CHAPTER 11

Twilight Years

NIELS BOHR HAD returned to Denmark in August 1945, and two months later had turned sixty. The anxieties of the war and the Manhattan Project had strained and saddened him. His thinning gray hair, the jowls that draped over his massive jaw, the heavy eyebrows that shadowed his intelligent and kindly eyes—all had made him a doleful figure. He had spent more and more time during the ensuing years at his summerhouse in Tisvilde, on the northern shore of Sjælland, a two-hour drive from Copenhagen. The thatched, one-story country house stood in a grove of pine trees on heather-covered hills that met the lavender waters of the Baltic in an unbroken harmony In a ramshackle barn in this beautiful and tranquil setting that he loved so much, Bohr had found time to think and reflect. For relaxation he had bicycled in the woods, walked on the beach, and read fairy tales and played games with his many grandchildren. Evenings were spent in the family circle, chatting about issues large or small. These had been happy days for Bohr, yet there had been long thoughts, too, of how the world had been changed by the bomb.

During the war, Bohr had foreseen that the atomic bomb would cause trouble with Russia, unless the Russians were made partners rather than rivals. Now the Iron Curtain had come down, and Bohr had watched the growing quarrel between East and West with grave misgivings. He did not surrender in his struggle. Time he could have devoted to science was now devoted to writing innumerable appeals and statements. Although these had often gone unanswered by the officials to whom they were addressed, Bohr saw them as a means of educating the public at large. What could be done to break the stalemate and make security possible? The answer to which he had come with increasing emphasis was the international control of atomic weapons before other countries acquired the bomb. Otherwise, the next big war could be the world’s last.

In the spring of 1948, while in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study, Bohr had met privately with Secretary of State George Marshall in Washington. During their talk, Bohr had reiterated his plea for openness and cooperation between the United States and the USSR on atomic weapons. This was essential, he had stressed in a follow-up letter, “in order not to lose the opportunity to forestall a fateful competition in atomic armaments.” He had then pointed, prophetically, to an even more frightening future. “The new and ominous menace to world security presented by employing the results of the latest development of bacteriological and biochemical science as terrible life-destructive means cannot be eliminated by any practicable control and will, therefore, remain a latent danger until such cooperation in openness has been achieved.” Bohr had believed America should take the initiative because it led in the field of atomic energy. “Your country,” he had told Marshall, “possesses the strength required to take the lead in accepting the challenge with which civilization is confronted.” ¹ Marshall gave no promise.

By 1950 Bohr had recognized that his efforts had come to naught, so he had written an “Open Letter” to the United Nations in June of that year in which he gave an account of his efforts in broad outline and pleaded with the world’s great powers to begin a dialogue with one another about the bomb. In the letter, he had predicted that the lack of such cooperation would trigger an escalating nuclear arms race and increased tensions between East and West. ² The Korean War, which broke out three weeks later, had put Bohr’s appeal in the shade, but his predictions turned out to be tragically correct.

Almost everyone who encountered Arthur Compton in his later years noticed his eyes. They had always been deep set, but now they were knowing and penetrating, like an old seer’s. When he was invited to become chancellor of Washington University at the end of the war, he had candidly told its board of trustees that he did not know what students’ and alumni’s attitude toward him would be when they learned of his involvement in the top secret Manhattan Project: either they would think of him as one of the scientists who had saved civilization—or had imperiled mankind. As he wrote a year after Hiroshima, “It is too early to say whether the moral historian, if there be one a thousand years hence, will record the use of the atomic bomb as the work of the world’s guardian angel or as that of the devil bent on man’s destruction.” ³ No one could go through what Compton did and come out quite the same.

Compton’s ambivalence had led him to refuse to have anything more to do with weapons making. Shortly after the Soviet atomic test in August 1949, Ernest Lawrence came to visit him in St. Louis. Depressed by the news, Lawrence had tried to estimate how long it would be until the Russians could attack the United States. He had said he was going to turn the efforts of his lab toward developing new weapons that he hoped would be helpful in the approaching struggle. Compton had told Lawrence that his task was no longer to develop nuclear weapons but to develop young people to bring about peace by building a strong society.

Not surprisingly, the superbomb filled Compton with anxiety. If such weapons were used upon centers of population, he doubted whether enough survivors would remain to rebuild civilized human existence. “The world is crying that the weapon itself and those responsible for its development and use be brought under control of those whose lives it endangers and at the same time protects,” said Compton. “And this means everyone.” ⁴ He opposed targeting civilian populations in war, urged limiting the size and number of superbombs, and advocated no-first-use of nuclear weapons by the United States—all ideas which became central goals of arms control advocates in later years. Above all, Compton urged the avoidance of nuclear war. “No nation,” he said again and again, to political leaders and ordinary people alike, “would expect such a war to end without itself suffering more damage than its possible gains would be worth.” ⁵

Compton’s style as chancellor of Washington University had been quiet and unpretentious. He told the faculty to call him Mr. Compton, not Dr. Compton, and asked that they do the same among themselves. He slipped easily into conversation with students, who sensed his disciplined enthusiasm, inner tranquility, and natural friendliness. In 1954 he retired as chancellor and accepted appointment as professor of natural philosophy at the university. The aging Compton devoted himself to speaking and writing about the impact of science on society and the morality of science. When asked to reflect on scientists’ role in the creation of the bomb, he would cite the biblical story of Eden—it had highly personal meaning for him. When man and woman wished to return to the garden of innocence, he pointed out, an angel with a fiery sword blocked their way. They had eaten the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and as the serpent had promised, became as gods, knowing good from evil. This was a heavy burden. They longed to be free of the knowledge of good and evil, but they could not. Their only peace lay in working to make the world as they felt it should be. Free will made people responsible for their destiny.

After the war, Berkeley had become the mecca of experimental physics and Ernest Lawrence its aging prophet. Tall and heavyset, with thinning hair set above rimless bifocals, Lawrence ruled the Rad Lab like an impresario, parking his car in a no-parking zone just outside the main door. To anyone who acted without consulting him first, he glared fiercely and with his jowls quivering said, “You had better learn which side your bread is buttered on if you want to remain in this laboratory.” ⁶ At other times he would go out of his way to help a subordinate by counseling on technique, by assisting in the building of equipment, or by suggesting some fruitful line of research. The Rad Lab grew rapidly during these years, aided by almost unlimited government funding. What had begun in the 1930s as Lawrence’s personal laboratory in a wooden shed had grown by the 1950s into a vast complex employing more than 2,800 people, including nearly 300 graduate students. ⁷

As he had always been, Lawrence was constantly on the move, the rapid character of his life heightened by increased responsibilities. But there were some changes. His legendary energy diminished and he abandoned his lifelong quest for ever larger contraptions, becoming the master tinkerer again. “Why, fellas, you don’t want a big machine,” he told a group of young experimental physicists at the University of Illinois who were redesigning the cyclotron there. “There’s too much emphasis these days on sheer size for its own sake. Build something small and precisely suited to the research information you want from it.” ⁸ It was a sign of a subtle shift, recognition of a connection between invention and application and that things had already moved “so far beyond human scale.” ⁹

Lawrence had not initially questioned the nuclear buildup (indeed, he had been in favor of it), but the escalating atomic arms race and his growing sense of mortality made him begin to worry whether he had been right. He grew more modest, philosophical, and tentative, and acknowledged uncertainties and vulnerabilities for the first time in his life. “The Nobel Prize in physics, or indeed in any other subject, surely is not to be taken as evidence of special wisdom in philosophy or of unusual insight into metaphysical problems,” he wrote a Berkeley neighbor in February 1955. ¹⁰ He even began to advocate scientific exchanges as a way of breaking down the Iron Curtain and took to giving visiting Soviet physicists personal tours of the Rad Lab as a way of building the mutual understanding that he now saw as necessary to prevent a nuclear holocaust between Cold War rivals.

Biology had offered Leo Szilard an intellectual challenge and an escape from his guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, allowing him to repudiate death and embrace life. “The mysteries of biology are no less deep than the mysteries of physics were one or two generations ago,” he said, “and the tools are available to solve them provided only that we believe they can be solved.” ¹¹ Yet he did not abandon arms control. “Theoretically I am supposed to divide my time between finding what life is and trying to preserve it by saving the world,” he wrote to Bohr in 1950. “At present the world seems to be beyond saving, and that leaves me more free time for biology.” ¹² He also found time to write satires on science and politics. In one story, superhuman minds on a distant planet worried that earthlings were smart enough to separate U-235, yet stupid enough to use this knowledge to make atomic bombs. ¹³

To strangers Szilard seemed shy, witty, and eccentric. To his peers he seemed gruff, demanding, even arrogant. A friend invited him to a dinner party one evening at which she served asparagus. When the platter reached him, he cut off all the tips and put them on his plate. Astonished, she asked Szilard why he did that, and he answered that he liked the tips the best. Another friend said, “I highly esteem Leo, and I would do anything for him—except work with him.” Shy and lonely behind his bombastic quips and wisecracks, he amused, annoyed, and bewildered the people around him. Szilard acknowledged his impulsive, erratic manner and moods with pride. At a meeting he had thrown into confusion, he rose and impishly announced, “I think I can best contribute to the progress of this conference by leaving.” During such conferences he habitually sat like a drowsy hound, with his round face and potbelly, giving the impression he was asleep while his mind played and wandered. Then he would suddenly spring to life and ask pointed questions that he would gruffly repeat if the answers did not come quickly. ¹⁴

Often what was complex and baffling to others was perfectly clear to Szilard. At these moments, he would look at his listener, shake his head impatiently, and say, “You’ll never understand.” His friends devised the “Szilard Index”: the number of sentences a speaker could utter before Szilard grew bored and stomped out. Part of this was his mighty ego. But behind his arrogance and apparent contempt was a great compassion for humanity that found expression in his tender solicitude toward children and his commitment to the moral use of knowledge. “A scientist must have certain qualities to be creative,” he said, “and the moral qualities are very important. Intelligence is not enough. There must be a religious attitude. By that I mean an inner conviction that life has a meaning. Einstein said and I agree, ‘Religion without science is blind, science without religion is lame.’” ¹⁵

In late 1957 Lawrence told Sproul that he might retire as director of the Rad Lab, after creating and running it with iron-fisted control for more than a quarter of a century. To the elderly former physics department chairman who had hired him nearly three decades before, he talked nostalgically about coming back to LeConte Hall, where he had arrived as a young physicist from Yale in 1929, and simply dabbling in a small laboratory in his office. ¹⁶

It seemed unthinkable that Lawrence would ever scale back to such an extent, but he had his reasons. By shedding the burdens he was carrying, Lawrence hoped to relieve the painful ulcers that were aggravated by the pressures under which he had worked for so long. But it was not to be. In 1958 Eisenhower asked Lawrence to serve as one of three U.S. scientists at a technical conference in Geneva to study whether detection measures were feasible for a suspension of nuclear tests. Lawrence, who favored limiting nuclear tests, answered the president’s call despite feeling worse than usual. On the way to Washington for briefings, he stopped in St. Louis to visit Compton, who was himself in the hospital recovering from a heart attack. Among other things, the old experimenter told a sympathetic Compton that limits must be put on nuclear experiments in order to control the arms race.

At Geneva, Lawrence was exhausted and uncomfortable. His intestinal bleeding increased rapidly and he grew more silent each day. Violently ill, he ran a high fever and had to be flown back home, where he was immediately admitted to a hospital. The attending physicians did what they could, but his condition worsened. (The Radiation Laboratory founder adamantly refused to submit to X rays.) Lying in his hospital bed, Lawrence apologized to his wife, Molly, “You know, I wish I’d taken more time off. I would have liked to, you know, but my conscience wouldn’t let me.” ¹⁷ The doctors decided they had to perform a colostomy, a difficult operation that removes the lower section of the digestive tract. Very discouraged, Lawrence was convinced that he would not survive the surgery. Five hours into the ordeal, as his circulatory system failed, he turned to Molly at his side in the operating room and whispered, “I’m ready to give up now.” ¹⁸ He died at Stanford University Hospital on August 27, 1958, shortly after his fifty-seventh birthday.

Only fifty years old when his security hearing ended in 1954, Robert Oppenheimer was at the height of his abilities and chafed at his forced exile from power. He missed being at the center of scientific action, and the telephone calls from secretaries of state and four-star generals. “He still carried on,” said Hans Bethe, but “he was a broken man.” ¹⁹ His brother, Frank, sensed that he felt defeated by his enemies. “The fact that he was kicked out in this way really got him down,” Frank said. ²⁰ Friends could not understand where he found the courage to confront his future.

Washington and weapons no longer part of his life, Oppenheimer settled into dignified exile as director of the Institute for Advanced Study. Sitting in his office, he often found himself full of both outrage and regret. Here he was, in one of the most splendid of honorific jobs, but his powers were rusting. He could not help thinking things in Washington would be in better shape if he had not been denied clearance. The creative and organizational energies he once devoted to physics and politics were still running strong and sought an outlet.

Oppenheimer was gradually able to get back to reading, thinking, and talking about physics—his first love—but he would never again be the politically naive professor he had been in the 1930s, when he was so indifferent to the world around him that he did not read newspapers. “I should think,” he said now, “that you wouldn’t step twice in the same river.” His ego and his evangelism would not permit him to withdraw from the public stage, so he became a much-traveled and much-interviewed celebrity who had a talent for self-dramatization and an ability to project a larger-than-life image to his audience. None of this, however, could make up for the sadness and the sense of loss in his life.

Oppenheimer received many visitors during these years. The white, unadorned walls of his office contained a blackboard at one end and a large window looking out on a rich green lawn at the other, with books piled neatly on a metal desk and conference table in between. But if the room was serene, the man occupying it was not. Oppenheimer chain-smoked or puffed on a pipe, pausing nervously to fill it, light it, and relight it from a big box of wooden matches. He fidgeted constantly. He talked cautiously and nervously, usually only in response to questions. There was much he wanted to say but did not because he didn’t want to appear to be seeking sympathy. When asked about his feelings—Was he bitter? Did he feel mistreated by the government he had worked for so hard? Was he hurt?—Oppenheimer declined to answer, refusing, as he said, to “bare his soul.” ²¹ All he said about himself was this: “I have tried to prove that a security risk can survive…. I had two alternatives. One was to seek ways to appeal the decision. I didn’t think we’d buy ourselves anything by that. The other was to prove that, in spite of some incredible words the commission wrote about me, these words would not necessarily be believed by all people. In other words, I had to establish by other means that what was put out as a final judgment about me wasn’t the final judgment. And the only way to do this was by surviving.” ²² He believed in a religion of endurance.

In 1957 the Atoms for Peace Award had been established in the United States to honor the individual who had contributed most to the peaceful uses of atomic energy “without regard to the recipient’s political inclinations or nationality.” On October twenty-fourth that year, President Eisenhower had presented the award to Bohr at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. The citation read: “Niels Bohr personifies the modern advances in science and the concern of the man of science for the broad human implications of scientific knowledge.” Applause rolled through the room as the aging, moonfaced Bohr had shuffled to his feet to accept the award. As the applause mounted, shouts could be heard above the uproar, for Bohr not only was esteemed and loved by the audience but stood for all that they wanted physicists to be—and believed they could be, given enough courage and insight. Bohr lived out the final years of his life in quiet retirement in his native Denmark. He died of heart failure at the age of seventy-seven on November 18, 1962. His remains were cremated and his ashes interred in the family cemetery in Copenhagen.

Always one to place himself at the center of things, Szilard continued to argue that the same qualities that produced the atomic bomb would be needed to solve the political and social problems that the bomb created: originality, imagination, resourcefulness, and hard work. His method of attacking the problem was, as in all things, energetic and eccentric. He moved about by train and plane, dictating letters and articles in paper-strewn hotel rooms, crisscrossing the country and the world proselytizing against the nuclear arms race and the Cold War. Sometimes he seemed to take impish delight in creating around himself an air of mystery. A freewheeling genius who preferred working behind the scenes, he generated ideas for people in power and spouted advice to anyone who would listen. He also sought contact with Soviet scientists. His idea was simple yet revolutionary: get scientists themselves to address and solve the problem they had created. This notion materialized in a series of “Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs” that began in the summer of 1957 at the Nova Scotia village of Pugwash, where industrialist Cyrus Eaton offered the scientists use of his estate. The Pugwash Conferences soon became the leading forum for international discussion of the nuclear arms race. At these meetings, Szilard offered proposals to avoid a nuclear cataclysm, many of which would eventually be adopted: creating a Washington-Moscow hotline; reducing stockpiles and limiting proliferation; renouncing first use; devising inspection systems; improving command and control to prevent accidents and hair-trigger launches. He also proposed what would later be called “minimal deterrence” by urging the United States and the Soviet Union to stop their nuclear tests, yet retain just enough weapons to deter each other. ²³ Szilard resisted the scholasticism that characterized many academic arms control debates. He did not believe nuclear weapons could, or should, be eliminated; but they should be minimized and their use negated by political accord. He favored multilateral disarmament, carried out step-by-step with proper guarantees.

But while Szilard’s proposals were farsighted, he lacked both the subtlety necessary to influence the Washington establishment that would have to carry them out and the patience for the bureaucratic scramble that preceded and followed decisions. He habitually moved outside established channels to try to get things done. His actions invited suspicion in Cold War America. FBI agents kept him under surveillance long after the Manhattan Project. Still his influence reached official channels, at least indirectly. One route ran through the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), where colleagues sympathetic to Szilard’s ideas had access to the White House. “Szilard kept us interested in the subject of arms control,” recalled Bethe, who was a PSAC member, “and later on that committee, in turn, sponsored the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, a part of the government.” ²⁴

Szilard clashed often with Teller during these years; he was one of very few people to whom Teller would seriously listen when there was a disagreement. The two debated on national TV in the fall of 1960. They agreed that the danger of nuclear war was great, noted Szilard, “but Teller meant this danger is great if the U.S. government should listen to me, and I meant the danger was great if the U.S. government should listen to him.” As their argument deepened, Szilard suggested, “I think, Teller, we should shake hands because maybe later on we don’t.” The studio audience laughed and applauded, but this did not keep the two from sparring more aggressively. During one heated exchange, when Teller accused Szilard of “irresponsible trustfulness” toward the Russians, Szilard in turn blamed Teller for his “irresponsible distrust.” ²⁵

Around this time Szilard was diagnosed with bladder cancer, considered terminal by most doctors. But true to character, Szilard did the unexpected: he did not die. He took control of his medical treatment, demanding that a detailed course of radiation worked out by him and his wife, Trude, be administered. The doctors followed his orders, and he was thoroughly cured, although his recovery took the better part of a year. During that time, his hospital room became his office and the hospital solarium his receiving room. Not surprisingly, when Szilard was discharged, the hospital was even more relieved to be rid of Szilard than Szilard was to be rid of the hospital.

When Compton learned of Szilard’s bladder cancer in early 1960, he wrote his onetime Met Lab colleague—who had caused him so much trouble with Groves and others in Washington—a nostalgic and moving letter, so open in its emotions that it touched its usually gruff recipient:

Dear Leo:

First let me tell of my deep and sincere sorrow at the news of your serious illness.

Let me further say that with the passing years I have become more clearly aware of the sincerity and earnestness and effectiveness of your efforts to turn the development of nuclear energy to the preservation of freedom and the meeting of man s human needs throughout the world.

It is true that we have not always seen eye to eye as to how these humane ends could best be achieved. But of the sincerity of your intent I have never had a doubt. Also your clear understanding of human reactions is impressive to me, and has led you to foresee with unusual clarity, some trends of history.

May I venture the prediction, which neither of us will probably be able to test, that history will see you not only as one of the important initiators of the “atomic” age but also as one who labored bravely to make of that age a condition of life under which men could enjoy an increasing degree of safety and mutual confidence, in spite of the threats of war.

With sincere friendship,
Arthur C ²⁶

Two years later, while on a speaking visit to Berkeley, Compton died of a cerebral hemorrhage on March 15, 1962. He was sixty-nine.

As for Szilard, he continued to fight for the issues he cherished, and to struggle with the nuclear fears that haunted him. One night in October 1962 friends saw how deeply he suffered. The Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height. Russian ships were plowing through the Caribbean toward Cuba, American naval vessels waiting to confront them. Szilard sat in his hotel room on Dupont Circle in Washington in the depths of despair. He viewed himself as the inventor of a monster which soon might destroy the world. “What can be done?” a visitor asked. “Nothing,” Szilard answered, his face pale with fear. “It is hopeless.” He had failed—he had created a Frankenstein. The next day he packed his bags and flew to Switzerland to ride out the coming disaster.

Oppenheimer’s exile had eased gradually with the passage of years. When John F. Kennedy became president in 1961, Oppenheimer’s friends, such as McGeorge Bundy and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., moved into high posts in the administration and began seeking ways to restore the physicist’s reputation. In 1962 Oppenheimer was invited to a White House dinner for Nobel laureates. Although he was not a laureate himself, Oppenheimer stood out among the honorees who shared the evening with him. During the event, AEC chairman Glenn Seaborg approached Oppenheimer and asked if he would like to have another security hearing to restore his clearance. “Not on your life,” replied Oppenheimer with utter certainty.

Since Oppenheimer could not regain his clearance without a new hearing, the best alternative was the Fermi Award, the highest honor the U.S. government could bestow for service in the field of nuclear energy. On April 5, 1963, the White House announced that the Fermi Award would go to Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer immediately issued a statement. “Most of us look to the good opinion of our colleagues, and to the goodwill and the confidence of our government. I am no exception.” There was some residual opposition among Oppenheimer’s old enemies, but most reaction was positive. “In Victor Hugo’s tale,” wrote one admirer, “they first decorated the hero, and then shot him. Happily in your case, the order is reversed.” Rabi wrote him:

Dear Robert,

You must feel like a voyager on a ship when after a long journey the sailor on the crow s nest cries, Land, Land!

I wish the reaction to the award could have been a simple Congratulations but there is too much history for simple rejoicing. The dismal years when injustice, paranoia and hypocrisy seemed to prevail remain all too vivid in the memory.

Now in addition to our gratification perhaps we can hope for better things to come.

Love to you and Kitty,
Rabi ²⁷

A handwritten note also arrived from Edward Teller:

Dear Oppie,

I just heard on the radio that you are getting the Fermi Award of 1963. This makes me happy for many reasons.

One is the memory of our work together in Berkeley in 1942. The other is your proposal which had become known as the Baruch Plan and which is the only honest and effective suggestion in this field that was ever made.

I had been often tempted to say something to you. This is the one time I can do so with full conviction and knowing that I am doing the right thing.

I enjoyed getting the Fermi prize last year. If you had gotten it first it might have been perhaps better. But I am glad that the announcement was made early, so you have more time for the pleasure.

With sincere wishes for good luck—which we all need,

Edward

Oppenheimer responded to Teller with a short, conciliatory note of his own:

Dear Edward:

Thank you for writing to me. I am very glad that you did.

With good wishes,

Robert Oppenheimer ²⁸

On the morning of November 22, 1963, the White House announced President Kennedy’s intention to present the award personally to Oppenheimer on December second. Less than twelve hours later, Kennedy was dead in Dallas. On the appointed day—twenty years after Oppenheimer had left Berkeley for Los Alamos and ten years after a “blank wall” had been placed between him and government secrets—President Johnson awarded him the Fermi Medal in the cabinet room of the White House. Once remarkably youthful for his years, Oppenheimer was now, at fifty-nine, painfully thin, gray, and wearied. Overcome with emotion, he grasped Kitty’s hand as the president spoke. Oppenheimer silently reflected on the situation and the medal for a few moments and then, turning to Johnson, he said, “I think it is just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today. That would seem to me a good augury for all our futures.” His eyes shone with unshed tears as he spoke.

After the ceremony, Oppenheimer and Teller posed in a handshake of reconciliation. Both behaved with scrupulous politeness. The former adversaries tried to put the past behind them, to close the wound between them. Teller told the press, “I respect Robert Oppenheimer. There are many things that I admire in him.” Oppenheimer, who always found it hard to keep a feud going and was prone to forgive anyone who showed him affection—whatever he really thought of them and their politics—said, “For a long time I thought of Edward Teller as a friend. I do not think of him as an enemy.” ²⁹ Kitty would have none of it. The cold look on her face as she watched her husband shake Teller’s hand told an entirely different story.

The world still in one piece, in early 1964 Szilard and his wife moved to La Jolla, California, a picturesque seaside village north of San Diego, where he accepted a fellowship at the new Salk Institute for Biological Studies. His bout with bladder cancer had left him thinner and his shock of brown hair had turned gray. He bought a small cottage on Torrey Pines Road, a winding, two-lane coastal road with stunning views of the blue sea below. Most afternoons he sat in a deck chair on the open veranda of the Salk Institute, staring at the sunlight dancing across the Pacific, thinking and churning. He had a rich inner world that engaged him, but his worries about the bomb kept him restless. He died in his sleep on the night of May 30, 1964, at the age of sixty-six, taken by a massive heart attack. *

“Leo Szilard was a very complex personality,” Bethe said in summing up his colleague’s extraordinary life. “His mind worked quickly and profoundly, and he was able to come to ideas that most of us appreciated only after many hours of talk. He was always ahead of his time.” ³⁰ Indeed, Szilard propounded ideas which initially were scoffed at as ridiculous, but had an odd way of looking like hard-headed realism within a few years. He had, of course, been the first scientist to imagine a chain reaction and realize that an atomic bomb was thus possible. During the war, while others toiled at making the bomb a reality, his mind was already exploring what the world would be like after the bomb had been made. This ability to see things honestly and perceptively made him a sage observer of human affairs. His vision of the future applied to politics as much as it did to science, as he once made clear:

Politics has been defined as the art of the possible. Science might be defined as the art of the impossible. The crisis which is upon us may not find its ultimate solution until the statesmen catch up with the scientists and politics, too, becomes the art of the impossible.

This, I believe, might be achieved when statesmen will be more afraid of the atomic bomb than they are afraid of using their imagination, because imagination is the tool which has to be used if the impossible is to be accomplished. ³¹

The Fermi Award symbolized Oppenheimer’s redemption in official circles. His return to Los Alamos the following spring marked a different kind of redemption, a sentimental homecoming among old friends. In May 1964 Oppenheimer returned to the Hill for his first public appearance there since the war. Much had changed in nineteen years. The Los Alamos he knew no longer existed. Few of the old buildings remained. Most of the original Tech Area had been demolished and the laboratory had been shifted across Los Alamos Canyon. A bridge now separated the vast laboratory from the town, which by 1964 had become a good-sized city, a key component of America’s sprawling Cold War military-industrial complex. Oppenheimer was also different, now a skeleton of skin and bones. Yet in other—more important—respects, he had not changed: his voice still resonated and his mind was as sharp as it had ever been.

Oppenheimer had come to Los Alamos to give a memorial address in honor of Niels Bohr and to reconnect with an important place from his past. It was an emotional occasion for the man who had founded the desert laboratory and had learned so much from Bohr. The cavernous auditorium of Los Alamos High School—which had not even existed when he left in 1945—was jammed when Norris Bradbury introduced Oppenheimer and noted that he had built Los Alamos by the sheer force of his personality and character. Bradbury’s next sentence was drowned out by applause that rippled from the front row and gathered to a prolonged, standing ovation. ³²

Oppenheimer was deeply moved by the outpouring of respect and affection. A sensitive man who hated to show emotion, he fought back his tears. He ruminated on the passage of time and all that had happened to him. His mind went back to his walks around Ashley Pond with Bohr, where the two had first discussed how the atomic bomb they were making would change the world. A tiny figure at the podium of the auditorium, Oppenheimer told his audience that the nuclear arms race that Bohr had feared, and struggled to avert, had reached mindless proportions. America and Russia each possessed not tens or hundreds but thousands of nuclear bombs, an arsenal of unimaginable destruction made infinitely more dangerous by each country’s suspicion and distrust of the other. New means of delivery and use made command and control of these weapons a nightmare fully known only to those responsible; they had added accident to anger as another potential cause of catastrophe. What Bohr and Oppenheimer had learned first, and some in government had learned since, all people should know and every government should understand: if another major war occurred in which nuclear weapons were used, no country could count on having enough living to bury their dead.

Yet Oppenheimer remained optimistic despite these dangers, he said, because of Bohr. “Bohr often spoke with deep appreciation of mortality,” said Oppenheimer, whose words—consciously or not—could be used to describe himself: “mortality that screens out the mistakes, the failures, and the follies that would otherwise encumber our future, and that makes it possible that what we have learned, and what has proved itself is transmitted for the next generations.” ³³ When he finished, the audience rose in loud and sustained applause.

Oppenheimer never returned to Los Alamos again.

A bout of pneumonia the following year weakened Oppenheimer badly, and he had to give up the directorship of the Institute, accepting Einstein’s old post as senior professor of theoretical physics instead. Then he was diagnosed with throat cancer. He began radiation therapy, gave up smoking, and took to sucking lozenges to ease his sore and swollen throat. He was in considerable pain, but he went to his office each day. His spirit strengthened as his body weakened. He was serenely courageous.

By now, Oppenheimer had become less nervous than he had been in the past, and he met the misfortune that befell him with determination. Criticism did not bother him as much as it once had. He still reacted passionately to events and was no less self-absorbed, but he had learned to control himself. Tempered by the fire, he seemed to have acquired a new, steely resolve. Those around him saw the arrogance of his earlier years dissolve, replaced by a healthy irony about himself, a humility, a compassion, a gentleness. He once again recalled his legendary partnership with Lawrence in the 1930s with affection. He began to examine himself searchingly, as he did at a public forum in the summer of 1966:

Up to now and even more in the days of my almost infinitely prolonged adolescence, I hardly took any action, hardly did anything, or failed to do anything, whether it was a paper on physics, or a lecture, or how I read a book, how I talked to a friend, how I loved, that did not arouse in me a very great sense of revulsion and of wrong.

It turned out to be impossible… for me to live with anybody else, without understanding that what I saw was only one part of the truth… and in an attempt to break out and be a reasonable man, I had to realize that my own worries about what I did were valid and were important, but that they were not the whole story, that there must be a complementary way of looking at them, because other people did not see them as I did. And I needed what they saw, needed them.

To a historian who came to interview him in Princeton for a documentary film about Fermi, Oppenheimer whispered, when the taping was over, “Well, when do we get down to the real business, the real interviews, the real historical personal material?” ³⁴ He was prepared at last to look at himself, and to speak of himself, searchingly and honestly.

A few months before his death, Oppenheimer sat for one final, on-the-record interview. Fighting with stoic grace the painful throat cancer that would soon kill him, he amiably greeted the reporter. He wore a brown tweed jacket, dark slacks, and scuffed shoes. His large blue eyes shone brightly over reading glasses. He was very frail, with deep lines in his face and his hair a white mist. There was all of the quickness of his mind and none of the abrasiveness. The once elegant and rich voice was now only a scraping hush.

Oppenheimer took off his glasses and let his hands fall to his lap. He hunched up his shoulders and brought forth a crooked smile, in which all the ironies in his life danced and played. Speaking in a gritty voice, he reaffirmed that scientists were responsible for the consequences of their work. “The central question is this,” he said: “how to subject the development of [nuclear] weapons to a notion of what is right.” He recalled what Bohr had said during their wartime talks: that the atomic bomb was both a peril and a hope for mankind. “Very great evil is inherent in weaponry,” Oppenheimer said, “and where there is great evil is the opportunity for great good. We have forgotten now, but right after the war, this is what people were saying: that the discovery of atomic power was good, that, among other things, it created an opportunity for great human grandeur because one was dealing with such great dimensions of evil. Atomic power is not the same old problem of evil with which man has always been confronted, but you lose an essential dimension when you view it without considering good and evil.” He regretted that the world had grown to include many other atomic powers and believed the United States bore much responsibility for this. “As long as we say, ‘It is all right for us, but don’t you do it,’” Oppenheimer sadly predicted, “efforts to prevent proliferation aren’t going to be very effective.” About the future, he said: “I’m not very sanguine, but at least the ideas I expressed are no longer radical.” ³⁵

Oppenheimer remained preoccupied with the morality of nuclear weapons and his role in their creation for the rest of his days. It was not long before his death that, speaking of the role he played in building the atomic bomb, he said he was not entirely free of guilt. ³⁶ Two weeks before the end came, he told Rudolf Peierls, the head of the British wartime team at Los Alamos who had come to see him a final time at Princeton, that he should have resigned from the GAC as soon as Truman overruled his recommendation against the superbomb. “You know,” Oppenheimer told Peierls, “there is the attitude that says, ‘As long as I keep riding on this train, it won’t go to the wrong destination.’” ³⁷ His tone was one of regret rather than bitterness.

Even as Oppenheimer suffered the final ravages of his illness, he remembered his friends. Unable to attend Bethe’s sixtieth birthday celebration in Ithaca in October 1966, he sent Bethe a warm congratulatory telegram instead. Bethe replied with a handwritten note that illustrated the deep bond that had grown between them over the years:

Dear Robert,

Thanks for your especially warm telegram. It was very good to see you two weeks ago. Your words express, better than I can, what I feel for you—admiration, affection, enduring gratitude and friendship.

As ever,
Hans ³⁸

That same month Oppenheimer wrote friends, “My cancer is spreading rapidly; thus I am being radiated further.” In November, “I am much less able to speak and eat now.” And in the following February, he wrote, “I am in some pain…. my hearing and my speech are very poor.” But he was content. “I have to die some year, and mine has been a pretty good life,” he remarked to a friend. ³⁹ On the night of Saturday, February 18, 1967, Robert Oppenheimer died at his home in Princeton at the age of 62. Kitty had his body cremated and his ashes scattered in the quiet seas of the Caribbean, where in his later years he found the peace that had always eluded him.

Reaction to Oppenheimer’s death was swift and moving. “It was as if an older brother had died,” lamented Bethe, who added wistfully, “Where he was, there was always life and excitement.” ⁴⁰ “We were friends,” said Rabi. “Oppenheimer meant a great deal to me. I miss him.” ⁴¹ In Japan, where bombs made under Oppenheimer’s direction had destroyed two cities, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Hideki Yukawa called Oppenheimer “a symbol of the tragedy of the modern nuclear scientists.” ⁴² Perhaps Oppenheimer’s Princeton colleague and fellow physicist Abraham Pais put it best: “In the years to come, the physicist will speak of him. So will the historian and the psychologist, the playwright and the poet.” ⁴³ There were so many facets to him. “Oppenheimer was a man who was put together of many bright shining splinters” in the perceptive words of Rabi. ⁴⁴

It was intensely cold on February 25, 1967, the day that friends, associates, and admirers gathered in Princeton University’s Alexander Hall to pay their final respects to J. Robert Oppenheimer. In the front row sat Kitty, Peter, Toni, and Oppenheimer’s brother, Frank. Behind them sat many notables of American science and government—among them Rabi and Groves, now white haired, who had flown in on a specially chartered plane to attend the service.

Those who delivered eulogies spoke with visible emotion. Bethe talked movingly of Oppenheimer’s time of glory:

Los Alamos might have succeeded without him, but certainly only with much greater strain, less enthusiasm, and less speed. As it was, it was an unforgettable experience for all the members of the laboratory. There were other wartime laboratories of high achievement, but I never observed in any one of these other groups quite the spirit of belonging together, quite the urge to reminisce about the days of the laboratory, quite the feeling that this was really the great times of their lives.

George Kennan, who had become Oppenheimer’s colleague at the Institute for Advanced Study, recalled a poignant story. “In the dark days of the early 1950s,” said Kennan, “when troubles crowded in upon him from many sides and when he found himself harassed by his position at the center of the controversy, I drew his attention to the fact that he would be welcome in a hundred academic centers abroad and asked him whether he had not thought of taking residence outside this country. With tears in his eyes, he replied, ‘Damn it, I happen to love this country.’” “On no one,” concluded Kennan, “did there ever rest with greater cruelty the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength.” Nor was there anyone “who more passionately desired to be useful in averting the catastrophes to which the development of the weapons of mass destruction threatened to lead.” ⁴⁵

At the end of the service the Juilliard String Quartet performed the adagio and allegro movements of Beethoven’s Quartet in C-sharp Minor. Back in the 1930s, the C-sharp minor had been the emblem that Oppenheimer and the aspiring theoretical physicists at his feet in Berkeley had held up to proclaim their own refinement and purity. They had been too innocent to discover that Beethoven had instructed his publisher that “it must be dedicated to Lieutenant General Field Marshal von Stutterheim.” The ghost of war had hovered in the background of the seminar rooms where they had dreamed, presaging a future that would haunt each and every one of them. ⁴⁶ Oppenheimer came to understand this irony and commented on it in the last years of his life. “The atom bomb and nuclear weapons will not go away,” he said. “These weapons are as present as the desire to have them and to use them. We can only hope that they will increasingly appear irrelevant and thus in the end preposterous, that some day we will look back ashamed of how stupid we were [to want them].” ⁴⁷

“Our experience in World War II had a profound effect on the scientific community,” I. I. Rabi had said after the war. “We saw how our command of scientific knowledge and method, aided by vast sums of money and support, have made it absurdly easy to kill human beings. This fateful truth has brought home to many scientists the fact that they cannot escape the social responsibility of their actions. No longer can science be just ‘fun and games.’” ⁴⁸ This realization had changed the direction of Rabi’s life. He gave up experimental physics and began advising the government. Trips to Washington came with increasing frequency. Demanding positions on the GAC and the PSAC did not impede his bursts of laughter in moments of amusement, nor did they impede his concern for the state of science and society. A quiet and self-confident man who projected toughness with a smile, Rabi played the inside game, operating behind the scenes to help chart America’s course in the new world that the atomic age had created. “I thought that by working from within, we might be able to do something about getting rid of the atomic bomb,” he said later. ⁴⁹ Rabi confined his opinion to the inner councils of government, but in those councils he never had the slightest fear of speaking his mind to anyone.

Throughout these years Rabi had worked closely with Oppenheimer. They had served together on the powerful GAC: Oppenheimer as its first chairman, Rabi succeeding him in 1952. Some physicists questioned the propriety of Rabi succeeding Oppenheimer after his close friend had been hounded from government service. The pragmatic Rabi had offered a quick reply. “If I had quit in a huff, I would have gotten two lines in the New York Times, and nobody would ever listen to me again on these questions. If I want to have any influence on what’s going on, I have to stay on the inside.” ⁵⁰ His style as an adviser differed from Oppenheimer’s. Rabi stayed out of the limelight. He was quiet and wise, where Oppenheimer had been vocal and brilliant. Rabi deliberately played second fiddle because he wanted to be effective. “During the war,” he said, “I had learned that you either get the credit or you get it done.” ⁵¹ Rabi wanted to get it done.

When he was not advising the government, he was teaching. Every morning until he retired as professor of physics at Columbia University, the short, bantamlike Rabi put on his horn-rimmed glasses, left his faculty apartment on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson River, and strolled up a gentle slope to Pupin Hall, a red-brick pile with limestone trim, where he rode an elevator to his eighth-floor office. Colleagues always knew when he got off the elevator because he hummed as he walked down the corridor. Inside his large, plain office was a huge blackboard that ran the length of an entire wall to large double windows, beneath which sat a green couch stacked with learned journals. He always kept his door open, did his own filing, and answered his own telephone. He maintained close, warm relations with people ranging from Nobel Prize-winning physicists to freshman students.

Rabi’s old sparring partner, Edward Teller, became the bête noire of liberals, who caricatured him as an amoral and unbalanced scientist. Teller’s volatile temperament and forbidding appearance contributed to this impression. Always headstrong, he was quick to denounce any and all who opposed him. To a physicist who challenged him on arms control, he said: “You’re either stupid or you’re treasonous, and I know you’re not stupid.” ⁵² His heavy eyebrows grew even bushier as he aged, giving him the shadowy, almost fierce countenance of the diabolical scientist. He talked with a deep voice in a strong, well-enunciated cadence with an accent that was part European university professor, part Cold War inquisitor, and part Bela Lugosi.

Teller’s efforts to make amends for his testimony against Oppenheimer got him nowhere. Ostracized within the physics community after 1954, Teller had made new friends, this time among the military, financiers, industrialists, and conservative politicians. He became an ally and a symbol of the American Right—the only one of the nine physicists to do so. It was not long before he was writing and speechifying like the best of them. The higher he flew with the hawks, the more it seemed to compensate for his ostracism by his peers—and the more he was impelled to justify and rationalize his actions. It was a hard and wearying journey.

Lewis Strauss once said that there were three kinds of physicists: theoretical, applied, and political. Teller was the most political of them all. He became extraordinarily well connected, often gaining access to the highest councils of government denied to scientists of lesser note. Time featured him on the cover of its November 18, 1957, issue, presenting Teller in a four-page story as the shining example of U.S. science at its best because he, more than any of his peers, had recognized the accelerating pace of Russian scientific achievement before sputnik. Like many Americans of the time, he was staunchly anticommunist. There was no weapon big enough to make him sleep well in a world where the Soviet Union existed. He was given to doom-laden pronouncements about communists taking over the earth and believed it a fatal fallacy that the West could be protected by enunciating moral principles while remaining militarily vulnerable.

As a result, Teller became a leading critic of all arms control initiatives, beginning with his fight against a nuclear test moratorium in the late 1950s. Eisenhower, at first favorably disposed toward a moratorium, was partly dissuaded when Teller came to the White House and told him that with continued testing the United States could develop “clean” (fallout free) weapons and that the Soviets could negate any moratorium by undetectable clandestine tests. If America was behind, Teller reasoned, it had to test to catch up; and if it was ahead, it had to test to stay there. As usual, Teller committed himself in an all-or-nothing way. To rally public support, he wrote, lectured, and engaged in radio and television debates with pro-test-ban spokesmen; to rally scientific backing, he helped devise experiments to show how the Russians could cheat on a test-ban agreement if they wanted to; to keep the Livermore lab on its toes in weapons development and ready for testing, he took direct charge of operations there.

The accumulated strains of overwork, added to the animosities that he felt increasingly surrounded him, began to take their toll, both physically and emotionally. His health deteriorated. His ulcerative colitis required daily doses of medicine and a doctor-ordered diet, frustrating for a man who had always devoured food with gusto. To a friend he wrote: “On my last medical checkup it was found that I have the same trouble as Ernest. It is a good thing to imitate him, but it seems I am carrying it too far. I have resigned from many of the things I am now doing and will have to lead a more quiet life.” ⁵³ His frustration was compounded by continuous concern for the fate of family members he had left behind in Hungary. Their experiences under communist rule were bitter, and they helped to harden the mistrust and hostility he felt toward the Soviets well into his later years. His former zest now gave way to somberness and black moods of near despair. The more opposition that he encountered, the more relentlessly he drove himself to overcome it—and the more impatient and irritable he became. As his isolation grew, so did his stubbornness, irascibility, and sense of self-importance.

The debate over the Limited Test Ban Treaty—which sought to end hazardous radiation fallout from nuclear explosions in the atmosphere—roused Teller’s temper to a fever pitch. The treaty, which had the backing of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was submitted to the Senate for ratification on August 9, 1963. Eleven days later, on August twentieth, Teller appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Members of the Armed Services Committee and the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy also attended. Teller’s testimony was presented without any prepared text or notes and was delivered with his usual great force and conviction. Largely for this reason he received far more attention from press and television than any other witness. He told the senators that the treaty would not make it more difficult for Russia to catch up, as some of its proponents had claimed, because “it is by no means certain that the United States is ahead of the Soviet Union in the field of nuclear explosives.” * He added that the treaty should not be passed because the Russians would secretly cheat—they might even do tests behind the moon. He ended by warning the senators that if they ratified the treaty, “You will have given away the future safety of our country and increased the dangers of war.” ⁵⁴ When asked his reaction to Teller’s testimony, President Kennedy replied, “It would be very difficult to satisfy Dr. Teller in this field.” ⁵⁵ The Senate agreed with Kennedy, ratifying the Limited Test Ban Treaty on September 23, 1963, by an overwhelming vote of eighty to nineteen. No country has detonated a nuclear weapon in the atmosphere since.

During his last years at Columbia, Rabi taught a course called Philosophical and Social Implications of Twentieth-Century Physics. In it, Rabi tried to show the importance of science to modern life. To Rabi, physics was not mysterious—it was an inspiring quest, a great game—and the playing field was the universe itself. “You’re playing with a champ,” he told students. “You’re trying to find out how God made the world, just like Jacob wrestling with the angel.” ⁵⁶ Rabi wanted people to understand scientists: their hopes and fears, their motivations and insecurities, how they thought and worked, in order to see them as flesh-and-blood human beings. To Rabi, scientists were not remote; they had “a vital role—sometimes one thinks of it as a fatal role” to play in the affairs of the world, he would say. ⁵⁷ But Rabi increasingly worried that those around him were specialists—technicians, really—who ignored the larger significance of their work. The increasing abstractions of modern physics were leading to less, not more, engagement with the world.

Rabi taught his last class in the spring of 1967, ending a forty-year career at Columbia. He had not enjoyed a reputation as a great lecturer and was feared by students as a tough taskmaster, but he was admired—as he had always been—for his moral integrity and an impeccable taste that set a style for the study of physics. He told his final class that American nuclear power was so vast that it was distorting human relationships. “Just because we got there first,” he said, “doesn’t mean that we should have the power of life and death over the whole world. When you get that powerful you begin to lose pity for the human condition.” He closed on the theme of power and responsibility. “I have spent most of my time in directions that would help us diminish our responsibility—relieve us of this burden” of power over life and death of nations, he said. “Although I have worked very hard,” he added, “I have not been very successful.”

Retirement held no professional terrors for Rabi, who retained his close connection with Columbia’s physics department. But he knew his time on the frontier of physics had passed. “I keep somewhat in touch with it,” he observed, “but not in a creative way. I’m always afraid of being a stuffed shirt—making do with pretense rather than actuality.” ⁵⁸ In retirement, Rabi watched as the superpowers continued to build up their nuclear stockpiles to absurd levels. He became discouraged, then dejected, and finally angry. He felt America’s blind reliance on military strength threatened the ethical principles on which that strength rested. “Americans are a moral people. They have respect for human life even where there are differences of opinion,” he stressed. ⁵⁹ Rabi declared that every military and political leader in the world with responsibility for nuclear weapons ought to observe in person, as he had, at least one detonation of a nuclear weapon, believing the effect would be so overpowering, so frightening and terrifying, that a sane person could draw only one conclusion: that these weapons must never be used and the only way to ensure that was to abolish them.

Teller’s image as a hawk in the 1960s and 1970s was balanced by his repeated calls for scientific openness. He made these requests with deep feeling in the face of bitter criticism from those who assailed him as the mastermind of a ruinous arms race and a mad scientist fixated on mass destruction, some of whom disrupted his talks with raucous shouts of “War Criminal!” (In 1970, radical students burned him in effigy a half block from his Berkeley home.) Teller passionately advocated the abolition of secrecy surrounding scientific research, including classified nuclear work. He argued that open scientific work was necessary “so we can clearly understand what we are talking about” in the growing debate over the impact of science and technology on society—a debate that had aroused in many people a sentiment against technology. ⁶⁰ “In a time of rapid development,” he proclaimed on another occasion, “the greatest danger is ignorance.” ⁶¹

By the time he turned seventy in 1978, Teller had experienced so much conflict that it seemed there could hardly be room for any more. But his indomitable will and technological exuberance fed his restless ambition, and he continued to promote big new ideas. Not all of his ideas seemed sensible to others. For example, he conceived that superbombs could be used to dig a sea-level waterway across Central America as an alternative to the Panama Canal. He also assumed a leading role in pushing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI or “Star Wars”) during the 1980s, the conservative years of Reagan, whose fierce anticommunism matched Teller’s own. Teller lobbied congressmen and administration officials indefatigably on behalf of the SDI. He looked on the SDI—an X-ray laser-based antimissile shield—as a silver bullet of sorts. If the United States could defend itself against nuclear missile attack, Teller reasoned, then it would not need to negotiate with the Soviet Union and it could move from a strategy of mutual assured destruction (popularly known as MAD) to a strategy of assured survival. He also was driven by guilt, confessing to an interviewer that “a good part, an important part, of my own psychology” was trying to negate, with antimissile arms, the horror of nuclear annihilation he had helped to give the world. ⁶² A theory that might or might not become a reality after years of research, SDI had many problems, not the least of which was Teller’s tendency to minimize technical problems, to make extravagant claims, and to describe hypothetical outcomes as if they were virtual accomplishments. Critics began calling Teller “the original E.T.” and accused him of wanting to create a “pin-ball outer-space war.” ⁶³

Teller remained active—and controversial—into his nineties. Although bent with age and able to walk only with the aid of a five-foot-high walking staff that he carved himself from a tree limb, he behaved in interviews at his office at the conservative Hoover Institution of Stanford University like a ring-wise veteran boxer instinctively responding to the bell. Inevitably, he looked tired and worn in his rumpled suit, wash-and-wear shirt, and striped tie. Teller listened motionlessly to interviewers’ questions. Then the famously thick brows furrowed, the sad gray eyes zeroed in, and the apocalyptic words came out slowly—each of them intense, uncompromising, and opinionated. Many of the lines in the script were familiar, but their effect had only grown through recitation. He answered with thumps of his staff on the floor. He was by turns gentle and charming, dark and brooding, rude and combative, his moods punctuated by outbursts of wry humor and ill temper. To combat his own weariness and occasional boredom, he would sometimes doze. When something came to mind, however, he would come alive and start talking in great detail. (Once finished, he would start dozing again.) At home he played dreamy Mozart sonatas on his battered Steinway for hours at a stretch in search of emotional solace. He was a strangely restless man, still full of the ambition, the fear, and the sadness that had marked his long and busy life.

“I don’t mind dying,” Rabi said in a widely watched 1983 public television interview. “My ancestors did that. What I do mind is the destruction of civilization. Take all my work—it is in libraries. Well, all that goes up in smoke. I mean the whole civilization. This is the holy thing which they are violating by pushing in the direction of an annihilating war.” ⁶⁴

Rabi’s use of the word “holy” hinted at something deeper. Religious themes increasingly colored his thinking in his final years, as he explained to a biographer near the end of his life:

Nothing in the world can move me as deeply as some of these Orthodox Jewish practices. People go to Israel, to Williamsburg in Brooklyn, or to those places where Orthodox Jews go… and they pray and shake back and forth. Some people are appalled by it, but to me it is great. These are my people. I could join them, shake back and forth, and feel all right about it. The thing that saves me from any of those feelings is that I’m a scientist which I firmly believe transcends, doesn’t oppose, but transcends these particular things. I am of this and there is no question, but I’m not in it, couldn’t be in it. I love it and I respect it, but as a scientist I am at a more universal level… and this comes back to God. ⁶⁵

In 1983 Rabi attended a reunion at Los Alamos marking the fortieth anniversary of its founding. He returned to where it all began, back to the sun-drenched mesa and a sprawl of buildings more numerous and permanent than those that he had last seen during the war. So much had changed since then—not the least Rabi himself. “I’m seeing an abomination,” he said as his car approached Los Alamos. “We should have put it to rest years ago.” Later he addressed a large gathering of physicists at the lab. It was an emotionally charged moment, and the fervor of the occasion moved Rabi, whose eyesight was failing but whose conscience was not. “We meant well,” the white-haired, bespectacled Rabi declared as his mind went back to wartime Los Alamos. ⁶⁶

But the way things developed—and this is the folly—it became a thing in itself. The question now is not so much how to protect civilization, but how to destroy other human beings. We have lost sight of the basic tenets of all religions—that a human being is a wonderful thing. We talk as if humans were matter…. There is no way for scientists to escape the responsibilities of their knowledge…. We now have nations lined up like those prisoners at Auschwitz, going into the ovens and waiting for the ovens to be perfected, made more efficient. I submit that this fatalistic attitude is very un-American. It is not American to stand around waiting for something to happen, hoping it won’t, when you see it on the horizon. It would be much more true to our spirit to understand and prevent it. The United States was founded on a very revolutionary principle [:]… the greatness of the human spirit. Somehow, rather than this calculus of destruction, we must get back to our true nature as a nation and as part of western civilization…. How do we recover it? We cannot put this evil spirit back into the bottle. We have to learn to live with it. ⁶⁷

Rabi’s words were received at first with a sound of indrawn breaths, followed by a gigantic, collective sigh—then wave after wave of loud applause. Five years later, on January 11, 1988, I. I. Rabi died at his home in New York City after a long illness. He was eighty-nine.

At a time when most people were happy to slow down, Teller continued to look ahead, championing weapons research and military preparedness after the collapse of the Soviet Union with the same intensity that he had during the height of the Cold War. The specter of bolshevism that had frightened him since his boyhood in Budapest disappeared into the dustbin of history, but the world remained a chaotic, hostile place in his mind and his adopted country remained perpetually at risk. At century’s end, when the United States reigned as the world’s sole superpower, Teller darkly warned that “America is as vulnerable as Poland was in 1939.” ⁶⁸ The pain, insecurity, and paranoia of his refugee past never left him.

Nor did the emotional sting of his ostracism in the wake of the Oppenheimer affair, despite his public damn-the-world attitude. The wound was extraordinarily deep and long lasting. More than thirty years on, Teller was asked how he had handled his loss. “As best I could,” he said in a voice that was so soft it could barely be heard. “Does it hurt?” he was asked. Teller exploded, “None of your business!” He then paused and added in a child’s high-low singsong, “Perhaps it does, perhaps it doesn’t.” There was another long pause. “Of course that hurts! It was meant to hurt, and it did! I acquired a new set of friends at an age when most people make no more friends. In the meantime, I had lots of additional problems.” With that, he abruptly ended the line of questioning. ⁶⁹ After he suffered a stroke in 1996, a nurse quizzed him to probe his lucidity. “Are you the famous Edward Teller?” she asked. “No,” he snapped, “I’m the infamous Edward Teller.” ⁷⁰

Toward the end of his long life, in 2001, Teller finally published his memoirs. They were like the man himself: by turns witty, insightful, defensive, and evasive. In them, Teller summarized his philosophy of nuclear-weapons work: “To my mind, in a democracy, using nuclear weapons is an issue entirely different from that of working on their development. Research on nuclear weapons has provided the United States with the ability to deter the use of nuclear weapons throughout the past half century.” ⁷¹ The ninety-three-year-old author showed occasional flashes of vulnerability and regret that he had never shown before. Perhaps most revealing was his comment that one of H. G. Wells’s lesser-known tales, The Man Who Could Work Miracles, gave him “particular pleasure.” ⁷² In Wells’s story, a skeptic discovers that he can work miracles. In the process of exploring his new talent, he commands the earth to stand still. That produces a catastrophe, because he forgets to command the atmosphere to stand still, too, and as a result everything is blown away. The man wishes he had never been given his power, and the story ends with the skeptic back in the setting where the tale began, where he undoes his recent past and loses forever the talent to perform miracles. Read as an autobiographical metaphor, Teller’s admiration for Wells’s tale was highly revealing. Two years later, on September 9, 2003, Edward Teller died at his home in Stanford, California. He was ninety-five.

It had been a long life. Presidents had come and gone, but Teller had remained on center stage for decades, building bombs, advising leaders, fashioning himself into a force to be reckoned with. He had become the science hero of the Republican right and the patron saint of the military-industrial complex. He had built up an enormous inventory of incredibly deadly weapons that outlived the Soviet Union that he hated and feared, and he had personally hindered or blocked almost every effort to control the atomic arms race. Teller’s obsession with thermonuclear fusion may be recalled as a monumental contribution to a world without major war. But if the world ever plunges into a nuclear Armageddon, its few survivors may regard Teller as the real incarnation of the fictional Dr. Strangelove. Eugene Wigner, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, said of Teller: “He is the most imaginative person I ever met, and this means a great deal when you consider that I knew Einstein.” Rabi saw him quite differently: “He is a danger to all that is important,” he said. “I do really feel it would have been a better world without Teller. I think he is an enemy of humanity.” ⁷³

Hans Bethe was the last survivor. When Bethe had witnessed the first atomic explosion at Trinity and then saw the photographs of the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he had been shocked by what he saw—and had helped to create. “Everything starts with Los Alamos—with the atomic bomb,” said Bethe. “All the tragedies and all the mistakes that haunt us now begin there.” ⁷⁴ His unease at the destructive power of the bomb had forced him to contemplate disquieting questions and to do what he had not done before: struggle deeply with the moral dilemmas and political implications of his work. After 1945 and for more than half a century, he wrote articles and pamphlets, signed petitions, held press conferences, lectured and debated throughout the world, and occasionally buttonholed important government officials—all in an effort to limit and control the terrible weapon that he and others had brought into the world. Beginning in the 1950s and for several decades thereafter, he chaired the CIA’s secret, highly influential panel charged with taking all source information about nuclear activities throughout the world and figuring out what was going on. Bethe worked within the system, wishing that by doing so he could help solve the problems presented by the bomb he and others had created.

Bethe had always been and remained a strapping figure with a deceptively distracted look. His graying hair became thin and wispy and his loosely knotted tie perpetually missed his collar, but he was rigorously logical and he had a strong sense of his own abilities. His self-confidence and the force of his personality made it possible for him to act with a moral sensibility. In contrast to Oppenheimer, Bethe was the same whether he was dealing with a student, a colleague, the president of Cornell, or a senator in Washington. In a world of intellectual egotists and academic prima donnas, Bethe—who won the Nobel Prize in 1967—was a modest man who liked to say, “The great day is when the student knows more than the teacher.” Approachable, he always left his office door open. “When I arrived at Cornell and introduced myself to the great man,” said one of his postwar graduate students, “two things about him immediately impressed me. First, there was a lot of mud on his shoes. Second, the other students called him Hans.” ⁷⁵

Bethe’s activities in the postwar years brought him into repeated conflict with Teller. He opposed Teller on development of the superbomb in the 1950s, the Limited Test Ban Treaty in the 1960s, the atomic arms race in the 1970s, the nuclear freeze and SDI in the 1980s, and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in the 1990s. Unlike Teller, who believed scientists should build ever bigger bombs to make it disastrous for either side to start a war, Bethe doubted such bombs would lead to peace. “No technology race can make us secure,” he told a congressional committee in May 1985. “Only negotiation and agreements with the other side and a change in the atmosphere of international relations can do that.” Having helped lead the world into the dangerous age of nuclear weapons, Bethe wanted to help lead the world out of it. ⁷⁶

Bethe and Teller were two lions contesting the legacy of their momentous creation. Their lifelines had run a parallel course since long ago in prewar Europe, their fates intertwined and even mirror images of each other. Even their temperaments and abilities complemented each other, Teller with his spirited imagination, Bethe with his purposeful common sense. “I am tired of arguing with Hans,” Teller would grumble with a mixture of irritation and admiration. ⁷⁷ Bethe showed similar feelings toward Teller. Throughout their letters to one another over the years ran a warm private relationship threaded with harsh differences on policy, frequent reassurances of personal and professional respect, and an occasional expression of hurtful surprise. Their friendship endured many strains, but each labored to preserve it.

At the height of the SDI debate in the 1980s, Bethe wrote Teller a letter outlining his objections to the program. Teller usually reacted to such criticism with aggressive rebuttals, but he dwelled on more personal matters with Bethe:

Dear Hans,

It is good to have your objections in writing.

I would have liked to respond in a prompt manner, but this was impossible for three reasons. The first is that your objections deserve a thorough answer.

The second is that my schedule has been even more crowded than usual, and I could not acquire the necessary time. I confess that one unavoidable commitment was to celebrate my fiftieth wedding anniversary with Mici and all our children and grandchildren in Hawaii.

The third and most important reason is that I have gotten into really serious trouble with my heart.

Yesterday I had an exhaustive and exhausting catheterization of my heart. Tomorrow or Thursday, when I have recovered enough from that procedure, I will have a four or five bypass heart surgery. If and when I recover I will write to you independently.

Edward ⁷⁸

Within months Teller had recovered enough to invite Bethe to visit him at Livermore. Bethe accepted, and made the visit in March 1985. He applauded the efforts of scientists while at Livermore, but repeated his doubts about SDI in articles and interviews thereafter. This prompted a pained response from Teller. “From a personal point of view, all this is very sad and I suspect that our feelings may be similar,” he wrote. “At the same time, I must pay more attention to my responsibilities as I see them rather than to my feelings. Indeed, the hope and effort for a useful defense in the strict and narrow sense of the word is the one remaining motivation for which I continue to work.” ⁷⁹

Bethe replied by forcefully summarizing their differing views on nuclear weapons:

Dear Edward,

I am happy that you wrote. Let me go right to fundamentals. We both want security for the United States and for the world, we both want to prevent a big nuclear war. But we differ fundamentally on how to achieve this goal. You think peace will be preserved by inventing ever new weapons, and by having a technology race. In my opinion, the arms race has made us less and less secure…. We are not going to convince each other, and we are both firmly committed to our convictions.

Bethe then reached out across the decades of their differences and disagreements:

I remember very fondly the years of our friendship, back in the 1930s and 1940s. I am very sad indeed that politics has separated us so far. But can’t we be personally friendly?

Yours sincerely,
Hans ⁸⁰

“Thank you for your kind letter,” Teller replied several weeks later, then testily asked: “Is peace better assured by negotiation with the Soviets or by working on defense?” “At this time, I do not urge work on weapons of mass destruction, but rather an effective defense against these weapons,” he summed up. “The conflict between the Soviets and us strikes me like the religious conflicts and wars lasting from 1517 to at least 1648,” Bethe replied, referring to the Protestant Reformation and the ensuing power struggles throughout western Europe. “But must we have the analogy of the Thirty Years War? With nuclear weapons, this would mean the end of civilization in the countries involved, and the ideological differences would become irrelevant.” ⁸¹

That summer, Bethe and Teller both found themselves at Los Alamos. A party was held to which each was invited. Bethe arrived first and sat down at a table on the patio, where a group of people surrounded him. Then Teller arrived, stomping in in good humor. The hostess said, “Edward, there is someone here I want you to meet,” and she took him over to Bethe. They shook hands, sat down, and talked together to the exclusion of everyone else for the rest of the party. They were like two old high-school chums who hadn’t seen each other in forty years and had just found one another. ⁸² Thereafter until ill health and old age slowed them both, Bethe, who visited Caltech each winter, would somehow find a way to see Teller, who was up the California coast at Stanford. ⁸³

By then, Bethe was in his eighties and the grand old man of American physics. His friendly blue eyes, soft white hair, and broad smile gave him the look of a favorite grandfather. He was deeply troubled by the irrationality and excesses of the nuclear arms race, but he remained what he had always been: thoughtful and meticulous. He still received visitors in his small office lined with bookcases on the third floor of the Newman Laboratory of Nuclear Studies at Cornell. He and his guests sat in straight-backed chairs around a simple metal desk covered with papers as Bethe listened attentively, barely shifting position. He spoke precisely in his deep, German-accented voice with a strength and orderliness that brooked no interruption but radiated honesty and curiosity. Asked if he sensed himself as a historical figure, he laughed. “Yes,” he said, and added: “As my son said after a talk, ‘Well, they got it from the horse’s mouth. And there aren’t so many horses left.’” ⁸⁴ His work ethic remained strong, but he preferred to work now on the theory of binary stars—a peaceful theory, he liked to note, one that required experience and wisdom.

As Bethe aged, his interests broadened beyond the natural world to the world of man. He took to reading history—lots of it. A visitor to his home was more likely to see Tacitus’s Germania than The Physical Review on the table by his reading chair. He increasingly put his faith not in technology but in human beings—a remarkable stance for a man who had dedicated his life to science. Only humane reasoning and political understanding, he felt, would prevent nuclear war. “If a man does not constantly ask himself what is the right thing to do,” he said, “I do not know what will become of him.” ⁸⁵ Where before he was willing to play the insider in the hope of influencing policy, he now assumed the role of blunt sage and critic. On the fortieth anniversary of the Trinity test in July 1985, Bethe had journeyed to Washington and spoke to Congress like a latter-day Jeremiah:

The Bible tells us that the children of Israel wandered forty years through the desert. Our desert has been the fear of nuclear war. But I don’t see any sign of the Promised Land.

U.S. policy has tried to rely on superior technology. Whenever there was a chance to make nuclear weapons more devastating, we took it. We introduced the H-bomb and the transcontinental bomber, we escalated the number of nuclear weapons and later that of nuclear missiles, and (worst of all) we introduced MIRV [multiple-warhead missiles]. In every case, the Soviets followed suit, three to five years later, and we were less secure than before….

Nuclear explosives have shattered the meaning of the age-old words “weapon,” “war,” and “defense.” A weapon is intended to achieve some definite military or political objective, but any use of nuclear explosives carries the risk of virtually unlimited destruction. Hence plans that assume that nuclear devices can be used to wage war are irrational. Nuclear “weapons” have only one purpose—that of deterring war….

The first forty years of the nuclear age should have taught us that we have only two choices: mutual security or mutual insecurity. During the past forty years we have blundered, and in effect chose mutual insecurity. In the next forty years we must strive for mutual security. If we do we will steadily decrease the risk of nuclear war, and restore confidence that we are masters of our fate. ⁸⁶

Ten years later, on the fiftieth anniversary of Hiroshima in August 1995, Bethe returned to Los Alamos and implored scientists there to withhold their talents from creating new weapons of mass destruction. “Enough is enough,” he said in a weak but insistent voice, speaking from notes written in a careful but shaky hand. “We shouldn’t design any more.” ⁸⁷ He issued this statement:

As director of the Theoretical Division of Los Alamos, I participated at the most senior level in the World War II Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic weapons.

Now, at the age of 88, I am one of the few remaining such senior persons alive. Looking back at the half-century since that time, I feel the most intense relief that these weapons have not been used since World War II, mixed with the horror that tens of thousands of such weapons have been built since that time—one hundred times more than any of us at Los Alamos could ever have imagined.

Today we are rightly in an era of disarmament and dismantlement of nuclear weapons. But in some countries nuclear development still continues. Whether and when the various nations of the world can agree to stop this is uncertain. But individual scientists can still influence this process by withholding their skills.

Accordingly, I call on all scientists in all countries to cease and desist from work creating, developing, improving and manufacturing further nuclear weapons—and for that matter, other weapons of potential mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons.

Hans Bethe ⁸⁸

These confessions were part of a gradual but powerful disaffection with the profession of nuclear weaponeering he had done so much to create. In his last years, Bethe grew acutely sensitive to the moral implications of the bomb. “I still believe that we contributed to the security of the United States” in first developing the atomic bomb, he said. “However, while working on weapons I wonder whether our security was really served by their perfection.” He paused. “It seemed quite logical,” he said in defense of the choices he had made, then added almost wistfully: “But sometimes I wish I were more consistent an idealist.” ⁸⁹ His poignant remark captured the dilemma that each of the atomic scientists confronted, and resolved, with varying degrees of success and guilt. Bethe took to quoting the famous dictum: “Sin must needs come into the world, but woe to him who brings it about.” “Perhaps that applies to us,” he confessed. ⁹⁰

The final founding brother of the atomic age died quietly at his home in Ithaca, New York, at ninety-eight, on the night of March 6, 2005. Bethe’s death brought the story of Pandora’s Keepers to a close. The legacy of Pandora’s Keepers remains urgent and undiminished by the passage of time.