Nuclear Options
By RICHARD RHODES
Published: May 15, 2005
THE story of the discovery of how to release nuclear
energy, and its application to making bombs capable of
blasting, irradiating and burning out entire cities,
is the great tragic epic of the 20th century. To build
the first such weapons, the United States invested
more than $2 billion and constructed an industrial
plant spread from Tennessee to New Mexico to
Washington State that by 1945 rivaled the American
automobile industry in scale.
Sixty years later, the Manhattan Project is fading
into myth. The massive production reactors and
plutonium extraction canyons at Hanford, Wash.; the
half-mile-long uranium separation buildings at Oak
Ridge, Tenn.; the 200,000 workers who built and
operated the vast machinery while managing to keep its
purpose secret, all disappear from view, leaving
behind a bare nucleus of legend: a secret laboratory
on a New Mexican mesa where the actual bombs were
designed and built; a charismatic lab director, J.
Robert Oppenheimer, who rose to international
prominence until his enemies brought him low; a lone
B-29, incongruently named for the pilot's mother,
Enola Gay; a ruined city, Hiroshima; and poor
Nagasaki, all but forgotten.
Robert Oppenheimer died of throat cancer at 62 in
1967. Perhaps because he was a complicated man,
''American Prometheus'' is the first full biography of
his life, rich in new revelations. (''J. Robert
Oppenheimer and the American Century,'' by David C.
Cassidy, the author of ''Uncertainty: The Life and
Science of Werner Heisenberg,'' looks primarily at
Oppenheimer's role as a scientist.) Born into a
wealthy German-Jewish family in New York City in 1904,
he grew up gifted in languages and friendship but
lonely and filled with self-loathing. Although he was
always rail-thin, a chain smoker, awkward and nervous,
women loved his brilliant blue eyes and courtly
attention and responded to his vulnerability. His
difficult wife, Katherine Puening, ''Kitty,''
abandoned a husband for him. Kai Bird and Martin J.
Sherwin have uncovered a long-term love affair with
Ruth Tolman, a clinical psychologist who was the wife
of one of Oppenheimer's close colleagues. In ''109
East Palace,'' Jennet Conant, whose previous book was
''Tuxedo Park: A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret
Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War
II,'' reports that at least two of the women
associated with the secret laboratory at Los Alamos,
Oppenheimer's secretary, Priscilla Greene, and the
lab's Santa Fe gatekeeper, an older widow named
Dorothy McKibben, were (as Greene described herself)
''more than a little in love with him.'' If he was
unable to rescue his darkly beautiful first love, Jean
Tatlock, from the deepening depressions that led to
her suicide in 1944, in their best years together at
Berkeley in the 1930's she opened his eyes to human
suffering. Tatlock's remedy was membership in the
Communist Party. Oppenheimer contributed to the party
and attended at least one meeting, but never became a
member, a conclusion Bird and Sherwin reached after a
thorough examination of Oppenheimer's F.B.I. files:
''Any attempt to label Robert Oppenheimer a Party
member is a futile exercise -- as the F.B.I. learned
to its frustration over many years.''
After Harvard, Oppenheimer faltered for a time at
Cambridge University in England, then found his
footing as a theoretical physicist in Germany and got
in on the ground floor of the revolution worked there
and in Denmark that led to quantum mechanics, a rich
new understanding of the physical world. Bird, author
of ''The Chairman: John J. McCloy, the Making of the
American Establishment,'' and Sherwin, author of ''A
World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies,'' shed
new light on this period. Oppenheimer at Cambridge was
wrongly considered to be afflicted with dementia
praecox (schizophrenia) by a Harley Street
psychiatrist who understood him less well than he
understood himself. His trouble was an occupational
and identity crisis, which he worked his way through
to confident creativity. One of his mentors was the
Danish Nobel laureate theoretical physicist Niels
Bohr, a profound, subtle and honorable man who would
become a central figure in Oppenheimer's life. With
first-class work on quantum theory published in
European journals, the 23-year-old Oppenheimer
returned to America in 1927 to found the nation's
first great schools of theoretical physics at Berkeley
and Caltech in Pasadena.
In 1942, a tough, efficient Army Corps of Engineers
general, Leslie R. Groves, picked Oppenheimer to
direct the secret laboratory at Los Alamos. To his
colleagues, Oppenheimer's appointment seemed unlikely,
but Groves knew his man; the physicist, always
something of an actor, found his best role in the work
of directing several hundred of the most accomplished
scientists in the world, many of them from Europe, as
well as several thousand technicians and other staff
members. Even Edward Teller, Oppenheimer's worst
enemy, told me once that the man was the best lab
director he had ever seen. In 28 months -- from April
1943, when Los Alamos opened its doors, to August 1945
-- two bombs of completely different design were ready
for use.
Using them was intended to shock the intransigent
Japanese government into surrender. The long debate
among historians about American motives and Japanese
efforts at ending World War II is finally resolved in
''Racing the Enemy,'' Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's brilliant
and definitive study of American, Soviet and Japanese
records of the last weeks of the war. Hasegawa, a
professor of history at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, reveals that Japanese efforts to enlist
the neutral Soviet Union as a mediator could not have
succeeded, before or after the atomic bombings,
because Stalin had no intention of allowing the war to
end until his armies had moved across Manchuria and
seized the prizes promised him at Potsdam -- Sakhalin
and the Kurils, and Hokkaido too if they could snatch
it. The bombs gave the Japanese emperor, Hirohito, the
excuse he needed to force his military to surrender,
on Aug. 15, to save the imperial house; but the war
newly joined between the Soviet Union and Japan
continued fiercely until Sept. 1, when Soviet forces
occupied Shikotan, an island just off the northeastern
coast of Hokkaido. The next day the surrender was
signed.
Even with the emperor's backing, the surrender of
Japanese forces was not guaranteed; the Japanese
military was no more impressed by the death toll of
civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki than it had been
by the death toll of the first firebombing of Tokyo in
March 1945, when as many as 140,000 people burned to
death and another million were seriously injured. The
relentless firebombing of Japanese cities between
March and August was far more destructive of lives and
property than the atomic bombings.
After the war, Oppenheimer emerged to public acclaim;
as an adviser to the newly created Atomic Energy
Commission, he worked to shape the strange new
political landscape of the atomic age. ''The atomic
bomb was the turn of the screw,'' he said during this
period. ''It has made the prospect of future war
unendurable. It has led us up those last few steps to
the mountain pass; and beyond there is a different
country.'' Meanwhile, Niels Bohr had escaped
Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943 and traveled to Los
Alamos with a message of hope: the common danger posed
by nuclear weapons would force nations to sit down and
agree to control them, just as the common danger of a
disease epidemic forces nations to work together for
its control. Oppenheimer included Bohr's ideas in the
document known as the Acheson-Lilienthal report he and
a small group of industrialists and engineers hammered
out for Truman in 1946. Truman appointed the financier
Bernard Baruch to present the report to the United
Nations, but Baruch added provisions ''designed,'' as
Bird and Sherwin put it, ''to prolong the U.S.
monopoly,'' and instead of negotiation to remove a
common danger, if such were possible when the Soviets
did not yet have the bomb, the world got a nuclear
arms race.
During this period, Oppenheimer made the enemies who
would plot to destroy him, especially once he opposed
the accelerated development of the hydrogen ''super''
bomb as a response to the Soviet Union's first atomic
bomb test in 1949. Oppenheimer doubted that the
hydrogen bomb design Edward Teller had been promoting
since Manhattan Project days would work (it didn't).
Fueling it, moreover, would claim reactor time
sufficient to produce dozens more atomic bombs. Truman
endorsed the hydrogen crash program anyway. No matter.
Teller was gunning for Oppenheimer now, as was Lewis
L. Strauss, a member and later the chairman of the
Atomic Energy Commission, who seethed with private
grudges. (Teller's full biography will be a long time
coming; in '''Edward Teller: The Real Dr.
Strangelove,'' Peter Goodchild, the former head of
Science and of Features and Drama at the BBC, has
competently assembled what is publicly available of
Teller's life.) Bird and Sherwin show that Strauss
made Oppenheimer's security file available to William
Borden, a soon-to-be former Congressional staff
member, from which Borden extracted information that
he believed proved Oppenheimer to be a Soviet spy.
Borden's accusatory 1953 letter to J. Edgar Hoover set
in motion the challenge that resulted in a
prosecutorial hearing orchestrated by Strauss, where
Teller's adverse testimony carried the day. In 1954,
the Atomic Energy Commission revoked Oppenheimer's
security clearance and cast him out of government.
Oppenheimer and Bohr understood at the beginning of
the nuclear age what the nations of the world, the
United States pointedly included, have not yet been
willing to act on: that nuclear weapons are not
weapons of war but embodiments of a new knowledge of
nature, one that in the long run -- before or,
horribly, after they are used again -- must inevitably
force nations to find some other way to settle their
disputes. ''Two scorpions in a bottle,'' Oppenheimer
characterized the superpowers sardonically in 1953,
''each capable of killing the other, but only at the
risk of his own life.'' Today nine scorpions crowd the
bottle. However tragic his life, Robert Oppenheimer is
the single figure who will be remembered when the
history of the Manhattan Project has blurred away.
Richard Rhodes is the author of ''The Making of the
Atomic Bomb.'' He is writing a history of the
international politics of nuclear weapons across the
past 20 years.
Mario Gagho
Agra University
www.ppi-india.org
---------
A WINNER works harder than a loser and has more time.
A LOSER is always "too busy" to do what is necessary.
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