Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (111 page)

^fn64
It is a surprise to many, particularly in the UK (whose Royal Air Force was established in 1918), that the US Air Force only became a separate branch of the US military as late as September 1947. Before that the air service had been part of the army.

^fn65
That phrase was remembered by Teller. Whatever else was in the letter is lost to history, since, rather oddly, it does not survive among the many boxes of correspondence that Oppenheimer diligently filed and preserved. Conant’s biographer, James G. Hershberg, has speculated – plausibly, to my mind – that Conant asked Oppenheimer to destroy it.

^fn66
This burden seems also to have influenced other members of the GAC. Conant, for example, said at the meeting that he felt he was ‘seeing the same film, and a punk one, for the second time’, while Rowe remarked: ‘We built one Frankenstein.’

^fn67
Though this talk is not generally allusive, this mention of an atomic clock
is
an allusion. It alludes to the ‘doomsday clock’ that appeared on every cover of the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
from June 1947 onwards. The closer the clock is to midnight, the closer the threat of global nuclear war. The February 1953 issue of the
Bulletin
showed the clock at two minutes to midnight, the closest it had ever been.

WILLIAM BORDEN’S TIME
as executive director of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy finished at the end of May 1953. A week or two before he left, while he still had security clearance, he was given Oppenheimer’s AEC security file by Strauss in order to make a close study of it. After he left the committee he no longer had any kind of government job, and should therefore have given the file back. However, quite illegally, Strauss let him keep it for a further three months. Ever since Strauss had been told that Klaus Fuchs had not acted alone, that there had been another Soviet spy at Los Alamos, he had suspected that Oppenheimer was that second spy, and he was hoping that Borden would be able to substantiate that claim sufficiently well for a solid case to be made for stripping Oppenheimer of his security clearance.

As he studied the FBI file, Borden became obsessed with the details of the case, which, he came to believe, pointed to the conclusion that Oppenheimer was indeed a Soviet agent. In the autumn of 1953 Borden prepared his own summary of the evidence, which, at just three and a half pages, was much shorter than the various FBI summaries and, Borden believed, much clearer. On 7 November, he sent his summary to J. Edgar Hoover, telling him: ‘The purpose of this letter is to state my own exhaustively considered opinion, based upon years of study of the available classified evidence, that more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.’ His summary organises the evidence into four groups, though it is not entirely clear what the organising principle is. The first group lists all the evidence that Oppenheimer – through his friends, his colleagues, his brother, his wife and his ‘mistress’ (Jean Tatlock) – had close links with the Communist Party. The second group
consists mostly of things that have little or no bearing on the question of whether or not he was a Soviet agent (for example, ‘In April 1942 his name was formally submitted for security clearance’), except the last, which accuses Oppenheimer of having lied to Groves and the FBI. The third group is mostly about the sharp difference between Oppenheimer’s attitudes to the atomic and hydrogen bombs before the war (when he was enthusiastic about them) and after the war (when his enthusiasm for them evaporated). And the fourth group concerns Oppenheimer’s alleged use of his influence in the post-war period to retard US defence projects, most notably the development of the hydrogen bomb.

None of this, of course, amounted to evidence that Oppenheimer had acted as a Soviet agent, and nor was any of it news to Hoover. Perhaps for that reason Hoover waited nearly three weeks before doing anything with Borden’s letter. During that time, suspicions about Oppenheimer were being raised all over Washington and beyond. On 12 November, the
Evening Star
newspaper ran a story under the heading ‘FBI report on vast spy ring shocked US leaders in 1945’, which contained the statement: ‘A top atomic scientist was a Communist and had been approached to furnish atomic bomb secrets from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco through professors at the University of California.’ As an FBI memo of 18 November concedes, this information came from a 1945 summary of Soviet espionage in the United States that the FBI had leaked to HUAC. ‘In addition,’ the memo says, ‘it appears members of the press have been informed of the material appearing in the summary.’

Around the same time, Borden sent versions of his letter to various members of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, who in turn showed it to the Republican senator Bourke B. Hickenlooper, a man known as a fervent anti-communist. Evidently Borden was anxious that his letter be acted upon. The pressure on Hoover to do
something
with Borden’s letter mounted when, on 24 November, Joseph McCarthy – whose interest in Oppenheimer was by this time well known – delivered a speech, broadcast on both radio and television, in which he accused the Eisenhower administration of ‘whining, whimpering appeasement’ in its dealings with communists. Three days later, Hoover distributed copies of Borden’s letter to the President, the Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Defense Secretary Charles Wilson and Lewis Strauss. On 3 December, Eisenhower ordered that a ‘blank wall’ be constructed separating Oppenheimer from atomic secrets. From that day on, Oppenheimer’s security clearance was suspended.

Oppenheimer himself had been in London since early November and was blithely unaware of Borden’s letter to Hoover and the chain of events it had set off. The suspension of Oppenheimer’s security clearance was
for the moment kept secret, not only from the press, but also from Oppenheimer himself, who, the FBI believed, might flee to the Soviet Union if he knew what was happening in Washington. Oppenheimer had gone to London in order to give the Reith Lectures, a series of six talks sponsored each year by the BBC. To be chosen as a Reith Lecturer was a great honour, and Oppenheimer attracted a good deal of publicity. A photograph in the
Sunday Express
on 15 November 1953 shows the forty-nine-year-old wandering alone through London’s Mayfair district, wearing an expensive-looking three-piece suit and his famous pork-pie hat, with a cigarette in his left hand. The accompanying text, ironically, concentrates on his freedom: ‘He moves about as a free man. Free, that is, from the hordes of G-men who dogged his steps when he went to France and Germany in 1951.’ In fact, his every step was being watched by the FBI.

The following week, Oppenheimer was the subject of an admiring profile in
The Observer
, which unwittingly contained some phrases that would have struck an ominous note back in Washington:

As for the Reith Lectures themselves, they were generally regarded by their British audience as something of a disappointment. As
The Economist
put it: ‘Something different was expected from the man who had engineered the mightiest scientific experiment in history.’ The advertised aim of the lectures, the overall title of which was ‘Science and the Common Understanding’, was to examine ‘what there is new in atomic physics that is relevant, helpful and inspiriting for men to know’, but this promised more novelty than Oppenheimer delivered. The disappointment was ‘at finding that the ideas expressed are, on the whole, familiar ones’. What Oppenheimer had to say turned out to be ‘an oft-told tale’. By ‘new in atomic physics’ Oppenheimer seemed to mean ‘atomic physics as it was thirty years ago’, since his focus was on the ‘heroic period’ of quantum physics in the 1920s, and even then he spent a long time getting there. His first lecture was on Newton, his second on Rutherford and his third on Bohr and the ‘old’ quantum theory. Only in the fourth lecture did he get on to the wave-particle duality at the heart of quantum mechanics,
together with the notion that was always at the heart of his thinking: complementarity. The fifth lecture attempts to show how the notion of complementarity can be applied outside physics, to an understanding of human nature and society, for example; and the sixth lecture rounds the whole thing off with a series of more or less empty platitudes, such as the following, which is the concluding sentence:

Rarely have so many words been used to say so little. The contrast, both in style and content, with ‘Atomic Weapons and American Policy’ could not be greater. There, he had something urgent to say that he wanted to communicate as clearly as possible; here, in the Reith Lectures, his wordy and obscure style seems designed to disguise the fact that he really has nothing to say. Robert Crease’s damning phrase about Oppenheimer’s public lectures – that they are ‘rhetorically evocative and conceptually stagnant’ – is in general somewhat unfair, but about the Reith Lectures it is devastatingly accurate.

Only twice does Oppenheimer’s style free itself from the verbose torpor that characterises the lectures as a whole. The first time is in the second lecture, when he takes a digression from Rutherford to talk about more recent developments, describing how ‘the story of sub-nuclear matter began to unfold and ramify’:

If only, one can imagine the British audiences thinking, he had chosen this as his subject.

The second time the lectures come to life is when Oppenheimer touches on the question of whether there will ever be a scientific explanation of consciousness. ‘It seems rather unlikely,’ he says, ‘that we shall be able to describe in physio-chemical terms the physiological phenomena which accompany a conscious thought or sentiment, or will.’

When the lectures were over, Oppenheimer and Kitty went first to Copenhagen to see Bohr and then to Paris, where, with security officers watching their every step, they called on the person who, of all the people in the world, Oppenheimer should
not
have been seen visiting at this time: Haakon Chevalier. Chevalier had been living in Paris for three years, working as a translator. ‘It was a happy reunion,’ Chevalier later remembered. The next day, he took Oppenheimer to meet André Malraux and listened ‘to an extraordinary dialogue between these two men, so different in mind and temperament, but each supreme in his field’. The conversation got on to Einstein, and Oppenheimer shocked both Malraux and Chevalier by remarking: ‘It is very sad for us who are close to Einstein and have such enormous respect for his early contribution, to have to say that for the past twenty-five years Einstein has done no science.’

Oppenheimer and Kitty returned from Europe on 13 December 1953. Waiting for Oppenheimer was an urgent message to call Strauss as soon as he could. When Oppenheimer called him the next day, Strauss told him ‘it might be a good idea’ for them to meet in the next day or two. Having been told by the FBI that they needed more time to examine Borden’s letter, however, Strauss got in touch with Oppenheimer and put off their meeting till 21 December. This gave Strauss time to consult others on how to deal with Oppenheimer. At a high-level meeting at the Oval Office on 18 December, involving Vice President Nixon and Allen Dulles of the CIA, it was decided to present Oppenheimer with the charges against him and offer him two possible responses: he could either resign as an AEC consultant or he could appeal against the suspension of
his security clearance in front of a panel appointed by Strauss.

When Oppenheimer arrived at Strauss’s office on the afternoon of 21 December, he was met by both Strauss and General Kenneth Nichols, the recently appointed general manager of the AEC. Nichols had known Oppenheimer ever since the early days of the Manhattan Project and had developed an antipathy towards him almost as strong as Strauss’s. After a few pleasantries about the recent sudden death of Deak Parsons, Strauss told Oppenheimer that, in the light of a presidential order of 27 April 1953 requiring the re-evaluation of all individuals about whom there was ‘derogatory information’ in their files, his security clearance had been suspended. It seems strange that Oppenheimer did not point out, upon hearing this, that his most recent reappointment as a consultant in June 1953 had occurred after this presidential order and so was presumably in accordance with its requirements, but he was evidently too shocked to think clearly. In any case he possibly did not have time to react in this way before Strauss followed up this shock with an even worse one. A letter had been drafted, Strauss told Oppenheimer, listing all the charges against him. The letter, which ran to eight pages, was then handed to Oppenheimer.