American Prometheus

by Kai Bird

“Generously, you ask what I do,” Oppenheimer wrote Smith. “Aside from the activities exposed in last week’s disgusting note, I labor, and write innumerable theses, notes, poems, stories and junk; I go to math lib[rary] and read and to the Phil[osophy] lib and divide my time between Minherr [Bertrand] Russell and the contemplation of a most beautiful and lovely lady who is writing a thesis on Spinoza—charmingly ironic, at that, don’t you think?; I make stenches in three different labs, listen to [Professor Louis] Allard gossip about Racine, serve tea and talk learnedly to a few lost souls, go off for the weekend to distill low grade energy into laughter and exhaustion, read Greek, commit faux pas, search my desk for letters, and wish I were dead. Voila.”

Einstein’s doubts were only heightened when in 1927 Heisenberg published his paper on the central role of uncertainty in the quantum world. What he meant was that it is impossible to determine at any given moment both an entity’s precise position and its precise momentum: “We cannot know, as a matter of principle, the present in all its details.” Born agreed, and argued that the outcome of any quantum experiment depended on chance. In 1927, Einstein wrote Born: “An inner voice tells me that this is not the true Jacob. The theory accomplishes a lot, but it does not bring us closer to the secrets of the Old One. In any case, I am convinced that He does not play dice.”

Rabi had fundamental doubts about the whole notion of building a bomb. “I was strongly opposed to bombing ever since 1931, when I saw those pictures of the Japanese bombing that suburb of Shanghai. 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.

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.

Isolated in Los Alamos, Oppenheimer had no knowledge of the “Magic” intelligence intercepts, no knowledge of the vigorous debate going on among Washington insiders over the surrender terms, and no idea that the president and his secretary of state were hoping that the atomic bomb would allow them to end the war without a clarification of the terms of unconditional surrender, and without Soviet intervention.

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.”

As Victor Weisskopf later wrote: “The war had made it obvious by the most cruel of all arguments, that science is of the most immediate and direct importance to everybody. This had changed the character of physics.”

“Mailing it was a serious violation of security,” Wilson later wrote. “For me, it was a declaration of independence from our leaders at Los Alamos, not that I did not continue to admire and cherish them. But the lesson we learned early on was that the Best and the Brightest, if in a position of power, were frequently constrained by other considerations and were not necessarily to be relied upon.”

What they had done was no less than an “organic necessity.” If you were a scientist, he said, “you believe that it is good to find out how the world works . . . that it is good to turn over to mankind at large the greatest possible power to control the world and to deal with it according to its lights and values.”

Over the years, critics of Oppenheimer’s 1946 proposals for international control have charged him with political naïveté. Stalin, they argue, would never have accepted inspections. Oppenheimer himself understood this point. “I cannot tell,” he wrote years later, “and I think that no one can tell, whether early actions along the lines suggested by Bohr would have changed the course of history. There is not anything that I know of Stalin’s behavior that gives one any shred of hope on that score. But Bohr understood that this action was to create a change in the situation. He did not say, except once in jest, ‘another experimental arrangement,’ but this is the model he had in mind. 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.”

MacLeish asked Oppenheimer what he thought of the essay. Robert’s reply revealed the evolution of his own political views. He thought MacLeish’s description of the “present state of affairs” was masterful. But he was troubled by MacLeish’s prescription—a call for a “redeclaration of the revolution of the individual.” This familiar exhortation to Jeffersonian individualism seemed somehow inadequate and not very fresh. “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.”

The story quoted the wartime head of Los Alamos Laboratory as saying, “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.”

Bethe discussed the H-bomb with his friend Victor Weisskopf, who argued that a war fought with thermonuclear weapons would be suicidal. “We both had to agree,” Bethe said, “that 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.

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.”

“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.”

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.”

At the end of 1954, Columbia University invited him to give an address on the occasion of its bicentennial; the lecture was broadcast to a national audience. His message was bleak and pessimistic. Earlier, in his Reith Lectures, he had extolled the virtues of science in communitarian endeavors, but now he dwelled on the solitary condition of intellectuals, embattled by the fierce winds of popular emotions. “This is a world,” he said, “in which each of us, knowing his limitations, knowing the evils of superficiality, will have to cling to what is close to him, to what he knows, to what he can do, to his friends and his tradition and his love, lest he be dissolved in a universal confusion and know nothing and love nothing. . . . If a man tells us that he sees differently than we, or that he finds beautiful what we find ugly, we may have to leave the room, from fatigue or trouble. . . .”

A few years later, he gave a hint of his feelings to Max Born, his former professor in Göttingen, who had made it clear that he rather disapproved of Oppenheimer’s decision to work on the atomic bomb. “It is satisfying to have had such clever and efficient pupils,” Born wrote in his memoirs, “but I wish they had shown less cleverness and more wisdom.” Oppenheimer wrote Born, “Over the years, I have felt a certain disapproval on your part for much that I have done. This has always seemed to me quite natural, for it is a sentiment that I share.”

In an implicit rebuke to those who thought that a powerful, nuclear-armed America could act unilaterally, Oppenheimer intoned, “The problem of doing justice to the implicit, the imponderable, and the unknown is of course not unique in politics. It is always with us in science, it is with us in the most trivial of personal affairs, and it is one of the great problems of writing and of all forms of art. The means by which it is solved is sometimes called style. It is style which complements affirmation with limitation and with humility; it is style which makes it possible to act effectively, but not absolutely; it is style which, in the domain of foreign policy, enables us to find a harmony between the pursuit of ends essential to us, and the regard for the views, the sensibilities, the aspirations of those to whom the problem may appear in another light; it is style which is the deference that action pays to uncertainty; it is above all style through which power defers to reason.”

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

In his acceptance speech, Oppenheimer mentioned that an earlier president, Thomas Jefferson, “often wrote of the ‘brotherly spirit of science.’ . . . We have not, I know, always given evidence of that brotherly spirit of science. This is not because we lack vital common or intersecting scientific interests. It is in part because, with countless other men and women, we are engaged in this great enterprise of our time, testing whether men can both preserve and enlarge life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and live without war as the great arbiter of history.”

As their conversation turned philosophical, Oppenheimer stressed the word “responsibility”— and when Morgan suggested he was using the word in an almost religious sense, Oppenheimer agreed it was a “secular device for using a religious notion without attaching it to a transcendent being. I like to use the word ‘ethical’ here. I am more explicit about ethical questions now than ever before—although these were very strong with me when I was working on the bomb. Now, I don’t know how to describe my life without using some word like ‘responsibility’ to characterize it, a word that has to do with choice and action and the tension in which choices can be resolved. I am not talking about knowledge, but about being limited by what you can do. . . . There is no meaningful responsibility without power. It may be only power over what you do yourself—but increased knowledge, increased wealth, leisure are all increasing the domain in which responsibility is conceivable.”

Robert would have been proud of Frank. Everything the two brothers had learned in two lives devoted to science, art and politics was brought together in the Exploratorium. “The whole point of the Exploratorium,” Frank said, “is to make it possible for people to believe they can understand the world around them. I think a lot of people have given up trying to comprehend things, and when they give up with the physical world, they give up with the social and political world as well. If we give up trying to understand things, I think we’ll all be sunk.” If Frank ran his Exploratorium as a “benevolent despot” until his death in 1985, it was always with the egalitarian notion that “human understanding will cease to be an instrument of power . . . for the benefit of a few, and will instead become a source of empowerment and pleasure to all.”