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Ordinarily, commenting on a book about a bygone era and a long forgotten player who emerged from the WW II scene, might seem oddly out of context, given the current circumstances of our economy, the war, soaring energy costs, declining values of our homes, foreclosures, huge public and private debt and of course an administration unlike any other in history for dealing with these problems. As Kevin Phillips has said in his recent book, "not in recent memory have we seen so many sharks in the tank all at once." Yet, did you notice that in the current climate of uncertainty and anxiety, where there are so many sources of angst, no one except Ralph Nader and Howard Zinn have dared bring up the policies of FDR for discussion. No one has asked what FDR would do and no one has suggested that maybe it’s time to do it again. If you think the problems we are facing today are not directly the result of complete regulatory failure, created by rewarding incompetency and the rich, then you have little hope of ever coming to grips with our current dilemma(s).

The topic of this book goes right to the heart of why we find ourselves in our current dismal condition, as we continue to tolerate these newly emerging crises while in a state of national paralysis. Indeed, this topic has never been more appropriate for understanding contemporary America. The origins of how we got to where we are today and why we seem so paralytic, have everything to do with what we did during the period that began immediately after WW II, when we were forced, without our knowledge, without our approval or consent, to take a hard right in our foreign policy, as we turned on the military spigot by formally adopting the "bomb." We were in fact seduced by the bomb. It seemed so lovely and decisive at first. First it was the Atom bomb, but that was followed by the much more powerful hydrogen bomb (thermonuclear). Indeed, the present state of our militarism, in which we spend $ 1.1 trillion on defense each year, directly and indirectly accounts for our deficiencies in having a decent health care system, the skyrocketing costs of energy, the growing population of homelessness in America, the diverging disparity in personal wealth, the high cost of services, like internet access, that are far less expensive in other countries and our failing infrastructure which allows major bridges to fall down with barely a ho-hum from the public. These realities of today and our complete ignorance about their root causes, had their origins in the events that began immediately after WW II. Yet almost no one understood, except a small cluster of perpetrators, what the objectives were and why so much energy was spent on moving our culture so dramatically to a different point. The country was exhausted at the end of WW II, but it was this state of exhaustion and distraction that the right was busy making sure it would undo the FDR administration and their seduction by the "bomb" would begin the process. Although most Americans do not realize it, since the WW II, we have become the bomb culture, identified with the development and use of atomic weapons. As E.L. Doctorow observed, "it was our first weaponry and then our diplomacy and now it’s our economy."

One person, J. Robert Oppenheimer tried to steer us clear of the bomb culture and economy and in appreciation for his efforts, we destroyed his career, and removed him from public influence and visibility. But the larger price of destruction for this transgression is yet to be paid. It is the one that now lies ahead of us, the one just now coming into view. The one that finds us incapable of dramatic re-investment in America because of the "bomb." With that introductory disclaimer–to the book!

Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin have co-authored "American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the new gold standard for the history/biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the famous WW II scientist who successfully took control of the Manhattan Project and created the atomic bomb. Many books have been written in the past about Oppenheimer, but they have only looked at sectors of his life or his role in limited issues of history. This book, for the first time, covers the entire life of Oppenheimer and it doesn’t fail to richly reward us for absorbing it. The book has earned a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 and has received a National Book Critics Circle Award.

Greek mythology holds that Prometheus stole fire and gave it to man, after which Zeus had his body nailed onto Mount Caucasus, where an eagle swooped and devoured his liver by day, which grew back by night (From the introduction). In September, 1945, one month after atom bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by Japan’s prompt surrender, Scientific Monthly declared that "Modern Prometheans have raided Mount Olympus again and have brought back for man the very thunderbolts of Zeus." Although the development of the atom bomb required a massive effort with 3000 physicists, chemists, engineers and technicians housed in newly created Los Alamos, New Mexico, and a few other key sites, one Promethian stood head and shoulders above all others and that was Oppenheimer. He became an overnight hero and an instant legend. As the Truman administration sought to defend the use of the bomb on Japan as a life-saving act, by preventing an invasion of the mainland, thereby saving thousands if not millions of lives (WW II in the Pacific stopped in Okinawa, a few weeks before the two atom bombs were dropped), Oppenheimer’s reputation grew into a larger than life figure, admired by everyone and celebrated as a new kind of American hero. He was on the cover of Time in 1948 and was one of the most recognizable faces to emerge from the war, with his porkpie hat and the inevitable cigarette dangling from one side of his mouth, looking at you through an intense fixation, as if to warn that if you want to say something, it’d better be good. His prodigious smoking habit, said to be four to five packs a day, would eventually cost him his life, as he died of throat cancer at the age of 62 in 1967.

As America entered the atomic age, with its triumphant development and use of the atom bomb, Oppenheimer was a new kind of American hero: imagine the idea of making a powerful new type of weapon, something no military weapons manufacturer could have possibly conceived, yet one discovered by scientists who only sat and thought about things. Oppenheimer himself was a theoretical physicist. He is generally regarded as the father of American Theoretical Physics. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize after the war, based on his own research papers that had provided break-through insights into atomic structure in the 1920s and 1930s. Speculation is that, after the war, as doubts about the ethics of using the bomb surfaced, this cloud of controversy may have prevented him from getting his Nobel Prize, that most of his colleagues felt he deserved. However, one point worthy of note is that Oppenheimer’s work on atomic theory paved the way for astrophysicists to understand the sub-atomic mechanisms that account for "black holes," a condition in which atoms collapse onto themselves and matter becomes so dense that not even light can escape. His work in the 1930s on this topic was not applied to astrophysics until the 1970s, at which time, he would have undoubtedly been awarded/shared a Nobel Prize, had he still been alive.

At the end of the war, Oppenheimer immediately resigned his position as head of the lab at Los Alamos and returned to Berkeley to continue his academic work. Two years later, he accepted the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Beginning that same year, in 1947, Oppenheimer assumed the Chairmanship of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), a position which he held until 1952, after which he served as an adviser. It was in his chairmanship capacity that he began to confront the planners of the post-war arms race. And, as Oppenheimer’s influence grew, he became a more potent force for questioning the wisdom of using the bomb and the march towards militancy based on its development: the right wing militarists increasingly saw Oppenheimer less as a hero and more as an obstacle to their emerging commitment to an arms race. When the bomb construction was completed and two were dropped on Japan (against the wishes of several nuclear scientists) the scientists who conceived of the idea and developed the technology of the weapon, tacitly assumed that they would have something to say about whether the bomb should be developed and used as a weapon. They felt that their unique efforts entitled them to have a seat at the table of this decision-making process. But, while every nuclear scientist had an opinion on this topic, Oppenheimer was the only one with sufficient visibility and charisma to take action, and that of course would prove to be the source of his downfall. Physicist Freeman Dyson remarked that Oppenheimer’s decision to participate in making the bomb was "a Faustian bargain if there ever was one….And of course we are still living with it…." But as Oppenheimer looked into the crystal ball of the future for atomic energy, like Faust, he tried to renegotiate his contract, but was destroyed for his attempt to do so. To me, this story is the story of the America we have today and unless it is understood in those terms, we can only look forward to a country that is more like a patchwork of unrelated quilts, rather than a country that is healthy and whole. We have to systematically unravel what Oppenheimer tried to prevent.

Less than a decade after the war’s end, in 1954, Oppenheimer’s celebrity status came to a crashing halt, as the US government removed his security clearance for his past "communist" party affiliations; his influence on public policy was promptly and permanently eradicated. No one would ever again seek his council on government policies. His rise was meteoric and his fall was equally abrupt and tragic. Oppenheimer’s removal from public policy matters cleared the way to eliminate the opinions of scientists in policy-making decisions and turned on the green light for the nuclear arms race, whose future would be decided more on the basis of budgetary priorities than ethics, with increased reliance on thermonuclear bombs (H bombs) and the eventual dominance of America’s economy by this strategy. Once Oppenheimer was out of the way, no other scientist had sufficient stature or visibility to replace him and carry on the fight. So, dissent was wiped out almost overnight. The fact that the worst possible label, that of being a communist, was attached to his security clearance hearing, meant that he had become an American Pariah, a marked man, a danger to our country. In fact of course, he was trying to save us from Dr. Strangelove. It didn’t matter that Oppenheimer’s liberal leanings and activities in the 1930s had already been vetted by the FBI and judged to be irrelevant by General Leslie Groves, who hired Oppenheimer to run the Manhattan Project (what Oppenheimer mostly did through his contacts with liberals who belonged to the CP was support the anti-Fascist war in Spain during the 1930s, with financial donations (Oppenheimer was independently well-off from his father’s financial success in New York). Franco’s Fascists were getting support from Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, but FDR had prevented US support of the Democratic government. The CP sent "communist brigades" to fight in Spain and Oppenheimer’s future wife Kitty was married to one of the CP brigade fighters who was killed in battle in Spain). The one scientist left standing when the smoke cleared from the removal of Oppenheimer’s security clearance was Edward Teller, who testified against Oppie and was the dream hawk scientist that the military was looking for. From that day on until he died in 2003, Teller would be the poster child for the arms race and the one who would defend the most aggressive policies related to the burgeoning nuclear arsenal of the United States. Teller was the lead enthusiast for selling or over selling the missile defense proposal of Ronald Reagan. He was the model for Dr. Strangelove in Kubrick’s film of the 1960s.

The love affair between the majority of nuclear physicists and the US government lasted a little more than a decade and the erosion of their influence was all orchestrated to insure that the country took a sharp right turn after the war; it also underscored the ongoing effort to purge the government of FDR’s influence, labeled as too leftist for the good of America–it had too many "commie" types or "pinkos" for comfort. As McCarthy would argue, the US State Department was filled with communists or communist sympathizers, as he waved his pages of fictitious names. Tragically, after Oppenheimer, during the red scare days of McCarthysm, no one was willing or able to stand up against the emerging insanity of the arms race, without fear of being labeled a communist and getting fired from their job and blacklisted within their profession. My own University, the University of Minnesota fired Frank Oppenheimer, Robert’s younger brother and a highly regarded experimental physicist, as an assistant professor of physics because he had belonged to the communist party in the 1930s (as did many academicians). He was unable to get a job in academia for more than ten years as he took up cattle ranching in Colorado. The right-wing scare tactics worked like a charm: the arms race was on and insanity prevailed.

It is clear in this book, and from every other source I have read about Oppenheimer, that he was never a member of the Communist Party (CP), that his security hearing was a sham, whose purpose was solely to erase his influence and visibility in the government, because government officials feared that he was the only scientist capable of publicly challenging the logic behind the emergent arms race. Unlike any of the others engaged in planning post-war America, Oppenheimer challenged the militaristic philosophy emerging at the time, by reflecting and discussing the long term dangers of the arms race and the likelihood that it would dramatically increase the level of catastrophic danger to Americans and non-Americans alike. When asked in a closed Senate hearing in 1946 about the terrorist dangers of atomic weapons and the possibility that someone could smuggle a bomb into the U.S., Oppenheimer acknowledged that it could be done and New York could be destroyed by such an action. Then when asked what kind of instrumentation would be required to protect Americans from that kind of intrusion, he responded "a screwdriver to open each and every crate." The only defense against an attack like that was the elimination of nuclear weapons–simple enough, don’t develop them, don’t go down that dark road.

Oppenheimer did not suffer fools lightly. He treated those in military planning as he did anyone in academia who said something foolish. The sting of his criticism was more biting than that of others, as he was a formidable person with whom to spar, so that most people never attempted it. For example, during his Ph.D. thesis defense (Oppenheimer obtained his Ph.D. in physics in Gottingen, Germany working with renowned physicist Max Born in 1927), one of his committee members said "we got out of there just in time before he started asking us questions." All the plotting and intrigue surrounding Oppenheimer’s hearing was done behind his back, not through face to face encounters. But his hearing was another matter. For some reason, his normally aggressive, confrontational personality subsided inside the formal courtroom of the hearing and the intense questioning by skilled lawyers seemed to bring out a more passive, disinterested and subdued Oppenheimer, which did not contribute positively to the outcome. Perhaps his passivity was achieved through the realization that he was being rail-roaded into obscurity and could do nothing about it. His elimination from policy meetings meant there would be no significant outside influence to challenge the sinister nuclear armaments strategy for fighting communism and the use of thermonuclear bombs (H bombs) as the center piece of that plan. Agitation for thinking about alternative views was gone. If you believe the current administration of GW Bush has hijacked our government, it was far outdone in the early post-war period, when the right-wing hijacked of our foreign policy and military establishment and eventually our economy and the posture we present to the World. And, it all got started right under Truman’s nose with his helping hand, followed by an enthusiastic endorsement from Eisenhower. After that is went into automatic pilot.

With Oppenheimer out of the way, the worst fears of the nuclear physicists were realized: they quickly understood that the bomb they created would not be used for peace, as some had hoped, but instead would serve as the centerpiece for a new kind of war, a cold war, based on the increasing ability of one country to annihilate another, and along with it, perhaps the rest of the world. The insanity of the nihilistic nuclear age was unleashed under the false pretense of seeking peace through security. This new form of nihilism crept into every facet of our culture. We became the "bomb culture." The arms race began because our government thought the atom bomb gave them a near permanent lead over the Soviets. It is a race that is still with us today, even though any rational human being has a hard time figuring out who the current enemy is that requires an arsenal of nuclear weapons that can still destroy the World. Yet, the arms race will not go away, because it is now our economy. The nuclear option remains as a great noose around our neck, with a huge constituency entrenched into sustaining it no matter what the political and social circumstances might be. These huge expenses, most of which are never discussed in the public domain, have impacted on our health care system, the infrastructure of the country and the sense of continued fear of nuclear terrorism among the public. Imagine, how different things might have been if Oppenheimer and Szilard (see below) had been able to convince Roosevelt and Truman to share the atomic secrets and bring the Russians and United Nations into the nuclear arena. By having an open policy about nuclear technology, with no nuclear arsenals at all, the genie might have been put back in the bottle. We might have switched to nuclear energy as the only application for nuclear technology. Better yet, where would the world be today if the American developers of the bomb did, as physicist Heisenburg in Germany claims to have done: make just enough progress so that the government believes something is happening, but make sure you never finish the task and deliver an explosive fission device. That is the plan that Heisenburg claims to have told Niels Bohr during their meeting in Copenhagen after the start of the war (see below).

For more than sixty years, we have been locked into an arms race that seemingly cannot be undone. Once communism was defeated and the Soviet Union broke up, with its Eastern block countries transformed into less despotic governments, there was no justification for continuing the arms race that we started and, although some reductions in nuclear weapons inventory have been achieved, thousands of nuclear devices remain and still form the potential basis for the mother of all terrorist attacks. It is also worth emphasizing that when all of these plans for attacking the Soviet Union (and China, North Korea and Vietnam) with nuclear bombs were drawn up, the concept of a Nuclear Winter had yet to emerge as a serious complication of a nuclear exchange. But, it is now recognized that even a relatively small exchange of nuclear explosives could generate sufficient soot and ash, thrown into the atmosphere and stoked by massive city fires, which would instantaneously reduce available sunlight, dramatically lower the Earth’s surface temperature, generating wide scale crop failure, ice-age like changes in the environment, with reduced rainfall: very recent global weather simulations have suggested that we might face a dinosaur-like extinction, now attributed to a large meteorite landing off the Yucatan Peninsula about 70 million years ago. This was one of Karl Sagan’s seminal contributions and, to my knowledge, no one in the military has either attempted to refute this "slight complication" for nuclear planning, or changed their plans in any way to prevent the use of these weapons and remove as from a path where this might happen. This failure to acknowledge the Nuclear Winter problem is a direct outcome of the security clearance hearing of J. Robert Oppenheimer. No administration feels it has to listen to scientists, who must feed at the end of the table, not near the head. So, rather than give up an arms race (which in all likelihood prolonged the life of the Soviet Union, by ensuring longevity of hard line leadership) we are now positioning ourselves to think of the whole world as our potential enemy: a terrorist attack could be launched from any soil. Therefore, weaponizing space is the new paradigm of militarism, the option we will use to brace ourselves against this new borderless threat. With a passive American public and massive short-term thinking as the mindset of our politicians and militarists, we seem increasingly less and less capable of confronting our real problems and more and more likely to move into an escapist mode by looking for Paris Hilton. Where is she tonight? Escapism into Paris Hilton or Christian fundamentalism seems to be our national form of therapy. If so, we are going to need a lot more of it in the future. Paris, get ready, your popularity is likely to get much much better in the future.

American Promethian Oppenheimer might have prevented all of this, as he saw the insanity of an arms race before the atom bomb was ever exploded. It might have been difficult for him to do this by himself; he needed support from a chain reaction, but Oppenheimer by himself he was the potential critical mass for starting the chain reaction. He and many other nuclear physicists who developed the bomb came to regret that such a powerful weapon was ever put into the hands of American politicians and the military. It would haunt many of the bomb achievers for the rest of their lives. But the advancing communist scare, designed to purge the government of it’s FDR liberal-leaning influence and left-leaning remnants of the depression, swept all rationalists from influence and helped to create the early beginnings of an anticommunist hero, in the form of Ronald Reagan, then head of the Screen Actors Guild. Reagan was in the FDR support column until the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) began uncovering "communists" in Hollywood and as President of the Guild, Reagan had provided names and refused to support some of those identified, those who got permanently blacklisted in Hollywood, including people like Charlie Chaplin. This experience transformed Reagan to a rabid anticommunist Republican, which helped to extend his movie career. Years later as US President, Reagan would help deliver the final blow to the remaining progressive ideas about government and its proper functions. Reagan started with the veins and paved the way for George W. Bush to get to the arteries of America’s blood-letting.

What I didn’t appreciate until I read this book, was how outrageously illegal and unethical the procedures involved in Oppenheimer’s security case were manipulated to obtain a guilty vote against him. It was a shameless display of raw power and duplicitous behavior. The entire process was tightly controlled and falsely configured, filled with lies and hearsay evidence, while dismissing out-of-hand evidence which disproved some of the main accusations. Completely hidden from Oppenheimer and his lawyer were other illegally obtained documents, supplied by the FBI, based on illegal wiretaps and uncorroborated testimony. These things would never be admissible in a court of law, but had no trouble finding their way into the committee report, which itself had almost nothing to do with the committee proceedings upon which they were supposed to be based. Neither Oppenheimer nor his lawyer got to see what actually went to the AEC report for a final vote. The procedure was so foul that there was little doubt what the purpose of the hearing was meant to achieve: Strauss wanted to make sure that a guilty verdict was the only possible outcome. Every American should be outraged by the methods that were used against Oppenheimer. He needed a few good friends and didn’t have any, at least not in the right places and at the right time. Where were the liberals? The political leadership that Oppenheimer had swerved to his side, by his plain language and common sense arguments, were promptly unswerved by the right wing militarists who wanted to have unfettered access of the bomb and our future military posture against the Soviet Union. To our everlasting shame they got their way by destroying Oppenheimer!

The sham security hearing was orchestrated by Lewis Strauss, former member of the Atomic Energy Commission. Strauss, a self-made businessman, hated Oppenheimer, whom he saw as a menace to developing the H bomb and a nuclear arsenal. Indeed Strauss tended to view Oppenheimer’s objections to the development of the hydrogen bomb as obstructionist, bordering on treason. With such firm convictions, Strauss committed himself to erasing Oppenheimer’s influence from government policy decision-making. Strauss had strong support from other sectors of the government, including J. Edgar Hoover in the FBI, the military, the pentagon and Eisenhower himself. The Air Force was particularly incensed with Oppenheimer as he ridiculed their plans to build an atomic plane and their outrageous plans to bomb every Russian city with a nuclear device. Furthermore, since the Air Force, through the Strategic Air Command (SAC), was trying to build up thermonuclear bombs as their main strategy against the Russians, Oppenheimer called them crazy and instead argued that a relatively small number of tactical nuclear devices could readily meet the US objectives. In a meeting with Eisenhower, Oppenheimer convinced him that the massive H bomb strategy was completely unnecessary. When Strauss heard about the Oppenheimer-Eisenhower meeting, he worked behind the scenes to discredit Oppenheimer in Eisenhower’s eyes as a communist threat to the nation: it worked.

To Oppenheimer, one issue was very clear: the use of thermonuclear bombs (H bombs) was genocidal, and smaller, strategic nuclear devices, whose magnitude could be more finely tuned, could be better rationalized as a military weapon. Strauss saw Oppenheimer’s injection into the Air Force plan as a serious impediment and further committed himself to removing the one obstacle in the scientific community that had sufficient visibility and public persona, whose free lance opinions might arouse the public to more carefully examine the planned, but still fledgling arms race, a race that we alone initiated. The militarists wanted the birth of the arms race to be kept off the front pages and they feared that every time Oppenheimer talked on the subject, it would be front page news. Oppenheimer was too liberal, too antagonistic and too damned smart to be trusted. He was a loose cannon and he alone could unravel the march of militaristic thinking that was emerging at the time.

Truman was only a few months into office (FDR died in April of 1945) when the decision was made to use the bomb on Japan. In reality, Truman didn’t make that decision. It was made by Leslie Groves who, as it turned out, had complete control of the cities that would be bombed and the order in which they would be targeted. Leslie Groves was the General in charge of the Manhattan Project. He hired Oppenheimer to run the show. Initially Groves wanted to draft every nuclear scientist into the army and rigidly control the flow of information into a compartmental structure, so that no scientist could participate in discussions about the whole scope of the project. But Oppenheimer convinced him that such an arrangement wouldn’t work, that he couldn’t recruit the people he needed if thy had to be inducted into the army and wear a uniform. Furthermore, Oppenheimer insisted that all scientists needed to be informed about all the issues and he formed a kind of journal club where all members of the Los Alamos community met regularly to discuss science and technology. Groves eventually agreed to these conditions, but he retained an arrogant, tight-fisted control of security. In fact, Oppenheimer’s phone was illegally tapped and his homes were illegally bugged for most of his adult life. With the bomb successfully developed, Groves was the decision maker. He was going to bomb one Japanese city after another until the Japanese surrendered unconditionally. His plan would only be limited by the rate at which bombs could be assembled at Los Alamos. The only challenge he ever received for his plan was from the Secretary of War, Henry Stimpson. Stimpson had lived in Kyoto for a while and knew that it was a shining cultural center for the Japanese. Groves wanted to drop an atom bomb on that city precisely for that reason, to destroy the cultural fabric of the society that attacked the US at Pearl Harbor. Every time Stimpson took Kyoto off the list, Groves put it back on. Finally, in exasperation, Stimpson had to go to Truman and get his support before Groves would stop making Kyoto a target. Groves thought of the bomb as his baby and he would decide where and when to use it. Had the Japanese not surrendered after the first two bombs, Kyoto might well have been annihilated by one of the other ten he had planned.

The Manhattan Project was initially started to thwart a suspected Nazi nuclear bomb program (some of the great, pioneering concepts and experiments on atomic structure were done in German Universities: they had sufficient scientific talent, with Heisenburg in charge, to develop the bomb). But, once Germany surrendered, many nuclear scientists felt that the bomb should not be used at all and its development should be stopped. Yet, the decision to use the bomb on Japan, though advertised as saving thousands if not millions of American and Japanese lives by preventing a costly invasion of the Japanese mainland (the war stopped in Okinawa, a Japanese Island, 350 miles from the Japanese Home Islands, only weeks before the bombs were dropped). Those who insisted on its use against Japan felt that at the time that this new weapon provided an unparalleled opportunity to dominate the Russians in the inevitable postwar life and death struggle between "communism" and "democracy." In addition, they didn’t want Russia to enter the war in the Pacific at some very late date and then make territorial claims against the US as they were doing in Eastern Europe. The US militarists were drooling to start the arms race, guided by the short-term thinking that all militaristic societies share (Leslie Groves predicted that the Russians would not have a competing atom bomb for forty years, though most scientists thought it would take them less than seven). Many nuclear physicists suffered from the false, naive assumption that since the bomb was their idea and since they alone had created it, they should have something to say about its use. That naivety was not only very short-lived, but it was eradicated when Oppenheimer’s hearing went against him.

One of the many ironies of this story is that Lewis Strauss, who took the lead in removing Oppenheimer’s security clearance, was also the chairman of the board of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the famous institute in which Albert Einstein took refuge. It was Strauss, acting as chairman of the board, who offered Oppenheimer the directorship of the Institute right after the war. But it took nearly two years before Oppenheimer accepted and by that time Strauss was a little miffed about the long delay. Although Oppenheimer thought of Strauss as relatively harmless (he was self-made with a high school education), Strauss was in fact almost pathologically ambitious and, as Oppenheimer would soon learn, Strauss would stop at nothing to get his own way. The genius and energy of Oppenheimer transformed the Institute for Advanced Study into a center of creative and productive science, and, due to his wide knowledge and sensitivity towards the humanities, Oppenheimer also brought in artists and a few government-related outcasts, such as George Kennan, co-author of the article (Article X) that spawned the idea of the "containment policy" towards the Soviet Union.

The newest branch of the armed services, the US Air Force, has always had a very aggressive attitude about warfare. They are always the most militaristic group and the one military faction that consistently promises excellent results that can never be delivered: they love war because, when confined to the air, they don’t have to see all the dead people on the ground. In their eyes, war is a noble exercise, going back to the romantic days of flying against the Red Baron . Left on his own, Oppenheimer might have derailed the inclusion of the hydrogen bomb as a major component to our nuclear arsenal. He was initially opposed to Edward Teller’s idea for the H bomb because, as he and many others argued, the H bomb was a weapon of genocide. When the atom bomb was first used, there were some who argued that it could serve as a military weapon, making small enough bombs to be useful against military targets (Truman went to has grave believing that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both military targets and was loath to accept what the air force and army knew, that civilian targets were purposely chosen because, as one air force guru put it, "you win wars by killing people." Of course the idea that even the atom bomb could serve as a military target weapon was not very attractive once more details of radiation sickness and the long-term consequences of fallout were grudgingly accepted (despite mounting evidence of disastrous, long-term effects of radiation, the US continued testing nuclear devices in the Pacific and Nevada test sites, and eventually wound up paying more than a $ 1 billion in health compensation .

As Oppenheimer’s objections to the postwar planning began to mount, he angered the Air Force over several issues, including their massive nuclear bombing plans, as he described the planners as being "crazy"; he didn’t support the development of the H bomb (he thought it should be built and tested for feasibility but never developed as a weapon); he was negative about the Air Force building an atomic plane and he did not support the use of nuclear reactors to generate electrical power, as he saw the huge problems of safety and the misuse of them to generate bomb material. His insistence that the H bomb was a genocidal weapon angered almost everyone in the defense planning industry. So, increasingly, those that wanted unquestioned use and development of a nuclear arsenal saw Oppenheimer as an every larger obstacle. He had to go and Lewis Strauss assigned himself to lead the way. Interestingly, McCarthy himself wanted to investigate Oppenheimer during the peak of his visibility, but Strauss saw McCarthy as something of a clown and didn’t want to entrust such a vitally important procedure to his sideshow. He made sure that McCarthy would have nothing to do in pursuing Oppenheimer. That he reserved for himself and the AEC.

If America had been smart enough to listen to Oppenheimer, we might well have avoided the arms race and we might have stopped McCarthyism dead in its tracks before it cast such an ugly pall on our culture of the 1950s. Who can remember without complete disgust at the image of young students in school, being drilled to get under their desk in case of a nuclear attack, without being told that if such a bomb could be delivered to their city, every student would be a new novel version of toast, to say nothing of the fact that the Russians at the time had no ability to deliver such a weapon. That part we never heard about, but it was only one of the thousands of little things that kept Americans in a state of fear, such that we, as a nation, would be grateful for the arms race as the only means of protecting us. The complete absurdity of this period of American culture was embodied in Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant film, Dr. Strangelove, or: High I Learned to Stop Worrying and Live With the Bomb , a movie that still today registers more like a handbook of history rather than a black comedy. Released in 1964, In some scores it ranks in the top 25 films of all time.

In addition to Oppenheimer, other physicists deserve credit for suggesting different ways of handling "nuclear secrets." In chapter 20 of the book, "Bohr was God and Oppie was his prohet," the authors give a fascinating account of the role that Niels Bohr played in shaping Oppenheimer’s views about the coming realities of the nuclear era. He had obviously given more thought to this than anyone else. Bohr was one of the great physicists of the 20th Century. His Nobel prize for his work on atomic physics acknowledged that it was one of the central keys for the concept of quantum mechanics introduced in the 1920s. Bohr was regarded as a giant, just as Einstein was at an earlier time. When two German emigre physicists, Otto Frisch and Rudolph Peierls, demonstrated how a fission bomb could be made in relatively short order while working in England in 1941, the US and England began to take the issue of building a bomb very seriously. Bohr was Danish and he barely escaped the Nazi invasion of his country by being smuggled out of Copenhagen in September, 1943. He arrived in Stockholm where German agents plotted his assassination. But he was picked up and flown to England on a harrowing plane trip in which he lost consciousness because he couldn’t get the oxygen mask on when the plane reached 20,000 ft. Beginning in London, Bohr learned about the British and American programs underway to build the bomb. The American effort was the Manhattan Project, while the British program was "Tube Alloy." Bohr agreed to come to America, which alarmed Leslie Groves, as Bohr had a reputation for being uncontrolled as a speaker, a loose cannon as far as security was concerned. Bohr had access to anyone he wanted to see: he could knock on the front door of the castle to see the Danish King and, while in America, he visited with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, an intimate of FDR and the British ambassador Lord Halifax. Bohr’s message was loud and clear: he viewed the making of the atomic bomb as inevitable, but it was not too soon to begin thinking about the impact of the weapon after it was made. His biggest concern was that it would produce an arms race between the East and West unless bold decisions were put into a place immediately. He argued that, to prevent the arms race, it was vital to immediately inform the Russians about the existence of the bomb project and assure them that it was not a threat to them. Leslie Groves, who already had a notion about using the bomb as a tool against the Russians after the war, viewed Bohr as a serious threat to his plans and wanted to get him to Los Alamos as quickly as possible, where because of the tight security there, Bohr would have no public access where he could continue to advocate his views. Groves met Bohr and his son in Chicago to personally escort them to New Mexico. He had his science advisor, Richard Tolman from Caltech, accompany him in hopes of keeping Bohr under wraps at all times and also to indoctrinate Bohr about atomic secrecy. Tollman agreed to serve as a watch dog, but, while on the train going out of Chicago, Tollman spent about an hour listening to Bohr and came out exhausted from the one-way conversation, telling Groves "Generali, I can’t stand it any more. I am reneging, you are in the Army, you have to do it." Groves also discovered that he could not influence Bohr in anyway, nor could he get him to keep his mouth shut about atomic secrets. As soon as Bohr nodded that he understood what should and should not be said, he would let it all out at a party that night at Oppenheimer’s in Los Alamos.

In 1941 Bohr had met with his former student Werner Heisenberg, who had been given permission by the German government to attend a meeting in Copenhagen. Heisenberg remained in Germany during the war and might have been instrumental in building a bomb, but when resources became scarce, as the war turned badly for Germany, the project was demoted in its priority. While Heisenberg was in Copenhagen, Bohr wanted to talk to his former student to probe him about German plans for a fission bomb (Groves and others tried to figure out a way to either kidnap or assassinate Heisenberg during his visit to Copenhagen, but couldn’t pull it off). Although Heisenberg later denied it, what Bohr took away from their meeting in Copenhagen was that the Germans had a viable atomic bomb program and it was through this connection that the American and British programs were stimulated to move into high gear.

Bohr and Oppie were good friends. Oppie admired Bohr and regarded him more as a saintly physicist. It was Bohr’s visit with Oppenheimer that got him out of his rut. Ever since he had been recruited to lead the development of the fission bomb in Los Alamos, he could think of nothing else but the details of the work and the urgency of meeting deadlines. But Bohr ignited in Oppie something that was dormant and now needed to escape. Oppenheimer, from his schooling days at the Ethical Culture school, had been a humanist and a scientist. He was as comfortable discussing literature, poetry and art as he was discussing physics. It was that element of Oppenheimer that set him in a class by himself, for no other physicist had such a broad sweeping intellect (with the exception of politics, where Oppenheimer was admittedly very naive). Throughout his life he was a prodigious reader and counted among his friends many humanists and creative people in the arts.

Bohr’s visit to Los Alamos started Oppenheimer thinking about an issue that he had never been concerned about before: how would the nuclear program be managed to serve the best interests of humanity, not necessarily the United States. That attitude, the one which promoted an appeal to his sense of being an internationalist, was where he departed from his military colleagues in the Manhattan project. The military and political managers saw the atomic bomb as a US achievement, whose control would be first and foremost for the purpose of promoting US security and US national interests. Furthermore, the US planners viewed the atom bomb and another element in the arsenal. But the nuclear scientists who developed the bomb, including Oppenheimer, saw it as an entirely new and different type of weapon. Oppenheimer and many of his colleagues also saw the development of a fission bomb as an international effort, with critical physicists, chemists and engineers coming from all over the World, coalescing in the desert. Their efforts should give them a seat at the decision-making table and Oppenheimer began to increasingly believe that the sharing of atomic secrets was, as Niels Bohr had stated, the only way to prevent a dangerous arms race. Years later Bohr wrote that his purpose in going to Los Alamos in 1943 was not to provide assistance about the bomb, but to convey his opinion on what to do after the bomb was an achievement.

Oppenheimer one-upped Bohr by going further: instead of sharing the nuclear secrets with only the Russians, he argued that they should put them in the hands of the United Nations who would administer benefits from such knowledge, so that mankind in general could benefit, and through the control of the United Nations, no country could gain an upper hand in the arms race. It was the fear of that mentality that Leslie Groves and the hard liners in the administration began to take a dim view of the scientists that were working on the project, and because Oppenheimer alone was so widely articulate about the humanitarian and ethical drive that needed to be applied as a guidance system, he increasingly became the focus of efforts to remove scientific influence on post-war policies. To the hardliners, the American government had paid a fortune to develop the bomb and the government alone would decide how to administer its secrets and how to deploy the weapon. Probably no scientist, including Oppenheimer understood at the time, that any efforts on their part to influence the control of bomb secrets would be met with suspicion and antagonism and persecution. Yet, those were the driving forces of Tom Hall and Klaus Fuchs, who delivered detailed information to the Russians for the very reason that they were our allies.

Perhaps the most insightful nuclear physicist was the Hungarian immigrant Leo Szilard. He was the first nuclear physicist to approach FDR, through a letter signed by Albert Einstein in 1939 to alert the American government about the need to develop an atomic bomb program because of his perception that the Nazis had a program underway. Now that the atom bomb was a near reality, he wanted to communicate with FDR again and warn him about the dangers of an arms race. If a bomb was going to be used against Japan, he argued that it should be dropped as a demonstration bomb, so that the Japanese could recognize and respond to it without being visited by its deadly destruction. A second letter was drafted with an introduction from Albert Einstein. But, Roosevelt died before Szilard could see him or communicate with him by letter. He went to see Harry Truman in May, 1945 only weeks after FDR had died. Szilard was frantic that an arms race might result if the US didn’t play their cards right. He wrote to Oppenheimer to enlist his support, as he did not want to see any bombs dropped on Japanese populated areas, but he got no reply. But Szilard never got to see Truman. Instead he was shuttled to James Byrnes who would soon be Truman’s new Secretary of State. Szilard realized that in talking to Byrnes, he was addressing a predisposed hawk on the issue of an arms race and left the meeting depressed. A final discussion with Oppenheimer made it apparent to him that Oppenheimer had already agreed to use the bomb against Japan, but agreed that the atomic secrets should be shared with the Russians. Szilard felt that this arrangement would do nothing to prevent an arms race. In fact, the decision to use the bomb against Japan was never really an argument of any serious debate. It was in the gene pool of the military planners who executed the war that atomic bombs would be dropped on Japan–they earned it. Of course, it was a moot point whether the Russians were informed, as they were continuously getting information about the US progress on bomb development, as Klaus Fuchs and American Tom Hall provided them with drawings and detailed information about the bomb plans, for the same reason that other nuclear scientists thought would be justified and urged that it be done through diplomatic channels. Diplomacy or not, the Russians exploded Atomic bomb and hydrogen bombs in succession after the Americans had developed theirs.

Oppenheimer proposed his United Nations idea about control of nuclear technology without every clearing his pronouncements through Leslie Groves, the military commander who had control of the Manhattan project. Oppenheimer arranged in a private meeting with Eisenhower to discuss has plan for sharing nuclear technology. Eisenhower was so impressed by Oppenheimer’s sweeping intellect and charming logic (Oppenheimer was 5′10"" tall and weighed about 125 lbs, but he lit up a room and when he spoke, as everyone was mesmerized by his manners and the free flow of language and the power of his intellect. Women were transfixed by Oppenheimer) that he initially agreed to give Oppenheimer’s suggestion very serious consideration. After all, Eisenhower had initially been opposed to using the atom bomb against the Japanese, as he considered it to be a weapon of excess and shared a commonly held view in the military at the time, that Japan was finished, it was just a matter of dipolomatically arranging the terms. But, hearing about the meeting between Eisenhower and Oppenheimer, Strauss mounted a campaign to discredit Oppenheimer in Eisenhower’s eyes and he used illegally acquired FBI information, with false documents based on hearsay, to convince Eisenhower that Oppenheimer was a communist threat and should be removed from influence on policy. Thereafter, Eisenhower did an about face and agreed to the proceedings against Oppenheimer. He also jumped on the bandwagon and initiated his own military strategy of relying almost exclusively on atomic weaponry delivered by the Strategic Air Command (SAC) to initiate and accelerate the arms race. It was a little disingenuous of Eisenhower to, years later, warn the nation against the "military-industrial complex", when in fact, he did more than any other president to bring it into orbit.

The only nuclear scientist who might have steered us out of the arms race was defrocked in 1954, with the scoundrel of the ages, Hungarian immigrant, Edward Teller, testifying against him in the proceedings. The hearing was silly in a way, because Oppenheimer was only an advisory to the committee at that point, so instead of removing his security clearance, all the AEC needed to do was stop consulting with him. But, it is obvious and was obvious then, that the government, led by Lewis Strauss, wanted to make an example of Oppenheimer and stop any future scientist from commenting or attempting to influence the secret government policies on nuclear armaments. The tragedy for America is that most of the decisions that were done to create the arms race were carried out well underneath the radar screen of public discourse. We never got to vote on whether we wanted an arms race and we never got to vote on the idea that perhaps the scientific creators of the bomb should have a significant say in its control. Had either of those two options found their way into prominence, we might have a very different country today. Now we have a country that has to unravel to get healthy. We have yet to figure out how to get out from under our bomb economy.

Strauss’s sinister plan worked. With Oppenheimer out of the way, the H bomb development proceded and the arms race was born, completely one-sided to begin with, but a few years later enjoined by the Russians, a few decades in advance of the predictions of Leslie Groves. Replacing Oppenheimer as the most visible nuclear scientist was Edward Teller, who was a hawk on steroids: for many years he would speak around the country arguing why the US needed to develop an ever larger arsenal of nuclear weapons. Never once did he attempt to challenge the idea that more is better. Teller obligingly set the new standard for scientists working for the government: they would be seen, but not heard, unless of course they supported the development of American militarism. Yet, Teller paid a price for being such a traitor (Oppenheimer had given Teller a position of some authority at Los Alamos, but had to replace him because he was always trying to think about developing the hydrogen bomb and not the target they were after. Most other physicists at Los Alamos wanted him to be removed from the premises (he was an asshole), but Oppenheimer made what was probably a mistake by letting him stay on in a reduced capacity, allowing him to continue to argue and think about the H bomb). After Teller’s testimony against Oppenheimer, other scientists refused to have anything to do with him and many told him so in confrontational episodes. Teller became honored and celebrated by the military as their token scientist and "father of the hydrogen bomb," but he was despised by most other physicists for what he did to Oppenheimer.

Yet even with Teller’s testimony and Oppenheimer’s fatal passive behavior at the hearing, it required a completely fabricated committee report, containing information never presented in the hearing, to which Oppenheimer and his lawyer never had any opportunity to examine, let alone respond to, that eventually went before the full AEC and resulted in the lifting of his security clearance. Though symbolic, Oppenheimer’s security clearance removal was a fatal blow to any further obstacle in front of the militarists plan for the arms race.

Ironically Lewis Strauss was also the head of the Board for the Princeton Institute that Oppenheimer had formed into a World class center of science and scholarship, so that after Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance, he and Strauss would have many arguments and pissing contests about a lot of other things related to the Institute. Yet, Strauss himself also paid a price for his treachery. Eisenhower nominated him to become Secretary of Commerce in 1958, but during the Senate confirmation hearings, his plotting tactics against Oppenheimer came out and his nomination went nowhere. Yet, the real damage had been done: the debate about atomic weapons policy was removed from the scientific community and placed in the hands of the military with compliant scientists who agreed to work on nuclear weapons and never publically challenged government policies.

Oppenheimer is my quintessential hero. Every academic that I know admired what Oppenheimer attempted to do and when you realize that he pursued his ideas with very little support from the essential political establishment, as the liberals who might have supported him were all running scared from the McCarthy hearings, you have to appreciate him all the more and yet also understand that, without some kind of institutional support, his cause was lost from the very beginning. Perhaps that’s the reason that we was so passive during his hearing.

When John Kennedy was elected President in 1960, he planned to provide restitution for Oppenheimer, but Kennedy was assassinated before Oppenheimer’s White House visit took place. When LBJ became President, he followed through with an invitation to Oppenheimer and honored him with the Enrico Fermi award. A few years later, at Oppenheimer’s memorial service, Henry Wolfe Smyth spoke to the large crowd of 600 gathered at Princeton. Smyth was a physicist who had been the only member of the AEC to vote in favor of supporting Oppenheimer at the security clearance hearing, Because of his presence at the hearing, he alone understood the travesty that Oppenheimer had to go through, as he commented "such a wrong can never be righted; such a blot on our history never erased…We regret that his great work for his country was repaid so shabbily…" But perhaps the most poignant statement came from George Kennan, who was Oppenheimer’s friend, whom Oppie had given a position at the Institute, after Kennan had become a Washington Pariah for denouncing the military option as a component of his containment policy. Kennan said "On no one did there ever rest with greater cruelty the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by himan beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength. No one ever saw more clearly the dangers arising for humanity from this mounting disparity. This anxiety never shook his faith in the value of the search for truth in all its forms, scientific and humane. But there was no one who more passionately desired to be useful in averting the catastrophes to which the development of the weapons of mass destruction threatened to lead. It was the interests of mankind that he had in mind here; but it was as an American, and through the medium of this national community to which he belonged, that he was his greatest possibilities for pursuing these aspirations."

Kennan went on–"In the dark days of the early fifties, when troubles crowded in upon him from many sides and when he found himself harassed by his position at the center of controversy, I drew his attention to the fact the he would be welcome in a hundred academic centers abroad and asked him whether he had not thought of taking residence outside this country. His answer, given to me with tears in his eyes: ‘Damn it, I happen to love this country.’"

The hard-liners of America got just about everything they wanted. The arms race was ignited and our culture became obsessed with militarism, inside of which we are gridlocked today, years after the contrived threats have disappeared. Russia never wanted a conflict with the West. She disarmed in a major way shortly after WW II. Today, the dilemma facing Americans is that we need to rebuild our own country, through investing in ourselves by reducing the outrageous expenditures through our bomb economy and funnel those efforts and resources to create a country that has closer similarity to the one we thought we had when we grew up. By examining the root causes of how we went from a free society to a militaristic society with a bomb economy, a society that is perhaps a terrorist attack or two removed from a dictatorship, it might be easier for us to see clarity and a way out of being our contemporary selves. We got ugly to fight a threat that was never there. Let’s admit it, change and do it right this time around. When the Berlin wall fell, we had a nation to save, now we have a planet to rescue. But we can’t seriously begin rescuing the planet without first righting our own ship. Oppenheimer tried and failed the first time around. We have to get it right the second time or we may lose more than a country, as the planet itself is now at stake and we cannot solve any single sector of that problem with our military.