Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  The dropping of the atomic bomb was so dramatic, the awed shock it provoked throughout the world was so deep, and the sense that it was, in President Truman’s words, “the greatest thing in history” seemed so incontestable that there was a general instinct to think that it had brought one phase of human affairs to an end. The events of the summer of 1945, Hans Bethe concurred, “changed everything.” 35

  CHAPTER 8

  An End, a Beginning

  THE TRINITY TEST, closely followed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shook the atomic scientists out of their absorption in the technical problems of building the bomb and awakened them to its enormous moral and political implications. The scientific work was finished, and the awful magnitude of what they had done began to sink in. I.I. Rabi voiced their confused reactions in a widely read magazine article that fall. “I would say that we are frankly pleased, terrified, and to an even greater extent embarrassed when we contemplate the results of our wartime efforts,” he wrote. “Our terror comes from the realization—which is nowhere more strongly felt than among us—of the tremendous forces of destruction now existing in an all too practical form.” 1 Many felt “a feeling of accomplishment and a feeling of revulsion about what we had done,” as Bethe said. 2

  All of them were haunted by the sarcasm of a Japanese radiologist in Hiroshima. “I did the experiment years ago, but only on a few rats. But you Americans—you are wonderful. You have made the human experiment.” “No one,” wrote a Los Alamos physicist, “could fail to carry the scar of such a cutting remark.” 3 Many decided to leave Los Alamos. They left for many reasons, and not all explained why. Those who watched them go saw answers in their eyes or read them in letters written some time afterward. “We all felt,” Bethe remembered, “that, like the soldiers, we had done our duty and that we deserved to return to the type of work that we had chosen as our life’s career, the pursuit of pure science and teaching. Moreover, it was not obvious that there was any need for a large effort on atomic weapons in peacetime.” 4

  Some felt a sense of unease, even those who believed that ending a bloody war had justified using the bomb. Many came to regard themselves, in the phrase of Time magazine, as the “world’s guilty men.” 5 Oppenheimer spoke for himself and many other physicists when he wrote, “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” 6 Oppenheimer’s words expressed the anguish of those caught between the commitment to pursue knowledge wherever it might lead and the realization that the knowledge discovered had caused great misery to other human beings.

  Oppenheimer’s anxiety was intensified by fear that the bomb threatened popular respect for the discipline of science he revered. Although physicists now seemed to wear the “tunic of Superman,” in the phrase of Life magazine, and to stand in the spotlight of a thousand suns, the physicists themselves knew better. 7 “If we take the stand that our object is merely to see that the next war is bigger and better,” Rabi warned, “we will ultimately lose the respect of the public. In popular demagogy we [will] become the unpaid servants of the ‘munitions makers’ and mere technicians rather than the self-sacrificing public-spirited citizens which we feel ourselves to be.” 8 The bomb seemed an ominous refutation of the Enlightenment principle—an article of faith to them—that more knowledge would inevitably bring more happiness and progress. “We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon,” admitted Oppenheimer, one “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, or whether it is good to learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it.” 9 Slowly, as if feeling their way in a blinding light, they struggled to understand what it all meant.

  Oppenheimer was not the only physicist uneasy about a world armed with atomic bombs, but his exhaustion was deeper than most. The day after Nagasaki, Lawrence flew to Los Alamos (he had overcome his fear of airplanes), where he found his Berkeley colleague looking weary and feeling pessimistic, his hair turning gray. “I know that he felt guilty in spite of having told Truman the weapon had to be used,” recalled Bethe. “He felt guilty for having directed the project.” 10

  Compton and Fermi joined Oppenheimer and Lawrence that weekend to draft a report for Washington on postwar atomic policy. The four were emerging from the secret project as public heroes; not just policy makers but also the American people were clamoring for their views. Understanding this, they eschewed merely technical advice and decided to draft a plea for international control. “Other powers,” they presciently warned, “can produce these weapons in a few years and all too soon be in a threatening position. We consider it imperative, therefore, to take determined steps toward international arrangements that will make such developments highly improbable, if not impossible.” 11

  “We are convinced,” they went on, “that weapons quantitatively and qualitatively far more effective than now available will result from further work on these problems.” They were referring to the superbomb. The physicists further emphasized their “firm opinion” that “no military countermeasures will be found which will be adequately effective in preventing the delivery of atomic weapons” on the American homeland. This led to their most sobering but farsighted conclusion:

  We are not only unable to outline a program that would assure to this nation for the next decades hegemony in the field of atomic weapons; we are equally unable to insure that such hegemony, if achieved, could protect us from the most terrible destruction.

  The development, in the years to come, of more effective atomic weapons, would appear to be a most natural element in any national policy of maintaining our military forces at great strength; nevertheless we have grave doubts that this further development can contribute essentially or permanently to the prevention of war. We believe that the safety of this nation—as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power—cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible. It is our unanimous and urgent recommendation to you that, despite the present incomplete exploitation of technical possibilities in this field, all steps be taken, all necessary international arrangements be made, to this one end. 12

  Oppenheimer took their report to Washington in late August. The timing was unfortunate; the report stood in jarring contrast to the triumphant mood of the capital, where policy makers were exulting in victory over Japan, anticipating trouble with Russia, and more interested in building up the U.S. atomic arsenal than in pursuing international control. Oppenheimer described Washington’s reaction in a disappointed letter back to Lawrence at Berkeley:

  August 30, 1945

  Dear Ernest:

  After our meetings [at Los Alamos] I had a few days in Washington: it was a bad time, too early for clarity. I took our letter to Bush and to [Stimson’s assistant] Harrison—Conant, Stimson, Compton were all away—and had an opportunity with them to explain in more detail than was appropriate in a letter what our common feelings were in this all-important thing. I emphasized of course that all of us would earnestly do whatever was really in the national interest, no matter how desperate and disagreeable; but that we felt reluctant to promise that much real good could come of continuing the atomic bomb work just like poison gases after the last war…. I had the fairly clear impression from the talks that things had gone most badly at Potsdam, and that little or no progress had been made in interesting the Russians in collaboration or control. * I don’t know how seriously an effort was made: apparently neither Churchill nor Attlee nor Stalin was any help at all, but this is only my conjecture. While I was in Washington two things happened, both rather gloomy: the President issued an absolute Ukase, forbidding any disclosures on the atomic bomb—and the terms were broad—without his personal approval. The other was that Harrison
took our letter to Byrnes, who sent back word just as I was leaving that “in the present critical international situation there was no alternative to pushing the [atomic] program full steam ahead.”… I do not come away from a profound grief, and a profound perplexity about the course we should be following….

  Affectionately,

  Robert 13

  Oppenheimer sensed that policy makers did not grasp what scientists had put into their hands. Just weeks after the war, in response to a reporter’s question, he said: “If you ask: ‘Can we make [atomic bombs] more terrible?’ the answer is yes. If you ask: ‘Can we make a lot of them?’ the answer is yes. If you ask: ‘Can we make them terribly more terrible?’ the answer is probably.” 14 It was already clear to Oppenheimer that the atomic bomb represented only the beginning of a revolutionary new level of destructiveness. And he and the other atomic scientists were no longer in control, if they ever had been. This sobering realization led Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Compton, and Fermi to use even stronger language in a second report they prepared for policy makers in late September. This time, the four intended to jolt Washington into confronting the bomb’s dangers. “The realization of atomic weapons constitutes a peril of the first magnitude for this nation and for the world,” they bluntly wrote. They warned that America’s nuclear monopoly would not last—the atomic genie had been let out of the bottle; other powers would one day develop their own weapons of mass destruction. All of this raised the specter of an atomic arms race, which they doubted America could win because the destructiveness of nuclear weapons could be increased almost infinitely and the development of effective countermeasures was unlikely. “There is no foundation for the hope that this nation can be safe against atomic weapons on the basis of technical prowess or technical ingenuity alone,” noted these technical wizards, with deliberate irony.

  The looming issue for all of them was the superbomb. As Teller’s latest report had suggested, there was a good chance it could be developed. They flatly opposed such development on moral grounds. “We feel that this development should not be undertaken,” they wrote, “primarily because we should prefer defeat in war to a victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its determined use.” Their dread was rooted in the superbomb’s boggling destructiveness: the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had leveled four square miles; a superbomb would level one hundred square miles.

  They cited other reasons for restraint. “If developed here, other great powers must follow suit,” they warned. Within a decade the United States could develop enough atomic bombs to destroy “all major industrial and military facilities throughout the world” anyway. The bomb had transformed the nature of war: “all the world faces a future in which sudden destruction is possible at any time.” Instead of building bigger bombs, they urged “work[ing] with speed and determination toward establishing a world ‘government’” that, to be effective, would require “the United States, along with the other great powers, to place into its hands all atom bomb and other major war-making facilities, and to submit to international inspection and control of work in the field of atomic energy.” 15 It was a bold—even revolutionary—conclusion, requiring an unprecedented—and perhaps unrealistic—political transformation. But they saw no other way. “The only solution to the problem,” they pointedly concluded, “must lie in politics, and this implies a profound and shattering alteration in the relations among nations.” 16

  Although curious as scientists, they nevertheless had concluded that the superbomb was a problem that should not be solved—some science had become too deadly, its implications too dangerous. Breaking with their past, they had decided to put the interests of humanity above the pursuit of knowledge, a courageous and farsighted stance that reflected the revulsion that the mass killings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had brought over each of them. They could not foresee that some of them would reverse their stance when America’s effort at international control failed and the Cold War set in. 17

  Oppenheimer returned to Los Alamos from Washington tired and dispirited. A few days later, he and Kitty drove across the Rio Grande Valley to Perro Caliente for their first real vacation in nearly three years. Oppenheimer took with him a pile of letters from old friends surprised to find his name prominently associated with the weapon that had ended the war, and answered some of the more personal ones by hand. A prompt reply went to Herbert Smith, his old teacher at the Ethical Culture School, with whom he had first experienced New Mexico. “It seemed appropriate, & very sweet,” he wrote Smith, “that your good note should reach me on the Pecos—we had come over for a few days after the surrender. Like so many of the beautiful things of which I learned first from you, the love of it grows with the years. Your words were good to have. You will believe that this undertaking has not been without its misgivings; they are heavy on us today, when the future, which has so many elements of high promise, is yet only a stone’s throw from despair. Thus the good which this work has perhaps contributed to make in the ending of the war looms very large to us, because it is there for sure.” A letter to Haakon Chevalier the next day reiterated his conviction on this last point. “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.” To his Harvard classmate Frederick Bernheim, he confessed: “We are at the ranch now, in an earnest but not-too-sanguine search for sanity…. There would seem to be some great headaches ahead.” 18

  Now that the war was over, the urgency was gone. Oppenheimer had lost the sense of purpose with which he had thrown himself into work on the bomb. He had already written to Groves, making it plain that he did not believe Los Alamos should continue as a weapons lab and that “the Director himself would very much like to know when he will be able to escape from these duties for which he is so ill-qualified and which he had accepted only in an effort to serve the country during the war.” 19 On a consulting visit to Washington in late September, he told Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson that physicists as a group opposed doing any more weapons work—“not merely a superbomb but any bomb”—because it went “against the dictates of their hearts and spirits.” 20 “There was not much left in me at that moment,” said Oppenheimer later. 21 He arranged to quit his post shortly after an army awards ceremony for the lab on October sixteenth.

  Almost everyone on the mesa turned out for the ceremony, which was held outdoors under a deep blue sky. Groves, standing in front of Fuller Lodge on a low platform decked in patriotic bunting and American flags fluttering in a cool wind amid the sound of shimmering aspen leaves colored gold by the autumn sun, spoke in loud and clear tones of the patriotic work done by the laboratory. Oppenheimer followed Groves, speaking in a low, quiet voice that he often used in public. He was uncharacteristically nervous as he began his speech. His theme was that the old concepts of war were no longer valid and that the only way to prevent a nuclear arms race leading one day to a nuclear holocaust was some form of international control. The atomic bomb, he said, symbolized “not only a great peril but a great hope of beginning to realize those changes which are needed if there is to be any peace.” Under threat of mutual destruction nations might come to understand the imperative need for control of atomic weapons. But then he warned:

  If atomic bombs are to be added 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.

  The peoples of this world must unite, or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them, in other times, in other wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some, misled by a false sense of human history, who hold that they will not prevail today. It is not for us to be
lieve that. By our works we are committed, committed to a world united, before this common peril. 22

  Oppenheimer spoke for the last time at Los Alamos on November second, the night before he returned to Berkeley. Hundreds jammed the largest auditorium on the Hill to hear their leader’s parting thoughts. It was a stormy night and thunder rolled over the mesa. This was the first—really the only—time at Los Alamos that he felt truly free to speak what was on his mind and in his heart:

  I should like to talk tonight as a fellow scientist, and at least as a fellow worrier about the fix we are in…. I would have liked to talk to you at an earlier date—but I couldn’t talk to you as Director…. I think that it can only help to look a little at what our situation is—at what has happened to us—and that this must give us some honesty, some insight, which will be a source of strength in what may be the not-too-easy days ahead….

  What has happened to us forced us to re-consider the relations between science and common sense…. They forced us to be prepared for the inadequacy of the ways in which human beings attempted to deal with reality…. In some ways I think these virtues, which scientists quite reluctantly were forced to learn by the nature of the world they were studying, may be useful even today in preparing us for somewhat more radical views of what the issues are than would be natural or easy for people who had not been through this experience….