One would be tempted to characterize J. Robert Oppenheimer as a tragic figure – certainly that is how he is portrayed by Christopher Nolan in the biography Oppenheimer. The father of the atomic bomb who spent the rest of his life agonizing over what he was born with; the ultimate insider who was humiliated and humiliated; the hopeful scientist who started the nuclear arms race. But tragic figures don’t generally spend their retirement sailing in the Caribbean. Or maybe he was a tragic figure modeled on Lord Byron – interestingly dark and mystical, remarkably handsome and rich like Midas.
Oppenheimer grew up in privileged circumstances and remained wrapped in it throughout his life. His father emigrated to New York without money and rose to become a wealthy manager of a textile company. His parents spoiled their little genius. As he grew up building a stone collection, it grew to cover the entire area of their home, which in turn occupied an entire floor overlooking the Hudson River. The Oppenheimers had a chauffeur, a French governess, three housemaids and three Van Gogh paintings. He corresponded with the New York Mineralogical Club, but when they invited him to speak they were surprised and delighted when it turned out that he was only 12 years old. His 16th birthday present was a 28-foot yacht (to match the family’s 40-foot Lorelei) that he named Trimethy after a chemical compound. When Oppenheimer bought his first vacation home in New Mexico, the state where he would later pioneer atomic bomb development, he remarked, “Hot dog!”
Oppenheimer was a somewhat odd student. He was a nerd at Harvard who was expelled for being an introvert and, in the highly anti-Semitic environment of the 1920s, for being Jewish. He was a somewhat restless young man. At Cambridge University he once left a poisoned apple on his tutor’s desk; When a friend told him about his engagement while on vacation, Oppenheimer tried to strangle him; and in Gottingen, where he was a graduate student, his classmates petitioned to get him to stop interrupting classes.
However, as a postdoc in Leiden and Zurich, he began to come out of his shell and became downright cool when he moved to California in 1929. He cooked nasi goreng – his colleagues called it “nasty gory” – and “eggs a la oppie”, prepared with lots of Mexican chilies. He had a house with a Picasso on the wall, New Mexico rugs on the floor, and a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. He raised funds for the Republican armed forces during the Spanish Civil War and flirted with Communism. With his chalk and cigarettes, he made major breakthroughs, inspired his graduate students, and built one of the finest theoretical physics departments in the world. And he was lucky: his father’s fortune was not damaged by the accident in 1929. After Oppenheimer crashed his Chrysler into a train, passed out and nearly killed his passenger, Natalie Raymond, his father gave her a Cezanne drawing as an apology. Hot dog!
After the war, he landed the most comfortable job imaginable, as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. As director he was given the 265-acre Olden Manor, parts of which date from 1696. He had no teaching commitments and a $120,000 fund to spend inviting anyone he liked to spend from a few months (TS Eliot, whose poem “The Wasteland” Oppenheimer is captivatingly portrayed on screen) to the rest of his career (the diplomat George Kennan, the proponent of Cold War containment policies). It sounds like a great performance. And if I had, I would have essentially stopped doing research like Oppenheimer did.
Oppenheimer spent much of the 1950s and 1960s at his vacation home in Hawksnest Bay on the Caribbean island of Saint John or on his yacht
Eventually he fell prey to McCarthyism, criminal FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and Oppenheimer’s own political blunders, and lost his security clearance and political appointments in 1954, events that serve as the setting for Nolan’s film. However, Oppenheimer remained director of the institute until his death. The sheer ridiculous injustice of the Republican show trial safety hearing — in the hands of banker and nuclear energy adviser Lewis Strauss — martyred him, and when the Democrats got back to the White House, they gave him a special honor. Oppenheimer spent much of the 1950s and 1960s at his vacation home in Hawksnest Bay on the Caribbean island of Saint John (where he imported cases of champagne) or on his yacht.
In comparison, his brother Frank became a member of the Communist Party in 1937 when he tried to desegregate his local swimming pool in Pasadena; was one of the first international arms control activists in Los Alamos; and then he was blacklisted from academia, denied a passport and forced to spend a decade ranching cattle.
The Los Alamos camp’s chief adviser
But the central place in Oppenheimer’s life wasn’t the Upper West Side, the Bay Shore mansion on Long Island, his bachelor pad in California, the mansion in Princeton, or his Caribbean island. The central location was Los Alamos. This scientific base was built from the ground up in the hills of northern New Mexico. It was Oppenheimer’s favorite part of the country; In fact, Los Alamos was only a day’s ride from his vacation home. It was like locating CERN, the vast intergovernmental laboratory for particle physics, in the pleasant English countryside of the Cotswolds.
Los Alamos during the war sounds like great fun. Married scientists were allowed to bring their families with them. There were barn dances or piano concerts on Saturday evenings, and hikes and horseback rides on Sundays. There was a local cinema, 15 cents a ticket. There was a local theater company: Oppenheimer even played a corpse in the comedy Arsenic and Old Lace. And there was copious amounts of alcohol — Oppenheimer was famous for mixing very strong, very cold martinis, while the drink for the less well-to-do bachelor scientists was half lab liquor and half grapefruit juice, chilled with a stick of smoking dry ice. The average age was 25 years. And between the works on making the atomic bomb, apparently everyone had sex: in the first year 80 children were born, after that ten a month. All in all, it’s a better war than storming the beaches of Normandy or Iwo Jima.
The amenities provided to the scientists and their families were dubbed “army socialism.” But the soldiers who emptied the bins and the local Indigenous women who cleaned the houses must have had a pretty keen sense of the pecking order. In the many memoirs of the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos is far more reminiscent of pre-war summer camp than a top-secret government project to develop a weapon of mass destruction
Oppenheimer’s most important contribution was as camp adviser to Los Alamos
Oppenheimer’s historical contribution came as scientific director of Los Alamos. But what was this contribution to the Manhattan Project? Not the science – the real breakthroughs came from Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, who showed that nuclear fission is possible, or from specialists like Robert Christy, who designed the plutonium implosion “Christy device”, which was successfully tested at the Trinity site near Los Alamos and later dropped on Nagasaki. And not direction — 90 percent of the budget of General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, went to the Fordist feats of administration, logistics and engineering, namely the Oak Ridge and Hanford manufacturing plants, which produced the plutonium and enriched uranium that fueled the atomic bombs. Oppenheimer’s most important contribution was as camp adviser to Los Alamos.
Oppenheimer encouraged them to keep going, and his charisma sort of captivated the campers. It is no coincidence that much of the bomb’s serious thinking – moral and political – took place elsewhere, in Chicago under Leo Szilard or in the giant head of Danish genius Niels Bohr. Oppenheimer got them going with a simple message: We must get the bomb before Hitler.
As it turned out, it was all a mistake. We now know that in 1942 the Nazis decided against a nuclear fission program. Nazi planners needed raw materials and labor for armaments production, and Nazi scientists thought that a bomb could not be delivered in time to affect the war in Europe, which turned out to be true. So the Manhattan Project did not discourage Hitler from developing and using the bomb, nor did it need to deter him. The scientists assumed a mistake.
The main effect of the Manhattan Project was to bring forward the age of the bomb and the age of the nuclear arms race. Existential risk researcher Toby Ord calls this era “the abyss”: the first period in which humanity can destroy itself. For a peacetime Manhattan project, the US probably would not have “sprinted” to the same extent, spending 0.4 percent of GDP. And Oppenheimer’s nemesis Lewis Strauss may have been right, albeit for the wrong reasons, when he accused Oppenheimer of supporting the Soviet nuclear program. Quite simply, it would have taken the Soviets years longer if they couldn’t just copy the Manhattan Project secrets. Szilard and Albert Einstein, whose 1939 letter prompted President Franklin Roosevelt to launch the US nuclear program, later described their commitment to the project as the biggest mistake of their lives.
It wasn’t just an honest mistake. Joseph Rotblat-the only scientist who left the Manhattan project-experienced an evil shock in May 1944 when Grove said at a dinner: “Of course, you know that the main purpose of this project is to subject the Russians.” Later, Groves said that “I had never had the illusion for this project, which was our enemy. Damon’s cheerful face to reconcile in Christopher Nolan’s film.
Was the bomb just too “technically cute” for Oppenheimer to resist?
How complicit was Oppenheimer? David Hawkins, Oppenheimer’s advisor and official historian of the Manhattan Project, claims that Groves told Oppenheimer in late 1943 that the Nazis had given up their attempt – and Oppenheimer shrugged. Oppenheimer dominated ethical discussions among scientists in late 1944, as both the war and the atomic bomb race were drawing to a close, arguing that scientists had no right to have a louder voice than other citizens and that if the war ended without the use of nuclear weapons, the next war would be fought with nuclear weapons. Was Oppenheimer filled with the same patriotic passion that led him to have a colonel’s uniform tailored? Was the bomb just too “technically cute” for him to resist? It is unclear. Perhaps the best we can say in his defense is that Oppenheimer was persuaded (to a certain extent) to do so, and that, unintentionally or unintentionally, he persuaded the other scientists as well.
“Would you like to wipe your hands?”
Oppenheimer’s complicity gave him prestige and access. However, he squandered this and lost four major political battles over the use and future of nuclear weapons: in a demonstration attack, in initiating talks at the Potsdam Conference, in post-war arms control proposals, and in not striving for the far more powerful hydrogen bomb.
The two main items on the agenda of the May 31, 1945 meeting of the “Interim Committee,” a government advisory group on nuclear research, were the use of the bomb and communications with the Soviets. Oppenheimer, the vast majority of Los Alamos scientists, and indeed General Dwight Eisenhower all supported a demonstration attack on an empty island. But Harvard President James Conant instead proposed “a vital war facility…surrounded by workers’ housing.”
At this crucial decision-making meeting, Oppenheimer did not dispute the targeting of civilians, merely pointing out the visual impact of a bomb and the feasibility of simultaneous attacks. He also remained silent when Groves received approval to exclude dissident scientists like Szilard from the project. Oppenheimer believed he had traded this betrayal for an obligation to clearly inform the USSR of the bomb and its intended use. These discussions would mean that the Soviets would not be caught off guard in a frightening way that would trigger an arms race. Instead, in his meeting with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference shortly after the successful Trinity test, Truman only casually and vaguely mentioned a new weapon and engaged in no serious discussion with his counterpart. Oppenheimer lost on both counts.
When he first met Truman, after the atomic bombing of Japan, Oppenheimer blurted out in frustration and passion, “There’s blood on my hands.” Truman melted on it for years, retelling the anecdote and embellishing it. He once claimed he pulled out his handkerchief and said, “Well, here, want to wipe your hands?” Immediately after he left, Truman called him a “crybaby scientist” and would never trust him again.
Oppenheimer’s post-war record was equally poor. He was the main intellectual force behind the 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal report, which proposed a single worldwide Atomic Development Agency with a monopoly over all uranium mines, laboratories, enrichment plants, and power plants. Control over nuclear technology would be international, not national. However, as Oppenheimer later conceded, this was impractical and naïve. Stalin would never have agreed to the renunciation of sovereignty, the inspections, or the close cooperation with the capitalist West that the plan would have required. Bernard Baruch, the proponent of the failed Baruch Plan, was an easy scapegoat.
When the Soviets detonated their first bomb in 1949, Oppenheimer told David Lilienthal, the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, that “we must not overdo it this time,” by which he meant the arms race. But they screwed up, and the US stockpile grew from 50 warheads in 1948 to 300 in 1950. The next battle was whether to build a “super” or a hydrogen bomb, much more destructive than the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer rejected it on scientific, technical, and moral grounds. But when Truman made the decision, the President had a question: Can the Russians pull this off? The answer was yes. “In that case,” Truman replied, “we have no choice.” The session lasted 7 minutes. The cry-baby scientist’s concerns were completely dismissed.
How Oppenheimer was dubbed
The two most notable facts about Oppenheimer’s life are that he first accelerated the development of nuclear weapons and then completely failed to stem the nuclear arms race that he helped start. The arms races used his scientific credibility to aid in their ruthless construction, surpassing him in every major political battle. After his release in 1954, it would be another 18 years before the first bilateral nuclear arms control agreement was signed. This withdrawal of his security clearance can be seen as the last mercy killing of a completely weakened and defeated political opponent.
It’s hard to overstate how close the writers of American Prometheus, the book the film is based on, are to Team Oppenheimer. One author, Kai Bird, spent 25 years interviewing Oppenheimer’s friends and family. They spend 88 pages detailing the mistrial of his hearing, minute by minute. They often refer to him as “Oppie”. And even her assessment is that he “didn’t gain anything and put up with everything.”
How Should We Remember Oppenheimer: A Tragic Martyr? Death, the destroyer of worlds? The “American Prometheus” of the title? Another descriptive phrase comes to mind that would be more familiar to an employee of his father in a New York textile mill: “What an idiot.”
Haydn Belfield was academic project manager for six years at the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge. He is also an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence.
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