American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

During the winter of 1942-43, Haakon Chevalier approached Oppenheimer on behalf of George Eltenton, a young British chemical engineer who wanted to pass atomic information to the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. By this time, Oppenheimer had accepted the directorship of the bomb program but had not yet relocated to Los Alamos. The conversation between the two men, which occurred in the kitchen of Oppenheimer’s Berkeley home, became known as the “Chevalier Affair.” Oppenheimer dismissed the request, and nothing came of it, but he waited six months before reporting it to Army counterintelligence. Even then, he was reluctant to name his friend Chevalier. Gen. Groves and others believed Oppenheimer’s account, but the Chevalier Affair became a note in the physicist’s security file and came back to haunt him at his 1954 hearing.

After World War II, the US and the Soviet Union emerged as rival superpowers. The former wartime allies engaged in an ideological conflict highlighted by massive defense spending and a nuclear arms race. The two sides never fought one another directly, so the rivalry did not intensify into a full-scale “hot” conflict, though relations remained icy, hence the name “Cold War.”

Also known as the Communist Party USA, this left-wing US political party was founded in 1919 and until the late 1950s was among the country’s most prominent leftist organizations. CPUSA membership peaked in 1942, just as the US entered World War II, at which time the CPUSA enthusiastically favored a joint Soviet-US war effort against Nazi Germany.

As a teen, Oppenheimer attended the prestigious Ethical Culture School in New York. The school was the educational arm of the Ethical Culture Society, a secular organization that attracted many affluent people of Jewish descent who were eager to assimilate into US culture and fight antisemitism. At this school, Oppenheimer received a liberal education from teachers who promoted social consciousness. Bird and Sherwin consider the Ethical Culture School one of the truly formative influences in Oppenheimer’s adolescence.

This refers to the process of bombarding an atom with neutrons, splitting it and releasing energy. Fission made the atomic bomb possible. In December 1938, German scientists successfully achieved fission, and news of the discovery traveled quickly. In early 1939, one of Oppenheimer’s graduate students entered his professor’s office and saw on the chalkboard “a drawing—a very bad, an execrable drawing—of a bomb” (168)

A group of scientists appointed by the president, the General Advisory Committee (GAC) provided guidance to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) on scientific and technical matters pertinent to research and development, materials, and production. In January 1947, Truman appointed Oppenheimer and other scientists to the GAC, and his colleagues unanimously elected him as chair. Oppenheimer’s GAC appointment—which occurred after he failed to persuade Truman of the need for international control of atomic energy—coincided with a mellowing of his alarmist attitudes toward atomic power and signaled his ascent into the nation’s foreign policy establishment. For several years thereafter, Oppenheimer’s anti-Soviet thinking followed “the general trajectory of the emerging Cold War” (352). He resigned from the GAC in 1952 but remained available as a contract consultant until the revocation of his security clearance in 1954.

Established in 1938, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) investigated citizens and organizations suspected of having dangerous ties to individuals or regimes hostile to the US. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, HUAC became notorious for intense investigation of US citizens whose left-wing political sympathies had brought them into contact with Communists. HUAC investigators questioned both Oppenheimer and his brother, Frank, as well as several of Oppenheimer’s former students. Critics denounced HUAC’s anti-leftist investigations as a symptom of unnecessarily extreme Cold War sentiment.

See “Superbomb.”

Founded in 1930, the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) was an independent organization in Princeton, New Jersey, that housed distinguished scholars, including physicist Albert Einstein. In 1947, Lewis Strauss—then vice president of the Institute’s board of trustees—offered Oppenheimer the directorship, and he accepted, moving his family from Berkeley, California, to Princeton. Neils Bohr and George Kennan joined Oppenheimer there. Dominated by scientists and mathematicians, the Institute had only scholars, no students, and acquired a reputation as a place where scholars thought and talked much but produced little. Oppenheimer once referred to it as “an intellectual hotel” (369). He tried to implement a more interdisciplinary approach, offering positions to literary scholars, and had some success. However, Strauss soon became Oppenheimer’s chief political enemy.

Located in New Mexico, Los Alamos was the site of the national laboratory where scientists and engineers worked from 1943 to 1945 to develop an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer oversaw the project and the makeshift installation’s thousands of residents. Bird and Sherwin foreshadow this moment at the end of Chapter 1 when a young Robert Oppenheimer, riding on horseback in the 1920s, first laid eyes on the valley of Los Alamos and fell in love with New Mexico (where he eventually purchased property).

The Los Alamos laboratory for atomic weapons researchers was just one part of the wartime atomic enterprise known as the Manhattan Project, which included other sites, including Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where project employees developed materials for the bomb. Bird and Sherwin focus heavily on Oppenheimer’s tenure at Los Alamos, mentioning other aspects of the Manhattan Project only in passing.

A general atmosphere of anti-Communist sentiment, which generated paranoia and persecution, prevailed during the early Cold War and became known as McCarthyism, after Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. McCarthy (as well as FBI head J. Edgar Hoover) relentlessly pursued citizens suspected of being members of the Communist Party USA, particularly citizens in the US government, and these investigations culminated in the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, one of the first broadcast spectacles of the television era. HUAC was an active part of the investigations and hearings. Although McCarthy never personally targeted Oppenheimer, Bird and Sherwin nonetheless describe Oppenheimer as the “most prominent victim” (548) of McCarthyism.

A small island in the Caribbean, St. John was a getaway destination and refuge for Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer following the ordeal of the 1954 hearing. The Oppenheimers built a beach cottage on the island, where they spent months at a time whenever they could get away from Princeton.

From 1936 to 1939, Spanish Communists, called “Republicans,” fought Spanish fascists in a brutal war that intentionally targeted civilians via air raids. Nazi Germany funded the fascists, but the Republicans received precious little support from sources outside Spain. The plight of the Spanish Republicans lacerated the political sensibilities of US liberals, many of whom, like Oppenheimer, had already gravitated toward the Communist Party.

The thermonuclear superbomb, also known as the hydrogen bomb (H-bomb), was the terrifying advanced version of the original atomic bomb and the successor to it. The superbomb, which scientist Edward Teller began contemplating during his time at Los Alamos, relied on a process that moved beyond fission and released destructive energy thousands of times more powerful than the original. Oppenheimer’s vehement opposition to its development earned him powerful enemies, including Lewis Strauss and others, who believed that the US needed a superbomb to maintain its atomic advantage and diplomatic leverage over the Soviets. As usual, the runaway nuclear arms race and anti-Communist sentiment of the early Cold War prevailed, and Oppenheimer lost the debate.