by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
To this point, Kennan’s memo followed the logic of the GAC’s October 30, 1949, recommendations. But Kennan picked up another idea that Oppenheimer had considered recently. Instead of relying on a massive arsenal of atomic bombs, Washington should substantially augment its conventional arms, particularly in Western Europe. The Soviets, he said, must understand that the West was willing to field sufficient troops and conventional armaments in Western Europe to deter any possible invasion. Such a conventional deterrent would then permit Washington to pledge itself to a policy of “no first use” of nuclear weapons. America, he argued, should “move as rapidly as possible toward the removal of [atomic weapons] from national armaments without insisting on a deep-seated change in the Soviet system.”
Kennan regarded Stalin’s regime as a reprehensible tyranny—but he did not think Stalin reckless. The Soviet dictator surely was determined to defend his internal empire, but that did not mean that he intended to wage a war of aggression against the Western allies, a war that would have inevitably threatened the stability of his own regime. Stalin understood that a war with the West might well spell the ruin of the Soviet Union. “I was firmly convinced,” Kennan said later, “that they had had absolutely their belly full of war. Stalin never wanted another major war.”
In short, Kennan believed that it had been compelling strategic considerations, rather than the American atomic monopoly, which had deterred a Soviet invasion of Western Europe in the years 1945–49. Now that the Soviets had their own atomic bomb, Kennan argued that it made no sense for the United States to get into a spiraling nuclear arms race. Like Oppenheimer, he believed that the bomb was ultimately a suicidal weapon and therefore both militarily useless and dangerous. Besides, Kennan was confident that the Soviet Union was politically and economically the weaker of the two adversaries, and that in the long run America could wear down the Soviet system by means of diplomacy and the “judicious exploitation of our strength as a deterrent to world conflict. . . .”
Kennan’s eighty-page “personal document” might well have been coauthored with Oppenheimer, reflecting as it did so many of Robert’s views. Indeed, both he and Kennan took its reception as a plunging barometer, indicating the approach of violent political storms. Circulated within the State Department, Kennan’s memo was quietly and firmly rejected by all who read it. Acheson called Kennan into his office one day and said, “George, if you persist in your view on this matter, you should resign from the Foreign Service, assume a monk’s habit, carry a tin cup and stand on the street corner and say, ‘The end of the world is nigh.’ ”
Acheson didn’t even bother to show the document to President Truman. By then, Oppenheimer was fully aware of which way the winds were blowing. Edward Teller was winning. But if so, Oppie still hoped that the technical obstacles to designing a thermonuclear device would prove to be insurmountable. “Let Teller and [John] Wheeler go ahead,” he was reported to have said. “Let them fall on their faces.” On January 29, 1950, he ran into Teller at a conference of the American Physical Society in New York and admitted that he thought Truman was going to reject his recommendation against the Super. If so, Teller asked, would he return to Los Alamos to work on the Super? “Certainly not,” Oppie snapped.
A day later, in Washington for a meeting of the GAC, he decided to drop in on a special meeting of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, called by Senator Brien McMahon to discuss the Super. Oppenheimer knew McMahon was vigorously lobbying the president to approve a crash Super program, and he knew his views would be unwelcome. But he turned up anyway, telling McMahon and the other legislators, “I thought it would be cowardly for me not to come up here and let you disagree and raise questions where you thought we had missed the point.” His demeanor was one of polite resignation. Asked what would happen if the Russians got the Super and the United States did not have it, he replied, “If the Russians have the weapon and we don’t, we will be badly off. And if the Russians have the weapon and we do, we will still be badly off.” The whole point, he explained, was that by “going down this path ourselves, we are doing the one thing that will accelerate and insure their [Super bomb] development.” When a congressman asked him if a war fought with hydrogen bombs would make the earth unfit for human habitation, Oppie interjected, “Pestiferous, you mean?” Actually, he said, he was more worried about mankind’s “moral survival.” He explained his position with an air of utter reasonableness, and though no one present questioned his logic, he left knowing that he had not changed anyone’s mind.
The next day, January 31, 1950, Lilienthal, Acheson and Defense Secretary Louis Johnson walked across the street from the old State Department building to the White House for a meeting with the president on the Super. Lilienthal was still ardently opposed to a crash program. Acheson privately agreed with many of Lilienthal’s objections, but believed that domestic political factors would compel Truman to go forward with a crash program: “The American people simply would not tolerate a policy of delaying nuclear research in so vital a matter. . . .” Johnson agreed, telling Lilienthal, “We must protect the president.” It had come to that. The real issues related to national security had been rendered irrelevant by the simplifications imposed by domestic politics.
They agreed, nonetheless, that Lilienthal would be allowed to make his case. Once they were in the Oval Office, however, Lilienthal had hardly begun his presentation when Truman cut him off to ask, “Can the Russians do it?” When everyone nodded, Truman said, “In that case, we have no choice. We’ll go ahead.” Lilienthal noted in his diary that Truman had “clearly set on what he was going to do before we set foot inside the door.” Some months earlier, Lilienthal had warned Truman that demagogues in Congress would attempt to force his hand on the Super. “I don’t blitz easily,” Truman had said. Walking out of the White House, Lilienthal looked at his watch. The president who couldn’t be blitzed had given him exactly seven minutes. It was, Lilienthal noted, like saying “ ‘No’ to a steamroller.”
That evening, in a radio address that had no doubt been in preparation for some time, President Truman announced a program to determine the “technical feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon.” At the same time, he ordered a general reexamination of the country’s strategic plans. This led to a top-secret policy paper, NSC-68, largely produced by Kennan’s successor as director of policy planning in the State Department, Paul Nitze. Nitze, an advocate of a large nuclear arsenal, depicted the Soviet Union as bent on world conquest. He called for “a rapid and sustained build-up of the political, economic and military strength of the free world.” Circulated in April 1950, NSC-68 specifically rejected Kennan’s proposal to proclaim a policy of “no first use” of nuclear weapons. To the contrary, a large arsenal of nuclear weapons was to become the foundation of U.S. defense strategy. And to that end, Truman authorized an industrial program to greatly expand the nation’s capacity to build nuclear warheads of all configurations.
By the end of the decade, America’s stockpile of nuclear weapons would leap from some 300 warheads to nearly 18,000 nuclear weapons. Over the next five decades, the United States would produce more than 70,000 nuclear weapons and spend a staggering $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons programs. In retrospect—and even at the time—it was clear that the H-bomb decision was a turning point in the Cold War’s spiraling arms race. Like Oppenheimer, Kennan was thoroughly “disgusted.” I. I. Rabi was outraged. “I never forgave Truman,” he said.
After his abbreviated meeting with Truman, David Lilienthal told Oppenheimer that the president had also demanded that all the scientists involved refrain from discussing the decision publicly: “It was like a funeral party—especially when I said we were all gagged.” Sorely disheartened, Oppenheimer considered resigning his position on the GAC. Acheson, fearful that Oppenheimer and Conant would take their appeal to the American public, made a point of telling Harvard’s president, “For heck’s sake, don’t upset the applecart.”
Conant told Oppenheimer of Ach
eson’s warning that a public debate would be “contrary to the national interest.” So once again, Oppie played the role of loyal supporter. As he later testified, it did not seem responsible to resign at that time and “promote a debate on a matter which was settled.” Conant wrote a friend that he and Oppenheimer “didn’t [resign] (or at least I didn’t) because I did not want to do anything that seemed to indicate we were not good soldiers. . . .” In retrospect, he regretted this decision—he thought they should both have immediately resigned.
How different and better Oppenheimer’s life would have been had he taken that step. But he didn’t, and like Conant, Oppenheimer again fell into line. Nevertheless, he could not disguise his disdain for those who had pushed through the decision. The very evening of Truman’s announcement, Oppenheimer felt obligated to attend a party at the Shoreham Hotel, celebrating Strauss’s fifty-fourth birthday. Finding Oppenheimer alone in a corner, a reporter walked up to him and said, “You don’t look jubilant.” Oppenheimer muttered in response, “This is the plague of Thebes.” When Strauss tried to introduce his son and daughter-in-law to the famous physicist, Oppenheimer brusquely offered them a hand over his shoulder—and then turned away without a word. Understandably, Strauss was incensed.
THE HYDROGEN BOMB decision had been made in camera, without public debate and, Oppenheimer believed, without an honest evaluation of its consequences. Secrecy had become the handmaiden of ignorant policies, and so Oppenheimer decided to speak out against secrecy. On February 12, 1950, Strauss was angered to see Oppenheimer appear on the first telecast of Eleanor Roosevelt’s Sunday morning talk show and openly challenge the manner in which the hydrogen bomb decision had been made. “These are complex technical things,” Oppenheimer told the television audience, “but they touch the very basis of our morality. It is a grave danger for us that these decisions are taken on the basis of facts held secret.” To Strauss, such comments signaled open defiance of the president—and he made sure the White House saw a transcript of Oppenheimer’s words.
Later that summer, in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Oppenheimer repeated “that these decisions have been taken on the basis of facts held secret.” This, he thought, was neither necessary nor wise: “The relevant facts could be of little help to an enemy; yet they are indispensable for an understanding of questions of policy.” No one in the administration agreed; the trend was toward more secrecy.
FOR NEARLY five years, Oppenheimer had tried to use his prestige and status as a celebrity scientist to influence Washington’s growing national security establishment from the inside. His old friends on the left, men like Phil Morrison, Bob Serber and even his own brother had warned him that this was a futile gamble. He had failed in 1946, when the Acheson-Lilienthal plan for international control over atomic bombs was sabotaged by President Truman’s appointment of Bernard Baruch. And now, once again, he had failed to persuade the president and members of his Administration to turn their back on what Conant had described to Acheson as “the whole rotten business.” The Administration now supported a program to build a bomb 1,000 times as lethal as the Hiroshima weapon. Still, Oppenheimer would not “upset the applecart.” He would remain an insider— albeit one who was increasingly outspoken and increasingly suspect.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“Dark Words About Oppie”
How utterly nauseating—but this is like a pu f of wind against the Gibraltar of your great standing in American life.
DAVID LILIENTHAL to Robert Oppenheimer, May 10, 1950
IN THE AFTERMATH OF WHAT HE LATER CALLED “our large and ill-managed bout with the Super,” Oppenheimer retreated to Princeton, bitterly discouraged. That spring, George Kennan wrote him, “You probably do not know to what extent you have become my intellectual conscience.” The debate over the Super had forged an alliance between these two formidable intellects whose instincts and sensibilities converged in opposition to a defense strategy based on the threat of nuclear war.
“What stands out in my mind when I think back on those days,” Kennan recalled, “was his insistence on the desirability of openness.” Oppenheimer argued that concealing information about the bomb increased the danger of misunderstandings. As Kennan recalled Oppie’s argument, “You had to have the frankest possible discussions with them [the Soviets] about the problems of the future and the use of the weapon.” Kennan agreed with Oppenheimer that nuclear weapons were inherently evil and genocidal: “It should have been visible to people at the time that this was a weapon from which nobody stood to gain. . . . The whole idea that you could achieve anything of a positive nature by the development of these weapons seemed to me preposterous from the start.”
On a personal level, Kennan would forever feel grateful to Oppenheimer for bringing him to the Institute to begin a new career as a distinguished scholar and historian. “I, who owe to your confidence and encouragement the very opportunity to make what I could of myself as a scholar, beginning in middle age, have a special personal debt to acknowledge.” Yet Kennan’s appointment to the Institute was highly controversial; some questioned the credentials of this career Foreign Service officer who had published nothing that could be remotely called scholarship. Johnny von Neumann voted against the appointment, and wrote Oppenheimer that Kennan was “not, so far, an historian,” and he had yet to produce any scholarly work of an “exceptional character.” Most of the resident mathematicians, led as usual by Oswald Veblen, objected on the grounds that Kennan was merely a political friend of Oppie’s and not an academic. “They resented Kennan,” recalled Freeman Dyson, “and took the thing as an opportunity to attack Oppenheimer.” But Oppenheimer, who had developed a great appreciation for Kennan’s intellect, pushed the appointment through the Board of Trustees, promising to pay Kennan’s $15,000 stipend out of his Director’s Fund.
Kennan spent eighteen months in Princeton before leaving, reluctantly, in the spring of 1952, when Truman and Acheson pressed him to serve as the United States ambassador in Moscow. But less than six months later, he wrote Robert that he thought his tenure in Moscow might be brief, and indeed, within the next ten days his ambassadorship was aborted when he told a reporter that life in Soviet Russia reminded him of the time he had spent in Nazi Germany. Not surprisingly, the Soviets declared him persona non grata. Then, after Dwight Eisenhower won the presidential election, it became clear that the Republicans who came into office promoting “roll-back” had little use for the author of “containment.” In March 1953, Kennan wrote Oppenheimer to say that he had just seen Secretary of State John Foster Dulles—who informed him that “he knew of no ‘niche’ for me in government at this time . . . tainted as I am with ‘containment.’ ” Kennan therefore took early retirement and promptly moved back to Princeton, Oppie’s “decompression chamber for scholars.” With the exception of a slightly longer stint as ambassador to Yugoslavia in the early 1960s, Kennan would spend the rest of his life there. He was Oppenheimer’s neighbor and devoted friend, and in his eyes, Oppenheimer had created a “place where the work of the mind could proceed in its highest form—gracefully, generously, and with the most exquisite scrupulousness and severity.”
THE H-BOMB was not the only issue on which Oppenheimer found himself bucking the Cold War armaments buildup. By 1949, he had despaired of making progress in the foreseeable future on nuclear disarmament. He still believed Bohr’s vision of global openness was mankind’s only hope in the nuclear age. But developments in the early Cold War had made it clear that the negotiations in the United Nations to control nuclear weapons were at an impasse. Instead, Oppenheimer tried to use his influence to put a damper on the government’s and the public’s growing expectations for all things nuclear. That summer, the press quoted him as saying that “nuclear power for planes and battleships is so much hogwash.” Inside the General Advisory Committee (GAC), Oppenheimer and the other scientists criticized the Air Force’s Project Lexington, a program to develop nuclear-powered bomber aircraft. He also talked about the po
tential dangers inherent in civilian nuclear power plants. Such statements did not endear him to those in the defense establishment or the power industry who favored the development of nuclear-based technologies.
Indeed, the GAC’s experiences with the military brass left all of its members increasingly uneasy about the military’s nuclear weapons planning. “I know,” recalled Lee DuBridge, “that there was a great deal of discussion about targets in the Soviet Union, and how many [bombs] it would take to knock out the major industrial centers. . . . At the time, we thought 50 would just about wipe out the essential things in the Soviet Union.” DuBridge always thought that was a pretty good estimate. But over time, the Pentagon’s representatives kept finding pretexts to push the number higher. DuBridge recalled, “We used to sometimes smile about this, that they always could seem to find targets for whatever number [of bombs] they thought they could get in the next year or two. They adjusted their target goals to the production goals.”
Oppenheimer’s presentations at GAC meetings were normally impeccably objective. Rarely did he reveal any emotion. One exception occurred when V. Adm. Hyman Rickover briefed the committee on the Navy’s rush to develop nuclear-powered submarines. Rickover complained that the AEC was not working hard enough on reactor development. He challenged Oppenheimer by asking if he had waited until he “had all the facts” before building an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer gave him one of his ice-cold blue-eyed stares and said yes. Though the admiral was notoriously overbearing, Oppenheimer restrained himself until Rickover departed. Oppie then walked over to a table where Rickover had left a small wooden model submarine. Placing his hand around the hull, he quietly crushed it and then silently walked away.
Oppenheimer was expanding his circle of political enemies. As his old friend Harold Cherniss had observed years earlier, Oppie’s remarks could be “very cruel.” He was often kind and considerate to subordinates, but he could be very cutting to colleagues.
