Pandora's Keepers (38 page)

Bohr looked to Oppenheimer as a key ally in this effort. After settling back in Copenhagen, Bohr wrote to him in November:

I was very sorry that I was not able see you again before my return to Denmark, but, due to difficulties in arranging passage
for Margrethe and me, we could not, as we had intended to, return to the U.S.A. before the secret of the project was lifted,
and then it was thought advisable that I no longer postponed my return to Denmark.

I need not say how often Aage and I think of all the kindness you and Kitty showed us in these last eventful years, where
your understanding and sympathy have meant so much to me, and how closely I feel connected with you in the hope that the great
accomplishment may contribute decisively to bringing about harmonious relationships between nations. I trust the whole matter
is developing in a favorable way.
²⁶

Oppenheimer shared Bohr’s goal, and sought to achieve it by courting policy makers, whom he believed would listen to him.
He was, after all, now an international celebrity and a national hero. Oppenheimer urged other physicists to keep the horrors
of atomic war fresh in the public’s mind. “It will not help to avert such a war,” he told them, “if we try to rub the edges
off this new terror that we have helped to bring to the world. If I return so insistently to the magnitude of the peril,”
he continued, “it is because I see in that our one great hope. As a vast threat, and a new one, to all the peoples of the
earth, by its novelty, its terror, its strangely promethean quality, it has become, in the eyes of many of us, an opportunity
unique and challenging.”
²⁷

Other physicists besides Oppenheimer began lobbying policy makers, their efforts made easier because policy makers now looked
on them much as primitive tribesmen had looked on their shamans: as high priests in touch with mysterious, supernatural forces
whose awsome power they alone could fathom. Fermi wrote Washington Democratic Senator Warren Magnuson in September 1945 to
warn against the fallacy of an atomic monopoly. “The safety offered this country by the attempt to withhold from foreign powers
what we know is only limited,” Fermi stressed. “Any major power could reach our present stage in this development in five
years. It would be extremely dangerous to rely on secrecy.”
²⁸
Compton told an audience of civic leaders in St. Louis in November that “if the United States should be a party to an atomic
war,” America’s cities would “follow Hiroshima and Nagasaki into oblivion.” “If our nation should eventually win,” Compton
said, “what would we have gained? Perhaps the control of the world. But of what value would this be with our civilization
gone and our population decimated?” “We must keep in mind,” he added, “that when all are armed with atomic weapons no superiority
of one nation can free it from danger of great damage by another.”
²⁹

Rabi agreed with Fermi and Compton—and set out to do something about it. His solution would not be—indeed, could not be—scientific.
Try as he might, Rabi could not recapture the single-minded focus on physics he had enjoyed before the war. Now he was an
older and wiser man who had experience dealing with the military, politics, and warfare, aware in a way he had not been as
a young professor of the complexity of his own equations. Rabi thought that by working from the “inside,” with the government
in Washington, he might be able to do something about controlling its dangers.

He decided to map out a plan with Oppenheimer. The two friends met in Rabi’s faculty apartment on Riverside Drive in late
December 1945. It was a bitterly cold day. Factories across the Hudson in New Jersey belched smoke that hung almost suspended
in the frigid air. Oppenheimer and Rabi stood at the window, looking out and watching small ice floes drift downstream, turning
pink in the sunset. They sat down and began posing questions to each other and shaping answers. When evening came, they had
formed a far-reaching idea for international control of the atom. “We were optimistic because we realized what a terrible
state the world was going to get into if something like what we were proposing didn’t happen,” remembered Rabi. “We assumed
the predicament was obvious to others and it was to most—even the military.”
³⁰

Oppenheimer conveyed their ideas to Washington, and the following month a committee was set up to draft an international control
plan. The committee was headed by Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, with Oppenheimer serving as a consultant.
^*
For the next six weeks, committee members met in Washington offices, in railroad cars, at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, even
aloft in a military transport plane. They worked and studied and debated late into the night, then resumed again early the
next morning.

The committee submitted its report to the Truman administration in March 1946. Although labeled the Acheson-Lilienthal Report,
it bore the unmistakable imprint of Robert Oppenheimer, who had drafted it. “Only if dangerous aspects of atomic energy are
taken out of national hands,” the report noted, “is there any reasonable prospect of devising safeguards against the use of
atomic energy for bombs.” The committee proposed the creation of an international atomic agency. Believing that an unpoliced
agreement placed too great a burden on good faith, the report recommended endowing the international agency with strong inspection
powers. It stressed that the risk to the United States of relinquishing its atomic monopoly to an international agency was
preferable to the risk of a nuclear arms race.
³¹

Other physicists rallied behind the report. Teller called it “a bold and dangerous solution; but inaction and an unplanned
drift into international competition would be still more dangerous.” “If the constructive and imaginative spirit of the State
Department report is compared with the ‘Maginot-line’ mentality of ‘keeping the secret,’“” Teller added, “one can hardly doubt
in which direction our eventual hope for safety lies.”
³²
Compton called the report “a sound and constructive basis for solving a difficult problem.” “We’d be in a much stronger position
if the United Nations would have the atomic weapons and no individual nations would have them,” he said, “than the position
in which we would hold atomic weapons and other nations also would develop them. Military defenses cannot make us safe; we’ve
got to rely on international agreement before we can really be safe.”
³³
Bethe thought the greatest service physicists could perform was to “make it clear that only a truly international control
of atomic energy gives any hope of lasting security from atomic weapons.”
³⁴
Any country in the world that possessed sufficient scientific talent and material resources—certainly including the Soviet
Union—could, sooner or later, duplicate the accomplishment of the Manhattan Project.

All of them conceded that if no international agreement could be reached, then the United States might have to keep its atomic
arsenal for purposes of deterrence. But they stressed that the bomb was not a “winning weapon” in the long run because other
countries would eventually have it too, and in any atomic war, all sides would lose.

The Acheson-Lilienthal Report was presented to the world with great fanfare by American diplomat Bernard Baruch in the gymnasium
of New York’s Hunter College, the temporary home of the United Nations, on June 14, 1946. Oppenheimer and Compton sat in the
audience that day. “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead,” Baruch intoned at the beginning of his speech.
He then went on to describe the destructive power of the bomb, to propose an international atomic authority, and to insist
on the abolition of the national veto in this one area. Baruch differed from Oppenheimer by focusing attention on the negative
aspect of punishment for violators rather than, as did the report, on the positive aspect of mutual cooperation.

Sadly, within weeks the plan was gravely ill and in less than six months it was dead. American military forces were rapidly
demobilizing from Western Europe while massive Russian military forces remained deployed in Eastern Europe; under such conditions,
Truman was unlikely to agree to relinquish what he considered the principal American deterrent to Soviet adventurism. Additionally,
probably no international control plan could have overcome the fear and suspicion with which Stalin viewed any outside intrusion
into Russian territory. Quite simply, Stalin wanted his own atomic bomb and probably would not have accepted any limitation
on his own fledgling program, and Truman favored preserving America’s atomic monopoly until, and unless, he got firm agreement
to international control from the Soviets.
^*
The Acheson-Lilienthal Report had addressed the physical facts of atomic energy, but it had ignored American and Soviet geopolitical
interests, which were rooted in different values, different dispositions of military forces, and different perceptions of
national security. The scientists had thought leaders would want the bomb to go away, but in fact what they wanted was the
bomb.
³⁵

The plan’s failure bitterly disappointed and badly discouraged Oppenheimer. David Lilienthal, who talked with Oppenheimer
late into the night that summer about the opportunity both thought had been missed, recorded in his diary:

He really is a tragic figure; with all his great attractiveness [and] brilliance of mind. As I left him he looked so sad:
“I am ready to go anywhere and do anything, but I am bankrupt of further ideas. And I find that physics and the teaching of
physics, which is my life, now seems irrelevant.” It was this last [remark] that really wrung my heart.
³⁶

Still, Oppenheimer saw no alternative but to continue working for international control. Writing to Bohr, he tried to put
the best face on what he considered a bad situation: “It seems important for all our future hopes that the wrong lessons should
not have been learned by the failure of the past year, but that on the contrary there may be a renewed courage for a somewhat
deeper attack on the problem.”
³⁷

Szilard was similarly dejected. Szilard had been hopeful, but his mood grew increasingly pessimistic as the months passed.
“To me it seems futile to hope that 140 million people of this country can be smuggled through the gates of Paradise while
most of them are looking the other way,” he said bitterly in 1947. “Nothing much can be achieved now or in the very near future
until such time as the people of this country understand what is at stake. Maybe God will work a miracle—if we don’t make
it too difficult for him.”
³⁸
Lawrence, however, took a completely different view: he blamed the failure of international control on Soviet intransigence,
which made him conclude that American restraint was unwise and an agreement with Stalin unattainable. As a result, Lawrence
abandoned the nuclear restraint that he had advocated along with Oppenheimer, Fermi, and Compton just after the war, and now
turned into an enthusiastic proponent of American nuclear superiority.

The failure of international control came as a deep disappointment to most of the other atomic scientists as well, and they
also lacked the political sophistication and stamina to swallow defeat and return to fight another day. This was most plainly
the case with Edward Teller, who supported the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, but when it failed, lost all interest in political
efforts to control the bomb. Losing his optimism and succumbing to an increasing suspicion of the Soviet Union in the late
1940s, Teller abandoned his support for international control and began to champion a conservative agenda that would remain
a constant for the rest of his life: development of a superbomb, opposition to all arms-control efforts as naive and dangerous,
and advocacy of an unlimited American nuclear buildup.

The failure of international control did nothing to diminish Robert Oppenheimer’s stature, however. The bomb’s success had
made him a celebrity whose views were in great demand by policy makers and ordinary citizens alike. His face replaced Einstein’s
as the public image of scientific genius. His portrait appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine, and he was in constant demand as a speaker and writer. A new journal,
Physics Today
, carried a photograph on the cover of its first issue that required no explanation: a porkpie hat slung nonchalantly over
a cyclotron. Periodicals featured his remarks with flattering portraits of him holding a pipe, looking erudite and persuasive.
He was “the smartest of the lot,” a magazine quoted an unnamed colleague.
³⁹
The public romance had begun.

Oppenheimer’s vast reputation gave him easy and regular access to top officials. His home and office phones rang constantly—usually
someone from Washington was calling—and his office safe was stuffed with classified documents. He served on countless advisory
committees and acted as a consultant to many others. All of this was a far cry from the Oppenheimer of Berkeley days. He had
changed from a brilliant, arrogant, and in many ways immature intellectual into a gifted administrator and savvy politician
with a masterly sense of public relations. He typified the new, worldly scientist of the atomic age who spent more time advising
the government and less time teaching students. He saw himself—and others did too—as an oracle for policy makers. A combination
of ambition, unrest, and guilt had compelled him into the central political arena of postwar America, and Oppenheimer reveled
in the attention and the limelight. He now wore his hair cut very short—as if to signal to Washington that he was no longer
one of the longhairs. His frequent public speaking resulted in a solidified persona, his voice now crossing a range of tones,
from deliberate arrogance to judicious reflectiveness to irresistible warmth. He reveled at making a difference and being
“in the swim”—perhaps too much. A former pupil noted, “I think his sudden fame and the new position he now occupied had gone
to his head so much that he began to consider himself God Almighty, able to put the whole world to rights.”
⁴⁰
Among those in the staid realm of academia, Oppenheimer’s new life in the political swim of Washington inspired no small
amount of envy.