Fifties (6 page)

No wonder most of the scientists involved were terrified of what they had wrought. There was, Winston Churchill wrote in 1955, “an immense gulf between the atomic and hydrogen bomb. The atomic bomb, with all its terrors, did not carry us outside the scope of human control or manageable events in thought or action in peace or war.”

Oppenheimer himself epitomized the evolution that many of the Los Alamos scientists underwent. He was the leader of the scientific community in those years, and after the successful development of the atomic bomb, he was at the pinnacle of his prestige, achieving something of a mythic status in popular culture. In 1948 he was on the cover of
Time
magazine, and that May, when a new professional journal called
Physics Today
was launched, the first issue had on its cover a photo of Oppenheimer’s rumpled porkpie hat. There was no credit line, no title—just the hat. “The bomb, whose glare illuminated a new world also gave the once-obscure brotherhood of physicists a strange new standing,” wrote Joseph and Stewart Alsop. “They acquired something of the position in our society of the
Mathematician-Astronomer-Priests of the ancient Mayas who were at once feared and revered as the knowers of the mystery of the seasons, and the helpers of the sun and the stars in their life-giving courses.” Oppenheimer, they added, was the unofficial high priest in that new order. When he spoke at Berkeley, his audience was so large that his lectures had to be piped into adjacent rooms. With his gaunt, hauntingly poetic features and literary sensibility, he seemed the embodiment of the modern physicist as Renaissance man. Besides, among his scientific peers he was the rarest thing—a native son, a brilliant scientist who spoke without an accent.

If there was a committee on science, on atomic energy, on government and science, Oppie was certain to be on it, and often would be the head of it. If the politicians wanted to know what the scientists thought or could do, they turned to Oppenheimer; if the scientists wanted an answer about the politicians, they turned to Oppie. He was never a Nobel laureate; it was argued by some he never fulfilled the promise of his exceptional scientific talent. One could speculate that at the very prime of his career he had sacrificed his own work for the good of his nation by becoming the manager of the Los Alamos lab instead of its chief scientist.

His stewardship of Los Alamos was considered a sterling model for all future scientific ventures. He had worked hard to bring in the best scientists in the world and to create an esprit de corps. Although they were isolated in the desert of New Mexico and the tight security measures were daunting, Oppenheimer managed to foster an atmosphere of unusual freedom. I. I. Rabi, the Nobel laureate, once said there was a special quality about Los Alamos—a romance, a palpable sense of magic. There, Johnny von Neumann, quite possibly the world’s greatest mathematician and the author of the
Theory of Games,
almost always lost in poker; there, to cut a ski trail, George Kistiakowsky simply detonated trees with Composition C explosive plastique instead of chopping them down. James Tuck remembered the miraculous openness in which young physicists met with the greatest names in their profession. Tuck spoke of Los Alamos as having “a spirit of Athens, of Plato.”

Oppie himself listened to everyone. As a leader of men who were brilliant, egocentric, and difficult, he behaved with exquisite grace and sensitivity. He summoned managerial and political skills that no one, including himself, previously knew he possessed. “When anyone mentions laboratory directors,” Enrico Fermi, the great Italian physicist, once said, “I think of directors and directors and of Oppenheimer, who is unique.”

Before Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was seen as privileged and spoiled. As a graduate student and then as a young instructor, he had been unbearably arrogant. He was so much smarter and quicker than anyone else that when a colleague would start to say something, Oppie would finish the sentence for him. He was intolerant of anyone he thought second-rate, and he did little to hide his disdain. Even those who liked him found him rude. One of his colleagues, Victor Weisskopf, mentioned to Oppie that he planned to write a paper on a particular subject. Oppie replied, “You don’t understand enough about it to write a paper.” To Weisskopf it was like a slap in the face.

Born in 1904, Oppenheimer was the son of a wealthy Jewish merchant family in New York. His was a home with servants, maids, cooks, chauffeurs. Van Goghs hung on the walls. He was so sheltered that he had few friends his own age. At age nine he told an older cousin, “Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek.” At twelve he gave a lecture to the New York Mineralogical Society (the officers of the society had thought he was an adult, based on an earlier paper he had written). “I was,” he later noted, “an unctuous repulsively good little boy. My childhood did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel bitter things. It gave me no normal, healthy way to be a bastard.” His apprehension of anti-Semitism was partly responsible for his social awkwardness, thought his friend Herbert Smith, a high school teacher. Because of that he was always wary of where he was welcomed and where he was not. (The year before he entered college at Harvard, President A. Lawrence Lowell had called for a quota for Jews. Years later, despite his immense fame that came from heading the Manhattan Project, there was a serious question of whether he could go back to Caltech since Robert Millikan, the president there, felt there were already enough Jews on the faculty.)

He was graduated from Harvard in three years, earning a summa, while making a minimal impression on his classmates. In his yearbook he summed up his experience in Cambridge: “In college three years as an undergraduate.” He spoke seven languages, one of them Sanskrit, which he learned in order to read the
Bhagavad-Gita
in its original form. Victor Weisskopf thought there was a terrible sadness to Oppie, a certain inability to love and be loved, which lasted his entire life. Nothing in his personal life was ever easy; if anything saved him from himself it was the sheer power of his intellect and, for a brief time at least, his nation’s need to employ it. As a graduate student, he went off to Europe. Edward Condon, a young American physicist also studying overseas, noted his intellectual
arrogance at the time: “Trouble is that Oppie is so quick on the trigger intellectually he puts the other guy at a disadvantage. And damnit he is always right, or at least right enough.” He got his Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen. A colleague asked James Franck, one of the examiners at his orals, how it had gone. Franck answered, “I got out of there just in time. He was beginning to ask me questions.”

He returned to teach at Harvard and then went to Berkeley. He was beloved by some students, who formed an Oppie coterie, imitating his style of dress and speech patterns. As his reputation and that of his colleague Ernest Lawrence grew, it became apparent that American physics was coming into its own. One contemporary decided, “There’s a huge difference between a genius and a bright person. The reason Oppenheimer knows so much is that it’s easy when you learn ten times as fast as other physicists and remember everything.”

He was remarkably sheltered from the world around him. Because of his family’s wealth, he had an income of ten thousand dollars a year from investments during the worst of the Depression—a great deal of money at the time. He had no radio or telephone. He read no newspapers or magazines. He found out about the Depression only when friends told him of it. In fact, he knew almost nothing of politics; but living in the hothouse world of Berkeley during the Depression and the Spanish Civil War, he soon began to join fellow-traveling groups. In that sense he was not that different from a good many academics of that period: his brother, Frank, and Frank’s wife were both Communist party members, as was Oppie’s first fiancée and his eventual wife, Kitty.

But Oppie’s fellow-traveling days were short-lived. Colleagues George Placzek and Victor Weisskopf spent time in the Soviet Union during the worst of Stalin’s terror. Afterward they visited with Oppie, telling him that yes, it was all true what critics said about Stalin—indeed if anything, it was worse. Hearing it from trusted liberal friends profoundly affected Oppie. Weisskopf felt, though, Kitty Oppenheimer still resisted his reports of Stalin’s Russia.

To some he seemed the divided man—part creator of the most dangerous weapon in history—part the romantic innocent searching for some inner spiritual truth. At Los Alamos, he would escape to the mountains, camping by himself, writing poetry. The name given to the first test of the atomic weapon was Trinity. When Leslie Groves, the military overseer of the group, asked why he had chosen that name, Oppenheimer answered: “... Why I chose that name is not
clear; but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation:

... As West and East

In all flatt Maps—and I am one—are one,

So death doth touch the Resurrection.

“That,” he told Groves, “still does not make Trinity; but in another, better known devotional poem, Donne opens, ‘Batter my heart three person’d God.’ Beyond that I have no clues whatsoever.” At the very instant of the Trinity explosion, Oppenheimer quoted a passage from the
Bhagavad-Gita:
“If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One.... I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.”

The day after the Nagasaki bombing, Ernest Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron, found Oppenheimer exhausted, depressed, and wondering aloud whether the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not luckier than the living. “There was not much left in me at the moment,” he later said. The job, as far as he was concerned, was done. As he withdrew from Los Alamos, so did others. He had wielded power there through sheer force of genius, and he seemed to reflect what the others would think before they had time to think it themselves; thus one could predict the changing mood of the scientific community by tracking Oppenheimer. On October 16, 1945, his last official day as head of the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer told a reporter, “If you ask, ‘Can we make them [atomic weapons] more terrible?’ the answer is yes. If you ask, ‘Can we make a lot of them?’ the answer is yes. If you ask, ‘Can we make them terribly more terrible?’ the answer is probably.” “Let the second team take over,” Groves later quoted him as saying, a phrase that was wounding to those who stayed behind. David Lilienthal, spending an evening with him in July 1946, noted, “He is really a tragic figure; with all of his great attractiveness, 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.’”

If Oppenheimer was morally exhausted, then Edward Teller was furious. The departure of the best scientists from Los Alamos meant that full resources would not be devoted to the development of the Super. To Teller, for whom the Super was
the
project, this was a bitter disappointment, both professionally and personally. He could
not understand, he said later, the moral difference between the fission bomb and the fusion bomb. Thus began a rift in the scientific world that would become a chasm over the next few years.

The scientists were beginning to find out the limits of their power. They might have become, as C. P. Snow had noted, the “most important military resource a nation state could call upon,” but in the end they had little control over the consequences of their work; they pursued the unknown, like great explorers, because it was there. But more and more, they ventured into a world filled with moral ambiguities, if not pure terror. Yet no one exercising political power in the United States or the Soviet Union was very interested in the piety or guilt of the scientists. This was a hard lesson. In the beginning they had been the professors and the politicians, the students—Acheson remembered that right after World War Two, when Oppenheimer tried to brief him and John McCloy about atomic fission, he had used a borrowed blackboard, “on which he drew little figures representing electrons, neutrons, and protons, bombarding one another, chasing one another about, dividing, and generally carrying on in unpredictable ways. Our bewildered questions seemed to distress him. At last he put down the chalk in gentle despair, saying, ‘It’s hopeless! I really think you two believe neutrons and electrons
are
little men.’ We admitted nothing.”

They had all been on the same team then. But the new tensions between politicians and scientists were to become apparent at President Truman’s very first meeting with Oppenheimer. Truman had been looking forward to it, but the meeting had not gone well. “Mr. President, I have blood on my hands,” Oppenheimer told Truman. “Never mind,” Truman was supposed to have answered. “It will all come out in the wash.” But at that moment Truman decided Oppenheimer was “a crybaby.” “Don’t you bring that fellow around again,” the President told Acheson later. “After all, all he did was make the bomb. I’m the guy who fired it off.”

A sure sign that the science of nuclear weapons would come to be dominated by the pressures of politics came in the summer of 1949. The Republican right tried to block administration policy on sharing nuclear information with the British. This merely foreshadowed the true split that came in debate over the Super: James Conant, the eminent chemist and president of Harvard, argued that the Super was an unusable weapon and that the atomic bomb was sufficient to deter aggression. The Super did not necessarily offer greater security, but might only create an endless race for ever more powerful weapons. In its own way, he argued, it might be oddly paralyzing
to the possessor. A balanced weapons program might offer greater security.

Even as the members of the AEC were trying to decide what to do about the Super, some of the nation’s top military men already thought war with the Soviet Union inevitable. Nor was it just military men and politicians on the fringe. The members of the AEC met with Senator Brien McMahon, a Democrat on the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, who had written the Atomic Energy Act and was generally considered a moderate. McMahon might have been by the standards of the day a domestic liberal, but he was a devout Catholic, with a heavily Catholic constituency, and thus a hard-liner on the subject of Communism. He had become the single most important congressional figure on the issue of atomic weapons, and unlike the scientists, he had no doubts about using them. The bombing of Hiroshima, he had said on the Senate floor, was “the greatest event in world history since the birth of Jesus Christ.” If the Russians got ahead of us in nuclear weaponry, that would, in his words, place “total power in the hands of total evil [which] will equal total destruction.” When David Lilienthal met with McMahon he found it extremely dispiriting. “What he [McMahon] is talking about is the inevitability of war with the Russians and what he says adds up to one thing: blow them off the face of the earth quick, before they do the same to us—and we haven’t much time.”