American Prometheus (57 page)
On September 9, Oppenheimer sent the report to Stimson’s assistant, George Harrison. In his cover letter, he noted that “The Document” had been circulated to more than 300 scientists, and only three had declined to sign it. Oppie wrote that while he had had nothing to do with its formulation, “The Document” certainly reflected his personal views, and he hoped that the War Department would approve its publication. Harrison soon phoned Oppie to say that Stimson wanted more copies for circulation within the government. But Harrison added that the War Department did not wish to release it—at least not just yet.
Unhappy at this delay, the ALAS scientists pressed Oppenheimer to do something. While admitting that he too was disturbed, Oppie argued that the Administration must have a good reason, and he urged his friends to be patient. On September 18, he flew to Washington and two days later phoned to say that “the situation looked real good.” “The Document” was being passed around, and he thought the Truman Administration wanted to do the right thing. However, by the end of the month, the Administration had classified it. The ALAS scientists were also stunned to learn that their own trusted emissary had reversed himself and now concurred in the decision to suppress it. To some of his colleagues, it appeared that the more time Oppie spent in Washington, D.C., the more compliant he became.
Oppenheimer insisted that he had a good reason for his change of heart: The Truman Administration was about to propose legislation on atomic energy, and he explained to scientists at Los Alamos that public debate of the sort reflected in the “famous memo” was very desirable—but that they should wait, as a matter of courtesy, until President Truman released his own message on atomic energy to Congress. Oppenheimer’s appeal was hotly debated back in Los Alamos, but ALAS’ leader, William “Willy” Higinbotham, argued that “the suppression of the document is a matter of political expediency, the reasons for which we are not in a position to know or evaluate.” ALAS, however, had “one representative who does know what is going on and knows personally the people involved, that is, Oppie.” A motion was then carried unanimously “that Willy tell Oppie that we are strongly behind him.”
Oppenheimer was, in fact, doing his best to reflect the deep concern his fellow scientists held for the future. Late in September, he told Under Secretary of State Dean Acheson that most Manhattan Project scientists were strongly disinclined to work any longer on weapons—and “not merely a super bomb, but any bomb.” After Hiroshima and the end of the war, such work, he said, was felt to be “against the dictates of their hearts and spirits.” He was a scientist, he told a reporter disdainfully, not an “armaments manufacturer.” Not every scientist, of course, felt this way. Edward Teller was still promoting the “Super” to anyone with the patience to listen. When Teller asked Oppenheimer to urge that research on the Super continue, Oppie cut him short: “I neither can nor will do so.” It was a reaction that Teller would never forget—or forgive.
WHEN PRESIDENT TRUMAN issued his message to Congress on October 3, 1945, many scientists initially thought it reassuring. Drafted by Herbert Marks, a young lawyer working for Acheson, the message urged Congress to establish an atomic energy commission with power to regulate the entire industry. Unbeknownst even to Washington insiders, Oppenheimer had helped Marks write the message. Not surprisingly, it reflected Oppie’s own sense of urgency about both the dangers and the potential benefits of atomic energy. The release of atomic energy, Truman pronounced, “constitutes a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas.” Time was of the essence. “The hope of civilization,” Truman warned, “lies in international arrangements looking, if possible, to the renunciation of the use and development of the atomic bomb. . . .” Oppenheimer thought he had won the president’s commitment to seek the abolition of atomic weapons.
But if Oppie had managed to shape the larger message, he had no control over the legislation introduced the following day by Senator Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado and Representative Andrew J. May of Kentucky. The May-Johnson bill embodied a policy that contrasted sharply with the tenor of the president’s speech. Most scientists read it as a victory for the military. For one thing, the bill proposed harsh prison terms and hefty fines for any violations of security. Inexplicably to his colleagues, Oppenheimer announced his support for the May-Johnson legislation. On October 7, he returned to Los Alamos and urged the members of ALAS’ executive committee to support the bill. As a measure of his still formidable powers of persuasion, he succeeded. His rationale was simple. Time was of the essence, and any bill that quickly set up legislation to oversee the domestic aspects of atomic energy would pave the way for the next step: an international agreement to ban nuclear weapons. Oppie had rapidly become a Washington insider—a cooperative and focused supporter of the Administration, guided by hope and sustained by naïveté.
But as scientists read the bill’s fine print, they became alarmed. May-Johnson proposed to centralize all power over atomic energy in the hands of a nine-member commission appointed by the president. Military officers would be allowed to sit on the commission. Scientists were subject to prison terms of up to ten years for even minor security violations. But, as in 1943, when he initially endorsed the notion of drafting Los Alamos scientists into the Army, the details and implications that troubled his colleagues didn’t alarm Oppenheimer. Based on his wartime experience, he felt he could work with Groves and the War Department. Others were not so sure. Leo Szilard was outraged, and vowed to work to defeat the bill. A Chicago physicist, Herbert L. Anderson, wrote a colleague in Los Alamos to confess that his confidence in Oppenheimer, Lawrence and Fermi had been shaken. “I believe that these worthy men were duped—that they never had a chance to see this bill.” Indeed, Oppie had persuaded Lawrence and Fermi to endorse May-Johnson before they had read the bill’s particulars. Both men soon withdrew their support.
In his own Senate testimony on October 17, 1945, Oppenheimer confessed that his prepared statement had been written “considerably before” he actually read the bill: “The Johnson bill, I don’t know much about . . . you could do almost anything under that bill.” He just knew that good men like Henry Stimson, James Conant and Vannevar Bush had helped to draft the legislation, and “if they like the philosophy of this bill,” well, that was good enough for him. It was all a matter of finding nine good men who could be trusted to execute the proposed commission’s powers “wisely.” When questioned about the wisdom of allowing military officers to sit on the commission, Oppenheimer responded, “I think it is a matter not of what uniform a man wears but what kind of man he is. I cannot think of an administrator in whom I would have more confidence than General [George C.] Marshall.”
Szilard, watching from the sidelines, thought Oppenheimer’s testimony “a masterpiece. . . . He talked in such a manner that the congressmen present thought he was for the bill but the physicists present all thought that he was against the bill.” The left-wing New York City newspaper
PM
reported that Oppenheimer had launched an “oblique attack” on the bill.
Frank Oppenheimer argued with his brother. An activist in ALAS, Frank believed it was time to go public and try to educate citizens about the need for international controls. “He said there wasn’t time for this,” recalled Frank, “he’d been in the Washington scene, he saw that everything was moving—he felt that he had to change things from within.” Perhaps Robert was making a calculated gamble that he could use his prestige and contacts to persuade the Truman Administration to take a quantum leap toward international controls—and he really didn’t care if this was done under a civilian or a military atomic regime. Or, perhaps he simply could not bring himself to press for a policy that might lead the Administration to define him as an outsider, a “troublemaker.” He wanted to sit center stage during the first act of the Atomic Age.
ALL THIS WAS too much for Robert Wilson, who rewrote the suppressed ALAS “Document” and mailed it to the
New York Times,
which promptly published the statement on its front page. “Mailing it was a serious violation of security,” Wilson later wrote. “For me, it was a declaration of independence from our leaders at Los Alamos, not that I did not continue to admire and cherish them. But the lesson we learned early on was that the Best and the Brightest, if in a position of power, were frequently constrained by other considerations and were not necessarily to be relied upon.”
As opposition to May-Johnson grew from scientists outside Los Alamos, ALAS members began to have second thoughts. Victor Weisskopf told his colleagues on the ALAS executive committee that “Oppie’s suggestions [should] be studied more critically.” Within the month, ALAS broke with Oppenheimer and began to mobilize against the legislation. Willy Higinbotham was dispatched to Washington, D.C., with instructions to mount a campaign against the bill. Szilard and other scientists testified against the legislation; this extraordinary lobbying soon commanded the front pages of newspapers and magazines around the country. It was a rebellion—and it succeeded.
To the surprise of many in Washington, the energetic lobbying of the scientists defeated the May-Johnson bill. In its place a new bill was introduced by a freshman senator from Connecticut, Brien McMahon, which proposed to give control over nuclear energy policy to an exclusively civilian Atomic Energy Commission, the AEC. But by the time the Atomic Energy Act was signed by President Truman on August 1, 1946, it had been so altered that many in the “atomic scientists’ ” movement wondered whether theirs had been a pyrrhic victory. The law included, for example, provisions that subjected scientists working in the field of nuclear physics to a security regime far more draconian than anything they had experienced at Los Alamos. So while many of his peers, including his own brother, were baffled by Oppie’s initial support for the May-Johnson bill, no one held it against him for very long. His ambivalence about the whole issue had been justified. If he had failed to challenge the Pentagon’s agenda, he had nevertheless understood that the truly important problem was achieving effective international controls against the manufacture of atomic bombs.
IN THE MIDST of this congressional debate, Oppenheimer formally resigned his directorship of Los Alamos. On October 16, 1945, at an award ceremony marking the occasion, thousands of people, virtually the entire population of the mesa, turned out to say good-bye to their forty-one-year-old leader. Dorothy McKibbin briefly greeted Oppie just before he rose to give his farewell address. He had no prepared remarks and McKibbin noted that “his eyes were glazed over, the way they were when he was deep in thought. Afterwards, I realized that in those few moments Robert had been preparing his acceptance speech.” A few minutes later, sitting on a dais under a blazing New Mexico sun, Oppenheimer rose to accept a scrolled Certificate of Appreciation from General Groves. Speaking in a low, quiet voice, he expressed his hope that in the years ahead everyone associated with the lab’s work would be able to look back on their achievements with pride. But on a sober note, he warned, “
Today that pride must be tempered
with a profound concern. If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons
to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing
for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los
Alamos and Hiroshima.
”
He went on: “The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them, in other times, of other wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some, misled by a false sense of history, who hold that they will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that. By our works we are committed, committed to a world united, before this common peril, in law and in humanity.”
His words reassured many on The Hill that despite his curious support for the May-Johnson bill, he was still one of them. “That day he was us,” wrote one Los Alamos resident. “He spoke to us, and for us.”
Sitting on the dais with him that morning was Robert G. Sproul, president of the University of California, Berkeley. Stunned by Oppenheimer’s stark language, Sproul was further unsettled by the private words they exchanged between speeches. Sproul had come with the intention of winning Oppenheimer back to Berkeley. He knew Oppie was disaffected. On September 29, the physicist had written him to say that he was undecided about his future. Several other institutions had offered him tenured faculty positions with salaries ranging from two to three times what he was paid at Berkeley. And, despite his long years in Berkeley, Oppie said he was aware “of a certain lack of confidence on the part of the University for what it must inevitably have regarded as my indiscretions of the past.” By “indiscretions,” Oppenheimer was referring to Sproul’s annoyance with his political activities on behalf of the Teachers’ Union. It would be wrong, he wrote Sproul, to return to Berkeley if the university and the physics department didn’t really want him. And “[i]t would seem wrong to me to return at a salary so out of proportion to those of other institutions.”
Sproul, a rigid and conservative man, had always thought Oppenheimer troublesome, so he had hesitated when Ernest Lawrence proposed that they offer to double Oppie’s salary. Lawrence argued that “how much we pay Professor Oppenheimer really means nothing because the Government will place such large sums at our disposal if Oppenheimer is here, that his salary will be insignificant.” Reluctantly, Sproul acquiesced. But now, as the two men sat on the dais and discussed the matter, Oppenheimer brushed aside Sproul’s offer, repeating in substance what he had said in his letter: He was aware that his colleagues in the physics department and Sproul himself were not enthusiastic about having him return “because of his difficult temperament and poor judgment.” He then abruptly informed Sproul that he had decided to teach at Caltech, but even so, he asked Sproul for a formal extension of his leave of absence—thus leaving the door open to a return to Berkeley at a later date. Though understandably miffed by the tenor of this conversation, Sproul felt compelled to agree to Oppie’s request.