of him, “If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you’re just a fool at first. But if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor.”

“Remember how we have always, both of us, been miserable when we had to look more than a week ahead?”

the “usefulness of useless knowledge.”

One scientist described it as “that magnificent place where science flourishes and never bears fruit.”

‘mesoniferous’

Oppie was “not capable of genuine originality, but that he is very good at comprehending other people’s ideas and seeing their implications.”

It was a concentration of scientific talent like no other in the world . . . except, of course, Los Alamos.

Oppenheimer loved to talk about things psychological. Bruner found him “brilliant, discursive in his interests, lavishly intolerant, ready to pursue any topic anywhere, extraordinarily lovable. . . . We talked about most anything, but psychology and the philosophy of physics were irresistible.”

In his speeches about the Institute, Oppenheimer continually emphasized that science needed the humanities to better understand its own character and consequences.

“The point of this place,” Oppenheimer once said, “is to make no excuses for not doing something, for not doing good work.” To outsiders, the Institute sometimes had the appearance of a pastoral asylum for the certifiably eccentric.

Einstein instinctively disliked meeting politicians, generals or figures of authority. As Oppenheimer observed, “he did not have that convenient and natural converse with statesmen and men of power. . . .”

Einstein was always uncomfortable with adulation.

Oppenheimer’s personal relations with Strauss were initially correct and cordial. Yet it was in these early years that the seeds of a terrible feud were sown.

THE PACE of life at the Institute was serene and civilized; tea was served every afternoon between three and four in the Common Room on the main floor of Fuld Hall. “Tea is where we explain to each other,” Oppenheimer once said, “what we don’t understand.”

“incomprehensibility can be mistaken for depth.”

Rabi knew Oppie too well to be angry with him, and he knew that one of his friend’s weaknesses was “a tendency to make things sound mystical.”

“Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. . . . If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there.”

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.”

“He wanted to be on good terms with the Washington generals,” Dyson observed, “and to be a savior of humanity at the same time.”

it is in America largely that it will be decided what manner of world we are to live in.”

A colleague of Abraham Pais’ once said of Princeton: “If you are single, you’ll go crazy; or, if you are married, your wife will go crazy.” Princeton drove Kitty crazy.

Kitty Oppenheimer was like a tigress caged in Princeton.

“She adored him,” Sherr said. “There was no doubt about that.” But in Sherr’s harsh view, Robert didn’t feel the same way. “I am sure he never would have married her had she not become pregnant. . . . I don’t think that he returned the love, and I don’t think that he was capable of returning any love.” By contrast, Verna Hobson always insisted that Robert loved Kitty. “I think he leaned on her tremendously,” Hobson said. “He didn’t always listen to her, but he respected her political and intellectual capacity.” Hobson tended to observe the marriage through Robert’s eyes. Both Sherr and Hobson admitted that the problem may have been one of clashing temperaments. Kitty was extreme in her passions, whereas Robert could be surprisingly disengaged.

Kitty told Sherr that while she had slept with many men in her life, she had never been unfaithful to Robert. The same, of course, was not true for Robert.

a man capable of “rapid and unpredictable shifts between warmth and coldness in his feelings toward those close to him.”

ON AUGUST 29, 1949, the Soviet Union secretly exploded an atomic bomb at an isolated testing site in Khazakhstan.

“Our atomic monopoly is like a cake of ice melting in the sun. . . .”

Oppenheimer believed the Truman Administration’s obsession with secrecy was both irrational and counterproductive. He and Lilienthal had been trying all year to nudge the president and his advisers toward more openness on nuclear issues.

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.

As early as September 1945, Oppenheimer had written a secret report on behalf of a special Scientific Advisory Panel composed of himself, Arthur Compton, Ernest Lawrence and Enrico Fermi. The report advised that “no such effort [on the Super or H-bomb] should be invested at the present time. . . .”

“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.”

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.

weapons that could annihilate life on earth could not be discussed in a military policy vacuum. Moral considerations were as relevant as technical assessments.

Oppenheimer feared that the Super would simply be too big—or to put it another way, any legitimate military target for a thermonuclear device would be “too small.”

The Super was simply too large even as a city-buster. It could easily destroy 150 to 1,000 square miles or more.