The Man Who Gave Us the Bomb:
Oppenheimer, Chevalier & the Garage Bomb

By Jon Else
This article originally ran in the S.F.Chronicle, 11/26/02

At just the moment when America contemplates home-grown A-bombs in Iraq and Communist North Korea, historian Gregg Herken has re-kindled the debate over whether J. Robert Oppenheimer "the father of the atomic bomb," was himself a secret Communist in the 1930s. In his new book "The Brotherhood of the bomb," Herken reminds us, as we dance toward war in the Middle East, that half a century ago Oppenheimer, perhaps against his better judgment, helped set in motion an arms race from which we can never escape.

Whether or not the enigmatic physicist, chosen by FDR's generals in 1942 to oversee the pioneering nuclear weapons work at Los Alamos, lied about being a member of a "secret'' Communist cell is an intriguing question. If true, it casts dark light on Oppenheimer's endlessly puzzling character and suggests that he committed perjury by repeatedly testifying that he was never a member. But against the snarled and exhausted debates over Whittaker Chambers, Alger Hiss, the receding Cold War, and the wreckage of lives brought low by McCarthyism and loyalty oaths, his party membership somehow doesn't really matter.

But what mattered then, and what matters now, is the atomic bomb that Oppenheimer built.

Early in World War II, high on a remote mesa at Los Alamos New Mexico, he assembled what was certainly the greatest concentration of very smart people ever brought together for one single task. Many of them were brilliant young left-wing intellectuals, many had escaped Nazi occupied Europe, or like Oppenheimer, had Jewish relatives fleeing the Germans.

Their task was to build a weapon to stop Hitler's unstoppable wave of systematic murder, and they built it well. If they hadn't forged that first atomic bomb and urged that it be dropped on Japanese civilians (even after Hitler's defeat), someone else probably would have. But they are the ones who did it, and we are the ones who have lived ever since with that bomb and its ever-multiplying descendants.

Oppenheimer's Hiroshima bomb was about the size of a Volkswagen Bug. Pound for pound, it was the most expensive man-made object ever constructed, but it was fluff compared to the multi-megaton savagery soon to be concocted by others with stronger stomachs. By 1952, Los Alamos scientists had exploded a bomb 500 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb; in 1961 the Soviets exploded a 58-megaton bomb, with 3,000 times the force of the Hiroshima explosion. Edward Teller, who had argued against dropping the first bomb on a city, was by 1954 proposing a 10,000-megaton bomb ... and by 1960 they had figured out how to mass produce little A-bombs the size of cantaloupes.

Since 1945, something like 100,000 nuclear bombs have been manufactured. Long ago we passed that milestone in history when it became practical to exterminate all life on earth. That probably won't happen in our lifetimes. But if you can get together a coffee can of enriched uranium, the Hiroshima-sized bombs designed at Los Alamos are relatively cheap and easy to build ... in Iraq, in Israel, probably in Idaho or Paraguay if you're passionate and determined enough. Getting the fuel is the only really hard part.

Today, Saddam Hussein apparently dreams of building a uranium hydride bomb (designed by Edward Teller at Los Alamos in 1941), and is apparently separating weapons-grade uranium on simple, old-fashioned machines called ""Calutrons,'' so named for the University of California at Berkeley where they were designed by Earnest Lawrence in 1942 for the Manhattan Project. Against this legacy of bombs, and rumors of war, the question of Oppenheimer's Communist party membership is intriguing, but in the end not that important.

In 50s he was the most influential scientist in America, but his fibs, fabrications, and duplicity got him in a world of trouble. Back in 1943, without telling his friend, the French novelist Haakon Chevalier, Oppenheimer had concocted a bizarre tale for security investigators at Los Alamos, falsely claiming that Chevalier was part of an imagined plot to steal the secret of the atomic bomb. In fact, neither Chevalier nor Oppenheimer was a spy, but fabrication ruined the unwitting Chevalier's career. Later, together with a poison brew of other contradictions, the "tissue of lies" resurfaced in a security hearing and destroyed Oppenheimer's own career.

By the time I met Chevalier, he was a kind and world-weary old writer, who had endured much of his life playing Salieri to Oppenheimer's Mozart. Oppie had made history, Haakon had not. Late one night in 1979, on a gravel road in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Haakon told me that Oppenheimer, his friend (and betrayer), had briefly belonged to a "special unit" of the Communist Party in Berkeley in the late 30s

Oppenheimer, who died in 1967, may or may not have been a clandestine Communist, but Chevalier's claim (his remains the only testimony, buttressed by recently released Soviet documents) told me little we didn't already know about Oppenheimer's very public leftist politics in the 1930s and his dissembling in the '40s. Chevalier (like Herken and subsequent historians) was careful to point out that there is absolutely no evidence that the celebrated physicist ever spied for anyone.

What also struck me that night in 1979 was that the CIA, the Army, HUAC, and the FBI, in 20 years of interrogating Oppenheimer and Chevalier, their families and friends, reading their mail, wiretapping their phones (and their lawyers' phones), shadowing them with agents, hauling them before tribunals, had, to the government's unending consternation, failed to confirm the information which Chevalier so casually passed on to me.

The truly astonishing intelligence failures had happened even before the first bomb, in 1943, when a real Communist spy, the English physicist Klaus Fuchs, had easily slipped detailed drawings of the bomb's plutonium core assembly out the front door of Los Alamos Labs to Stalin. Again in 1949, Fuchs, still a Soviet spy, still employed at Los Alamos, secured a classified U.S. patent on the hydrogen bomb.

American Communism ... perfectly legal, often heroic, sometimes dangerous, often preposterous ... had vanished into irrelevance long before Haakon shared his tidbit with me. By 1979, it was easy to forget the allure that the Soviet system held during the Great Depression, when American capitalism seemed doomed only to the grim business of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The great stumbling giant of Soviet communism would soon lose its compass, and by 1991 it too, was headed for the dustbin. Now, just about the only Stalinists left are in North Korea.

Before Hiroshima, barely a handful among those thousands of people feverishly working on what they knew to be a near-genocidal weapon paused to question what unintended consequences they might set in motion with "the gadget.'' I fear that I myself might not have paused. But after his bombs had blown two entire Japanese

cities off the Earth, (in about nine seconds each), Oppenheimer knew he could never get that ghastly genie back in the bottle.

After the war, he first supported, and then opposed development of the Hydrogen bomb on moral grounds. He and many others from wartime Los Alamos spent the rest of their lives working to effect a lasting peace, to bring all nuclear weapons and all nuclear secrets under international control so that future generations ... our generations ...would not have to live under their cloud. They nearly succeeded.

Now, the Oppenheimer's possible fleeting party membership during the political turmoil on the Berkeley campus in 1939 pales in significance beside the lasting bargain which big universities first struck with big weapons research around that same time on the same campus. That deal proved far more enduring than progressive politics. Herken's tale traces how the wartime urgency of secret Manhattan Project contracts signed in Berkeley's LeConte Hall in 1943 had become so routine by 1950 that President t.k/Robert Sproul and the regents unanimously authorized a classified $11 million Atomic Energy Commission contract without knowing what it was for ... construction of the first hydrogen bomb.

Now, half a century later, as President Bush signs into law the largest defense budget since the Cold War, UC has just renewed a 5-year contract to run the weapons laboratories at Los Alamos and Livermore. Serious talk about the resumption of nuclear testing in Nevada has surfaced within the administration and the labs. Stalinism, fascism, Maoism, liberal democracy, Islamic fundamentalism, and the The Bush Doctrine may ebb and flow, but we will live with atomic bombs until the end of time..

Questions of long-ago allegiance may stay shrouded in mystery. The Los Alamos scientists are almost all gone now. They were mostly humanist bomb builders, nearly all liberals, living in the miracle years of particle physics. The best and the brightest of them spoke half a dozen languages, read the classics in Greek or, like Oppenheimer, the Bhagavad Ghita in Sanskrit, and wrestled with moral demons. But they were filled with hope. They were people like you and me, only much smarter, who, in a fight against evil, designed and built the most savage weapon in history, and they did it in an effort to save civilization.

Only a few weeks before talking with Haakon, I interviewed physicist Frank Oppenheimer, Robert's brother, who also worked on the bomb at Berkeley and Los Alamos. Frank had openly joined the Communist party in the '30s, then openly lied about it, and paid dearly ... refusing to name names, blacklisted from physics in the '50s, forced into internal exile high in the mountains of Colorado, only to emerge as the beloved founder of San Francisco's Exploratorium, one of the finest science museums in the world.

After a long conversation about the '30s and the war years, Frank offered a final thought on the heady triumphs at Los Alamos: "So far, nothing has turned out quite the way we hoped.''