Brotherhood of the Bomb

by Gregg Herken

  As the FBI was also aware, Oppenheimer had remained in touch with other known and suspected Communists since his return from Los Alamos. That spring, Oppie spent a weekend with Haakon Chevalier at the latter’s Stinson Beach house. Chevalier was now working full-time on his novel, For Us the Living, having been denied tenure by Berkeley the previous fall.8

  Hoover had once again taken a personal interest in the Oppenheimer investigation—and was becoming increasingly frustrated at Groves’s lack of cooperation in the case.9 Asked to provide details about Oppenheimer’s wartime association with Eltenton, Groves flatly refused, claiming that Oppie had given him the information in “the strictest of confidence.”10 The head of the Manhattan Project was similarly closed-mouthed about the results of his December 1943 meeting with Oppenheimer, which the bureau already knew about from Lansdale, however.11

  That summer, Hoover pressed Groves once more for the truth about the Chevalier incident, but the general again refused to talk. Even after the FBI director put his request in writing, Groves declined to cooperate—defending his unwillingness to provide “details concerning the information reported to me by Oppenheimer” on the grounds that it “would endanger our relationship which must, in the best interest of the United States, be continued in its present state.”12

  “Bearing in mind General Groves’ thoroughly uncooperative attitude in this situation,” the FBI’s Lish Whitson urged his boss to interview Oppenheimer anyway, despite Groves’s objections.13 Hoover, whose memory in such matters was long, neither forgot not forgave Groves’s obstinacy.

  His patience finally at an end, the FBI director ordered both Chevalier and Eltenton interviewed. On June 26, 1946, a pair of agents picked up Chevalier at his beach house and drove him to bureau headquarters in San Francisco. That same afternoon, agents Branigan and Cassidy went to Eltenton’s office at Shell Development, later taking him to a room in the Post Office building in Oakland. During both interrogations, behind the scenes, the agents stayed in touch by telephone, the better to exploit contradictions in the stories of the two men.

  Chevalier told the FBI that he had approached only one individual—Robert Oppenheimer—at Eltenton’s instigation, and that he had been immediately rebuffed. When one of the agents bragged that he possessed signed affidavits from three scientists whom Chevalier had contacted to spy for the Russians, Haakon asked for the scientists’ names. The FBI man remained silent.14

  Eltenton’s account essentially corroborated Chevalier’s version. “It is my impression that Haakon Chevalier did not contact any other persons connected with the Radiation Laboratory other than Dr. J. R. Oppenheimer,” Eltenton wrote in an unsigned statement.15 But Eltenton also provided additional details—the use of microfilm, the involvement of the Soviets’ San Francisco consulate—leaving the impression that the approach had been part of an elaborate espionage plot, and not the innocent inquiry that Chevalier described.

  A few days afterward, on the occasion of a cocktail party at Eagle Hill, Chevalier informed Oppenheimer of the FBI’s visit. He later recalled how Oppie’s face darkened when he was told how the agents had asked repeatedly about three unnamed scientists. Chevalier said he had been puzzled by the G-men’s questions, but Oppenheimer made no reply. Instead, leading Chevalier to a wooded spot at the back of the yard, far away from the house and any hidden microphones, Oppenheimer quizzed him at length. Chevalier remembered his friend seemed “extremely nervous and tense.” Oppie rudely snapped at Kitty when she interrupted to remind him that other guests were arriving.16

  Almost three months would pass before Branigan and Cassidy talked to Oppenheimer, who now freely admitted that the original story he had told Pash in 1943 was a “fabrication.”17 Oppie said that he had been the only person approached by Chevalier and that he had quickly dismissed the idea as “treason” or “close to treason.”18 Nothing more had come of it, he claimed.

  But Oppie declared that he “would be reluctant to appear as a witness in any hearing involving Chevalier,” and also that he “ha[d] never personally disclosed to Chevalier that he had mentioned his name in connection with the incident under investigation.” In their report, Branigan and Cassidy noted that they had to ask the same questions several times during the interview, since Oppenheimer’s answers were “indirect or oblique.” Neither Oppenheimer—nor Chevalier—had made any mention of Frank.

  Evidently forgetting what he had said to Lansdale back in 1943, Oppenheimer expressed surprise upon being told by the agents that Joseph Weinberg was a Communist. Oppie also said that he had never been asked for information about the bomb project by Steve Nelson—a claim that Nelson’s recorded conversation with “Joe” flatly contradicted.19

  Across the Bay, Weinberg, too, was getting the third degree that afternoon. He denied meeting with Steve Nelson at the latter’s home or even knowing Nelson.20

  In the early fall, Hoover sent copies of the interviews to the Justice Department. The FBI director obviously hoped and expected that the attorney general would issue indictments under the espionage statutes of all those involved in the Chevalier incident, which was mentioned for the first time in Hoover’s report.21 Instead, a few weeks later, Clark informed Hoover “that after consideration of all the facts presently available, it has been decided that no prosecution will be authorized.”22

  * * *

  For a few brief weeks early in 1946, Oppenheimer’s pessimism had lifted when he believed that the bomb might actually be removed as a threat to humanity’s future.

  In January, Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson was appointed head of a special committee to study the prospects for the international control of atomic energy.23 Although Truman had committed the nation, at least temporarily, to maintaining its atomic monopoly, the president also promised to strive for the bomb’s cooperative control.24

  Joining Acheson and the inevitable Bush, Conant, and Groves on the committee was a former Stimson aide and investment banker, John McCloy. Acheson himself chose the five members of a so-called Board of Consultants, which would offer technical advice and draft the actual plan for international control. He made an experienced administrator—former TVA director David Lilienthal—the group’s chairman and appointed Robert Oppenheimer its chief scientist. The other members of the board were all from industry: Monsanto vice president Charles Thomas, who had stood alongside Lawrence on Compania Hill; Chester Barnard, president of New Jersey Bell; and Harry Winne, a vice president at General Electric.

  Acheson’s first impression of Oppenheimer was that of a smart but hopeless idealist. Following drinks with the physicist at the Shoreham hotel, Lilienthal wrote of Oppie in his journal: “I left liking him, greatly impressed with his flash of mind, but rather disturbed by the flow of words.”25

  Acheson’s committee and its technical experts met for the first time in late January at the American Trucking Associations’ building in Washington, former OSRD headquarters. Standing once again at a blackboard with chalk in hand, Oppenheimer gave the Board of Consultants a two-day tutorial on atomic theory and nuclear physics. So absorbed was the group that, as night fell, they sent out for sandwiches and shooed away a persistent cleaning lady. (Lilienthal thought it “a soul-stirring experience” to have “the terrible facts of nature’s ultimate forces cooly laid before [one] as on an operating table, almost feeling them warm and stirring under one’s probing fingers.”)26

  A familiarization tour of Manhattan Project facilities followed—including the gaseous diffusion plant at Oak Ridge and the nuclear weapons vault outside Albuquerque—to introduce the previously uninitiated to the bomb.27

  Oppenheimer also used the primer to expound on his own ideas about international control. The scheme that he described over the next several weeks was, in fact, the so-called pilot plant for international collaboration that he had spoken of in his speech to ALAS the previous November. The ultimate aim, he had told the scientists then, should be “a world that is united, and a world in which war will not occur.”


  Oppenheimer had a draft plan prepared by early February, circulating it for discussion by the board.28 Originally, Lilienthal had thought to offer Acheson’s committee a series of possible alternatives, with varying degrees of government interference. Oppie, however, persuaded the group to submit just a single option, the one he had outlined. Once again, force of personality and sheer power of intellect had made Oppenheimer the dominant figure in a group.

  The central feature of Oppenheimer’s plan was a provision that vested control over all aspects of atomic energy—isotopes, civilian reactors, and bombs—in an international Atomic Development Authority. From the mining of atomic raw materials to the final disposal of the radioactive waste products, the ADA would have suzerainty over the so-called harmless as well as the dangerous aspects of the atom. As such, it came perilously close to being—as Oppenheimer fully realized—a kind of world government.

  Another key part of Oppenheimer’s plan was the idea of “denaturing”: deliberately adding contaminants to weapons-grade uranium and plutonium in order to render them useless for making bombs. Fissionable materials that had been denatured by the ADA, the plan argued, could be returned to national hands and used in peaceful applications, such as power reactors.29

  The problem with denaturing was that fissionable materials could be all too easily “renatured.”30 Outside scientists on whom Oppie tried the idea out were openly skeptical. (Rabi later remembered a Christmas Day conversation at his apartment, where the two men stood at the window, looking out at the Hudson River. “We were watching the ice drift down the river in the sunset, turning pink. Oppie ruined the mood by bringing up the idea of poisoning uranium.”)31 Fermi was even more blunt than Rabi—telling Oppenheimer that his idea was a “distortion.”32

  “Oppie wanted it to work,” explained Rabi.33

  On March 7, 1946, Acheson’s committee and the Board of Consultants assembled at Georgetown’s Dumbarton Oaks to vote on Oppie’s plan. In a room dominated by an El Greco painting, medieval tapestries, and an alabaster cat from Byzantium, the plan received almost unanimous support.34 The single prominent naysayer was Groves. (The general had protested against appointing a Board of Consultants in the first place—on the grounds that he, Bush, and Conant already knew more about atomic energy “than any panel that could be assembled.”)35 Groves objected that denaturing would not work and that the ADA would be unable to enforce an effective monopoly of the world’s atomic raw materials.36

  In meetings that lasted till midmonth, other critics surfaced. Bush and Conant complained that implementation of the plan lacked specific stages. Oppenheimer revised the report to include them—the first stage being a comprehensive, worldwide survey of raw materials. A suggestion from McCloy that the survey also be used to spy on the Soviets was politely rebuffed by the board.37

  Mindful of the danger that their grand vision might be nibbled to death by endless revision, Lilienthal and Acheson gave the committee an ultimatum on March 17: accept the plan as revised, or they would forward it to the secretary of state without a recommendation. To Lilienthal’s surprise, the committee unanimously approved the report and sent it on to Byrnes that same day.38

  The response of atomic scientists to the so-called Acheson-Lilienthal report bordered on ecstatic. Returning to California for a brief vacation, Oppie boasted to Frank that the report was the best thing the U.S. government had ever done.39 Writing in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Edward Teller hailed it as “the first ray of hope that the problem of international control can, actually, be solved.”*40 The Federation of Atomic Scientists—no longer battling the army over civilian control—suddenly had a new cause to champion. “We clasped the new Bible in our hands and went out to ring doorbells,” FAS president Willie Higinbotham later recalled.41

  * * *

  In fact, the fate of Oppenheimer’s plan was already sealed. The day before Byrnes received the report, he and Truman had picked Bernard Baruch, a seventy-five-year-old financier and self-described presidential adviser, to present the plan to the Russians at the United Nations.

  Truman as well as Byrnes soon came to regret their choice. (“[Baruch] wants to run the world, the moon and maybe Jupiter—but we’ll see,” the president wrote in his journal that night.)42 To the Board of Consultants, the mistake was clear. “When I read this news last night, I was quite sick,” Lilienthal confided to his diary.43 “We’re lost,” Oppie had told Higinbotham the day that Baruch was appointed.44

  Oppenheimer’s worst fears were realized when Baruch appointed a coterie of conservative businessmen and longtime cronies to help him “fine-tune” the Acheson-Lilienthal report. “It is the old crowd,” Lilienthal lamented. “Wall-Streeters,” sniffed Bush.

  Barely a week after taking the job, the temperamental Baruch was already threatening to resign, after a description of the Acheson-Lilienthal report appeared in the press.45

  Over the next fortnight, Baruch and his associates transformed Oppenheimer’s vision into something that the Board of Consultants had resolutely rejected from the outset: an updated version of the age-old call for the outlawry of war. Behind the public relations facade of the Baruch plan, moreover, were signs of a more sinister agenda. “They talk about preparing the American people for a refusal by Russia,” wrote Lilienthal.46

  Oppenheimer and the Board of Consultants had deliberately avoided specifying the type of sanctions that violators would encounter—believing it a matter best left up to the United Nations and the ADA. Baruch and his cronies, on the other hand, spoke vaguely but ominously of “condign punishment” for transgressors.47 (Asked their opinion of the plan, the Joint Chiefs of Staff politely observed that the bases where Baruch was proposing to stockpile atomic bombs to use against would-be aggressors were “all too obviously pointed at the U.S.S.R.”)48

  Baruch’s principal ally in rewriting Oppenheimer’s plan was Groves, whom the septuagenarian had appointed his “interpreter of military policy.”49 Believing that he was wanted merely for window dressing, Oppenheimer twice turned down Baruch’s offer to make him the delegation’s science adviser. Bush and Lawrence likewise refused. Finally, at Groves’s urging, Robert Bacher agreed to become a part-time consultant, and Cal-tech physicist Richard Tolman joined Baruch and his team in New York—against Oppie’s advice.50

  In talks that he gave on college campuses, Oppenheimer was careful to temper his public criticism of the Baruch plan.51 But any doubt about Oppie’s personal views ended in late May, when Hoover sent to Baruch and to Byrnes—“as of possible interest”—the transcript of a recent telephone conversation between Oppenheimer and an unidentified physicist.52 The wiretap was revealing not only of Oppie’s attitude toward Baruch but of the lengths to which the physicist was prepared to go to counter the new plan.

  I just want to watch this side of it and see if anything can be done. I think that if the price of it is that I have to live with the old man and his people, it may be too high.… I don’t want anything from them and if I can work on his conscience, that is the best angle I have.… It is very hard for me to tell if there is harm, little good, or some good, in my getting in touch with those European scientists.

  A few days later, Hoover passed to Baruch the transcript of another wiretapped call, in which Oppie spoke of mobilizing public opinion against the plan, in “an attempt to box the old guy in.”53

  On June 14, 1946, Oppenheimer, Bacher, and Arthur Compton sat silent and glum in the gymnasium of Hunter College, temporary headquarters of the United Nations, in the Bronx, New York, as the Baruch plan was introduced to the world.54 “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead,” Baruch began, in a melodramatic flourish suggested by one of his aides, a public relations consultant. The Soviets rejected the plan without qualification or ceremony five days later.

  Back in Washington by late July, Lilienthal and Oppenheimer stayed up until the early hours talking in Oppie’s hotel room about the opportunity that had been missed. Lilienthal tho
ught the physicist transformed from the self-confident, even ebullient figure of the previous spring.

  He is really a tragic figure; with all 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.” It was this last that really wrung my heart.55

  * * *

  Lawrence was conspicuously absent from the ranks of atomic scientists who had trooped up Capitol Hill the previous fall to lobby for international control. Since the chastening experience of Neylan’s mock cross-examination, Ernest had refused all appeals for public appearances and political endorsements.56 “In fact, my own feeling is that this political activity of many of our atomic scientists is unfortunate in many ways,” he told a reporter.57

  The fame that had come to Oppenheimer for his work on the atomic bomb translated for Lawrence into financial opportunity, as well as closer association with those whom Ernest most envied and admired.

  By mid-1946, Lawrence was a paid consultant to several corporations, including General Electric, Eastman Kodak, and American Cyanamid—which, in addition to a monthly retainer, provided an annual $10,000 supplement to Loomis’s research fund.58 One unadvertised perquisite of serving on the Board of Directors of the Yosemite Park and Curry Company was the opportunity to obtain a new Cadillac at cost. Ernest could now afford to replace his favorite baby blue convertible almost annually, selling the car back to the dealer for what he had paid the year before.59