Pandora's Keepers (70 page)

*
They were right. The Soviets tested their first superbomb, a fission-boosted weapon, on August 12, 1953. Their first “true”
superbomb, based on thermonuclear fusion, was tested on November 22, 1955.

*
Bethe and Fermi subsequently consulted at Los Alamos on the superbomb’s development, and Bethe helped design the weapon based
on an idea conceived by Edward Teller, Stanis-law Ulam, and Richard Garwin.

*
The FBI monitored these and subsequent conversations between Oppenheimer and his lawyers, violating the attorney-client privilege
and giving Strauss and the AEC the unfair advantage of anticipating Oppenheimer’s defense.

*
Teller had told FBI investigators in 1950 that Frank Oppenheimer would not have joined the Communist Party without the “tacit
approval” of his brother. (See SAC, WFO to FBI Director, “Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer,” January 5, 1954, FBI J. Robert Oppenheimer
Serial File [100–17828]/Freedom of Information Act Files.)

*
If Oppenheimer did lie about his Communist Party affiliation in the late 1930s and early 1940s, why did he do so? Most likely
because he felt vulnerable in the anticommunist political climate of the 1950s and thought it necessary to cover up his now
embarrassing past in order to maintain his influence as a government adviser, which had become so important to him after 1945
as a way of assuaging his guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One who knew Oppenheimer well during his radical days offered
a revealing insight: “This fiction that he was putting forward was presumably necessary for his protection in the carrying
out of an ideal purpose which I had no doubt he was pursuing.” (Chevalier,
Oppenheimer
, p. 84.)

*
Paradoxically, the implications of Oppenheimer’s false story were more serious than what actually happened. His story impeded
army security officers, hurt his friend Chevalier, and damned himself in the eyes of both his friend and his judges. To protect
others, Oppenheimer accepted the guilt of a made-up story that he could not sustain.

*
Jean Tatlock committed suicide the following year.

*
Groves later said that he had compelled Oppenheimer to divulge Chevalier’s identity only to stop complaints from his security
officers.

*
Shortly before Szilard died, he said that he wanted his ashes tied to a helium balloon and sent skyward. People, he said,
should look up rather than down. But—as had been the case with so many of Szilard’s ideas—without him there to fight, pester,
and promote, nothing happened. His ashes, kept in a California crematory after his death, would finally be buried during the
centenary of his birth in 1998.

*
Teller was later proved quite wrong. In 1963 the United States led the Soviet Union by a large margin in both nuclear technology
and stockpiled nuclear weapons.

THEY WERE NINE BRILLIANT MEN
who believed in science and who saw before anyone else the awesome workings of an invisible world. They came From many places,
some fleeing Nazism in Europe, others quietly slipping out of university teaching jobs, all gathering in secret wartime laboratories
to create the world’s first atomic bomb.

During World War II, few of the atomic scientists questioned the wisdom of their desperate endeavor. But afterward they were
forced to deal with the sobering legacy of their creation. Some were haunted by the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and became
anti–nuclear weapons activists; others went on to build even deadlier bombs, In explaining their lives and their struggles,
Brian VanDeMark superbly illuminates not only their moral reckoning with their horrific creation but also the ways in which
each of us grapples with responsibility and unintended consequences.

“The story of the Manhattan Project is famous, and so are the complicated, remarkable men behind it, whom VanDeMark brings
engrossingly to life: men like Oppenheimer, Bethe, Bohr, Teller, Fermi, and Szilard…. VanDeMark does not overlook the implications
in today’s world.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“A well-considered portrait of the scientists who made the atomic bomb and then repented ever after…. A welcome addition to
the literature of the atomic age.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

Brian VanDeMark
teaches history at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis. He is the author of a widely acclaimed book on Lyndon Johnson
and Vietnam,
Into the Quagmire
. He also coauthored Robert S. McNamara’s, #1, bestseller
In Retrospect
and assisted Clark Clifford with his bestselling.