Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  The failure of international control came as a deep disappointment to most of the other atomic scientists as well, and they also lacked the political sophistication and stamina to swallow defeat and return to fight another day. This was most plainly the case with Edward Teller, who supported the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, but when it failed, lost all interest in political efforts to control the bomb. Losing his optimism and succumbing to an increasing suspicion of the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, Teller abandoned his support for international control and began to champion a conservative agenda that would remain a constant for the rest of his life: development of a superbomb, opposition to all arms-control efforts as naive and dangerous, and advocacy of an unlimited American nuclear buildup.

  The failure of international control did nothing to diminish Robert Oppenheimer’s stature, however. The bomb’s success had made him a celebrity whose views were in great demand by policy makers and ordinary citizens alike. His face replaced Einstein’s as the public image of scientific genius. His portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and he was in constant demand as a speaker and writer. A new journal, Physics Today, carried a photograph on the cover of its first issue that required no explanation: a porkpie hat slung nonchalantly over a cyclotron. Periodicals featured his remarks with flattering portraits of him holding a pipe, looking erudite and persuasive. He was “the smartest of the lot,” a magazine quoted an unnamed colleague. 39 The public romance had begun.

  Oppenheimer’s vast reputation gave him easy and regular access to top officials. His home and office phones rang constantly—usually someone from Washington was calling—and his office safe was stuffed with classified documents. He served on countless advisory committees and acted as a consultant to many others. All of this was a far cry from the Oppenheimer of Berkeley days. He had changed from a brilliant, arrogant, and in many ways immature intellectual into a gifted administrator and savvy politician with a masterly sense of public relations. He typified the new, worldly scientist of the atomic age who spent more time advising the government and less time teaching students. He saw himself—and others did too—as an oracle for policy makers. A combination of ambition, unrest, and guilt had compelled him into the central political arena of postwar America, and Oppenheimer reveled in the attention and the limelight. He now wore his hair cut very short—as if to signal to Washington that he was no longer one of the longhairs. His frequent public speaking resulted in a solidified persona, his voice now crossing a range of tones, from deliberate arrogance to judicious reflectiveness to irresistible warmth. He reveled at making a difference and being “in the swim”—perhaps too much. A former pupil noted, “I think his sudden fame and the new position he now occupied had gone to his head so much that he began to consider himself God Almighty, able to put the whole world to rights.” 40 Among those in the staid realm of academia, Oppenheimer’s new life in the political swim of Washington inspired no small amount of envy.

  In October 1947 Oppenheimer accepted the prestigious post of director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. (He had changed his mind about Princeton since his visit there in the 1930s, when he wrote his brother, Frank, that the institute was “a madhouse, its solipsistic luminaries shining in separate and helpless desolation.”) Oppenheimer gave up his tenured professorships at Berkeley and Caltech not only because of the intellectual appeal of the institute but also because it moved him close to the political action of Washington, where he really wanted to be.

  Not surprisingly, the Institute for Advanced Study soon began to reflect Oppenheimer’s personality. Although Oppenheimer’s career in original research was over, he remained an effective and articulate critic of others’ research, and this gave the institute’s weekly seminars in theoretical physics enormous vitality. A young postdoctoral fellow at the institute described Oppenheimer’s exacting standards in the seminar room in a letter home to his parents:

  I have been observing rather carefully his behavior during seminars. If one is saying, for the benefit of the rest of the audience, things that he knows already, he cannot resist hurrying one on to something else; then when one says things that he doesn’t know or immediately agree with, he breaks in before the point is fully explained with acute and sometimes devastating criticisms, to which it is impossible to reply adequately even when he is wrong. If one watches him one can see that he is moving around nervously all the time, never stops smoking, and I believe that his impatience is largely beyond his control. On Tuesday we had our fiercest public battle so far, when I criticized some unwarrantably pessimistic remarks he had made about the Schwinger theory. He came down on me like a ton of bricks, and conclusively won the argument so far as the public was concerned. However, afterwards he was very friendly and even apologized to me. 41

  Oppenheimer’s greatest contribution to the institute, however, was more indirect and subtle. He gave its faculty, as he gave scientists at Los Alamos during the war, a sense of participation in a great adventure. He still had the ability to inspire and motivate others by conveying an extraordinary sense of excitement and purpose. His talent for attracting bright people and stimulating them to excellence showed itself once more. There remained shortcomings, however. Oppenheimer continued to wound others with his cutting tongue when they failed to clarify a point or missed one entirely, belittling them with unnecessarily cruel and biting remarks. More than one young fellow fled to his office sobbing after being humiliated by Oppenheimer. Such conduct deeply hurt people, some of whom would not forget.

  Oppenheimer and his family lived at Olden Manor, the director’s residence on the institute grounds. The large white-frame colonial house provided a spacious setting. Robert had a library, Kitty a greenhouse, Peter a darkroom, and Toni a pony. Summers were spent lecturing in California, and for a few years the Oppenheimers made regular visits to Perro Caliente in New Mexico. Winter holidays were spent in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Oppenheimer rediscovered his youthful love of sailing. St. John became his preferred retreat.

  It was an easy and pleasant life in many respects, but not in others. Oppenheimer was operating now in the hard and unforgiving arena of politics, where his sensitive nature was bound to get battered and bruised. So too was his introspective temperament, which increasingly assailed him with guilt about what he had done. When Oppenheimer visited Truman in the Oval Office shortly after the war, the Los Alamos director blurted out, “Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.” Truman, offended by what he considered Oppenheimer’s melodramatic egocentricity, offered his guest his handkerchief and said: “Well, here, would you like to wipe off your hands?” After Oppenheimer left the room, Truman, angrier and more agitated than he was willing to admit, turned to Dean Acheson, who was also present, and snapped: “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again. After all, all he did was make the bomb. I’m the guy who fired it off.” 42

  When Oppenheimer began serving as a government adviser, he viewed the assignment as an opportunity to educate policy makers about peaceful applications of atomic energy. Instead, he found most of his time devoted to giving counsel on the development of newer bombs. He grew disenchanted and melancholy when he realized that his principal task “was to provide atomic weapons and good atomic weapons and many atomic weapons.” 43 He thought the prospect of superbombs—assuming they could be made—would be a dangerous mistake, inviting Armageddon in the event of another world war. If atomic bombs had to be part of the picture, he thought it better, and wiser, to rely on conventional military forces supported by tactical nuclear weapons as powerful as the bombs that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  The postwar years also brought increased scrutiny of Oppenheimer by government security agencies and their supporters in Congress and the media, where “the internal communist threat” was becoming a popular political issue in the deepening Cold War. The surveillance that had dogged him at Los Alamos was intensified. His phones were tapped, his office was bugged, his movements
were watched. In September 1946 FBI agents questioned him for the first time. The interview concerned some of his former Berkeley students and meetings he had attended in the Bay Area before and after the war where communists were present. It was a line of questioning that was to become all too familiar in coming years. Cold War anticommunist feeling was rising, and in this political climate Oppenheimer was going to learn the high price of having an independent mind and a vulnerable left-wing past.

  In 1947 responsibility for atomic energy passed from the military to the newly created civilian Atomic Energy Commission. All AEC consultants who had received wartime clearances from the army were reinvestigated, including Oppenheimer. After reading all the material in his FBI file, the AEC commissioners reached the same conclusion as John Lansdale, Groves’s wartime counterintelligence chief, who “was absolutely certain of the present loyalty of J. Robert Oppenheimer, despite the fact that he doubtless was at one time at least an avid fellow-traveler.” The AEC renewed his security clearance on August 11, 1947.

  But hints of trouble to come had already surfaced. A month earlier, on July twelfth, the Washington Times-Herald had published a front-page story by a reporter with ties to the FBI under the banner headline u.s. ATOM SCIENTIST’S BROTHER EXPOSED AS COMMUNIST WHO WORKED ON A-BOMB. It began:

  Amid official revelation that security of some of the nation’s atom secrets has been jeopardized, this newspaper today can reveal that Dr. Frank Oppenheimer, brother of the American scientist who directed development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party who worked on the Manhattan Project and was aware of many secrets of the bomb from the start.

  Buried on page six of the same story was the following disclaimer: “The Times-Herald wishes to emphasize that the official report on Frank Oppenheimer in no way reflects on the loyalty or ability of his brother, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

  Oppenheimer himself was ordered before the House Un-American Activities Committee on June 7, 1949. The hearing room seemed designed to intimidate witnesses: members of the committee and their staff sat on a raised platform that ran in a semicircle around the witness table. Oppenheimer was called to testify in executive session about leftists he had known at Berkeley before the war. Oppenheimer answered the questions put to him and the session ended with California Republican Congressman Richard Nixon saying, “I think we all have been tremendously impressed with him and are mighty happy we have him in the position he has in our program.” Within days, Oppenheimer’s testimony was leaked to the press.

  A week later, his brother, Frank, appeared before the same committee. Frank and his wife, Jackie, admitted to having been members of the Communist Party—a charge they had denied two years earlier, when the Times-Herald article had appeared—but explained that they had left the party before Frank joined the Manhattan Project. (He had terminated his Communist Party membership in 1941, but had not revealed his former membership to wartime security officers.) Less than an hour after testifying at this hearing, Frank learned from one of the journalists covering his appearance that he had “resigned” as an assistant professor of physics at the University of Minnesota, a position he had secured with the help of Ernest Lawrence. Angered that Frank had covered up his Communist Party membership, Lawrence banished him from the Rad Lab. Ten years would pass before Frank was invited to teach physics at the college level again. One did not have to be very smart to know that his brother’s position was a shaky one. And Robert Oppenheimer was very smart.

  Shortly after the war was over, Oppenheimer’s successor as Los Alamos, director Norris Bradbury, invited Teller to succeed the departing Bethe as head of the laboratory’s Theoretical Division. The position that Teller had coveted throughout the war seemed within his reach at last. Teller told Bradbury that he would gladly accept, if the lab would take up work on his superbomb idea with the same gusto that it had committed to making the atomic bomb. Bradbury was noncommittal, noting that postwar political conditions made a crash program to build a superbomb unlikely.

  That evening, Teller attended a party where the soon-to-depart Oppenheimer was also present. Teller told Oppenheimer about his conversation with Bradbury earlier that day. “This has been your laboratory, and its future depends upon you,” said Teller. “I will stay if you will help enlist support for work toward a hydrogen bomb or further development of the atomic bomb.” Oppenheimer gave a reply that was short and pointed. “I neither can, nor will do so,” he said. Knowing there was little hope without Oppenheimer’s help, Teller announced that he would accept a post he had been offered by the University of Chicago. Oppenheimer shook Teller’s hand, smiled, and said, “You are doing the right thing.” The two spoke again at the end of the party. “Now that you have decided to go to Chicago, don’t you feel better?” Oppenheimer asked. 44 He told Teller he would have nothing more to do with the superbomb. 45

  Teller, his wife, Mici, and their young son, Paul, packed up and left Los Alamos for Chicago on February 1, 1946. They moved into a duplex in Hyde Park near the university, where Teller resumed an academic life. The next few years proved to be happy and productive ones for Teller. His second child, a girl named Wendy, was born in the summer of 1946, and Teller quickly took to doting on his baby daughter. Freed from the pressures of political turmoil and war for the first time since the early 1930s—and secure in the knowledge of America’s sole possession of the atomic bomb—Teller began to relax. He learned to enjoy the quietly satisfying pleasures of domesticity. He became less choleric, more optimistic, and trusting. He threw himself back into pure research and coauthored numerous papers. He got caught up again in the grandeur and deeply satisfying creativity of basic science. He also wrote articles for the liberal Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, started in 1946 by Met Lab activists. In one article he praised Oppenheimer’s plan for international control of nuclear weapons as “ingenious, daring and basically sound.” 46 “World government,” he wrote in the Bulletin as late as July 1948, “is our only hope for survival…. I believe that we should cease to be infatuated with the menace of this fabulous monster, Russia.” 47 There were moments during these early postwar years when Teller almost forgot about fear and danger.

  The Cold War, however, remained an underlying strain on his newfound optimism. He was troubled by the Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia, by the Berlin Blockade, and by the Communist victory over Nationalist forces in China. A more personal challenge was his family in Hungary. His parents were too old and frail to emigrate, but his widowed sister and her small son could. Teller sent the necessary papers to Hungary, but nothing happened. Then his father, wearied by hunger and depressed by Soviet domination, died. His mother was deported from Budapest to the countryside as a bourgeois “undesirable.” His sister endured secret-police interrogations about his scientific activities. Although his sibling knew nothing, Teller was greatly agitated and angered by her ordeal. These hardships intensified Teller’s childhood fears of the Russians and reinforced his fundamental belief that only the military strength of democracies like the United States kept totalitarian nations like the Soviet Union at bay.

  While Teller felt fearful of the Russians, Szilard remained guilty about his part in the making of the bomb. After the war, he sometimes wished that he could undo what he had done and withdraw from the world—or at least change it. Szilard shared his thoughts at a conference at the University of Chicago in September 1945. A participant who kept shorthand notes of Szilard’s talk wrote:

  We are in an armament race.

  If Russia starts making atomic bombs in two or three years—perhaps five or six years—then we have an armed peace, and it will be a durable peace.

  But we will not have permanent peace at lesser cost than world government. But this cannot come without changed loyalty of people. If we can’t have that, all we can have is a durable peace. Only purpose of a durable peace would be to create conditions 20–30 years from now [that] can bring about world peace. That requires shift of loya
lties.

  If we are sure to get a Third World War, the later it comes the worse for us.

  Victor of next war will make a world government, even if that victor should be the United States, having lost 25 million people dead.

  Szilard’s fear of a nuclear World War III appalled him so much that he decided to have nothing more to do with physics, which he had once associated with creativity but now associated with destruction. In 1947 he took up the study of biology, which was for him a rejection of death and an affirmation of life. Hotel lobbies and cafés remained the settings where he communicated his ideas to others in wide-ranging discussions. People who came in contact with Szilard remained impressed by his capacity to see far beyond what most others were seeing or thinking, but some also concluded dismissively that he had become a Don Quixote, tilting against a nuclear windmill that had begun to turn faster and faster.

  After the war, Hans Bethe returned to Cornell, but continued doing weapons work at Los Alamos during summers because he thought this would give him the credibility to influence government policy along lines he considered constructive. This “inside” strategy reflected Bethe’s pragmatic temperament. He thought that refusing to do any weapons work (as did some of his wartime colleagues) would not accomplish anything: atomic bombs would not go away—Pandora’s box had been opened irrevocably—and there would always be other competent scientists willing to do anything he refused. He explained his thinking this way: