Oppenheimer Case, Contd.

The specially convened Atomic Energy Commission security board which found Physicist Robert Oppenheimer a security risk (TIME, June 14) also realized that Dr. Oppenheimer's fellow scientists might rise up to contest the verdict. In anticipation the board majority warned: "If scientists should believe that such a decision . . . however distasteful with respect to an individual, must be applicable to [the] whole profession, they misapprehend their own duties and obligations as citizens."

By last week it was clear that the scientific fraternity, always touchy about the Oppenheimer case, chose to ignore the warning. First the rambunctious Federation of American Scientists attacked "the dangers and the bitter fruits of a security system which is now motivated more by the risks of politics than the risks of disclosure of information." Then the more restrained American Physical Society (whose membership includes nearly all U.S. nuclear physicists) warned that the decision "will have an adverse effect upon the utilization of scientists in Government."

In the New York Times Magazine, the Carnegie Institution's respected President Vannevar Bush, onetime chairman of the Pentagon's Research and Development Board, decried the whole spirit of the inquiry: "In looking at the scene, scientists generally see only slightly concealed an inclination to exclude anyone who does not conform completely to the judgment of those who in one way or another have acquired authority."

This week the New York Times's James Reston reported that AEC General Manager Kenneth Nichols, after reviewing the findings, had used even stronger language than the security board's report, as he passed the Oppenheimer case along to the five AECommissioners for final action.

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