Pandora's Keepers (53 page)

Not long after his hearing was over and his security clearance had been revoked, Oppenheimer gave a speech at Amherst College
where students asked him why he had not helped his case by showing more repentance for his past left-wing associations. Oppenheimer
replied, “It may not be the obligation of a man in a position of responsibility to conform his actions to what the public
desires; but if he wishes to play an effective part in politics, it is clear that he must either conform himself to what the
public desires, or persuade the public to accept what he is.”
¹¹⁰
Oppenheimer refused to do the former and failed to do the latter.

Freed from the burden of playing the Washington game, Oppenheimer devoted himself to investigating issues raised by modern
science and commenting on man’s fate in the nuclear age. Those who encountered him now noticed traces of defeat in his manner.
At the same time, they noticed tranquility in his face. He was calmer than he had been since going to Los Alamos. “We did
the devil’s work,” he told a visitor in 1956, summing up his experiences during and after the war. “But we are now going back
to our real jobs. Rabi for instance was telling me only the other day that he intended to devote himself exclusively to research
in the future.”
¹¹¹
Oppenheimer felt unburdened at last. The hearing made him a martyr among liberals. The Gray Board’s verdict ended their concern
that Oppenheimer had surrendered his independence to establish his political influence. The AEC’s action ironically served
as a means of his redemption.

Everywhere people wondered, “How could this happen?” Some blamed the unpopularity of Oppenheimer’s views on the superbomb.
Others blamed Oppenheimer’s unscrupulous enemies. Still others blamed Oppenheimer’s own arrogance and past evasions. All of
them were factors, but all of them would not have been enough had the country not been in the grip of the insecurity and paranoia
that expressed itself in anticommunist witch-hunts. In the spring of 1954, when McCarthyism was at its peak, the reigning
dogma identified security with superiority in the arms race: the superbomb served as a powerful buttress against expanding
communism and kept the peace by means of deterrence, the capacity to wreak sufficient destruction on the enemy so as to discourage
any attack. In this climate, it was all too easy to see a physicist with a radical past who disagreed with this view as being
a security threat. It was a mood fed by hysterical fear; its chief symptom was the belief that anyone who did not share it
was dangerously unreliable.

Of course, because of his association with the bomb, because of the fascinating complexities of his personality, and because
of his marvelous eloquence, Oppenheimer had come to represent all physicists in the public mind. To liberals frightened by
the arms race and obsessed with avoiding a nuclear war, he was a superb scientist and a selfless public servant who had been
sacrificed for his unpopular beliefs. To conservatives frightened by communism and obsessed with national security, he was
the man who had cavorted with the Cold War enemy. Robert Oppenheimer touched people—then and now—because he was the most sensitive
and reflective individual among all those involved in the creation of the terrible new weapons.

Yet the Oppenheimer affair was not just the story of one man; it was also the story of all of the atomic scientists. His personal
tragedy was also his profession’s. It dramatized physicists’ sudden transformation from naive academics into major players
in the realm of American national security. The bomb had given once-obscure physicists a new standing akin to the mathematician-astronomer-priests
of the ancient Maya, who were both revered and feared as the keepers of the mystery of the seasons and the helpers of the
sun and stars. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, became the unofficial high priest. Not just Oppenheimer’s life
had been dissected in the hearing room but the lives—with all their subtle pressures and unsolved problems—of the scientists
who had ushered in the atomic age. The hearings revealed the new and influential part these men now played in national security
politics, their uneasiness in a nuclear world they had helped to create, and above all their anxiety about losing sight of
the deeply rooted set of ethical beliefs out of which science—their passion—had grown. How had it happened that men who had
tried to find a more comprehensive truth were in the end obliged to spend the best years of their lives in the search for
ever more destructive weapons—and then the best among them punished for it? Science had ceased to be seen as something remote
and now was looked upon as something terrible. To an extent, then, Oppenheimer and the other atomic scientists whom he symbolized
had fallen victim to the very weapon they had created.

N
IELS BOHR HAD
returned to Denmark in August 1945, and two months later had turned sixty. The anxieties of the war and the Manhattan Project
had strained and saddened him. His thinning gray hair, the jowls that draped over his massive jaw, the heavy eyebrows that
shadowed his intelligent and kindly eyes—all had made him a doleful figure. He had spent more and more time during the ensuing
years at his summerhouse in Tisvilde, on the northern shore of Sjælland, a two-hour drive from Copenhagen. The thatched, one-story
country house stood in a grove of pine trees on heather-covered hills that met the lavender waters of the Baltic in an unbroken
harmony In a ramshackle barn in this beautiful and tranquil setting that he loved so much, Bohr had found time to think and
reflect. For relaxation he had bicycled in the woods, walked on the beach, and read fairy tales and played games with his
many grandchildren. Evenings were spent in the family circle, chatting about issues large or small. These had been happy days
for Bohr, yet there had been long thoughts, too, of how the world had been changed by the bomb.

During the war, Bohr had foreseen that the atomic bomb would cause trouble with Russia, unless the Russians were made partners
rather than rivals. Now the Iron Curtain had come down, and Bohr had watched the growing quarrel between East and West with
grave misgivings. He did not surrender in his struggle. Time he could have devoted to science was now devoted to writing innumerable
appeals and statements. Although these had often gone unanswered by the officials to whom they were addressed, Bohr saw them
as a means of educating the public at large. What could be done to break the stalemate and make security possible? The answer
to which he had come with increasing emphasis was the international control of atomic weapons before other countries acquired
the bomb. Otherwise, the next big war could be the world’s last.

In the spring of 1948, while in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study, Bohr had met privately with Secretary of State
George Marshall in Washington. During their talk, Bohr had reiterated his plea for openness and cooperation between the United
States and the USSR on atomic weapons. This was essential, he had stressed in a follow-up letter, “in order not to lose the
opportunity to forestall a fateful competition in atomic armaments.” He had then pointed, prophetically, to an even more frightening
future. “The new and ominous menace to world security presented by employing the results of the latest development of bacteriological
and biochemical science as terrible life-destructive means cannot be eliminated by any practicable control and will, therefore,
remain a latent danger until such cooperation in openness has been achieved.” Bohr had believed America should take the initiative
because it led in the field of atomic energy. “Your country,” he had told Marshall, “possesses the strength required to take
the lead in accepting the challenge with which civilization is confronted.”
¹
Marshall gave no promise.

By 1950 Bohr had recognized that his efforts had come to naught, so he had written an “Open Letter” to the United Nations
in June of that year in which he gave an account of his efforts in broad outline and pleaded with the world’s great powers
to begin a dialogue with one another about the bomb. In the letter, he had predicted that the lack of such cooperation would
trigger an escalating nuclear arms race and increased tensions between East and West.
²
The Korean War, which broke out three weeks later, had put Bohr’s appeal in the shade, but his predictions turned out to
be tragically correct.

Almost everyone who encountered Arthur Compton in his later years noticed his eyes. They had always been deep set, but now
they were knowing and penetrating, like an old seer’s. When he was invited to become chancellor of Washington University at
the end of the war, he had candidly told its board of trustees that he did not know what students’ and alumni’s attitude toward
him would be when they learned of his involvement in the top secret Manhattan Project: either they would think of him as one
of the scientists who had saved civilization—or had imperiled mankind. As he wrote a year after Hiroshima, “It is too early
to say whether the moral historian, if there be one a thousand years hence, will record the use of the atomic bomb as the
work of the world’s guardian angel or as that of the devil bent on man’s destruction.”
³
No one could go through what Compton did and come out quite the same.

Compton’s ambivalence had led him to refuse to have anything more to do with weapons making. Shortly after the Soviet atomic
test in August 1949, Ernest Lawrence came to visit him in St. Louis. Depressed by the news, Lawrence had tried to estimate
how long it would be until the Russians could attack the United States. He had said he was going to turn the efforts of his
lab toward developing new weapons that he hoped would be helpful in the approaching struggle. Compton had told Lawrence that
his task was no longer to develop nuclear weapons but to develop young people to bring about peace by building a strong society.

Not surprisingly, the superbomb filled Compton with anxiety. If such weapons were used upon centers of population, he doubted
whether enough survivors would remain to rebuild civilized human existence. “The world is crying that the weapon itself and
those responsible for its development and use be brought under control of those whose lives it endangers and at the same time
protects,” said Compton. “And this means everyone.”
⁴
He opposed targeting civilian populations in war, urged limiting the size and number of superbombs, and advocated no-first-use
of nuclear weapons by the United States—all ideas which became central goals of arms control advocates in later years. Above
all, Compton urged the avoidance of nuclear war. “No nation,” he said again and again, to political leaders and ordinary people
alike, “would expect such a war to end without itself suffering more damage than its possible gains would be worth.”
⁵

Compton’s style as chancellor of Washington University had been quiet and unpretentious. He told the faculty to call him Mr.
Compton, not Dr. Compton, and asked that they do the same among themselves. He slipped easily into conversation with students,
who sensed his disciplined enthusiasm, inner tranquility, and natural friendliness. In 1954 he retired as chancellor and accepted
appointment as professor of natural philosophy at the university. The aging Compton devoted himself to speaking and writing
about the impact of science on society and the morality of science. When asked to reflect on scientists’ role in the creation
of the bomb, he would cite the biblical story of Eden—it had highly personal meaning for him. When man and woman wished to
return to the garden of innocence, he pointed out, an angel with a fiery sword blocked their way. They had eaten the fruit
of the tree of knowledge, and as the serpent had promised, became as gods, knowing good from evil. This was a heavy burden.
They longed to be free of the knowledge of good and evil, but they could not. Their only peace lay in working to make the
world as they felt it should be. Free will made people responsible for their destiny.

After the war, Berkeley had become the mecca of experimental physics and Ernest Lawrence its aging prophet. Tall and heavyset,
with thinning hair set above rimless bifocals, Lawrence ruled the Rad Lab like an impresario, parking his car in a no-parking
zone just outside the main door. To anyone who acted without consulting him first, he glared fiercely and with his jowls quivering
said, “You had better learn which side your bread is buttered on if you want to remain in this laboratory.”
⁶
At other times he would go out of his way to help a subordinate by counseling on technique, by assisting in the building
of equipment, or by suggesting some fruitful line of research. The Rad Lab grew rapidly during these years, aided by almost
unlimited government funding. What had begun in the 1930s as Lawrence’s personal laboratory in a wooden shed had grown by
the 1950s into a vast complex employing more than 2,800 people, including nearly 300 graduate students.
⁷