by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
On August 7, Haakon Chevalier had written him a note of congratulations: “Dear Opje, You are probably the most famous man in the world today. . . .” Oppie replied on August 27 with a three-page handwritten letter. Chevalier later described it as filled with the “affection and the informal intimacy that had always existed between us.” Regarding the bomb, Oppie wrote Chevalier: “the thing had to be done, Haakon. It had to be brought to an open public fruition at a time when all over the world men craved peace as never before, were committed as never before both to technology as a way of life and thought and to the idea that no man is an island.” But he was by no means comfortable with this defense. “Circumstances are heavy with misgiving, and far, far more difficult than they should be, had we power to re-make the world to be as we think it.”
Oppenheimer had long since decided to resign his job as scientific director. By the end of August, he knew that Harvard, Princeton and Columbia University were offering him jobs—but his instinct was to return to California. “I have a sense of belonging there which I will probably not get over,” he wrote his friend James Conant, Harvard’s president. His old friends at Caltech, Dick Tolman and Charlie Lauritsen, were encouraging him to come full-time to Pasadena. Incredibly, a formal offer from Caltech was delayed when its president, Robert Millikan, raised objections. Oppenheimer, he wrote Tolman, was not a good teacher, his original contributions to theoretical physics were probably behind him—and perhaps Caltech had enough Jews on its faculty. But Tolman and others persuaded Millikan to change his mind, and an offer was extended to Oppenheimer on August 31.
By then, Oppenheimer also had been invited to return to Berkeley, which he felt was his real home. Still, he hesitated. He told Lawrence that he had “got in bad” with President Robert G. Sproul and Monroe Deutsch, the university provost. Furthermore, his relations with the physics department chairman, Raymond Birge, were so strained that Oppie said to Lawrence that he thought Birge should be replaced. Lawrence, angered by what he saw as a cavalier display of arrogance, retorted that if Oppie felt this way perhaps he shouldn’t come back to Berkeley.
Oppenheimer wrote Lawrence a note of explanation: “I have very mixed and sad feelings about our discussions on Berkeley.” Oppie reminded his old friend “how much more of an underdogger I have always been than you. That is a part of me that is unlikely to change, for I am not ashamed of it.” He had not decided what to do, but Lawrence’s “very strong, very negative reactions” gave him pause.
Even as “Oppenheimer” was becoming a household name around the globe, the man who defined himself as an “underdogger” was plunging into depression. When they returned to Los Alamos, Kitty told her friend Jean Bacher, “You just can’t imagine how terrible it’s been for me; Robert was just definitely beside himself.” Bacher was struck by Kitty’s emotional state. “She was just afraid for what was going to happen [given] the terrible reaction that he [Robert] had.”
The enormity of what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had affected him profoundly. “Kitty didn’t often share her feelings,” Bacher said. “But she just said she didn’t know how she would stand it.” Robert had shared his distress with others as well. According to his Ethical Culture School classmate, Jane Didisheim, Robert wrote her a letter soon after the war ended “that shows so clearly and so sadly his disappointment and his grief.”
On The Hill, many people had similar emotional responses—particularly after Bob Serber and Phil Morrison returned from Hiroshima and Nagasaki in October with the first group of scientific observers. Until then, people sometimes gathered in their homes to try to grasp what had happened. “But Phil was the only one who really made me understand it,” recalled Jean Bacher. “He’s got quite a wizard tongue and descriptive power. I was just absolutely undone. I went home and I couldn’t go to sleep; I just shook all night, it was such a shock.”
Morrison had landed in Hiroshima just thirty-one days after the Enola Gay dropped its deadly load. “Virtually everyone in the street for nearly a mile around was instantly and seriously burned by the heat of the bomb,” Morrison said. “The hot flash burned suddenly and strangely. They [the Japanese] told us of people who wore striped clothing upon whom the skin was burned in stripes. . . . There were many who thought themselves lucky, who crawled out of the ruins of their homes only slightly injured. But they died anyway. They died days or weeks later from the radium-like rays emitted in great numbers at the moment of the explosion.”
Serber described how in Nagasaki he noticed that the sides of all the telephone poles facing the explosion were charred. He followed a line of such charred poles out beyond two miles from ground zero. “At one point,” Serber recounted, “I saw a horse grazing. On one side all its hair was burnt off, the other side was perfectly normal.” When Serber somewhat flippantly remarked that the horse nevertheless seemed to be “happily grazing,” Oppenheimer “scolded me for giving the impression that the bomb was a benevolent weapon.”
Morrison gave a formal briefing in Los Alamos on what he had seen, but he also summarized his report for a local Albuquerque radio station: “We circled finally low over Hiroshima and stared in disbelief. There below was the flat level ground of what had been a city, scorched red. . . . But no hundreds of planes had visited this town during a long night. One bomber and one bomb, had, in the time it takes a rifle bullet to cross the city, turned a city of three hundred thousand into a burning pyre. That was the new thing.”
Miss Edith Warner first heard the news of Hiroshima from Kitty, who came one day to fetch fresh vegetables: “Much was now explained,” Warner noted afterwards. More than one physicist felt compelled to visit the house at Otowi Bridge and explain themselves to the gentle Miss Warner. Morrison himself wrote her of his hope that “people of intelligence and goodwill everywhere can understand and share our sense of crisis.” Having helped to build the weapon, Morrison and many other like-minded physicists now believed the only wise course of action left was to place international controls over all things nuclear. “The scientists know,” Miss Warner wrote approvingly in her Christmas letter of 1945, “that they cannot go back to the laboratories leaving atomic energy in the hands of the armed forces or the statesmen.”
Oppenheimer knew that in some fundamental sense the Manhattan Project had achieved exactly what Rabi had feared it would achieve—it had made a weapon of mass destruction “the culmination of three centuries of physics.” And in doing so, he thought, the project had impoverished physics, and not just in a metaphysical sense; and soon he began to disparage it as a scientific achievement. “We took this tree with a lot of ripe fruit on it,” Oppenheimer told a Senate committee in late 1945, “and shook it hard and out came radar and atomic bombs. [The] whole [wartime] spirit was one of frantic and rather ruthless exploitation of the known.” The war had “a notable effect on physics,” he said. “It practically stopped it.” He soon came to believe that during the war we “perhaps witnessed a more total cessation of true professional activity in the field of physics, even in its training, than [in] any other country.” But the war also had focused attention on science. As Victor Weisskopf later wrote: “The war had made it obvious by the most cruel of all arguments, that science is of the most immediate and direct importance to everybody. This had changed the character of physics.”
At noon on Friday, September 21, 1945, Oppenheimer went to say farewell to Henry Stimson. It was both Stimson’s last day in office as secretary of war and his seventy-eighth birthday. Oppenheimer knew that Stimson was scheduled to give a parting presentation at the White House that afternoon in which he would advocate, “very belatedly,” thought Oppenheimer, the case for “an open approach on the atom. . . .” By Stimson’s diary account, he would bluntly tell President Truman that “we should approach Russia at once with an opportunity to share on a proper quid pro quo the bomb.”
Robert genuinely liked and trusted the old man. He was sorry to see him leaving at such a critical juncture in the emerging debate over ho
w to handle the atomic bomb in the postwar era. On this occasion, Oppenheimer briefed him one more time about some technical aspects of the bomb, and then Stimson asked him to accompany him to the Pentagon barbershop, where he had his thin gray hair trimmed. When it was time to go, Stimson rose from the barber’s chair, shook Oppenheimer’s hand and said, “Now it is in your hands.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“I Feel I Have Blood on My Hands”
If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER October 16, 1945
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER WAS NOW a celebrity, his name familiar to millions of Americans. Photographs of his chiseled features stared out from magazine covers and newsprint across the nation. His achievements had become synonymous with the achievements of all science. “Hats off to the men of research,” editorialized the Milwaukee Journal. Never again, chimed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, should America’s “science-explorers . . . be denied anything needful for their adventures.” We must admire their “glorious achievement,” opined Scientific Monthly. “Modern Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus.” Life magazine observed that physicists now seemed to wear “the tunic of Superman.”
Oppenheimer grew comfortable with the adulation. It was as if he had spent the previous two and a half years atop the mesa training for this new role. It had transformed him into a scientist-statesman—and an icon. Even his affectations, the pipe-smoking and the ever-present porkpie hat, soon became internationally recognizable.
He soon began to make his private broodings public. “We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon,” he told an audience of the American Philosophical Society, “that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world . . . a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing . . . we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man. . . .” The “father” of the atomic bomb explained that it was by definition a weapon of terror and aggression. And it was cheap. The combination might someday prove deadly to whole civilizations. “Atomic weapons, even with what we know today,” he said, “can be cheap . . . atomic armament will not break the economic back of any people that want it. The pattern of the use of atomic weapons was set at Hiroshima.” The Hiroshima bomb, he said, was used “against an essentially defeated enemy. . . . it is a weapon for aggressors, and the elements of surprise and of terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.”
Some of his friends were astounded by his ability to speak, often extemporaneously, with such eloquence and poise. Harold Cherniss was present one day when he addressed an assembly of students at U.C. Berkeley. Thousands packed into the men’s gymnasium to hear the famous scientist. Cherniss, however, was apprehensive, because “I thought that he was no public speaker.” After being introduced by President Sproul, Oppenheimer got up and spoke without notes for three-quarters of an hour. Cherniss was stunned by his hold on the audience: “From the moment he began to speak until the end, not a whisper in the whole place. This was the kind of magic that he exercised.” Cherniss, indeed, thought his friend perhaps spoke too well for his own good. “The ability to speak in public like that is a poison—it’s very dangerous for the person who has it.” Such a talent might lead a man to think his velvet tongue was an effective political armor.
THROUGHOUT THAT AUTUMN, Oppenheimer shuttled between Los Alamos and Washington, trying to use his sudden celebrity to influence high-ranking government officials. He spoke on behalf of virtually all the civilian scientists at Los Alamos. On August 30, 1945, some 500 of them had squeezed into the auditorium and agreed to form a new organization, the Association of Los Alamos Scientists (ALAS). Within days, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Frank Oppenheimer, Robert Christy and others had drafted a strongly worded statement on the dangers of an arms race, the impossibility of any defense against the atomic bomb in future wars, and the need for international control. Oppenheimer was asked to forward “The Document,” as it became known, to the War Department. Everyone fully expected that the statement would shortly be released to the press.
On September 9, Oppenheimer sent the report to Stimson’s assistant, George Harrison. In his cover letter, he noted that “The Document” had been circulated to more than 300 scientists, and only three had declined to sign it. Oppie wrote that while he had had nothing to do with its formulation, “The Document” certainly reflected his personal views, and he hoped that the War Department would approve its publication. Harrison soon phoned Oppie to say that Stimson wanted more copies for circulation within the government. But Harrison added that the War Department did not wish to release it—at least not just yet.
Unhappy at this delay, the ALAS scientists pressed Oppenheimer to do something. While admitting that he too was disturbed, Oppie argued that the Administration must have a good reason, and he urged his friends to be patient. On September 18, he flew to Washington and two days later phoned to say that “the situation looked real good.” “The Document” was being passed around, and he thought the Truman Administration wanted to do the right thing. However, by the end of the month, the Administration had classified it. The ALAS scientists were also stunned to learn that their own trusted emissary had reversed himself and now concurred in the decision to suppress it. To some of his colleagues, it appeared that the more time Oppie spent in Washington, D.C., the more compliant he became.
Oppenheimer insisted that he had a good reason for his change of heart: The Truman Administration was about to propose legislation on atomic energy, and he explained to scientists at Los Alamos that public debate of the sort reflected in the “famous memo” was very desirable—but that they should wait, as a matter of courtesy, until President Truman released his own message on atomic energy to Congress. Oppenheimer’s appeal was hotly debated back in Los Alamos, but ALAS’ leader, William “Willy” Higinbotham, argued that “the suppression of the document is a matter of political expediency, the reasons for which we are not in a position to know or evaluate.” ALAS, however, had “one representative who does know what is going on and knows personally the people involved, that is, Oppie.” A motion was then carried unanimously “that Willy tell Oppie that we are strongly behind him.”
Oppenheimer was, in fact, doing his best to reflect the deep concern his fellow scientists held for the future. Late in September, he told Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson that most Manhattan Project scientists were strongly disinclined to work any longer on weapons—and “not merely a super bomb, but any bomb.” After Hiroshima and the end of the war, such work, he said, was felt to be “against the dictates of their hearts and spirits.” He was a scientist, he told a reporter disdainfully, not an “armaments manufacturer.” Not every scientist, of course, felt this way. Edward Teller was still promoting the “Super” to anyone with the patience to listen. When Teller asked Oppenheimer to urge that research on the Super continue, Oppie cut him short: “I neither can nor will do so.” It was a reaction that Teller would never forget—or forgive.
WHEN PRESIDENT TRUMAN issued his message to Congress on October 3, 1945, many scientists initially thought it reassuring. Drafted by Herbert Marks, a young lawyer working for Acheson, the message urged Congress to establish an atomic energy commission with power to regulate the entire industry. Unbeknownst even to Washington insiders, Oppenheimer had helped Marks write the message. Not surprisingly, it reflected Oppie’s own sense of urgency about both the dangers and the potential benefits of atomic energy. The release of atomic energy, Truman pronounced, “constitutes a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas.” Time was of the essence. “The hope of civilization,” Truman warned, “lies in international arrangements looking, if possible, to the renunciation of the use and development of the atomic bomb. . . .
” Oppenheimer thought he had won the president’s commitment to seek the abolition of atomic weapons.
But if Oppie had managed to shape the larger message, he had no control over the legislation introduced the following day by Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado and Representative Andrew J. May of Kentucky. The May-Johnson bill embodied a policy that contrasted sharply with the tenor of the president’s speech. Most scientists read it as a victory for the military. For one thing, the bill proposed harsh prison terms and hefty fines for any violations of security. Inexplicably to his colleagues, Oppenheimer announced his support for the May-Johnson legislation. On October 7, he returned to Los Alamos and urged the members of ALAS’ executive committee to support the bill. As a measure of his still formidable powers of persuasion, he succeeded. His rationale was simple. Time was of the essence, and any bill that quickly set up legislation to oversee the domestic aspects of atomic energy would pave the way for the next step: an international agreement to ban nuclear weapons. Oppie had rapidly become a Washington insider—a cooperative and focused supporter of the Administration, guided by hope and sustained by naïveté.
But as scientists read the bill’s fine print, they became alarmed. May-Johnson proposed to centralize all power over atomic energy in the hands of a nine-member commission appointed by the president. Military officers would be allowed to sit on the commission. Scientists were subject to prison terms of up to ten years for even minor security violations. But, as in 1943, when he initially endorsed the notion of drafting Los Alamos scientists into the Army, the details and implications that troubled his colleagues didn’t alarm Oppenheimer. Based on his wartime experience, he felt he could work with Groves and the War Department. Others were not so sure. Leo Szilard was outraged, and vowed to work to defeat the bill. A Chicago physicist, Herbert L. Anderson, wrote a colleague in Los Alamos to confess that his confidence in Oppenheimer, Lawrence and Fermi had been shaken. “I believe that these worthy men were duped—that they never had a chance to see this bill.” Indeed, Oppie had persuaded Lawrence and Fermi to endorse May-Johnson before they had read the bill’s particulars. Both men soon withdrew their support.
