Creator
and Destroyer A rivalry to end the
world Vivian Gornick
Oppenheimer:
Portrait of an Enigma
Jeremy Bernstein
Ivan R. Dee, $25 (cloth)
J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century
David C. Cassidy
Pi Press, $27.95 (cloth)
Edward Teller: The Real Dr.
Strangelove
Peter Goodchild
Harvard University Press,
$29.95 (cloth)
I came to
understand that vast insecurities lay forever barely hidden beneath
his charismatic exterior, whence an arrogance and occasional cruelty
befitting neither his age nor his
stature. Abraham Pais
on Robert Oppenheimer [Nothing could] silence the
insecurities preying on him . . . the roots of his turmoil ran deep .
. . conflicting emotions [fueled] the will to succeed that Heisenberg
had identified and the aggression that Rabi had
seen. Peter Goodchild on Edward
Teller
8 Two
menboth brilliant at science, both hungry to
exert an influence
on world affairs, both living in a time that allowed
them to aggravate
into existence the ability to destroy the planet, and
both sufficiently
neurotic that neither fulfilled his own promise as a scientist
(though both betrayed friends and colleagues to hold the power
they thought they had attained). Only Thomas Hardy could have
done justice to the melodrama that grew out of the
fateful connection
between Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, and the
American development
of nuclear weapons. Now, three new biographiestwo of them
on Oppenheimerconcentrate us once more on the
extraordinary
impact two larger-than-life figures can have on the world when
they antagonize one another at a receptive moment in political
time.
The outline of the story is simple. When war
broke out in 1939, scientists all over the West who had been working
for years to understand the possibilities of nuclear energy realized
that if such energy could be harnessed properly, a weapon of immense
power might be fashioned. Very soon, those living in England and the
United States became persuaded that the Germans were at work on just
such a project; their fears drove them to approach Franklin Roosevelt
with the suggestion that a laboratory be created in the United States
to hasten the development of a nuclear weapon for the Allies. A year
after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt authorized the
army to organize such a lab. The military man in charge, General
Leslie Groves, chose Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist from
Berkeley, to run it. Together, Groves and Oppenheimer decided on Los
Alamos, a village high up in the mountains of New Mexico, as the
perfect site. There, Oppenheimer gathered together the largest group
of talented scientists ever assembled in one placephysicists,
mathematicians, chemists, and engineers who, under his direction,
lived for the 27 months between April 1943 and August 1945 in virtual
isolation, working single-mindedly to produce a successful fission
bomb. In July of 1945 their
long labor at last produced results,
and that August two such bombs were released over the Japanese cities
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. World War II was at an end, the nearly
fatal rivalry between Russia and the United States had begun, and
humanity now existed in a world capable of destroying itselfnot
partially and temporarily, but totally and forever. In the interim
between the time the atom bomb blew up Hiroshima and the Cold War
began in earnest, the Los Alamos scientists (among them countless
Nobel laureates) declared themselves eager to help develop political
policy regarding nuclear weapons. Inevitably, these men turned out
doves and hawks alike. Among the doves were the physicists Hans
Bethe, I.I. Rabi, Leo Szilard, and Oppenheimer, who wanted badly to
put nuclear-energy research under international control. The chief
hawk was the physicist Edward Teller, who obsessively insisted that
America build a fusion (that is, hydrogen) bomb to get ahead of
Russia and stay ahead. For
nine years the debate over
nuclear-weapons research raged among scientists, politicians, and the
military. Then, in early 1954, Robert Oppenheimer (by then the
director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a
member of the influential advisory council on the Atomic Energy
Commission) submitted to a security-clearance hearing that went
against him. At this hearing Edward Teller (who by then had caused a
hydrogen bomb to be built and tested) was the main witness against
him. Afterward, the sociologist Phillip Rieff said that the outcome
of the Oppenheimer case meant that scientists as a body would no
longer play a role in shaping an American military policy that
they themselves have made possible. In actuality, the
Oppenheimer hearing meant only that liberal scientists would have no
future clout; right-wing scientists like Teller would go on playing a
role in government decisions for the next 40 years. But the light
that the hearing had cast on our sorry Cold War times did mean that
forever after Teller would be demonized in the public eye as Dr.
Strangelove and Oppenheimer deified as a figure of heroic tragedy.
The more interesting reality is that each man, having in the deepest
sense borne witness against himself, came out of that hearing doomed
to a kind of isolation that he could not have dreamed was waiting for
himan isolation that mirrored the powerful sameness of
self-division that had brought both, ineluctably, to this
moment. * * * J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in 1904, in New York
City, into a wealthy family of assimilated German Jews. He grew up
restless, lonely, brilliantresponsive to poetry and language,
literature and the artsyet apprehensive enough to approach the
world from inside the protective armor of an intellectual arrogance
that came early and stayed late. From his school days on, Oppenheimer
was known not only for his brains but also for his scornful,
interruptive manner when in the presence of those he judged as less
intelligent than himself. When he encountered a figure he admired,
however, his capacity for appreciation showed itself immense. His
love of science developed through exposure to a great high-school
teacher of physics and chemistry, a man of whom Oppenheimer later
said, He loved [science] in three ways: he loved the subject, he
loved the bumpy contingent nature of the way in which you actually
find out about something, and he loved the excitement that he could
stir in young people . . . to whom he hoped to give some touch, some
taste, some love of this life, and in whose awakening he saw his
destiny. Many who heard Oppenheimer speak these words felt he was
describing himself. Soon
enough, the young Robert shared
the passion of the laboratory with his inspired mentor. Yet his own
nature remained moody and restless, his interests broad, his
attention fractured, and he failed to developthen or everthe
single-mindedness required to do great science. As everyone who knew
him recognized, Oppenheimers talent for physics was consistently
short-circuited by his inability to concentrate exclusively on a
single major problem for as long as it took to solve it. Ambitious
for he knew not what, he continued writing poetry, learning Sanskrit,
riding horses, falling in love. Nevertheless, science held him rather
more than not and, as he was gifted, it kept pushing him ahead to
study at one star-studded institution after another. Upon graduation
from Harvard, he went to the Cavendish Laboratory in England, then on
to Germany and Denmark to learn the new European physics (that
is, quantum mechanics), along the way meeting and attracting the
attention of every world-famous physicist then
teaching. Returning
to America in 1929, Oppenheimer accepted a joint appointment at the
California Institute of Technology in Los Angeles and the University
of California at Berkeley, where no programs in theoretical physics
existed. (American physics, until then, had been almost exclusively
experimental.) It was here, in this position, that Oppenheimer came
into his own. His real talent, as it turned out, was not only for
teaching, but for building a department; not just a department, a
school; not only a school, but a culture of research from which
eminent physicists might emerge. Within a year, Oppenheimer had
gathered a small but significant group of genius graduate
students around him, nearly all of whom would ultimately disseminate
the new ideas in physics throughout American science. At the same
timethat is, in the early 1930sanother young physicist, the
future Nobel laureate I.I. Rabi (a fellow student of Oppenheimers
in Germany), was doing the same thing at Columbia University in New
York. When the Second World War broke out, these two men and their
protégés provided the majority of the scientists who would create
radar and build the atomic bomb. In the 30s, Oppenheimer was
famous in the small world of American physics not only for the
elegance with which he had built the Berkeley school of physics, but
also for his ascetic good looks, his high-class taste in clothes and
wine, and his left-leaning politics. The Depression and the rise of
fascism in Europe had politicized the heretofore unworldly
Oppenheimer in the same way that it had thinking people the world
over. He felt the relation between man and society as never
beforeand the feeling pressed on him. If Oppenheimer was not
actually in the Communist Party at that time, he was nonetheless an
intimate of many who were; throughout the decade he was perceived as
an active fellow traveler who supported a myriad of so-called
progressive causes and associated freely with known left-wingers.
Then came the warthe problem of nuclear fission, the urgency of
defeating the Nazisand with it the directorship of the lab at Los
Alamos. Overnight, the aesthetic but politically progressive physics
teacher became the scientist in single-minded service to his
government. From the very
beginning, running the lab at Los Alamos
brought Oppenheimers gift for synthesizing the work of others into
astonishing clarity. He had always had the outstanding ability to, as
David C. Cassidy writes in J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American
Century, almost instantly comprehend research across the entire
spectrum of theoretical and experimental physics . . . quickly grasp
a formal argument in physics, assess its internal problems, and
determine its possible solutions. To this talent he now added
another: the ability to keep track in his head, all at the same time,
of every aspect of the bomb-building program. He was alive with
understanding for everyones needsphysicists, engineers,
mathematicians, wives and children, technicians and maintenance men,
cooks and secretariesand spent every waking hour attending to
them. The situation had
clearly brought out the best in him.
Throughout his life, Oppenheimer had dismissed all whose minds were
not as quick as his ownstudents and colleagues alike dreaded his
scornbut now, at Los Alamos, the defensive arrogance went
underground. His behavior transformed into something remarkably
benign. The one quality that runs through all the scientists
narratives of [their time at Los Alamos] is enthusiasm, Jeremy
Bernstein writes in his Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma. As
hard as they worked building the bomb, they also had a great deal of
fun. The reason, they all agree, was Oppenheimer. It was he who
set the tone, he who created and sustained the mood, he who attended
magnificently to everyone everywhere, soothing, arranging, supplying.
In return, he became the man for whom one wanted to do ones best.
At Los Alamos, Robert Oppenheimer was universally beloved. Even
Edward TellerOppenheimers bête noire then
as laterhad to admit that as a laboratory director he had no
equal. The problem,
as it turned out, was that Oppenheimer became addicted to his own
extraordinary effectiveness, especially when he began to feel assured
that Los Alamos would put him on the road to glory. He and General
Groves got along so excellently because each was aware that the
project would be the making of his career, and thus the two were
equally driven to make it work. For many others at Los Alamos, the
projects mission was often the cause of profound inner conflict.
Not so for the elegant, independent-minded, left-leaning lab director
who obsessed only over the successful conclusion of the task at hand.
Now we arrive at the
complication of character that would dog
Oppenheimers rise and foreshadow his fall. No sooner was the lab
at Los Alamos put into operation than national security became an
overriding issue with the government, and the FBI began digging
around in everyones pastincluding Oppenheimers. Almost
immediately, he seemed to grow frightened of losing what was now so
visibly within his graspand suddenly he was a man eager to help
his government root out potential security risks. He didnt know
exactly what they wanted, but he decided to throw them a bone they
could chew on. Interviewed in 1943 on a peripheral matter of security
at the lab, Oppenheimer, for no real or immediate reason, offered up
a number of names from among his Berkeley friends and colleagues as
potential communist threats to the safety of the nation. Later
that same year, interviewed again in Washington, he named several of
his former students at the Lawrence Radiation Lab as possible
Communist Party members (for which the agents, of course, read
Soviet spies). Oppenheimer was essentially just shooting off
his mouth, talking to persuade the FBI that it didnt have to worry
about him, that he was true blue. But unbeknownst to him, these
conversations were being recorded andexactly as in a Hardy
novelwould rise from the grave to grab Oppenheimer by the throat
in 1954 when they were made public during his disastrous
security-clearance hearing. Then, not only were the professional
lives of the people he had named destroyed, but he himself was seen
to be a man of seriously frail character who had sold out others when
he didnt have tosimply to hold on to the position that was
allowing him to experience himself at his very best. * * * Enter
Edward Teller, of whom I.I. Rabi was to say that it would have been a
better world had he never been born. Teller grew up with the
same kind of privilege as Oppenheimer, he possessed the same kind of
talent, and, ultimately, he would be undone by the same kind of
neurosis. The son of a prosperous, assimilated Jewish-Hungarian
lawyer, he was born in Budapest in 1908 and came to science young
through exposure to a great teacher of mathematics who made him fall
in love with the underlying simplicity of what seems at first
complex. This teacher, he wrote, could do mathematics all day
long. He was the only adult I did not feel sorry for. Almost all the
others had complaints about their jobs. I became determined to have a
job that allowed me to do something I wanted to do for its own
sake. The sentiment was true enough as far as it went, but as it
turned out, it didnt go far enough. In 1926, when Teller was 18
years old, Hungarian anti-Semitism forced him to travel to Germany,
where, ironically, a Jew was still able to take a Ph.D. There, of
course, he met every great physicist then working in Europe, just as
Oppenheimer had, and there he, too, performed brilliantly and
exhibited the inner restlessness that made it impossible for either
man to ever work long, hard, and exclusively on a single problem.
Restlessness is a euphemism for a kind of insecurity that never
abates. Although he was awarded his Ph.D. at the unusually young age
of 22, Teller remained incurably anxious about his talents. He was
mortified when he went to Berlin to hear Einstein speak on his vision
of a unified theory and couldnt understand a word of the lecture;
75 years later the memory of that moment could still eat him
alive. In 1934, the
26-year-old Teller and his young wife, Mici,
arrived in England under the protection of a plan hatched by the
British scientific community to rescue Jewish scientists already at
risk in Hitlers Germany. Within a year, though, an offer came
through at an American university, and the Tellers traveled to the
United States, where they remained for the rest of their lives, with
Edward occupying one excellent academic post after another throughout
the 1930s. Then came World War II and Los Alamos, the power struggle
between the United States and Soviet Russia, and Tellers lifelong
obsession not only with building a hydrogen bomb, but with nonstop
politicking for the continual development of nuclear weapons. It was
Teller who caused Livermore, the California laboratory devoted to
nuclear-weapons research, to be built; Teller who hammered away at
one president after another on the necessity of the arms race; Teller
who led the United States into Star Wars, the mad dream of a
space-based anti-missile defense system. In his early years Edward
Teller was seen as a bundle of contradictions. On the one hand, his
approach to science was warm, personal, unorthodox, exciting, and
stimulating. Peter Goodchild, in Edward Teller: The Real Dr.
Strangelove, quotes a former student who remembers that during the
30s, All relished Tellers quickness in grasping the essence
of your problem, and his uncanny ability to make good his half-jest,
I dont understand it, but I will explain it to you . . . He
could [always] offer some ideas which would help you understand the
problem yourself. This was precisely Tellers forte. His
enthusiasm was as legendary as his quicksilver movement from one
scientific interest to another. At the very same time, Teller was
also seen as deeply irascible: thin-skinned, emotionally volatile,
easily provoked, quick to take offense. By the time he got to Los
Alamos, his capacity for grievance-collecting was nearly at its
all-time high. Many who knew Teller well were convinced that it was
here that his attitude hardened into one of temperamental reaction
from which he could never retreat. He had expected to be appointed
head of the theoretical division at Los Alamosnot only because he
thought the position was his by right, but because he needed the
recognitionand when Oppenheimer appointed Hans Bethe instead he
suffered a blow to his ego from which he never recovered. From this
time on, according to many (including Bethe himself), Oppie
became the man with whom Teller felt himself embattled. If another
scientist responded negatively to a suggestion of his, he took to
saying to his friends, Oppenheimers gotten to him. He burned
with an angry ambition to have his own scientific presence achieve
dominance over Oppenheimersand that ambition became hopelessly
wedded to the building of the large thermonuclear bomb known as the
Super. The Super, Teller was persuaded, would be his path to glory.
And indeed, throughout his later years, he was proud to be known as
the father of the hydrogen bomb. Even so, it is hard to explain how
it was that Teller fell so completely away from the world of
science-for-its-own-sake into a world of political power-brokering
that served right-wing America to such an extent that Gorbachev
refused to shake his hand when the two men met at a Washington
reception. All we can say is that when the war ended and Teller
returned to the University of Chicago, where he had been teaching
before he had gone to Los Alamos, and where he had many old friends
(including the great Italian physicist Enrico Fermi), he found that
pure science was no longer an all-in-allness to him. The thing he now
felt compelled byand I mean compelledwas the desire to build a
thermonuclear bomb. So single-minded was this urgency of his that it
is impossible not to feel a hidden psychological need at work,
manipulating a Cold War panic that he insisted on inflaming within
himself as well as in the world at large. The allure that the
hydrogen bomb held for Teller went way back, actually, to a
preliminary meeting held in Berkeley (before the laboratory at Los
Alamos had opened) at which Teller had proposed that research be
concentrated on a fusion rather than a fission bomb. Such a bomb, it
was calculated, would produce an explosion equivalent to that of
1,000,000 tons of TNT. This suggestion was so startling to the others
at the meeting that Oppenheimer made a trip to Michigan to discuss
the idea with the University of Chicagos dean of physics, Arthur
Compton, who, in turn, was horrified. This, Compton wrote,
would be the ultimate catastrophe. Better to accept the slavery of
the Nazis than to run a chance of drawing the final curtain on
mankind. We agreed . . . that unless [Oppenheimers team] came up
with a firm and reliable conclusion that our atomic bombs could not
explode the air or the sea, these bombs must never be
made. Teller never for
one moment felt the same
compunctionmuch less the same terroras the others, and he
resented, even then, the way in which the idea of the Super was
dismissed. Now, in 1948, he left the University of Chicago, returning
to Los Alamos, where he set to work with a will to bring to fruition
the thing he had been so long obsessed by. Toiling ceaselessly to
direct the development of the device that could explode a hydrogen
bomb, Tellerhaving badgered, cajoled, insulted, and strong-armed
countless scientists at Los Alamos into working solely on the
Superwas experienced only as petulant, explosive, imperious. He
made many enemies among his fellow scientists in these years, but on
November 1, 1952, the first thermonuclear bomb in history was
exploded, on the Pacific atoll of Eniwetok. Here is Peter
Goodchilds description of what happened that day:In the
sky fifteen miles away and 40,000 feet above [the earth] the wings of
one B36 monitoring plane heated to boiling point almost instantly.
Wildlife and vegetation on the surrounding islands vaporized, birds
burnt to a cinder in mid-flight, fish stripped of their skin as if
deep-fried. Within five minutes the fireball had been transformed
into a purple, roiling cloud a few hundred miles wide and thirty
miles high. At ground level, the island of Elugelab ceased to exist,
replaced by a crater two miles wide and half a mile deep. Eighty
million tons of coral, earth and water had been vaporized and
dispersed high into the atmosphere, radioactive material that would
circulate and fall out around the world. Between this time
and the time a test-ban treaty was at last signed, over 300 such
tests were performed in the United States and in Russia. Of that
moment in 1952 when the first hydrogen bomb was exploded, Vannevar
Bush, Roosevelts wartime head of the National Defense Research
Committee, was to say at the Oppenheimer hearing in 1954, I think
history will show that this was a turning point . . . when we entered
into the grim world that we are entering right now . . . [and] that
those who pushed that thing through to a conclusion . . . have a
great deal to answer for. Edward Teller heard many people
speak as Vannevar Bush spoke at the very same hearing, but he
remained unmoved. When his turn came, he told the committee sitting
in judgment on Robert Oppenheimer that he regretted to say, but say
it he must, that he did not think the future safety of the country
would be well served by extending security clearance to Oppenheimer,
mainly because Oppenheimer had opposed the development of the
Super. Teller could not, at
that moment, realize that with these
words he was sealing his own fate. For the next 40 years he would be
absorbed by the monomaniacal drive to produce more and more powerful
nuclear weapons, at least partly because after the Oppenheimer
hearing he was shunned by almost everyone in science he had ever
known or worked with. For the rest of his long life people at
scientific conferences would turn away from him, refuse his hand, cut
him dead. The result: he became increasingly more allied with
powerful right-wing figures both in government and in the military.
Now, they were his pals, not the scientists. Years later, George
Cowan, a radio chemist who had known Teller since wartime Los Alamos,
said, People do betray themselves. Potentially, Edward was a great
man in the highest sense, but he was betrayed by his obsession for
power. Early on he was ambitious, which led to frustration, and then
with success came the hubris and the power. And then he was lost. He
made a mistake. He knows. The observation is, I think, shrewd,
but the analysis somewhat lacking. In The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy creates a character who is filled with intelligence,
enterprise, and ingenuity while he is at the same time a man who
knows no moderation in his requests and impulses. When he
loves, the warmth is all-enveloping; when he grows suspicious, he is
capable of murder. The volatility and the moroseness within rise up
repeatedly out of an uncontrollable inner conviction that the
worldin the person of one intimate after anotherstands ready to
humiliate him. Once an enemy is identified, the mayors
passions know no bounds: he is willing to risk bringing the world
down to defeat those whom he imagines opposing him.
Edward Teller never understood
the degree to which battling the opposition was an
emotional necessity
that drove him on and on; much less did he understand that it
was Robert Oppenheimer, not the Russians, whom he had
internalized
as the designated enemy. <
Vivian
Gornick's newest book, The Solitude of Self:
Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
will be published in the fall.
Originally published in the April/May
2005 issue of Boston Review |