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One story, curated by Gregory Bufithis. More about me here.


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THOUGHTS OVER MY AFTERNOON COFFEE:


Oppenheimer’s tragedy. And ours.


In 1954, Oppenheimer was subjected to what was rightly described as “an extraordinary American inquisition” under the name of a security hearing. But while harmful professionally and personally, the hearings were not Oppenheimer’s greatest tragedy.

ABOVE: Sequence of images from the Trinity test fireball,

millisecond-by-millisecond


20 July 2023 -- Some smart cookie timed the release of the movie about Robert Oppenheimer this week, the anniversary of "Trinity" - the first test of the first nuclear weapon.


And another smart cookie threw in the release of a Barbie movie and a notable Barbenheimer genre was born. Earlier this morning I wrote about Barbie.


Last night I watched "Oppenheimer" (a privilege of being a member of the producers guild) and I've read "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer" upon which the movie is based. Herein a few comments on just one part of his life.


J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1926, when he was a physics student in Germany.

In 1954, Robert Oppenheimer was subjected to what was rightly called “an extraordinary American inquisition” under the name of a security hearing. Despite having served his country so devotedly in heading the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos:


  • he was publicly humiliated
  • scientific facts he developed cleverly manipulated against him
  • he was condemned as a security risk
  • he was stripped of his security clearance
  • he was forced to step down from his government consultancies


Those hearings were pilloried in the press, seen as "skewed and manipulated in typical McCarthyite fashion".


BACKGROUND: I have read all of the hearing transcripts, plus some historical analysis. The controversy was driven by many in power who were jealous of Oppenheimer's popularity, and who wanted him out of the way since he was against building a hydrogen bomb. So they took advantage of the anti-Communist McCarthyism hysteria at the time.


Doubts about Oppenheimer's loyalty dated back to the 1930s, when he was a member of numerous Communist front organizations, and was associated with Communist Party USA members, including his wife and his brother. But these associations were known to Army Counterintelligence at the time he was made director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in 1942, and chairman of the influential General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission in 1947. Those roles allowed him to make decisions on the types of nuclear weapons the country required, and to resolve technical conflict between the scientists over the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb.



But while extremely harmful professionally and personally, the hearings were not Oppenheimer’s greatest tragedy.


His greatest tragedy was the success of his leadership in the creation of the weapon. His remarkable gifts as a physicist and as a human being were most realized in the building of a weapon that could lead to the destruction of humankind.


To be sure, Oppenheimer also achieved renown as a brilliant teacher of the new physics - the quantum mechanics he had himself studied in Europe. And he did make discoveries in physics of lasting importance (though they were restless and varied rather than constituting a major development). But the “American Prometheus,” as his biographers termed him, found his greatest life achievement in the creation of an instrument of genocide.


In making the bomb, Oppenheimer became immersed in what has been called "nuclearism" - the embrace of the weapon as serving humankind. But with the later development of weapons a thousand times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb, he became an articulate critic of nuclearism, perhaps the most articulate of all critics.


He was a survivor of his own dreadful creation: when immersed in nuclearism, he was a national hero; when he painfully extricated himself from that condition and exposed its danger, he was cast as disloyal and publicly crucified.


Oppenheimer offered his entire being to the bomb project; his devotion to it was total. On a professional level, he familiarized himself with the work of each of the other scientists, both facilitating that work and learning from it. And on a personal level he was generous in his involvement in their living arrangements and family needs.


Though he had been frequently arrogant in the past, at Los Alamos he became the most empathic and fatherly leader. He inspired everyone to maximum effort in the race against German bomb-makers whose more advanced level of the new physics seemed to give them an advantage. As noted in the biography I mentioned above: “It was as if the man and the job had been created with the other in mind”.


Largely through Oppenheimer’s leadership in that mission, Los Alamos became something close to a utopian community - collegial, professionally focused, and transcendently idealistic. Yet this same utopian community was engaged in creating the most deadly weapon in human history.


There have been extensive interviews with "the Los Alamos community" - the 4 other physicists who had been part of it: Hans Bethe, Philip Morrison, Herbert York, and George Kistiakowsky - and all described Oppenheimer the same way: a unique leader, decisive and evenhanded, and all spoke of their sense of being on a moral crusade on behalf of the future of civilization.


ABOVE: This photograph was taken immediately after the detonation of a nuclear device during Operation Tumbler-Snapper. The projecting spikes are known as a “rope trick effect,” caused by the heating, rapid vaporization and then expansion of the guy wires that extend from the ground to housing at the top of the tower that contains the explosive device.


This is one of several images that sat in vaults at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for decades, and more recently were declassified and put on YouTube. There are still 100s of documents and other material that remain classified.

Oppenheimer’s unquestioned leadership also had much to do with the shared psychic numbing of that community in regard to what would happen on the other end of the weapon. As Alice K. Smith (1958), a historian who lived there with her physicist husband, explained:


They all agreed that they were frenetically busy and extremely security conscious and suggest that there was even some half-conscious closing of the mind to anything but the fact that they were trying desperately to produce a device which would end the war.


A large measure of Oppenheimer’s tragedy lay in the depth of his immersion in nuclearism. Oppenheimer had a series of conversations with Niels Bohr, the revered Danish physicist who was a major mentor of his and who made several visits to Los Alamos. Bohr had developed the concept of “complementarity,” the idea that two very different findings in physics can be equally true, depending on the vantage point or the instruments utilized by the observer. For instance, matter could be accurately represented by particles or by waves.


The two men came to believe that they could apply this principle of complementarity to the atomic bomb: If used, it would bring a new dimension of destruction but would also create an equally new dedication to peace. As his biographers note:


The bomb for Bohr and Oppenheimer was a weapon of death that might also end war and redeem mankind.


We may pause here for a moment to note that this bizarre and dangerous version of nuclearism could be embraced by two such intellectual giants and otherwise humane men. It makes a study of these men so perplexing.


There is an interesting interview with Philip Morrison, one of the physicists at Las Alamos, a few years before he died (in 2005). He had become a prominent public figure and antinuclear spokesman. He described riding in a Jeep with Oppenheimer at the plutonium test site, and then 3 weeks later by himself holding the components of the actual Nagasaki bomb in his hand on the island of Tinian, the launching point for the atomic bomb attacks against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was fine.



But everything changed for Morrison when he went to Hiroshima and directly witnessed what the bomb had done there and discovered how:


One bomber could now destroy a city. When you go there you saw what it was actually like - the brutal human effects of the single atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.


Morrison’s psychological trajectory with the atomic bomb is not too different from Oppenheimer’s.


Oppenheimer’s earlier nuclearism included a commitment to the bomb’s use, and that deepened his tragedy. When other scientists involved with its creation engaged in a collective effort to urge that it be given a demonstration in an isolated area rather than exploding it on a human population, Oppenheimer had opposed the idea. His biographers note:


He did so with some ambivalence, referring to his own “anxieties” about the bomb and partial receptivity to arguments against its use on human beings. But he ended up on the side of those who “emphasized the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use.” His reasoning was essentially as Bohrian as that of the men who favored a demonstration. He had become convinced that the military use of the bomb in this war might eliminate all wars.


Oppenheimer would later say words to the effect that “I never regretted … having done my part of the job.” He would even add that “I … think that it was a damn good thing that the bomb was developed, that it was recognized as something important and new, and it would have an effect on the course of history.”


Why, then, his seeming about-face in relation to the “Super” hydrogen bomb? A number of people have emphasized, with some truth, that the hydrogen bomb was not “his” bomb and would require a new project of its own. But many suggest another reason, that the hydrogen bomb went too far. That is, Oppenheimer understood that, while an atomic bomb could destroy a city, hydrogen bombs, in tapping the energy of the sun, could destroy the world and eliminate its human inhabitants. Although he did not necessarily use the terminology, it was a sequence from genocide to omnicide. Other scientists and humanists shared his rejection of such a device.


In his case, that rejection was at first only partial, as he had come to accept many of the views of the American establishment, of which he had become, according to his biographers, “a member in good standing.” He had not joined antinuclear activists such as Bertrand Russell, Leo Szilard, Joseph Rotblat, and Albert Einstein in their public statements. Although “still capable of being a critic [he] wanted to stand alone and with far more ambiguity than his fellow scientists.”


As he explained: “If the Russians have the weapon and we don’t, we will be badly off. And if the Russians have the weapon and we do, we will still be badly off.” For him the weapon was (in his biographers’ words) “neither necessary as a deterrent or beneficial to American security.” He did become a consistent advocate of openness in connection with hydrogen bombs and believed strongly in some form of international control.


ABOVE: Time-sequence photos of a test house being destroyed by the blast from a nuclear weapon in a 16-kiloton test known as “Annie,” which was part of Operation Upshot-Knothole at Yucca Flat, Nevada, on March 17, 1953.


The house - part of an entire mock neighborhood known as “Doom Town” - was 3,500 feet away from the blast, and completely destroyed. The Annie test included structures familiar to any American: 50 cars and a pair of two-story suburban homes, complete except for utilities and interior finishes, and filled with furniture, household items, and fully-dressed mannequins.


Shooting 24 frames per second, the time from the first to last picture was two-and-one-third seconds.


In frame 1, the house is lighted by the blast. In frame 2, the house is on fire. In frame 3, the blast blows the fire out, and the building starts to disintegrate. Frames 4 through 8 show the house’s complete disintegration.

He also posed important questions: “What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life” but “which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?”


We gain further understanding of Oppenheimer’s complexities by taking a look at his famous statement that “the physicists have known sin.”


The full sentence is more impressive:


In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.


He is not saying that the physicists were wrong to create the weapons but rather that they - he - had committed a profound moral transgression, a collective sin in creating a genocidal instrument, even if it was necessary for preventing future wars.


Underneath Oppenheimer’s promethean capacities was a vulnerable and at times deeply distraught human being. He could be needy and contradictory in his relationships with others and subject to periodic depression. During his early adult life he was at times suicidal and on at least two occasions violent toward others: he poisoned an apple of a Cambridge tutor (we do not know how much poison he used) who insisted that he engage in hated laboratory work, and on another occasion attempted to strangle a friend who told him of love and plans for marriage.


His biographers say he struggled for adult identity. The historian of science, Gerald Holton, insisted that there was more to the story:


Some psychological damage remained, however, not least a vulnerability that ran through his personality like a geological fault, to be revealed at the next earthquake.


That “geographical fault” had to do with what may be viewed as a disorder of the self: a tendency toward self-abasement, collapse before authority, to self-loathing and self-flagellation. Nor were these tendencies relieved by several attempts at psychoanalytic and psychiatric therapy.


Even Oppenheimer’s decision to subject himself to the security hearings could be viewed as self-destructive. A number of friends and colleagues, including Einstein, urged him to avoid the inevitable humiliation by simply resigning from his consultancies. Einstein had further insight into Oppenheimer’s predicament in telling a mutual friend: “The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him - the United States government”.


J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1953, in his famous pork pie hat

Are the kinds of things that happened to Oppenheimer still happening today? Are scientific facts still being distorted for political gain?


Obviously, yes. We just have to look back to the recent pandemic where the integrity of scientists and public health officials was being questioned by the public and by politicians - a very dangerous thing. Or the almost wholesale rejection of science. The psychology of science denial, doubt, and disbelief is a bizarre thing.



We live in a very complicated, modern society, drenched with technology and physics, and we need the knowledge of scientists. And more than that, we need their opinions as public intellectuals to help provide guidance to understand the public policy questions that we face. Not that they have any gilded wisdom, but they have certain expertise that we lack as ordinary citizens.


But unfortunately, the role of the scientist or the expert witness in American society is very low. They don’t have much standing. There is a downright suspicion of scientific expertise.


And I think at least part of this lack of trust in science and scientific expertise dates back to what happened to Oppenheimer in 1954 when America’s most famous scientist was publicly humiliated. That had a chilling effect on scientists everywhere, making them wary of speaking out on public policy issues - no matter how much we need them to. The notion is that scientists have to beware of contradicting the conventional wisdom spouted by politicians, because you could be tarred and feathered.


I can’t think of a scientist today who has the sort of public standing that Oppenheimer had in 1945, when his image was put on the cover of Time magazine, and he was celebrated as a scientist and as someone to be listened to. We just don’t have the sort of large public intellectual like that anymore, who has a scientific background.


And that’s a curious and most unfortunate thing.


ABOVE: in May, 1948, the first issue of Physics Today appeared, and the cover featured a photo of Oppenheimer's porkpie hat resting on top of some metal piping. The hat was such a well-known identifier of its famous owner that no caption was needed.

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