American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

In April 1943, the first full month after staff arrived at Los Alamos, one of Oppenheimer’s fellow scientists angered General Groves over what Groves perceived as disregard for security protocols. Oppenheimer backed Groves, and the scientist resigned. Oppenheimer generally maintained a solid relationship with the security-conscious Groves but also sympathized with scientists who were unaccustomed to such tight security and whose work required the free exchange of ideas. Relations between the Army and the civilians, including civilian workers’ families, were strained. Army counterintelligence officers posed the greatest annoyance. Even as Oppenheimer worked to build the ultimate weapon, he remained under constant surveillance. In June 1943, he took a brief trip to Berkeley. FBI surveillance reports show that he met and spent the night with his old girlfriend, Dr. Jean Tatlock, now a practicing pediatric psychiatrist. Oppenheimer’s marital infidelity troubled the FBI far less than his having met with a known Communist. Colonel Boris Pash of Army counterintelligence suspected Tatlock of spying for the Soviets and wanted Oppenheimer fired.

Over the objections of Col. Pash and others in Army counterintelligence, and despite the FBI’s mounting obsession with Oppenheimer, Gen. Groves regarded the brilliant physicist as indispensable and kept him on as director. Oppenheimer nonetheless learned of the Army officers’ suspicions and made the “fateful decision” to tell them about George Eltenton, the man behind the “Chevalier Affair.” On August 26, 1943, Pash interviewed Oppenheimer. The physicist tried to keep the focus on Eltenton, so he did not mention Chevalier by name. In the process, however, Oppenheimer foolishly invented details and then elaborated on them, believing that they would help downplay the episode’s seriousness. Instead, he only further raised Pash’s intense suspicions.

A few weeks later, Lt. Col. John Lansdale, Groves’s security aide, met with Oppenheimer to discuss, among other things, the Pash interview. Lansdale had come to believe, along with Groves, that Oppenheimer had been generally truthful. Caught between paranoid counterintelligence officials on one side and his trust in Oppenheimer on the other, Groves finally relented and ordered the physicist to identify the man who had approached him in his kitchen about passing information to the Soviets. Oppenheimer named Chevalier. The FBI remained unsatisfied and urged Groves to press Oppenheimer for more names. One FBI agent even suspected Frank Oppenheimer’s involvement. Groves, however, had the luxury of ignoring the FBI, so he did.

On January 5, 1944, John Tatlock, Jean’s father, discovered his daughter’s dead body in her apartment, along with a note expressing the pain and exhaustion of a “paralyzed soul” (250). Before calling the police, John Tatlock burned some of his daughter’s personal correspondence and photos. His behavior raised questions about exactly what he thought he must destroy. Some friends believed that Jean Tatlock had struggled with her sexual orientation, which suggested that her father had burned evidence of a lesbian relationship. Others, however, suspected that she might have been murdered as part of the Army-FBI obsession with rooting out Communists. Given her lifelong struggle with manic depression, however, Tatlock appeared to have died by suicide in the way—and for the despairing reasons—that her note indicated. This is what Oppenheimer believed.

The average age of the people working at Los Alamos was 25. Recreation hours, therefore, involved married couples but also many single men and women, and social life had the variations typical of such circumstances: evening dinners for married couples, Saturday night parties for the singles, and outdoor excursions such as hiking or picnicking for everyone on Sunday. Occasional afternoon getaways to Santa Fe, however, did little to alleviate Kitty’s feeling of being trapped and smothered by all the security. In April 1945—after more than two years in residence at Los Alamos—Kitty left for Pittsburgh, where she stayed until July. While she was away, she left her four-month-old daughter, Toni, in the care of her friend Pat Sherr at Los Alamos. With Kitty away, and with the project approaching its critical phase, an obviously exhausted Oppenheimer stunned Sherr by asking if she would like to adopt Toni. Oppenheimer did not believe he could love his own child. Sherr assured him that eventually he would.

After being smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Denmark, Neils Bohr arrived at Los Alamos in December 1943. Bohr informed Oppenheimer of a cryptic conversation with German physicist Werner Heisenberg in September 1941 in which Heisenberg apparently raised the possibility of building an atomic weapon. Bohr had come away from the conversation fearful that the Germans intended to build such a weapon, but his report of their engineering designs convinced the Los Alamos scientists that the Germans were on the wrong track. In addition, Bohr began talking about preventing a postwar nuclear arms race. This was seemingly the first time Oppenheimer’s mind turned to that subject, albeit in a cursory way, given that the outcome of World War II remained uncertain. Above all, Bohr opposed secrecy. Before the end of 1943, Groves received a report that the Germans had abandoned their bomb program. Work at Los Alamos continued.

Oppenheimer spent part of July 1944 trying to resolve a developing crisis involving the bomb’s design. In a debate over how best to achieve an implosion, Oppenheimer backed his explosives expert, and this decision proved crucial because Oppenheimer had always known that the project’s success depended on engineering above all else. Earlier that year, Oppenheimer had replaced the underperforming Edward Teller with another scientist because Teller had become obsessed with developing a thermonuclear superbomb, or hydrogen bomb (H-bomb). At least two Soviet spies, Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall, slipped past Army security and succeeded in obtaining information. Even among the scientists who did not engage in espionage, concern mounted about the bomb project’s politics and morality. Oppenheimer listened. He noted that scientists had no special claim to authority on such subjects, but he shared Neils Bohr’s aversion to secrecy. Physicist Robert Wilson later recalled that by late 1944 no one involved in the project had even considered Japan.

President Franklin Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, created an air of sadness and led to uncertainty about the bomb’s future use. Adolf Hitler’s suicide 18 days later effectively ended the war in Europe. Meanwhile, the conflict in the Pacific assumed the character of a total war, highlighted by the March 9-10 firebombing of Tokyo that killed 100,000 people and destroyed nearly 16 square miles. Physicist Leo Szilard begged the new administration not to use the atomic weapon on Japan. Incoming Secretary of State James Byrnes, however, regarded the atomic bomb as a diplomatic tool that could frighten the Soviets into withdrawing their troops from Eastern Europe.

On May 31, Oppenheimer attended a meeting of an important government committee on atomic policy. During the meeting, Secretary of War Henry Stimson appeared to have a clearer sense of the danger the bomb posed to humankind. The same held true for arguably the committee’s most respected member, General George C. Marshall. Conversely, Byrnes and Ernest Lawrence wanted to accelerate the nation’s nuclear weapons development and keep the program secret from the Soviets. Oppenheimer did not object when Harvard president James Conant suggested that the atomic bomb be used against a Japanese war plant in a populated area. That summer, program scientists floated the idea of a nonlethal demonstration for the Japanese. Oppenheimer, however, was absorbed in final preparations for the weapon’s first test and seemed to have embraced the idea of using the bomb to prevent an invasion and thus save US lives.

Bird and Sherwin explain what Oppenheimer did not know at the time—namely, that officials in the Truman administration already believed that the Japanese were seeking a way to end the war other than unconditional surrender. Truman and Byrnes, however, appeared enamored of the bomb for its probable effect on the Soviets. At 5:30 am on July 16, at a remote New Mexico test site dubbed “Trinity,” Oppenheimer and his team witnessed a successful test of the atomic bomb. Twenty miles away, one scientist saw the giant orange ball and then heard the explosion a minute and a half later. Robert Serber, also 20 miles away, felt the heat on his face. Oppenheimer and those closest to him in the control bunker—including his brother Frank—reacted with both excitement and relief. Only in the coming months and years would the enormity of the moment hit some of them, including Oppenheimer.