Read Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer Online
Authors: Ray Monk
Inside the Centre: The Life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (51 page)
Although it is easy to sneer at Lawrence’s obsession with bigger and bigger machines and at the fact that, as Bethe put it, he was ‘not even a good physicist’, one should also remember the other half of Bethe’s assessment, his statement that: ‘Lawrence was a tremendous influence on the
development of physics, good in that he made people conscious of big accelerators.’ The American public were not entirely wrong to regard him as their greatest scientist. The 60-inch cyclotron that distracted Lawrence from the news of fission, for example, was used to make significant scientific discoveries in 1940 and thereafter. In this way, Lawrence, despite his limitations as a scientist, did indeed make an important contribution to science. Segrè reports that Lawrence had expected to receive the Nobel Prize in 1938 and was disappointed when it went instead to Fermi. Lawrence may not have been completely surprised, then, to learn, as he did on 9 November 1939, that his time had come. He was to receive the 1939 Nobel Prize ‘for the invention and development of the cyclotron and for the results obtained by its aid, especially with regard to artificially radioactive elements’.
When the award was presented to him on 29 February 1940 (in Berkeley rather than in Sweden, because of the dangers of travelling in Europe), Lawrence used his acceptance speech to plead for funding for his new dream machine, which had now swollen to a 184-inch model, weighing 3,000 tons, the cost of which would be about $2 million. Two months later, he heard that the Rockefeller Foundation had agreed to give him $1.15 million to develop the new cyclotron, which, together with other contributions, guaranteed that it would be built. In acknowledging his thanks, Lawrence said that he expected it to be complete by the summer of 1944, barring any ‘unforeseen difficulties’. Of course, there were any number of unforeseen difficulties, but the 184-inch cyclotron
was
built and, after being pressed into service as the first ‘Calutron’ during the war, underwent a fundamental redesign as a ‘synchrocyclotron’, which produced beams of deuterons with energies of nearly 200 million volts and was used to make important scientific breakthroughs. What in 1939 looked like a distraction from real science, in favour of a misguided obsession with mere size, looked after the war like a prescient anticipation of the age of ‘big science’. Lawrence’s instinct that larger and larger machines capable of greater and greater voltages would be essential to the scientific research of the future turned out to be entirely correct.
It was not just in relation to science that Segrè found his new colleagues at Berkeley unsophisticated. ‘Talking politics with American colleagues,’ he says, ‘I found an incomprehension of things European that was appalling to me.’ Illustrative of what he meant were Lawrence’s sometimes extraordinarily naïve and ill-informed reactions to, and views about, European affairs. Shortly after the Munich Agreement in October 1938, for example, Lawrence wrote to the British scientist Wilfrid Mann, who had recently returned to London after working at the Rad Lab: ‘You have been having a very anxious time recently, but let us hope the war clouds have passed and that we have ahead of us
at least a decade
of peace. I don’t think it
absurd to believe it is possible that we have seen a turning point in history, that henceforth international disputes of great powers will be settled by peaceful negotiations and not by war.’ On 29 August 1939, just three days before Germany invaded Poland, Lawrence wrote to his parents: ‘I still think war is going to be avoided. All this discussion must mean that Hitler is backing down.’
But what of Oppenheimer? Segrè has some equally tart observations about him. Oppenheimer, he says:
. . . was considered a demigod by himself and others at Berkeley, and as such he spake in learned and obscure fashions. Besides, he knew quantum mechanics well, and in this he was unique at Berkeley. He taught it in none too easy a fashion, which showed off his prowess and attracted a number of gifted students. Oppenheimer’s loyal disciples hung on his words and put on corresponding airs. Just as we in Rome had acquired Fermi’s intonation, in Berkeley Oppenheimer’s students walked as if they had flat feet, an infirmity of their master’s.
With regard to the celebrated cultural sophistication of Oppenheimer and his students, Segrè was not impressed:
Oppenheimer and his group did not inspire in me the awe that they perhaps expected. I had the impression that their celebrated general culture was not superior to that expected in a boy who had attended a good European high school. I was already acquainted with most of their cultural discoveries, and I found Oppenheimer’s ostentation slightly ridiculous. In physics I was used to Fermi, who had a quite different solidity, coupled with a simplicity that contrasted with Oppenheimer’s erudite complexities.
It is with regard to politics, however, that Segrè is especially damning. ‘Oppenheimer and most of his acolytes,’ he says, ‘followed the political line of the Communist Party of the United States, which was highly uncritical and simple-minded.’ He had the impression that Oppenheimer regarded him as a ‘great Fascist’ (‘I was a Fascist Party member, as every Italian state employee was required to be by law, but it did not take much acumen to figure out that I could not be a Fascist at heart’), while, according to him, Oppenheimer – in following the Communist Party line – ‘deemed that the European quarrels were caused by capitalist imperialists, and that Holy Communism would avoid them’.
In the light of the reports quoted earlier – that Oppenheimer’s faith in the Soviet Union was strongly undermined in the summer of 1938
– one might think Segrè misunderstood the degree to which Oppenheimer was prepared to follow slavishly the Communist Party line, or that at the very least he was exaggerating. What evidence there is, however, supports Segrè. A key event here is the Treaty of Non-Aggression, signed by Germany and the Soviet Union on 23 August 1939, which shocked most liberals and a good number of Communist Party members, and effectively put an end to the strategy Earl Browder had pursued throughout the 1930s of presenting the Communist Party as the upholder of, and natural heir to, the tradition of American liberalism. Indeed, the pact put Browder and the American Communist Party in an extraordinarily difficult position and ended any hope they might have had of continuing to be part of a broad ‘popular front’. After years of upholding communism as the one force that had the strength and determination to halt the spread of fascism in Europe, how could Browder and the Communist Party possibly justify an agreement – something close to an alliance – between the world’s most repugnant fascist state and its only communist state? Against his own inclinations, Browder was forced to insist in public that the pact was ‘a wonderful contribution to peace’ and to deny that it made Poland’s position more insecure. He, however, was obliged by his position to follow the party line; Oppenheimer was not.
In 1954 Oppenheimer mentioned the Nazi-Soviet pact as one of the things that influenced his ‘changing opinion of Russia’, but also insisted that this ‘did not mean a sharp break for me with those who hold to different views’. Those who held to different views, of course, included all who, despite everything, maintained the party line, for instance all of Oppenheimer’s friends and students – and there were many – who remained members of the Communist Party after the signing of the pact. One of those was Haakon Chevalier, who in his book
Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship
raises the question of the pact and then, ostensibly in order to illustrate the quality of Oppenheimer’s analyses of political events, offers the following account of Oppenheimer’s reaction to the anti-communist feeling that followed:
It was in the fall of 1939, too, that Opje
fn42
proved himself to be such an impressive and effective political analyst. The Soviet-German pact, and later the invasion of Poland by the USSR and the Soviet war with Finland, had confused and upset many people, even among the most open-minded and liberal. Opje had such a simple, lucid way of presenting facts and arguments that one felt in him a kind of passionate commitment which was contagious. He communicated with
extraordinary effectiveness his own conviction that political events were motivated human events that could be made to yield their significance if examined objectively, in the light of the factors that had conditioned them.
After reading this account, what Oppenheimer actually thought of the pact, or of the war, remains utterly opaque. The documentary record is a little clearer. In a letter to Willie Fowler at Caltech that seems to have been written on or about 9 September 1939, Oppenheimer writes: ‘I know Charlie [Lauritsen] will say a melancholy I told you so over the Nazisoviet [
sic
] pact, but I am not paying any bets yet on any aspect of the hocus-pocus except maybe that the Germans are pretty well into Poland.
Ça stink
.’
In the ensuing months of what is commonly called the ‘phoney war’, while no hostilities were exchanged between Germany and France or Britain, Poland was divided up between Germany and the Soviet Union and the latter invaded Finland. The belief that the Nazi-Soviet pact was nothing more than a cynical temporary agreement between two dictatorships, allowing each to expand without fear of the other, seemed to be amply confirmed. Moreover, because the Soviet Union seemed so indifferent to the plight of the European democracies – indeed, its propaganda seemed to hold the British Empire in greater contempt than Nazi Germany – and its foreign policy so out of keeping with anything with which American liberal opinion could sympathise, it seemed no longer possible, so long as the American Communist Party took its ‘line’ from Moscow, to believe that the views of the Party were those that a loyal American, concerned only with local, American issues, would have arrived at independently.
And yet, in his February 1940 pamphlet
Report to our Colleagues
mentioned previously,
fn43
that is exactly the belief for which Oppenheimer tried to argue. Published under the auspices of the ‘College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California’, this pamphlet had as its purpose presenting to academic colleagues at Berkeley, Stanford and Caltech the political views of the discussion group/Communist Party unit to which Oppenheimer, Chevalier and others belonged. According to Gordon Griffiths, Oppenheimer was not the sole author of this pamphlet, but he ‘took special pride in it’.
How Oppenheimer could have been proud of the document is something of a puzzle, since it contains almost no original thought, being simply a presentation of the official Communist Party line, nor does it contain any fine writing or telling phrase; its style is that of a Party tract.
What it seeks to persuade ‘colleagues’ of is that the attacks on the Communist Party made in the wake of the Nazi-Soviet pact and the invasions of Poland and Finland should be seen not in relation to global politics, but rather in relation to
American
politics and in particular the plight of the poor and the unemployed in the US. Instead of focusing on the pact made between Hitler and Stalin, the report urges, colleagues should look at the ‘strange things’ that were happening to the New Deal, and, in particular, to the cuts in relief funding that had been announced at both a federal level by Roosevelt and a local level by the California legislature. In this context, the report argues, it can be seen that the purpose of the attacks on communists is ‘to disrupt the democratic forces, to destroy unions in general and CIO [Congress of Industrial Organisations] unions in particular, to make possible the cutting of relief, to force the abandonment of the great program of peace, security and work that is the basis of the movement toward a democratic front’.
Despite its attempt to focus on issues such as poor relief and unemployment, what comes through most strongly in the
Report
is its echoing of the slogan of the Communist Party manifesto: ‘Keep America Out of the Imperialist War!’ The communists, the
Report
claims, possess ‘some of the clearest voices that oppose a war between the United States and Russia’, the silencing of which, it alleges, is the hidden motive behind the attacks being made on the Communist Party. It would, the report emphasises and reiterates, ‘be an evil thing for this country to go to war, or to join a war, against Russia’. Warming to its theme, it goes on: ‘In a war against Russia almost anything could be illegal except the rich making money and the poor dying.’
This fear of a war with Russia is evident too in the second and last
Report to our Colleagues
, published in April 1940, which states unequivocally: ‘There has never been a clearer issue than that of keeping this country out of the war in Europe.’ When the report tries to make this clarity apparent, however, it slips into communist rhetoric that makes uncomfortable reading for anyone inclined to think Segrè was being misleading about Oppenheimer’s political views:
Europe is in the throes of a war. It is a common thought, and a likely one, that when the war is over Europe will be socialist, and the British Empire gone. We think that Roosevelt is assuming the role of preserving the old order in Europe and that he plans, if need be, to use the wealth and the lives of this country to carry it out. We think, that is, that Roosevelt is not only a ‘war monger’ but a counter-revolutionary war-monger. We think it is this that has turned him from something of a progressive to very much of a reactionary.
So,
why
is it so clear that the US should stay out of the war? Because, it seems, if it stays out, the British Empire will collapse, which will be a good thing. But won’t that signal the victory of Nazism rather than of socialism? How does one get from the collapse of the British Empire to the ‘likely’ outcome of a socialist Europe? The most natural interpretation of this seems to be that Oppenheimer (and the ‘College Faculties Committee, Communist Party of California’) foresees the defeat of Britain being followed by the defeat of a weakened Germany at the hands of the Soviet Union. If this is right (and it is hard to find an alternative that would make sense of the above passage), then, if anything, Segrè was being kind in his characterisation of Oppenheimer’s views (‘that the European quarrels were caused by capitalist imperialists, and that Holy Communism would avoid them’). Oppenheimer’s view seems rather to be: the war is actually a good thing, precisely because it is caused by capitalist imperialists, who, in defeating and weakening each other, will allow ‘socialism’, in the form of the Soviet Union, to triumph over Europe – but
only
if the US stays out of the struggle, thereby allowing the defeat of Britain to take place.