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J. Robert Oppenheimer Priscilla J. McMillan The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Birth of the Modern Arms Race VIKING VIKING Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 100I4, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen's Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pry Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Lrd, II Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-no 0I7, India Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pry) Ltd, 24 Srurdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Lrd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R oRL, England First published in 2005 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Copyright © Priscilla Johnson McMillan, 2005 All rights reserved Photograph credits appear on page 374- LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA McMillan, Priscilla Johnson. The ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer / Priscilla J. McMillan. p. ern. Includes index. ISBN 0-670-03422-3 I. Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 1904-1967. 2. Physicists-United States-Biography. 3. Manhattan Project (U.S.) 4- Atomic bomb-United States-s-History. 5. Nuclear physics- United States-Histoty-20th century. 6. Teller, Edward, 1908- I. Tide. QC16.062M362005 530' .092-dc22 2004066103 This book is printed on acid-free paper. 8 Printed in the United States of America Set in Adobe Garamond Designed by Francesca Belanger Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scan- ning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable ma- terials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated. Introduction 0)( THE MORNING of April 12, 1954, readers of the New York Times ----0 ce to startling news. The security clearance of the nation's best- -'=lown nuclear scientist, J. Robert Oppenheimer, had been sus- ?Ended in the face of charges that he was a security risk. The Timess scoop created a sensation, for Oppenheimer was a na- "':onalhero. He had been the leader of the Manhattan Project during -odd War II, and his name, more than that of any other American, -='2S coupled with the building of the atomic bomb and the war's ~ orious end at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After the war, as the gov- emrnent's number one adviser on atomic weapons, he had been privy :0 all its decisions about these weapons. If Oppenheimer was a secu- ziry risk, did the United States have a single important secret left? It was almost unthinkable that this man's loyalty should be in question. Except that as U.S. disagreement with the Soviet Union Jafdened into a state of permanent tension, the certainties that had sustained the American people during the war and the early years zhereafter ebbed away, and so did some of the nation's confidence. _-\frerthe defections of two people who had spied for the USSR (a So- +ier code clerk in Canada named Igor Gouzenko in 1946 and a "oman named Elizabeth Bentley from the U.S. Communist Party in =948), Americans learned that key parts of the government-State, -:::-reasury,and possibly even the White House-had been penetrated ~y Soviet agents. Then, in 1948, a rumpled-looking former writer for ~ime magazine named Whittaker Chambers rose in a crowded con- _ essional committee room and, in an unforgettable televised con- ::::-omation,accused the irreproachable Alger Hiss, president of the ,---,,-:----~~-~---. 2 The Ruin of]. Robert Oppenheimer Introduction 3 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, of having handed u.s. weapons, Oppenheimer had chaired the October 1949 meeting at government secrets to Russia years before, while he had been a State which the GAC had voted 8 to 0 (a ninth GAC member was out of Department official. The confidence of Americans was shaken again the country) against a crash program to develop the hydrogen bomb. in the late summer of 1949, when the Soviet Union tested its first Oppenheimer's committee had cited both technical and moral argu- atomic bomb, an event the CIA had not expected for at least two ments. It had before it only one design for the weapon, and despite more years. Its atomic monopoly broken, the country learned in early several years of research, it was not clear that it could ever be made to 1950 that Hiss had been convicted on charges of perjury and that a work. To launch a new stage of the arms race by committing the na- serious-looking, bespectacled ex-Manhattan Project scientist named tion to build a weapon that had so far been proof against every effort Klaus Fuchs had confessed in England to having passed atomic secrets at invention seemed to the committee members supremely irresponsi- to Russia. ble. Nor did they think it would be ethical. The new weapon, should After only four short years, the United States found itself shorn of it ever prove feasible, could be designed to carry unlimited destructive its monopoly on the weapon that had given it a feeling of omnipo- power. It would be a weapon not of warfare but, quite possibly, of tence, and learned that the key to its unrivaled ascendancy-the se- genocide. As an answer to Russia's newfound possession of the atomic crets of the atomic bomb-had been stolen. It was not long before bomb it was, all too literally, overkill. ambitious politicians started to capitalize on the nation's new sense of Oppenheimer agreed with the committee, but, contrary to accusa- vulnerability, and no accident that the most strident of those who tions that were brought against him later, he had not led the GAC to tried to do so was a hard-drinking senator from the heartland of tra- its conclusions. He came to his view only in the last few days before ditional isolationism. Within days of the Hiss conviction and the the meeting, partly under the influence of Harvard president James Fuchs confession, Joseph McCarthy stood up in Wheeling, West Vir- B. Conant, a committee member for whom he had almost filial re- ginia, and brandished a piece of paper purportedly containing the pect, and in the course of the meeting itself, as the consensus took names of 205 "known" Communists who he claimed were working hape. His feelings were less vehement than Conant's and he did not for the Department of State. write the majority opinion, as he very often did. Nevertheless, the As McCarthy spoke, a debate that had been waged in secret about four-month behind-the-scenes debate over the hydrogen bomb a possible next step in the arms race reached its decisive point, as arned him bitter foes. One was Lewis Strauss, a highly partisan Re- President Harry Truman ordered the nation's scientists to find out publican banker and businessman who was one of five AEC commis- whether a new weapon, the so-called hydrogen bomb, could be built sioners. Another was Edward Teller, the Hungarian-bern scientist in response to the Soviet success. Such a bomb would, if feasible, whom Oppenheimer had known well during the Manhattan Project have a thousand times the explosive power of the atomic bomb. And, y ars, and whom he had disappointed in 1943 by declining to make in subsequent directives, Truman made clear that the effort to build a him head of Los Alamos's Theoretical Division. A brilliant adminis- hydrogen bomb was to be an all-out affair, and that everything about trator, Oppenheimer had kept Teller on the reservation throughout the program was to be held in utmost secrecy. rhc war by allowing him to form a small group of his own. But Teller, Robert Oppenheimer had been at the center of the debate over nIrcady obsessed by the idea of the hydrogen bomb, nursed his re- whether to try to build the hydrogen bomb. As chairman of the Atomic scnrments and concluded that Oppenheimer was motivated not by Energy Commission's General Advisory Committee, the group which, IIC)n .st onviction but by ambition, not wanting his success, the more than any other, made the government's decisions about atomic .uorni bomb, to be trumped hya bigg r weapon. III i 4 The Ruin of']. Robert Oppenheimer Introduction The enmities Oppenheimer incurred during the H-bomb debate of study commissioned by the Air Force in 1951,which urged that tacti- 1949-50 became deeper afterward, for as part of his H-bomb decision, cal nuclear weapons be made available to defend Western Europe I Truman also decreed that the very fact of the debate, plus everything against Soviet land armies if necessary. Instead of relying on a small that had been said in the course of it, was to remain supersecret, No number of thermonuclear bombs with which the Air Force could pul- one who had taken part was permitted even to describe the proceed- verize targets in the far-off USSR, "Vista" recommended that a large ings to anyone who did not have a "Q" clearance, a clearance to see top number of smaller bombs be spread among the services so that, if secret nuclear data.
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