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Copyright © 2002 by Gregg Herken
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Herken, Gregg, 1947–.
Brotherhood of the bomb : the tangled lives and loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller / Gregg Herken.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-6589-3
ISBN-10: 0-8050-6589-X
1. Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 1904–1967. 2. Lawrence, Ernest Orlando, 1901–1958. 3. Teller, Edward, 1908–. 4. Physicists—United States—Biography. 5. Atomic bomb—United States—History—20th century. 6. Nuclear physics—United States—History—20th century. I. Title.
QC16.O62 H47 2002
539.7'092'273—dc21
[B]
2002017219
First published in hardcover in 2002 by Henry Holt and Company
First Owl Books Edition 2003
A John Macrae / Owl Book
eISBN 9781466851559
First eBook edition: July 2013
* Oppenheimer’s nickname varied according to time, place, and associates. It was “Opje” while he was a postdoc in Holland, later becoming “Oppy” or “Oppie” when he moved to California. The J at the beginning of his name was given to him at birth by his father, Julius. The initial did not stand for anything, and Oppenheimer rarely used it as an adult. His wife, Kitty, tried—but failed—to get friends to address him as “Robert.”
* Hamilton later achieved notoriety as the physician who oversaw secret human radiation experiments at University Hospital, where three patients were injected with plutonium between 1945 and 1947. Although these experiments were funded by the wartime Manhattan Project and its successor, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, Hamilton’s apparent intent was to identify so-called magic bullets—radioisotopes that would concentrate selectively in different organs—for eventual therapeutic use.
* Wrote Chevalier in a subsequent, fictional account of his friendship with Oppenheimer: “No amount of casuistry, however, could eradicate the fact that in joining the Communist Party, as in taking holy orders or in committing murder, one entered a world that separated one from all those who did not belong to the brotherhood.… [i]t was a world of passion, of dedication and sacrifice, and it bore the future darkly in its womb.”
* “For, on lustful kings, / Unlook’d-for, sudden deaths from heaven are sent, / But curs’d is he who is their instrument.”
The quotation was from the finale of The Maid’s Tragedy, a play written in 1622 by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, English poets who were contemporaries of Donne. It was vintage Oppie.
* In pencil at the bottom, Oppenheimer added this partial disclaimer: “I have endeavored to make this list complete. It includes all organizations to which I now belong. It does not include so-called sponsorships. It includes all past memberships I can remember. I believe it to be accurate.”
* Perhaps anticipating that he would have trouble with the temperamental Hungarian, Oppie invited Edward and his wife, Mici, to Eagle Hill near the seminar’s end. Nearly sixty years later, Teller remembered that Oppenheimer found his house gift—a recording of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in E-flat Major, one of Edward’s favorites—“uninteresting,” and that Oppie predicted only the atomic bomb would be able to dislodge Hitler from Europe.
* Underhill was not told the secret for another year; Sproul probably learned sometime after that. One evening in November 1943, Underhill was summoned to LeConte by Lawrence, who made a show of locking the door and drawing the blinds. “We practically crawled under the desk,” Underhill later remembered. “Do you know what they’re doing down there?” Lawrence asked. Underhill confessed his ignorance and became an initiate. The regents’ representative was also told that he was never to divulge the secret to Sproul, who had appalled Groves by speculating in a commencement address that the Rad Lab was developing a secret “death ray.”
* Haakon had recently received a letter from the dean, warning that his son was spending too much time on campus promoting political causes. Yet the admonitory letter that Haakon sent to Jacques may have said more about the father than the son: “There is nothing more pitiful than a left-wing campus intellectual who can’t make the grade. He carries no authority and inspires nothing but contempt.”
* Copies of the cables were, of course, passed to U.S. Army cryptanalysts, who, beginning in late 1946, were able to partially decipher them in a secret code-breaking project named Venona. The Venona decrypts were subsequently used to identify Soviet agents operating in the United States. They are the primary source for the code names and cables cited in this section.
* According to Sacred Secrets, a book by Jerrold Schecter and Leona Schecter, and based in part upon Soviet sources, Kheifets first met Oppenheimer during this reception at Bransten’s house, and thereafter had lunch with the physicist. The book claims that Oppenheimer ultimately informed Kheifets of the Einstein-Szilard letter and of Oppie’s own concern that the United States was moving too slowly on the atomic project—information that Kheifets passed along in a coded telegram to Moscow. Reproduced in the book’s appendix is a top-secret cable that the head of the wartime NKVD reportedly sent to Beria in October 1944, which includes this passage: “In 1942 one of the leaders of the scientific work on uranium in the USA, professor Oppenheimer (unlisted member of the apparat of Comrade Browder) informed us about the beginning of work. At the request of Comrade Kheifets, confirmed by Comrade Browder, he provided cooperation in access to the research for several of our tested sources including a relative of Comrade Browder.”
Lacking additional documentation from former Soviet archives, it is difficult to know whether this cable is evidence of Oppenheimer’s complicity in espionage or reflects the (understandable) desire of Kheifets and other NKVD operatives to curry
