Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Against Unsupported Attacks (Attacks Responsibility of the Scientist

Current Books essays. Had Singer reshaped some of the Study in Princeton, New Jersey, while essays and put a bit more effort into harmo- Bethe returned to Cornell University, his nizing the others, the result would have intellectual home since 1935 and a scholarly been a far better book. But one should still be community that would give him moral sup- grateful for the intelligence and judiciousness port. of the book we do have. One should “It is one of Bethe’s striking characteris- acknowledge, too, that writers who have the tics,” writes Schweber, a physicist and science temerity to write about Santayana are historian at Brandeis University, “that there doomed to be outshone by their subject. We is only one of him—in contrast to Oppen- can be grateful to Singer for showing just heimer.” When Cold War anticommunism such temerity, and thereby helping to keep struck American college campuses in the Santayana’s vision alive. 1940s and 1950s, a duplicitous Oppen- —Wilfred M. McClay heimer so feared his conservative critics that he could not bring himself to defend publicly a former student, University of IN THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB: Rochester physics professor Bernard Peters, Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral against unsupported attacks (attacks Responsibility of the Scientist. prompted by Oppenheimer’s own casual By S. S. Schweber. Princeton Univ. remarks). By contrast, Bethe staunchly Press. 260 pp. $24.95 defended Cornell physicist Philip Morrison against biased accusations by the university’s o understand the overlapping but alumni and board members. President Tdivergent careers of nuclear physi- Dwight Eisenhower’s science adviser, cists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hans James Killian, spoke of Bethe’s “grave Bethe, according to Schweber, look to nobility of character,” a quality that Oppen- Immanuel Kant and educator Felix Adler. heimer somehow lacked. Oppenheimer and Bethe both grew up in Indeed, as Schweber argues in this Jewish families that sought social and cultural engaging intellectual story, the two men’s assimilation, and both men found physics lives seem like mirror images refracted by and secular ethics appealing substitutes for their heady years at Los Alamos. Before traditional religion. Oppenheimer studied at World War II, Oppenheimer thrived in a New York’s Society for Ethical Culture, circle of colleagues and talented students at which Adler had founded in 1876 to impart Berkeley; after the war, he was nearly alone a humanitarian philosophy that might in his struggles against political enemies. replace traditional Judaism. Adler considered Before the war, Bethe was “self-sufficient Kant’s ethics “a species of physics” that and somewhat of a loner” socially and intel- impelled each individual to behave as if his lectually; after the war, he created a lively actions could be a universal ideal. Bethe’s physics community at Cornell and “set its parents and his German education impart- moral and scientific standards.” ed a similar Kantian moral imperative that Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, is a his- would enrich his life, but in ways more torical icon, remembered by many as a mar- communal and familial than Oppen- tyr who professed that “the physicists have heimer’s. known sin; and this is a knowledge they can- Creating the A-bomb together at Los not lose.” Bethe is a living legend. He Alamos during World War II, Oppen- received the 1967 Nobel Prize in physics for heimer (director of the secret laboratory) explaining how stars produce energy. and Bethe (head of its theoretical division) Throughout the Cold War he publicly advo- personified individual responsibility for cated nuclear arms control and test bans, their science: Beating Nazi Germany to the and he recently sent a letter to President Bill bomb became their moral imperative. Clinton opposing the development of a Afterward they went their separate ways. national missile defense system. At 94, he Oppenheimer left theoretical physics still studies physics at Cornell. research to head the Institute for Advanced —William Lanouette 138 Wilson Quarterly.

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