Pandora's Keepers (54 page)

Years would pass before Teller would again be tolerated by his peers, but even then he was never really forgiven. And while many conservatives admired Teller for conceiving the superbomb and protecting the state against Oppenheimer, he would remain a pariah to liberals for the rest of his long life. Being a perceptive man with a sensitive ego, Teller saw his fate all too clearly. Questioned about the long-term effects of the Oppenheimer affair nearly twenty years later, Teller replied without hesitation: “I think it made Oppenheimer. I think it destroyed Teller.”
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When he published his memoirs in 2001—nearly half a century after the affair—Teller was moved to write: “Why did I testify? In retrospect, the answer is simple and obvious: because I was demonstrating my fulsome quantity of that general human property, stupidity….... In retrospect, I should have said at the beginning of my testimony that the hearing was a dirty business, and that I wouldn’t talk to anyone about it.”
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Such expressions of personal regret and suffering were rare. But at unguarded moments, Teller would let the bitterness pour forth. “If a person leaves his country, leaves his continent, leaves his relatives, leaves his friends, the only people he knows are his professional colleagues. If more than ninety percent of these then come around to consider him an enemy, an outcast, it is bound to have an effect. The truth is it had a profound effect.”
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And in his final days, during the summer of 2003, he confessed: “In my long life I had to face some difficult decisions and found myself often in doubt whether I acted the right way.”
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The affair crippled both men: Oppenheimer because he lost, Teller because he won. The poignancy of Teller’s self-awareness about the pariah status to which he relegated himself spoke volumes about the horrible irony of the larger story.

After Strauss retired as AEC chairman in 1958, a review of the Oppenheimer hearing was made by the commission’s general counsel, who found that there was “a messy record from a legal standpoint; that the charges kept shifting at each level of the proceedings; that the evidence was stale and consisted of information that was 12 years old and was known when a security clearance was granted during World War II, and that it was a punitive, personal abuse of the judicial system.”
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But by then it was too late.

Not long after his hearing was over and his security clearance had been revoked, Oppenheimer gave a speech at Amherst College where students asked him why he had not helped his case by showing more repentance for his past left-wing associations. Oppenheimer replied, “It may not be the obligation of a man in a position of responsibility to conform his actions to what the public desires; but if he wishes to play an effective part in politics, it is clear that he must either conform himself to what the public desires, or persuade the public to accept what he is.”
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Oppenheimer refused to do the former and failed to do the latter.

Freed from the burden of playing the Washington game, Oppenheimer devoted himself to investigating issues raised by modern science and commenting on man’s fate in the nuclear age. Those who encountered him now noticed traces of defeat in his manner. At the same time, they noticed tranquility in his face. He was calmer than he had been since going to Los Alamos. “We did the devil’s work,” he told a visitor in 1956, summing up his experiences during and after the war. “But we are now going back to our real jobs. Rabi for instance was telling me only the other day that he intended to devote himself exclusively to research in the future.”
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Oppenheimer felt unburdened at last. The hearing made him a martyr among liberals. The Gray Board’s verdict ended their concern that Oppenheimer had surrendered his independence to establish his political influence. The AEC’s action ironically served as a means of his redemption.

Everywhere people wondered, “How could this happen?” Some blamed the unpopularity of Oppenheimer’s views on the superbomb. Others blamed Oppenheimer’s unscrupulous enemies. Still others blamed Oppenheimer’s own arrogance and past evasions. All of them were factors, but all of them would not have been enough had the country not been in the grip of the insecurity and paranoia that expressed itself in anticommunist witch-hunts. In the spring of 1954, when McCarthyism was at its peak, the reigning dogma identified security with superiority in the arms race: the superbomb served as a powerful buttress against expanding communism and kept the peace by means of deterrence, the capacity to wreak sufficient destruction on the enemy so as to discourage any attack. In this climate, it was all too easy to see a physicist with a radical past who disagreed with this view as being a security threat. It was a mood fed by hysterical fear; its chief symptom was the belief that anyone who did not share it was dangerously unreliable.

Of course, because of his association with the bomb, because of the fascinating complexities of his personality, and because of his marvelous eloquence, Oppenheimer had come to represent all physicists in the public mind. To liberals frightened by the arms race and obsessed with avoiding a nuclear war, he was a superb scientist and a selfless public servant who had been sacrificed for his unpopular beliefs. To conservatives frightened by communism and obsessed with national security, he was the man who had cavorted with the Cold War enemy. Robert Oppenheimer touched people—then and now—because he was the most sensitive and reflective individual among all those involved in the creation of the terrible new weapons.

Yet the Oppenheimer affair was not just the story of one man; it was also the story of all of the atomic scientists. His personal tragedy was also his profession’s. It dramatized physicists’ sudden transformation from naive academics into major players in the realm of American national security. The bomb had given once-obscure physicists a new standing akin to the mathematician-astronomer-priests of the ancient Maya, who were both revered and feared as the keepers of the mystery of the seasons and the helpers of the sun and stars. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, became the unofficial high priest. Not just Oppenheimer’s life had been dissected in the hearing room but the lives—with all their subtle pressures and unsolved problems—of the scientists who had ushered in the atomic age. The hearings revealed the new and influential part these men now played in national security politics, their uneasiness in a nuclear world they had helped to create, and above all their anxiety about losing sight of the deeply rooted set of ethical beliefs out of which science—their passion—had grown. How had it happened that men who had tried to find a more comprehensive truth were in the end obliged to spend the best years of their lives in the search for ever more destructive weapons—and then the best among them punished for it? Science had ceased to be seen as something remote and now was looked upon as something terrible. To an extent, then, Oppenheimer and the other atomic scientists whom he symbolized had fallen victim to the very weapon they had created.

CHAPTER 11

Twilight Years

N
IELS BOHR HAD
returned to Denmark in August 1945, and two months later had turned sixty. The anxieties of the war and the Manhattan Project had strained and saddened him. His thinning gray hair, the jowls that draped over his massive jaw, the heavy eyebrows that shadowed his intelligent and kindly eyes—all had made him a doleful figure. He had spent more and more time during the ensuing years at his summerhouse in Tisvilde, on the northern shore of Sjælland, a two-hour drive from Copenhagen. The thatched, one-story country house stood in a grove of pine trees on heather-covered hills that met the lavender waters of the Baltic in an unbroken harmony In a ramshackle barn in this beautiful and tranquil setting that he loved so much, Bohr had found time to think and reflect. For relaxation he had bicycled in the woods, walked on the beach, and read fairy tales and played games with his many grandchildren. Evenings were spent in the family circle, chatting about issues large or small. These had been happy days for Bohr, yet there had been long thoughts, too, of how the world had been changed by the bomb.

During the war, Bohr had foreseen that the atomic bomb would cause trouble with Russia, unless the Russians were made partners rather than rivals. Now the Iron Curtain had come down, and Bohr had watched the growing quarrel between East and West with grave misgivings. He did not surrender in his struggle. Time he could have devoted to science was now devoted to writing innumerable appeals and statements. Although these had often gone unanswered by the officials to whom they were addressed, Bohr saw them as a means of educating the public at large. What could be done to break the stalemate and make security possible? The answer to which he had come with increasing emphasis was the international control of atomic weapons before other countries acquired the bomb. Otherwise, the next big war could be the world’s last.

In the spring of 1948, while in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study, Bohr had met privately with Secretary of State George Marshall in Washington. During their talk, Bohr had reiterated his plea for openness and cooperation between the United States and the USSR on atomic weapons. This was essential, he had stressed in a follow-up letter, “in order not to lose the opportunity to forestall a fateful competition in atomic armaments.” He had then pointed, prophetically, to an even more frightening future. “The new and ominous menace to world security presented by employing the results of the latest development of bacteriological and biochemical science as terrible life-destructive means cannot be eliminated by any practicable control and will, therefore, remain a latent danger until such cooperation in openness has been achieved.” Bohr had believed America should take the initiative because it led in the field of atomic energy. “Your country,” he had told Marshall, “possesses the strength required to take the lead in accepting the challenge with which civilization is confronted.”
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Marshall gave no promise.

By 1950 Bohr had recognized that his efforts had come to naught, so he had written an “Open Letter” to the United Nations in June of that year in which he gave an account of his efforts in broad outline and pleaded with the world’s great powers to begin a dialogue with one another about the bomb. In the letter, he had predicted that the lack of such cooperation would trigger an escalating nuclear arms race and increased tensions between East and West.
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The Korean War, which broke out three weeks later, had put Bohr’s appeal in the shade, but his predictions turned out to be tragically correct.

Almost everyone who encountered Arthur Compton in his later years noticed his eyes. They had always been deep set, but now they were knowing and penetrating, like an old seer’s. When he was invited to become chancellor of Washington University at the end of the war, he had candidly told its board of trustees that he did not know what students’ and alumni’s attitude toward him would be when they learned of his involvement in the top secret Manhattan Project: either they would think of him as one of the scientists who had saved civilization—or had imperiled mankind. As he wrote a year after Hiroshima, “It is too early to say whether the moral historian, if there be one a thousand years hence, will record the use of the atomic bomb as the work of the world’s guardian angel or as that of the devil bent on man’s destruction.”
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No one could go through what Compton did and come out quite the same.

Compton’s ambivalence had led him to refuse to have anything more to do with weapons making. Shortly after the Soviet atomic test in August 1949, Ernest Lawrence came to visit him in St. Louis. Depressed by the news, Lawrence had tried to estimate how long it would be until the Russians could attack the United States. He had said he was going to turn the efforts of his lab toward developing new weapons that he hoped would be helpful in the approaching struggle. Compton had told Lawrence that his task was no longer to develop nuclear weapons but to develop young people to bring about peace by building a strong society.

Not surprisingly, the superbomb filled Compton with anxiety. If such weapons were used upon centers of population, he doubted whether enough survivors would remain to rebuild civilized human existence. “The world is crying that the weapon itself and those responsible for its development and use be brought under control of those whose lives it endangers and at the same time protects,” said Compton. “And this means everyone.”
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He opposed targeting civilian populations in war, urged limiting the size and number of superbombs, and advocated no-first-use of nuclear weapons by the United States—all ideas which became central goals of arms control advocates in later years. Above all, Compton urged the avoidance of nuclear war. “No nation,” he said again and again, to political leaders and ordinary people alike, “would expect such a war to end without itself suffering more damage than its possible gains would be worth.”
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