Pandora's Keepers (37 page)

Oppenheimer returned to Los Alamos from Washington tired and dispirited. A few days later, he and Kitty drove across the Rio
Grande Valley to Perro Caliente for their first real vacation in nearly three years. Oppenheimer took with him a pile of letters
from old friends surprised to find his name prominently associated with the weapon that had ended the war, and answered some
of the more personal ones by hand. A prompt reply went to Herbert Smith, his old teacher at the Ethical Culture School, with
whom he had first experienced New Mexico. “It seemed appropriate, & very sweet,” he wrote Smith, “that your good note should
reach me on the Pecos—we had come over for a few days after the surrender. Like so many of the beautiful things of which I
learned first from you, the love of it grows with the years. Your words were good to have. You will believe that this undertaking
has not been without its misgivings; they are heavy on us today, when the future, which has so many elements of high promise,
is yet only a stone’s throw from despair. Thus the good which this work has perhaps contributed to make in the ending of the
war looms very large to us, because it is there for sure.” A letter to Haakon Chevalier the next day reiterated his conviction
on this last point. “The thing had to be done, Haakon. It had to be brought to an open public fruition at a time when all
over the world men craved peace as never before, were committed as never before both to technology as a way of life and thought
and to the idea that no man is an island.” To his Harvard classmate Frederick Bernheim, he confessed: “We are at the ranch
now, in an earnest but not-too-sanguine search for sanity…. There would seem to be some great headaches ahead.”
¹⁸

Now that the war was over, the urgency was gone. Oppenheimer had lost the sense of purpose with which he had thrown himself
into work on the bomb. He had already written to Groves, making it plain that he did not believe Los Alamos should continue
as a weapons lab and that “the Director himself would very much like to know when he will be able to escape from these duties
for which he is so ill-qualified and which he had accepted only in an effort to serve the country during the war.”
¹⁹
On a consulting visit to Washington in late September, he told Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson that physicists as a
group opposed doing any more weapons work—“not merely a superbomb but any bomb”—because it went “against the dictates of their
hearts and spirits.”
²⁰
“There was not much left in me at that moment,” said Oppenheimer later.
²¹
He arranged to quit his post shortly after an army awards ceremony for the lab on October sixteenth.

Almost everyone on the mesa turned out for the ceremony, which was held outdoors under a deep blue sky. Groves, standing in
front of Fuller Lodge on a low platform decked in patriotic bunting and American flags fluttering in a cool wind amid the
sound of shimmering aspen leaves colored gold by the autumn sun, spoke in loud and clear tones of the patriotic work done
by the laboratory. Oppenheimer followed Groves, speaking in a low, quiet voice that he often used in public. He was uncharacteristically
nervous as he began his speech. His theme was that the old concepts of war were no longer valid and that the only way to prevent
a nuclear arms race leading one day to a nuclear holocaust was some form of international control. The atomic bomb, he said,
symbolized “not only a great peril but a great hope of beginning to realize those changes which are needed if there is to
be any peace.” Under threat of mutual destruction nations might come to understand the imperative need for control of atomic
weapons. But then he warned:

If atomic bombs are to be added to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then
the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.

The peoples of this world must unite, or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these
words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them, in other times, in other
wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some, misled by a false sense of human history, who hold that they
will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that. By our works we are committed, committed to a world united, before
this common peril.
²²

Oppenheimer spoke for the last time at Los Alamos on November second, the night before he returned to Berkeley. Hundreds jammed
the largest auditorium on the Hill to hear their leader’s parting thoughts. It was a stormy night and thunder rolled over
the mesa. This was the first—really the only—time at Los Alamos that he felt truly free to speak what was on his mind and
in his heart:

I should like to talk tonight as a fellow scientist, and at least as a fellow worrier about the fix we are in…. I would have
liked to talk to you at an earlier date—but I couldn’t talk to you as Director…. I think that it can only help to look a little
at what our situation is—at what has happened to us—and that this must give us some honesty, some insight, which will be a
source of strength in what may be the not-too-easy days ahead….

What has happened to us forced us to re-consider the relations between science and common sense…. They forced us to be prepared
for the inadequacy of the ways in which human beings attempted to deal with reality…. In some ways I think these virtues,
which scientists quite reluctantly were forced to learn by the nature of the world they were studying, may be useful even
today in preparing us for somewhat more radical views of what the issues are than would be natural or easy for people who
had not been through this experience….

I think that it hardly needs to be said why the impact is so strong. There are three reasons: one is the extraordinary speed
with which things which were right on the frontier of science were translated into terms where they affected many living people,
and potentially all people. Another is the fact, quite accidental in many ways, and connected with the speed, that scientists
themselves played such a large part, not merely in providing the foundation for atomic weapons, but in actually making them.
In this we are certainly closer to it than any other group. The third is that the thing we made… arrived in the world with
such a shattering reality and suddenness that there was no opportunity for the edges to be worn off.

In considering what the situation of science is, it may be helpful to think a little of what people said and felt of their
motives in coming into this job. One always has to worry that what people say of their motives is not adequate. Many people
said different things, and most of them, I think, had some validity. There was in the first place the great concern that our
enemy might develop these weapons before we did, and the feeling—at least, in the early days, the very strong feeling—that
without atomic weapons it might be very difficult, it might be an impossible, it might be an incredibly long thing to win
the war. These things wore off a little as it became clear that the war would be won in any case. Some people, I think, were
motivated by curiosity, and rightly so; and some by a sense of adventure, and rightly so. Others had more political arguments
and said, “Well, we know that atomic weapons are in principle possible, and it is not right that the threat of their unrealized
possibility should hang over the world. It is right that the world should know what can be done in their field and deal with
it.” And the people added to that that it was a time when all over the world men would be particularly ripe and open for dealing
with this problem because of the immediacy of the evils of war, because of the universal cry from everyone that one could
not go through this thing again, even a war without atomic bombs. And there was finally, and I think rightly, the feeling
that there was probably no place in the world where the development of atomic weapons would have a better chance of leading
to a reasonable solution, and a smaller chance of leading to disaster, than within the United States. I believe all these
things that people said are true, and I think I said them all myself at one time or another….

There are [those] who try to escape the immediacy of this situation by saying that, after all, war has always been very terrible;
after all, weapons have always gotten worse and worse; that this is just another weapon and it doesn’t create a great change;
that they are not so bad; bombings have been bad in this war and this is not a change in that—it just adds a little to the
effectiveness of bombing; that some sort of protection will be found. I think that these efforts to diffuse and weaken the
nature of the crisis make it only more dangerous. I think it is for us to accept it as a very grave crisis, to realize that
these atomic weapons which we have started to make are very terrible, that they involve a change, that they are not just a
slight modification….

I think the advent of the atomic bomb and the facts which will get around that they are not too hard to make—that they will
be universal if people wish to make them universal, that they will not constitute a real drain on the economy of any strong
nation, and that their power of destruction will grow and is already incomparably greater than that of any other weapon—these
things create a new situation…. I think when people talk of the fact that this is not only a great peril, but a great hope,
this is what they should mean…. There exists a possibility of realizing those changes which are needed if there is to be any
peace.

Those are very far-reaching changes. They are changes in the relations between nations, not only in spirit, not only in law,
but also in conception and feeling. I don’t know which of these is prior; they must all work together, and only the gradual
interaction of one on the other can make a reality…. Atomic weapons are a peril which affect everyone in the world, and in
that sense a completely common problem, as common a problem as it was for the Allies to defeat the Nazis. I think that in
order to handle this common problem there must be a complete sense of community responsibility. I do not think that one may
expect that people will contribute to the solution of the problem until they are aware of their ability to take part in the
solution….

I think it is important to realize that even those who are well informed in this country have been slow to understand, slow
to believe that the bombs would work, and then slow to understand that their working would present such profound problems.
We have certain interests in playing up the bomb, not only we here locally, but all over the country, because we made them,
and our pride is involved. I think that in other lands it may be even more difficult for an appreciation of the magnitude
of the thing to take hold. For this reason, I’m not sure that the greatest opportunities for progress do not lie somewhat
further in the future than I had for a long time thought….

The thing which must have troubled you, and which troubled me, in the official statements was the insistent note of unilateral
responsibility for the handling of atomic weapons. However good the motives of this country are… we are 140 million people,
and there are two billion people living on earth. We must understand that whatever our commitments to our own views and ideas,
and however confident we are that in the course of time they will tend to prevail, our absolute—our completely absolute—commitment
to them, in denial of the views and ideas of other people, cannot be the basis of any kind of agreement….

We are not only scientists; we are men, too. We cannot forget our dependence on our fellow men. I mean not only our material
dependence, without which no science would be possible, and without which we could not work; I mean also our deep moral dependence,
in that the value of science must lie in the world of men, that all our roots lie there. These are the strongest bonds in
the world, stronger than those even that bind us to one another, these are the deepest bonds—that bind us to our fellow men.
²³

Down beside the Rio Grande River, at the teahouse where Oppenheimer had often sought refuge from his burdens, Edith Warner
read a transcript of his remarks in the newspaper a few days later. She had made a point during the war of never questioning
Oppenheimer as she quietly served him dinner, but she had sensed all along that he was thinking about more than just science.
On November twenty-fifth, she wrote Oppenheimer a letter:

Dear Mr. Opp,

I have thought of you frequently…. So it was especially satisfying to read your recent speech. I hope you do not mind my having
it.

As I read, it seemed almost as though you were pacing my kitchen, talking half to yourself and half to me. And from it came
the conviction of what I’ve felt a number of times—you have, in lesser degree, that quality which radiates from Mr. Baker
[Niels Bohr]. It has seemed to me in these past few months that it is a power as little known as atomic energy, which has
greatly increased man’s need for it. It also seems that even recognition of it involves responsibility.

There are many things for which I would express my gratitude…. Your hours here mean much to me and I appreciate, perhaps more
than most outsiders, what you have given of yourself in these Los Alamos years. Most of all I am grateful for your bringing
Mr. Baker. I think of you both, hopefully, as the song of the river comes from the canyon and the need of the world reaches
even this quiet spot.

May you have strength and courage and wisdom,

Edith Warner
²⁴

In Bohr’s view, because the problem of atomic weapons and war
had
to be solved, it
would
be solved; the threat to humanity’s survival simply left no other choice. Bohr believed that scientists should not portray
the atomic bomb to the public solely as a potential destroyer, but as a “forceful reminder of how closely the fate of all
mankind is coupled together,” and as “a unique opportunity to remove obstacles to peaceful collaboration between nations and
to enable them jointly to benefit from the great promises held out by the progress of science.” Bohr saw physicists like himself
as the unique agents of this opportunity, both as makers of the bomb and as the teachers of its universal lessons.
²⁵