An American Prometheus

I have at long last finished An American Prometheus, the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Prometheus we remember as the Greek hero who angered Zeus by giving fire and presumably light to humans. His punishment was to be chained to a rock where on a daily basis birds of prey came to eat out his stomach. Robert Oppenheimer, colloquially known as “the father of the A-bomb” was similarly punished by a McCarthy-inspired inquisition which resulted in removal of his Atomic Energy Commission security clearance.

A lengthy and carefully crafted biography turns on two points of time in the life of Robert Oppenheimer, the first being the creation of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos New Mexico in 1945 and the second being Oppenheimer's administrative hearing, in effect a trial, contemporaneous with the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. In his years prior to Los Alamos we have a detailed description of privilege and brilliance, years at Harvard, studies with professors whose names are as familiar as Neils Bohr and others and the intellectual life of Berkeley and Europe. Oppenheimer is intense, intellectual, overbearing, superior, oversexed and perhaps somewhat amoral. His personal life could be generously called a failure. Oppenheimer was at least a “fellow traveler” with Communists in the 1930's, and the authors may have given him the benefit of the doubt as to those years. Oppenheimer was, however, at the right place at the right time to lead the United States in a race against Germany in development of atomic weapons.

As the European war wound down in 1945 the race against the Germans becomes a race for its own sake. The project was shifted to a weapon to be used against the Japanese, and although some scientists expressed concerns about the use of the bomb, the debate about its use has been wider and more general since 1945 than at the time. There is no evidence that either Oppenheimer or Truman had any reservations about the Alamogordo test on July 16, 1945 or any serious or lingering concerns prior to August 6, 1945. Afterwards, seeing the certainty of nuclear buildups, Oppenheimer opposed development of the hydrogen “super” bombs, for which opposition he was labeled as a security risk.

Oppenheimer’s fall came in the form of a 1954 hearing on removal of his AEC security clearance. Orchestrated by Lewis Strauss, AEC Chairman the hearing violated every standard of due process or fundamental fairness, and the divided panel ultimately found that Oppenheimer had given inconsistent accounts, years apart, of a 1942 meeting in which he was approached about sharing atomic secrets with the Soviets, a suggestion he immediately rejected. In the end he was found unsuited for a security clearance in a wave of societal paranoia, not because of anything he had done but on account of telling different versions of events to protect a friend. Not the event itself, but the telling of it, in effect the coverup. Shades of Bill Clinton and Scooter Libby. “American Prometheus” is a suitable title.