Oppenheimer, the naivety and pathos of scientists

Source: The "Oppenheimer" movie

Written by|Zhang Tianqi Li Shanshan

"Like a man whose destiny is in control".

In 1945, after the first atomic bomb in human history, a colleague described Oppenheimer outside the control center bunker.

This physicist with the subtle "overlord" temperament of the atomic bomb test site was later called the "father of the atomic bomb", and people said that he was Prometheus the fire thief, bringing fire to mankind, but had to bear the punishment of this act for life.

Not only that, but the fire-stealer biographer also considers him an iconic figure in American science: he is almost the last "big public intellectual with a scientific background" in the United States, and since then, scientists have almost degenerated into technocrats, who dare not express their opposition, can only criticize technically, and thus lose the public's trust.

In 1942, 38-year-old Oppenheimer led a group of young people with an average age of only 25 in the western United States, 3 years, $2 billion, they created a mass murderous weapon, won the biggest gamble in the history of human warfare for Americans, and pushed human warfare into a new atomic age - an era in which a city of tens and hundreds of inhabitants can be destroyed in an instant, and humans will easily have the ability to destroy the world.

After a brief period of euphoria of success, the man felt a long period of fear. Two atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, hundreds of thousands of people died, and the "creepy" that haunted him came true, "I feel like my hands are covered in blood," he complained to President Harry S. Truman.

Since then, the man who opened the box has tried to close the box with his own hands - using the reputation of the "father of the atomic bomb", he opposes the research of the more powerful hydrogen bomb, calls for and lobbies, hopes to reach an international agreement banning nuclear weapons, establishes an international organization to restrict the development of nuclear weapons, dreams of awakening people to "abolish nuclear weapons"... He is less and less the image politicians want, he is seriously affecting their plans, and this leads to the "hearing" aimed at getting rid of him.

There, the man was almost stripped naked to face a group of heavily armed opponents, and then all the records were released and he was destroyed.

This "Oppenheimer affair", mixed with political struggle, personal grievances, the Cold War, and McCarthyism, is almost one of the biggest wrongs in the United States of the 20th century. Since then, however, the once-spirited physicist has been an outcast, living in "one's prison" until his death. Some people said of this proud man, saying he was "very humble."

Oppenheimer died in 1967, and in 2006, a biography about him, "Oppenheimer: The Triumph and Tragedy of the "Father of the Atomic Bomb" in the United States, won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and today, the film "Oppenheimer" based on this book is being released.

In a recent interview, Kai Bird, one of the authors of Oppenheimer's Biography, asked: Is what happened to Oppenheimer still happening today? Are scientific facts still being distorted for political gain?

"I'm afraid the answer is clearly yes." Bird replied.

Perhaps, this answer is the reason why we revisit Oppenheimer's story today. We look back on this past and hope that the tragedy of 70 years ago will not be repeated, and hope, as the "father of the atomic bomb" said, that the atomic bomb will be "not only a great danger, but also a great hope" and bring us lasting peace.

Cover of Oppenheimer, published by CITIC Press.

Prophet Oppenheimer

"Those poor little people, those poor little people"

In 2022, the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, a war involving a superpower with nuclear weapons, reminded people who had said goodbye to the shadow of the Cold War for many years the fear of being dominated by nuclear war. This threat of world nuclear war was realized 80 years ago, long before the atomic bomb, in the town founded in Oppenheimer.

In 1943, the second year after the establishment of the atomic bomb factory in Los Alamos, Bohr, like the "father of science", visited. Bohr inspired Oppenheimer to believe that a nuclear-based weapon of mass destruction was on the line, a "terrible thing," but perhaps a "great hope," a new international relationship, a hope for an open, peaceful new world.

In the science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem, a dark forest hypothesis holds that civilization can maintain peace through the deterrence of information barriers. But Oppenheimer and Bohr had another way to keep the peace with trust — peace under nuclear weapons, which requires every country to be confident that no potential enemy is secretly stockpiling such weapons, and that requires full transparency and trust.

It was an "open world" in which international inspectors had free access to any military and industrial facility and had full access to the latest scientific advances, Bohr said. Oppenheimer was clearly convinced that the weapon of mass destruction he was creating would defeat fascism, end all wars, and build a new civilization.

The belief that the atomic bomb would end the war and bring lasting peace to mankind was deeply ingrained in Oppenheimer's heart, even during the hardest years of its development. On the eve of the atomic bomb test, a group of young people began to ethically question whether to continue developing this "little device", and Oppenheimer joined the debate, in which he "prevailed" in a soft voice because "many underage boys will save their lives because of it".

Oppenheimer "is like an angel, true and honest, he can't go wrong ... I believed him," recalled a physicist who participated in the discussion.

In the summer of 1945, when the first atomic bomb was successfully tested, Oppenheimer replied indifferently that the scene of the explosion was "terrifying" but also "not entirely depressing." Years later, recalling that scene, Oppenheimer referred to the sentence he had read in the Bocchavad Gita, "Now I am the Grim Reaper, the destroyer of all worlds"—a phrase that was used in a restricted shot in Nolan's film.

In the two weeks that followed, Oppenheimer became unusually quiet among his elated young colleagues, according to the recollections of his colleagues at the time, and some even remembered him smoking a pipe and saying "those poor little people, those poor little people", with a resigned expression, as if announcing death.

There are some indications that Oppenheimer did not particularly strongly oppose the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, perhaps because he knew he needed a way to make the new weapon powerful. In order to better carry out this demonstration, scientists had put forward various opinions to the military at that time, such as: inviting representatives of various countries to visit a test explosion to tell everyone the power of new weapons; Drop the bomb at a remote arsenal; Even, before dropping the bomb, inform the local government and let civilians hide first to reduce casualties. Clearly, these suggestions have been ignored.

On August 6, the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, and on August 9, another was dropped on Nagasaki. That same day, an FBI informant reported that Oppenheimer had a "nervous breakdown."

Oppenheimer was indeed in a state of intense disappointment and grief at the end of 1945, when he told a Senate committee in November of that year: "We shook a fruitful tree with great strength, and from it fell radar and atomic bombs." The whole guiding ideology (in wartime) is the crazy and ruthless exploitation of existing knowledge. ”

In essence, he argued, the achievements of the Manhattan Project, weapons of mass destruction, were "the pinnacle of physics in 300 years," but they also damaged physics.

However, this sadness did not last long, because he needed to pick himself up and realize the new world of openness and mutual trust in peace.

Naïve atomic scientist

In war, it is stupid to argue whether one weapon is more immoral than another .....

After World War II, atomic scientists recovered from the joy of victory and began to reflect on the dangers of atomic energy and pursue the peaceful use of atomic energy.

The people who are most enthusiastic about carrying out this nuclear control campaign are the scientists who participated in the Manhattan Project and created the first atomic bomb, first in Los Alamos, then Chicago, Oak Ridge... By November 1945, three months after the first atomic bomb was put into battle, a national organization of scientists, the Union of Atomic Scientists, was formed, soon renamed the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), but its purpose remained the same: to work for the peaceful uses of atomic energy.

As a result of active lobbying by FAS, the United States established the non-military-administered Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which established a General Advisory Committee (GAC) composed of nine distinguished scientists, chaired by Oppenheimer.

It seems that the movement of scientists has achieved an initial victory in civilian nuclear energy, but the feeling of victory is short-lived. The AEC is nominally a civilian commission, but it has established a military liaison committee that is actually used for military purposes. The atomic energy bill that scientists fought for was amended by Congress to become almost the military plan they opposed.

Oppenheimer had a heavier task than other atomic scientists, discussing more politically sensitive nuclear weapons and facing a more dodgy military and politician hierarchy.

Before that, Oppenheimer had seen the difficulty of communicating with politicians. At the end of 1945, he blurted out in front of Truman, "I feel my hands are covered in blood," and the two sides broke up.

In early 1946, Oppenheimer and his colleague Liliansol came up with the "Acheson-Lillensol Plan" after two months of cooperation. Although there is no Oppenheimer's name, the content is dominated by Oppenheimer.

Based on the conviction that the U.S. nuclear monopoly would not last long, Oppenheimer proposed a forward-thinking and naïve solution. He devised an international approach to controlling atomic energy, in which countries would relinquish part of their sovereignty and hand over their atomic scientific information and materials to this global body, which would then control all uranium on Earth, making it available only for peaceful purposes. It provides both security guarantees against atomic weapons and a source of electricity.

This long-term plan, which takes the world and all mankind as its coordinates, has just been handed in and encountered the black hands of politicians. Secretary of State Burns approached his business partner, Baruch, the night he received the material, and both of them had invested heavily in uranium mines. Uranium ore shared, they were the first to disagree.

Burns persuaded the president to twist the "Acheson-Lilensor Plan" into the "Baruch Plan," turning a decentralized international agency for atomic energy into one that guaranteed a U.S. nuclear monopoly. The plan was quickly met with strong opposition from the Soviet Union, and the plan ended in vain.

Frustrated by the failure of this plan, Oppenheimer prepared to return to his physics, "physics and physics teaching used to be my life, and now they seem irrelevant."

All this until 1949, when the Soviet Union also detonated its first atomic bomb. Oppenheimer was thrilled again, feeling that the opportunity had come and that the Soviet Union had mastered nuclear weapons technology, which meant that excessive secrecy was no longer necessary.

Politicians did not, however, think otherwise, and the Truman administration at the time had in mind a response to Soviet nuclear weapons: production of nuclear bombs and the rapid development of hydrogen bombs. The two super-Powers have entered the phase of an arms race in nuclear weapons.

The power of hydrogen bombs is much greater than that of atomic bombs, and the maximum explosive power of atomic bombs is difficult to exceed 500,000 tons, while thermonuclear weapons such as hydrogen bombs have almost no fixed upper limit. The advent of the hydrogen bomb could lead to indiscriminate massacres of humanity and even become an instrument of genocide. This terrified Oppenheimer and decided to stop the government from experimenting with hydrogen bomb research.

Oppenheimer submitted a report on the hydrogen bomb, in which he wisely chose a technical criticism of the bomb: criticizing the hydrogen bomb as "vague in design and uncertain in performance." And because producing one kilogram of tritium would require abandoning about 70 kilograms of plutonium, developing a hydrogen bomb would slow down the expansion of the atomic arsenal. Strategically, the large number of atomic bombs in the U.S. arsenal was sufficient to deal with the Soviet Union. Therefore, whether it is nuclear deterrence or nuclear retaliation, hydrogen bombs are unnecessary existence.

However, naïve he still inadvertently exposed his starting point. He attached a "minority annex" in which he accused the hydrogen bomb of "its existence and knowledge of its construction as a danger to humanity as a whole" and "necessarily an evil thing from any point of view".

These moral accusations have become the report's weakness in the eyes of politicians, and the committee that examines the hydrogen bomb issue said, "In war, it is foolish to argue whether one weapon is more immoral than another... War itself is immoral, and this immoral shame must fall on the country that initiated the hostilities." ”

In the end, Truman spoke with Lillensor for only 7 minutes at the meeting, and when he confirmed that the Soviet Union had the possibility of developing a hydrogen bomb, he declared that the United States had no choice but to move forward and forbade all scientists to talk publicly about the issue.

In 1952, the United States detonated the world's first hydrogen bomb, and in 1953, the Soviet Union successfully tested the hydrogen bomb. In this way, in contrast to the vision of peace that scientists hoped for, the U.S. military and politicians chose to ensure that the United States and the Soviet Union destroyed each other, even if it might end human civilization. The era of peace that atomic scientists had hoped for has not come, and Oppenheimer and Bohr's original vision of an open world has been ruthlessly destroyed by the reality of the bipolar pattern.

Hearing, one public execution

In an age of increasing tension in relations between states, attacking a person's loyalty to the state,

Always the most convenient means of splashing dirty water.

Oppenheimer, who opposed the failure of the hydrogen bomb, gradually marginalized his position in the government. After 1953, his opponent, Strauss, an ardent supporter of the hydrogen bomb, became president of the ACE.

After being marginalized in government, Oppenheimer has also been trying to use his prestige and position as a prominent scientist to influence the national security apparatus from within. His old friends and his brother advised him that it was a futile gamble, but Oppenheimer insisted.

The naïve Oppenheimer did not yet know that he had reached a catastrophe.

Today, unlike in times of war, governments needed the technical help of scientists and the need to establish scientific icons to unite people, and Oppenheimer gained great prestige and influence on policy. But during the Cold War, governments were more wary of scientists' independence from government influence. Now the government needs not only capable scientists, but also obedient scientists.

Oppenheimer's presence in the American system, but adhering to the principles of intellectuals, constantly speaking out and criticizing state policies in the public sphere, is difficult to say whether he was courageous or naïve. In the prevailing McCarthy environment at the time, it is not surprising that he was attacked and purged.

Over a longer period of time, the U.S. bureaucracy has sought to eliminate the influence of the community of scientists in the public sphere, making them technologically experts at the service of government, and cooperation in wartime is nothing more than a stopgap measure. Since the beginning of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government has worked to create a new role as a scientist. The title of a memorandum circulated by Eisenhower in 1946 best sums up this goal: "Scientific and technological resources as military assets." ”

To achieve this goal, taking the most prestigious Oppenheimer is risky, but the rewards are also considerable. FBI Director Hoover's statement is indicative of the administration's current attitude toward scientists, "Scientists consider themselves sacrosanct ... I personally feel that they are no different from others. ”

Oppenheimer, as the most outstanding scientist, was once pushed to the height of national heroes and even myths, and now it is time to be knocked down to the mortal world.

In an era of increasing tensions between nations, attacking one's loyalty to one's country was always the most convenient means of splashing dirty water.

Because of his stance against the hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer has long been targeted by McCarthy. In May 1953, McCarthy told FBI Director Hoover that he would investigate Oppenheimer. McCarthy also claimed that Soviet spies in the government delayed the hydrogen bomb program for eighteen months. "Our country may well perish because of delay. Who caused it? Loyal Americans, or traitors to our government? ”

Without waiting for McCarthy to attack, Oppenheimer had already been charged. On November 7, 1953, Borden, the former executive director of the Congressional Joint Commission on Atomic Energy, wrote accusing Heimer of most likely a "Soviet agent" and recommending that he be deprived of a security clearance to access classified secrets. A secret hearing began.

It was an unfair hearing, and Oppenheimer had little chance of victory from the start.

Green, the AEC legal officer who drafted the letter of allegation against Oppenheimer, said the "intended goal" of the hearing was to find that Oppenheimer was a security risk. According to Green, both Strauss and FBI Director Hoover exerted considerable pressure to achieve that goal, and hardliners "with anti-Oppenheimer tendencies" were selected to the committee.

Although legally, this hearing is only an investigation. But in practical terms, this is not only a trial, but also a long-planned execution of Oppenheimer's public identity.

Oppenheimer's influence greatly annoyed his opponents. They understood that even if he lost his government office, Oppenheimer would continue to criticize the hydrogen bomb as a great scientist. To shut up Oppenheimer completely would require the complete destruction of Oppenheimer's credibility and prestige as a scientist and even as a person.

As one AEC official once told Taylor, the "father of the hydrogen bomb," the key was to "strip him naked in [Oppenheimer's] church." It is not enough to remove Oppenheimer, but also to remove Oppenheimer's aura of scientists and expose him completely to the public.

It was supposed to be a secret hearing, but before the hearing, the letter of allegation against Oppenheimer and the full text of his response had been leaked to The New York Times. After the hearing began, the content was also casually revealed to reporters by Oppenheimer's opponents. The secret hearing turned into a media spree broadcast nationally.

Privacy is non-existent in this hearing, which holds complete information about Oppenheimer's years of investigation and wiretapping. Oppenheimer was forced to confess his affair with Joan Tatlock. Questioned in court, "Why does she have to see you?" "You spent the night with her, didn't you?"

Oppenheimer also had to answer which of his people were communists and which were sympathizers. If it is said, Oppenheimer is betraying his friends, which greatly damages his personal credibility. But if it doesn't say, the hearing will confirm his disloyalty.

Oppenheimer, who originally had excellent expressive skills, often fell into chaos under the continuous interrogation of lawyer Rob like prisoners.

He once corrected himself by referring to "I think I'm an idiot," a simple self-deprecation that his opponents used to humiliate Oppenheimer. In media reports, Oppenheimer said this "curled up, hands clasped, and his face pale as paper." In the past, the media seemed to be the embodiment of wisdom, casually quoting the Bocca Gita, explaining quantum mechanics Oppenheimer, but now they contradict themselves and consider themselves idiots.

The transcript of the hearing, which should have been kept secret, was also made public by Strauss after the hearing. Oppenheimer's allegations, every humiliation during the trial, and almost his entire life file were exposed to public scrutiny.

It can be said that even if the hearing can prove Oppenheimer's innocence, Oppenheimer, exposed to the media spotlight, will not be able to become the mythical scientist again.

Until the end of the hearing, there was no evidence of Oppenheimer's disloyalty, but his security clearance was still stripped. Oppenheimer's public role has also been crushed, and although he can continue to make public appearances and give lectures on science and philosophy, he has disappeared from the public sphere. The hearing successfully transformed him from the most famous person in the world into a transparent person.

A journalist at the time once expressed shock at this change, saying: "Oppenheimer was once one of the most famous and admirable people in the world, quoted, photographed, consulted, celebrated, almost deified as a whole new heroic mythological archetype - the hero of science and wisdom, the pioneer and living symbol of the new atomic age... Suddenly he disappeared, and even more incredibly, not many teenagers, he was clearly forgotten. ”

The last public intellectuals

Today's distrust of scientists,

Part of it can be traced back to the public humiliation to Oppenheimer.

The Oppenheimer case brought fear to the entire scientific community. Scientists realized that even a national hero like Oppenheimer would be labeled unpatriotic simply because he had doubts about certain government policies.

James Jr., who served as science adviser to the President from 1957 to 1959, Jr. Reflecting on the case more than a decade later, Dr. James R. Killian Jr. said, "The most horrific aspect of Oppenheimer's case was the fear it caused... Technical advice may be condemned if it does not support certain current military or political policies. ”

Oppenheimer has the epitome of a generation of atomic scientists. They once had a lofty and ambitious vision that in the long run, only a world government capable of controlling atomic energy could guarantee the survival of mankind, but this internationalist aspiration ran aground on the shoals of the Cold War.

As tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union intensified after the war, the United States' national security pursuit of security gradually fell into paranoia, and atomic scientists, who still had hopes for the United Nations to control atomic energy, became the target of suspicion and suppression. The ideal of science ultimately failed to entrenched ideologies.

In the era of McCarthyism, scientists with internationalist ideals were the best scapegoats. In a propaganda campaign directed by the government and military, scientists are associated with communists, spies, and traitors, and the public increasingly believes that theoretical physicists are "the weakest link" in the U.S. national security system. ”

In 1954, a scientist complained to the AEC that "the exaggerated coverage of the public media gives the impression that scientists as a class are very unreliable and that many are disloyal." ”

Some academic and government scientific institutions support this red scare. UC Berkeley instituted a pledge of loyalty for its staff and fired many who refused to sign it, while the AEC launched a new round of security review hearings to weed out those suspected of subversion.

The flip side of repression is co-optation. The expansion of the U.S. military-industrial complex during the Cold War brought a lot of money to the scientific community and provided physicists with stable, well-paid jobs. Military-related research once dominated the employment of physicists, and to get such jobs, scientists are subject to strict political scrutiny in their work and life, and need to abandon speech, behavior, and relationships that the system does not recognize.

America needs the knowledge of scientists, but not their moral and political ideas. According to the government's official statement, the freedom of scientists to express scientific opinions should be respected. But in fact, scientists have the "freedom" to express opinions only when they have nothing to do with moral and political issues.

After being forced to silence public and policy issues, the American community of scientists was divided.

Some scientists lost their intellectual side and degenerated into technocrats. With nuclear deterrence as a fundamental prerequisite for U.S. national security, scientists make recommendations only technically. Even scientists who do not agree with the current policy do not dare to express their opposition and can only criticize technically. Correspondingly, they lose the trust of the public.

Scientists who remained independent of institutions and insisted on moral criticism soon found themselves excluded from policymaking, even ostracized by their peers, and seen by governments and even peers as activists rather than scientists. Their peers have learned to distinguish between sciences that do not challenge the red lines of the Cold War and are tolerated.

And the opinions of scientists on public issues, especially atomic science, are inherently valuable to the public. Due to the secrecy nature of atomic tests, media outlets that receive opportunities to report on atomic tests are often collaborators with the government and military, and the content of their reports is also subject to censorship.

Doubts about atomic testing were not reported or even discredited as treason, based on fears of health hazards. Failed to gain public attention and gain further political influence.

For example, after a nuclear test at the Nevada test site, radioactive fallout in Utah was visible to the naked eye. But the reports included official debunks such as "less than 100 cars need to be cleaned," "reports of AEC personnel quelling radiation sickness in Utah," and "information workers trying to quell mass hysteria." It wasn't until 7 years later that the AEC admitted that Utah had measured "the highest measured concentration of radioactive fallout in the air in populated areas."

There are no more scientists like Oppenheimer. In him, expertise, moral and cultural authority, and a strong position in the state were once closely combined to become the ideal spokesperson for scientific authority. In the past, he was able to openly criticize atomic testing and arms expansion as an insider, alerting and connecting with the public. But after the hearing, his powers were stripped away.

In a recent interview, a reporter asked Kai Bird, one of the authors of Oppenheimer: Is what happened to Oppenheimer still happening today? Are scientific facts still being distorted for political gain?

"I'm afraid the answer is clearly yes." Bird replied. "We only need to recall the recent pandemic, where the integrity of scientists and public health officials has been questioned by the public and politicians, which is very dangerous."

In Bird's view, today's distrust of scientists can be traced in part to Oppenheimer's public humiliation. This gives scientists a cautious voice on public policy, no matter how necessary that scientific knowledge may be for ordinary citizens. No scientist today enjoys the status of Oppenheimer in 1945, a recognized scientist and a public willing to listen to his public issues.

"We don't have a big public intellectual with a scientific background like Oppenheimer anymore. This is a strange and unfortunate thing. Bird said.

In December 2022, after 68 years, the U.S. Secretary of Energy rehabilitated Oppenheimer by reversing the 1954 decision to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance. It was also this year that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict reminded people who had said goodbye to the shadow of the Cold War for many years the fear of being dominated by nuclear war.

Now we are still sitting on the powder pile. The United States and Russia still possess about 90 percent of the world's 13,000 nuclear weapons by 2023, and both sides still deploy about 1,500 thermonuclear warheads on strategic missiles and bombers, ready to launch within minutes of giving an order.

At the same time, the world's nuclear-armed states continue to invest tens of billions of dollars each year to replace and upgrade their lethal arsenals. Due to the stagnation in nuclear arms control, a nuclear war could cause tens of millions of casualties in the first few hours alone.

This is also the vision of scientists, without international control of atomic energy, mankind is forever on the verge of destruction. As Nolan warns us at the end of the movie, the risk of nuclear war is never far away, and it may end up igniting the whole world.

Bibliography:

[1] Kay Bird, Martin M. J. Sherwin. (2023). Oppenheimer's Biography: The Triumph and Tragedy of the "Father of the Atomic Bomb" in the United States. CITIC Publishing Group

[2] Rubinson, P. (2017). Redefining Science: Scientists, the National Security State, and Nuclear Weapons in Cold War America. University of Massachusetts Press.

[3] Rubinson, P. (2018). Rethinking the American antinuclear movement. Routledge.

[4] Wammack, M. D. (2010). Atomic governance: Militarism, secrecy, and science in post-war America, 1945-1958.

[5] Thorpe, C. (2002). Disciplining experts: scientific authority and liberal democracy in the Oppenheimer case. Social Studies of Science,32(4), 525-562.

[6] Thorpe, C. (2019). Oppenheimer: The tragic intellect. University of Chicago Press.

[7] Diaz-Maurin, F. (2023, August 16).‘ Oppenheimer’, the bomb, and arms control, then and now - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

[8] Oppie—“A very mysterious and delphic character.” Interview with Kai Bird, co-author of American Prometheus - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. (2023, August 7). Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

[9] The Franck Report - Nuclear Museum. (1946). Nuclear Museum.

[10] Strategic Analysis: The Missed Opportunity to Stop the H-Bomb. (1999).