Pandora's Keepers

by Brian Van DeMark

  Reaction to Oppenheimer’s death was swift and moving. “It was as if an older brother had died,” lamented Bethe, who added wistfully, “Where he was, there was always life and excitement.” 40 “We were friends,” said Rabi. “Oppenheimer meant a great deal to me. I miss him.” 41 In Japan, where bombs made under Oppenheimer’s direction had destroyed two cities, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hideki Yukawa called Oppenheimer “a symbol of the tragedy of the modern nuclear scientists.” 42 Perhaps Oppenheimer’s Princeton colleague and fellow physicist Abraham Pais put it best: “In the years to come, the physicist will speak of him. So will the historian and the psychologist, the playwright and the poet.” 43 There were so many facets to him. “Oppenheimer was a man who was put together of many bright shining splinters” in the perceptive words of Rabi. 44

  It was intensely cold on February 25, 1967, the day that friends, associates, and admirers gathered in Princeton University’s Alexander Hall to pay their final respects to J. Robert Oppenheimer. In the front row sat Kitty, Peter, Toni, and Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank. Behind them sat many notables of American science and government—among them Rabi and Groves, now white haired, who had flown in on a specially chartered plane to attend the service.

  Those who delivered eulogies spoke with visible emotion. Bethe talked movingly of Oppenheimer’s time of glory:

  Los Alamos might have succeeded without him, but certainly only with much greater strain, less enthusiasm, and less speed. As it was, it was an unforgettable experience for all the members of the laboratory. There were other wartime laboratories of high achievement, but I never observed in any one of these other groups quite the spirit of belonging together, quite the urge to reminisce about the days of the laboratory, quite the feeling that this was really the great times of their lives.

  George Kennan, who had become Oppenheimer’s colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study, recalled a poignant story. “In the dark days of the early 1950s,” said Kennan, “when troubles crowded in upon him from many sides and when he found himself harassed by his position at the center of the controversy, I drew his attention to the fact that he would be welcome in a hundred academic centers abroad and asked him whether he had not thought of taking residence outside this country. With tears in his eyes, he replied, ‘Damn it, I happen to love this country.’” “On no one,” concluded Kennan, “did there ever rest with greater cruelty the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength.” Nor was there anyone “who more passionately desired to be useful in averting the catastrophes to which the development of the weapons of mass destruction threatened to lead.” 45

  At the end of the service the Juilliard String Quartet performed the adagio and allegro movements of Beethoven’s Quartet in C-sharp Minor. Back in the 1930s, the C-sharp minor had been the emblem that Oppenheimer and the aspiring theoretical physicists at his feet in Berkeley had held up to proclaim their own refinement and purity. They had been too innocent to discover that Beethoven had instructed his publisher that “it must be dedicated to Lieutenant General Field Marshal von Stutterheim.” The ghost of war had hovered in the background of the seminar rooms where they had dreamed, presaging a future that would haunt each and every one of them. 46 Oppenheimer came to understand this irony and commented on it in the last years of his life. “The atom bomb and nuclear weapons will not go away,” he said. “These weapons are as present as the desire to have them and to use them. We can only hope that they will increasingly appear irrelevant and thus in the end preposterous, that some day we will look back ashamed of how stupid we were [to want them].” 47

  “Our experience in World War II had a profound effect on the scientific community,” I. I. Rabi had said after the war. “We saw how our command of scientific knowledge and method, aided by vast sums of money and support, have made it absurdly easy to kill human beings. This fateful truth has brought home to many scientists the fact that they cannot escape the social responsibility of their actions. No longer can science be just ‘fun and games.’” 48 This realization had changed the direction of Rabi’s life. He gave up experimental physics and began advising the government. Trips to Washington came with increasing frequency. Demanding positions on the GAC and the PSAC did not impede his bursts of laughter in moments of amusement, nor did they impede his concern for the state of science and society. A quiet and self-confident man who projected toughness with a smile, Rabi played the inside game, operating behind the scenes to help chart America’s course in the new world that the atomic age had created. “I thought that by working from within, we might be able to do something about getting rid of the atomic bomb,” he said later. 49 Rabi confined his opinion to the inner councils of government, but in those councils he never had the slightest fear of speaking his mind to anyone.

  Throughout these years Rabi had worked closely with Oppenheimer. They had served together on the powerful GAC: Oppenheimer as its first chairman, Rabi succeeding him in 1952. Some physicists questioned the propriety of Rabi succeeding Oppenheimer after his close friend had been hounded from government service. The pragmatic Rabi had offered a quick reply. “If I had quit in a huff, I would have gotten two lines in the New York Times, and nobody would ever listen to me again on these questions. If I want to have any influence on what’s going on, I have to stay on the inside.” 50 His style as an adviser differed from Oppenheimer’s. Rabi stayed out of the limelight. He was quiet and wise, where Oppenheimer had been vocal and brilliant. Rabi deliberately played second fiddle because he wanted to be effective. “During the war,” he said, “I had learned that you either get the credit or you get it done.” 51 Rabi wanted to get it done.

  When he was not advising the government, he was teaching. Every morning until he retired as professor of physics at Columbia University, the short, bantamlike Rabi put on his horn-rimmed glasses, left his faculty apartment on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson River, and strolled up a gentle slope to Pupin Hall, a red-brick pile with limestone trim, where he rode an elevator to his eighth-floor office. Colleagues always knew when he got off the elevator because he hummed as he walked down the corridor. Inside his large, plain office was a huge blackboard that ran the length of an entire wall to large double windows, beneath which sat a green couch stacked with learned journals. He always kept his door open, did his own filing, and answered his own telephone. He maintained close, warm relations with people ranging from Nobel Prize-winning physicists to freshman students.

  Rabi’s old sparring partner, Edward Teller, became the bête noire of liberals, who caricatured him as an amoral and unbalanced scientist. Teller’s volatile temperament and forbidding appearance contributed to this impression. Always headstrong, he was quick to denounce any and all who opposed him. To a physicist who challenged him on arms control, he said: “You’re either stupid or you’re treasonous, and I know you’re not stupid.” 52 His heavy eyebrows grew even bushier as he aged, giving him the shadowy, almost fierce countenance of the diabolical scientist. He talked with a deep voice in a strong, well-enunciated cadence with an accent that was part European university professor, part Cold War inquisitor, and part Bela Lugosi.

  Teller’s efforts to make amends for his testimony against Oppenheimer got him nowhere. Ostracized within the physics community after 1954, Teller had made new friends, this time among the military, financiers, industrialists, and conservative politicians. He became an ally and a symbol of the American Right—the only one of the nine physicists to do so. It was not long before he was writing and speechifying like the best of them. The higher he flew with the hawks, the more it seemed to compensate for his ostracism by his peers—and the more he was impelled to justify and rationalize his actions. It was a hard and wearying journey.

  Lewis Strauss once said that there were three kinds of physicists: theoretical, applied, and political. Teller was the most political of them all. He became extraordinarily well connected, often gaining access to th
e highest councils of government denied to scientists of lesser note. Time featured him on the cover of its November 18, 1957, issue, presenting Teller in a four-page story as the shining example of U.S. science at its best because he, more than any of his peers, had recognized the accelerating pace of Russian scientific achievement before sputnik. Like many Americans of the time, he was staunchly anticommunist. There was no weapon big enough to make him sleep well in a world where the Soviet Union existed. He was given to doom-laden pronouncements about communists taking over the earth and believed it a fatal fallacy that the West could be protected by enunciating moral principles while remaining militarily vulnerable.

  As a result, Teller became a leading critic of all arms control initiatives, beginning with his fight against a nuclear test moratorium in the late 1950s. Eisenhower, at first favorably disposed toward a moratorium, was partly dissuaded when Teller came to the White House and told him that with continued testing the United States could develop “clean” (fallout free) weapons and that the Soviets could negate any moratorium by undetectable clandestine tests. If America was behind, Teller reasoned, it had to test to catch up; and if it was ahead, it had to test to stay there. As usual, Teller committed himself in an all-or-nothing way. To rally public support, he wrote, lectured, and engaged in radio and television debates with pro-test-ban spokesmen; to rally scientific backing, he helped devise experiments to show how the Russians could cheat on a test-ban agreement if they wanted to; to keep the Livermore lab on its toes in weapons development and ready for testing, he took direct charge of operations there.

  The accumulated strains of overwork, added to the animosities that he felt increasingly surrounded him, began to take their toll, both physically and emotionally. His health deteriorated. His ulcerative colitis required daily doses of medicine and a doctor-ordered diet, frustrating for a man who had always devoured food with gusto. To a friend he wrote: “On my last medical checkup it was found that I have the same trouble as Ernest. It is a good thing to imitate him, but it seems I am carrying it too far. I have resigned from many of the things I am now doing and will have to lead a more quiet life.” 53 His frustration was compounded by continuous concern for the fate of family members he had left behind in Hungary. Their experiences under communist rule were bitter, and they helped to harden the mistrust and hostility he felt toward the Soviets well into his later years. His former zest now gave way to somberness and black moods of near despair. The more opposition that he encountered, the more relentlessly he drove himself to overcome it—and the more impatient and irritable he became. As his isolation grew, so did his stubbornness, irascibility, and sense of self-importance.

  The debate over the Limited Test Ban Treaty—which sought to end hazardous radiation fallout from nuclear explosions in the atmosphere—roused Teller’s temper to a fever pitch. The treaty, which had the backing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was submitted to the Senate for ratification on August 9, 1963. Eleven days later, on August twentieth, Teller appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Members of the Armed Services Committee and the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy also attended. Teller’s testimony was presented without any prepared text or notes and was delivered with his usual great force and conviction. Largely for this reason he received far more attention from press and television than any other witness. He told the senators that the treaty would not make it more difficult for Russia to catch up, as some of its proponents had claimed, because “it is by no means certain that the United States is ahead of the Soviet Union in the field of nuclear explosives.” * He added that the treaty should not be passed because the Russians would secretly cheat—they might even do tests behind the moon. He ended by warning the senators that if they ratified the treaty, “You will have given away the future safety of our country and increased the dangers of war.” 54 When asked his reaction to Teller’s testimony, President Kennedy replied, “It would be very difficult to satisfy Dr. Teller in this field.” 55 The Senate agreed with Kennedy, ratifying the Limited Test Ban Treaty on September 23, 1963, by an overwhelming vote of eighty to nineteen. No country has detonated a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere since.

  During his last years at Columbia, Rabi taught a course called Philosophical and Social Implications of Twentieth-Century Physics. In it, Rabi tried to show the importance of science to modern life. To Rabi, physics was not mysterious—it was an inspiring quest, a great game—and the playing field was the universe itself. “You’re playing with a champ,” he told students. “You’re trying to find out how God made the world, just like Jacob wrestling with the angel.” 56 Rabi wanted people to understand scientists: their hopes and fears, their motivations and insecurities, how they thought and worked, in order to see them as flesh-and-blood human beings. To Rabi, scientists were not remote; they had “a vital role—sometimes one thinks of it as a fatal role” to play in the affairs of the world, he would say. 57 But Rabi increasingly worried that those around him were specialists—technicians, really—who ignored the larger significance of their work. The increasing abstractions of modern physics were leading to less, not more, engagement with the world.

  Rabi taught his last class in the spring of 1967, ending a forty-year career at Columbia. He had not enjoyed a reputation as a great lecturer and was feared by students as a tough taskmaster, but he was admired—as he had always been—for his moral integrity and an impeccable taste that set a style for the study of physics. He told his final class that American nuclear power was so vast that it was distorting human relationships. “Just because we got there first,” he said, “doesn’t mean that we should have the power of life and death over the whole world. When you get that powerful you begin to lose pity for the human condition.” He closed on the theme of power and responsibility. “I have spent most of my time in directions that would help us diminish our responsibility—relieve us of this burden” of power over life and death of nations, he said. “Although I have worked very hard,” he added, “I have not been very successful.”

  Retirement held no professional terrors for Rabi, who retained his close connection with Columbia’s physics department. But he knew his time on the frontier of physics had passed. “I keep somewhat in touch with it,” he observed, “but not in a creative way. I’m always afraid of being a stuffed shirt—making do with pretense rather than actuality.” 58 In retirement, Rabi watched as the superpowers continued to build up their nuclear stockpiles to absurd levels. He became discouraged, then dejected, and finally angry. He felt America’s blind reliance on military strength threatened the ethical principles on which that strength rested. “Americans are a moral people. They have respect for human life even where there are differences of opinion,” he stressed. 59 Rabi declared that every military and political leader in the world with responsibility for nuclear weapons ought to observe in person, as he had, at least one detonation of a nuclear weapon, believing the effect would be so overpowering, so frightening and terrifying, that a sane person could draw only one conclusion: that these weapons must never be used and the only way to ensure that was to abolish them.

  Teller’s image as a hawk in the 1960s and 1970s was balanced by his repeated calls for scientific openness. He made these requests with deep feeling in the face of bitter criticism from those who assailed him as the mastermind of a ruinous arms race and a mad scientist fixated on mass destruction, some of whom disrupted his talks with raucous shouts of “War Criminal!” (In 1970, radical students burned him in effigy a half block from his Berkeley home.) Teller passionately advocated the abolition of secrecy surrounding scientific research, including classified nuclear work. He argued that open scientific work was necessary “so we can clearly understand what we are talking about” in the growing debate over the impact of science and technology on society—a debate that had aroused in many people a sentiment against technology. 60 “In a time of rapid development,” he proclaimed on another occasion, “the greatest danger is ignorance.” 61

 
By the time he turned seventy in 1978, Teller had experienced so much conflict that it seemed there could hardly be room for any more. But his indomitable will and technological exuberance fed his restless ambition, and he continued to promote big new ideas. Not all of his ideas seemed sensible to others. For example, he conceived that superbombs could be used to dig a sea-level waterway across Central America as an alternative to the Panama Canal. He also assumed a leading role in pushing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or “Star Wars”) during the 1980s, the conservative years of Reagan, whose fierce anticommunism matched Teller’s own. Teller lobbied congressmen and administration officials indefatigably on behalf of the SDI. He looked on the SDI—an X-ray laser-based antimissile shield—as a silver bullet of sorts. If the United States could defend itself against nuclear missile attack, Teller reasoned, then it would not need to negotiate with the Soviet Union and it could move from a strategy of mutual assured destruction (popularly known as MAD) to a strategy of assured survival. He also was driven by guilt, confessing to an interviewer that “a good part, an important part, of my own psychology” was trying to negate, with antimissile arms, the horror of nuclear annihilation he had helped to give the world. 62 A theory that might or might not become a reality after years of research, SDI had many problems, not the least of which was Teller’s tendency to minimize technical problems, to make extravagant claims, and to describe hypothetical outcomes as if they were virtual accomplishments. Critics began calling Teller “the original E.T.” and accused him of wanting to create a “pin-ball outer-space war.” 63