by Ray Monk
Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Ray Monk
List of Illustrations
Title Page
Preface and Acknowledgements
Part I: 1904–1926
1. ‘Amerika, du hast es besser’: Oppenheimer’s German Jewish Background
2. Childhood
3. First Love: New Mexico
4. Harvard
5. Cambridge
Part II: 1926–1941
6. Göttingen
7. Postdoctoral Fellow
8. An American School of Theoretical Physics
9. Unstable Cores
10. Fission
Part III: 1941–1945
11. In on the Secret
12. Los Alamos 1: Security
13. Los Alamos 2: Implosion
14. Los Alamos 3: Heavy with Misgiving
Part IV: 1945–1967
15. The Insider Scientist
16. The Booming Years
17. Massive Retaliation
18. Falsus in uno
19. An Open Book?
Picture Section
Notes and References
Index
Bibliography
Copyright
About the Book
J. Robert Oppenheimer is among the most contentious and important figures of the twentieth century. As head of the Los Alamos Laboratory, he oversaw the successful effort to beat the Nazis to develop the first atomic bomb – a breakthrough which was to have eternal ramifications for mankind, and made Oppenheimer the ‘father of the Bomb’.
Oppenheimer was a man of diverse interests and phenomenal intellectual attributes. His talent and drive allowed him, as a young scientist, to enter a community peopled by the great names of twentieth-century physics – men such as Bohr, Born, Dirac and Einstein – and to play a role in the laboratories and classrooms where the world was being changed forever.
But Oppenheimer’s was not a simple story of assimilation, scientific success and world fame. A complicated and fragile personality, the implications of the discoveries at Los Alamos were to weigh heavily upon him. Having formed suspicious connections in the 1930s, in the wake of the Allied victory in World War Two, Oppenheimer’s attempts to resist the escalation of the Cold War arms race would lead many to question his loyalties – and set him on a collision course with Senator Joseph McCarthy and his witch hunters.
As with Ray Monk’s peerless biographies of Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell, Inside the Centre is a work of towering scholarship. A story of discovery, secrecy, impossible choices and unimaginable destruction, it goes deeper than any previous work in revealing the motivations and complexities of this most brilliant and divisive of men.
About the Author
Ray Monk is the author of Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius for which he won the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Duff Cooper Award, and Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude. He is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton.
Also by Ray Monk
Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude
Bertrand Russell: The Ghost of Madness
List of Illustrations
FIRST SECTION
1 Oppenheimer with his mother (© Historical/CORBIS);
2 Oppenheimer in the arms of his father (© Historical/CORBIS);
3 Oppenheimer building with blocks (© Historical/CORBIS);
4 155 Riverside Drive (© Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations);
5 Oppenheimer at Harvard (© Harvard University Archives);
6 William Boyd (© The National Library of Medicine);
7 Frederick Bernheim (image provided by the Duke Medical Center Archives);
8 Paul Horgan (© J. R. Eyerman/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images);
9 The Upper Pecos Valley (courtesy of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe/053755);
10 Inside the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge (© Omikron/Science Photo Library);
11 Paul Dirac (© Bettmann/CORBIS);
12 Patrick Blackett (© Science Photo Library);
13 Niels Bohr (© Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory/Science Photo Library);
14 Max Born (© Bettmann/CORBIS);
15 Charlotte Riefenstahl (© Göttingen Museum of Chemistry);
16 Werner Heisenberg (© Bettmann/CORBIS);
17 Paul Ehrenfest;
18 Oppenheimer on Lake Zurich with I. I. Rabi, H. M. Mott-Smith and Wolfgang Pauli (© AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives);
19 Oppenheimer at Berkeley (courtesy of the Department of Physics, Physics and Astronomy Library);
20 Oppenheimer with Robert Serber (© New York Times/Redux/eyevine);
21 Ernest Lawrence (© AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives);
22 Kitty (© Historical/CORBIS);
23 Perro Caliente (© Peter Goodchild);
24 Haakon Chevalier (courtesy of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley);
25 Frank Oppenheimer;
26 Jean Tatlock (© Dr Hugh Tatlock);
27 Steve Nelson (© United Press International Photos);
28 Joe Weinberg, Rossi Lomanitz, David Bohm and Max Friedman;
29 The staff of the Radiation Laboratory sitting on the 60-inch (© Science Source/Science Photo Library)
SECOND SECTION
1 Julian Schwinger (© Estate of Francis Bello/Science Photo Library);
2 Richard Feynman (© Tom Harvey);
3 The Los Alamos Ranch School (© Digital Photo Archive, Department of Energy (DOE), courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives);
4 General Groves (© Los Alamos National Laboratory/Science Photo Library);
5 Enrico Fermi (© Argonne National Laboratory/Science Photo Library);
6 The graphite pile at Stagg Field (© Historical/CORBIS);
7 Hans Bethe (© Science Source/Science Photo Library);
8 Klaus Fuchs (© Keystone/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images);
9 Edward Teller (© University of California Radiation Laboratory/Science Photo Library);
10 Seth Neddermeyer’s early attempts at implosion (courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives);
11 The Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs (Claus Lunau/Science Photo Library);
12 The ‘Little Boy’ design, as reverse engineered by John Coster-Mullen;
13 Workers at Oak Ridge (© Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Digital Photo Archive, Department of Energy (DOE), courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives);
14 Preparing the Trinity Test (courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives);
15 Preparing the Trinity Test, landscape (courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives);
16 The Trinity explosion (© Historical/CORBIS);
17 Oppenheimer and Groves at the Trinity Test site (Emilio Segrè Visual Archives/American Institute of Physics/Science Photo Library);
18 The effects of the atomic bombs in Japan (courtesy of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives);
19 Oppenheimer and Kitty in Japan, 1960 (© Historical/CORBIS);
20 The cover of the first issue of Physics Today (courtesy of Berkeley Laboratory);
21 Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard (© Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
22 The Ulam-Teller design (© Carey Sublette and the NuclearWeaponArchive.org);
23 The Mike Test;
24 Oppenheimer lectures Ed Murrow (© Bettm
ann/CORBIS);
25 Oppenheimer with Paul Dirac and Abraham Pais at the Institute for Advanced Study (© Alfred Eisenstaedt/Getty Images);
26 Oppenheimer, Toni and Peter at Olden Manor, Princeton (© Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images);
27 Lewis Strauss (© Bettmann/CORBIS);
28 Edward Teller congratulates Oppenheimer on his Fermi Prize (© Ralph Morse/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images);
29 Oppenheimer speaking at last visit to Los Alamos (© Oppenheimer Archives/CORBIS);
30 Oppenheimer photographed for Life magazine (© Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Inside the Centre:
The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer
Ray Monk
Preface and Acknowledgements
THE ORIGINS OF this book lie in a review I wrote about fifteen years ago of a reissued edition of Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and Recollections, edited by Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner. Until then, I knew about Oppenheimer only what everybody knows: that he was an important physicist, that he led the project to design and build the world’s first atomic bomb, and that he had his security clearance taken away from him during the McCarthy era because of suspicions that he was a communist, or even possibly a Soviet agent.
What I did not know until I read this collection of his letters was what a fascinatingly diverse man he was. I did not know that he wrote poetry and short stories, that he had a deep love and wide knowledge of French literature, that he found the Hindu scriptures so inspiring that he learned Sanskrit in order to read them in their original language. Nor did I know how complicated and fragile his personality was, nor how intense his personal relations were with his father, his mother, his girlfriends, his friends and his students.
Learning all this, I was surprised to discover that no full and complete biography of him had, at that point, been written. There was, I said in my review, a really great biography waiting to be written about Oppenheimer, a biography that would attempt to do justice both to his important role in the history and politics of the twentieth century and to the singularity of his mind, to the depth and diversity of his intellectual interests. Such a book would need to describe and explain his contributions to physics and to place them in their historical context. It would need to do the same with regard to his other intellectual interests and to his participation in public life. It would not be an easy book to write. In fact, it seemed perfectly possible that it would never be written.
Since I wrote that review, several books about Oppenheimer have been written and published, which attempt to rise to at least some of the challenges I described. Chief among these is American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, a book that was a long time in the making and the result of a staggering amount of research. American Prometheus is a very fine book indeed, a monumental piece of scholarship that I have had at my side ever since it was published. However (partly to my relief, since I was, by the time this book appeared, engaged on my own book), it is not the book I envisaged when I reviewed Smith and Weiner. Though Bird and Sherwin describe in exhaustive detail Oppenheimer’s personal life and his political activities, they either ignore altogether or summarise very briefly his contributions to physics.
To take an example that might seem unimportant, but in fact is not, one would never know from reading Bird and Sherwin’s book how much of Oppenheimer’s time and intellectual energy was taken up with thinking about mesons. Mesons are subatomic particles, the existence of which was predicted in 1934 and discovered in 1936. For much of Oppenheimer’s scientific career they were a puzzle, resisting all attempts to make sense of the apparently contradictory evidence about their nature and their behaviour that was gathered from laboratory experiments and observations of cosmic rays. Oppenheimer’s student, Edward Gerjuoy, in illustration of his point that ‘Oppie did his physics, talked about his physics, lived his physics, with an unusual passion’, gave as his prime example Oppenheimer’s frustrated determination to make sense of mesons: ‘it bothered him, it tore at him’. If one wants to understand Oppenheimer, one might think this passionate, decades-long search for an understanding of mesons is something one should look at. And yet almost nothing is said about it in Bird and Sherwin’s book. The word ‘meson’ is not even in the index.
The relationship between a biographical subject and his or her work has often been discussed. Many people, rightly in my opinion, insist that of course it is possible to understand a person’s work without knowing anything about their lives, Shakespeare being the obvious and most telling example. This does not make biography useless or superfluous, since the understanding of individual people is a worthwhile and interesting pursuit in itself. We want to understand Oppenheimer, not in order to understand his work, but just because he was an interesting man. However, though it is possible to understand Oppenheimer’s work in isolation from his life, the reverse, it seems to me, is not possible: we cannot claim to understand Oppenheimer unless we have at least some understanding of his work, especially when, as Gerjuoy’s comments make clear, that work was pursued with such passion and intensity and was such an important part of what made him the person he was.
So, much as I admire Bird and Sherwin’s achievement, and much as I have learned from their work, theirs is not the book I imagined after I had read Oppenheimer’s letters. Nor, for basically similar reasons, is Charles Thorpe’s Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect, which came out the year after Bird and Sherwin’s and which has much of interest to say about Oppenheimer’s life as it was affected by, and as it affected, the society and politics of the time, but almost nothing to say about Oppenheimer’s life as it was shaped and driven by his desire to understand physics.
Many people, including me, thought that a biography of Oppenheimer that put his contributions to physics at the centre of the narrative would be written by the late Abraham Pais, who, it was widely known, had been working on a biography of Oppenheimer for many years before his death in 2000. A renowned particle physicist himself, Pais had known Oppenheimer well at Princeton, and had previously written excellent lives of Bohr and Einstein. Alas, when he died, Pais was a long way from finishing the book. What he had written, together with ‘supplementary material’ added by Robert P. Crease, was published in 2006 as J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life. It turned out that what Pais had been concentrating on was not Oppenheimer’s contributions to physics (to which he devotes only a short and highly derivative chapter), but rather his directorship of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Those looking for a scientific biography of Oppenheimer were thus forced to look elsewhere.
David C. Cassidy, who had previously written an outstandingly good, scientifically literate biography of Heisenberg, published a biography of Oppenheimer in 2005 that many thought would fill the gap left open by Pais. Cassidy’s book, J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century, certainly gives more prominence to Oppenheimer’s scientific work than any previous biography. However, as indicated by his title, Cassidy has, like Thorpe, chosen to approach Oppenheimer’s life from a broadly historical and sociological perspective. Though there is much new biographical information in the book, its focus, for much of the time, is on Cassidy’s theme of ‘the American century’ – that is, the growth of American political power and the pre-eminence of American science during the twentieth century.
There is nothing wrong with such an approach, and much to be gained by pursuing it, but it cannot possibly produce the kind of biography that I envisaged and that I have tried to write. Oppenheimer’s place in history, his impact on American society and that society’s impact on him are all interesting topics, and ones that a biography of him cannot ignore. However, what most interests me is Oppenheimer himself, his extraordinary intellectual powers, his emotional and psychological complexity and his curious mixture of strengths and weaknesses in dealing with other people. Of the books that have come out in the last few years on Oppenheimer, the one that most closely
approximates to the one I wanted to write, in terms of balance and focus, is Jeremy Bernstein’s wonderful memoir, Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma. If Bernstein had chosen to write a full biography rather than a brief memoir, he might well have made my book entirely superfluous.
I have entitled my book ‘Inside the Centre’ for many reasons, the first of which is to indicate my intention of writing an internal rather than an external biography – one that aims, first and foremost, to understand Oppenheimer himself. Of course this does not mean that I am not interested in the social and political background to Oppenheimer’s life. On the contrary, I am deeply interested in that background and, indeed, devote my first chapter to the German Jewish community in New York in which he was born and brought up. The legacy of that community, in fact, forms another reason for my title, as it seems to me that Oppenheimer cannot be understood without taking into account the importance of his deeply felt desire to overcome the sense of being an outsider that he inherited from his German Jewish background and his desire to get inside the centre of American political and social life. This desire lies at the root of the ambivalence towards his Jewish ancestry that was noted by many of his closest friends, and at the root of what Einstein perceptively described as his unrequited love for the US government. It also, I think, figures largely in his willingness to undertake the enormous task of leading the effort to build the world’s first atomic bomb, and his determination after the war to play a leading part in shaping US atomic policy. It must be taken into account too in understanding why he felt compelled to defend himself against charges of disloyalty when it would have been so much easier simply to walk away from the battle.
Moreover, as I have said above, it seems to me that, if one wants to understand Oppenheimer, one must attempt to understand his contributions to science, and the phrase ‘inside the centre’ captures some of the themes that dominate that work. Oppenheimer’s striving to understand mesons, for example, was driven, at least in part, by a desire to know what forces are acting inside the centre of an atom, the pi-meson being the carrier of the strong nuclear force that binds nucleons (neutrons and protons) together. And, of course, the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb are possible only because of an understanding – which Oppenheimer helped to create – of the fission and fusion processes undergone by atomic nuclei. What many people consider to be Oppenheimer’s greatest contribution to physics – his work in the late 1930s on neutron stars and black holes – sheds light on what happens at the centre of a massive star when it has burned up all its hydrogen and gravitational collapse takes over.
