Pandora's Keepers (29 page)

Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer together at Berkeley, 1946. Growing political differences between them after the war—over the superbomb in particular—eroded their storied friendship, which had been weakened when Oppenheimer left Berkeley for Princeton in 1947 and ended as a result of Oppenheimer’s security hearing in 1954. (
© AP/Wide World Photos
)

Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi together at the University of Chicago, 1951. By this time, the superbomb had become Teller’s fixation. But he failed to convince his good friend Fermi to support a crash program to develop the thermonuclear weapon. (
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
)

As his lobbying for the superbomb and his testimony against Oppenheimer estranged him from many other physicists in the 1950s, Edward Teller increasingly sought the friendship and support of political conservatives and military officers (such as General Joseph Garvin, pictured here). (
National Archives and Records Administration, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
)

TWILIGHT YEARS

Enrico Fermi boating off the island of Elba, 1954. This photograph, taken during Fermi’s last visit to his homeland a few months before his death, shows the ravages that undiagnosed stomach cancer had begun to take on the previously vigorous Fermi. Physicists mourned his premature death later that year. (
Amaldi Archives, Dipartimento di Fisica, Università “La Sapienza,” Rome, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
)

Ernest Lawrence sitting on a hill above the Berkeley campus and the dome of the sprawling Rad Lab, surveying the extraordinary empire he had built, 1958. The ulcerative colitis that had plagued this energetic and driven man finally killed him later that year. (
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
, Physics Today
Collection
)

Niels Bohr receiving the prestigious Atoms for Peace Award from President Eisenhower, with Arthur Compton (second from left) and Lewis Strauss (far left) looking on, 1957. Strauss had orchestrated the vendetta that brought down Bohr’s good friend Robert Oppenheimer three years earlier. Bohr and Compton both died in 1962. (
Niels Bohr Archive, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
)

Leo Szilard with former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a few years before his death from a heart attack in 1964. Until the end, Szilard remained what he had always been: a dreamer, a gadfly, and the moral conscience of his generation of physicists. (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
)

A chastened and reflective Robert Oppenheimer after the revocation of his security clearance, late 1950s. His story was a personal tragedy—and the tragedy of his generation of physicists, who opened Pandora’s box and ushered nuclear weapons into the world. (
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
, Physics Today
Collection
)

I. I. Rahi at the fortieth anniversary commemoration of the founding of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, 1983. At the commemoration, Rabi spoke with conscious and courageous irony of “how well we meant.” He died in 1988. (
Photograph by Sam Treiman, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
, Physics Today
Collection
)

Edward Teller in his eighties, in a photograph taken in his office at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, California, where he continued in interviews to voice the argument for nuclear weapons well into his nineties. (©
Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS
)

An insecure pessimist, Edward Teller found refuge from his anxieties at the piano, where he played sonatas by Mozart and Beethoven. (
Photo by Fred Rothwarf, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
)