By Wendy Smith
Wendy Smith is the author of "Real Life Drama: The Group Theater and America,
1931-1940."
August 25, 2002
BROTHERHOOD OF THE BOMB: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer,
Ernest Lawrence and Edward Teller, by Gregg Herken. Holt, 448 pp., $30.
The invention and employment of nuclear weapons was one of the 20th century's
most gripping dramas, raising military and moral issues of monumental
complexity and urgency with which we still grapple.
The subject has prompted many excellent books, perhaps most notably Richard
Rhodes' "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (1986) and "Dark Sun: The Making of the
Hydrogen Bomb" (1995). Smithsonian curator Gregg Herken offers an interesting
new approach, taking advantage of recently declassified documents from the FBI,
the Atomic Energy Commission, the U.S. Army and the Soviet government to give a
much fuller picture of the personal and political maneuvers that shaped every
aspect of nuclear policy.
Although billed as a collective biography of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest
Lawrence and Edward Teller, "Brotherhood of the Bomb" is actually broader in
scope. Providing vivid thumbnail sketches of virtually every scientist involved
in nuclear physics, the military men who oversaw the bomb's development, the
Russian and American Communists who sought to pass its secrets to the Soviets,
the domestic security agents who shadowed them and the government officials who
determined nuclear strategy, Herken brings to life a whole world of intrigue,
ambition and political passions of every variety. His main narrative stretches
from 1939, "almost a year after German scientists had first observed the
fissioning of uranium," to the moratorium on nuclear testing agreed to in
Geneva by American and Soviet representatives in 1958. It does not seek to
reproduce Rhodes' detailed account of the bomb's creation but rather focuses on
the struggle over the larger questions of who would control it, and who would
benefit from it.
"Benefit" may seem an odd word to use in conjunction with the deadliest weapons
ever fashioned, but one of this book's principal virtues is its frank depiction
of the Faustian bargain physicists made to obtain previously undreamed-of
amounts of money they would never have received for purely theoretical
research. The member of Herken's central trio who most clearly demonstrates
this is Lawrence, whose Radiation Laboratory at Berkeley was the earliest
beneficiary of freehanded government spending. The military-industrial complex
Dwight D. Eisenhower decried upon leaving office in 1961 had a crucial academic
component, and Lawrence played a key role in shaping it. It's no accident that
Berkeley was the site of the nation's most vehement anti-Vietnam War protests
during the 1960s; the University of California's economic well-being was
closely linked to military ties forged by Lawrence in the '40s. The ever more
enormous particle accelerators he built to smash atoms and produce fissionable
raw materials for Oppenheimer's bomb builders at Los Alamos, N.M., required
equally enormous funding, which the government was only too happy to provide as
it raced to defeat the Nazis.
Lawrence made sure that funding continued after World War II by convincing
government officials that his department's research was vital to the Cold War
struggle against the Soviet Union. He disliked Oppenheimer's left-wing
politics, but he kept his distance from Teller's ferocious anti-communism as
well, claiming ill health to avoid testifying at the 1954 hearing that deprived
Oppenheimer of his security clearance. That decision, on the heels of the
University of California's ill-advised attempt to force faculty members to sign
a loyalty oath in 1950, tore apart the scientific community, with lasting
consequences. Teller was convinced that his difficulty in recruiting physicists
to work on Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" project had its source in enmities
formed during the hearing, at which he was the only physicist of international
stature to testify against Oppenheimer.
Herken's coverage of the complicated tangle of events leading to Oppenheimer's
fall takes a typically post-Cold War stance. He makes extensive use of FBI
surveillance and messages between Moscow and Soviet agents deciphered by the
U.S. Army's Venona code-breakers to paint a nonjudgmental but emphatic portrait
of Oppenheimer's prewar social circle, including several physics graduate
students who later worked at Los Alamos, as consisting largely of convinced
radicals, many of them Communists and a few quite likely willing to pass
classified material to Soviet spies. On the other hand, Herken makes it clear
that much of the surveillance was illegal (including an FBI wiretap of
"Oppie's" conversations with his lawyers, in blatant violation of
attorney-client privilege), that Oppenheimer rejected the one approach made to
him by a Soviet intermediary and that his accusers were motivated primarily by
his opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb and advocacy of
international nuclear controls, which might have forestalled the unbridled arms
race that created the current terrifying stockpiles.
Dogmatists of both the left and right will find nits to pick in Herken's
approach. Those not emotionally invested in Cold War ideological disputes will
appreciate his evenhandedness and the human contradictions it reveals. Lawrence
argued on humanitarian grounds for a demonstration of the atomic bomb before
its use on Hiroshima, and Oppenheimer opposed him, but the hydrogen bomb whose
super-destructive potential caused Oppie to recoil apparently gave Lawrence
visions only of more money for bigger and better labs. Teller initially
declined to take a job at the University of California after three Berkeley
physicists were fired for refusing to sign the loyalty oath ("Since the days of
the Nazis I have seen no such thing") but couldn't resist the opportunity to
advance the hydrogen bomb (his personal obsession) at the university's new
Livermore weapons lab. "I have quit the appeasers and joined the fascists," he
told a friend.
There are neither white knights nor outright villains in Herken's meticulous
narrative, which is particularly strong in its delineation of the exceedingly
complex personalities and opinions of Lewis Strauss, a Republican investment
banker who was Oppenheimer's most implacable enemy on the AEC, and fellow
commissioner Thomas Murray, a New York industrialist who also distrusted
Oppenheimer but who as a devout Catholic was appalled by nuclear weapons and
fought hard for the test ban treaty that Strauss violently opposed. Herken
performs a valuable service in bringing their crucial but little-known roles to
the attention of the general public.
It would be nice if he commented on the contemporary relevance of the fact that
two businessmen appointed by President Harry S Truman had more impact on the
direction and intensity of nuclear-weapons development than almost any elected
official, but editorial intrusions are not this author's style. Although
smoothly written and notable for its lucid scientific expositions and nice use
of human touches (such as Oppenheimer's fondness for spicy food and stiff
drinks), Herken's text may daunt some readers simply because it declines to
provide an organizing framework for its dense flow of detail. The themes are
there, though, and anyone willing to tease them out will find "Brotherhood of
the Bomb" a fresh and original work with much to tell us about the fearsome
weapons whose creation, funding and deployment had major social and economic
consequences that we live with today.
Copyright (c) 2002, Newsday, Inc.