Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  Compton’s ambivalence had led him to refuse to have anything more to do with weapons making. Shortly after the Soviet atomic test in August 1949, Ernest Lawrence came to visit him in St. Louis. Depressed by the news, Lawrence had tried to estimate how long it would be until the Russians could attack the United States. He had said he was going to turn the efforts of his lab toward developing new weapons that he hoped would be helpful in the approaching struggle. Compton had told Lawrence that his task was no longer to develop nuclear weapons but to develop young people to bring about peace by building a strong society.

  Not surprisingly, the superbomb filled Compton with anxiety. If such weapons were used upon centers of population, he doubted whether enough survivors would remain to rebuild civilized human existence. “The world is crying that the weapon itself and those responsible for its development and use be brought under control of those whose lives it endangers and at the same time protects,” said Compton. “And this means everyone.” 4 He opposed targeting civilian populations in war, urged limiting the size and number of superbombs, and advocated no-first-use of nuclear weapons by the United States—all ideas which became central goals of arms control advocates in later years. Above all, Compton urged the avoidance of nuclear war. “No nation,” he said again and again, to political leaders and ordinary people alike, “would expect such a war to end without itself suffering more damage than its possible gains would be worth.” 5

  Compton’s style as chancellor of Washington University had been quiet and unpretentious. He told the faculty to call him Mr. Compton, not Dr. Compton, and asked that they do the same among themselves. He slipped easily into conversation with students, who sensed his disciplined enthusiasm, inner tranquility, and natural friendliness. In 1954 he retired as chancellor and accepted appointment as professor of natural philosophy at the university. The aging Compton devoted himself to speaking and writing about the impact of science on society and the morality of science. When asked to reflect on scientists’ role in the creation of the bomb, he would cite the biblical story of Eden—it had highly personal meaning for him. When man and woman wished to return to the garden of innocence, he pointed out, an angel with a fiery sword blocked their way. They had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and as the serpent had promised, became as gods, knowing good from evil. This was a heavy burden. They longed to be free of the knowledge of good and evil, but they could not. Their only peace lay in working to make the world as they felt it should be. Free will made people responsible for their destiny.

  After the war, Berkeley had become the mecca of experimental physics and Ernest Lawrence its aging prophet. Tall and heavyset, with thinning hair set above rimless bifocals, Lawrence ruled the Rad Lab like an impresario, parking his car in a no-parking zone just outside the main door. To anyone who acted without consulting him first, he glared fiercely and with his jowls quivering said, “You had better learn which side your bread is buttered on if you want to remain in this laboratory.” 6 At other times he would go out of his way to help a subordinate by counseling on technique, by assisting in the building of equipment, or by suggesting some fruitful line of research. The Rad Lab grew rapidly during these years, aided by almost unlimited government funding. What had begun in the 1930s as Lawrence’s personal laboratory in a wooden shed had grown by the 1950s into a vast complex employing more than 2,800 people, including nearly 300 graduate students. 7

  As he had always been, Lawrence was constantly on the move, the rapid character of his life heightened by increased responsibilities. But there were some changes. His legendary energy diminished and he abandoned his lifelong quest for ever larger contraptions, becoming the master tinkerer again. “Why, fellas, you don’t want a big machine,” he told a group of young experimental physicists at the University of Illinois who were redesigning the cyclotron there. “There’s too much emphasis these days on sheer size for its own sake. Build something small and precisely suited to the research information you want from it.” 8 It was a sign of a subtle shift, recognition of a connection between invention and application and that things had already moved “so far beyond human scale.” 9

  Lawrence had not initially questioned the nuclear buildup (indeed, he had been in favor of it), but the escalating atomic arms race and his growing sense of mortality made him begin to worry whether he had been right. He grew more modest, philosophical, and tentative, and acknowledged uncertainties and vulnerabilities for the first time in his life. “The Nobel Prize in physics, or indeed in any other subject, surely is not to be taken as evidence of special wisdom in philosophy or of unusual insight into metaphysical problems,” he wrote a Berkeley neighbor in February 1955. 10 He even began to advocate scientific exchanges as a way of breaking down the Iron Curtain and took to giving visiting Soviet physicists personal tours of the Rad Lab as a way of building the mutual understanding that he now saw as necessary to prevent a nuclear holocaust between Cold War rivals.

  Biology had offered Leo Szilard an intellectual challenge and an escape from his guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, allowing him to repudiate death and embrace life. “The mysteries of biology are no less deep than the mysteries of physics were one or two generations ago,” he said, “and the tools are available to solve them provided only that we believe they can be solved.” 11 Yet he did not abandon arms control. “Theoretically I am supposed to divide my time between finding what life is and trying to preserve it by saving the world,” he wrote to Bohr in 1950. “At present the world seems to be beyond saving, and that leaves me more free time for biology.” 12 He also found time to write satires on science and politics. In one story, superhuman minds on a distant planet worried that earthlings were smart enough to separate U-235, yet stupid enough to use this knowledge to make atomic bombs. 13

  To strangers Szilard seemed shy, witty, and eccentric. To his peers he seemed gruff, demanding, even arrogant. A friend invited him to a dinner party one evening at which she served asparagus. When the platter reached him, he cut off all the tips and put them on his plate. Astonished, she asked Szilard why he did that, and he answered that he liked the tips the best. Another friend said, “I highly esteem Leo, and I would do anything for him—except work with him.” Shy and lonely behind his bombastic quips and wisecracks, he amused, annoyed, and bewildered the people around him. Szilard acknowledged his impulsive, erratic manner and moods with pride. At a meeting he had thrown into confusion, he rose and impishly announced, “I think I can best contribute to the progress of this conference by leaving.” During such conferences he habitually sat like a drowsy hound, with his round face and potbelly, giving the impression he was asleep while his mind played and wandered. Then he would suddenly spring to life and ask pointed questions that he would gruffly repeat if the answers did not come quickly. 14

  Often what was complex and baffling to others was perfectly clear to Szilard. At these moments, he would look at his listener, shake his head impatiently, and say, “You’ll never understand.” His friends devised the “Szilard Index”: the number of sentences a speaker could utter before Szilard grew bored and stomped out. Part of this was his mighty ego. But behind his arrogance and apparent contempt was a great compassion for humanity that found expression in his tender solicitude toward children and his commitment to the moral use of knowledge. “A scientist must have certain qualities to be creative,” he said, “and the moral qualities are very important. Intelligence is not enough. There must be a religious attitude. By that I mean an inner conviction that life has a meaning. Einstein said and I agree, ‘Religion without science is blind, science without religion is lame.’” 15

  In late 1957 Lawrence told Sproul that he might retire as director of the Rad Lab, after creating and running it with iron-fisted control for more than a quarter of a century. To the elderly former physics department chairman who had hired him nearly three decades before, he talked nostalgically about coming back to LeConte Hall, where he had arrived as a young physicist from Yale in 1929, and simply da
bbling in a small laboratory in his office. 16

  It seemed unthinkable that Lawrence would ever scale back to such an extent, but he had his reasons. By shedding the burdens he was carrying, Lawrence hoped to relieve the painful ulcers that were aggravated by the pressures under which he had worked for so long. But it was not to be. In 1958 Eisenhower asked Lawrence to serve as one of three U.S. scientists at a technical conference in Geneva to study whether detection measures were feasible for a suspension of nuclear tests. Lawrence, who favored limiting nuclear tests, answered the president’s call despite feeling worse than usual. On the way to Washington for briefings, he stopped in St. Louis to visit Compton, who was himself in the hospital recovering from a heart attack. Among other things, the old experimenter told a sympathetic Compton that limits must be put on nuclear experiments in order to control the arms race.

  At Geneva, Lawrence was exhausted and uncomfortable. His intestinal bleeding increased rapidly and he grew more silent each day. Violently ill, he ran a high fever and had to be flown back home, where he was immediately admitted to a hospital. The attending physicians did what they could, but his condition worsened. (The Radiation Laboratory founder adamantly refused to submit to X rays.) Lying in his hospital bed, Lawrence apologized to his wife, Molly, “You know, I wish I’d taken more time off. I would have liked to, you know, but my conscience wouldn’t let me.” 17 The doctors decided they had to perform a colostomy, a difficult operation that removes the lower section of the digestive tract. Very discouraged, Lawrence was convinced that he would not survive the surgery. Five hours into the ordeal, as his circulatory system failed, he turned to Molly at his side in the operating room and whispered, “I’m ready to give up now.” 18 He died at Stanford University Hospital on August 27, 1958, shortly after his fifty-seventh birthday.

  Only fifty years old when his security hearing ended in 1954, Robert Oppenheimer was at the height of his abilities and chafed at his forced exile from power. He missed being at the center of scientific action, and the telephone calls from secretaries of state and four-star generals. “He still carried on,” said Hans Bethe, but “he was a broken man.” 19 His brother, Frank, sensed that he felt defeated by his enemies. “The fact that he was kicked out in this way really got him down,” Frank said. 20 Friends could not understand where he found the courage to confront his future.

  Washington and weapons no longer part of his life, Oppenheimer settled into dignified exile as director of the Institute for Advanced Study. Sitting in his office, he often found himself full of both outrage and regret. Here he was, in one of the most splendid of honorific jobs, but his powers were rusting. He could not help thinking things in Washington would be in better shape if he had not been denied clearance. The creative and organizational energies he once devoted to physics and politics were still running strong and sought an outlet.

  Oppenheimer was gradually able to get back to reading, thinking, and talking about physics—his first love—but he would never again be the politically naive professor he had been in the 1930s, when he was so indifferent to the world around him that he did not read newspapers. “I should think,” he said now, “that you wouldn’t step twice in the same river.” His ego and his evangelism would not permit him to withdraw from the public stage, so he became a much-traveled and much-interviewed celebrity who had a talent for self-dramatization and an ability to project a larger-than-life image to his audience. None of this, however, could make up for the sadness and the sense of loss in his life.

  Oppenheimer received many visitors during these years. The white, unadorned walls of his office contained a blackboard at one end and a large window looking out on a rich green lawn at the other, with books piled neatly on a metal desk and conference table in between. But if the room was serene, the man occupying it was not. Oppenheimer chain-smoked or puffed on a pipe, pausing nervously to fill it, light it, and relight it from a big box of wooden matches. He fidgeted constantly. He talked cautiously and nervously, usually only in response to questions. There was much he wanted to say but did not because he didn’t want to appear to be seeking sympathy. When asked about his feelings—Was he bitter? Did he feel mistreated by the government he had worked for so hard? Was he hurt?—Oppenheimer declined to answer, refusing, as he said, to “bare his soul.” 21 All he said about himself was this: “I have tried to prove that a security risk can survive…. I had two alternatives. One was to seek ways to appeal the decision. I didn’t think we’d buy ourselves anything by that. The other was to prove that, in spite of some incredible words the commission wrote about me, these words would not necessarily be believed by all people. In other words, I had to establish by other means that what was put out as a final judgment about me wasn’t the final judgment. And the only way to do this was by surviving.” 22 He believed in a religion of endurance.

  In 1957 the Atoms for Peace Award had been established in the United States to honor the individual who had contributed most to the peaceful uses of atomic energy “without regard to the recipient’s political inclinations or nationality.” On October twenty-fourth that year, President Eisenhower had presented the award to Bohr at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. The citation read: “Niels Bohr personifies the modern advances in science and the concern of the man of science for the broad human implications of scientific knowledge.” Applause rolled through the room as the aging, moonfaced Bohr had shuffled to his feet to accept the award. As the applause mounted, shouts could be heard above the uproar, for Bohr not only was esteemed and loved by the audience but stood for all that they wanted physicists to be—and believed they could be, given enough courage and insight. Bohr lived out the final years of his life in quiet retirement in his native Denmark. He died of heart failure at the age of seventy-seven on November 18, 1962. His remains were cremated and his ashes interred in the family cemetery in Copenhagen.

  Always one to place himself at the center of things, Szilard continued to argue that the same qualities that produced the atomic bomb would be needed to solve the political and social problems that the bomb created: originality, imagination, resourcefulness, and hard work. His method of attacking the problem was, as in all things, energetic and eccentric. He moved about by train and plane, dictating letters and articles in paper-strewn hotel rooms, crisscrossing the country and the world proselytizing against the nuclear arms race and the Cold War. Sometimes he seemed to take impish delight in creating around himself an air of mystery. A freewheeling genius who preferred working behind the scenes, he generated ideas for people in power and spouted advice to anyone who would listen. He also sought contact with Soviet scientists. His idea was simple yet revolutionary: get scientists themselves to address and solve the problem they had created. This notion materialized in a series of “Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs” that began in the summer of 1957 at the Nova Scotia village of Pugwash, where industrialist Cyrus Eaton offered the scientists use of his estate. The Pugwash Conferences soon became the leading forum for international discussion of the nuclear arms race. At these meetings, Szilard offered proposals to avoid a nuclear cataclysm, many of which would eventually be adopted: creating a Washington-Moscow hotline; reducing stockpiles and limiting proliferation; renouncing first use; devising inspection systems; improving command and control to prevent accidents and hair-trigger launches. He also proposed what would later be called “minimal deterrence” by urging the United States and the Soviet Union to stop their nuclear tests, yet retain just enough weapons to deter each other. 23 Szilard resisted the scholasticism that characterized many academic arms control debates. He did not believe nuclear weapons could, or should, be eliminated; but they should be minimized and their use negated by political accord. He favored multilateral disarmament, carried out step-by-step with proper guarantees.

  But while Szilard’s proposals were farsighted, he lacked both the subtlety necessary to influence the Washington establishment that would have to carry them out and the patience for the bureau
cratic scramble that preceded and followed decisions. He habitually moved outside established channels to try to get things done. His actions invited suspicion in Cold War America. FBI agents kept him under surveillance long after the Manhattan Project. Still his influence reached official channels, at least indirectly. One route ran through the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), where colleagues sympathetic to Szilard’s ideas had access to the White House. “Szilard kept us interested in the subject of arms control,” recalled Bethe, who was a PSAC member, “and later on that committee, in turn, sponsored the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, a part of the government.” 24

  Szilard clashed often with Teller during these years; he was one of very few people to whom Teller would seriously listen when there was a disagreement. The two debated on national TV in the fall of 1960. They agreed that the danger of nuclear war was great, noted Szilard, “but Teller meant this danger is great if the U.S. government should listen to me, and I meant the danger was great if the U.S. government should listen to him.” As their argument deepened, Szilard suggested, “I think, Teller, we should shake hands because maybe later on we don’t.” The studio audience laughed and applauded, but this did not keep the two from sparring more aggressively. During one heated exchange, when Teller accused Szilard of “irresponsible trustfulness” toward the Russians, Szilard in turn blamed Teller for his “irresponsible distrust.” 25

  Around this time Szilard was diagnosed with bladder cancer, considered terminal by most doctors. But true to character, Szilard did the unexpected: he did not die. He took control of his medical treatment, demanding that a detailed course of radiation worked out by him and his wife, Trude, be administered. The doctors followed his orders, and he was thoroughly cured, although his recovery took the better part of a year. During that time, his hospital room became his office and the hospital solarium his receiving room. Not surprisingly, when Szilard was discharged, the hospital was even more relieved to be rid of Szilard than Szilard was to be rid of the hospital.