2023-08-03 11:56:05
It took 25,041 days to formal rehabilitation. On May 27, 1954, after nearly four weeks of confidential hearings, the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) had withdrawn its former chairman J. Robert Oppenheimer’s declaration of no objection – effectively declaring him a traitor. Not declared until December 16, 2022 US Energy Minister Jennifer Granholm officially found this investigation to be defective and overturned it. More than 55 years late because of the brilliant Physicist and science organizer Oppenheimer had already died on February 18, 1967.
The complications surrounding Oppenheimer are one of the great dramas in the field of tension between science and politics in the 20th century. It was driven by the self-confidence of one actor in particular and, during a period of hysteria, led to the concern of those responsible in politics that they would appear too “soft” in front of the – not at all real – public attitude.
Robert Oppenheimer discusses a photo of the mushroom cloud over Nagasaki
Quelle: Getty Images
Oppenheimer, born in New York City in 1904, came from a wealthy family. His father was a textile merchant who had emigrated from Germany and was successful in his new homeland, and his mother was a respected artist. The son had graduated from high school and then went to Harvard in 1922. He actually wanted to study chemistry, but soon switched to physics and specialized in theoretical physics, which at the time primarily meant nuclear physics.
In 1924 he moved to Cambridge University in England, two years later he completed several semesters in Göttingen with Max Born. At the age of 22, he submitted his doctoral thesis here, a 25-page thin but highly complex essay on the “Quantum theory of continuous spectra”. He was soon regarded as one of the leading experts in quantum mechanics, making significant contributions to the understanding of nuclear physics.
Financially independent thanks to his father’s inheritance, Oppenheimer formed a kind of think tank of particularly clever theoretical physicists. He commuted with many of them between his two jobs, the private California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (near Los Angeles) and the state university of Berkeley near San Francisco, 400 miles away.
Especially in the second half of the 1930s, at the time of the Spanish Civil War, Oppenheimer’s circle also included a number of physicists and intellectuals who had sympathies for the Soviet Union and communism. Like Oppenheimer himself, they were of part Jewish descent and had been forced to leave Central Europe because of the anti-Semitism of Hitler’s Germany. The Italian was one of them Enrico Fermia friend of Oppenheimer’s from Göttingen days, who emigrated because of his wife’s Jewish family and some of his closest associates.
At the end of the 1940s, Oppenheimer still had something youthful about him
Quelle: Getty Images
Oppenheimer also had a private relationship with pro-communist circles: before they met his girlfriend and wife Katherine Püning, who had been his wife since 1941, lived with a US communist who had volunteered for the International Brigades and had died in the Spanish Civil War. Despite these points of contact, however, there was never the slightest serious indication that Oppenheimer himself sympathized with the Soviet Union or even betrayed secrets.
In late 1942, Oppenheimer joined the Manhattan Project, the top-secret US atomic bomb program, and was appointed director of the remote Los Alamos Laboratory. There, some of the brightest minds in the world tried to solve the theoretical and practical problems of a nuclear fission bomb together. general Leslie R. Grovesthe military head of the project, personally gave Oppenheimer security clearance.
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The success of Los Alamos was largely due to Oppenheimer. On the one hand, he knew how to get the very special workforce to work consistently and goal-oriented, and on the other hand, together with Groves, he mobilized the gigantic resources that were necessary to produce enough fissile material. And he kept the team of dozens of scientists from different countries together. Without Oppenheimer, one can assume that the first nuclear fission bomb would not have existed, or at least not in July 1945.
However, there were actually several traitors associated with the Manhattan Project. The most important was the German-British physicist Klaus Fuchs, who worked significantly on the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” (the uranium bomb “Little Boy” was scientifically far less demanding; almost all nuclear weapons built later followed the “Fat Man” principle). He revealed everything he knew to the Soviet military intelligence service GRU.
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Other Communist agents also worked at Los Alamos: Theodore Alvin Hall, who passed complementary information on Fuchs; David Greenglass, who understood the practical problems of uranium enrichment; also Harry Gold as courier. The British secretary Melita Norwood also betrayed numerous secrets, over whose desk many results of nuclear research had wandered over the course of Anglo-American research cooperation.
Robert Oppenheimer, however, had never passed any information whatsoever to the Soviet Union. However, that did not interest FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. He increased what was, in principle, the right level of caution towards potential communist traitors to an almost insane degree, driven by personal aversions and probably also deep-seated fears.
The FBI had been keeping a file on Oppenheimer since March 1941, but it contained only vague suspicions and never any concrete information. Upon joining the Manhattan Project, the prospective director, when asked, to him a ridiculous question about political affiliations with communist organizations, replied that he had been a member of every pro-communist West Coast club that existed at the time. This was filed and later interpreted as a “confession”.
Oppenheimer’s role in the development of the atomic bomb only became known after 1945; on November 8, 1948, the “Time Magazine” made him on that Cover away. Nothing drew him back into active research; instead, he took over as director of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies, a research think tank in New Jersey. He also became Chairman of the General Commission of the civilian US Atomic Energy Agency, effectively the successor to the Manhattan Project.
Contemporaries remembered Openheimer’s particularly intense gaze
Quelle: Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
Oppenheimer, who had pushed the development of nuclear weapons with all his might during the war, now advocated arms limitation. He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb. That also made him suspicious at the beginning of the Cold War.
In the course of the general fear of communists in the early 1950s, Oppenheimer lost most of his influence. Actually, the boiler-drinking known under the name of Senator Joe McCarthy, which was certainly not a glorious page for the USA, had already died down again when Oppenheimer got caught in the crosshairs in 1954.
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In the confidential hearing, he testified comprehensively and also named numerous names of people whom he assumed had contacts with Soviet agents. Opponents of Oppenheimer interpreted this as denunciation; it is probably more appropriate to see in it his efforts to clarify the matter. Despite this, his security clearance was revoked.
Criticism of this decision was mounting as early as 1955. Eight years later, President John F. Kennedy partially redeemed him by awarding him the lucrative Enrico Fermi Prize. The award was only presented a week after Kennedy’s assassination by his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson.
A good three years later, Oppenheimer, who had been a heavy smoker all his life, died of throat cancer. The controversy over his rating continued after his death, sometimes stronger, sometimes less so. As a result, on December 16, 2022, his security clearance was posthumously restored.
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This article was first published in December 2022.
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