Pandora's Keepers (28 page)

Niels Bohr on the ski hill above Los Alamos, January 1945. Bohr used such occasions to listen to other physicists’ anxieties
about the bomb and to share his own views about the bomb’s revolutionary implications. (
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Segrè Collection
)

Robert Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves at the Trinity Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, two months after the July 16, 1945,
test. Intense heat generated by the world’s first atomic explosion vaporized the hundred-foot steel tower holding the bomb,
gouged an enormous crater in the ground, and fused the surrounding sand into jadelike crystals. (©
Bettmann/CORBIS
)

Hiroshima, Japan, after the atomic bomb attack on August 6, 1945. The explosion caused widespread destruction, vividly illustrated
by this photograph taken shortly after the attack. Civilians outnumbered soldiers in Hiroshima more than six to one. Over
75,000 inhabitants of the city perished that day, and tens of thousands more afterward due to burns, radiation, and other
sicknesses. (©
Bettmann/CORBIS
)

AFTER THE WAR

Robert Oppenheimer’s signature porkpie hat on the cover of the May 1948 issue of
Physics Today
eloquently conveyed his fame after the war. Until his downfall in 1954, Oppenheimer remained America’s most celebrated and
influential physicist. (
Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
, Physics Today
Collection
)

Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer together at Berkeley, 1946. Growing political differences between them after the war—over
the superbomb in particular—eroded their storied friendship, which had been weakened when Oppenheimer left Berkeley for Princeton
in 1947 and ended as a result of Oppenheimer’s security hearing in 1954. (
© AP/Wide World Photos
)

Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi together at the University of Chicago, 1951. By this time, the superbomb had become Teller’s
fixation. But he failed to convince his good friend Fermi to support a crash program to develop the thermonuclear weapon.
(
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
)

As his lobbying for the superbomb and his testimony against Oppenheimer estranged him from many other physicists in the 1950s,
Edward Teller increasingly sought the friendship and support of political conservatives and military officers (such as General
Joseph Garvin, pictured here). (
National Archives and Records Administration, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
)

TWILIGHT YEARS

Enrico Fermi boating off the island of Elba, 1954. This photograph, taken during Fermi’s last visit to his homeland a few
months before his death, shows the ravages that undiagnosed stomach cancer had begun to take on the previously vigorous Fermi.
Physicists mourned his premature death later that year. (
Amaldi Archives, Dipartimento di Fisica, Università “La Sapienza,” Rome, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
)

Ernest Lawrence sitting on a hill above the Berkeley campus and the dome of the sprawling Rad Lab, surveying the extraordinary
empire he had built, 1958. The ulcerative colitis that had plagued this energetic and driven man finally killed him later
that year. (
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
, Physics Today
Collection
)

Niels Bohr receiving the prestigious Atoms for Peace Award from President Eisenhower, with Arthur Compton (second from left)
and Lewis Strauss (far left) looking on, 1957. Strauss had orchestrated the vendetta that brought down Bohr’s good friend
Robert Oppenheimer three years earlier. Bohr and Compton both died in 1962. (
Niels Bohr Archive, courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
)

Leo Szilard with former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a few years before his death from a heart attack in 1964. Until the
end, Szilard remained what he had always been: a dreamer, a gadfly, and the moral conscience of his generation of physicists.
(Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
courtesy AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
)