American Prometheus (76 page)
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Dark Words About Oppie”
How utterly nauseating—but this is like a pu f of wind
against the Gibraltar of your great standing in American
life.
DAVID LILIENTHAL to Robert Oppenheimer, May 10, 1950
IN THE AFTERMATH OF WHAT HE LATER CALLED “our large and ill-managed bout with the Super,” Oppenheimer retreated to Princeton, bitterly discouraged. That spring, George Kennan wrote him, “You probably do not know to what extent you have become my intellectual conscience.” The debate over the Super had forged an alliance between these two formidable intellects whose instincts and sensibilities converged in opposition to a defense strategy based on the threat of nuclear war.
“What stands out in my mind when I think back on those days,” Kennan recalled, “was his insistence on the desirability of openness.” Oppenheimer argued that concealing information about the bomb increased the danger of misunderstandings. As Kennan recalled Oppie’s argument, “You had to have the frankest possible discussions with them [the Soviets] about the problems of the future and the use of the weapon.” Kennan agreed with Oppenheimer that nuclear weapons were inherently evil and genocidal: “It should have been visible to people at the time that this was a weapon from which nobody stood to gain. . . . The whole idea that you could achieve anything of a positive nature by the development of these weapons seemed to me preposterous from the start.”
On a personal level, Kennan would forever feel grateful to Oppenheimer for bringing him to the Institute to begin a new career as a distinguished scholar and historian. “I, who owe to your confidence and encouragement the very opportunity to make what I could of myself as a scholar, beginning in middle age, have a special personal debt to acknowledge.” Yet Kennan’s appointment to the Institute was highly controversial; some questioned the credentials of this career Foreign Service officer who had published nothing that could be remotely called scholarship. Johnny von Neumann voted against the appointment, and wrote Oppenheimer that Kennan was “not, so far, an historian,” and he had yet to produce any scholarly work of an “exceptional character.” Most of the resident mathematicians, led as usual by Oswald Veblen, objected on the grounds that Kennan was merely a political friend of Oppie’s and not an academic. “They resented Kennan,” recalled Freeman Dyson, “and took the thing as an opportunity to attack Oppenheimer.” But Oppenheimer, who had developed a great appreciation for Kennan’s intellect, pushed the appointment through the Board of Trustees, promising to pay Kennan’s $15,000 stipend out of his Director’s Fund.
Kennan spent eighteen months in Princeton before leaving, reluctantly, in the spring of 1952, when Truman and Acheson pressed him to serve as the United States ambassador in Moscow. But less than six months later, he wrote Robert that he thought his tenure in Moscow might be brief, and indeed, within the next ten days his ambassadorship was aborted when he told a reporter that life in Soviet Russia reminded him of the time he had spent in Nazi Germany. Not surprisingly, the Soviets declared him persona non grata. Then, after Dwight Eisenhower won the presidential election, it became clear that the Republicans who came into office promoting “roll-back” had little use for the author of “containment.” In March 1953, Kennan wrote Oppenheimer to say that he had just seen Secretary of State John Foster Dulles—who informed him that “he knew of no ‘niche’ for me in government at this time . . . tainted as I am with ‘containment.’ ” Kennan therefore took early retirement and promptly moved back to Princeton, Oppie’s “decompression chamber for scholars.” With the exception of a slightly longer stint as ambassador to Yugoslavia in the early 1960s, Kennan would spend the rest of his life there. He was Oppenheimer’s neighbor and devoted friend, and in his eyes, Oppenheimer had created a “place where the work of the mind could proceed in its highest form—gracefully, generously, and with the most exquisite scrupulousness and severity.”
THE H-BOMB was not the only issue on which Oppenheimer found himself bucking the Cold War armaments buildup. By 1949, he had despaired of making progress in the foreseeable future on nuclear disarmament. He still believed Bohr’s vision of global openness was mankind’s only hope in the nuclear age. But developments in the early Cold War had made it clear that the negotiations in the United Nations to control nuclear weapons were at an impasse. Instead, Oppenheimer tried to use his influence to put a damper on the government’s and the public’s growing expectations for all things nuclear. That summer, the press quoted him as saying that “nuclear power for planes and battleships is so much hogwash.” Inside the General Advisory Committee (GAC), Oppenheimer and the other scientists criticized the Air Force’s Project Lexington, a program to develop nuclear-powered bomber aircraft. He also talked about the potential dangers inherent in civilian nuclear power plants. Such statements did not endear him to those in the defense establishment or the power industry who favored the development of nuclear-based technologies.
Indeed, the GAC’s experiences with the military brass left all of its members increasingly uneasy about the military’s nuclear weapons planning. “I know,” recalled Lee DuBridge, “that there was a great deal of discussion about targets in the Soviet Union, and how many [bombs] it would take to knock out the major industrial centers. . . . At the time, we thought 50 would just about wipe out the essential things in the Soviet Union.” DuBridge always thought that was a pretty good estimate. But over time, the Pentagon’s representatives kept finding pretexts to push the number higher. DuBridge recalled, “We used to sometimes smile about this, that they always could seem to find targets for whatever number [of bombs] they thought they could get in the next year or two. They adjusted their target goals to the production goals.”
Oppenheimer’s presentations at GAC meetings were normally impeccably objective. Rarely did he reveal any emotion. One exception occurred when V. Adm. Hyman Rickover briefed the committee on the Navy’s rush to develop nuclear-powered submarines. Rickover complained that the AEC was not working hard enough on reactor development. He challenged Oppenheimer by asking if he had waited until he “had all the facts” before building an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer gave him one of his ice-cold blue-eyed stares and said yes. Though the admiral was notoriously overbearing, Oppenheimer restrained himself until Rickover departed. Oppie then walked over to a table where Rickover had left a small wooden model submarine. Placing his hand around the hull, he quietly crushed it and then silently walked away.
Oppenheimer was expanding his circle of political enemies. As his old friend Harold Cherniss had observed years earlier, Oppie’s remarks could be “very cruel.” He was often kind and considerate to subordinates, but he could be very cutting to colleagues.
Lewis Strauss remained Oppenheimer’s most dangerous political enemy. He had not forgotten how Oppenheimer had ridiculed his recommendations at a congressional hearing the previous summer. “These are not happy days for me,” Strauss wrote a friend in July 1949. Having repeatedly dissented inside the AEC over various policies, Strauss felt on the defensive. With Oppenheimer and his friends in mind, he complained privately “that I have been guilty in their eyes of
lèse majesté
in having the effrontery to disagree with my colleagues.” He believed that Oppenheimer’s close friends Herbert Marks and Anne Wilson Marks were spreading stories “to the effect that I am an ‘isolationist.’ . . .” When a friend observed that some people seemed to think it “effrontery for anyone to differ with Dr. Oppenheimer on a scientific matter,” Strauss wrote a memo for his files on the “theme of omniscience” in which he noted that Oppenheimer had once proposed “denaturing” uranium—a process that had since been proven impossible.
Strauss also convinced himself that Oppenheimer was consciously trying to slow work on the thermonuclear bomb. He thought of Oppenheimer as “a general who did not want to fight. Victory could hardly be expected.” Early in 1951, Strauss, though no longer an AEC commissioner, went to AEC Chairman Gordon Dean and, reading from a carefully drafted memo, accused Oppenheimer of “sabotaging the project.” He said “something radical” must be done, strongly implying that Oppenheimer should be fired. And, as if to underscore the political risks of taking on the scientist, Strauss ended the meeting by melodramatically throwing the memo into the fire in Dean’s fireplace. Consciously or not, it was a metaphorical gesture; the security of the country demanded that Oppenheimer’s influence be reduced to ashes.
Back in the autumn of 1949, just as the internal debate over the Super was heating up, Strauss was apprised of top secret information that further fueled his suspicions of Oppenheimer. In mid-October, the FBI informed him that decrypted Soviet cable traffic indicated that a Soviet spy had been operating out of Los Alamos. The crypts seemed to implicate a British physicist, Klaus Fuchs, who had arrived at Los Alamos in 1944 as a member of the British Scientific Mission. In the weeks ahead, it would become clear to Strauss and others that Fuchs had had ample access to classified information about both the atomic bomb and the Super.
While the FBI and the British investigated Fuchs, Strauss began his own investigation of Oppenheimer. He phoned General Groves and, referring to information in Oppenheimer’s FBI file, asked about the Chevalier affair. In response, Groves wrote Strauss two long letters trying to explain what had happened in 1943 and why he had accepted Oppenheimer’s explanation of Chevalier’s activities. In his first letter, he was emphatic in his belief that Oppenheimer was a loyal American. In his second, he tried to convey the complexity of the Chevalier affair.
Groves also made it clear that he did not think that Robert’s behavior in the incident was incriminating. “It is important to realize,” he wrote Strauss, “that if we had eliminated promptly every man who had in the past had associations with friends who were communistically inclined, or who had been sympathetic to the Russians at one time or another, that we would have lost many of our most able scientists.”
Finding Groves’ defense of Oppenheimer unsatisfactory, Strauss continued his search for incriminating information. By early December he was in communication with Groves’ former aide, Col. Kenneth Nichols, who loathed Oppenheimer. Over the next several years, Nichols would become one of Strauss’ assistants and confidants. The two men bonded in their hostility to Oppenheimer. Now Nichols gladly provided Strauss with a copy of Arthur Compton’s September 1945 letter to Henry Wallace in which Compton, allegedly speaking also for Oppenheimer, Lawrence and Fermi, had stated they would “prefer defeat in war” over a victory won by use of a genocidal weapon like the Super bomb. This view outraged Strauss, who saw in Compton’s letter further evidence of Oppenheimer’s dangerous influence; that Compton had written the letter, and had noted that Lawrence and Fermi supported his argument, made no difference to Strauss.
ON THE AFTERNOON of February 1, 1950, the day after Truman’s endorsement of the Super, Strauss received a phone call from J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI chief informed him that Fuchs had just confessed to espionage. Although Oppenheimer had had no hand in Fuchs’ transfer to Los Alamos, Strauss nevertheless held it against him that Fuchs’ spying had occurred on his watch. The next day, Strauss wrote Truman that the Fuchs case “only fortifies the wisdom of your decision [on the Super].” To Strauss’ way of thinking, the Fuchs case also vindicated his obsession with secrecy and his opposition to sharing nuclear technology and research isotopes with the British or anyone else. And for both Strauss and Hoover, the Fuchs revelation also demanded renewed scrutiny of Oppenheimer’s left-wing past.
The day Oppenheimer learned of Fuchs’ confession, he happened to be having lunch with Anne Wilson Marks in Grand Central Station’s famed Oyster Bar. “Have you heard the news about Fuchs?” he asked his former Los Alamos secretary. They agreed that Fuchs had always seemed like such a quiet, lonely, even pathetic character at Los Alamos. “Robert was stunned by the news,” recalled Wilson. On the other hand, he suspected that Fuchs’ knowledge about the Super was probably confined to the less-than-practical “oxcart” model. That same week he told his Institute colleague Abraham Pais that he hoped Fuchs had told the Russians all he knew about the Super, because that “would set them back several years.”
Just days before Fuchs’ confession became public knowledge, Oppenheimer testified in executive session before the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. Asked for the first time specifically about his political associations in the 1930s, Oppenheimer calmly explained that he had naïvely thought the Communists possessed some answers to the problems facing the country in the midst of the Depression. At home, his students had found it difficult to find employment, and abroad, Hitler was a menace. While never a Party member himself, Oppenheimer volunteered that he had maintained friendships with some communists right through the war years. Gradually, however, he had discerned a “lack of honesty and integrity in the . . . Communist Party.” By the end of the war, he said, he had become “a resolute anti-Communist, whose earlier sympathies for Communist causes would give immunity against further infection.” He harshly criticized communism for its “hideous dishonesty” and “elements of secrecy and dogma.”
Afterwards, a young staff member of the Joint Committee, William Liscum Borden, wrote Oppenheimer a letter politely thanking him for his appearance: “I . . . think it was right that you appear[ed] before the Committee and I think it did lots of good.”
Borden, a product of St. Albans prep school and Yale Law School, was bright, energetic—and obsessed with the Soviet menace. During the war, he was piloting a B-24 bomber on a nighttime mission when a German V-2 rocket flashed by him on its way to London. “It resembled a meteor,” Borden later wrote, “streaming red sparks and whizzing past us as though the aircraft was motionless. I became convinced that it was only a matter of time until rockets would expose the United States to direct, transoceanic attack.” In 1946, he wrote an alarmist book on the future risk of a “nuclear Pearl Harbor,”
There Will Be No Time: The Revolution in Strategy.
Borden predicted that in years to come, America’s adversaries would possess large numbers of intercontinental rockets tipped with atomic bombs. At Yale, Borden and other conservative classmates bought a newspaper ad urging President Truman to issue a nuclear ultimatum to the Soviet Union: “Let Stalin Decide: atomic war or atomic peace.” After spotting the incendiary ad, Senator Brien McMahon hired the twenty-eight-year-old Borden as his aide on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy. “Borden was like a new dog on the block who barked louder and bit harder than the old dogs,” wrote the Princeton physicist John Wheeler, who met him in 1952. “Wherever he looked, he saw conspiracies to slow down or derail weapons development in the United States.”
