Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer

by Ray Monk

  On the contrary, there are signs that Oppenheimer’s resignation was forced upon him, or, at the very least, that it was made clear to him that he would not be reappointed even if he wished to be. By the time Oppenheimer told Dean he no longer wished to serve on the GAC there was a formidable campaign against his reappointment. In April 1952, Kenneth Pitzer had told the FBI that one of the reasons he alerted them to his suspicions about Oppenheimer was that, as an FBI memo puts it, ‘he is very much concerned about the above at the present time inasmuch as it is his opinion that J. Robert Oppenheimer is now “making a play” to be reappointed’. The following month, Willard Libby let it be known to the FBI that he, too, ‘believed it would be extremely wise not to reappoint Oppenheimer to the General Advisory Committee’. In the light of these views, together with those of Teller, Strauss, Griggs, Finletter, Borden and others, Oppenheimer’s chances of being reappointed were extremely slim. Indeed, Brien McMahon told the FBI at the end of May that he ‘is personally going to talk to the President’, to tell him that he had ‘worked out a plan whereby Oppenheimer would take the initiative and decline to serve another term by an exchange of letters and everybody will be happy’.

  The exchange of letters in question was read out at Oppenheimer’s security hearing. It included one from Gordon Dean to Oppenheimer, thanking him for his ‘magnificent’ contribution to ‘the Commission and the country’, and another, ostensibly from President Truman, but in fact drafted by Dean, expressing the President’s ‘deep sense of personal regret’ that Oppenheimer had chosen to step down from the GAC and his gratitude for the ‘lasting and immensely valuable contribution to the national security and to atomic energy progress in this Nation’ that Oppenheimer had made.

  More surprising than Oppenheimer’s decision not to seek reappointment as a member of the GAC was his appointment by Dean on a one-year contract as a consultant to the AEC. Since this made it necessary to extend Oppenheimer’s security clearance for another year, it meant that the campaign by his many enemies to separate him from the military secrets of the US would continue. It is natural to assume that this appointment was part of the deal mentioned by McMahon to get Oppenheimer off the GAC. Whether this was so, or whether Oppenheimer was persuaded against his own inclinations to stay as a consultant, the fact that he accepted the position shows on his part a desire, or anyway a willingness, to stay in the line of fire and to keep on fighting a series of battles that, he surely knew by this time, he had no chance of winning.

  Griggs, Strauss and others thought that the explanation for this willingness to continue the fight was that Oppenheimer was determined to maintain access to military secrets so that he could betray them to the Soviet Union. However, despite all the efforts of the FBI and Oppenheimer’s political enemies, not a shred of evidence for this suspicion emerged, unless, like Griggs and Strauss, one regards Oppenheimer’s political views and the advice he gave to government departments as evidence of disloyalty, in which case one has to explain why the many people who shared those views – Bethe, Rabi, Conant, DuBridge, and numerous others – were not also regarded as potential security risks. The explanation offered for this by many of Oppenheimer’s enemies is that he exerted some kind of mysterious control over these people in order to get them to accept obviously muddle-headed political opinions. The idea that men with the intellectual power and strength of character of Bethe, Conant and Rabi could possibly be controlled in this way is so ludicrous that one has to regard this ‘explanation’ as a reductio ad absurdum of the whole view, and one is forced to offer a different explanation as to why Oppenheimer would subject himself to the constant attacks upon him that accompanied his involvement in political questions.

  In the immediate post-war period that explanation might well have been the appeal of the prestige, glamour and intoxicating sense of importance that went with being on close terms with America’s political leaders – being able, for example, to call the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense by their first names. But by 1952, when Oppenheimer was disliked, or at the very least held in suspicion by nearly every person in high office in Washington, this explanation fails. Fortunately, another explanation is lying to hand, forcing itself upon one as the simple and obvious truth: Oppenheimer continued to act as a consultant to government projects, thereby exposing himself to all sorts of exhausting conflicts and crushing unpleasantness, precisely because of his love of, and loyalty to, his country. He did it for the same reason that he underwent the extreme rigours of leading Los Alamos: because he felt that it was, using the word that underpins the morality of the Bhagavad Gita, his duty to do it.

  In July 1952, immediately after his decision to leave the GAC and to accept the one-year consultancy appointment, Oppenheimer was involved in a project that was regarded by David Griggs – as he emphasised in his 1954 testimony against Oppenheimer – as further evidence of his disloyalty, but which is much more naturally seen as an expression of his patriotism and his desire to see America well protected against the possibility of nuclear attack. That project was a summer school at the Lincoln Laboratory, organised by Jerrold Zacharias, the laboratory’s associate director.

  The Lincoln Laboratory was then a fairly new establishment, having been set up as the result of a study, to which Oppenheimer had contributed, called ‘Project Charles’. The aim of Project Charles had been to investigate the feasibility of building an air-defence system to protect the United States against nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. The conclusion reached was that such a system was feasible, which led to the launch in 1951 of ‘Project Lincoln’, a huge programme, funded by the air force to the tune of $20 million, charged with the task of making such a system a reality. The Lincoln Laboratory, which was housed on the grounds of MIT and then on a purpose-built site about fifteen miles north-west of Boston, opened in September 1951 with Francis Wheeler Loomis as its first director. After a year – by which time the laboratory was employing more than 1,000 people – Loomis handed over to Albert G. Hill, who, like Loomis, had spent the war working on radar at MIT’s radiation laboratory.

  Indeed, the reason the Lincoln Laboratory had originally been based at MIT was to make use of the considerable expertise on radar that had been developed there during the war by scientists such as Loomis, Hill and, most notably, Oppenheimer’s friend Isidor Rabi. For radar was at the very heart of the Lincoln Project, its guiding concept – soon to acquire the acronym SAGE (‘Semi-Automatic Ground Environment’) – being to build a network of radars designed to provide early warning of air attacks. The data from these radars would be tracked by a series of computers that would then be used to guide weapons to destroy the enemy aircraft before they were able to drop their bombs.

  The idea of the summer school at the Lincoln Laboratory emerged from discussions that Jerrold Zacharias had with another friend of Oppenheimer’s, Charlie Lauritsen, in the spring of 1952. As Zacharias later recalled, he and Lauritsen were concerned about the ‘technical, military, and economic questions’ that arose from the programme of providing America with air defence against nuclear attack, and ‘decided that we should talk this over with certain others whom we knew very well’. First they talked to Albert Hill, who was then the associate director of Lincoln Laboratory, and then: ‘We decided we would talk it over with Dr Oppenheimer and Dr Rabi.’

  The summer school started on 1 July 1952 and lasted for about two months, with Oppenheimer, Lauritsen and Rabi participating on a part-time basis at the beginning and at the end. One of the tasks of the summer school was to consider how and where the US was vulnerable to Soviet air attack. They decided the greatest vulnerability came from the possibility that Soviet bombers might approach the United States by flying directly over the North Pole, and so they recommended what became known as the ‘DEW (Distant Early Warning) line’. This was a line of thirty-five radar stations, stretching right across the northernmost tip of the North American continent, from Alaska in the west to Greenland in the east, which would give bet
ween three and six hours’ warning of any attack from the north. This advice was passed on to the air force by Zacharias in September 1952 and was acted upon straight away, so that by the end of that year work was under way to construct the radar stations.

  The air force and the Department of Defense were very pleased with the advice they received from the summer school and with the work done by the Lincoln Project, both of which, it was generally agreed, had considerably strengthened the US air-defence system. And yet, if all you knew about the summer school was the description David Griggs gave of it in his evidence at Oppenheimer’s security hearing, you would think it was not a well-received study acting on behalf of the US air force, but a subversive communist plot. Lending considerable credence to Oppenheimer’s description of him as ‘paranoid’, Griggs talked of a semi-secret group of four with the name ‘ZORC’ (the letters standing for Zacharias, Oppenheimer, Rabi and Charles Lauritsen), dedicated to undermining US Strategic Air Command under the guise of developing an air-defence system. Some of the people involved in the summer school had told him, Griggs said, that ‘in order to achieve world peace’, it was necessary ‘not only to strengthen the Air Defense of the continental United States, but also to give up something, and the thing that was recommended that we give up was the Strategic Air Command’.

  The suggestion that the US should give up its Strategic Air Command upset him, Griggs continued, because he did not think the members of the summer school had ‘the background nor were charged with the responsibility of considering in any detail or considering at all the fact of the activities of the Strategic Air Command’. ‘I felt that for any group to make such recommendations it was necessary that they know as much about the Strategic Air Command and the general strategic picture as they knew about the Air Defense Command.’

  This anxiety, however, was completely misplaced, since the summer school did not, in fact, recommend the abolition of Strategic Air Command, as Griggs would later admit in an exchange with Oppenheimer’s lawyers that makes clear how bizarre his earlier statements were:

  Griggs. I should say what I don’t believe I did say this morning, that I believe that as a result of the Lincoln summer study our air defense is materially improved.

  Q. Was that the main object of the Lincoln summer study, to find ways to improve our air defense?

  Griggs. Yes, sir.

  Q. And did the Lincoln study ever recommend the giving-up of any part of our strategic air power?

  Griggs. No, not to my knowledge.

  Griggs’s mention of ‘world peace’ possibly indicates a confusion on his part between the discussions that took place during the Lincoln summer school and the meetings of another committee in which Oppenheimer was participating during this period, namely the Department of State’s Disarmament Panel. This was a panel of consultants appointed by Dean Acheson to advise the government in connection with the work of the United Nations Disarmament Commission. Besides Oppenheimer, the other members of the panel, announced on 28 April 1952, included Vannevar Bush and Allen W. Dulles, the deputy director of the CIA.

  At their inaugural meeting the panel voted Oppenheimer as its chairman. The dominant voice, however, was that of Vannevar Bush, who, while serving on the panel, became convinced of the view that Fermi and Rabi had proposed in their ‘minority report’ in October 1949: namely that the US should attempt to negotiate with the USSR a ban on testing (and, therefore, on successfully developing) thermonuclear bombs. At the second meeting of the Disarmament Panel, held on 6 May 1952, Bush raised the possibility of a test ban, which he argued, as Fermi and Rabi had argued three years earlier, ‘would not require inspection and control’, since an H-bomb explosion would be so easy to detect. Led by Bush, and encouraged from the chair by Oppenheimer, the Disarmament Panel thus moved in a direction that had been unforeseen by Acheson and, from the point of view of Washington’s political and military establishment, was entirely unwelcome.

  By the end of the summer of 1952, the panel was convinced not only of the wisdom of a negotiated test ban, but also of the desirability of postponing the Mike test, scheduled for 1 November. In a paper submitted to the President in September, the panel urged Truman to cancel the test in order to keep alive the possibility of negotiating a test ban with the Soviet Union. The test was, the panel argued, a ‘point of no return’, since, afterwards, the Soviet Union would surely regard any proposal to ban thermonuclear testing as motivated simply by the US’s desire to stay ahead in the race. Also, the panel suggested, the testing of such a powerful bomb would alienate other countries besides the Soviet Union, convincing them that the US ‘is irrevocably committed to a strategy of destroying its enemies by indiscriminate means and at whatever cost’.

  As well as arguing for a postponement on the grounds of international relations, the panel stressed its belief that the test was fatally ill timed because it coincided with the presidential election, the polling day for which would be 4 November, just three days after the test was scheduled to take place. Indeed, the panel’s report was entitled ‘The Timing of the Thermonuclear Test’. It was widely (and, as it turned out, correctly) expected that the Democrats would lose the election, which meant that the test would take place just when the US was exchanging one administration for another – surely not the best time for the country to be crossing a ‘point of no return’.

  By the summer of 1952, it was more or less clear that the next US government would be a Republican one, led by General Eisenhower, which was, if anything, less likely than Truman’s administration to be receptive to the ideas of the Disarmament Panel. For some years a ‘draft Eisenhower’ campaign, with the slogan ‘I like Ike’, had been urging Eisenhower to stand and marshalling the considerable popular support that he enjoyed throughout the country. Meanwhile Truman, who was becoming less and less popular, made it clear that he would not seek re-election. After Eisenhower fought his first primary in March 1952, winning a landslide victory, there was little doubt that he would be the Republican candidate, or that he would beat whoever the Democrats chose as their candidate, which, in July 1952, turned out to be Adlai Stevenson.

  In a campaign speech to the American Legion on 25 August 1952, Eisenhower declared that the US had need of security forces ‘whose destructive and retaliatory power is so great that it causes nightmares in the Kremlin whenever they think of attacking us’. This commitment to exactly the kind of policy against which Oppenheimer had been warning for years was made even more explicit in the public statements of John Foster Dulles (the brother of Allen W. Dulles, Oppenheimer’s colleague on the Disarmament Panel), who was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State-elect. In a speech he gave in November 1951, Dulles asked rhetorically why the Soviet Union had not attacked Germany or Japan, and answered:

  The most reasonable explanation is that the rulers of Russia knew that if they indulged in this open aggression in any area of vital concern to the United States or which by treaty we were bound to defend, their sources and means of power would have been visited with incredible means of destruction. Thus the free world has been getting the security of deterrent striking power.

  In an article that he published in Life magazine called ‘A Policy of Boldness’, Dulles gave what became regarded as the classic statement of the doctrine of ‘massive retaliation’. How, Dulles asked, was the US to defend the ‘free world’ against Soviet aggression? To attempt to match the Red Army ‘man for man, gun for gun and tank for tank’ would, he urged, ‘mean real strength nowhere and bankruptcy everywhere’:

  There is one solution and only one: that is for the free world to develop the will and organize the means to retaliate instantly against open aggression by Red armies, so that, if it occurred anywhere, we could and would strike back where it hurts, by means of our choosing.

  The policy Dulles recommended in this article called upon the creation ‘of means to hit with shattering effectiveness the sources of power and lines of communication of the Sovietized world’. ‘Today,’ he wrote, ‘
atomic power, coupled with strategic air and sea power, provides the community of free nations with vast new possibilities of organizing a community power to stop open aggression before it starts and reduce, to vanishing point, the risk of general war’.

  In 1952, the American general public was extremely receptive to such views for three reasons: 1. the fear of communism and of Soviet expansionism made the American people open to the idea that something had to be done to deter the Soviets from further acts of aggression; 2. the prolonged, costly and indecisive Korean War had made Americans wary of engaging with communist armies on the ground; and 3. there was widespread support for reducing government spending. The policy of ‘massive retaliation’ was successfully sold as a way of meeting all three of these objectives: deterring Soviet aggression in a way that did not involve either the deaths of US soldiers or the expense of maintaining an army and a navy that could conceivably match the armies of the Soviet Union and China. In the context of such thinking, the development of thermonuclear bombs – the ultimate deterrence – seemed to make a good deal of sense.

  The members of the Disarmament Panel, then, were politically isolated, with few allies among Truman’s Democrats and even fewer among Eisenhower’s Republicans. This did not deter them from trying as hard as they could to prevent the US from making what they considered to be the potentially catastrophic mistake of going ahead with the Mike test. One very powerful – and, as it turned out, prescient – reason they gave for not going ahead was that the fallout from the test would provide the Soviet Union with valuable clues about the Ulam–Teller design. Despite the strength of this argument, by the autumn of 1952 practically the only person in the whole of the US’s security establishment – comprising the GAC, the AEC, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the Departments of State and of Defense – sympathetic to a ban on H-bomb tests was Isidor Rabi, Oppenheimer’s successor as chair of the GAC. Most other members of those committees, departments and advisory bodies were not only opposed to the idea of a ban, but deeply suspicious of it.