American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

He went on to tell Truman that before a final decision was taken to invade the Japanese home islands, or to use the atomic bomb, political steps should be taken that might well secure a full Japanese surrender.

“The big boom came about 100 seconds after the Great Flash—the first cry of a new-born world. It brought the silent, motionless silhouettes to life, gave them a voice. A loud cry filled the air. The little groups that hitherto had stood rooted to the earth like desert plants broke into dance.”

As Oppenheimer left the control center, he turned to shake hands with Ken Bainbridge, who looked him in the eye and muttered, “Now we’re all sons-of-bitches.”

“It’s a terrible thing that we made,”

Frank Oppenheimer was standing in the hallway right outside his brother’s office when he heard the news. His first reaction was “Thank God, it wasn’t a dud.” But within seconds, he recalled, “One suddenly got this horror of all the people that had been killed.”

Phil Morrison heard the news on Tinian, where he had helped to prepare the bomb and load it aboard the Enola Gay. “That night we from Los Alamos had a party,” Morrison recalled. “It was war and victory in war, and we had a right to our celebration. But I remember sitting . . . on the edge of a cot . . . wondering what it was like on the other side, what was going on in Hiroshima that night.”

“I felt betrayed,” Wilson wrote in 1958, “when the bomb was exploded over Japan without discussion or some peaceful demonstration of its power to the Japanese.”

“As the days passed,” wrote Alice Kimball Smith, the wife of the Los Alamos metallurgist Cyril Smith, “the revulsion grew, bringing with it—even for those who believed that the end of the war justified the bombing—an intensely personal experience of the reality of evil.”

We believe that the safety of this nation—as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power—cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible.”

“Circumstances are heavy with misgiving, and far, far more difficult than they should be, had we power to re-make the world to be as we think it.”

“Hats off to the men of research,” editorialized the Milwaukee Journal. Never again, chimed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, should America’s “science-explorers . . . be denied anything needful for their adventures.”

“We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon,” he told an audience of the American Philosophical Society, “that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world . . . a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing . . . we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man. .

Cherniss, indeed, thought his friend perhaps spoke too well for his own good. “The ability to speak in public like that is a poison—it’s very dangerous for the person who has it.” Such a talent might lead a man to think his velvet tongue was an effective political armor.

Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Frank Oppenheimer, Robert Christy and others had drafted a strongly worded statement on the dangers of an arms race, the impossibility of any defense against the atomic bomb in future wars, and the need for international control. Oppenheimer was asked to forward “The Document,” as it became known, to the War Department. Everyone fully expected that the statement would shortly be released to the press.

The release of atomic energy, Truman pronounced, “constitutes a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas.”

Oppie had rapidly become a Washington insider—a cooperative and focused supporter of the Administration, guided by hope and sustained by naïveté.

When questioned about the wisdom of allowing military officers to sit on the commission, Oppenheimer responded, “I think it is a matter not of what uniform a man wears but what kind of man he is.

If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.”

“The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them, in other times, of other wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some, misled by a false sense of history, who hold that they will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that. By our works we are committed, committed to a world united, before this common peril, in law and in humanity.”

Walking with the former vice president through downtown Washington toward the Commerce Department, Oppie revealed his deepest anxieties about the bomb. He rapidly outlined the dangers inherent in the Administration’s policies. Afterwards, Wallace wrote in his diary that “I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer. He seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent.”

“I think it is for us to accept it as a very grave crisis, to realize that these atomic weapons which we have started to make are very terrible, that they involve a change, they are not just a slight modification.

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. He called this “condign punishment.”

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I think that if we had acted in accordance, wisely and clearly and discreetly in accordance with his views, we might have been freed of our rather sleazy sense of omnipotence, and our delusions about the effectiveness of secrecy, and turned our society toward a healthier vision of a future worth living for.”

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“the only way in which this country can have security comparable to that which it had in the years before the war. It is the only way in which we will be able to live with bad governments, with new discoveries, with irresponsible governments such as are likely to arise in the next hundred years, without living in fairly constant fear of the surprise use of these weapons.”

Although America was the most powerful nation on the globe, the American people seemed seized by a mad compulsion to define themselves by the Soviet threat. In this sense, MacLeish wryly concluded, America had been “conquered” by the Soviets, who were now dictating American behavior. “Whatever the Russians did, we did in reverse,” MacLeish wrote. He harshly criticized Soviet tyranny, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism.

“Man is both an end and an instrument,” Oppenheimer wrote. He reminded MacLeish of the “profound part that culture and society play in the very definition of human values, human salvation and liberation.” Therefore, “I think that what is needed is something far subtler than the emancipation of the individual from society; it involves, with an awareness that the past one hundred and fifty years have rendered progressively more acute, the basic dependence of man on his fellows.”

Gödel spent years trying to solve the continuum problem, a mathematical conundrum involving a question of infinities. He never found an answer.

“He fought with Bohr in a noble and furious way, and he fought with the theory which he had fathered but which he hated. It was not the first time that this had happened in science.”

Weil was typical of the bloated egos Oppenheimer encountered at the Institute. These were not the young men he had easily led in Los Alamos by the force of his personality. Weil was arrogant, acerbic and demanding. He took an almost roguish delight in intimidating others, and he was furious that he could not intimidate Oppenheimer.

Because the mathematicians were in the nature of things quickly beyond their prime, and because they had no teaching duties, in middle age many of them tended to devote themselves to other affairs. If not distracted, the mathematicians inevitably turned every appointment into a controversy.

To be sure, most of the time Robert charmed people with his wit and gracious manners. But sometimes he seemed unable to contain his fierce arrogance.

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.”

“The best way to send information,” he explained, “is to wrap it up in a person.”

Oppenheimer was understandably anxious to have a serious discussion of his work. Instead, the gathered physicists veered off into a discussion of Kugelblitz or “ball lightning,” an unexplained phenomenon in which lightning has sometimes been observed in the form of a ball. As they discussed what might explain such events, Oppenheimer began to flush with fury. Finally, he rose and stalked out muttering, “Fireballs, fireballs!”

“In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”

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

In physics the conferences have been good, yet everywhere—Copenhagen, England, Paris, even here [Brussels], there is the phrase ‘you see, we are somewhat out of things. . . .’ ” This led Robert to conclude, almost wistfully, “Above all I have the knowledge that it is in America largely that it will be decided what manner of world we are to live in.”

Oppenheimer may not have set out to humiliate Strauss over what he regarded as a minor policy disagreement. But for Oppie, condescension came easily—too easily, many friends insisted; it was part of his classroom repertoire. “Robert could make grown men feel like schoolchildren,” said one friend. “He could make giants feel like cockroaches.”

“Dear Oppy,” he wrote after one such visit in September 1950, “As always our weekend with you and Kitty was the event of the season for us. Our little affairs and even the world problems seem more nearly soluble in such an atmosphere.”

The Super was simply too large even as a city-buster. It could easily destroy 150 to 1,000 square miles or more. As the GAC’s report concluded, “a super bomb might become a weapon of genocide.” Even if it was never used, the mere fact that the United States had such a genocidal weapon in its arsenal would ultimately undermine U.S. security. “The existence of such a weapon in our armory,” the GAC majority report stated, “would have far-reaching effects on world opinion.” Reasonable people could conclude that America was willing to contemplate an act of Armageddon. “Thus we believe that the psychological effect of the weapon in our hands would be adverse to our interest.”

How can you persuade a paranoid adversary to disarm ‘by example’?”

“Memorandum: The International Control of Atomic Energy”—challenged

Lilienthal was still ardently opposed to a crash program. Acheson privately agreed with many of Lilienthal’s objections, but believed that domestic political factors would compel Truman to go forward with a crash program: “The American people simply would not tolerate a policy of delaying nuclear research in so vital a matter. . . .” Johnson agreed, telling Lilienthal, “We must protect the president.” It had come to that. The real issues related to national security had been rendered irrelevant by the simplifications imposed by domestic politics.

For his part, Oppenheimer questioned the sanity of the Air Force’s leadership. He was appalled by their murderous schemes. In 1951, he was shown the Air Force’s strategic war plan—which called for the obliteration of Soviet cities on a scale that shocked him. It was a war plan of criminal genocide. “That was the goddamnedest thing I ever saw,” he later told Freeman Dyson.

“We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”

And far from conducting any reconsideration of nuclear strategy, in the months ahead the Eisenhower Administration would begin to cut defense spending on conventional weapons while building up its nuclear arsenal. Eisenhower called this his “New Look” defense posture. The Administration had accepted the Air Force’s strategy and would rely almost exclusively on air power for America’s defense. A policy of “massive retaliation” appeared to be a cheap and deadly fix. It was also shortsighted, genocidal and, if initiated, suicidal. Dean Acheson called it a “fraud upon the words and upon the facts.” Adlai Stevenson asked pointedly, “Are we leaving ourselves the grim choice of inaction or thermonuclear holocaust?” The “New Look” was in fact old policy, and precisely the opposite of what Oppenheimer had hoped for from the new Administration.

But perhaps only a malignant end can follow the systematic belief that all communities are one community; that all truth is one truth; that all experience is compatible with all other; that total knowledge is possible; that all that is potential can exist as actual. This is not man’s fate; this is not his path; to force him on it makes him resemble not that divine image of the all-knowing and all-powerful but the helpless, iron-bound prisoner of a dying world.”

Communism’s role in America had changed; Robert’s role as a responsible American citizen had changed; but his deepest values were unaltered. “The open society, the unrestricted access to knowledge, the unplanned and uninhibited association of men for its furtherance,” he said in one of his Reith Lectures, “these are what may make a vast, complex, ever-growing, ever-changing, ever more specialized and expert technological world nevertheless a world of human community.”

The inclusion of Oppenheimer’s opposition to the Super reflected the depth of McCarthyite hysteria that had enveloped Washington. Equating dissent with disloyalty, it redefined the role of government advisers and the very purpose of advice.

“The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil.”