Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  The small room was lit only by a dim red lamp, which was turned off. Teller’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness. It would take about a quarter of an hour for the shock wave to travel deep under the Pacific basin to the California coast. He sat alone in the darkness, with a loudly ticking clock hovering anxiously above the sensitive seismograph that would indicate the slightest tremor with a tiny beam of light on a photographic plate. He recalled what happened next:

  I waited with little patience, the seismograph making at each minute a clearly visible vibration which served as a time signal.

  At last the time signal came that had to be followed by the shock from the explosion and there it seemed to be: the luminous point appeared to dance wildly and irregularly. Was it only that the pencil which I held as a marker trembled in my hand?

  I waited for many more minutes to be sure that the record did not miss any of the shocks that might follow the first. Then, finally, the film was taken off and developed. By that time I had almost convinced myself that what I saw was the motion of my own hand rather than the signal from the first hydrogen bomb.

  Then the trace appeared on the photographic plate. It was clear and unmistakable. It had been made by the wave of compression that had traveled for thousands of miles and brought positive assurance that Mike [the bomb’s nickname] was a success. 77

  Lawrence was the first to offer congratulations.

  The superbomb’s explosion expanded in an instant to a blinding white fireball more than three miles wide. (The Hiroshima fireball had measured little more than one-tenth of a mile.) The fireball seemed to blot out the whole horizon. It dug out of the sea floor a crater two hundred feet deep and a mile and a half wide. Observers felt a wall of heat as if someone had opened an oven, heat that persisted for an unnervingly long time. “You would swear that the whole world was on fire,” one eyewitness wrote home. 78 Swirling with intense radioactivity, the enormous fireball became a burning mushroom cloud with a skirt of boiling water around its base that fell back to sea with a roar. The ominous cloud began to spread out, its top cresting in the stratosphere at twenty-seven miles across, its stem eight miles wide. “It really filled up the sky,” said a physicist who had witnessed earlier atomic tests and was not easily impressed. “It was awesome. It just went on and on.” 79 The superbomb had exploded with the force of more than 10 million tons of TNT, a thousand times greater than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

  Less than two years later, on March 1, 1954, American scientists developed and tested a superbomb with the explosive force of 15 million tons of TNT. Before the decade was over, the Soviets would develop a superbomb with an explosive yield of 60 million tons of TNT Where would it all end?

  As with the atomic bomb in 1945, the superbomb debate forced scientists once again to reflect on the implications of their work. It made them come face-to-face with moral and political issues of enormous moment and scope—for example, weighing the current national interests of their own country against creating a perpetual catastrophic danger for the world. Teller and other proponents argued that it was in the nature of science to pursue knowledge, and no amount of moral scruples or hand-wringing should—or could—stop this quest. “It is the scientist’s job to find the ways in which laws [of nature] can serve the human will,” Teller wrote at the time of the debate. “It is not the scientist’s job to determine whether a hydrogen bomb should be constructed, whether it should be used, or how it should be used.” He put the point more sharply toward the end of his life: “As a scientist, it is my responsibility to make things work that will work. How they’re used is not my responsibility.” 80 For Teller, trying to stop the pursuit of knowledge was not only futile but irrational and even immoral. Knowledge was inherently good.

  In the end, even Teller had to occasionally confront the implications of a weapon whose destructiveness boggled the mind and tortured the conscience. When he did, it left him deeply ambivalent—with elemental feelings of awe mixed with dread. On a spring afternoon in 1950, just weeks after Truman gave the go-ahead to the superbomb, the physicist had a very private and candid talk with his old friend Cloyd Marvin, president of George Washington University, whom Teller had known since arriving in the United States in 1935 to teach at GWU. Teller and Marvin sat together in Marvin’s office in Foggy Bottom until the shadows lengthened and the room grew dark. Teller was in a curious mood; he seemed to be searching for something. Finally he got around to his question. “Suppose you could develop a force capable of destroying all life on earth,” said Teller, pausing for a moment. “Is it right even to take any steps in that direction?” Marvin said it was, assuring Teller that such a force would be safe in the hands of the United States. 81

  That same spring, Teller began composing a bedtime rhyme for his young son, Paul, basing each stanza on a successive letter of the alphabet. He first wrote rhymes for A and B:

  A stands for atom; it is so small

  No one has ever seen it at all.

  B stands for bomb; the bombs are much bigger,

  So, brother, do not be too fast on the trigger.

  Later Teller added a rhyme for H:

  H has become a most ominous letter.

  It means something bigger if not something better. 82

  CHAPTER 10

  The Oppenheimer Affair

  ROBERT OPPENHEIMER HAD a mind and a manner that could be very persuasive, but also an arrogance and an impatience that could be very wounding. His moral sensitivity, moreover, stood at odds with his desire to be near power, an enterprise not often guided by considerations of sin. Famous after the war, Oppenheimer became infatuated with the Washington scene and his influence within it. He became ever sensitive to the way he appeared; Robert Oppenheimer was on his mind at all times. While Oppenheimer’s vanity irritated many of his friends, to his enemies it was intolerable. 1

  Oppenheimer’s enemies included men practiced in the subterranean stiletto warfare of Washington who envied his brilliance and influence, resented his liberal politics, suspected his patriotism because of his radical past and their own fear of communism, and felt no qualms about ruthlessly exploiting his vulnerabilities. So Oppenheimer’s enemies, who felt intimidated and threatened by him and yet could not cope with him, decided to use these skeletons to shame Oppenheimer and to bring him down with a maximum of disgrace so that his influence would be finished. The atmosphere was even more Machiavellian and predatory than usual in Washington life.

  On November 7, 1953, one of Oppenheimer’s enemies, William Borden, a former staff director of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy who had zealously advocated the superbomb and deeply resented Oppenheimer’s opposition to it, mailed a three and a half page, single-spaced letter to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who was another Oppenheimer foe. “More probably than not,” Borden asserted in his accusatory letter, “J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.” Borden listed the factors that led him to this conclusion: Oppenheimer’s financial contributions to the Communist Party during the late 1930s and early 1940s; the fact that his wife, his brother, and his onetime fiancée all had been communists; his contradictory information about espionage approaches in 1943; and his “tireless” work “to retard the United States H-bomb program.” 2

  Oppenheimer had been in Hoover’s crosshairs for years. In 1947 the FBI director had argued in vain against renewing Oppenheimer’s wartime security clearance. Since then, on Hoover’s instructions, FBI agents had busily collected further evidence and innuendo against the physicist through minute and ceaseless surveillance of his public and private life. Oppenheimer’s phone was tapped. His office and home were bugged. His mail was opened. By 1953 the FBI file on Oppenheimer was four and a half feet thick—plenty with which to tarnish his name. After receiving Borden’s letter, Hoover eagerly prepared a digest of Oppenheimer’s file and sent it, along with a copy of the letter, to various top government officials, including President Eisenhower. That Eisenhower had recently come under a
ttack by Senator Joseph McCarthy for laxness in confronting communism made it politically imperative that he and his administration be seen as tough in handling Borden’s accusation.

  Unaware of the storm brewing against him—his celebrity and the caliber of his high-level friends gave him an illusion of invulnerability—Oppenheimer spent the last weeks of 1953 giving the distinguished Reith Lectures over BBC Radio from a studio in Bush House, London. In one of these lectures, Oppenheimer expressed his personal view of communism:

  It is a cruel and humorless sort of pun that so powerful a present form of modern tyranny should call itself by the very name of a belief in community, by a word “communism” which in other times evoked memories of villages and village inns and of artisans concerting their skills, and of men of learning content with anonymity.

  But perhaps only a malignant end can follow the systematic belief that all communities are one community; that all truth is one truth; that all experience is compatible with all other; that total knowledge is possible; that all that is potential can exist as actual.

  This is not man’s fate; this is not his path; to force him on it makes him resemble not that divine image of the all-knowing and all-powerful but the helpless, iron-bound prisoner of a dying world.

  Whatever the young and naive Oppenheimer’s view of communism had been in the late 1930s and early 1940s, in these words an older and wiser Oppenheimer clearly condemned an ideology that held no appeal or sway over him. But perhaps that did not matter. It is a hallmark of Greek tragedy that the selection of the victim is never accidental, and the end is always foreordained.

  Borden and Hoover triggered the vendetta against Oppenheimer, but it was AEC chairman Lewis Strauss who brought him down. An owlish and dour-looking man with cool, deep, enormous eyes like a night animal, Strauss had a keen mind and a clever political sense. As a young naval officer in World War I, he had caught Herbert Hoover’s attention, and had seen high politics firsthand as Hoover’s personal assistant. Between the wars, he had made a fortune on Wall Street before rejoining the navy at the beginning of World War II, where he had risen to the rank of rear admiral and head of the navy’s Ordnance Division. Strauss possessed considerable charm and urbanity that cloaked profound insecurity about his limited formal education and humble roots, two areas where he felt particularly inadequate in comparison to Oppenheimer. This was apparent in Strauss’s description of Oppenheimer when he first met him in the summer of 1945. “I was enormously impressed with him,” said Strauss. “He was a man with an extraordinary mind, a compelling, dramatic personality, a charm for me that I suppose rose out of his poetic approach to the problem we faced together. I’m not his peer, of course.” 3

  A self-made man with a limited formal education, Strauss labored to comprehend physics and was proudly sensitive about his intellectual ability. He made a cult of science, and since he saw Oppenheimer as the apotheosis of the scientist, he considered him a wizard who would not withhold his powers for good unless he proposed to employ them for evil. There was also something in Strauss that gave him a desperate need to be always agreed with, to dominate. With superiors, he was always pliable and flattering. But from equals and subordinates, he brooked no argument. One acquaintance said of him, “If you disagree with Lewis about anything, he assumes you’re just a fool at first. But if you go on disagreeing with him, he concludes you must be a traitor.” 4 His face, with its rosy hue and the blandness of its spectacles, gave no hint of his resentments or his long and unforgiving memory. His personality combined extraordinary vanity with a stubborn vindictiveness.

  Oppenheimer was fated from the first to get on badly with such a man. The scientist bore some responsibility himself. He had demanding standards, more than a hint of intellectual snobbery, and sometimes cold contempt for those who failed to measure up. These qualities of Oppenheimer’s only inflamed those of Strauss. 5

  The triggering incident had occurred in June 1949, when Oppenheimer testified before the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy about the exportation of radioactive isotopes. Strauss, who had testified against such exports because he thought they might assist in production of an atomic bomb, was present in the hearing room. When asked about the possible military application of exported isotopes, Oppenheimer replied with the laserlike sarcasm that had wounded so many others before:

  No one can force me to say you cannot use these isotopes for atomic energy. You can use a shovel for atomic energy. In fact you do. You can use a bottle of beer for atomic energy. In fact you do. But to get some perspective, the fact is that during the war and after the war these materials have played no significant part and in my knowledge no part at all. 6

  As snickers spread around the hearing room, it became clear that Oppenheimer was ridiculing someone. AEC deputy general counsel Joseph Volpe, seated next to him at the witness table, had no doubt who that someone was. He turned around and sneaked a look at Strauss. His eyes had narrowed, his jaw had tightened, and his cheeks had colored. His countenance was cold, hard, and furious. A senator then asked: “Is it not true, doctor, that the overall national defense of a country rests on more than secret military development alone?” “Of course it does,” replied Oppenheimer, who could not stop there. “My own rating of the importance of isotopes in this broad sense is that they are far less important than electronic devices, but far more important than, let us say, vitamins. Somewhere in between.” There were more snickers. At the end of his testimony, Oppenheimer, delighted and amused by his own wit, turned to Volpe and said, “Well, Joe, how did I do?” Volpe, with the memory of Strauss’s twisted face vividly in his mind, shook his head and answered, “Too well, Robert. Much too well.” Years later, another observer in the hearing room that afternoon could still remember Strauss’s expression. “There was a look of hatred there that you don’t see very often in a man’s face.” 7 Like most vain and insecure men, Strauss was a close accountant of small insults. All such sins were entered in a ledger, no less permanent for being kept in Strauss’s razor-sharp memory rather than on bookkeeper’s pages. It concealed interior tides of terrible anger.

  Oppenheimer’s barbs were unwise—it is always dangerous business to slight powerful people in Washington—but they were understandable. Oppenheimer knew that Strauss had whispered doubts about his loyalty to others in Washington, that the FBI had leaked these doubts to friends in the press, that his every action was under round-the-clock FBI surveillance, and that he could never be certain what kind of whispering campaign was being mounted against him or when it would eventually come to a head. He was angry about the backstage politics and it showed in his rude demeanor.

  In Strauss, Oppenheimer had antagonized a vindictive man who retaliated from the moment Eisenhower named him AEC chairman in June 1953. During his first week in office, Strauss sent a squad of AEC security officers to Princeton to remove the classified documents which Oppenheimer had always been allowed to store in a specially guarded facility in his office, and then hired former army security agents to dig up derogatory information on Oppenheimer. Strauss was so obsessed with getting Oppenheimer that he turned the AEC’s security officers into his personal gumshoes. 8 When Borden’s letter came in, Strauss could have reassured Eisenhower, but he did not. Oppenheimer’s influence among physicists was so pervasive and, in Strauss’s view, so pernicious that it could be thwarted only by destroying him. With the fuse lit by Borden, Strauss calculated that he at last had at hand the means of Oppenheimer’s destruction.

  Strauss phoned Oppenheimer in Princeton shortly after the physicist’s return from Europe, but did not mention that his security clearance had been suspended or even that there were any serious problems. “I was wondering whether you planned to come down here?” Strauss amiably inquired. “I haven’t made plans,” Oppenheimer replied, “but I can easily do it if you like.” 9 A week later, on the afternoon of December 21, 1953, Oppenheimer called on Strauss at his office at AEC headquarters. The two men took their seats at a long tabl
e in the large octagonal room where the Combined Chiefs of Staff had met during World War II. Oppenheimer had not been told the reason for the meeting, so it began with a coldly correct exchange of pleasantries. After a while, Strauss dropped the pleasantries and showed Oppenheimer a letter of charges based on Borden’s correspondence but refused to give him a copy. Strauss explained that as a result of Borden’s letter, Eisenhower had ordered a “blank wall” placed between Oppenheimer and any further access to secret information. The physicist’s clearance was being suspended until his “character, associations, and loyalty” had been judged by a Personnel Security Board hearing, which would be conducted in secret and not bound by courtroom rules of evidence. Strauss told Oppenheimer that he could resign rather than face a hearing and thus “avoid an explicit consideration of the charges.”

  The issue of clearance was crucial because Oppenheimer’s influence depended on access to classified information. “You had to be inside the government if you wanted to have an influence, especially on these military matters,” Rabi noted. “Since there was all that secrecy, you couldn’t know what you were talking about unless you were a part of it.” 10 Oppenheimer’s top secret “Q Clearance” allowed him to know what he was talking about; withdrawing it would eliminate his influence immediately and effectively.