The Men Who Built the Bomb

In “Brotherhood of the Bomb,” Gregg Herken has written an immensely readable account of the lives of three physicists who led us into the Nuclear Age. Robert Oppenheimer directed the wartime effort to design and make the atomic bomb at Los Alamos; Ernest Lawrence developed the method that produced the uranium-235 for the Hiroshima bomb; and Edward Teller, the only one of the three still alive, was the chief designer of the hydrogen bomb. Much of the story is familiar territory, but Herken provides a new angle by looking at the intersecting lives of his three protagonists.

Herken begins his story in the 1930s in Berkeley, where Lawrence was building machines to accelerate elementary particles; in 1939, Lawrence received the Nobel Prize for this work. Oppenheimer was the leading theoretical physicist in Berkeley, and he and Lawrence became close friends in spite of differences in temperament and political outlook. Teller’s role grew after 1942, when he was recognized as one of the main advocates of research on the hydrogen bomb.

Herken shows how Lawrence brought the enthusiasm and the skills of an American entrepreneur to physics, ushering it into the age of Big Science. A brilliant organizer and director of research, he could do unexpected things. It was Lawrence who twice proposed, in meetings in May and June 1945, that the bomb be demonstrated to the Japanese in “some innocuous but striking manner” to persuade them to surrender before the bomb was used to destroy cities. In the mid-1950s, when it became possible to meet Soviet physicists, he was taken with the prospect that such contacts might lead to breaking down the Iron Curtain.

But Oppenheimer and Lawrence fell out over politics and personal matters. And after the war, Oppenheimer resisted Teller’s push for the hydrogen bomb and opposed the creation of a second nuclear weapon laboratory. Despite his opposition, however, by the time the book’s narrative ends, in the mid-1950s, the United States had tested a hydrogen bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb and set up a second nuclear weapon laboratory named for Lawrence (the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) to work on the hydrogen bomb. After loyalty-security hearings on Oppenheimer, the U.S. government declared him a security risk and deprived him of security clearance.

Herken had access to government documents, personal papers and memoirs, as well as to FBI transcripts of recorded telephone conversations. “Brotherhood of the Bomb” also benefits from new evidence about Soviet espionage from declassified Russian documents and from the Venona documents, consisting of U.S. intercepts of coded messages between Moscow and its agents in the United States. With these sources, Herken provides a collective biography of three men who left a huge mark on history through their political advice and administrative skill as well as through their scientific research.

There is one important new source, however, that Herken was not able to use and assess: Soviet documents listing Oppenheimer as a secret or covert member of the Communist Party, which have recently been declassified. The suspicion that Oppenheimer was a Communist is a major element in Herken’s story, as are Oppenheimer’s consistent denials that he was ever a member of the party.

All three men worked hard to develop nuclear weapons and became deeply involved in Washington councils on nuclear policy. The great disagreement among them, however, was over what priority to give development of the hydrogen bomb. Teller, supported by Lawrence, pressed for an all-out effort. Oppenheimer, though he changed his mind from time to time, opposed its development in the late 1940s and early 1950s for moral, political and technical reasons.

At Oppenheimer’s security hearing, Teller testified in a way that suggested that Oppenheimer should be deprived of his security clearance because he had taken the wrong position on the hydrogen bomb. As a result, Teller experienced hostility and ostracism from the physics community, which apparently caused him considerable pain.

Oppenheimer was undoubtedly the most complex of the three men. He proved to be an unexpectedly brilliant director of Los Alamos. But his close ties to the Communist Party raised questions from the very beginning about his suitability for such a position. He was granted the necessary security clearance only at the insistence of Gen. Leslie Groves, the head of the Manhattan Project.

In 1943 a communist friend, Haakon Chevalier, mentioned to Oppenheimer that he had been told of someone who could pass information discreetly to the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer quickly cut off the conversation. Subsequently he gave different accounts of it to Groves and the security people in the Manhattan Project. When he was confronted with these differences at the security hearing, he could not explain them. His behavior was hard to fathom, and it fueled suspicions about his loyalty to the United States. Herken suggests, plausibly though without proof, that Oppenheimer’s evasions were designed to protect his brother, Frank, who may have been involved as well.

Oppenheimer was an enigmatic figure. The decision not to renew his security clearance was a terrible blow to him, and he appeared to many to be a victim of McCarthyism. He was too complex a figure, however, to conform to the image of a persecuted liberal. In the summer of 1945 he helped to quash Lawrence’s proposal for an atomic bomb demonstration, thus making certain that it would be used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He opposed the hydrogen bomb through the early 1950s but at the same time encouraged the development of tactical nuclear weapons and more powerful fission weapons.

Herken quotes a revealing comment made to Oppenheimer by a Dutch physicist: “Robert, the reason you know so much about ethics is that you have no character.” Oppenheimer characteristically quoted this in a letter to a colleague. Perhaps he did not have a very clear sense of his own self, which he sometimes presented to others in a playful manner. Some people saw Oppenheimer as a poseur, but that seems unfair in view of the deep seriousness with which he regarded nuclear weapons and the effort he made after the war to secure international control of atomic energy.

Do the recently declassified Soviet documents listing Oppenheimer as a member of the Communist Party change our understanding of him and his role? Assuming that the documents are genuine, they do indeed throw into sharper relief the contradictions in Oppenheimer’s character and in his actions. They do not prove that he was a spy or an “enabler” of spies. There was extensive espionage at Los Alamos, but Oppenheimer cannot be shown to have known or approved of it. The documents do indicate, however, that unless Oppenheimer persuaded himself that he had not really been a member of the party (what does “membership” mean?), he perjured himself in the 1954 hearings.

Herken tells this story with great skill, making excellent use of copious sources. What he does not do, however, is stand back from his narrative to analyze the issues that it raises.

One of the charges made by Oppenheimer’s critics, for example, was that his advice on the hydrogen bomb would, if followed, have imperiled the security of the United States. Twenty-five years ago, Herbert York, a Lawrence protege and the first director of the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, demonstrated that U.S. national security would not have been harmed if Oppenheimer’s advice had been taken.

One can be skeptical about the possibility of the Soviet Union’s reciprocating American restraint in the development of the hydrogen bomb and still believe that restraint could have been tried without harming the United States. Herken does not address this question but sticks to the narrative of the arguments as they were presented at the time, which is a pity. We should nevertheless be grateful for “Brotherhood of the Bomb,” a well-written, well-documented, exciting and yet unhappy tale of a crucial encounter between science and politics.