American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

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.

It is a deeply personal biography researched and written in the belief that a person’s public behavior and his policy decisions (and in Oppenheimer’s case perhaps even his science) are guided by the private experiences of a lifetime.

“We have had the bomb on our minds since 1945,” E. L. Doctorow has observed. “It was first our weaponry and then our diplomacy, and now it’s our economy. How can we suppose that something so monstrously powerful would not, after forty years, compose our identity? The great golem we have made against our enemies is our culture, our bomb culture—its logic, its faith, its vision.”

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.

Ethical Culture Society—that celebrated rationalism and a progressive brand of secular humanism.

As its name suggests, Ethical Culture was not a religion but a way of life that promoted social justice over self-aggrandizement.

since the American Revolution, when deists like Thomas Jefferson had insisted on a radical separation of organized religion from the state, American Jews had experienced a sense of tolerance. But after the stock market

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.”

Robert’s seemingly brittle and delicate shell actually disguised a stoic personality built of stubborn pride and determination, a characteristic that would reappear throughout his life.

Introverted and intellectual, Robert was already reading such dark-spirited writers as Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield. His favorite Shakespearean character was Hamlet. Horgan recalled years later that “Robert had bouts of melancholy, deep, deep depressions as a youngster. He would seem to be incommunicado emotionally for a day or two at a time. That happened while I was staying with him once or twice, and I was very distressed, had no idea what was causing it.”

“Leonardos and Oppenheimers are scarce,” Horgan wrote in 1988, “but their wonderful love and projection of understanding as both private connoisseurs and historical achievers offer us at least an ideal to consider and measure by.”

Briefly stated, quantum physics is the study of the laws that apply to the behavior of phenomena on a very small scale, the scale of molecules and atoms.

quantum physics nevertheless explains our physical world.

Quantum mechanics seems to study that which doesn’t exist—but nevertheless proves true. It works. In the decades to come, quantum physics would open the door to a host of practical inventions that now define the digital age, including the modern personal computer, nuclear power, genetic engineering, and laser technology (from which we get such consumer products as the CD player and the bar-code reader commonly used in supermarkets).

Nine months later, 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.

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. Some physicists have suggested that Oppenheimer possessed the knowledge and resources to publish a comprehensive “bible” of quantum physics.

Oppenheimer thought that no one could be expected to learn quantum mechanics from books alone; the verbal wrestling inherent in the process of explanation is what opens the door to understanding.

MAN’S LIFE CAN TURN on a small event, and for Robert Oppenheimer such an incident occurred in the winter of 1942–43 in the kitchen of his Eagle Hill home. It was merely a brief conversation with a friend. But what was said, and how Oppie chose to deal with it, so shaped the remainder of his life that one is drawn to comparisons with the tragedies of classical Greece and Shakespeare.

over time it took on some of the qualities of Rashomon, the 1951 film by Akira Kurosawa in which descriptions of an event vary according to the perspective of each participant.

Eltenton, Chevalier reported, had solicited him to ask his friend Oppenheimer to pass information about his scientific work to a diplomat Eltenton knew in the Soviet consulate in San Francisco.

Chevalier always insisted that he was merely alerting Oppie to Eltenton’s proposal rather than acting as his conduit. In either case, that is the interpretation that Oppenheimer put on what his friend told him.

In other words, 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.

“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.”

For Bohr, it was the communitarian culture of scientific inquiry that produced progress, rationality and even peace. “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.”

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.

But we do know that after the war he came to believe that he had been misled, and that this knowledge served as a constant reminder that it was henceforth his obligation to be skeptical of what he was told by government officials.

The Hiroshima bomb, he said, was used “against an essentially defeated enemy. . . . it is a weapon for aggressors, and the elements of surprise and of terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

Strauss. He was pathologically ambitious, tenacious and extraordinarily prickly, a combination that made him a particularly dangerous opponent in bureaucratic warfare.

if Oppenheimer himself was not the author of such discoveries, many of his peers saw him as their great facilitator.

Soon, other such humanists were joining the Institute, including the archaeologist Homer Thompson, the poet T. S. Eliot, the historian Arnold Toynbee, the social philosopher Isaiah Berlin and, later, the diplomat and historian George F. Kennan. Oppenheimer had always admired Eliot’s The Waste Land, and was delighted when he agreed to come to the Institute for one semester in 1948. But it didn’t work out. Having a poet in residence didn’t sit well with the Institute’s mathematicians, some of whom snubbed Eliot, even after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature that year. Eliot, for his part, kept to himself and spent more time at the university than he did at the Institute. Oppenheimer was disappointed. “I invited Eliot here,” he told Freeman Dyson, “in the hope that he would produce another masterpiece, and all he did here was to work on The Cocktail Party, the worst thing he ever wrote.”

the Soviets “did not have pre-conceived plans to make Eastern Europe communist, to support the Chinese communists, or to wage war in Korea.” Stalin had no “master plan” for Germany, and wished to avoid military conflict with the United States. At the end of World War II, Stalin reduced his army from 11,356,000 in May 1945 to 2,874,000 in June 1947—suggesting that even under Stalin, the Soviet Union had neither the capability nor the intention to launch a war of aggression. George F. Kennan later wrote that he “never believed that they [the Soviets] have seen it in their interest to overrun Western Europe militarily, or that they would have launched an attack on that region generally even if the so-called nuclear deterrent had not existed.”

“atomic weapons strongly favor the side that attacks aggressively and by surprise. This the United States will never do; and let me point out that we never had any of this hysterical fear of any nation until atomic weapons appeared upon the scene.”

“The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil.” He now feared that by cooperating with the government’s security board, Oppenheimer would not only humiliate himself but would lend legitimacy to the whole poisonous process.

How should a man be judged, by his associations or by his actions? Can criticism of a government’s policies be equated with disloyalty to country? Can democracy survive in an atmosphere that demands the sacrifice of personal relationships to state policy? Is national security well served by applying narrow tests of political conformity to government employees?

‘Great wits are near to madness, closely allied and thin partitions do their bounds divide.’ ”

“You have to take the whole story,” Rabi insisted. “That is what novels are about. There is a dramatic moment and the history of the man, what made him act, what he did, and what sort of person he was. That is what you are really doing here. You are writing a man’s life.”

“I think the moment you were confronted with that letter, you should have returned the letter, and asked that it be redrafted so that you would have before you a clear-cut issue. . . . I think this board or no board should ever sit on a question in this country of whether a man should serve his country or not because he expressed strong opinions. If you want to try that case, you can try me. I have expressed strong opinions many times, and I intend to do so. They have been unpopular opinions at times. When a man is pilloried for doing that, this country is in a severe state. . . . Excuse me, gentlemen, if I become stirred, but I am.”

As the science historian Patrick McGrath later observed, “Scientists and administrators such as Edward Teller, Lewis Strauss, and Ernest Lawrence, with their fullthroated militarism and anti-communism, pushed American scientists and their institutions toward a nearly complete and subservient devotion to American military interests.”

He disapproved of self-appointed pundits—like the young Henry Kissinger, who had turned himself into a nuclear strategist. “A lot of nonsense,” he privately told Lilienthal, waving his unlit pipe around in the air. “To think that these are troubles that can be solved by the theory of games or behavioral research!” But he would not publicly condemn Kissinger or any other nuclear strategist.