Pandora's Keepers (39 page)

He decided to map out a plan with Oppenheimer. The two friends met in Rabi’s faculty apartment on Riverside Drive in late December 1945. It was a bitterly cold day. Factories across the Hudson in New Jersey belched smoke that hung almost suspended in the frigid air. Oppenheimer and Rabi stood at the window, looking out and watching small ice floes drift downstream, turning pink in the sunset. They sat down and began posing questions to each other and shaping answers. When evening came, they had formed a far-reaching idea for international control of the atom. “We were optimistic because we realized what a terrible state the world was going to get into if something like what we were proposing didn’t happen,” remembered Rabi. “We assumed the predicament was obvious to others and it was to most—even the military.”
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Oppenheimer conveyed their ideas to Washington, and the following month a committee was set up to draft an international control plan. The committee was headed by Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, with Oppenheimer serving as a consultant.
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For the next six weeks, committee members met in Washington offices, in railroad cars, at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, even aloft in a military transport plane. They worked and studied and debated late into the night, then resumed again early the next morning.

The committee submitted its report to the Truman administration in March 1946. Although labeled the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, it bore the unmistakable imprint of Robert Oppenheimer, who had drafted it. “Only if dangerous aspects of atomic energy are taken out of national hands,” the report noted, “is there any reasonable prospect of devising safeguards against the use of atomic energy for bombs.” The committee proposed the creation of an international atomic agency. Believing that an unpoliced agreement placed too great a burden on good faith, the report recommended endowing the international agency with strong inspection powers. It stressed that the risk to the United States of relinquishing its atomic monopoly to an international agency was preferable to the risk of a nuclear arms race.
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Other physicists rallied behind the report. Teller called it “a bold and dangerous solution; but inaction and an unplanned drift into international competition would be still more dangerous.” “If the constructive and imaginative spirit of the State Department report is compared with the ‘Maginot-line’ mentality of ‘keeping the secret,’“” Teller added, “one can hardly doubt in which direction our eventual hope for safety lies.”
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Compton called the report “a sound and constructive basis for solving a difficult problem.” “We’d be in a much stronger position if the United Nations would have the atomic weapons and no individual nations would have them,” he said, “than the position in which we would hold atomic weapons and other nations also would develop them. Military defenses cannot make us safe; we’ve got to rely on international agreement before we can really be safe.”
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Bethe thought the greatest service physicists could perform was to “make it clear that only a truly international control of atomic energy gives any hope of lasting security from atomic weapons.”
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Any country in the world that possessed sufficient scientific talent and material resources—certainly including the Soviet Union—could, sooner or later, duplicate the accomplishment of the Manhattan Project.

All of them conceded that if no international agreement could be reached, then the United States might have to keep its atomic arsenal for purposes of deterrence. But they stressed that the bomb was not a “winning weapon” in the long run because other countries would eventually have it too, and in any atomic war, all sides would lose.

The Acheson-Lilienthal Report was presented to the world with great fanfare by American diplomat Bernard Baruch in the gymnasium of New York’s Hunter College, the temporary home of the United Nations, on June 14, 1946. Oppenheimer and Compton sat in the audience that day. “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead,” Baruch intoned at the beginning of his speech. He then went on to describe the destructive power of the bomb, to propose an international atomic authority, and to insist on the abolition of the national veto in this one area. Baruch differed from Oppenheimer by focusing attention on the negative aspect of punishment for violators rather than, as did the report, on the positive aspect of mutual cooperation.

Sadly, within weeks the plan was gravely ill and in less than six months it was dead. American military forces were rapidly demobilizing from Western Europe while massive Russian military forces remained deployed in Eastern Europe; under such conditions, Truman was unlikely to agree to relinquish what he considered the principal American deterrent to Soviet adventurism. Additionally, probably no international control plan could have overcome the fear and suspicion with which Stalin viewed any outside intrusion into Russian territory. Quite simply, Stalin wanted his own atomic bomb and probably would not have accepted any limitation on his own fledgling program, and Truman favored preserving America’s atomic monopoly until, and unless, he got firm agreement to international control from the Soviets.
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The Acheson-Lilienthal Report had addressed the physical facts of atomic energy, but it had ignored American and Soviet geopolitical interests, which were rooted in different values, different dispositions of military forces, and different perceptions of national security. The scientists had thought leaders would want the bomb to go away, but in fact what they wanted was the bomb.
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The plan’s failure bitterly disappointed and badly discouraged Oppenheimer. David Lilienthal, who talked with Oppenheimer late into the night that summer about the opportunity both thought had been missed, recorded in his diary:

He really is a tragic figure; with all his great attractiveness [and] brilliance of mind. As I left him he looked so sad: “I am ready to go anywhere and do anything, but I am bankrupt of further ideas. And I find that physics and the teaching of physics, which is my life, now seems irrelevant.” It was this last [remark] that really wrung my heart.
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Still, Oppenheimer saw no alternative but to continue working for international control. Writing to Bohr, he tried to put the best face on what he considered a bad situation: “It seems important for all our future hopes that the wrong lessons should not have been learned by the failure of the past year, but that on the contrary there may be a renewed courage for a somewhat deeper attack on the problem.”
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Szilard was similarly dejected. Szilard had been hopeful, but his mood grew increasingly pessimistic as the months passed. “To me it seems futile to hope that 140 million people of this country can be smuggled through the gates of Paradise while most of them are looking the other way,” he said bitterly in 1947. “Nothing much can be achieved now or in the very near future until such time as the people of this country understand what is at stake. Maybe God will work a miracle—if we don’t make it too difficult for him.”
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Lawrence, however, took a completely different view: he blamed the failure of international control on Soviet intransigence, which made him conclude that American restraint was unwise and an agreement with Stalin unattainable. As a result, Lawrence abandoned the nuclear restraint that he had advocated along with Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Compton just after the war, and now turned into an enthusiastic proponent of American nuclear superiority.

The failure of international control came as a deep disappointment to most of the other atomic scientists as well, and they also lacked the political sophistication and stamina to swallow defeat and return to fight another day. This was most plainly the case with Edward Teller, who supported the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, but when it failed, lost all interest in political efforts to control the bomb. Losing his optimism and succumbing to an increasing suspicion of the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, Teller abandoned his support for international control and began to champion a conservative agenda that would remain a constant for the rest of his life: development of a superbomb, opposition to all arms-control efforts as naive and dangerous, and advocacy of an unlimited American nuclear buildup.

The failure of international control did nothing to diminish Robert Oppenheimer’s stature, however. The bomb’s success had made him a celebrity whose views were in great demand by policy makers and ordinary citizens alike. His face replaced Einstein’s as the public image of scientific genius. His portrait appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine, and he was in constant demand as a speaker and writer. A new journal,
Physics Today
, carried a photograph on the cover of its first issue that required no explanation: a porkpie hat slung nonchalantly over a cyclotron. Periodicals featured his remarks with flattering portraits of him holding a pipe, looking erudite and persuasive. He was “the smartest of the lot,” a magazine quoted an unnamed colleague.
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The public romance had begun.

Oppenheimer’s vast reputation gave him easy and regular access to top officials. His home and office phones rang constantly—usually someone from Washington was calling—and his office safe was stuffed with classified documents. He served on countless advisory committees and acted as a consultant to many others. All of this was a far cry from the Oppenheimer of Berkeley days. He had changed from a brilliant, arrogant, and in many ways immature intellectual into a gifted administrator and savvy politician with a masterly sense of public relations. He typified the new, worldly scientist of the atomic age who spent more time advising the government and less time teaching students. He saw himself—and others did too—as an oracle for policy makers. A combination of ambition, unrest, and guilt had compelled him into the central political arena of postwar America, and Oppenheimer reveled in the attention and the limelight. He now wore his hair cut very short—as if to signal to Washington that he was no longer one of the longhairs. His frequent public speaking resulted in a solidified persona, his voice now crossing a range of tones, from deliberate arrogance to judicious reflectiveness to irresistible warmth. He reveled at making a difference and being “in the swim”—perhaps too much. A former pupil noted, “I think his sudden fame and the new position he now occupied had gone to his head so much that he began to consider himself God Almighty, able to put the whole world to rights.”
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Among those in the staid realm of academia, Oppenheimer’s new life in the political swim of Washington inspired no small amount of envy.

In October 1947 Oppenheimer accepted the prestigious post of director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. (He had changed his mind about Princeton since his visit there in the 1930s, when he wrote his brother, Frank, that the institute was “a madhouse, its solipsistic luminaries shining in separate and helpless desolation.”) Oppenheimer gave up his tenured professorships at Berkeley and Caltech not only because of the intellectual appeal of the institute but also because it moved him close to the political action of Washington, where he really wanted to be.

Not surprisingly, the Institute for Advanced Study soon began to reflect Oppenheimer’s personality. Although Oppenheimer’s career in original research was over, he remained an effective and articulate critic of others’ research, and this gave the institute’s weekly seminars in theoretical physics enormous vitality. A young postdoctoral fellow at the institute described Oppenheimer’s exacting standards in the seminar room in a letter home to his parents:

I have been observing rather carefully his behavior during seminars. If one is saying, for the benefit of the rest of the audience, things that he knows already, he cannot resist hurrying one on to something else; then when one says things that he doesn’t know or immediately agree with, he breaks in before the point is fully explained with acute and sometimes devastating criticisms, to which it is impossible to reply adequately even when he is wrong. If one watches him one can see that he is moving around nervously all the time, never stops smoking, and I believe that his impatience is largely beyond his control. On Tuesday we had our fiercest public battle so far, when I criticized some unwarrantably pessimistic remarks he had made about the Schwinger theory. He came down on me like a ton of bricks, and conclusively won the argument so far as the public was concerned. However, afterwards he was very friendly and even apologized to me.
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Oppenheimer’s greatest contribution to the institute, however, was more indirect and subtle. He gave its faculty, as he gave scientists at Los Alamos during the war, a sense of participation in a great adventure. He still had the ability to inspire and motivate others by conveying an extraordinary sense of excitement and purpose. His talent for attracting bright people and stimulating them to excellence showed itself once more. There remained shortcomings, however. Oppenheimer continued to wound others with his cutting tongue when they failed to clarify a point or missed one entirely, belittling them with unnecessarily cruel and biting remarks. More than one young fellow fled to his office sobbing after being humiliated by Oppenheimer. Such conduct deeply hurt people, some of whom would not forget.

Oppenheimer and his family lived at Olden Manor, the director’s residence on the institute grounds. The large white-frame colonial house provided a spacious setting. Robert had a library, Kitty a greenhouse, Peter a darkroom, and Toni a pony. Summers were spent lecturing in California, and for a few years the Oppenheimers made regular visits to Perro Caliente in New Mexico. Winter holidays were spent in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Oppenheimer rediscovered his youthful love of sailing. St. John became his preferred retreat.