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History

A life of genius and tragedy

02 Nov 2005

Michael Friedlander reviews American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin

Robert Oppenheimer

Most young people today will associate the name J Robert Oppenheimer – if they recognize it at all – with the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan in the last days of the Second World War. However, those of us who lived through those momentous times will remember much more about this great physicist. In particular, we will recall the famous 1954 Personnel Security Board hearing, which centred on Oppenheimer’s advice on the hydrogen-bomb programme and his loyalty to the US. The board decided he should no longer advise the government on nuclear weapons.

But 50 years have passed since those days. When today’s younger readers encounter the bomb project and its consequences, they will probably see those events blended into a seamless fabric of history, uneven in detail and devoid of nuance. This lack of historical awareness is certainly what I encountered when leading student discussions regarding Michael Frayn’s play Copenhagen, which dramatizes the wartime meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg.

So to whom, then, will these two interesting new books appeal? For their book American Prometheus, Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird have interviewed well over 100 of the major participants in the events they describe. Sherwin has studied Oppenheimer’s career for a quarter of a century and the result is a monumental and impressive work, supported by extensive documentation. The authors, who are judicious in their treatment of Oppenheimer’s strengths and personal weaknesses, have written what I consider to be the best overall survey of his life, achievements and problems.

They start with an excellent description of Oppenheimer’s early years – his cosseted youth in a wealthy family in New York City, his burgeoning academic career and his postgraduate days in Europe. They then cover his return to the US, including his joint academic appointments at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley, where he established the first US school of theoretical physics. There follows a good description of the left-wing political scene at Berkeley in the 1930s. Oppenheimer moved in those circles and had many close friends among the communists and fellow travellers. This period was to play a critical role in Oppenheimer’s later troubles. Without this background material by Sherwin and Bird, it is impossible to understand why people were later suspicious about Oppenheimer’s personality and his loyalty to the US, and why he gave such opaque responses when questioned by intelligence officers and Groves about his brother’s and friends’ membership of the Communist party.

Despite having little administrative experience, Oppenheimer’s selection as scientific director of the Los Alamos Laboratory was as surprising as it was inspired. In this role, he displayed his ability to master every aspect of the Manhattan Project – both scientific and technical – and led it brilliantly (see “J Robert Oppenheimer: Proteus unbound” Physics World February 2001 pp39-46). It is interesting to note that General Leslie Groves, who was the overall leader of the project, knew of Oppenheimer’s early flirtation with radical politics – yet never questioned Oppenheimer’s loyalty to the US nor his selection to head the project.

After the war, Oppenheimer was appointed director of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton. One young colleague at the institute was Abraham Pais, who went on to lead a distinguished career in theoretical physics and wrote major biographies of both Bohr and Einstein. He also began a biography of Oppenheimer, but died in 2000 with the book only partially complete. J Robert Oppenheimer: A Life has now been finished by Robert P Crease, a philosopher at the State University of New York at Stony Brook (and a columnist for this magazine). Based on Pais’ extensive notes, Crease has written the last four of the 27 chapters. Pais’ treatment is idiosyncratic. One chapter consists of a single page and several are only four pages long. He omits the Berkeley background, but does provide much insider detail on Oppenheimer’s physics and the IAS. He includes the text of Oppenheimer’s farewell address at Los Alamos that is not otherwise easily available. The address is typical Oppenheimer: it offers a sweeping view of the impact of nuclear weapons and the role of scientists, despite being occasionally rambling and opaque. In general, though, this book will be of most interest to readers already familiar with Oppenheimer and the hearing.

Two particular events were central to the later vengeful and politically motivated pursuit of Oppenheimer. First was President Harry Truman’s decision to undertake a “crash” programme to develop a hydrogen bomb, against the unanimous advice of the General Advisory Committee, which Oppenheimer chaired. The committee rejected such a programme because at the time there was no known way of achieving fusion; the successful “Teller-Ulam process” emerged only several years later.

The other key event was Oppenheimer’s brief conversation in 1943 with his close friend Haakon Chevalier, who was a Marxist and professor of French at Berkeley. This led to two key questions. Did Chevalier offer to pass information of the bomb project to the Soviet consulate? And why did Oppenheimer lie about this conversation when questioned in 1943 by military intelligence officers Colonels Boris Pash and John Lansdale?

Bird and Sherwin provide excellent treatments of both of these subjects. The hydrogen-bomb decision has been well documented, for example by Gregg Herken in his fine book Brotherhood of the Bomb (2002 Henry Holt). However, we may never know the true content of the Chevalier-Oppenheimer conversation, just as we may never know what Bohr and Heisenberg said to each other at Copenhagen in 1941. Pais does not cover the Chevalier conversation but goes into considerable detail about the 1949 GAC review.

A sea-change in national defence policy occurred when President Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican administration took office in January 1953. The GAC’s advice against a crash hydrogen-bomb programme, which Truman had ignored, was now viewed as an attempt by Oppenheimer to hinder the development of the bomb. Coupled with latent suspicions of disloyalty based on Oppenheimer’s earlier political affiliations, Lewis Strauss – chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) – decided in December 1953 to suspend Oppenheimer from any further involvement in nuclear weapons.

The Personnel Security Board was then convened to conduct an investigation. Following its hearing in 1954, the board recommended that Oppenheimer’s security clearance should not be restored. The conduct of this hearing – and its later confirmation by the AEC – were travesties of the judicial process. Oppenheimer’s phone conversations were tapped, his letters were opened, and he was clandestinely followed. The FBI passed transcripts of phone conversations to the prosecutor. Official documents were made available to the prosecutor and the hearing board but not to Oppenheimer and his lawyers. There was continual collusion between the board and the prosecution.

Bird and Sherwin’s detailed treatment of the hearing is excellent. Although Pais only got as far as setting the stage for the hearing, Crease provides a good and extensive description. The hearing and the verdict provoked many protests. For example, in 1957 the philosopher Georgio de Santillana compared the hearing to “an Inquisitional trial de vehementi“.

The situation was summed up nicely by the lawyer Charles P Curtis in his 1954 book The Oppenheimer Case. In it he quotes from George Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan, in which Charles VII tells Joan that her judges “were full of corruption and cozenage, fraud and malice”.”Not they,” replies Joan, “they were as honest a lot of poor fools as ever burned their betters.”

  • 2005 Knopf 721pp $35.00hb

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