The Atomic Meltdown

By Richard Lacayo

It was J. Robert Oppenheimer himself who chose the code name "Trinity" for the 1945 test of the atom bomb he had done so much to create. He would say later that he was inspired by a line from the poet John Donne: "Batter my heart, three-personed God." It was just like Oppenheimer, at a moment of triumph, to lay in a note of anguish. He may have been the physicist who led-- who drove--the scientific crash program at Los Alamos, N.M. But he was not a simple man. It tells you something that his idea of the right parting gift for one girlfriend was Dostoyevsky's The Possessed.

Nine years after Trinity, and then the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer was stripped of his government security clearance after an inquiry into his past association with communists. As an effort to prove that he had been a party member, much less one involved in espionage, the inquest was a failure. Its real purpose was larger, however: to punish the most prominent American critic of the U.S. move from atomic weapons to the much more lethal hydrogen bomb.

Two accounts of his complex life can be found in American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Knopf; 721 pages) and 109 East Palace: The Secret City of Los Alamos (Simon & Schuster; 424 pages). To grasp the full dimensions of Oppenheimer's humiliation, you need to understand not only the currents of American postwar paranoia but also the tangled particulars of the man himself. Even a generous evaluation of his fate would call him complicit in his downfall. Whether through hubris or naivete, he refused to take seriously that his years of association with communists would open him to suspicion. American Prometheus tells his story at length and exceedingly well. The authors, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, employ a mix of thoroughness and judgment that makes this an essential book.

Oppenheimer was just 38 when he was chosen to direct what was called the Manhattan Project. Brilliant and detached, kindly and arrogant, cocksure and tormented, he had long been recognized as a star of the new quantum physics, a man with an acute and elegant mind. During his years as a physics professor at Berkeley and Caltech, he had also signed just about every petition for farmworkers' rights and attended every fund raiser for the Spanish Republic. Oppenheimer always denied that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party. But he never sought to conceal that he had spent much of his professional life surrounded by party members, including his younger brother Frank. Even his wife had been a member before their marriage.

After the war, when he moved to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., Oppenheimer made powerful enemies with his stance against the hydrogen bomb, including Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). A ferocious advocate of the hydrogen bomb, Strauss set in motion the lethal chain of events that led to the hearing on Oppenheimer's fitness to hold a security clearance. The FBI put illegal taps on Oppenheimer's phones and planted bugs at his home and Princeton office. As a basis for its most serious charge, that Oppenheimer had been a secret party member, the AEC inquest panel used transcripts of the illegal wiretaps, which were full of hearsay from party members who thought he might have been an unacknowledged comrade. During the inquest, Oppenheimer's lawyers were not allowed to see those transcripts, so they could never prepare an adequate rebuttal.

The same evidence would never be permitted in a courtroom, but Strauss had seen to it that Oppenheimer was being disposed of in an administrative hearing for which courtroom niceties did not apply. The outcome was a foregone conclusion. As a deliberate act of political rehabilitation, John Kennedy would invite Oppenheimer to the White House in 1961 and later arrange for him to receive the Enrico Fermi Prize. Yet until his death in 1967, Oppenheimer would never again feel comfortable as a public advocate for a sane nuclear policy.

Bird and Sherwin are concerned chiefly with the political and personal dimensions of Oppenheimer's case. For a broader picture of Los Alamos as a unique human settlement, part Western boom town, part scientific prison camp, turn to 109 East Palace by Jennet Conant. The Los Alamos in her book is largely the one General Leslie Groves, military chief of the Manhattan Project, was describing when he directed Oppenheimer, saying: "Here at great expense the government has assembled the world's largest collection of crackpots. Take good care of them." Conant sees the place partly through the eyes of Dorothy McKibbin, a local woman who managed the tiny Santa Fe office that channeled new arrivals to the growing but highly secret enclave on a desert mesa outside of town. To get at the intrigues of Los Alamos through McKibbin is at times like trying to figure out Hamlet by way of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But by moving frequently beyond the things McKibbin could know, Conant ends up providing an entertaining picture of day-to-day life in a deadly serious wartime enclave that still managed to have a baby boom, a prostitution scandal and its own tragedy--Oppenheimer's.