by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
This was too harsh. Both Robert and Kitty tried to connect with their son. One day when Peter was six or seven years old, Kitty helped him build an electrical toy, a square board filled with various lights, buzzers, fuses and switches. Peter dubbed the toy his “gimmick,” and two years later he still loved to play with it. One evening in 1949, David Lilienthal was visiting the Oppenheimers and observed Kitty sitting on the floor with Peter, patiently trying to fix the “gimmick.” After nearly an hour, when she rose to prepare dinner in the kitchen, Robert, “looking very paternal and very loving at Peter, moved over and took his place on the floor where Kitty had previously been working with this mess of wiring.” As Robert sat on the floor, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, fiddling with the wires, Peter ran to the kitchen and whispered loudly to Kitty, “Mama, is it all right to let Daddy work with the gimmick?” Everyone laughed at the notion that the man who directed the construction of the ultimate “gadget” might not be qualified to fiddle with his child’s electrical toy.
Despite such moments of familial warmth, Robert was perhaps too distracted to be a very attentive father. Freeman Dyson once asked him if it wasn’t a difficult thing for Peter and Toni to have such a “problematical figure for a father.” Robert replied with his usual flippancy, “Oh, it’s all right for them. They have no imagination.” Dyson later observed of his friend that this was a man capable of “rapid and unpredictable shifts between warmth and coldness in his feelings toward those close to him.” It was difficult for the children. “To an outsider like me,” Pais later observed, “Oppenheimer’s family life looked like hell on earth. The worst of it all was that inevitably the two children had to suffer.”
Despite the “gimmick” and other indulgences, Kitty and Peter never bonded and their relationship was often quite contentious. Robert felt Kitty was the problem. “Robert thought,” said Hobson, “that in their highly charged passionate falling in love that Peter had come too soon, and Kitty resented him for that.” When he was about eleven years old, Peter put on some puppy fat and Kitty couldn’t stop nagging him about his weight. There was never much food around the house, but now Kitty put Peter on a strict diet. Mother and son fought frequently. “She used to make Peter’s life just miserable the way she went on about it,” Hobson said. Sherr agreed: “Kitty was very, very impatient with him; she had absolutely no intuitive understanding of the children.” Robert stood passively by, and if pressed, he invariably took Kitty’s side in these arguments. “He [Robert] was very loving,” recalled Dr. Hempelmann. “He didn’t discipline the kids. Kitty did all that.”
From all accounts, Peter was a normal rambunctious child. As a toddler, like most boys, he had been loud, active and altogether difficult to handle. But Kitty interpreted his behavior as abnormal. She once told Bob Serber that her relationship with Peter was fine until the boy turned seven years old, and then it suddenly changed and she never knew why. Peter was a great builder; like his uncle Frank, he could do marvelous things with his hands, taking things apart and putting them back together. But he never shone in school, and Kitty found this intolerable. “Peter was a terrifically sensitive child,” said Harold Cherniss, “and he had a very hard time in school. . . . [But this] had nothing to do with his ability.” In response to Kitty’s nagging, Peter retreated into himself. Serber recalled that when Peter was five or six years old, “he seemed to be starved for affection.” But as a teenager he was just very solemn. “You’d come into the Oppenheimer kitchen,” Serber said, “and Peter would be a shadow . . . trying not to be noticed—that would be Peter.”
Kitty treated her daughter very differently. “Her attachment to Toni,” Hobson recalled, “was profound and seemed just purely loving and admiring . . . She wanted only goodness and happiness for Toni and she was just horrible to Peter.” As a young girl, Toni always seemed serene and sturdy. “From when she was six or seven years old,” Hobson observed, “the rest of the family relied on her to be sensible and solid and to cheer them on. . . . Toni was the one you never worried about.”
Late in 1951, Toni, then seven, was diagnosed with a mild case of polio, and doctors advised the Oppenheimers to take her somewhere warm and humid. That Christmas they rented a seventy-two-foot ketch, the Comanche, and spent two weeks sailing around St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Comanche was owned and captained by Ted Dale, a warm and gregarious man who quickly won Robert’s affection. Dale sailed the boat over to St. John, a tiny jewel of an island with pristine white beaches and turquoise waters. Anchoring in Trunk Bay, they went ashore and explored. Charmed, Robert wrote a letter to Ruth Tolman describing St. John. Ruth replied, “So the warm waters, the bright fish, the soft trade winds must all have been welcome and restoring.” St. John left a deep impression upon the Oppenheimers. Toni recovered from her bout with polio; years later she would return to this lovely island paradise and make it her permanent home.
IF KITTY sometimes made family life harrowing, Robert’s aloofness and detachment helped him endure. He had consciously chosen to stay in his marriage, and, to be fair to Kitty, she was perfectly capable of controlling her behavior if she wanted to. She had an iron will—with or without drink. One day when the Dysons had a sudden crisis in their household, Kitty came rushing over in her blue jeans, her hands still muddy from her garden. “She was a tower of strength to us as she was to Robert,” observed Freeman Dyson. “She was in many ways the stronger of the two, and more solid in a way. You never had the feeling that she was the one who needed help. True, she got drunk from time to time, but I never thought of her as being uncontrollably alcoholic.”
And if Kitty had her enemies, she also had her friends. “We always have such fun with you, and love to be in your house,” wrote Elinor Hempelmann after one of her frequent visits to the Oppenheimer household. When the Oppenheimers’ Los Alamos friends “Deke” and Martha Parsons visited Olden Manor, Kitty often took them on lovely picnics, serving eggs, caviar and cheeses on rye toast washed down with champagne. Parsons, a conservative Navy career man—he was by then an admiral—treasured his rambling philosophical conversations with the Oppenheimers. “Dear Oppy,” he wrote after one such visit in September 1950, “As always our weekend with you and Kitty was the event of the season for us. Our little affairs and even the world problems seem more nearly soluble in such an atmosphere.”
While Kitty could be outrageous, if she chose, she could also be charming and competent. She had an impish sense of humor. One evening, saying good-bye to her dinner guests, she surveyed Charley Taft’s great bulk and said, “I am so glad you don’t look like your brother [the very slender Senator Robert Taft].” Robert protested, raising his hands, and said, “Kitty!” Whereupon she said, to laughter all around, “I said the same thing to Allen Dulles.” Like Robert, Kitty was always capable of putting on a performance. And so if there were episodes of histrionics, Kitty also set the stage for many fine performances in which she and Robert played the gracious intellectual couple.
“It was another lunch time,” wrote Ursula Niebuhr, the wife of Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, a fellow for a year at the Institute. “This one was at the Oppenheimers’ house, on a beautiful spring day, and Kitty had masses of daffodils about the house.” George Kennan and his wife were also guests. “Robert was at his most charming and hospitable best.” After lunching, the guests adjourned for coffee to the lower level of the Oppenheimer living room. In the course of their conversation, Robert discovered that Kennan was unfamiliar with the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert. Herbert was one of Oppie’s favorite poets, and so he drew out a fine old edition of Herbert from his bookcase and began reading aloud, in “that sympathetic voice of his,” a Herbert poem titled “The Pulley,” the theme of which was man’s restlessness, a trait Oppenheimer knew he carried to a fault.
When God at first made man
Having a glasse of blessings standing by . . .
The poem ends with these lines:
Yet let him keep the rest,
But k
eep them with repining restlessnesse;
Let him be rich and wearie, that at least,
If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearnesse
May tosse him to My breast.
CHAPTER THIRTY
“He Never Let On What His Opinion Was”
Our atomic monopoly is like a cake of ice melting in the sun. . . .
ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, Time magazine, November 8, 1948
ON AUGUST 29, 1949, the Soviet Union secretly exploded an atomic bomb at an isolated testing site in Khazakhstan. Nine days later, an American B-29 atmospheric detection reconnaissance plane flying over the northern Pacific picked up radioactive readings on special filter paper designed expressly to detect just such an explosion. On September 9, the news was transmitted to high-ranking officials in the Truman Administration. No one wanted to believe it, and Truman himself expressed skepticism. To settle the matter, it was agreed that a panel of experts would analyze the evidence. Tellingly, the Defense Department picked Vannevar Bush to chair the panel. When called, Bush suggested it would be more reasonable if Dr. Oppenheimer chaired such a technical panel. But an Air Force general told Bush they preferred him as chairman.
Bush acquiesced, but he made sure to have Oppenheimer on the panel. Oppenheimer had just returned from Perro Caliente when Bush called to tell him the news. The panel of experts met for five hours on the morning of September 19. While Bush presided, Oppenheimer directed many of the questions, and by lunchtime everyone agreed that the evidence was overwhelming: “Joe-1” was indeed an atomic bomb test, and furthermore, it was a close copy of the Manhattan Project’s plutonium bomb.
The following day, Lilienthal briefed President Truman on the detection panel’s conclusions—and pleaded with him to make an immediate announcement. Lilienthal noted in his diary that he “tried every argument I knew with so little apparent headway.” Truman balked, saying he was not even certain that the Soviets had a real bomb. He told Lilienthal that he would sit on the news for a few days and think about it. When Oppenheimer heard this, he was incredulous and upset; an opportunity was being missed, he told Lilienthal, to seize the initiative.
Finally, three days later, a still doubtful Truman reluctantly announced that an atomic explosion had occurred in the Soviet Union; he pointedly refused to say that it had been a bomb. A shocked Edward Teller called Oppenheimer and asked him, “What do we do now?” Oppenheimer replied laconically, “Keep your shirt on.”
“ ‘Operation Joe’ is simply the fulfillment of an expectation,” Oppenheimer calmly told a reporter from Life magazine that autumn. He had never thought that the American monopoly would last very long. A year earlier, he had told Time magazine, “Our atomic monopoly is like a cake of ice melting in the sun. . . .” Now he hoped the existence of a Soviet bomb would persuade Truman to change course, and renew the efforts made in 1946 to internationalize control over all nuclear technology. But he also feared the Administration might overreact; he had heard talk of preventive war in some quarters. David Lilienthal found his friend “frantic, drawn” with nervous energy. He told Lilienthal, “We mustn’t muff it this time; this could be an end of the miasma of secrecy.”
Oppenheimer believed the Truman Administration’s obsession with secrecy was both irrational and counterproductive. He and Lilienthal had been trying all year to nudge the president and his advisers toward more openness on nuclear issues. Now that the Soviets had the bomb, they reasoned, excessive secrecy no longer had any rationale. At a meeting of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, Oppenheimer expressed the hope that the Soviet achievement would push the United States to adopt a “more rational security policy.”
Even as Oppenheimer cautioned against any drastic reaction, legislators on Capitol Hill began speaking of measures to counter the Soviet achievement. Within days, Truman endorsed a Joint Chiefs proposal for increasing the production of nuclear weapons. The U.S. stockpile of atomic weapons—which in June 1948 stood at about 50 bombs—would rise rapidly to some 300 such weapons by June 1950. This was just the beginning. AEC Commissioner Lewis Strauss circulated a memo arguing that U.S. military superiority over the Soviets would inevitably diminish; borrowing language from physics, Strauss suggested that America could only regain its absolute advantage with a “quantum jump” in technology. The nation needed a crash program to develop the Super, a thermonuclear weapon.
Truman was not even aware of the possibility of a Super until October 1949. But once apprised of it, the president was intrigued. Oppenheimer had always been skeptical. “I am not sure the miserable thing will work,” he wrote Conant, “nor that it can be gotten to a target except by ox-cart,” a reference to the expectation that it would be too big to be carried in an aircraft. Profoundly disturbed by the ethical implications of a weapon thousands of times more destructive than an atomic bomb, he hoped that the Super would prove technically unfeasible. More horrific than the atomic (fission) bomb, the Super (fusion) bomb would surely escalate the nuclear arms race. The physics of fusion emulated the reactions in the interior of the sun, meaning that fusion explosions had no physical limits. One could get an even larger explosion simply by adding more heavy hydrogen. Armed with Super bombs, a single airplane could kill millions of people in minutes. It was too big for any known military target; it was a weapon of mass, indiscriminate murder. The possibility of such a weapon horrified Oppenheimer as much as it excited the imaginations of various Air Force generals, their supporters in Congress and the scientists who supported Edward Teller’s ambition to build a Super.
As early as September 1945, Oppenheimer had written a secret report on behalf of a special Scientific Advisory Panel composed of himself, Arthur Compton, Ernest Lawrence and Enrico Fermi. The report advised that “no such effort [on the Super or H-bomb] should be invested at the present time. . . .” To be sure, the possibility that such a weapon could be developed “should not be forgotten.” But it was not an imperative. Officially, Oppenheimer raised no ethical concerns. But Compton—speaking for himself, Oppenheimer, Lawrence and Fermi—wrote Henry Wallace and explained, “We feel that this development [the H-bomb] should not be undertaken, primarily because we should prefer defeat in war to victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its determined use.” (emphasis added)
Over the next four years, much changed. Relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated, nuclear weapons emerged as the anchor of America’s emerging containment policy, and the U.S. nuclear arsenal expanded to more than 100 atomic bombs, with more and larger ones on the way. The question at issue was obvious: What effect would this new, gigantic weapon, if it were built, have on American national security?
On October 9, 1949, Oppenheimer traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend a meeting of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, to which he had just been elected that spring. He stayed at Conant’s home on Quincy Street, and he and Harvard’s president had a “long and difficult discussion having, alas, nothing to do with Harvard.” The two friends knew that they would have to grapple with a recommendation about the Super at a meeting of the General Advisory Committee later that month. So it would have been natural for them to vent their worries, and it was probably on this occasion that Conant told Oppenheimer that the hydrogen bomb would be built “over my dead body.” Conant was outraged that a civilized country would even consider using such a ghastly, murderous weapon; he thought it nothing less than a genocide machine.
Later that same month, on October 21, after being briefed on the current status of thermonuclear research, Oppie sat down and wrote “Uncle Jim” a long letter. He acknowledged that when they had last spoken, “I was inclined to think that the super might also be relevant.” Technically, he still thought the Super was “not very different from what it was when we first spoke of it more than 7 years ago: a weapon of unknown design, cost, deliverability and military value.” The only thing that had changed in seven years was the country’s climate of opinion. He pointed out that “two experienced promo
ters have been at work, i.e. Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller. The project has long been dear to Teller’s heart; and Ernest has convinced himself that we must learn from Operation Joe [the Soviet atomic explosion] that the Russians will soon do the Super, and that we had better beat them to it.”
Oppenheimer and all the other members of the GAC believed the technical problems associated with building an H-bomb were still formidable. But he and Conant also were deeply troubled by the political implications of the Super. “What does worry me,” Oppenheimer wrote to Conant, “is that this thing appears to have caught the imagination, both of congressional and of military people, as the answer to the problem posed by the Russian advance [in atomic weapons]. It would be folly to oppose the exploration of this weapon. We have always known it had to be done; and it does have to be done. . . . But that we become committed to it as the way to save the country and the peace appears to me full of dangers.”
After noting that the Joint Chiefs were already inclined to ask the president for a crash H-bomb program, Oppie worried that “the climate of opinion among the competent physicists also shows signs of shifting.” Even Hans Bethe, he wrote, was thinking of returning to Los Alamos to work on the Super on a full-time basis.
