The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer: And the Birth of the Modern Arms Race

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Overview

On April 12, 1954, the nation was astonished to learn that scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer faced charges of violating national security. Why had the charismatic leader of the Manhattan Project— the man who led the team that developed the atomic bomb that ended World War II—been cast into overnight disgrace? In this riveting narrative, bestselling author Priscilla J. McMillan draws on newly declassified U.S. government documents and materials from Russia, as well as in-depth interviews, to present the truth about the downfall of America's most famous scientist.

McMillan re-creates the fraught years from 1949 to 1955 when Oppenheimer and a group of ...

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Overview

On April 12, 1954, the nation was astonished to learn that scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer faced charges of violating national security. Why had the charismatic leader of the Manhattan Project— the man who led the team that developed the atomic bomb that ended World War II—been cast into overnight disgrace? In this riveting narrative, bestselling author Priscilla J. McMillan draws on newly declassified U.S. government documents and materials from Russia, as well as in-depth interviews, to present the truth about the downfall of America's most famous scientist.

McMillan re-creates the fraught years from 1949 to 1955 when Oppenheimer and a group of liberal scientists tried to head off the cabal of hard-line air force officials, anti-Communist politicians, and rival scientists—including Edward Teller—who were trying to seize control of U.S. policy and build ever more deadly nuclear weapons. The conspiracy to discredit Oppenheimer, occurring at the height of the McCarthy era and sanctioned by a misinformed President Eisenhower, was a watershed in the cold war, poisoning American politics for decades and creating dangers that haunt us today.

Editorial Reviews

The New Yorker
Oppenheimer lost his security clearance in 1954, after a rigged hearing during which his conversations with his lawyers were secretly recorded by the F.B.I. and he was never allowed to review the evidence against him. This compact study elegantly parses a central accusation in the case: that Oppenheimer was disloyal for opposing the hydrogen bomb—essentially, for voicing his opinion. Yet it was his prosecutors who compromised national security: one physicist they consulted absent-mindedly misplaced a classified document that contained all the details for launching a full-scale thermonuclear program; from the transcript of the hearing, the British gleaned enough information to develop their own H-bomb. The author concludes, depressingly, that scientists today rarely speak out, because they rely on military funding to pursue research.
Publishers Weekly
Harvard historian McMillan (Marina and Lee) focuses on the nine-year span in the late 1940s and early '50s when Oppenheimer, who had spearheaded the development of the atom bomb, was transformed from a hero into an alleged security risk, accused of spying for the Soviets. In light of the outstanding new biography American Prometheus and other recent scholarship on Oppenheimer, this account doesn't transform our perception of the man or the case, but it does fill in background on the anti-Communist agitators inside and outside the federal government, such as Atomic Energy Commission member Lewis Strauss, who conspired to "destroy Oppenheimer and make [Edward] Teller the leader of the scientific community" because of the latter's enthusiasm for (and Oppenheimer's doubts about) developing the hydrogen bomb. McMillan makes Teller one of the chief villains, dwelling on his contentious relations with other atomic researchers and underlining her contempt for his role in creating a massive, "superfluous" nuclear arsenal. The idealistic claim that Oppenheimer could have slowed or prevented the arms race through sheer force of personality is less convincing. Still, this is a damning record of the "travesty of justice" perpetrated through the smear campaign against Oppenheimer. (July 25) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
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Foreign Affairs
This has been a good year for students of the case of Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the U.S. wartime atomic bomb project, whose security clearance was revoked under extraordinary circumstances in 1954. Following close on the heels of Kai Bird's and Martin Sherwin's monumental biography, American Prometheus, McMillan's book is shorter and sharper. McMillan focuses more on the policy issues at the heart of the drama and illuminates well the surrounding cast of characters, with lots of fascinating detail about the interaction between scientific politics and Washington politics.
Library Journal
It's always been profitable to mention Darwin and Einstein in popular science titles. Judging by the renewed interest in his career, Oppenheimer's name might be added to that list. This book by McMillan (associate, Davis Ctr. for Russian & Eurasian Studies, Harvard Univ.) is less about him than about the political climate between 1945 and 1954, as America and the Soviet Union engaged in an escalating and perhaps paranoid nuclear arms race. Oppenheimer is central, but by no means the only player-Edward Teller (Oppenheimer's rival), FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and Presidents Eisenhower and Truman all make appearances. There is little here that other Oppenheimer biographies or histories of the era have not already covered. (See, for example, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin's American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer or Richard Rhodes's Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.) What distinguishes this book is its more interpretive approach; at times the author's statements seem value-laden and thus might be questioned. Still, those interpretations make for an engaging work. An optional purchase for academic and larger public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/05.]-Gregg Sapp, Science Lib., SUNY at Albany Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Did a vast right-wing conspiracy bring down the peace wing of the American nuclear establishment?Working with declassified American and Soviet documents, McMillan (Russian and Eurasian Studies/Harvard; Marina and Lee, 1977) writes that in the late 1940s, atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer stood at the center of a debate about whether the U.S. should build a hydrogen bomb-and on an accelerated schedule at that. Oppenheimer adduced moral and logistical arguments against the bomb; the Atomic Energy Commission "had before it only one design for the weapon, and despite several years of research, it was not clear that it would ever work," and Oppenheimer, like Einstein, Fermi and other physicists of the time, felt that this was a weapon not of warfare but of genocide. He was not the smartest of politicians, however; Oppenheimer, writes McMillan, was capable of "feline, almost involuntary, cruelty" toward opponents, and he made enemies all too easily. And so he did: Oppenheimer earned the wrath of higher-up Edward Teller, who, McMillan reveals, had "sat out ‘the main event' . . . the effort to build the A-bomb, and chosen instead to work on the hypothetical hydrogen bomb just when all hands were needed to work on a bomb that would end [WWII]." And not just Teller; a host of Air Force senior officers and anticommunist politicos found in Oppenheimer a poster boy for all that was wrong with a scientific community that would not pitch in to make the world safe from Stalin's legions. Stalin was newly dead by the time Oppenheimer lost his security clearance, and soon the U.S., followed quickly by the USSR, was testing the H-bomb. Though inarguably aligned with leftist causes, Oppenheimer fell,McMillan writes, thanks to a conspiracy and to a newborn culture of governmental control of science, whereby "the scientist is less and less likely to speak out against government policies"-the condition, she adds, of subsidized science today. Excellently researched and argued; a useful adjunct to Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin's broader-ranging American Prometheus (p. 205).

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780641805257
  • Publisher: Viking
  • Publication date: 7/21/2005
  • Pages: 384
  • Product dimensions: 6.20 (w) x 9.10 (h) x 1.40 (d)

Meet the Author

Priscilla Johnson McMillan is an associate of the Davis Center for Russian Studies at Harvard and the author of the bestselling Marina and Lee. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times, Harper's Magazine, and Scientific American, among other places.

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