Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect

CHARLES THORPE is lecturer in science and technology studies at University College London.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2006 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2006

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13 (ebook): 978-0-226-79848-6

ISBN-13 (cloth): 978-0-226-79845-5

ISBN-13 (paper): 978-0-226-79846-2

ISBN-10 (cloth): 0-226-79845-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Thorpe, Charles, 1973–

Oppenheimer : the tragic intellect / Charles Thorpe.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-79845-5 (acid-free paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-79845-3 (acid-free paper)

1. Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 1904–1967. 2. Physicists—United States—Biography. 3. Scientists—Intellectual life—20th century. 4. Science—Moral and ethical aspects. 5. Science and state—United States. 6. Atomic bomb—United States—History. I. Title.

QC16.062T56 2006

530.092—dc22

[B]

2006015223

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Oppenheimer

THE TRAGIC INTELLECT

Charles Thorpe

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

FOR ANGELA

The individual event, the act, goes far beyond the general law. It is a sort of intersection of many generalities, harmonizing them in one instance as they cannot be harmonized in general. And we as men are not only the ingredients of our communities; we are their intersection, making a harmony which does not exist between the communities except as we, the individual men, may create it and reveal it.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, The Sciences and Man’s Community (1953)

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Introduction: Charisma, Self, and Sociological Biography

2. Struggling for Self

3. Confronting the World

4. King of the Hill

5. Against Time

6. Power and Vocation

7. I Was an Idiot

8. The Last Intellectual?

Appendix: Interviews by the Author

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

PREFACE

This book traces the life and career of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. But it aims, through looking at his life, to analyze more general themes: the shaping of self; vocation; the cultural and political authority of science; charisma; and individual moral responsibility. Framing all of this is the way in which science became, in the twentieth century, a central instrument of violence, transforming the capacity and scope of violence and, in so doing, becoming a vital resource of state power.

Problems of power and violence, in light of the atomic bomb, were central to Oppenheimer’s reflections after World War II on the meaning of science. In his 1948 lecture The Open Mind, Oppenheimer pointed to the paradox that this activity, held in modern culture to be at the polar opposite to coercion, has become perhaps the primary medium of technological violence. A central faith of modernity, and perhaps the core idea of the Enlightenment, was that science and reason offer a solution to the problem of violence. In the middle of the twentieth century, such a view of the social order of science as antithetical to coercion took on particular significance as part of the liberal response to Fascism and Communism. Science, it was said, flourished in, and helped to preserve, a peaceful and free society. The founder of the academic history of science in America, George Sarton, articulated this faith most clearly when he wrote, Science makes for peace more than anything else in the world; it is the cement that holds together the highest and the most comprehensive minds of all countries, of all races, of all creeds. It was a view that strongly informed the statement by his student, sociologist Robert K. Merton, of the universalistic values that, Merton argued, constituted the normative structure of science.¹

Yet contemporaneous developments of the twentieth century began to make such ideals of science sound increasingly hollow. Twentieth-century history attests to the intimacy of the modern relationship between science and violence, which has cast a shadow over visions of scientific progress. Modern violence has taken on an increasingly scientific character: impersonal, institutionalized, and rationally organized. And science has become integral to the technological sophistication and power of modern warfare. If the nineteenth century saw the mechanization and industrialization of warfare, the twentieth century has been shaped by the scientization of war—a development indicated by the characterization, albeit caricatured, of World War I as the chemist’s war and World War II as the physicist’s war. America’s chief wartime science administrator, Vannevar Bush, called for a science of total war.² And the scientization of warfare is today reflected in the language with terms such as smart bombs and surgical strikes. Yet despite the pervasiveness of the modern integration of science and violence, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand out as having particular significance. This has to do not only with the degree of destruction unleashed, but also with the way in which the release of the power of the atom was cast as the high point of scientific modernity.³

These interconnections between science and violence raise the problem of the responsibility and role of the scientist. Perhaps the most articulate and complete twentieth-century formulation of this problem was sociologist Max Weber’s 1918 lecture Science as a Vocation. For Weber, the essence of science as a vocation was acceptance of the divide between fact and value and, therefore, eschewing of professional concern for ends or ultimate values. Science, Weber said, serves self-clarification and knowledge of interrelated facts—in other words, awareness.⁴ Weber insisted on the separation of fact from value so as to preserve the autonomy of science from politics—and to protect science against political violence (which he saw in, for example, nationalist students’ disrupting lectures of those they identified as political opponents).

Herbert Marcuse later pointed out the paradox that Weber’s insistence on the separation of science from any substantive values makes science more vulnerable to being subordinated to external forces: "Your ‘neutrality’ is as compulsory as it is illusory. For neutrality is only real where you have the power to repel interference: if you do not, you become the victim and assistant of any power that chooses to use you."⁵ Marcuse’s point is particularly significant when one considers problems of technology and the contemporary situation in which sophisticated research and development organizations are in place to rapidly convert scientific findings into military applications. When in modern technological warfare the scientist becomes a servant of state power, that role does not contradict, but is arguably a fulfilment of, the requirements of the Weberian vocation. Weber’s ethos of science as a vocation, while defending the life of science against the irrational violence of the political campaign, provides no ethical safeguards against modern scientized violence. Instead, such an ethos of value-neutrality, entailing a discipline not altogether different from that of bureaucratic and military organizations, facilitates the mobilization of science in the rationalized violence of the modern state.⁶

This book examines how Oppenheimer, as wartime leader of the Los Alamos atomic weapons laboratory and as senior postwar scientific adviser to the U.S. government, sought to construct his role and attempted to handle his responsibilities in relation to science, politics, and the problems of warfare and violence. Oppenheimer formulated a vocational ethic close to the one outlined by Weber. Yet the physicist’s struggles in his role as atomic bomb scientist revealed ethical problems that ultimately could not be adequately handled in terms of the compartmentalized ethics of vocation. Oppenheimer’s moral conflicts and struggles demonstrate tensions in, and the limitations of, the ethics of vocation.

Oppenheimer’s struggle with vocation also attests to the difficulty of formulating and maintaining an ethical stance that goes beyond this compartmentalizing ethos. A limited and fragmented ethical orientation is powerfully fostered and maintained by modern, specialized technobureaucratic culture and institutions.⁷ A key message of the Personnel Security Board finding against Oppenheimer in 1954 was that scientists overstep the boundaries of their authority when they concern themselves ethically with the consequences of their work. In a democratic society, the board insisted, questions of ends should be left to elected representatives. That bureaucratic and instrumental conception of the scientist’s role seems to be the dominant one in modern Western societies. And as science journalist Daniel Greenberg has recently argued, scientists, overridingly concerned with protecting their sources of funding, have become increasingly unwilling to rock the boat by challenging this narrow role.⁸

Adopting a broader conception of the scientific or intellectual responsibility of the scientist means challenging the assimilation of science into the state and its corresponding divorce from civil society. It means questioning the way in which the conception of science as a resource or instrument has overwhelmed and pushed out the place of science within a public conversation constitutive of civil society. In this regard, it is worth mentioning a communication I recently received from the National Archives. It was in response to an inquiry about the famous report of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee (GAC), which, under Oppenheimer’s chairmanship, took a position against the development of the hydrogen bomb. The archivist told me:

AEC historical document no. 349, the report of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission, Oct. 30, 1949, re: their 17th meeting, whose topic was the Super, i.e., development of a hydrogen bomb, had its classification cancelled on March 15, 1954, by the Atomic Energy Commission. On February 17, 1994, it was stamped classification still retained by Department of Energy reviewers and was withdrawn from the open AEC records. It currently remains classified in spite of the fact that anyone can read it in its entirety in the Appendix of Herbert F. York’s 1976 book, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb.⁹

It is paradoxical that the document was declassified in the run-up to the 1954 security hearing. In order to produce a publicly successful degradation ceremony,¹⁰ the AEC was forced to make public much information that was previously hidden behind the security curtain of the nuclear state. The publicly released transcript of the hearing was a revelation of the workings of science and policy within the Cold War state. I have no information about the reasons for the reclassification of the GAC report in 1994, nor an understanding of why this action would be seen as useful or appropriate when the document is now, in practice, irrevocably in the public domain. But the symbolic maintenance of this dissenting document as a state secret speaks eloquently to what sociologist Chandra Mukerji has called the state’s appropriation of the voice of science.¹¹ It makes clear the difference between science as an instrument or resource of its funders and patrons (whether the state or business) and science as a constituent of the broader culture of civil society and free public discourse. This difference was an important part of what was at stake in the Oppenheimer security hearing.

There is currently an intense interest in Oppenheimer among historians of science and scholars of American history. This book follows the publication of very fine studies by historians Silvan S. Schweber and, very recently, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, David C. Cassidy, and Priscilla McMillan.

For Bird and Sherwin, Oppenheimer was an authentic voice of American scientific, intellectual, and political liberalism. For McMillan, he was a defeated moderating voice in American foreign policy.¹² In contrast to these books, I emphasize what I see as Oppenheimer’s failure to develop a critical political perspective as his liberalism was shaped by the culture of the Cold War. I argue that (paradoxically, in light of the security hearing) Oppenheimer in significant ways accommodated himself to and internalized the culture and mentality of the national-security state.

Schweber is critical of Oppenheimer’s personal inability to live up to the model of responsibility that he put forward in his writings and reflections on science. In particular, Schweber has criticized Oppenheimer’s inconsistent response to McCarthyism, particularly in relation to the security problems of his graduate students and their ordeals with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Schweber suggests that Oppenheimer was too fractured an individual to handle the ethical and political dilemmas presented by Hiroshima and the Cold War, and he instead presents physicist Hans Bethe as the more consistent embodiment of an ethic of scientific responsibility. Schweber celebrates Bethe as a model of the working craftsman in science, whose research was his anchor in integrity. This is an ethic of duty in a calling, or vocation, and Schweber notes that Bethe responded to the intellectual and social world around him by adopting a Weberian stance: he would deal with the world rationally, to the utmost limits that rationality would allow.¹³ In contrast, I take Oppenheimer’s dilemmas not so much as indicative of a purely personal failure to live up to an ethic, but as indicative of both a broader ethical uncertainty and inherent problems with the ethics of vocation in relation to problems of war and state power. Cassidy has admirably contextualized Oppenheimer’s struggles within the framework of America’s rise to global power and the centrality to this of the alliance among science (physics in particular), industry, and the military. Cassidy suggests that Oppenheimer’s career reflects how this alliance, while strengthening American science financially and in some ways politically, led to a sacrifice of the independent cultural authority of science.¹⁴ My account is broadly in agreement with this analysis. But at the same time, I aim to connect these contextual themes with issues of self-shaping, the idea of vocation, the ethics of responsibility, and the changing cultural identity of the scientist.

The recent biographies all, in different ways, place Oppenheimer’s life in the context of the transformations of science and American society and politics during the Cold War. My aim in this book has been to provide a biography that draws together individual character structure and social structure, looking at the social processes and collective work though which individual identity is constituted. It is a sociological biography, which looks at the collaborative and interactional shaping of the individual in a web of relationships. In that sense, it aims to break down the division between individual and context, treating both in terms of social process. This is a difficult task. Sociologist Norbert Elias has written, "Wherever one looks, one comes across the same antinomies: we have a certain traditional idea of what we are as individuals. And we have a more or less distinct idea of what we mean when we say ‘society.’ But these two ideas, the consciousness we have of ourselves as society on the one hand and as individuals on the other, never entirely coalesce . . . What we lack, let us be clear about it, are conceptual models and, beyond them, a total vision with the aid of which our ideas of human beings as individuals and as societies can be better harmonized."¹⁵ This study attempts to use the narrative form of a sociologically conceptualized biography to weave together the threads of the individual and the social.

This book can also be read as a study of themes that emerge from the work of Max Weber: vocation, responsibility, cultivation and expertise, charisma, bureaucracy, instrumental reason, fact and value, means and ends. While I did not consciously begin thinking of the research as Weberian, these concepts and themes seemed to quite naturally emerge from and fit seamlessly with the historical material. Many of the concepts employed by Weber—charisma, problems of specialization, fact and value—also occur in the discourse of the World War II generation of atomic scientists and are in that sense actors’ categories for this study. That may have something to do with the character of Weber’s sociology—he did not seek to replace history with an abstract sociological model, but rather to define a series of concepts that would facilitate interpretive historical understanding. But of course, in relation to Weber’s own lifetime, the events I am describing are not history, but the future. It is also possible, therefore, that the fit may have something to do with the cultural impact of Weber’s own work. For example, it seems that the widespread modern use of the term charisma to describe secular leadership, even if not always faithful to Weber’s analysis, owes something to his formulation. But the correspondence is most likely due to Weber’s picking out and codifying problems and themes that were emerging in his time from a variety of sources and that would—again, through many influences and sources—become central to thinking about problems of science and modernity in the twentieth century. The high modern bureaucratic world of the Manhattan Project and the early Cold War was arguably more neatly Weberian than our contemporary postmodern society.¹⁶ Nevertheless, the issue of whether and to what extent these Weberian categories are an analytic resource or a cultural and historical topic is indicative of what Anthony Giddens has called the double hermeneutic of the social sciences. Giddens reminds us that sociological concepts and understandings of the world are constitutive elements of the modern cultures we seek to interpret.¹⁷

Finally, it is worth mentioning a paradox inherent in the writing of this history. In the book, I have given considerable attention to others’ impressions of Oppenheimer and also to the way in which he was described and his life interpreted within his own lifetime (as well as after his death). This is because I want to question the idea of a discrete real Oppenheimer separate from these impressions, descriptions, and interpretations (which is not to say that there is nothing but representation). Representations and expectations of him, whether explicit or implicit, were a key part of Oppenheimer’s social context and social existence. In his own lifetime, it is possible to see Oppenheimer responding to, resisting, and shaping but also enacting, playing to, and being shaped by these various representations and associated expectations. The narrative structure of this book ends with Oppenheimer’s death. But it is interesting to ask to what extent this is the natural ending point of a biography. There is a sense in which death is such an ending point—there is no longer an Oppenheimer to play Oppenheimer. But there is also a sense in which it doesn’t have to be. Sociologist Charles Horton Cooley wrote that there is no separation between real and imaginary persons; indeed, to be imagined is to become real, in a social sense.¹⁸ Oppenheimer as a social item, real therefore in a social sense, is continuing to be constructed by the act of writing and representation. As communications scholar Bryan C. Taylor has put it, Oppenheimer is an enduring discursive form through which audiences discover and contest the ideologies of modern science and the national-security state. Since Oppenheimer’s death, "history and popular culture have ‘saved’ the sign of Oppenheimer as an opportunity to explore the formidable social problems associated with nuclear weapons and the possibility of their solution.¹⁹ Biographies imagine" their subjects, and also participate in creating them as socially real.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people to thank for their help with this project. The book grew out of my doctoral dissertation, and my greatest debt is to my doctoral supervisor, Steven Shapin, for years of patient advice and encouragement and for his intellectual example. I also want to thank the other members of my doctoral committee at the University of California, San Diego—Gerald Doppelt, Harvey Goldman, Naomi Oreskes, and Andrew Scull—for their advice, critical comments, interest, and encouragement. I am, in addition, very grateful to Herbert York at UCSD for sharing his knowledge and experience.

I learned a great deal from fellow participants in the 1998–99 research group on Scientific Personae, organized by Lorraine Daston at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science; this work benefited greatly from that experience. It has also benefited from discussion with colleagues in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University, in particular Harry Collins, Robert Evans, Ian Welsh, and Barbara Adam. I would also like to thank colleagues in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at University College London for the enthusiasm and encouragement that they communicated as I was completing the writing. For conversation, correspondence, the provision of documents, and their published and unpublished work that I have read, I am grateful to Michael Day, Shawn Mullet, James Hijiya, John Rigden, Albert Christman, and Silvan S. Schweber. I am very grateful to Cathryn Carson and David Hollinger for inviting me to participate in the Oppenheimer Centennial Conference at Berkeley. There I had also the opportunity to meet historians Kai Bird, Martin Sherwin, and David Cassidy, whose scholarly work on Oppenheimer I very much admire. David Kaiser read and commented on a number of drafts of the full manuscript, and I have benefited a great deal from his insights, criticisms, and advice.

This work also owes much to the archivists who helped me—in particular Roger Meade at Los Alamos National Laboratory Archives and Hedy Dunn, Patricia Goulding, and Shelley Morris at the Los Alamos Historical Museum, but also staff at the Library of Congress, the American Institute of Physics, and all the other archives I visited (a list of which appears in the bibliography). I am also extremely grateful to the Manhattan Project veterans and scientists who allowed me to interview them.

The research and writing were made possible by a Science Studies Dissertation Fellowship at UCSD, a dissertation writing fellowship from the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, and a pre-doctoral fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Subsequent research was funded by a British Academy Small Research Grant.

I am grateful to Katie Crawford, Philip and Diane Olsson, and Susan and Michael Dimock for their hospitality while I was carrying out research. I would also like to thank my family for their support, and I especially want to thank my wife, Angela, for her loving support and understanding during this work.

Any errors, omissions, or shortcomings in the work are, of course, entirely my own fault and responsibility.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction: Charisma, Self, and Sociological Biography

Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) occupied a nodal position in the emergence of late modern technoscientific culture and in the compact between science and the state that developed from World War II. To trace the constitution of Oppenheimer’s wartime and postwar scientific identity is to trace the key struggles over the role of the scientist in relation to nuclear weapons, the state, and culture. This is a study in biography, but it is one that reveals the individual—Oppenheimer—as a point of intersection of social forces and interests and that describes the collaborative, social, and interactional fashioning of his identity, his scientific role, and his intellectual, political, and cultural authority. It examines how he negotiated the opportunities created and the constraints imposed by the institutional positions he occupied and by the relationships and networks in which he was embedded. It traces the social and interactional constitution of a unique individual scientific identity and role. In so doing, it provides a history of the making of broader forms of power and authority entwining science and the late modern state.

Between 1943 and 1945, Oppenheimer was director of the Los Alamos Laboratory—the remote site in northern New Mexico where the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki were designed and built. It was the key installation of the Manhattan Project, a vast military-industrial-scientific endeavor organized under the Army Corps of Engineers. Employing at its peak nearly 129,000 workers and costing $2 billion, the Manhattan Project was the largest technoscientific project to that time. It was a hybrid organizational network incorporating not only scientists and engineers, but also a long list of America’s major industrial corporations, including DuPont, Monsanto, Tennessee Eastman, Westinghouse, Chrysler, Union Carbide, Bell Labs, and other large chemical, electrical, and construction firms. At Hanford, Washington, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, sprawling factories and industrial towns were erected to produce plutonium and to separate out the fissionable uranium-235 isotope. The project linked these industrial sites with university laboratories at Chicago, Columbia, Berkeley, and elsewhere. Los Alamos was the culminating point of the work of these disparate sites. It brought together mathematicians, theoretical and experimental physicists, chemists, metallurgists, high-explosives experts, and engineers, combining this expertise to produce a novel form of technoscientific power and a new method of total war.¹

The bomb project catapulted scientists into a position within America’s political and administrative elites, and Oppenheimer emerged from the war as the chief representative of this new power of the scientist. In 1947, he was appointed to the country’s top science advisory position: chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee (GAC). However, Oppenheimer’s power was beset by tensions and contradictions. Since his earliest involvement in the bomb project, he had been under investigation by military intelligence and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) for his Communist associations and political involvements of the late 1930s and early 1940s. In 1949, when the GAC advised against the development of the hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer was widely suspected of spearheading opposition to the new weapon. During the early 1950s, H-bomb proponents (including physicist Edward Teller, AEC chairman Admiral Lewis L. Strauss, and powerful figures in the military) began a behind-the-scenes campaign to remove Oppenheimer from any governmental role. This struggle culminated in the security hearings of 1954, when an AEC Personnel Security Board declared Oppenheimer a security risk. The withdrawal of Oppenheimer’s security clearance suddenly severed his connection with government, consigning him to the political wilderness. He was only partially rehabilitated when, in 1963, he received the AEC’s prestigious Fermi Award, given the previous year to Teller. Though his past work for the government was now officially recognized and rewarded, his security clearance was not renewed.

This, in outline, is a well-known story. Even during his lifetime, Oppenheimer was a focal point for reflection on the place of science and scientists in the modern world. That remains the case today: in academia and in popular culture, the narrative of Oppenheimer as tragic hero has become a parable neatly encapsulating the moral and political dilemmas of the nuclear age. It is a tale that has been the subject of many biographies, historical studies, novels, plays, and movies.² Commonly, the Oppenheimer story relies on tropes of purity and danger: Oppenheimer represents the corruption of the pure scientist overwhelmed both by encroaching militarism and by his own desire for power. Oppenheimer’s role in building the atomic bomb represents a fall from grace, the scientist’s original sin. The security hearings are often portrayed as a kind of martyrdom or crucifixion, and Oppenheimer’s subsequent exile from power as a retreat from a corrupt world, a chance for purity and salvation. Oppenheimer appears sometimes as a saint, sometimes as Faust, with the atomic bomb as a diabolic device.³

This narrative has found a central place in our understanding of the scientifically modern. Sociologists, philosophers, historians, and other social commentators examining the role of the scientific intellectual have all attempted to come to terms with the figure of Oppenheimer. In Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, the journalist Robert Jungk’s celebrated study of the atomic scientists, Oppenheimer appears in a field of struggle between pure science and the will to power. He is presented as embodying a unity between science and humanistic culture, a unity that is shattered by the one-sided technical-instrumental orientation that led to the atomic bomb. For Jungk, Oppenheimer was the tragic representative of the scientists’ Faustian bargain with military technology. Jungk wrote in 1958, nine years before Oppenheimer’s death: "Oppenheimer . . . reveals . . . why the twentieth century Faust allows himself, in his obsession with success and despite occasional twinges of conscience, to be persuaded into signing the pact with the Devil that confronts him: What is ‘technically sweet’ he finds nothing less than irresistible."⁴ Oppenheimer’s former friend, Haakon Chevalier (their connection was to be the key subject of interrogation in the 1954 hearings), concluded that Oppenheimer was a Faust of the twentieth century, he had sold his soul to the bomb.⁵

For sociologist Lewis Feuer, Oppenheimer represented the rise of managerialism, technocratic power, and militarism in science. During our generation, he wrote, science has become the bearer of a death wish, and he quoted Oppenheimer’s famous reaction to the first atomic bomb test: I am become death—the shatterer of worlds.⁶ Lewis Coser was also interested in Oppenheimer as a leading representative of the scientists’ new public role in confronting the problems of atomic weapons. Like Feuer, Coser was worried that scientists were becoming the domesticated retainers of their bureaucratic masters. But in contrast to Feuer, he saw Oppenheimer as exemplary of scientists who have cultivated uncommon sensitivity to the values of our culture and the fate of our society. In Coser’s view, Oppenheimer was a true scientific intellectual.⁷

Philip Rieff similarly dwelled on Oppenheimer’s charismatic and symbolic role: "His thin handsome face and figure replaced Einstein’s as the public image of genius . . . He had actually become the priest-scientist of Comtean vision, transforming history as well as nature. But Rieff argued that the scope for such a charismatic role for scientists in modern America was limited. Without a vibrant humanistic public culture to support them, the scientists’ engagement with politics was doomed to failure. For Rieff, Oppenheimer’s denunciation by the AEC signified the reduction of the scientific elite to the merely technical function of a service class."⁸

The security hearings have frequently been taken to instantiate a deep-rooted, or even inevitable, conflict between the intellectual and the powers. Historian Giorgio de Santillana was directly inspired by the Oppenheimer case in writing The Crime of Galileo, published in 1958. In both cases, he argued, the free scientific mind was at odds with Reasons of State.⁹ Political scientist Sanford Lakoff compared the Oppenheimer hearings with the Athenians’ persecution of Socrates and argued that the trial of Dr. Oppenheimer was also the trial of liberal democracy in America. But above all, Lakoff argued, the "tragedy in Dr. Oppenheimer’s predicament . . . stemmed . . . from his internal struggle with the scientific vocation. For Oppenheimer, unlike Socrates, the center of his life is not the city but his vocation. Oppenheimer symbolized for Lakoff the alienation" of the modern intellectual and the severance of specialized knowledge from a moral and political engagement with the world.¹⁰

NUCLEAR PHYSICS, RESPONSIBILITY, AND VOCATION

Oppenheimer has been a focus for reflection on the relationship between truth and worldly power: between the intellectual and the polis, pure science and technology, charisma and bureaucracy. Oppenheimer’s personal trajectory represents a key moment in a larger story of social changes impacting the organization of science and intellectual life: bureaucratization, professionalization, the rise of science as a career, the routinization of career patterns, and, above all, the ever closer integration of science into the affairs of state.

Max Weber linked the rise of modern rational bureaucracy to a particular character structure, that of the "personally detached and strictly ‘objective’ expert. This figure of the expert stood in conflict with, and in Western societies has gradually replaced, the older type of humanistic cultivated man. The education of the cultivated man aimed at producing a particular kind of bearing in life rather than expert knowledge per se. Weber wrote, Behind all the present discussions of the foundations of the educational system, the struggle of the ‘specialist type of man’ against the older type of ‘cultivated man’ is hidden at some decisive point . . . This fight intrudes into all intimate cultural questions."¹¹ The decline of the cultivated man and the rise of the specialist reflected the increasing cultural dominance of science, expertise, and rationality and their separation from other frameworks of value. In the disenchanted world of modernity, science has had to stand independently from religion, art, or humanistic moral values. All former illusions such as science as the way to true God or the way to true happiness have been dispelled. Weberagreed with Tolstoy that science could give "no answer to . . . the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’ Instead, the value of the scientific enterprise in a rationalized and disenchanted world was limited to the service of factual knowledge: Science today is a ‘vocation’ organized in special disciplines in the service of self-clarification and knowledge of interrelated facts. It is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations." Weber’s conception of the ethos of science was set in tension between the twin connotations of both the German Beruf and the English vocation: on the one hand, the more archaic and spiritual value of the calling; on the other, the modern secular occupation. Weber’s concern was whether it was possible to sustain a sense of the meaning and value of science while it was becoming a secular, routinized profession.¹²

Michel Foucault has also centrally grappled with the implications of the specialization and disenchantment of the intellectual role during the twentieth century, and he has pointed to Oppenheimer as a pivotal figure in these transformations. Like Weber, he emphasized the modern divorce of knowledge from sacred religious and moral values: Truth is a thing of this world. Instead of speaking for transcendent values or universal truths, the modern intellectual-as-expert provides techniques of power: the intellectual is no longer the rhapsodist of the eternal, but the strategist of life and death. And Foucault wrote, It seems to me that this figure of the ‘specific’ intellectual has emerged since the Second World War. Perhaps it was the atomic scientist (in a word, or rather a name: Oppenheimer) who acted as the point of transition between the universal and the specific intellectual.¹³ Foucault suggested that Oppenheimer and the atomic scientists were able to combine the narrowly focused expertise of the specific intellectual with the claim to speak for all people that had been the mark of the universal intellectual. The global scope of the atomic threat enabled the scientists to be understood as speaking for humanity when they addressed the problems of the nuclear age. This universality, however, was rooted not in claims to universal truth or transcendent moral law, but rather in a new kind of global technological power.

Foucault’s account points to the way in which the Manhattan Project drew together and intensified those processes identified by Weber, which in more dispersed ways were already changing the nature of the scientific vocation. Foucault, however, did not adequately address the ethical tensions and ambiguities in the new scientific role that emerged. The claim to universality of specialized expertise remains contested, and the Tolstoyan problem of meaning, emphasized by Weber, has not disappeared. The threat of atomic warfare gave rise to moral problems that could not be addressed by specialized expertise alone. The atomic bomb was the culmination of the rise of technical expertise, but it also called into question the nature of expert authority and its adequacy to deal with the crises of the modern world. The bomb project put scientists in a new situation, in which they had to either claim some sort of moral authority or publicly divest themselves of it entirely. Weber’s problem of vocation was at the heart of struggles over the nature and scope of scientific authority in the wake of World War II.¹⁴

This book tells a particular story, about how these tensions played out in Oppenheimer’s life and career. It aims to capture the particularity of his situation and of his interventions, while at the same time drawing attention to the broader institutional and cultural context that he was negotiating. It was a particular social and institutional trajectory that shaped Oppenheimer’s personal identity and his historical significance. Of course, there are other individuals whose trajectories offer similarities and who responded in interestingly similar and different ways to the challenge of atomic weapons. But more than any other figure, Oppenheimer had the potential to combine the emerging technocratic power of the scientist within the state with a humanistic and critical perspective on the development of nuclear weapons. He therefore stood in notable contrast with such scientists as Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, and others who criticized the national-security state from positions outside it. He equally stood in contrast with institutional insiders, such as Edward Teller, who defined their role as scientists strictly in instrumental terms, exclusive of any obligation to consider questions of ultimate ends.

Einstein was the most important representative of the view that scientists have a moral obligation to address the ends to which research is applied. His only direct involvement with the atomic bomb project was in signing a letter to Roosevelt urging that the U.S. government take seriously the possibility of developing an atomic weapon. This step was motivated by his fear of the Nazis. But after World War II, Einstein became a vigorous advocate of arms control and world government. For example, the (Bertrand) Russell–Einstein manifesto of 1955 highlighted the threat of nuclear holocaust and called on scientists to work toward the goal of ending war. It led to the institution of the Pugwash conferences, aiming to promote scientific internationalism as a vehicle for peaceful international cooperation. Einstein was never included in, nor did he seek inclusion in, formal government advisory bodies. His political engagement was always as an outsider, drawing on moral authority rather than political power.¹⁵

Others more embroiled than Einstein in the atomic bomb project could nevertheless foresee an arms race and tried to take steps to prevent one. Bohr spent the war trying to convince the British and U.S. governments to support a plan for international control of atomic energy. Although he was an important influence on other scientists, including Oppenheimer, his own direct interventions met with little success. For example, Bohr’s meeting with Winston Churchill in May 1944 was a disaster. Bohr, characteristically, mumbled in a barely audible voice, and Churchill understood only that he was advocating telling the Soviets about the atomic bomb. Churchill thought Bohr dangerously naive, and Bohr later said, We did not speak the same language.¹⁶

A group of scientists on the Manhattan Project at Chicago, including James Franck, Leo Szilard, and Eugene Rabinowitch, tried to prevent the military use of the atomic bomb by arguing for a technical demonstration instead. Szilard circulated a petition urging restraint against the military use of the bomb. Versions of this petition were signed by more than a hundred scientists in the Chicago and Oak Ridge laboratories. But in the face of the powerful institutional and bureaucratic momentum toward use of the bomb, such efforts proved of little avail. Szilard told Oppenheimer at the time that although the petition was unlikely to influence wartime decisions, nevertheless, from a point of view of the standing of the scientists in the eyes of the general public one or two years from now it is a good thing that a minority of scientists should have gone on record in favor of giving greater weight to moral arguments.¹⁷

The connection of science to political activity has often been associated with a belief in the possibility of a rational solution to political problems. Rabinowitch and other figures associated with the Federation of American Scientists and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists believed that, as sociologist Edward Shils summarized it, the scientific method that led to the monstrosity [of the atomic bomb] could also lead the way to the solution. Rabinowitch thought that the scientific method could replace the vagaries of political passion, ideology, and self-righteousness.¹⁸ The same spirit was expressed by Linus Pauling, the 1962 Nobel Peace Prize winner, co-founder of the Emergency Committee of the Atomic Scientists in 1946, and an important force behind the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty. Joseph Rotblat was working along the same lines in Britain after the war. The only scientist to leave Los Alamos on moral grounds, he later became a founder of Pugwash and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 for his work in promoting arms control. These scientists explicitly sought to connect their professional identity with a moral and political agenda, and they have done so largely outside governmental channels, pursuing their campaign within civil society.¹⁹

Others, while harboring moral objections to the buildup of nuclear weapons, have been more ambivalent about the place these objections should occupy in relation to their professional scientific life. For example, historian Silvan S. Schweber suggests that the theoretical physicist Hans Bethe wrestled with moral problems but ultimately decided that only through working on weapons could he have any real influence on policy. While he articulated technical arguments for a test ban and, later, against the Strategic Defense Initiative, he did not—unlike, say, Einstein—consistently oppose nuclear weapons on moral grounds.²⁰

Teller, in contrast, showed no ambivalence whatever. For him, scientists in the relevant fields had a clear-cut, positive obligation to push the boundaries of what is technically possible; in the field of weapons research, this meant developing ever more powerful and sophisticated means of destruction. Teller argued that scientists have responsibilities that are real and great. The scientist must try to understand nature and to extend man’s use of that understanding. When a scientist has learned what he can and built what he can build, his work is not yet done. He must also explain in clear and simple terms what he has found and what he has constructed. And there his responsibility as a scientist ends.²¹

Teller’s argument is premised on the radical incommensurability between ultimate values. In an argument closely paralleling Weber’s, he suggested that science as a vocation is one value-sphere among many and that the responsibility of the scientist is strictly limited to that particular value-sphere:

There are three things of great importance which philosophers like Plato said must be answered together in a positive way: What is good? What is true? What is beautiful? I disagree with Plato. I think that these are three entirely different questions. What is true is up to the scientist. What is good is up to the politician and maybe the religious leaders. What is beautiful is up to the artist. These are three very important questions. And neither of them should be handled by what the other two answers are.²²

The modern condition of the separation between value-spheres and the fragmentation of authority implied for Teller the limitation of the weapons scientist to the production of weapons—he should not concern himself with their consequences.

Teller’s position is the official one of modern Western society. It is institutionalized in the official culture of bureaucratic organizations that divide professional from personal life and that restrict responsibility to narrow institutional roles. While Teller himself may be a controversial figure, his conception of the scientific role and its responsibilities is not. It is one that is tacitly subscribed to by the many thousands of scientists across the industrialized world who work in weapons laboratories and for whom perfecting the means of mass killing is a bureaucratic job requirement.²³ Assuming a responsibility beyond the instrumental role advocated by Teller has generally meant becoming an outsider in relation to the bureaucratic apparatus of the national-security state.

The predicament in which I situate Oppenheimer is therefore general across Western societies. It involves, first, the fragmentation of cultural authority endemic to bureaucratic and industrial modernity and to the scientific vocation in the twentieth century; and, second, the crisis posed by the atomic bomb and forms of technoscientific power that break down the institutional boundaries of science as a distinct sphere. Specialized modern intellectual authority appears increasingly inadequate to deal with the global dimensions of the problems of late modern technoscience. As Einstein put it, "By painful experience we have learned that rational thinking does not suffice to solve the problems of our social life. Penetrating research and keen scientific work have often had tragic implications for mankind, . . . creating the means for his own mass destruction."²⁴

The integration of science with state power and violence cut to the heart of postwar liberal political culture. Science was a key motif in the reconstruction of Western liberalism after the end of World War II. Sociologist Shiv Visvanathan has argued that in the face of the twin crises of the Great Depression and the plunge into world war, "science took over as the sustaining force of the liberal imagination . . . The scientific method was substituted for the invisible hand and [Karl] Popper and [Michael] Polanyi became the Adam Smiths of this new regime."²⁵ Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) and Polanyi’s Science, Faith and Society (1946), though they expressed different epistemologies, converged on the notion that science instantiated and expressed the core values of liberal democracy and that the professional values of science made it incompatible with totalitarianism.²⁶

Yet this vision of science as a beacon of liberal humanist values was disturbed by the nightmares of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even as the atomic bomb made science a sword and shield against totalitarianism, it also rendered the gap between high culture and barbarism uncomfortably narrow, even nonexistent. As Oppenheimer saw it, the scientific endeavor, fostered throughout the centuries, in which the role of coercion was perhaps reduced more completely than in any other human activity, had culminated in the construction of a secret, and an unparalleled instrument of coercion.²⁷

Oppenheimer occupied a pivotal position in these moral, political, and cultural dilemmas and conflicts. He emerged from the war as a nodal figure in the new relationship between science and the American state and as the embodiment of the new cultural significance of science. Until 1954, he played a key mediating role between government and the scientific community. Oppenheimer attempted to hold together the competing scientific roles of the humanistic critic, the technocrat, and the weaponeer. He was seen as uniquely able to combine a technocratic advisory role within the state with more archaic forms of cultural authority. To explore Oppenheimer’s individual trajectory is therefore to examine tensions between humanism and technological expertise that lie at the core of modern science and society.

CULTIVATION, CHARISMA, AND SCIENTIFIC AUTHORITY

Oppenheimer’s persona seems to pitch directly against dominant sociological ideas about the nature of self and authority in modern science, large-scale organizations, and government. He was not only a nuclear expert but also the kind of cultivated man whom cultural commentators since Weber have repeatedly pronounced extinct. In contrast to the narrowly specialized focus of modern bureaucratized big science, Oppenheimer came to be celebrated for his general or humanistic intellect. He once described himself as a properly educated esthete. Chemist Glenn Seaborg wrote of the scope of his knowledge and interest—in languages, literature, the arts, music, and the social and political problems of the world and of his fervent desire to see and relate an order and purpose in the entire spectrum of human existence and experience. William L. Laurence, the only journalist to witness the Manhattan Project’s first atomic bomb test, described Oppenheimer as not merely a scientist but a poet and a dreamer. At one of his last public appearances, to receive an honorary degree at Princeton, Oppenheimer was introduced as a modern Renaissance man: a physicist and sailor, philosopher and horseman, linguist and cook, lover of fine wine and better poetry.²⁸

Aesthetic values were central to Oppenheimer’s personal appeal and public image. The wife of physicist P. A. M. Dirac wrote to Oppenheimer in 1964 commending him on his impeccable taste: Many people have a lot of money, but few people have taste. The Oppenheimer house was a relief from this general philistinism; to wake up in surroundings so pleasant to the eye, wherever one turns to, is to me a great feast indeed. Oppenheimer was a darling host. The Oppenheimers’ home in Princeton (a house dating from 1696), with its collection of French literature and paintings by van Gogh, Vuillard, and Derain, was described by a journalist as the perfect mirror of their cultivation. It was characteristic that in 1958, Look magazine photographed Oppenheimer in the Princeton house standing in front of his inherited van Gogh.²⁹

Because he was financially independent, Oppenheimer could not be perceived as a mere bureaucratic hireling. While science was increasingly professionalized and bureaucratized, he retained some remnants of the qualities of the gentleman-amateur. Physicist Isidor I. Rabi, for example, had been struck by the way in which Oppenheimer, as a postdoctoral student in Zurich, would talk about literature rather than his studies in physics, and also by the apparent effortlessness and unconcern with which Oppenheimer approached his work. Even at Los Alamos, according to physicist Charles Critchfield, Oppenheimer "didn’t talk about weapons or physics. He talked about the mystery of life . . . He [would] walk around the room . . . He would rub his palms together and look to the side . . . He kept quoting the Bhagavad Gita."³⁰

Oppenheimer’s cultivation was often invoked in relation to social virtues. In his novel The Man Who Would Be God, Chevalier’s character of Sebastian Bloch—clearly recognizable as Oppenheimer—is celebrated for his general intellect: He’s said to have what they call a universal mind. He doesn’t limit himself to one speciality like most scientists, but seems to be completely at home in the whole realm of science and the arts as well. And this general cultivation is crucially linked in the description to gentlemanly qualities of disinterestedness: "He seems to have little or no personal ambition . . . Most of the important contributions he has made have been ideas passed on to colleagues and students, or work done in collaboration, for which he has never claimed credit."³¹

Chevalier wrote of Oppenheimer, "His presence . . . seemed to bring out in each of the assembled what was most genuine and most expressive in his true nature. This mirrors the refrain of the Los Alamos scientists, who noted that Oppenheimer tended to draw out and clarify the key points of any technical discussion, his gentlemanly disinterestedness ensuring a genuinely civil, rather than autocratic, role. According to Victor Weisskopf, Oppenheimer gave us an example of how large scientific enterprises can be more than the sum of the collaborative effort of their groups. They can be imbued with a creative spirit based upon a common heritage and a common aim. Physicist James Tuck, part of the British mission to Los Alamos, similarly said, His function here [at Los Alamos] was not to do penetrating original research but to inspire it. It required a surpassing knowledge of science and of scientists . . . A lesser man could not have done it. Scientists are not necessarily cultured, especially in America. Oppenheimer had to be. And it was because they had a great gentleman to serve under, said Tuck, that the Los Alamos scientists invariably remember that golden time with enormous emotion."³²

Oppenheimer’s breadth and cultivation were not only humanistic and aesthetic, but also technical and scientific. Physicist Robert R. Wilson, for example, highlighted the aesthetic in Oppenheimer’s influence on and leadership of American physics. When Oppenheimer received the Fermi Award in 1963, Wilson wrote to him that American physics is beautiful to behold, and this beauty has to do with a style, and an intensity, and a depth that we can relate to your profound example. Rabi wrote, Oppenheimer understood the whole structure of physics with extraordinary clarity, and not only the structure, but the interactions between the different elements. In addition to his expertise in theoretical physics, he would continually amaze experimenters by his great knowledge of their own subject. In an age of specialization, Oppenheimer stood out as a general scientific philosopher, and this was a key part of what was described as his intellectual sex appeal.³³

Oppenheimer is remembered as the man who insisted that the first atomic bomb test be called Trinity, invoking John Donne’s sonnet Batter my heart, three-person’d God; who summed up the new place of the scientist in the atomic age by quoting a line from the Bhagavad Gita, I am become Death, destroyer of worlds; who told Truman, Mr. President, I have blood on my hands; and who recognized that the physicists have known sin.³⁴ Oppenheimer was seen to transcend the role of the scientific specialist even as he gave voice to the predicament of this figure and to the meaning of science in the postwar nuclear age. This was a key aspect of what was, and still is, repeatedly referred to as Oppenheimer’s charisma.

The term charisma was introduced into sociological vocabulary by Weber to pick out a form of authority that was being lost from the modern scientific and bureaucratic world. In Weber’s usage, charismatic authority derived from an attributed gift of grace or specific gifts of body and spirit that set an individual apart as a natural leader. Weber described charisma as a revolutionary force, fundamentally opposed to any form of institutional routine and especially to bureaucratic organization. The charismatic structure, he said, knows no regulated ‘career,’ ‘advancement,’ ‘salary,’ or regulated and expert training. The modern disenchanted world, devoid of belief in magical or supernatural forces and qualities and increasingly pervaded by bureaucratic structures, is also a world emptied of charisma. Since science is the source of this disenchantment of the world, and since Weber observed the increasingly close affiliation of science with the bureaucratic state, he suggested that scientists would be one of the most unlikely groups in which to find a charismatic leader.³⁵

For sociologist Daniel Bell, it was just this contrast and paradox that made Oppenheimer’s persona such an appealing, but also elusive, one. He described Oppenheimer as a gnostic figure who seemed to have stepped more from the world of thaumaturgy than of science. To Bell, Oppenheimer exemplified the messianic role of the scientist and the charismatic dimension of modern science; and, he added, it is "the tension between those charismatic elements and the realities of large-scale organization that will