Fifties (56 page)

As the AEC began to move on Oppenheimer, it was difficult to tell where the commission let off and the FBI began. In the past when the FBI had done a security dossier on a person, it sent in the file and that was the end of it. Not in the Oppenheimer case. FBI surveillance of the scientist was constant. So close was the cooperation between the FBI and Strauss that by the time Oppenheimer was first presented with the charges against him, the FBI had already managed to bug two places he was almost sure to go to next: the law offices of both Joe Volpe and Herbert Marks, the former AEC general counsels.

For Harold Green, the Oppenheimer case was the one episode in his government career that he came not merely to regret but to hate. He sensed he was preparing charges for a hanging jury and a kangaroo court. Still, Green was surprised by Oppie’s prolonged history of fellow traveling during the late thirties and the disingenuous answers Oppenheimer had given to questions from security officers during the Los Alamos years. Above all, Green was fascinated by the charges that Oppenheimer had deliberately slowed down the attempt to produce a hydrogen bomb. One document seemed to jump out at him—an FBI interview with Edward Teller some eighteen months earlier. In this secret conversation, Teller portrayed Oppenheimer as a once great scientist who was able, by using deft psychological tricks and considerable powers of persuasion, to persuade other, more patriotic physicists not to work on the Super. Teller believed that Oppenheimer was motivated not by subversive attitudes but by jealousy and his fear that Teller was about to build an even bigger bomb and thus achieve even greater scientific success.

On December 21, 1953, Lewis Strauss summoned J. Robert Oppenheimer to tell him that the AEC believed he was a security risk. Strauss gave him twenty-four hours either to challenge the AEC
charge or to concur in his own repudiation. Oppenheimer, for all his awareness of the growing resentment of him in high places, was stunned. He sat that first day with his two lawyers (with the FBI listening in on electronic bugs), shaking his head and saying, “I can’t believe what is happening to me!”

The lines were drawn. “Don’t fight it, you can’t win,” his old friend Victor Weisskopf told Oppenheimer. “What you should say, if they take away your clearance, is that it’s their loss.” But Oppenheimer felt cornered. The charges cut to the core of his integrity as a scientist. He had had some sense of how painful the hearings would be. He did not, he wrote Lewis Strauss, accept the idea that he was unworthy to serve his government: “If I were this unworthy I could hardly have served our country as I have tried, or been the Director of our Institute in Princeton, or have spoken, as on more than one occasion I have found myself speaking, in the name of science and our country.” Of course, he would fight the charges.

There was a curious duality to events now. As America was moving ahead to test the Super, lawyers hired by the Atomic Energy Commission were preparing to put J. Robert Oppenheimer on trial as a security risk.

The case against J. Robert Oppenheimer seemed likely to begin in April 1954; the test of the Super took place on March 1, 1954, at Bikini, in the Marshall Islands. It was the first hydrogen bomb to be exploded, and it was dropped not from a plane but from a 150-foot tower so that scientists could calibrate the damage with precision. The men controlling the explosion believed that it would detonate 7 megatons of explosion. Instead, it was twice as powerful, with a yield of 15 megatons. That made it a thousand times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The government’s best meteorologists had studied the prevailing winds in the area in order to predict what the radioactive fallout would do after the explosion. But instead of blowing to the northeast as expected, the winds shifted to an area south of the projected course. Fallout blew across an American destroyer, whose seamen had been well schooled in what precautions to take: They buttoned up their clothes and quickly went belowdecks; later, they hosed down the ship for hours to wash away any of the ash from the fallout. No one on the ship was seriously ill.

Not everyone was so lucky. Three tiny islands some hundred miles to the east of Bikini were hit hard. On the island of Rongerik,
twenty-six American sailors stationed to make weather observations knew enough to wash immediately, put on extra clothes, and stay inside their tents. But no one had bothered to tell the Marshall Islanders about their vulnerability to the most terrible of modern weapons. American medical teams were rushed to all three islands. Luckily on Rongerik, the worst radiation occurred in unpopulated areas.

The most unfortunate victims turned out to be a group of fishermen aboard a small Japanese fishing trawler called the
Fukuryu Maru
or
The Lucky Dragon.
The
Dragon
on this trip was anything but lucky. From the start of its cruise, five weeks earlier, almost everything had gone wrong. The regular captain was ill, there was constant engine trouble, the catch was marginal, and the fishermen lost half their lines to coral. Trying desperately to salvage their disastrous trip, they decided to try the waters east of the Marshalls. Forty tons of tuna was considered a good catch. So far they had taken only nine. On March 1, they decided to cast their nets for the last time on this trip. The men in charge of
The Lucky Dragon
were wary of the area around the Marshalls, where in the past the Americans had conducted atomic tests. They did not so much fear for their health as worry about offending the authorities of a great foreign power. A notice had been issued by the Japanese Maritime Safety Board warning of the possibility of a test around March 1, but this news, while it reached some Japanese boats in the major ports, did not reach
The Lucky Dragon,
which was out of the minor port of Yaizu.

Just before dawn on March 1, the
Dragon
was about a hundred miles east of Bikini. Unable to sleep, a young seaman named Shinzo Suyuki was walking on the deck and chanced to look toward the west. There he saw a giant whitish-yellow glow that turned orange. He raced belowdecks to tell his shipmates. “The sun’s rising in the west!” he yelled. They woke to see the flaming orange light. “It a
pika-don
!” one of the seamen said, using the new Japanese phrase for an atomic bomb: Born on the morning of Hiroshima, it meant “thunder and flash.” A few minutes later there was a great seismic shock in the ocean, followed by two enormous concussionlike explosions. Soon the crew could see a giant cloud reaching far into the stratosphere. Some of the fishermen wanted to get out of the area immediately, but others felt that their catch was so small that they needed to spend one more day fishing. So they unfurled their net. Aikichi Kuboyama, the radioman and the most educated man of the crew, wondered what had happened and pulled from among the
books in his cabin one that gave the speed of sound. He estimated that some seven minutes had elapsed between the sight of the explosion and the sound from it. Calibrating as best he could, Kuboyama figured that seven minutes equaled roughly eighty-seven miles. He looked on the map and placed the boat exactly eighty-seven miles from the island of Bikini. The fishermen were nervous now, and they quickly pulled their nets in. Their luck had not changed. They caught only nine fish that day.

Two hours later the sky changed. Suddenly a giant fog appeared and a light drizzle began. But this was no ordinary rain, for it contained tiny bits of ash. “Some kind of white sand is falling from the heavens,” said Takashi Suzuki, one of the seamen. The ash got in their hair and in their eyes, and the men tentatively tasted it. Some said it tasted like salt, others, like sand. The crew found, to their surprise, that they had little appetite that afternoon. Some experienced severe nausea. Others found that their eyes ached and the next morning they could barely open them. Their hands began to hurt where they had handled the ropes. By the third day some felt feverish. Their skin began to turn darker and they began to get sores on their fingers and necks, which had been exposed to the rain of ash. Still, they were mostly relieved to have gotten out of the Bikini area without being caught by the Americans.

On March 13, the AEC issued a quiet announcement of the test, not notable for its candor (“during the course of a routine atomic test in the Marshall Islands”) and mentioning briefly that twenty-eight Americans and 236 Marshall Island residents had been treated for radiation (“The individuals were unexpectedly exposed to some radiation. There were no burns. All are reported well ...”). The story made page-one news in Japan, though it was of no help to the
Dragon
’s crew who pulled into port the next day. Though many of the men aboard were very sick, it had not radioed for help on its return trip to Japan, for its men still feared notifying the Americans authorities. Kuboyama, the man who had the best sense of what had happened, went to see a friend named Ootsuka: “Ootsuka-san, look at me, I am done for.” His friend took one look at his dark skin. “You look like a Negro,” he said.

The crew was taken to a hospital, many of them seriously ill by this time. When he found out about his radiation sickness, Kuboyama wrote in his journal: “From this day on, unhappiness in our family began.” At first the seamen were outcasts: No barber in Yaizu would cut their hair; young women, interviewed on television news shows, said they would never marry them. One of the seamen
told a German journalist, “Our fate menaces mankind. God grant that it may listen.”

Kuboyama became the central figure as the drama continued to unfold. He was the most articulate of the men, and, as it turned out, the sickest as well. Perhaps, Japanese newspapers pointed out at this time, his illness was a cautionary tale for millions. He was sure the Americans were being disingenuous; for those who had been killed or had become sick at Hiroshima had been relatively near the epicenter, whereas his boat had been nearly ninety miles from where the explosion had taken place.

Japanese authorities found the American officials less than forthcoming about the nature of the explosion, and the Japanese doctors regarded the preliminary visits of American doctors warily; the Americans, they thought, seemed prone to arrive, make pronouncements, immediately dismiss the seriousness of the illness, and then go on to other matters. When the fishermen were eventually asked if they wanted to be examined by a team of American medical experts, they, led by Kuboyama, rejected the offer, because they felt the Americans were far more interested in studying them like guinea pigs than in helping them.

That summer Aikichi Kuboyama’s health continued to decline. He was terribly weak. His white-blood-cell count was low, and he suffered from hepatitis. By September the entire nation took up a vigil as he hovered near death. At one point he cried out that the pain was unusually severe: “My body feels like it is being burned with electricity. Under my body there must be a high-tension wire.” On September 23 he died. American authorities, speaking without attribution, told journalists that Kuboyama had died of hepatitis. More and more often, it seemed, the cover-up was a critical part of American policy.

As additional reports emanated from Japan on the terrible hardships endured by the crewmen of
The Lucky Dragon,
Lewis Strauss became so angry that he started to believe—it was a reflection of the paranoia of the age—that he, rather than the fishermen, was the victim. Those Japanese fishermen, he told Eisenhower, were part of a Communist plot to spy on and to embarrass the U.S. “If I were the Reds,” he told Eisenhower’s press secretary Jim Hagerty, “I would fill the oceans all over the world with radioactive fish. It would be so easy to do!”

On April 2, 1954, James Hagerty made a note in his diary that presented a remarkable insight into the increasing isolation from reality that was coming with the Cold War: “Here is good place to
put down story on Japanese fishing boat who claims fishermen were ‘burned’ by fallout of March 1 H-bomb explosion. Lewis Strauss and others suspect this boat was a Red spy outfit. Here are the reasons (1) The fish, supposedly radioactivized, were in refrigerators when the fallout occurred. (2) The Japanese government has refused to let our people examine the fishermen. (3) Their reported blood count same as those of our own weather station personnel who were also caught in fallout, and who were not burned. (4) The ‘captain’ is twenty-two years old, with no known background of seamanship. Suspect this part of Russian espionage system, but we don’t want to say so publicly. Would tip our hand on other stuff we also know about. Interesting story and hope it will come out some day.”

At the same time a three-man board was being selected to hear the evidence against Oppenheimer, not on the basis of its experience in security cases but rather for political tilt. Those suspected of having any sympathy for Oppenheimer were vetoed. Strauss busied himself rounding up the anti-Oppenheimer forces. He reminded Teller how he had helped get him the lab and backed him when his was a lonely voice of opposition. Also, some thought Teller was personally indebted because Strauss had tried to help shepherd Teller’s aged parents out of Communist Hungary in a clandestine operation after World War Two. Luis Alvarez, another Oppenheimer opponent, did not want to testify, but as Alvarez later wrote, “I had a duty to serve my country, Lewis countered. I said I had served my country during the war. Lewis’ emotional intensity increased as he ran out of arguments. As a parting shot he prophesied that if I didn’t come to Washington the next day I wouldn’t be able to look myself in the mirror for the rest of my life.”

There was, Oppenheimer’s friends Lilienthal and Weisskopf thought, an insanity to the proceedings. “Somehow,” Weisskopf wrote Oppenheimer, “Fate has chosen you as the one who has to bear the heaviest load in this struggle.... If I had to choose whom to select for the man who has to take this on I could not but choose you. Who else in this country could represent better than you the spirit and the philosophy of all that for which we are living. Please think of us when you are feeling low. Think of all your friends who are going to remain your friends and who rely upon you ...”