CHAPTER 8

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An End, a Beginning

THE TRINITY TEST, closely followed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, shook the atomic scientists out of their absorption in the technical problems of building the bomb and awakened them to its enormous moral and political implications. The scientific work was finished, and the awful magnitude of what they had done began to sink in. I.I. Rabi voiced their confused reactions in a widely read magazine article that fall. “I would say that we are frankly pleased, terrified, and to an even greater extent embarrassed when we contemplate the results of our wartime efforts,” he wrote. “Our terror comes from the realization—which is nowhere more strongly felt than among us—of the tremendous forces of destruction now existing in an all too practical form.” ¹ Many felt “a feeling of accomplishment and a feeling of revulsion about what we had done,” as Bethe said. ²

All of them were haunted by the sarcasm of a Japanese radiologist in Hiroshima. “I did the experiment years ago, but only on a few rats. But you Americans—you are wonderful. You have made the human experiment.” “No one,” wrote a Los Alamos physicist, “could fail to carry the scar of such a cutting remark.” ³ Many decided to leave Los Alamos. They left for many reasons, and not all explained why. Those who watched them go saw answers in their eyes or read them in letters written some time afterward. “We all felt,” Bethe remembered, “that, like the soldiers, we had done our duty and that we deserved to return to the type of work that we had chosen as our life’s career, the pursuit of pure science and teaching. Moreover, it was not obvious that there was any need for a large effort on atomic weapons in peacetime.” ⁴

Some felt a sense of unease, even those who believed that ending a bloody war had justified using the bomb. Many came to regard themselves, in the phrase of Time magazine, as the “world’s guilty men.” ⁵ Oppenheimer spoke for himself and many other physicists when he wrote, “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” ⁶ Oppenheimer’s words expressed the anguish of those caught between the commitment to pursue knowledge wherever it might lead and the realization that the knowledge discovered had caused great misery to other human beings.

Oppenheimer’s anxiety was intensified by fear that the bomb threatened popular respect for the discipline of science he revered. Although physicists now seemed to wear the “tunic of Superman,” in the phrase of Life magazine, and to stand in the spotlight of a thousand suns, the physicists themselves knew better. ⁷ “If we take the stand that our object is merely to see that the next war is bigger and better,” Rabi warned, “we will ultimately lose the respect of the public. In popular demagogy we [will] become the unpaid servants of the ‘munitions makers’ and mere technicians rather than the self-sacrificing public-spirited citizens which we feel ourselves to be.” ⁸ The bomb seemed an ominous refutation of the Enlightenment principle—an article of faith to them—that more knowledge would inevitably bring more happiness and progress. “We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon,” admitted Oppenheimer, one “that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world, a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man, or whether it is good to learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it.” ⁹ Slowly, as if feeling their way in a blinding light, they struggled to understand what it all meant.

Oppenheimer was not the only physicist uneasy about a world armed with atomic bombs, but his exhaustion was deeper than most. The day after Nagasaki, Lawrence flew to Los Alamos (he had overcome his fear of airplanes), where he found his Berkeley colleague looking weary and feeling pessimistic, his hair turning gray. “I know that he felt guilty in spite of having told Truman the weapon had to be used,” recalled Bethe. “He felt guilty for having directed the project.” ¹⁰

Compton and Fermi joined Oppenheimer and Lawrence that weekend to draft a report for Washington on postwar atomic policy. The four were emerging from the secret project as public heroes; not just policy makers but also the American people were clamoring for their views. Understanding this, they eschewed merely technical advice and decided to draft a plea for international control. “Other powers,” they presciently warned, “can produce these weapons in a few years and all too soon be in a threatening position. We consider it imperative, therefore, to take determined steps toward international arrangements that will make such developments highly improbable, if not impossible.” ¹¹

“We are convinced,” they went on, “that weapons quantitatively and qualitatively far more effective than now available will result from further work on these problems.” They were referring to the superbomb. The physicists further emphasized their “firm opinion” that “no military countermeasures will be found which will be adequately effective in preventing the delivery of atomic weapons” on the American homeland. This led to their most sobering but farsighted conclusion:

We are not only unable to outline a program that would assure to this nation for the next decades hegemony in the field of atomic weapons; we are equally unable to insure that such hegemony, if achieved, could protect us from the most terrible destruction.

The development, in the years to come, of more effective atomic weapons, would appear to be a most natural element in any national policy of maintaining our military forces at great strength; nevertheless we have grave doubts that this further development can contribute essentially or permanently to the prevention of war. We believe that the safety of this nation—as opposed to its ability to inflict damage on an enemy power—cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible. It is our unanimous and urgent recommendation to you that, despite the present incomplete exploitation of technical possibilities in this field, all steps be taken, all necessary international arrangements be made, to this one end. ¹²

Oppenheimer took their report to Washington in late August. The timing was unfortunate; the report stood in jarring contrast to the triumphant mood of the capital, where policy makers were exulting in victory over Japan, anticipating trouble with Russia, and more interested in building up the U.S. atomic arsenal than in pursuing international control. Oppenheimer described Washington’s reaction in a disappointed letter back to Lawrence at Berkeley:

August 30, 1945

Dear Ernest:

After our meetings [at Los Alamos] I had a few days in Washington: it was a bad time, too early for clarity. I took our letter to Bush and to [Stimson’s assistant] Harrison—Conant, Stimson, Compton were all away—and had an opportunity with them to explain in more detail than was appropriate in a letter what our common feelings were in this all-important thing. I emphasized of course that all of us would earnestly do whatever was really in the national interest, no matter how desperate and disagreeable; but that we felt reluctant to promise that much real good could come of continuing the atomic bomb work just like poison gases after the last war…. I had the fairly clear impression from the talks that things had gone most badly at Potsdam, and that little or no progress had been made in interesting the Russians in collaboration or control. * I don’t know how seriously an effort was made: apparently neither Churchill nor Attlee nor Stalin was any help at all, but this is only my conjecture. While I was in Washington two things happened, both rather gloomy: the President issued an absolute Ukase, forbidding any disclosures on the atomic bomb—and the terms were broad—without his personal approval. The other was that Harrison took our letter to Byrnes, who sent back word just as I was leaving that “in the present critical international situation there was no alternative to pushing the [atomic] program full steam ahead.”… I do not come away from a profound grief, and a profound perplexity about the course we should be following….

Affectionately,
Robert ¹³

Oppenheimer sensed that policy makers did not grasp what scientists had put into their hands. Just weeks after the war, in response to a reporter’s question, he said: “If you ask: ‘Can we make [atomic bombs] more terrible?’ the answer is yes. If you ask: ‘Can we make a lot of them?’ the answer is yes. If you ask: ‘Can we make them terribly more terrible?’ the answer is probably.” ¹⁴ It was already clear to Oppenheimer that the atomic bomb represented only the beginning of a revolutionary new level of destructiveness. And he and the other atomic scientists were no longer in control, if they ever had been. This sobering realization led Oppenheimer, Lawrence, Compton, and Fermi to use even stronger language in a second report they prepared for policy makers in late September. This time, the four intended to jolt Washington into confronting the bomb’s dangers. “The realization of atomic weapons constitutes a peril of the first magnitude for this nation and for the world,” they bluntly wrote. They warned that America’s nuclear monopoly would not last—the atomic genie had been let out of the bottle; other powers would one day develop their own weapons of mass destruction. All of this raised the specter of an atomic arms race, which they doubted America could win because the destructiveness of nuclear weapons could be increased almost infinitely and the development of effective countermeasures was unlikely. “There is no foundation for the hope that this nation can be safe against atomic weapons on the basis of technical prowess or technical ingenuity alone,” noted these technical wizards, with deliberate irony.

The looming issue for all of them was the superbomb. As Teller’s latest report had suggested, there was a good chance it could be developed. They flatly opposed such development on moral grounds. “We feel that this development should not be undertaken,” they wrote, “primarily because we should prefer defeat in war to a victory obtained at the expense of the enormous human disaster that would be caused by its determined use.” Their dread was rooted in the superbomb’s boggling destructiveness: the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had leveled four square miles; a superbomb would level one hundred square miles.

They cited other reasons for restraint. “If developed here, other great powers must follow suit,” they warned. Within a decade the United States could develop enough atomic bombs to destroy “all major industrial and military facilities throughout the world” anyway. The bomb had transformed the nature of war: “all the world faces a future in which sudden destruction is possible at any time.” Instead of building bigger bombs, they urged “work[ing] with speed and determination toward establishing a world ‘government’” that, to be effective, would require “the United States, along with the other great powers, to place into its hands all atom bomb and other major war-making facilities, and to submit to international inspection and control of work in the field of atomic energy.” ¹⁵ It was a bold—even revolutionary—conclusion, requiring an unprecedented—and perhaps unrealistic—political transformation. But they saw no other way. “The only solution to the problem,” they pointedly concluded, “must lie in politics, and this implies a profound and shattering alteration in the relations among nations.” ¹⁶

Although curious as scientists, they nevertheless had concluded that the superbomb was a problem that should not be solved—some science had become too deadly, its implications too dangerous. Breaking with their past, they had decided to put the interests of humanity above the pursuit of knowledge, a courageous and farsighted stance that reflected the revulsion that the mass killings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had brought over each of them. They could not foresee that some of them would reverse their stance when America’s effort at international control failed and the Cold War set in. ¹⁷

Oppenheimer returned to Los Alamos from Washington tired and dispirited. A few days later, he and Kitty drove across the Rio Grande Valley to Perro Caliente for their first real vacation in nearly three years. Oppenheimer took with him a pile of letters from old friends surprised to find his name prominently associated with the weapon that had ended the war, and answered some of the more personal ones by hand. A prompt reply went to Herbert Smith, his old teacher at the Ethical Culture School, with whom he had first experienced New Mexico. “It seemed appropriate, & very sweet,” he wrote Smith, “that your good note should reach me on the Pecos—we had come over for a few days after the surrender. Like so many of the beautiful things of which I learned first from you, the love of it grows with the years. Your words were good to have. You will believe that this undertaking has not been without its misgivings; they are heavy on us today, when the future, which has so many elements of high promise, is yet only a stone’s throw from despair. Thus the good which this work has perhaps contributed to make in the ending of the war looms very large to us, because it is there for sure.” A letter to Haakon Chevalier the next day reiterated his conviction on this last point. “The thing had to be done, Haakon. It had to be brought to an open public fruition at a time when all over the world men craved peace as never before, were committed as never before both to technology as a way of life and thought and to the idea that no man is an island.” To his Harvard classmate Frederick Bernheim, he confessed: “We are at the ranch now, in an earnest but not-too-sanguine search for sanity…. There would seem to be some great headaches ahead.” ¹⁸

Now that the war was over, the urgency was gone. Oppenheimer had lost the sense of purpose with which he had thrown himself into work on the bomb. He had already written to Groves, making it plain that he did not believe Los Alamos should continue as a weapons lab and that “the Director himself would very much like to know when he will be able to escape from these duties for which he is so ill-qualified and which he had accepted only in an effort to serve the country during the war.” ¹⁹ On a consulting visit to Washington in late September, he told Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson that physicists as a group opposed doing any more weapons work—“not merely a superbomb but any bomb”—because it went “against the dictates of their hearts and spirits.” ²⁰ “There was not much left in me at that moment,” said Oppenheimer later. ²¹ He arranged to quit his post shortly after an army awards ceremony for the lab on October sixteenth.

Almost everyone on the mesa turned out for the ceremony, which was held outdoors under a deep blue sky. Groves, standing in front of Fuller Lodge on a low platform decked in patriotic bunting and American flags fluttering in a cool wind amid the sound of shimmering aspen leaves colored gold by the autumn sun, spoke in loud and clear tones of the patriotic work done by the laboratory. Oppenheimer followed Groves, speaking in a low, quiet voice that he often used in public. He was uncharacteristically nervous as he began his speech. His theme was that the old concepts of war were no longer valid and that the only way to prevent a nuclear arms race leading one day to a nuclear holocaust was some form of international control. The atomic bomb, he said, symbolized “not only a great peril but a great hope of beginning to realize those changes which are needed if there is to be any peace.” Under threat of mutual destruction nations might come to understand the imperative need for control of atomic weapons. But then he warned:

If atomic bombs are to be added to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.

The peoples of this world must unite, or they will perish. This war, that has ravaged so much of the earth, has written these words. The atomic bomb has spelled them out for all men to understand. Other men have spoken them, in other times, in other wars, of other weapons. They have not prevailed. There are some, misled by a false sense of human history, who hold that they will not prevail today. It is not for us to believe that. By our works we are committed, committed to a world united, before this common peril. ²²

Oppenheimer spoke for the last time at Los Alamos on November second, the night before he returned to Berkeley. Hundreds jammed the largest auditorium on the Hill to hear their leader’s parting thoughts. It was a stormy night and thunder rolled over the mesa. This was the first—really the only—time at Los Alamos that he felt truly free to speak what was on his mind and in his heart:

I should like to talk tonight as a fellow scientist, and at least as a fellow worrier about the fix we are in…. I would have liked to talk to you at an earlier date—but I couldn’t talk to you as Director…. I think that it can only help to look a little at what our situation is—at what has happened to us—and that this must give us some honesty, some insight, which will be a source of strength in what may be the not-too-easy days ahead….

What has happened to us forced us to re-consider the relations between science and common sense…. They forced us to be prepared for the inadequacy of the ways in which human beings attempted to deal with reality…. In some ways I think these virtues, which scientists quite reluctantly were forced to learn by the nature of the world they were studying, may be useful even today in preparing us for somewhat more radical views of what the issues are than would be natural or easy for people who had not been through this experience….

I think that it hardly needs to be said why the impact is so strong. There are three reasons: one is the extraordinary speed with which things which were right on the frontier of science were translated into terms where they affected many living people, and potentially all people. Another is the fact, quite accidental in many ways, and connected with the speed, that scientists themselves played such a large part, not merely in providing the foundation for atomic weapons, but in actually making them. In this we are certainly closer to it than any other group. The third is that the thing we made… arrived in the world with such a shattering reality and suddenness that there was no opportunity for the edges to be worn off.

In considering what the situation of science is, it may be helpful to think a little of what people said and felt of their motives in coming into this job. One always has to worry that what people say of their motives is not adequate. Many people said different things, and most of them, I think, had some validity. There was in the first place the great concern that our enemy might develop these weapons before we did, and the feeling—at least, in the early days, the very strong feeling—that without atomic weapons it might be very difficult, it might be an impossible, it might be an incredibly long thing to win the war. These things wore off a little as it became clear that the war would be won in any case. Some people, I think, were motivated by curiosity, and rightly so; and some by a sense of adventure, and rightly so. Others had more political arguments and said, “Well, we know that atomic weapons are in principle possible, and it is not right that the threat of their unrealized possibility should hang over the world. It is right that the world should know what can be done in their field and deal with it.” And the people added to that that it was a time when all over the world men would be particularly ripe and open for dealing with this problem because of the immediacy of the evils of war, because of the universal cry from everyone that one could not go through this thing again, even a war without atomic bombs. And there was finally, and I think rightly, the feeling that there was probably no place in the world where the development of atomic weapons would have a better chance of leading to a reasonable solution, and a smaller chance of leading to disaster, than within the United States. I believe all these things that people said are true, and I think I said them all myself at one time or another….

There are [those] who try to escape the immediacy of this situation by saying that, after all, war has always been very terrible; after all, weapons have always gotten worse and worse; that this is just another weapon and it doesn’t create a great change; that they are not so bad; bombings have been bad in this war and this is not a change in that—it just adds a little to the effectiveness of bombing; that some sort of protection will be found. I think that these efforts to diffuse and weaken the nature of the crisis make it only more dangerous. I think it is for us to accept it as a very grave crisis, to realize that these atomic weapons which we have started to make are very terrible, that they involve a change, that they are not just a slight modification….

I think the advent of the atomic bomb and the facts which will get around that they are not too hard to make—that they will be universal if people wish to make them universal, that they will not constitute a real drain on the economy of any strong nation, and that their power of destruction will grow and is already incomparably greater than that of any other weapon—these things create a new situation…. I think when people talk of the fact that this is not only a great peril, but a great hope, this is what they should mean…. There exists a possibility of realizing those changes which are needed if there is to be any peace.

Those are very far-reaching changes. They are changes in the relations between nations, not only in spirit, not only in law, but also in conception and feeling. I don’t know which of these is prior; they must all work together, and only the gradual interaction of one on the other can make a reality…. Atomic weapons are a peril which affect everyone in the world, and in that sense a completely common problem, as common a problem as it was for the Allies to defeat the Nazis. I think that in order to handle this common problem there must be a complete sense of community responsibility. I do not think that one may expect that people will contribute to the solution of the problem until they are aware of their ability to take part in the solution….

I think it is important to realize that even those who are well informed in this country have been slow to understand, slow to believe that the bombs would work, and then slow to understand that their working would present such profound problems. We have certain interests in playing up the bomb, not only we here locally, but all over the country, because we made them, and our pride is involved. I think that in other lands it may be even more difficult for an appreciation of the magnitude of the thing to take hold. For this reason, I’m not sure that the greatest opportunities for progress do not lie somewhat further in the future than I had for a long time thought….

The thing which must have troubled you, and which troubled me, in the official statements was the insistent note of unilateral responsibility for the handling of atomic weapons. However good the motives of this country are… we are 140 million people, and there are two billion people living on earth. We must understand that whatever our commitments to our own views and ideas, and however confident we are that in the course of time they will tend to prevail, our absolute—our completely absolute—commitment to them, in denial of the views and ideas of other people, cannot be the basis of any kind of agreement….

We are not only scientists; we are men, too. We cannot forget our dependence on our fellow men. I mean not only our material dependence, without which no science would be possible, and without which we could not work; I mean also our deep moral dependence, in that the value of science must lie in the world of men, that all our roots lie there. These are the strongest bonds in the world, stronger than those even that bind us to one another, these are the deepest bonds—that bind us to our fellow men. ²³

Down beside the Rio Grande River, at the teahouse where Oppenheimer had often sought refuge from his burdens, Edith Warner read a transcript of his remarks in the newspaper a few days later. She had made a point during the war of never questioning Oppenheimer as she quietly served him dinner, but she had sensed all along that he was thinking about more than just science. On November twenty-fifth, she wrote Oppenheimer a letter:

Dear Mr. Opp,

I have thought of you frequently…. So it was especially satisfying to read your recent speech. I hope you do not mind my having it.

As I read, it seemed almost as though you were pacing my kitchen, talking half to yourself and half to me. And from it came the conviction of what I’ve felt a number of times—you have, in lesser degree, that quality which radiates from Mr. Baker [Niels Bohr]. It has seemed to me in these past few months that it is a power as little known as atomic energy, which has greatly increased man’s need for it. It also seems that even recognition of it involves responsibility.

There are many things for which I would express my gratitude…. Your hours here mean much to me and I appreciate, perhaps more than most outsiders, what you have given of yourself in these Los Alamos years. Most of all I am grateful for your bringing Mr. Baker. I think of you both, hopefully, as the song of the river comes from the canyon and the need of the world reaches even this quiet spot.

May you have strength and courage and wisdom,

Edith Warner ²⁴

In Bohr’s view, because the problem of atomic weapons and war had to be solved, it would be solved; the threat to humanity’s survival simply left no other choice. Bohr believed that scientists should not portray the atomic bomb to the public solely as a potential destroyer, but as a “forceful reminder of how closely the fate of all mankind is coupled together,” and as “a unique opportunity to remove obstacles to peaceful collaboration between nations and to enable them jointly to benefit from the great promises held out by the progress of science.” Bohr saw physicists like himself as the unique agents of this opportunity, both as makers of the bomb and as the teachers of its universal lessons. ²⁵

Bohr looked to Oppenheimer as a key ally in this effort. After settling back in Copenhagen, Bohr wrote to him in November:

I was very sorry that I was not able see you again before my return to Denmark, but, due to difficulties in arranging passage for Margrethe and me, we could not, as we had intended to, return to the U.S.A. before the secret of the project was lifted, and then it was thought advisable that I no longer postponed my return to Denmark.

I need not say how often Aage and I think of all the kindness you and Kitty showed us in these last eventful years, where your understanding and sympathy have meant so much to me, and how closely I feel connected with you in the hope that the great accomplishment may contribute decisively to bringing about harmonious relationships between nations. I trust the whole matter is developing in a favorable way. ²⁶

Oppenheimer shared Bohr’s goal, and sought to achieve it by courting policy makers, whom he believed would listen to him. He was, after all, now an international celebrity and a national hero. Oppenheimer urged other physicists to keep the horrors of atomic war fresh in the public’s mind. “It will not help to avert such a war,” he told them, “if we try to rub the edges off this new terror that we have helped to bring to the world. If I return so insistently to the magnitude of the peril,” he continued, “it is because I see in that our one great hope. As a vast threat, and a new one, to all the peoples of the earth, by its novelty, its terror, its strangely promethean quality, it has become, in the eyes of many of us, an opportunity unique and challenging.” ²⁷

Other physicists besides Oppenheimer began lobbying policy makers, their efforts made easier because policy makers now looked on them much as primitive tribesmen had looked on their shamans: as high priests in touch with mysterious, supernatural forces whose awsome power they alone could fathom. Fermi wrote Washington Democratic Senator Warren Magnuson in September 1945 to warn against the fallacy of an atomic monopoly. “The safety offered this country by the attempt to withhold from foreign powers what we know is only limited,” Fermi stressed. “Any major power could reach our present stage in this development in five years. It would be extremely dangerous to rely on secrecy.” ²⁸ Compton told an audience of civic leaders in St. Louis in November that “if the United States should be a party to an atomic war,” America’s cities would “follow Hiroshima and Nagasaki into oblivion.” “If our nation should eventually win,” Compton said, “what would we have gained? Perhaps the control of the world. But of what value would this be with our civilization gone and our population decimated?” “We must keep in mind,” he added, “that when all are armed with atomic weapons no superiority of one nation can free it from danger of great damage by another.” ²⁹

Rabi agreed with Fermi and Compton—and set out to do something about it. His solution would not be—indeed, could not be—scientific. Try as he might, Rabi could not recapture the single-minded focus on physics he had enjoyed before the war. Now he was an older and wiser man who had experience dealing with the military, politics, and warfare, aware in a way he had not been as a young professor of the complexity of his own equations. Rabi thought that by working from the “inside,” with the government in Washington, he might be able to do something about controlling its dangers.

He decided to map out a plan with Oppenheimer. The two friends met in Rabi’s faculty apartment on Riverside Drive in late December 1945. It was a bitterly cold day. Factories across the Hudson in New Jersey belched smoke that hung almost suspended in the frigid air. Oppenheimer and Rabi stood at the window, looking out and watching small ice floes drift downstream, turning pink in the sunset. They sat down and began posing questions to each other and shaping answers. When evening came, they had formed a far-reaching idea for international control of the atom. “We were optimistic because we realized what a terrible state the world was going to get into if something like what we were proposing didn’t happen,” remembered Rabi. “We assumed the predicament was obvious to others and it was to most—even the military.” ³⁰

Oppenheimer conveyed their ideas to Washington, and the following month a committee was set up to draft an international control plan. The committee was headed by Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson, with Oppenheimer serving as a consultant. * For the next six weeks, committee members met in Washington offices, in railroad cars, at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos, even aloft in a military transport plane. They worked and studied and debated late into the night, then resumed again early the next morning.

The committee submitted its report to the Truman administration in March 1946. Although labeled the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, it bore the unmistakable imprint of Robert Oppenheimer, who had drafted it. “Only if dangerous aspects of atomic energy are taken out of national hands,” the report noted, “is there any reasonable prospect of devising safeguards against the use of atomic energy for bombs.” The committee proposed the creation of an international atomic agency. Believing that an unpoliced agreement placed too great a burden on good faith, the report recommended endowing the international agency with strong inspection powers. It stressed that the risk to the United States of relinquishing its atomic monopoly to an international agency was preferable to the risk of a nuclear arms race. ³¹

Other physicists rallied behind the report. Teller called it “a bold and dangerous solution; but inaction and an unplanned drift into international competition would be still more dangerous.” “If the constructive and imaginative spirit of the State Department report is compared with the ‘Maginot-line’ mentality of ‘keeping the secret,’“” Teller added, “one can hardly doubt in which direction our eventual hope for safety lies.” ³² Compton called the report “a sound and constructive basis for solving a difficult problem.” “We’d be in a much stronger position if the United Nations would have the atomic weapons and no individual nations would have them,” he said, “than the position in which we would hold atomic weapons and other nations also would develop them. Military defenses cannot make us safe; we’ve got to rely on international agreement before we can really be safe.” ³³ Bethe thought the greatest service physicists could perform was to “make it clear that only a truly international control of atomic energy gives any hope of lasting security from atomic weapons.” ³⁴ Any country in the world that possessed sufficient scientific talent and material resources—certainly including the Soviet Union—could, sooner or later, duplicate the accomplishment of the Manhattan Project.

All of them conceded that if no international agreement could be reached, then the United States might have to keep its atomic arsenal for purposes of deterrence. But they stressed that the bomb was not a “winning weapon” in the long run because other countries would eventually have it too, and in any atomic war, all sides would lose.

The Acheson-Lilienthal Report was presented to the world with great fanfare by American diplomat Bernard Baruch in the gymnasium of New York’s Hunter College, the temporary home of the United Nations, on June 14, 1946. Oppenheimer and Compton sat in the audience that day. “We are here to make a choice between the quick and the dead,” Baruch intoned at the beginning of his speech. He then went on to describe the destructive power of the bomb, to propose an international atomic authority, and to insist on the abolition of the national veto in this one area. Baruch differed from Oppenheimer by focusing attention on the negative aspect of punishment for violators rather than, as did the report, on the positive aspect of mutual cooperation.

Sadly, within weeks the plan was gravely ill and in less than six months it was dead. American military forces were rapidly demobilizing from Western Europe while massive Russian military forces remained deployed in Eastern Europe; under such conditions, Truman was unlikely to agree to relinquish what he considered the principal American deterrent to Soviet adventurism. Additionally, probably no international control plan could have overcome the fear and suspicion with which Stalin viewed any outside intrusion into Russian territory. Quite simply, Stalin wanted his own atomic bomb and probably would not have accepted any limitation on his own fledgling program, and Truman favored preserving America’s atomic monopoly until, and unless, he got firm agreement to international control from the Soviets. * The Acheson-Lilienthal Report had addressed the physical facts of atomic energy, but it had ignored American and Soviet geopolitical interests, which were rooted in different values, different dispositions of military forces, and different perceptions of national security. The scientists had thought leaders would want the bomb to go away, but in fact what they wanted was the bomb. ³⁵

The plan’s failure bitterly disappointed and badly discouraged Oppenheimer. David Lilienthal, who talked with Oppenheimer late into the night that summer about the opportunity both thought had been missed, recorded in his diary:

He really is a tragic figure; with all his great attractiveness [and] brilliance of mind. As I left him he looked so sad: “I am ready to go anywhere and do anything, but I am bankrupt of further ideas. And I find that physics and the teaching of physics, which is my life, now seems irrelevant.” It was this last [remark] that really wrung my heart. ³⁶

Still, Oppenheimer saw no alternative but to continue working for international control. Writing to Bohr, he tried to put the best face on what he considered a bad situation: “It seems important for all our future hopes that the wrong lessons should not have been learned by the failure of the past year, but that on the contrary there may be a renewed courage for a somewhat deeper attack on the problem.” ³⁷

The failure of international control came as a deep disappointment to most of the other atomic scientists as well, and they also lacked the political sophistication and stamina to swallow defeat and return to fight another day. This was most plainly the case with Edward Teller, who supported the Acheson-Lilienthal Report, but when it failed, lost all interest in political efforts to control the bomb. Losing his optimism and succumbing to an increasing suspicion of the Soviet Union in the late 1940s, Teller abandoned his support for international control and began to champion a conservative agenda that would remain a constant for the rest of his life: development of a superbomb, opposition to all arms-control efforts as naive and dangerous, and advocacy of an unlimited American nuclear buildup.

The failure of international control did nothing to diminish Robert Oppenheimer’s stature, however. The bomb’s success had made him a celebrity whose views were in great demand by policy makers and ordinary citizens alike. His face replaced Einstein’s as the public image of scientific genius. His portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and he was in constant demand as a speaker and writer. A new journal, Physics Today, carried a photograph on the cover of its first issue that required no explanation: a porkpie hat slung nonchalantly over a cyclotron. Periodicals featured his remarks with flattering portraits of him holding a pipe, looking erudite and persuasive. He was “the smartest of the lot,” a magazine quoted an unnamed colleague. ³⁹ The public romance had begun.

Oppenheimer’s vast reputation gave him easy and regular access to top officials. His home and office phones rang constantly—usually someone from Washington was calling—and his office safe was stuffed with classified documents. He served on countless advisory committees and acted as a consultant to many others. All of this was a far cry from the Oppenheimer of Berkeley days. He had changed from a brilliant, arrogant, and in many ways immature intellectual into a gifted administrator and savvy politician with a masterly sense of public relations. He typified the new, worldly scientist of the atomic age who spent more time advising the government and less time teaching students. He saw himself—and others did too—as an oracle for policy makers. A combination of ambition, unrest, and guilt had compelled him into the central political arena of postwar America, and Oppenheimer reveled in the attention and the limelight. He now wore his hair cut very short—as if to signal to Washington that he was no longer one of the longhairs. His frequent public speaking resulted in a solidified persona, his voice now crossing a range of tones, from deliberate arrogance to judicious reflectiveness to irresistible warmth. He reveled at making a difference and being “in the swim”—perhaps too much. A former pupil noted, “I think his sudden fame and the new position he now occupied had gone to his head so much that he began to consider himself God Almighty, able to put the whole world to rights.” ⁴⁰ Among those in the staid realm of academia, Oppenheimer’s new life in the political swim of Washington inspired no small amount of envy.

In October 1947 Oppenheimer accepted the prestigious post of director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. (He had changed his mind about Princeton since his visit there in the 1930s, when he wrote his brother, Frank, that the institute was “a madhouse, its solipsistic luminaries shining in separate and helpless desolation.”) Oppenheimer gave up his tenured professorships at Berkeley and Caltech not only because of the intellectual appeal of the institute but also because it moved him close to the political action of Washington, where he really wanted to be.

Not surprisingly, the Institute for Advanced Study soon began to reflect Oppenheimer’s personality. Although Oppenheimer’s career in original research was over, he remained an effective and articulate critic of others’ research, and this gave the institute’s weekly seminars in theoretical physics enormous vitality. A young postdoctoral fellow at the institute described Oppenheimer’s exacting standards in the seminar room in a letter home to his parents:

I have been observing rather carefully his behavior during seminars. If one is saying, for the benefit of the rest of the audience, things that he knows already, he cannot resist hurrying one on to something else; then when one says things that he doesn’t know or immediately agree with, he breaks in before the point is fully explained with acute and sometimes devastating criticisms, to which it is impossible to reply adequately even when he is wrong. If one watches him one can see that he is moving around nervously all the time, never stops smoking, and I believe that his impatience is largely beyond his control. On Tuesday we had our fiercest public battle so far, when I criticized some unwarrantably pessimistic remarks he had made about the Schwinger theory. He came down on me like a ton of bricks, and conclusively won the argument so far as the public was concerned. However, afterwards he was very friendly and even apologized to me. ⁴¹

Oppenheimer’s greatest contribution to the institute, however, was more indirect and subtle. He gave its faculty, as he gave scientists at Los Alamos during the war, a sense of participation in a great adventure. He still had the ability to inspire and motivate others by conveying an extraordinary sense of excitement and purpose. His talent for attracting bright people and stimulating them to excellence showed itself once more. There remained shortcomings, however. Oppenheimer continued to wound others with his cutting tongue when they failed to clarify a point or missed one entirely, belittling them with unnecessarily cruel and biting remarks. More than one young fellow fled to his office sobbing after being humiliated by Oppenheimer. Such conduct deeply hurt people, some of whom would not forget.

Oppenheimer and his family lived at Olden Manor, the director’s residence on the institute grounds. The large white-frame colonial house provided a spacious setting. Robert had a library, Kitty a greenhouse, Peter a darkroom, and Toni a pony. Summers were spent lecturing in California, and for a few years the Oppenheimers made regular visits to Perro Caliente in New Mexico. Winter holidays were spent in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Oppenheimer rediscovered his youthful love of sailing. St. John became his preferred retreat.

It was an easy and pleasant life in many respects, but not in others. Oppenheimer was operating now in the hard and unforgiving arena of politics, where his sensitive nature was bound to get battered and bruised. So too was his introspective temperament, which increasingly assailed him with guilt about what he had done. When Oppenheimer visited Truman in the Oval Office shortly after the war, the Los Alamos director blurted out, “Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.” Truman, offended by what he considered Oppenheimer’s melodramatic egocentricity, offered his guest his handkerchief and said: “Well, here, would you like to wipe off your hands?” After Oppenheimer left the room, Truman, angrier and more agitated than he was willing to admit, turned to Dean Acheson, who was also present, and snapped: “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-bitch in this office ever again. After all, all he did was make the bomb. I’m the guy who fired it off.” ⁴²

When Oppenheimer began serving as a government adviser, he viewed the assignment as an opportunity to educate policy makers about peaceful applications of atomic energy. Instead, he found most of his time devoted to giving counsel on the development of newer bombs. He grew disenchanted and melancholy when he realized that his principal task “was to provide atomic weapons and good atomic weapons and many atomic weapons.” ⁴³ He thought the prospect of superbombs—assuming they could be made—would be a dangerous mistake, inviting Armageddon in the event of another world war. If atomic bombs had to be part of the picture, he thought it better, and wiser, to rely on conventional military forces supported by tactical nuclear weapons as powerful as the bombs that had destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The postwar years also brought increased scrutiny of Oppenheimer by government security agencies and their supporters in Congress and the media, where “the internal communist threat” was becoming a popular political issue in the deepening Cold War. The surveillance that had dogged him at Los Alamos was intensified. His phones were tapped, his office was bugged, his movements were watched. In September 1946 FBI agents questioned him for the first time. The interview concerned some of his former Berkeley students and meetings he had attended in the Bay Area before and after the war where communists were present. It was a line of questioning that was to become all too familiar in coming years. Cold War anticommunist feeling was rising, and in this political climate Oppenheimer was going to learn the high price of having an independent mind and a vulnerable left-wing past.

In 1947 responsibility for atomic energy passed from the military to the newly created civilian Atomic Energy Commission. All AEC consultants who had received wartime clearances from the army were reinvestigated, including Oppenheimer. After reading all the material in his FBI file, the AEC commissioners reached the same conclusion as John Lansdale, Groves’s wartime counterintelligence chief, who “was absolutely certain of the present loyalty of J. Robert Oppenheimer, despite the fact that he doubtless was at one time at least an avid fellow-traveler.” The AEC renewed his security clearance on August 11, 1947.

But hints of trouble to come had already surfaced. A month earlier, on July twelfth, the Washington Times-Herald had published a front-page story by a reporter with ties to the FBI under the banner headline u.s. ATOM SCIENTIST’S BROTHER EXPOSED AS COMMUNIST WHO WORKED ON A-BOMB. It began:

Amid official revelation that security of some of the nation’s atom secrets has been jeopardized, this newspaper today can reveal that Dr. Frank Oppenheimer, brother of the American scientist who directed development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party who worked on the Manhattan Project and was aware of many secrets of the bomb from the start.

Buried on page six of the same story was the following disclaimer: “The Times-Herald wishes to emphasize that the official report on Frank Oppenheimer in no way reflects on the loyalty or ability of his brother, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

Oppenheimer himself was ordered before the House Un-American Activities Committee on June 7, 1949. The hearing room seemed designed to intimidate witnesses: members of the committee and their staff sat on a raised platform that ran in a semicircle around the witness table. Oppenheimer was called to testify in executive session about leftists he had known at Berkeley before the war. Oppenheimer answered the questions put to him and the session ended with California Republican Congressman Richard Nixon saying, “I think we all have been tremendously impressed with him and are mighty happy we have him in the position he has in our program.” Within days, Oppenheimer’s testimony was leaked to the press.

A week later, his brother, Frank, appeared before the same committee. Frank and his wife, Jackie, admitted to having been members of the Communist Party—a charge they had denied two years earlier, when the Times-Herald article had appeared—but explained that they had left the party before Frank joined the Manhattan Project. (He had terminated his Communist Party membership in 1941, but had not revealed his former membership to wartime security officers.) Less than an hour after testifying at this hearing, Frank learned from one of the journalists covering his appearance that he had “resigned” as an assistant professor of physics at the University of Minnesota, a position he had secured with the help of Ernest Lawrence. Angered that Frank had covered up his Communist Party membership, Lawrence banished him from the Rad Lab. Ten years would pass before Frank was invited to teach physics at the college level again. One did not have to be very smart to know that his brother’s position was a shaky one. And Robert Oppenheimer was very smart.

Shortly after the war was over, Oppenheimer’s successor as Los Alamos, director Norris Bradbury, invited Teller to succeed the departing Bethe as head of the laboratory’s Theoretical Division. The position that Teller had coveted throughout the war seemed within his reach at last. Teller told Bradbury that he would gladly accept, if the lab would take up work on his superbomb idea with the same gusto that it had committed to making the atomic bomb. Bradbury was noncommittal, noting that postwar political conditions made a crash program to build a superbomb unlikely.

That evening, Teller attended a party where the soon-to-depart Oppenheimer was also present. Teller told Oppenheimer about his conversation with Bradbury earlier that day. “This has been your laboratory, and its future depends upon you,” said Teller. “I will stay if you will help enlist support for work toward a hydrogen bomb or further development of the atomic bomb.” Oppenheimer gave a reply that was short and pointed. “I neither can, nor will do so,” he said. Knowing there was little hope without Oppenheimer’s help, Teller announced that he would accept a post he had been offered by the University of Chicago. Oppenheimer shook Teller’s hand, smiled, and said, “You are doing the right thing.” The two spoke again at the end of the party. “Now that you have decided to go to Chicago, don’t you feel better?” Oppenheimer asked. ⁴⁴ He told Teller he would have nothing more to do with the superbomb. ⁴⁵

Teller, his wife, Mici, and their young son, Paul, packed up and left Los Alamos for Chicago on February 1, 1946. They moved into a duplex in Hyde Park near the university, where Teller resumed an academic life. The next few years proved to be happy and productive ones for Teller. His second child, a girl named Wendy, was born in the summer of 1946, and Teller quickly took to doting on his baby daughter. Freed from the pressures of political turmoil and war for the first time since the early 1930s—and secure in the knowledge of America’s sole possession of the atomic bomb—Teller began to relax. He learned to enjoy the quietly satisfying pleasures of domesticity. He became less choleric, more optimistic, and trusting. He threw himself back into pure research and coauthored numerous papers. He got caught up again in the grandeur and deeply satisfying creativity of basic science. He also wrote articles for the liberal Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, started in 1946 by Met Lab activists. In one article he praised Oppenheimer’s plan for international control of nuclear weapons as “ingenious, daring and basically sound.” ⁴⁶ “World government,” he wrote in the Bulletin as late as July 1948, “is our only hope for survival…. I believe that we should cease to be infatuated with the menace of this fabulous monster, Russia.” ⁴⁷ There were moments during these early postwar years when Teller almost forgot about fear and danger.

The Cold War, however, remained an underlying strain on his newfound optimism. He was troubled by the Soviet coup in Czechoslovakia, by the Berlin Blockade, and by the Communist victory over Nationalist forces in China. A more personal challenge was his family in Hungary. His parents were too old and frail to emigrate, but his widowed sister and her small son could. Teller sent the necessary papers to Hungary, but nothing happened. Then his father, wearied by hunger and depressed by Soviet domination, died. His mother was deported from Budapest to the countryside as a bourgeois “undesirable.” His sister endured secret-police interrogations about his scientific activities. Although his sibling knew nothing, Teller was greatly agitated and angered by her ordeal. These hardships intensified Teller’s childhood fears of the Russians and reinforced his fundamental belief that only the military strength of democracies like the United States kept totalitarian nations like the Soviet Union at bay.

While Teller felt fearful of the Russians, Szilard remained guilty about his part in the making of the bomb. After the war, he sometimes wished that he could undo what he had done and withdraw from the world—or at least change it. Szilard shared his thoughts at a conference at the University of Chicago in September 1945. A participant who kept shorthand notes of Szilard’s talk wrote:

We are in an armament race.

If Russia starts making atomic bombs in two or three years—perhaps five or six years—then we have an armed peace, and it will be a durable peace.

But we will not have permanent peace at lesser cost than world government. But this cannot come without changed loyalty of people. If we can’t have that, all we can have is a durable peace. Only purpose of a durable peace would be to create conditions 20–30 years from now [that] can bring about world peace. That requires shift of loyalties.

If we are sure to get a Third World War, the later it comes the worse for us.

Victor of next war will make a world government, even if that victor should be the United States, having lost 25 million people dead.

Szilard’s fear of a nuclear World War III appalled him so much that he decided to have nothing more to do with physics, which he had once associated with creativity but now associated with destruction. In 1947 he took up the study of biology, which was for him a rejection of death and an affirmation of life. Hotel lobbies and cafés remained the settings where he communicated his ideas to others in wide-ranging discussions. People who came in contact with Szilard remained impressed by his capacity to see far beyond what most others were seeing or thinking, but some also concluded dismissively that he had become a Don Quixote, tilting against a nuclear windmill that had begun to turn faster and faster.

After the war, Hans Bethe returned to Cornell, but continued doing weapons work at Los Alamos during summers because he thought this would give him the credibility to influence government policy along lines he considered constructive. This “inside” strategy reflected Bethe’s pragmatic temperament. He thought that refusing to do any weapons work (as did some of his wartime colleagues) would not accomplish anything: atomic bombs would not go away—Pandora’s box had been opened irrevocably—and there would always be other competent scientists willing to do anything he refused. He explained his thinking this way:

In order to fulfill this function of contributing to the decision-making process, scientists (at least some of them) must be willing to work on weapons. They must do this also because our present struggle is (fortunately) not carried on in actual warfare which has become an absurdity, but in technical development for a potential war which nobody expects to come. The scientists must preserve the precarious balance of armament which would make it disastrous for either side to start a war. Only then can we argue for and embark on more constructive ventures like disarmament and international cooperation which may eventually lead to a more definite peace. ⁴⁸

As relations between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorated in the late 1940s, Bethe grew skeptical. By the end of the decade, he expected a nuclear war between America and Russia within ten years. ⁴⁹ Bethe’s sense of foreboding and pessimism intensified with the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. He continued, however, to urge that America’s atomic stockpile be kept to a minimum compatible with national security. He privately worried that Cold War firebrands in Washington were whipping up a dangerous atmosphere in which scientists might be compelled to invent more frightful weapons.

Ernest Lawrence’s direction of the Rad Lab after the war was more absolute and also more distant. The Rad Lab had grown so large that he no longer knew all the people who worked for him. Instead of pausing for brief conversations on inspection walks, he now merely checked to see whether everyone on the staff was busy. This sometimes produced comical results. Once, Lawrence happened upon a man who seemed to be loafing. “What are you doing?” he snapped. “I’m just waiting for the phone to ring.” “You’re fired,” said Lawrence. “I work for the telephone company,” the man replied. ⁵⁰

If the size of the Rad Lab had changed, its spirit had not. Lawrence still wanted to do big things and tended to treat his staff like servants. He drove them hard as always, but more now through subordinates than through personal contact. When he did see them, the tension he created had a new edge to it. No longer shrugging off an idea when it became a blind alley, Lawrence grew irritated and inclined to fix blame. He was driving himself harder than ever. He began to drink in the evenings, and Rad Lab personnel he encountered on nighttime visits to the lab noticed it. “Although he seemed perfectly sober,” said one staffer, “it really smelled.” ⁵¹ The cumulative toll on Lawrence manifested itself in the form of ulcerative colitis, intestinal bleeding that he found increasingly difficult to stanch.

Lawrence’s mission had become one of raising ever more money and building ever larger machines. His intense optimism, his connections to rich donors, and his high-powered contacts in Washington still proved an effective combination. A new laboratory rose at his bidding near Livermore, a quiet town an hour’s drive east of Berkeley in a dry, rural valley—tucked in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada—known for good wines, fields of roses, and grazing horses and cattle. (Today it is known as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.) The navy had used a square mile of the Livermore Valley as a training camp during World War II, and Lawrence converted this camp into a satellite of the Rad Lab. In the tense atmosphere of the Cold War, Livermore quickly became a high-tech compound of hundreds of olive-drab buildings and thousands of employees—all surrounded by barbed-wire fences and guardposts obscured from a distance by tall eucalyptus trees. It was a long way from the early days of the Rad Lab.

Every Friday afternoon, Lawrence drove out to Livermore from Berkeley in his baby blue Cadillac convertible to survey his new domain. He had an office reserved especially for him, where he began his weekly visit by interrogating Herbert York, a young Berkeley post-doctorate whom he picked to run the lab for him. “What’s going on?” Lawrence would say to York. “What’s new?” ⁵² Lawrence then would walk the grounds, asking everyone he encountered to explain what they were doing.

Although Lawrence still looked to Oppenheimer to interpret the findings made with his machines, the relationship between the two physicists was changing. Before the war, Lawrence had been the leader in the public mind and his laboratory had been famous. He had won the Nobel Prize; Oppenheimer had not. After the war, Oppenheimer was hailed as the father of the atomic bomb, the wizard of the scientific world. His name carried magic. Crowds gathered around him. Lawrence had reacted by urgently seeking to enlist Oppenheimer in his projects, but instead Oppenheimer had left for Princeton. “To Lawrence,” said I. I. Rabi, who spoke with both men during this period, “Oppenheimer’s leaving Berkeley seemed treason.” ⁵³ On a visit to Berkeley in the summer of 1949, Oppenheimer and his wife, Kitty, encountered Lawrence at a faculty party. Kitty, who was tight, loudly scolded him for banishing Frank from the Rad Lab. Oppenheimer looked on, saying nothing. Their fabled friendship was rapidly deteriorating.

When Enrico Fermi returned to Chicago after the war, he bought a large, three-story house on University Avenue a few blocks east of campus and set about creating an expansive new Institute for Nuclear Studies. (Today it is known as the Enrico Fermi Institute.) Ground was broken for the institute on July 8, 1947, in the block between 56th and 57th Streets and Ellis and Ingleside Avenues, across the street from Stagg Field, where Fermi had achieved the world’s first chain reaction five years earlier. Once construction was completed, Fermi moved his office and laboratory into the ground floor of the institute’s south wing. Discussions with Teller were frequent and productive. Fermi leveraged Teller’s originality, often developing his ideas far beyond the point reached by Teller, though Fermi always credited his friend’s contributions. ⁵⁴

Teller was not the only Manhattan Project colleague hanging around the Midway. Veterans of the Met Lab and Los Alamos thronged to Chicago after the war to study physics, attracted by Fermi’s reputation. Fermi did not teach only advanced students; he wanted to bring beginners into contact with science, and taught the elementary physics course to large classes with great enthusiasm and success. It was “standing room only” when Fermi taught, and he would talk with equal brilliance to a crowd as to a single student. It seemed effortless, but this impression was contrived. Fermi spent hours preparing for each course. Once, when he had to be away from Chicago, Fermi asked a graduate student to take over a session of one of his classes. Fermi handed the student a small notebook in which he had written out the entire lecture. ⁵⁵

Once a week, Fermi held an informal seminar for graduate students. The group gathered in Fermi’s office and one of his students proposed a topic for discussion. Fermi then searched through his carefully indexed papers to find his notes on that topic and shared them. He always kept the discussion focused on the essential aspects of a topic. He taught his students that physics should not be an esoteric specialty but rather a practical and relevant discipline, and he was always eager to learn—and grateful when he found out something new. Throughout, he was rigorously inductive in his reasoning; theoretical generalizations came only after empirical observation. Exploring the mysteries of nature was a great adventure for him, a thrilling sport for the intensely competitive and confident man behind the mask of nonchalance and modesty.

As he had before the war, Fermi continued to dislike pretension and stuffiness. Whenever he and Laura planned a party where the guest list included an important person—as many of the atomic scientists were after the war—Fermi would say, “We’ve got to dilute him with somebody.” He was amazingly unassuming, given his fame and accomplishments. After the war, he helped General Electric build nuclear reactors, telling its engineers what to do and boosting its corporate profits enormously. One night at dinner Laura said, “Enrico, I went to the store today and put our name on the list for a dishwasher.” “Fine,” said Fermi. “Enrico, you know the president of General Electric. If you tell him you want one, you’ll get it tomorrow.” “No,” he said, “we’re on the list, we’ll wait and get it when it comes.” ⁵⁶

But some things had changed. Friends noticed that Fermi was becoming more reflective, and were surprised to glimpse his occasional detachment from physics—unheard of before the war. The steady reading he had been doing since coming to America extended and deepened his cultural interests beyond what they had been in his Italian days. He even began to meditate on literature and philosophical questions, once remarking to Laura that “with science one can explain everything except oneself.” ⁵⁷ Fermi was struggling to understand himself and his place in the new world he had helped to create.

As the atomic scientists strived to warn people about the dangers of nuclear weapons, the political climate began to change, and the Cold War set in. By the early 1950s, American public opinion shifted from sympathy for Russia as a wartime ally to fear of the Soviet Union as an expansionist power. This fear found expression in many ways, including pressure to expand America’s atomic arsenal. Partly in response to this pressure, and partly the result of bureaucratic momentum and military demand, the size of the nation’s atomic stockpile grew from thirteen in 1947 to nearly three hundred in 1950, with a corresponding increase in strategic delivery capability. ⁵⁸ What Bohr and the other atomic scientists had feared—a growing reliance on nuclear weapons and the beginnings of a nuclear arms race—was coming to pass. The direction of America’s atomic program would soon become a major political issue, struggled over vehemently by those with competing visions of the future.