American Prometheus (61 page)

Oppie told Lilienthal that he had talked in San Francisco with a Soviet scientist, a technical adviser to the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, who had stressed that Baruch’s proposal was meant to preserve America’s atomic monopoly. “The American proposal,” he had said, “was designed to permit the United States to maintain its own bombs and plants almost indefinitely—30 years, 50 years, as long as we thought necessary— whereas it wants Russia’s uranium, and therefore her chance of producing materials, to be taken over and controlled by the ADA [Atomic Development Authority] at once.”

On June 11, 1946, the FBI overheard Oppenheimer talking with Lilienthal about Baruch’s proposals for “condign punishment.” “They worry me like hell,” he told Lilienthal.

“Yes, it is very bad,” Lilienthal replied. “Even in the short run point of view, it will take all the—”

“Take all the fun out of it,” Oppenheimer interrupted. “But they don’t see that and they never will. They just haven’t lived in the right world.”

“They have lived in an unreal world,” Lilienthal agreed, “and it is populated by figures and statistics and bonds, and I can’t understand them and they can’t understand us.”

Two days earlier, Oppenheimer had taken his case to the public by publishing a long essay in the
New York Times Magazine
that explained the plan for an international Atomic Development Authority in layman’s language.

It proposes that in the field of atomic energy there be set up a world government. That in this field there be a renunciation of sovereignty. That in this field there be no legal veto power. That in this field there be international law. How is this possible in a world of sovereign nations? There are only two ways in which this ever can be possible: One is conquest. That destroys sovereignty. And the other is the partial renunciation of that sovereignty. What is here proposed is such a partial renunciation, sufficient, but not more than sufficient, for an atomic development authority to come into being; to exercise its functions of development, exploitation and control; to enable it to live and grow, and to protect the world against the use of atomic weapons and provide it with the benefits of atomic energy.

Early that summer, Oppenheimer ran into his former student Joe Weinberg, who was still teaching physics at Berkeley. When Weinberg asked him, “What do we do if this effort in international control fails?” Oppie pointed out the window and replied, “Well, we can enjoy the view—as long as it lasts.”

ON JUNE 14, 1946, Baruch presented his plan to the United Nations, dramatically proclaiming in biblical language that he offered the world a choice between “the quick and the dead.” As Oppenheimer and everyone else associated with the original Acheson-Lilienthal plan predicted, Baruch’s proposal was promptly rejected by the Soviets. Moscow’s diplomats instead proposed a simple treaty to ban the production or use of atomic weapons. This proposal, Oppenheimer told Kitty in a phone call the next day, was “Not too bad.” No one could be surprised by Soviet objections to the veto provisions of the Baruch proposal. And yet, Oppie observed to his wife that Baruch was declaiming loudly how sorely disappointed he was, all the while “knowing it was a damn fool performance.”

Nevertheless, as Oppie predicted, the Truman Administration rejected the Soviet response out of hand. Negotiations continued in a desultory fashion for many months, but without result. An early opportunity for a good-faith effort to prevent an uncontrolled nuclear arms race between the two major powers had been lost. It would take the terrors of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the massive Soviet buildup that followed it, before an American administration would propose, in the 1970s, a serious and acceptable arms control agreement. But by then tens of thousands of nuclear warheads had been built. Oppenheimer and many of his colleagues always blamed Baruch for this missed opportunity. Acheson angrily observed later, “It was his [Baruch’s] ball and he balled it up. . . . He pretty well ruined the thing.” Rabi was equally blunt: “It’s simply real madness what has happened.”

Over the years, critics of Oppenheimer’s 1946 proposals for international control have charged him with political naïveté. Stalin, they argue, would never have accepted inspections. Oppenheimer himself understood this point. “I cannot tell,” he wrote years later, “and I think that no one can tell, whether early actions along the lines suggested by Bohr would have changed the course of history. There is not anything that I know of Stalin’s behavior that gives one any shred of hope on that score. But Bohr understood that this action was to create a change in the situation. He did not say, except once in jest, ‘another experimental arrangement,’ but this is the model he had in mind. I think that if we had acted in accordance, wisely and clearly and discreetly in accordance with his views, we might have been freed of our rather sleazy sense of omnipotence, and our delusions about the effectiveness of secrecy, and turned our society toward a healthier vision of a future worth living for.”

Later that summer, Lilienthal visited Oppenheimer in his Washington hotel room and the two men talked late into the night about what had happened. “He is really a tragic figure,” Lilienthal wrote in his diary, “with all his great attractiveness, brilliance of mind. As I left him he looked so sad: ‘I am ready to go anywhere and do anything [Oppie said], but I am bankrupt of further ideas. And I find that physics and the teaching of physics, which is my life, now seems irrelevant.’ It was this last that really wrung my heart.”

Oppenheimer’s anguish was real and deep. He felt a personal responsibility for the consequences of his work at Los Alamos. Every day the newspaper headlines gave him evidence that the world might once again be on the road to war. “Every American knows that if there is another major war,” he wrote in the
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
on June 1, 1946, “atomic weapons will be used. . . .” This meant, he argued, that the real task at hand was the elimination of war itself. “We know this because in the last war, the two nations which we like to think are the most enlightened and humane in the world—Great Britain and the United States—used atomic weapons against an enemy which was essentially defeated.”

He had made this observation earlier in a speech at Los Alamos, but to publish it in 1946 was an extraordinary admission. Less than a year after the events of August 1945, the man who had instructed the bombardiers exactly how to drop their atomic bombs on the center of two Japanese cities had come to the conclusion that he had supported the use of atomic weapons against “
an enemy which was essentially defeated.
” This realization weighed heavily on him.

A major war was not Oppie’s only worry; he was concerned too about nuclear terrorism. Asked in a closed Senate hearing room “whether three or four men couldn’t smuggle units of an [atomic] bomb into New York and blow up the whole city.” Oppenheimer responded, “Of course it could be done, and people could destroy New York.” When a startled senator then followed by asking, “What instrument would you use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in a city?” Oppenheimer quipped, “A screwdriver [to open each and every crate or suitcase].” There was no defense against nuclear terrorism—and he felt there never would be.

International control of the bomb, he later told an audience of Foreign Service and military officers, is “the only way in which this country can have security comparable to that which it had in the years before the war. It is the only way in which we will be able to live with bad governments, with new discoveries, with irresponsible governments such as are likely to arise in the next hundred years, without living in fairly constant fear of the surprise use of these weapons.”

AT THIRTY-FOUR seconds after 9:00 a.m. on July 1, 1946, the world’s fourth atomic bomb exploded above the lagoon of Bikini Atoll, a part of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean. A fleet of abandoned Navy vessels of all shapes and sizes were either sunk or exposed to murderous radiation. A large crowd of congressmen, journalists and diplomats from numerous countries, including the Soviet Union, witnessed this demonstration. Oppenheimer had been one of many scientists invited to see the show, but he was conspicuously absent.

Two months earlier, his frustrations mounting, Oppenheimer had decided he would not attend the Bikini tests. On May 3, 1946, he wrote President Truman, ostensibly to explain his decision. His real intent, however, was to challenge Truman’s entire posture. He began by outlining his “misgivings,” which he asserted were shared “not unanimously, but very widely” by other scientists. Then, with devastating logic, he decimated the whole exercise. If the purpose of the tests, as stated, was to determine the effectiveness of atomic weapons in naval warfare, the answer was quite simple: “If an atomic bomb comes close enough to a ship, even a capital ship, it will sink it.” One need only determine how close the bomb had to be to the ship—and this could be deduced from mathematical calculations. The cost of the tests as planned might easily reach $100 million. “For less than one percent of this,” Oppenheimer explained, “one could obtain more useful information.”

Likewise, if the tests hoped to obtain scientific data on radiation’s effects on naval equipment, rations and animals, this information too could be obtained more cheaply and more accurately “by simple laboratory methods.” Proponents of testing argued, Oppenheimer wrote, that “we must be prepared for the possibility of atomic warfare.” If this was the true purpose behind the tests, then surely everyone understood that “the overwhelming effectiveness of atomic weapons lies in their use for the bombardment of cities.” By comparison, “the detailed determination of the destruction of atomic weapons against naval craft would appear trivial.” Finally—and this was undoubtedly Oppenheimer’s fiercest objection—he questioned “the appropriateness of a purely military test of atomic weapons, at a time when our plans for effectively eliminating them from national armaments are in their earliest beginnings.” (The Bikini tests were being conducted virtually simultaneously with Baruch’s presentation at the United Nations.)

Oppenheimer concluded that he could have remained on the presidential commission to observe the Bikini tests—but that perhaps the president might think it “most undesirable for me to turn in, after the tests are completed, a report” critical of the whole exercise. Under the circumstances, he wrote, perhaps he could better serve the president elsewhere.

If Oppenheimer thought his letter might persuade Truman to postpone or cancel the Bikini tests, he was mistaken. Instead of focusing on the substance of Oppenheimer’s dissent, the president remembered his first encounter with him. Affronted by the letter, Truman now forwarded it to Acting Secretary of State Dean Acheson with a short note in which he described Oppenheimer as that “cry-baby scientist” who had earlier claimed to have blood on his hands. “I think he has concocted himself an alibi in this letter.” Truman misunderstood. Oppie’s letter was actually a declaration of personal independence, and through it, once again, he further alienated the president of the United States.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

“Oppie Had a Rash and Is
Now Immune”

He [Oppenheimer] thinks he’s God.

PHILIP MORRISON

OPPENHEIMER WENT ABOUT TEACHING physics at Caltech, but his heart wasn’t in it. “I did actually give a course,” he later said, “but it is obscure to me how I gave it now.... The charm went out of teaching after the great change in the war.... I was always called away and distracted because I was thinking about other things.” Indeed, he and Kitty never set up house in Pasadena. Kitty remained in the Berkeley house on Eagle Hill and Robert commuted, staying one or two nights a week in the guest cottage behind the home of his old friends Richard and Ruth Tolman. But the phone calls from Washington never stopped, and as the months passed, this arrangement proved to be awkward. Late in the spring of 1946, in the midst of his peripatetic negotiations in Washington, New York and Los Alamos, Oppenheimer announced his intention to resume his teaching post at Berkeley in the autumn.

Though truly disheartened by the moral and intellectual fiasco of the “Baruch Plan,” Oppenheimer and Lilienthal continued to work together. On October 23, the FBI overheard the two men discussing who should be named to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which had been created by the August 1 passage of the McMahon Act. Oppenheimer told his new friend, “I owe you a statement which I haven’t thought it discreet to make until tonight, and that is, in a very grim world since I last saw you, I have not been a despondent man. I just can’t tell you, Dave, how I admire what you are doing and how it has changed the whole world for me.”

Lilienthal thanked him and remarked, “I think we’re going to get a hold of this damn thing yet.”

That autumn, President Truman appointed Lilienthal chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and, as required by Congress, he created a General Advisory Committee (GAC) to assist the AEC commissioners. Despite Truman’s dislike of Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb” could hardly be kept off such a committee. So, following the recommendations of a variety of advisers, Truman appointed him together with I. I. Rabi, Glenn Seaborg, Enrico Fermi, James Conant, Cyril S. Smith, Hartley Rowe (a Los Alamos consultant), Hood Worthington (a Du Pont company official), and Lee DuBridge, who had recently been appointed president of Caltech. Truman left it up to these men to choose their own chairman. But when a news report wrongly implied that Conant would chair the committee, Kitty Oppenheimer huffily asked Robert why
he
hadn’t been named chairman. Robert assured his wife that “it is not a major issue.” In fact, DuBridge and Rabi were quietly lobbying behind the scenes for Oppenheimer. By the time the GAC gathered for its first formal meeting in early January 1947, the fix was in. Delayed by a snowstorm, Oppenheimer arrived late, to learn that his colleagues had unanimously elected him their chairman.