J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century
By David C. Cassidy
Pi Press, 2005
462 pages, $39.95 (hb)
J. Robert Oppenheimer built the atomic bomb. Awestruck by the power of its test bombing at Alamogordo in the New Mexico desert, he nevertheless set the coordinates for "Little Boy" and "Fat Man", the first atomic bombs to be used in war, to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki three weeks later. He said he had no regrets. Oppenheimer's story, ably told in David Cassidy's biography of this gifted physicist, is the gloomy story of science in the service of power.
Born to moneyed privilege in New York in 1904, Julius Robert Oppenheimer had a passion for science and mathematics, finding his calling as an outstanding, if politically detached, theoretical physicist. Not even professors cocooned in wealth, however, could remain aloof from the social traumas of the 1930s. Nazi attacks on Jewish scientists in Germany (Oppenheimer was of German-Jewish origin), the fascist menace in the Spanish Civil War, the economic depression in the US, and Oppenheimer's romantic involvement with women of the socialist left, shook him out of his political indifference.
He rallied to the left, as did much of the intelligentsia. For some intellectuals the appeal was one of "radical chic" and Cassidy suggests that it was not out of character for Oppenheimer "to add the cachet of communism to his portfolio as an intellectual bohemian", although Oppenheimer, like many idealistic liberals, was genuinely drawn to the social justice agenda of socialism, and its most visible manifestation in the US Communist Party. Oppenheimer supported labour struggles and was active in drives to unionise scientific workers. For around five years from 1937, Oppenheimer was an open "fellow-traveller" of the Communist Party.
The US government temporarily put Oppenheimer's politics to one side when he was made director in 1942 of the "Manhattan Project" to build the atomic bomb. Nuclear fission had been discovered in 1938 and its potential for massive, and destructive, energy release was soon exciting the political and military visionaries who saw beyond the defeat of imperialist rivals Germany and Japan to the opportunity to extend US power on the back of the new super weapon.
Germany's defeat in May 1945, before the last equation was nutted out by the Manhattan Project scientists, in fact accelerated Washington's drive to use the bomb against "the last enemy left standing". Oppenheimer agreed, arguing that an atomic game-breaker would be needed in the war against Japan. He chaired the Targeting Committee that chose the largely unscathed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to maximise the bomb's material destruction and its psychological impact (mainly on, as the principal political players recognised, their war-time ally but long-term foe, the Soviet Union). Whilst many other scientists now pleaded against bombing Japan, whose surrender was imminent, Oppenheimer censored their petitions.
The atomic bomb marked Oppenheimer's transformation from liberal scientist to state scientist. But not without one last protest. Oppenheimer argued for restraint by the War Department in the development of the thermo-nuclear hydrogen bomb.
Oppenheimer's opposition to President Eisenhower's crash program to build the H-bomb made him some powerful enemies. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and key politicians began to feed Eisenhower with fake tales of Oppenheimer's "espionage", and alarmist accounts of his past communist liaisons. Oppenheimer, by now a consultant to the government's nuclear weapons agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, was called to a hearing of the Commission's Security Board in 1954, which proceeded, in a kangaroo court, to dump him as a "security risk".
Oppenheimer's fall from favour, however, was in part a failure of his liberal politics as much as a government abuse of power. As early as 1942, when leading the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer, as a possible hedge against communist-hunters as well as to demonstrate his loyalty to the flag in war-time, gave the names of possible Communist Party members amongst the scientists to army counter-intelligence. In 1949, when subpoenaed to a hearing of Senator Joseph McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Oppenheimer named at least four former students as communists, thus destroying their careers.
By the time of Oppenheimer's death from cancer in 1967, he had helped to preside over the nuclear-backed rise to world dominance of United States capitalism. He played a key role in setting the mould for the platoons of scientists contentedly feasting on state largesse for weapons research. He had no regrets. The regrets, alas, belong to those who wish to see science serve the people and not military-corporate paymasters.
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