Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (91 page)

Adding further to both President Truman’s dislike of him and the FBI’s suspicion of him, Oppenheimer wanted nothing to do with Operation Crossroads. The tests were originally scheduled for May 1946, but, at the request of Secretary Byrnes (who did not want them to influence the negotiations over international control of atomic energy), were postponed until July. On 3 May, responding to a request that he attend the tests and contribute to the analysis of the results gained from them, Oppenheimer wrote to Truman asking to be excluded from the scientific panel associated with the tests. Like many other scientists, Oppenheimer told Truman, he had misgivings about their scientific value and whether they could possibly reveal anything that was not already known. After all, on the basis of what had already been witnessed at Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it could safely be predicted that: ‘If an atomic bomb comes close enough to a ship, even a capital one, it will sink it.’ And if the point was to investigate the effects of radiation, this could be done much more cheaply and more effectively in the laboratory. But, over and above those considerations, Oppenheimer raised doubts about ‘the appropriateness of a purely military test of atomic weapons’ at a time when ‘our plans for effectively eliminating them from national armaments are in their earliest beginnings’. In other words, for Oppenheimer it seemed at best pointless and at worst dangerous for the US to be testing bombs at the very time when it was (or anyway, in Oppenheimer’s view, ought to have been) trying to convince the world to adopt a plan designed to ensure that no further bombs were made or used. The point was lost on Truman, who forwarded Oppenheimer’s letter to Acheson, adding a short note dismissing Oppenheimer as the ‘cry-baby scientist’, who had come to the White House six months earlier.

Oppenheimer’s opposition to the tests became known to the press, by whom he was perfectly prepared to be quoted on the subject. On 11 June, the San Francisco office of the FBI sent Hoover a transcript of a phone conversation between Oppenheimer and a journalist for the
New York Herald Tribune
called Steve White. The pair discussed the forthcoming Bikini test, Oppenheimer confirming it as his view that there was no need for a test to determine that any ship within a certain radius of an atomic bomb would be destroyed. The conversation continued:

White: I also have another quotation here but I haven’t got your name on it.

Oppenheimer: What’s that?

White: If the bomb fails entirely, it will likely prove something. It will prove that you can’t do these things without good people.

Oppenheimer: OK. That shouldn’t have my name on.

Many of the misgivings that Oppenheimer expressed to Truman and to the press were expressed persuasively in an anonymous article published in the 15 February 1946 edition of the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago
, a journal that had only been in existence for two months, but was already recognised as the voice of the politically concerned scientists of the Manhattan Project. In addition to the points made by Oppenheimer in his conversation with White, the
Bulletin
article also made the telling, and, as it turned out, prescient observation:

In fact, this is just what happened at the first test, Able, which took place on 1 July 1946, in front of an audience of more than a hundred people, including two observers from the Soviet Union. The fleet to be destroyed consisted of twenty-three ships, the central target of which was the battleship USS
Nevada
. Of these, only two were sunk by the initial blast (within twenty-four hours, a further three sank); the
Nevada
remained afloat. ‘Dressed in all the trappings of an exaggerated and sometimes frivolous publicity,’
The Economist
reported, ‘the first Bikini atom bomb experiment has left rather the impression of a fireworks display which slightly misfired.’ One of the Soviet observers remarked that the damage inflicted by the bomb was ‘not so much’. In fact, the blast, measured at 23,000 tons of TNT, was as powerful as any bomb that had yet been exploded, and the test
did
provide incontrovertible evidence of the devastating effect of radiation. On board the ships were hundreds of mice, rats, goats and pigs, the death rate of which was enough to suggest that, though the
Nevada
remained afloat, had it been fully manned, it would, within a few days have been, a ‘ghost ship’, a floating coffin for a crew whose every member would have died.

The second test, Baker, took place on 25 July and provided a much more arresting display. A ‘Fat Man’ bomb was suspended beneath a landing craft and detonated just ninety feet underwater. The result was spectacular indeed: the landing craft was vaporised and a huge vertical column of water and steam was created, which destroyed ten ships. By this time, however, there was little public interest in, and much criticism of, the tests. The Soviet reaction was expressed in a
Pravda
editorial that described the tests as ‘common blackmail’, which ‘fundamentally undermined the belief in the seriousness of American talk about atomic disarmament’. The third test, Charlie, was called off.

The day before the Baker test, Lilienthal recorded in his diary a meeting with Oppenheimer in his hotel room in Washington. Oppenheimer, he wrote, ‘is in deep despair about the way things are going in the negotiations in New York’.

If the Baruch Plan failed, Oppenheimer told Lilienthal, it:

Lilienthal recorded that Oppenheimer ‘paced up and down in the frenetic way’, saying all this ‘in a really heart-breaking tone’.

Oppenheimer did in fact, during that summer, make some moves towards returning to physics. He finally agreed, for example, to return to his old arrangement of lecturing at Berkeley for half the year and Caltech for the other half, beginning that autumn. After his experiences at Los
Alamos and, during the year following the war, his experience of being part of US policy-making at the very top of the political process, he no doubt knew that he could not simply return to his pre-war life. Nevertheless, there are signs that at least part of him wanted just that. Even during the war, despite his quip to Pauli that ‘for the last four years I have had only classified thoughts’, he had managed to publish at least one article on theoretical physics. Admittedly the article in question – ‘Cosmic Rays: Report of Recent Progress, 1936–1941’, published in a collection commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the University of California – was synoptic and introductory, rather than an original contribution to research. Nevertheless, it gives some indication of what Oppenheimer was hoping to return to when the war was over. In a section on ‘Mesons and Nuclei’ Oppenheimer discusses the puzzles that arise from the enigmatic Yukawa particle, to which he had devoted so much of his energy during the 1930s. The existence of this particle – named the ‘meson’ because its mass put it somewhere in the middle between the tiny electron and the comparatively huge proton – was postulated by Yukawa in order to explain nuclear forces, and, it was thought, was observed in cosmic rays. The troubles arose from the fact that the properties of the particle detectable in cosmic rays were not consistent with it being the particle postulated by Yukawa. ‘The situation in this respect,’ Oppenheimer writes, ‘is not only rather complicated; it is also very incompletely understood, and presents at the moment the principal challenge to theoretical physics.’

It was this ‘principal challenge’ to which Oppenheimer wanted to devote himself. Astonishingly, even right in the middle of the UN negotiations over international atomic-energy policy, he had managed to pursue original research into an aspect of this challenge. On 26 June 1946, the
Physical Review
received a paper jointly written by Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe entitled ‘Reaction of Radiation on Electron Scattering and Heitler’s Theory of Radiation Damping’. This was a response to work published in 1941 and 1942 by the German Jewish physicist Walter Heitler, who, after escaping Hitler’s Germany, had worked first at Bristol with Nevill Mott and then at Dublin with Erwin Schrödinger. At Dublin, Heitler collaborated with the Chinese physicist Peng Huanwu on a mathematical theory that, they hoped, would contribute to the understanding of cosmic rays, mesons and quantum electrodynamics. The paper by Oppenheimer and Bethe (which, at eight pages, was by Oppenheimer’s standards fairly long) was a reaction to the Heitler–Peng paper, ‘The Influence of Radiation Damping on the Scattering of Mesons’, which had been published in the
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society
in 1942. What Oppenheimer and Bethe showed was that the equations devised by Heitler and Peng had only limited success in describing the scattering of electrons
by electromagnetic energy. As an attempt to meet the ‘principal challenge’, this paper with Bethe was small beer, but, given what else Oppenheimer was doing in the summer of 1946, its very existence is something of a marvel.

On returning to California that summer after his work on the Baruch Plan, Oppenheimer narrowly missed what might have become an opportunity to build on the extraordinary work on astrophysics that he had done immediately before the war, the work now regarded as his most important contribution to science. Waiting for him on his return to Berkeley was a letter, dated 15 July 1946, from the Harvard astronomer Donald Menzel, whom Oppenheimer had known in the 1920s and ’30s, when Menzel was working at the Lick Observatory in California. What Menzel wanted was to arouse Oppenheimer’s interest in some speculations he had regarding the structure of the sun. His suggestion, prompted in part by Bethe’s seminal work on solar structure, was that the sun should be regarded as an enormous atom, with most of its mass concentrated in an extremely dense ‘nucleus’. ‘I think that this problem is important from the physical standpoint,’ Menzel told Oppenheimer, ‘because it may be tied up with the generation of cosmic rays.’ Next time Oppenheimer was in the east, he suggested, perhaps the two of them could meet in New York, Philadelphia or Washington to talk about it.

Oppenheimer’s reply, written on 8 August, was fairly encouraging. ‘I would like to talk over with you your ideas on stellar interiors,’ he told Menzel, suggesting that the forthcoming American Physical Society meeting in Princeton might provide an opportunity. ‘I may have to come East before then,’ Oppenheimer wrote, ‘but I devoutly hope not.’ Menzel, as he told Oppenheimer in a subsequent letter, was unable to attend the Princeton meeting, but was still hoping to lure Oppenheimer into further thinking on the subject. ‘There are certainly a lot of interesting and important problems in astrophysics,’ Menzel told Oppenheimer, ‘relating to atomic structure, nuclear structure, and interpretation of spectra. If only we could get together once in a while, as we used to many years ago, I am sure we could have a lot of fun.’

Even while Oppenheimer and Menzel were exchanging these letters, however, moves were afoot in Washington that would guarantee that both Oppenheimer’s devout hope not to return to the east and Menzel’s hope that he and Oppenheimer could have fun discussing astrophysics were destined to be thwarted. On 1 August, President Truman signed the McMahon Bill, bringing into law the Atomic Energy Act.

Brien McMahon had first presented his bill to Congress in December 1945 as an alternative to the defeated May–Johnson Bill. Its fundamental principle was to ensure – as the May–Johnson Bill had so conspicuously failed to – that atomic-energy policy was kept in civilian rather than
military hands. Its chief means of ensuring this was through the creation of the entirely civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which would have responsibility for the development and control of both military and non-military uses of atomic energy. The man Truman chose to be the first chairman of the AEC was David Lilienthal, thus ensuring that Oppenheimer would be called back to Washington to play a key role in the shaping of US atomic-energy policy.

The Atomic Energy Commission was a five-man body, which, according to the terms of the McMahon Act, took over from the Manhattan Project on 1 January 1947. This meant, for example, that Los Alamos was now a civilian rather than a military establishment. Apart from Lilienthal, the commissioners were Sumner T. Pike, a businessman from New England; William T. Waymack, a farmer and newspaper editor from Iowa; Robert F. Bacher, the only scientist on the commission; and Lewis L. Strauss, a politically conservative banker and reserve admiral. Strauss, who insisted that his name be pronounced ‘straws’, was a former shoe salesman who had become extremely wealthy and, through acting as an aide to President Hoover, politically influential. On 24 October 1946, Oppenheimer was recorded by the FBI as remarking about Strauss: ‘He is not greatly cultivated but will not obstruct things.’