When Lawrence flew to Los Alamos for a meeting of the Scientific Panel on August 10, he found Oppenheimer anxious, distracted, and depressed by the casualty reports from Nagasaki.14 Discussions that were supposed to take place on the subject of postwar research were sidetracked by the news, and by Lawrence’s insistence that Oppenheimer make up his mind whether he was going to return to Berkeley.15 Repeated entreaties from Birge had gone unanswered, Ernest chided, and plans had to be made for classes that fall.
Instead, Oppenheimer complained bitterly to Lawrence about how he had been treated by Underhill and the University of California. Rival offers, Oppie said, had come from Columbia University, Harvard, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.16
As the discussion turned to the bomb casualties in Japan, Lawrence pointed out, perhaps unkindly, that it was he who had championed the demonstration and Oppie who had opposed it. Stung, in turn, by Oppenheimer’s claim that he respected only those who were victorious in life—generals, rich businessmen, and the like—Ernest observed, somewhat plaintively, that both he and Oppie had achieved great success. Oppenheimer hinted that Lawrence was jealous of his achievements and eager to make him a mere subordinate once more at the Rad Lab.
Like the spat over Oppenheimer’s leftwandering before the war, this fight between friends ended without resolution. Ernest returned home angry and embittered at Oppie, who, in a final gesture of defiance, had refused to say whether he would return to Berkeley.
Two weeks later, when tempers had cooled, Oppenheimer wrote Lawrence a long letter. Although meant as an attempt at reconciliation, it actually showed how much their differences and simmering resentments remained.
I have very mixed and sad feelings about our discussions on Berkeley. I meant them in a far more friendly, tentative and considerate spirit than they appeared to you; and was aware and tried to make you aware at the time that fatigue and confusion gave them a false emphasis and color. It may seem odd and wrong to you that the lack of sympathy between us at Y and the California administration over the operation of the project could make me consider not coming back: I think it would not have seemed so odd if you had lived through the history as we did, nor so hard to understand if you remembered how much more of an underdogger I have always been than you. That is a part of me that is unlikely to change, for I am not ashamed of it; it is responsible for such difference as we have had in the past, I think; I should have thought that after the long years it would not be new to you.17
* * *
Oppenheimer, in his letter to Lawrence, confessed to feeling “a profound grief, and a profound perplexity about the course we should be following.” Oppie’s mixed mood was attributable, in part, to his anxiety over what would be done with the bomb after the war. Stimson’s Interim Committee had focused on the military problems at hand and offered little or no guidance for the future.
Japan’s surrender in mid-August was announced just as Oppenheimer arrived in Washington to deliver to Stimson a two-page memorandum that the Scientific Panel had drafted at Los Alamos. Oppie had persuaded the panel that its recommendations on postwar research should be postponed pending completion of a more urgent task: a plea for the international control of atomic energy. As his memo noted, the opportunity for international control might soon disappear—particularly given “the quite favorable technical prospects of the realization of the super bomb.”18
As with the demonstration, members of the Scientific Panel had disagreed over what should go into the memo to Stimson.19 Lawrence wanted a statement that would acknowledge the need to “stockpile and continue intensive development of atomic weapons” for several years. But he had finally deferred to Oppenheimer, who included this impassioned appeal in the final version:
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 … all steps be taken, all necessary international arrangements be made, to this one end.20
Unable to deliver the document to Stimson—who was on a long-deferred vacation in the Adirondacks, having returned exhausted from the Potsdam summit—Oppenheimer instead briefed Vannevar Bush and George Harrison on its contents.21 Harrison, who showed the memo to James Byrnes the following day, recorded the latter’s reaction: “Secretary Byrnes felt so strongly about all of this that he requested me to tell Dr. Oppenheimer for the time being his proposal about an international agreement was not practical and that he and the rest of the gang should pursue their work full force.”22
Harrison relayed Byrnes’s message to Oppenheimer, who was at his hotel packing for the return to Los Alamos. Oppie had heard that things had gone badly at Potsdam, and so believed the prospects “gloomy” for approaching the Russians on any kind of collaborative control of the bomb.23 Harrison’s news further darkened the physicist’s mood.
Retreating a few days later to the sanctuary of Perro Caliente, Oppenheimer wrote to a friend that his feelings about the future were “only a stone’s throw from despair.”24 Oppie’s letter to Chevalier seemed an attempt to persuade himself that what he wrote was true: “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
