American Prometheus (78 page)
“I carried away the impression,” Mansfield told Borden, “that Oppenheimer regards war [with the Soviet Union] as unthinkable, a game hardly worth the candle.”
I believe that he accordingly stops short of really thinking out the consequences of his policy of temperance and moderation. I also suspect that his fastidious mind finds the whole notion of strategic bombing essentially clumsy and heavy-handed. It is using the sledgehammer rather than the surgeon’s scalpel; it takes no great imagination or sophistication. Couple this with his moral sensibilities of the variety especially pronounced amongst scientists, add on his deep conviction that the Russian people are essentially victims of a tyrannical . . . government, compound this with his distaste for killing noncombatants—and his frequently reiterated stress on the importance of developing tactical uses perhaps becomes more explicable.
Mansfield’s June 1951 memo accurately caught the spirit and logic of Oppenheimer’s thinking. But Borden appears to have set his mind against the possibility that Oppenheimer’s policy recommendations could be explained by logic. He believed there were other, dark influences at work and it became clear to him that others shared that view. Later that summer, Borden and Strauss got together to discuss their mutual suspicions about Oppenheimer. Strauss “devoted a good part of the conversation to an expression of his fear and concern over Oppenheimer,” a summary of their meeting records. They talked at length about Crouch’s allegation that Oppenheimer had hosted a secret Communist Party meeting.
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, both men believed Crouch’s story; their minds were made up about Oppenheimer’s perfidy. Yet they reluctantly concluded that the story could not be confirmed, even with the use of wiretap intelligence. Strauss told Borden, “They [Oppenheimer and his sidekicks] would now be exceedingly careful over the telephone because the ‘barber’ [Strauss’ nickname for Joe Volpe] was in a position to know about possible telephone checks and would have passed this information on.” Oppenheimer’s friends in the scientific community, they thought, would always protect him, and Oppie seemed to understand that he was being watched. “I pointed out [to Strauss],” Borden noted in a memo to himself, that other officials [presumably the FBI] had the same “feeling of utter frustration about the possibility of any definite conclusions.”
In their conspiratorial frame of mind, all Borden and Strauss could see was that Oppenheimer’s championing of tactical nuclear weapons was a ploy to block the Super bomb. Indeed, Borden was convinced that in the years 1950–52, Oppenheimer had used all his influence against pursuing the Super’s development—even after it became clear in June 1951 that Stanislaw Ulam and Teller had solved the Super’s design problems. It did not seem to matter to them that Oppie had pronounced the design “technically sweet,” and had formally acquiesced in its development. He and his colleagues on the GAC had repeatedly rejected Teller’s proposal to build a second weapons laboratory devoted specifically to the Super, and for Borden and Strauss that was sufficient evidence of Oppenheimer’s continuing resistance. But Oppie and his GAC colleagues had their reasons. They believed that dividing America’s scientific talent between two weapons laboratories would impede rather than advance scientific progress.
That same year, Teller had gone to the FBI with a laundry list of accusations against Oppenheimer. The general theme of his charges was that Oppenheimer had “delayed or attempted to delay or hinder the development of the H-bomb.” Interviewed at Los Alamos, Teller did his best to smear Oppenheimer by innuendo, telling the FBI that “a lot of people believe Oppenheimer opposed the development of the H-Bomb on ‘direct orders from Moscow.’ ” To cover himself, he then said that he did not think Oppie was “disloyal.” Instead, he attributed Oppenheimer’s behavior to a personality defect: “Oppenheimer is a very complicated person, and an outstanding man. In his youth he was troubled with some sort of physical or mental attacks which may have permanently affected him. He has had great ambitions in science and realizes that he is not as great a physicist as he would like to be.” In conclusion, Teller said that he “
would do anything possible
” to see that Oppenheimer’s services to the government were terminated.
Teller was not the only H-bomb booster desperate to eliminate Oppenheimer’s influence. In September 1951, David Tressel Griggs, a professor of geophysics at UCLA, was appointed chief scientist for the U.S. Air Force. As a RAND consultant in 1946, Griggs had heard rumors about Oppenheimer’s security problems, and now his immediate boss, Air Force Secretary Thomas K. Finletter, told him he had “serious questions as to the loyalty of Dr. Oppenheimer.” Neither Finletter nor Griggs had any new evidence, but both men believed their suspicions validated by “a pattern of activities, all of which involved Dr. Oppenheimer.”
For his part, Oppenheimer questioned the sanity of the Air Force’s leadership. He was appalled by their murderous schemes. In 1951, he was shown the Air Force’s strategic war plan—which called for the obliteration of Soviet cities on a scale that shocked him. It was a war plan of criminal genocide. “That was the goddamnedest thing I ever saw,” he later told Freeman Dyson.
Just weeks after going to work for Finletter in 1951, Griggs led an Air Force delegation to Pasadena for a conference with a group of Caltech scientists. Chaired by Caltech’s president, Lee DuBridge, this group had been asked to write a highly classified report—dubbed Project Vista—on what role nuclear weapons might play in the event of a Soviet ground invasion of Western Europe. Griggs and other Air Force officials were alarmed by rumors that the Project Vista report disparaged strategic bombing. The authors of Project Vista reportedly promised to “bring the battle back to the battlefield” by giving small, tactical nuclear warheads priority over city-buster thermonuclear bombs.
Chapter Five of the report even argued that thermonuclear bombs could not be used for tactical purposes on a real battlefield—and suggested that it would serve U.S. interests if Washington publicly adopted a policy of “no first use” of nuclear weapons. The chapter also recommended that SAC receive only a third of the country’s precious supply of fissionable material. The remainder would go to the Army for tactical battlefield weapons. Griggs was furious about these recommendations—and not surprised to learn that the primary author of Chapter Five was Robert Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer had not even been a member of the Project Vista panel. But DuBridge had brought him into its deliberations to help clarify their conclusions. Characteristically, Oppie spent two days reading the panel’s materials and then quickly wrote what became the controversial, but highly logical, Chapter Five. Fearing Oppenheimer’s persuasive powers, Griggs and his Air Force colleagues did everything they could to bottle up the report. They were not particularly successful; just before Christmas 1951, DuBridge, Oppenheimer and the Caltech scientist Charles C. Lauritsen arrived in Paris to brief the NATO Supreme Commander, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, on Project Vista’s conclusions. They impressed upon Eisenhower, an Army man, what a few tactical nuclear warheads could do against a Soviet armored division. Oppie thought the briefing was a “success.”
When Finletter learned of the trip, he “went straight through the roof.” The Air Force did not want Eisenhower exposed to Oppenheimer’s thinking, particularly since his views would support the Army’s demand for a bigger share of the atomic budget. Lewis Strauss was also furious, and later wrote Senator Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa, a conservative member of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, that “ever since Oppenheimer and DuBridge spent some time with Gen. Eisenhower in Paris last year I have been concerned over the probability that their visit was primarily for the purpose of indoctrinating him with their plausible but specious policy on the atomic energy situation.” The Air Force Chief of Staff, Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, was so alarmed at Oppenheimer’s influence that he quietly removed the scientist’s name from the Air Force’s list of individuals cleared for access to Top Secret information.
Oppenheimer’s preference for tactical nuclear weapons as an antidote to genocidal warfare had unintended consequences. By “bringing the battle back to the battlefield,” he was also making it more likely that nuclear weapons would actually be used. In 1946, he had warned that atomic weapons “are not policy weapons, but . . . are themselves a supreme expression of the concept of total war.” By 1951, however, he was writing in the Vista report, “It is clear that they [tactical atomic weapons] can be used only as adjuncts in a military campaign which has some other components, and whose primary purpose is a military victory. They are not primarily weapons of totality or terror, but weapons used to give combat forces help that they would otherwise lack.” That they might also serve as a nuclear trip-wire which could set off an exchange of ever larger nuclear weapons was a scenario that Oppenheimer ignored in his desperation to prevent the Air Force from planning Armageddon under the guise of a rational warfighting strategy.
Griggs and Finletter were further troubled by Oppenheimer’s influence over another analysis of nuclear strategy, the 1952 Lincoln Summer Study Group, a classified MIT report on how best to improve the country’s air defense against a nuclear attack. The Air Force—dominated as it was by the Strategic Air Command—feared that any investment in air defense would shift resources from SAC’s retaliatory forces. And that’s exactly what the Lincoln Study Group proposed: to convert “the bulk of the B-47 fleet in the Strategic Air Command” to “long range interceptors, armed with relatively long-range guided missiles.” Oppenheimer considered air defense a reasonable priority—but SAC’s commanders—all bomber pilots—thought it sheer defeatism.
At the end of 1952, Finletter and other Air Force officials were horrified to learn that someone had slipped the summary report of the Lincoln Study Group to the Alsop brothers. Convinced that Oppenheimer was the culprit, “Finletter was filled with wrath about the collusion of Oppenheimer with the Alsop brothers.”
EARLIER THAT SPRING, Griggs had told Rabi that Oppenheimer and the GAC were blocking the development of the Super. Rabi angrily defended his friend and suggested that Griggs should read the minutes of GAC’s deliberations; only then, he suggested, would he understand how fairly Oppenheimer chaired these meetings. He then offered to set up a meeting in Princeton between the two antagonists. Griggs agreed.
At 3:30 p.m. on May 23, 1952, Griggs entered Oppenheimer’s Princeton office and sat down for what was supposed to be an attempt at mutual understanding. Oppenheimer, however, promptly pulled out a copy of the GAC’s October 1949 report with its controversial recommendation against development of the H-bomb. This was like waving a red flag. Oppie might have used his considerable charm to reassure a bureaucratic opponent, but he could not help himself. He saw in Griggs just another idiotic pretender to power, a mediocre scientist who had aligned himself with generals and an ambitious physicist, Edward Teller. He would not stoop to defend himself before such a man, and their conversation quickly became strained. When Griggs asked Oppenheimer if he had circulated a story that had Secretary Finletter boasting that with a few H-bombs the United States could rule the world, Oppenheimer lost what little patience he had maintained to that point. Staring back at Griggs, Oppie said he had heard the story and furthermore, he believed it. When Griggs insisted that he had been in the room on the occasion in question and Finletter had said no such thing, Oppie replied that he had heard it from an unimpeachable source who had also been present.
Since slander was now on the table, Oppenheimer then asked Griggs whether he thought him “pro-Russian or merely confused.” Griggs replied that he wished he knew the answer to that question. Well, Oppenheimer said, have you ever assailed my loyalty? Griggs replied that he had indeed heard Oppenheimer’s loyalty questioned and he had discussed Oppenheimer as a security risk with both Secretary Finletter and Air Force Chief of Staff Hoyt Vandenberg. At this, Oppenheimer pronounced Griggs “a paranoid.”
Griggs left angry, and more convinced than ever that Oppenheimer was dangerous. He subsequently gave Finletter an “eyes only” account of the encounter. For his part, Oppie naïvely thought Griggs too inconsequential to do him harm. To compound his error, a few weeks later Oppenheimer repeated his Princeton performance in a luncheon with Finletter himself. The Air Force secretary’s aides thought it time for the two men to meet one-on-one and talk out their differences. But Oppenheimer arrived late from testifying on the Hill and sat stony-faced throughout the lunch as Finletter— a sophisticated Wall Street lawyer—tried repeatedly to draw him out. Making no effort to disguise his contempt, Oppenheimer was “rude beyond belief.” He had come to loathe these Air Force men with their commitment to building more and more bombs for the purpose of killing more and more millions of people. To his mind, they were so dangerous, so morally obtuse, that he almost welcomed them as political enemies. A few weeks later, Finletter and his people told the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy that it was an open question “whether [Oppenheimer] was a subversive.”
FINLETTER’S ACCUSATIONS against Oppenheimer were a reflection of the extremes to which those engaged in the nuclear debate were driven. Oppenheimer himself was not immune to this contagion. In June 1951, he gave an off-the-record speech to the Committee on the Present Danger (of which he was a member), a private group dedicated to lobbying the government to build up its conventional defenses. Speaking without notes, he made the argument for a real defense of Western Europe, one that would “leave Europe free, not destroyed [by atomic bombs].” “In dealing with the Russians,” he concluded, “we are coping with a barbarous, backward people who are hardly loyal to their rulers. Our supreme policy should ultimately be to ‘get rid of this atom-stuff as a weapon.’ ”
As a measure of just how far his thinking had evolved, by 1952 Oppenheimer was heard speculating aloud about the possibility of preventive war, an idea he had abhorred only three years earlier. To be sure, he never actually advocated it, but on several occasions he broached its possibility. In January 1952, Oppenheimer had a discussion with the Alsop brothers, and Joe Alsop noted that “Oppie’s line, to put it bluntly, was something damned close to preventive war; we can’t just sit by while a potential enemy builds up the means of our certain destruction.”