American Prometheus (81 page)

Since the prosecution was barred from introducing the illegal FBI wiretap of Weinberg’s conversation with Steve Nelson, its case was now transparently weak. The trial ended on March 5, 1953, with Weinberg’s acquittal. In an extraordinary departure from legal norms, U.S. District Court Judge Alexander Holtzoff told the jury that “the court does not approve of your verdict.” He went on to observe that testimony in the trial had unearthed “an amazing and shocking situation existing in the crucial years of 1939, 1940, and 1941 on the campus of a great university in which a large and active Communist underground organization was in operation.”
¹⁸

Nevertheless, Oppenheimer was greatly relieved. The whole business, he hoped, was finally put to rest. When David Lilienthal learned that Oppenheimer would not be called to testify in the case, he wrote his old friend, “With so many mean and unjust things happening, we’re entitled to some decency even in these days.” Ironically, one day when Oppenheimer happened to be up on Capitol Hill he stepped into an elevator and saw Senator McCarthy. “We looked at each other,” Robert later told a friend, “and I winked.”

Joe Weinberg, now thirty-six, had a life again—though not a job. The University of Minnesota had dismissed him two years earlier when HUAC had labeled him “Scientist X.” And despite his acquittal, the university’s president announced that Weinberg would not be reinstated because of his refusal to cooperate with the FBI. Turning one last time to his mentor, Weinberg wrote Oppie asking for a letter of recommendation for a possible job at an optics firm. Weinberg assured him that “this will be the last time I will ever disturb you.” Although Oppenheimer had every reason to believe the FBI would find out about it, as they did, he wrote a supportive letter for Weinberg, who got the job. Weinberg was grateful, but years later, when asked to reflect on his relationship with Oppie he replied, “He had had enough of me and I had had enough of him too.”

The Weinberg case had been emotionally draining, and it had been an expensive ordeal. On December 30, 1952, even before the case went to trial, Oppenheimer had dropped by the offices of Lewis Strauss, telling him that he had a personal matter to discuss. His attorneys, he said, had just billed him $9,000 for their representation of him as a potential witness in the Weinberg case. The legal fees far exceeded his expectations, and he “did not know how to handle it.” He then asked Strauss if he, in his capacity as chairman of the board for the Institute, would recommend that the Institute pay his legal expenses. Strauss firmly replied that this would be a “mistake.” When Oppenheimer pointed out that Corning Glass Company paid the legal bills of his friend, Dr. Ed Condon, Strauss said the circumstances were not parallel. Dr. Condon’s employers, he pointed out, had known of Condon’s problems with HUAC before they had hired him. The Institute’s trustees, Strauss said coldly, had “no indication whatever” that Oppenheimer had such problems. This, of course, was not true; in 1947, Oppenheimer had informed Strauss of his documented left-wing past. Nevertheless, Strauss suggested that his legal bills were high because his lawyers thought him “quite rich and that the traffic would bear it.”

Oppenheimer replied testily that Strauss must know that was not the case since his tax returns were prepared by an Institute office manager under Strauss’ supervision. Strauss said no, he had “no idea what his income situation was.” To this, Oppenheimer said that he “was not wealthy—that he had a modest income aside from his Institute salary. . . .” He allowed that some people might think him wealthy because he had inherited “some quite extraordinary works of art.” Clearly unsympathetic, Strauss ended the meeting by saying that he would not raise the issue with the trustees “at this time.” Oppenheimer left angry and humiliated; henceforth he knew he could count on Strauss’ hostility. He decided simply to go around him and send the legal bill to the Institute’s trustees, hoping they would pay it. But Strauss later told the FBI that he had persuaded the “long-haired professors” on the board to reject the bill. By the spring of 1953, the enmity between the two men was palpable to everyone who knew them.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

“The Beast in the Jungle”

We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable
of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.

J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, 1953

OPPENHEIMER HAD LONG BEEN HARBORING a vague premonition that something dark and momentous lay in his future. One day in the late 1940s, he had picked up a copy of Henry James’ short story “The Beast in the Jungle,” a tale of obsession, tormented egotism and existential foreboding. “Utterly transfixed” by the story, Oppenheimer immediately called up Herb Marks. “He was very anxious that Herb read it,” recalled Marks’ widow, Anne Wilson Marks. James’ central character, John Marcher, encounters a woman he met many years earlier, and she recalls his having confided in her that he was haunted by a premonition: “You said you had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you.”

Marcher confesses that whatever it is, the event hasn’t happened—yet: “It hasn’t yet come. Only, you know, it isn’t anything I’m to
do,
to achieve in the world, to be distinguished or admired for. I’m not such an ass as
that.
” When the woman asks, “It’s to be something you’re merely to suffer?” Marcher replies, “Well, say to wait for—to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences. . . .”

Since Hiroshima, Oppenheimer had lived with just such a peculiar sense that someday his own “beast in the jungle” would emerge to alter his existence. For some years now, he had known that he was a hunted man. And if there was a “beast in the jungle” waiting for him, it was Lewis Strauss.

ON FEBRUARY 17, 1953, some six weeks before Joe Weinberg was finally acquitted, and thus at a moment when Oppenheimer still felt vulnerable, he nevertheless gave a speech in New York that was essentially an unclassified version of the disarmament report he and Bundy had recently sent the new Eisenhower Administration urging a policy of “candor” about nuclear weapons. According to the historian Patrick J. McGrath, Oppenheimer gave the speech with the consent of Eisenhower—but he surely realized that it would anger his political enemies in Washington. His chosen audience was a closed meeting of members of the Council on Foreign Relations. Precisely because the Council was such an elite venue, his words were sure to resonate loudly throughout Washington’s military and policy-making circles. Sitting in the audience that day were such luminaries of the foreign policy establishment as the young banker David Rockefeller, the
Washington Post
publisher Eugene Meyer, the
New York Times
military correspondent Hanson Baldwin and the Kuhn, Loeb investment banker Benjamin Buttenwieser. Also there that evening—Lewis L. Strauss.

Introduced by his good friend David Lilienthal, Oppie began by noting that he had entitled his talk “Atomic Weapons and American Policy.” To polite laughter, he acknowledged that this was a “presumptuous title,” but he begged his listeners’ indulgence, explaining, “Any smaller vehicle would give an impression of clarity different than that which I wanted to communicate.”

He then observed that because almost everything associated with nuclear weapons was classified, “I must reveal its nature without revealing anything.” He pointed out that since the end of the war, the United States had been compelled to come to grips with the “massive evidences of Soviet hostility, and the growing evidences of Soviet power.” The role of the atom in this Cold War was a simple one: American policy-makers had concluded, “Let us keep ahead. Let us be sure that we are ahead of the enemy.”

Turning to the status of this race, he reported that the Soviets had produced three atomic explosions and were manufacturing substantial quantities of fissionable material. “I should like to present the evidence for this”; he said, “I cannot.” But he said that he could reveal his own casual estimate of where the Soviets stood in relation to America: “I think that the USSR is about four years behind us.” This might sound somewhat reassuring, but after reviewing the effects of one bomb delivered onto Hiroshima, Oppenheimer observed that both sides understood that these new weapons could become even more lethal. Vaguely alluding to missile technology, he said that technical developments would soon bring “more modern, more flexible, harder to intercept” delivery vehicles. “All of this is in train,” he said. “It is my opinion that we should all know—not precisely, but quantitatively and, above all, authoritatively—where we stand in these matters.”

The facts were essential to any understanding. But the facts were classified. “I cannot write of them,” he said, emphasizing once again the albatross of secrecy. “What I can say is this: I have never discussed these prospects candidly with any responsible group, whether scientists or statesmen, whether citizens or officers of the government, with any group that could steadily look at the facts, that did not come away with a great sense of anxiety and somberness at what they saw.” Looking a decade ahead, he said, “it is likely to be small comfort that the Soviet Union is four years behind us. . . . The very least we can conclude is that our twenty-thousandth bomb . . . will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two-thousandth.”

Without revealing the specific numbers, Oppenheimer said that the American stockpile of atomic weapons was growing rapidly. “We have from the first maintained that we should be free to use these weapons; and it is generally known we plan to use them. It is also generally known that one ingredient of this plan is a rather rigid commitment to their use in a very massive, initial, unremitting strategic assault on the enemy.” This, of course, was a succinct definition of the Strategic Air Command’s war plan—to obliterate scores of Russian cities in a genocidal air strike.

Atomic bombs, he continued, are “almost the only military measure that anyone has in mind to prevent, let us say, a great battle in Europe from being a continuing, agonizing, large-scale Korea.” And yet, the Europeans are “in ignorance of what these weapons are, how many there will be, how they will be used and what they will do.”

Secrecy in the atomic field, he charged, was leading to widespread rumor, speculation and outright ignorance. “We do not operate well when they [important facts] are known, in secrecy and in fear, only to a few men.” Former president Harry Truman had recently disparaged the notion that the Soviets were developing a nuclear arsenal capable of harming continental America. Oppenheimer noted sharply: “It must be disturbing that an ex-President of the United States, who has been briefed on what we know about the Soviet atomic capability, can publicly call in doubt all conclusions from the evidence.” He also ridiculed a “high officer of the Air Defense Command” for saying, only a few months ago, that “it was our policy to attempt to protect our striking force, but not really our policy to attempt to protect this country, for that is so big a job that it would interfere with our retaliatory capabilities.” Oppenheimer concluded that such “follies can occur only when even the men who know the facts can find no one to talk about them, when the facts are too secret for discussion, and thus for thought.”

The only remedy, Oppenheimer concluded, was “candor.” Officials in Washington, D.C., had to start leveling with the American people, and tell them what the enemy already knew about the atomic armaments race.

It was an extraordinarily perceptive and brazen speech. Again and again, Oppenheimer observed that he was barred from speaking of the essential facts—and then like a Brahmin priest endowed with special knowledge, he proceeded to reveal the most fundamental secret of all—that no country could expect in any meaningful sense to win an atomic war. In the very near future, he said, “we may anticipate a state of affairs in which the two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own.” And then, in a chilling turn of phrase that startled everyone who heard it, Oppenheimer quietly added, “We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.”

It is hard to imagine a more provocative speech. After all, the new administration’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, was an outspoken advocate of a defense doctrine based on massive retaliation. And yet, here was the father of the atomic era declaring that the fundamental assumptions of the country’s defense policy were laced with ignorance and folly. The nation’s most famous nuclear scientist was calling upon the government to release heretofore closely guarded nuclear secrets, and to discuss candidly the consequences of nuclear war. Here was a celebrated private citizen, armed with the highest security clearance, denigrating the secrecy that surrounded the nation’s war plans. As word spread through Washington’s national security bureaucracy of what Oppenheimer had said, many were appalled. Lewis Strauss was seething.

On the other hand, most of the lawyers and investment bankers listening to Oppenheimer’s speech at the Council came away impressed. Even the new president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he later read the speech, was taken by the notion of candor. As a former military officer, Ike understood Oppenheimer’s vivid rendering of the two major powers as “two scorpions in a bottle.” Eisenhower had seen the Disarmament Panel report and he found it thoughtful and wise. Highly skeptical of nuclear weapons, he told one of his key White House aides, C. D. Jackson—who had been Henry Luce’s right-hand man at Time-Life—that “atomic weapons strongly favor the side that attacks aggressively and
by
surprise.
This the United States will never do; and let me point out that we never had any of this hysterical fear of
any nation
until atomic weapons appeared upon the scene.” Later in his presidency, Eisenhower would feel compelled to rebuke a panel of hawkish advisers, caustically observing, “You can’t have this kind of war. There just aren’t enough bulldozers to scrape the bodies off the streets.”