http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/books/review/15RHODESL.html?pagewanted=printNY TIMES
May 15, 2005
Nuclear Options
By RICHARD RHODES
AMERICAN PROMETHEUS
The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.
Illustrated. 721 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35.
J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER AND THE AMERICAN CENTURY
By David C. Cassidy.
Illustrated. 462 pp. Pi Press. $27.95.
109 EAST PALACE
Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos.
By Jennet Conant.
Illustrated. 424 pp. Simon & Schuster. $26.95.
RACING THE ENEMY
Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan.
By Tsuyoshi Hasegawa.
Illustrated. 382 pp. The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $29.95.
EDWARD TELLER
The Real Dr. Strangelove.
By Peter Goodchild.
Illustrated. 469 pp. Harvard University Press. $29.95. 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.
