Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (89 page)

Again whereas in Washington he had been respectful to the point of being deferential to those in power, in this speech he was openly critical of the President, remarking that ‘the views suggested in the President’s Navy Day speech are not entirely encouraging’. In particular, he took issue with Truman’s US-centric view of the issue: the idea that the world could, and had to, look to the US to keep possession of atomic bombs as a ‘sacred trust’. This ‘insistent tone of unilateral responsibility for the handling of atomic weapons,’ Oppenheimer told his audience, ‘is surely the thing which must have troubled you, and which troubled me, in the official statements.’

In place of Truman’s insistence on putting America’s interests first, and domestic concerns before international ones, Oppenheimer outlined a robustly international perspective. What he proposed was agreement between nations, first to set up an international atomic-energy commission that, without any interference from the heads of any particular state, had control over the development of peaceful uses of atomic energy, and second to ‘say that no bombs be made’. In every respect the speech echoed the views of the scientists at Los Alamos, and they left the theatre feeling that Oppenheimer had spoken for them. He may have failed to win the President round to his way of seeing the issues, but he had at
least re-established himself as the voice, the heart and the conscience of the Los Alamos scientists.

Oppenheimer had begun his ALAS speech with a rueful remark about himself. He would like, he said, to speak to them as a fellow scientist, adding: ‘If some of you have long memories, perhaps you will regard it as justified.’ It felt like a long time had passed since he was able to concentrate on the kind of pure, disinterested, theoretical physics that he loved, and he was anxious to return to that way of thinking. That is why he had resigned his directorship of Los Alamos so quickly; he wanted to return to academic life. Though he was flattered by the offers from the east – Harvard, Princeton, Columbia – what he wanted most of all was to return to either Berkeley or Caltech, or both. As he explained in a letter to Conant, rejecting the Harvard offer, ‘I would like to go back to California for the rest of my days’ because ‘I have a sense of belonging there which I will probably not get over.’

Nevertheless, as his letters of August to Deutsch, Lawrence and Lauritsen had revealed, he had serious misgivings about both Berkeley and Caltech. In letters to Sproul and Birge written at the end of September, he asked them to say frankly whether, in the light of the quarrels he had had with officials from the University of California during his war work, he would be entirely welcome at Berkeley. Both assured him that he would find an extremely warm welcome there, but he remained unconvinced. His doubts about Caltech were more easily overcome and on 16 October, the day he resigned from Los Alamos, he wrote to William Houston, the chair of the physics department at Caltech, formally accepting the offer of a professorship of physics and promising to arrive in Pasadena during the first week of November. For the moment, nothing was decided about Berkeley. He had not actually resigned his position there, so the door remained open for him to return. For the time being, his leave of absence was extended, giving him more time to decide whether he wanted to return.

In the meantime, after giving his ALAS speech, he and Kitty drove to California. Leaving Kitty in Berkeley, Oppenheimer went on to Pasadena, where he stayed as a guest of the Tolmans. For the following term this was to be the pattern: Oppenheimer spending one or two nights a week in Pasadena, while Kitty and the children remained in Berkeley. At Caltech, he later claimed: ‘I did actually give a course, but it is obscure to me how I gave it now.’ Indeed, it is difficult to see how he could possibly have given a course. As well as arriving late, he was called back to Washington several times to give evidence to McMahon’s Senate special committee. ‘I was sort of reluctant to do it,’ he later said, ‘on the ground that I hoped to stay put. But I came back.’

What compelled him to keep going back to Washington, despite the
strong urge to ‘stay put’, was the hope that he might have some influence in directing US policy away from the unilateralism of Truman’s public utterances and towards the internationalism espoused by most scientists. The gulf between scientists and politicians, and the horror with which scientists contemplated military control over scientific research, were increased at the end of November 1945, when newspapers reported that US forces in Japan had seized and destroyed five cyclotrons that belonged to Japanese universities. The machines were cut to pieces with welding torches and then the fragmented parts were buried deep in the Pacific Ocean. The brutality, the incomprehension and the naked stupidity of this act filled scientists everywhere with revulsion and ended for ever any chance of atomic scientists in the States agreeing to allow the US army any role in directing and organizing their research.

In his efforts to push forward an internationalist perspective on atomic energy, Oppenheimer discovered that he had an extremely welcome ally. Isidor Rabi, it turned out, had been thinking along exactly the same lines. Rabi was then living in Riverside Drive, where Oppenheimer grew up, and, when Rabi was on the East Coast Oppenheimer would often stay with him. ‘Oppenheimer and I met frequently and discussed these questions thoroughly,’ Rabi later told Jeremy Bernstein. ‘I remember one meeting with him, on Christmas Day of 1945, in my apartment. From the window of my study we could watch blocks of ice floating past on the Hudson.’ By the end of that evening Rabi and Oppenheimer had arrived at a plan for taking control of atomic-energy policy out of the hands of individual governments and giving it to the international community as a whole.

In the New Year of 1946, Oppenheimer was provided with an opportunity of putting his and Rabi’s plan into effect when he was appointed on to a Board of Consultants advising a special committee drawn up by Secretary Byrnes. The committee was charged with the task of drawing up a proposal for international control of nuclear weapons and was chaired by Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson. He appointed as chair of the Board of Consultants a liberal New Dealer, David Lilienthal. From Oppenheimer’s point of view, Lilienthal turned out to be a perfect choice, not least because he developed a respect for Oppenheimer that bordered on hero worship.

Oppenheimer and Lilienthal first met on 22 January 1946, when Oppenheimer came to Washington to attend the first meeting of the Board of Consultants. They met in Oppenheimer’s hotel room, where, Lilienthal recorded in his diary, Oppenheimer ‘walked back and forth, making funny “high” sounds between sentences or phrases as he paced the room, looking at the floor.’ ‘I left liking him,’ he added, ‘greatly impressed with his flash of a mind.’ The next day, when he saw Oppenheimer in action in a meeting of Acheson’s committee (the members of which included Conant, Bush
and Groves), Lilienthal’s admiration was unrestrained. Oppenheimer, he wrote, was ‘an extraordinary personage’ and ‘a really
great
teacher’ – his evidence to the committee being, for Lilienthal, ‘one of the most memorable intellectual and emotional experiences of my life’. He later told the lawyer Herbert Marks that it was ‘worth living a lifetime just to know that mankind has been able to produce such a being’ as Oppenheimer.

Nor was Lilienthal alone in his admiration of Oppenheimer. ‘All the participants, I think,’ Dean Acheson later wrote, ‘agree that the most stimulating and creative mind among us was Robert Oppenheimer’s.’ Not that Oppenheimer’s influence was universally welcomed. Groves, in particular, looked on in dismay at the way things were going. He had not wanted to appoint a Board of Consultants, believing that he, Conant and Bush ‘knew more about the broad aspects of the problem . . . than any panel that could be assembled’, and did not like the composition of the board that was, against his advice, appointed. Lilienthal, Groves remarked, ‘had little or no knowledge of the subject whatever’, and he was rather scathing about the reverence for Oppenheimer that prevailed among the members of the board. ‘Everybody genuflected,’ he sniffed, ‘Lilienthal got so bad he would consult Oppie on what tie to wear in the morning.’

Not only was Oppenheimer the most respected person on the Board of Consultants, but he was also the only scientist. He therefore had little trouble imposing his views on the other members and turning the whole process of framing a proposed international policy on atomic energy into a vehicle for advancing the views that Bohr had developed during the war and that he and Rabi had discussed on Christmas Day. The first meeting of the Board was on 23 January, and from then until the Board submitted its report to the Secretary of State on 16 March, the business of drafting the proposal took up all of Oppenheimer’s time. He later described the first few weeks like this:

On 2 February, Oppenheimer sent Lilienthal a long memo that became the foundation of the board’s report. Its central idea was very radical.
What Oppenheimer proposed was that a single international agency, the Atomic Development Authority, should be established with extremely far-reaching powers. It would not only have responsibility for all aspects of the development and control of atomic energy, including the power to inspect the atomic facilities in any nation in the world, but would also actually own all the uranium and every atomic-energy plant in the world. Under the terms of Oppenheimer’s proposal, no nation would be allowed to build atomic bombs and no nation would be
able
to build atom bombs, since all the materials necessary for such bombs would be in the hands of the Atomic Development Authority.

On 7 March, Acheson’s committee, together with its associated Board of Consultants, met to discuss and vote on a plan that was substantially drawn from Oppenheimer’s memo. Remarkably, all except one voted in favour of the plan. Predictably the one exception was Groves, who was implacably opposed to the idea of giving up the US monopoly of atomic weapons and handing over to the United Nations America’s uranium, its separation plants, its plutonium plants and its advanced knowledge. Despite Groves’s opposition, however, the plan was approved, and, after a few revisions and amendments were made, was sent to Secretary of State Byrnes on 16 March. To Groves’s horror, the State Department authorised publication of the report, which became known as the ‘Acheson–Lilienthal Plan’. Acheson’s committee had advised against publication, Groves says in his autobiography, since ‘we did not feel it wise to disclose to the Russians just how far the United States was willing to go in sharing its knowledge before negotiations had even been arranged for’.

In fact, the United States government was
not
willing to go as far as the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan proposed, and quickly took steps to ensure that it would not be required to do so. On 5 March, just two days before the Acheson committee met to consider Oppenheimer’s plan, the thinking that would dominate the policy of both the US and the UK was expressed with great force by Winston Churchill in a speech he gave in Fulton, Missouri. The speech, which is generally regarded as marking the beginning of the Cold War, famously described the growth of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe as the descent of an ‘iron curtain’, behind which was ‘the Soviet Sphere’. The spread of Soviet influence, he urged, must be contained by – if necessary – military force. The view put forward by Churchill could not have been more antithetical to Oppenheimer’s. Indeed, at times he gave the impression of arguing directly against the views that were embodied in the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan:

Having lost the last election to Clement Attlee, Churchill was not at this time Prime Minister and was not, officially at any rate, speaking for the UK or the US government. But any doubts that the views of Truman and Byrnes accorded better with those of Churchill than with those advanced in the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan would soon be removed.

On the very day that he received the plan, Byrnes appointed as his spokesman at the United Nations on the international control of atomic energy a seventy-five-year-old financier called Bernard Baruch, who, he knew, would be opposed to its proposals. ‘That was the day I gave up hope,’ Oppenheimer later said. As well as being politically conservative and sceptical about international control of atomic energy, Baruch had a vested interest in
not
surrendering ownership of uranium, having investments in a company that had a stake in uranium mines. As soon as he was appointed, Baruch set to work on ‘revising’ the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan, turning it into, as Byrnes put it to Acheson, ‘a workable plan’. To help him in this aim, Baruch chose a team of politically right-wing advisors that included two bankers, a mining engineer and, as ‘interpreter of military policy’, General Groves.

Three months separated the appointment of Baruch on 16 March and his appearance at the United Nations, where he presented the US proposal for international control of atomic energy on 14 June. During those months the proposal underwent fundamental changes that altered completely its character as an expression of the Bohr–Rabi–Oppenheimer philosophy of international cooperation. Also during those months Oppenheimer’s personal position as a trusted and prestigious advisor to the US government was fatally compromised by an increasingly vicious campaign against him, led by powerful figures in the US political establishment.