LETTERS
Oppenheimer & Chomsky Editor: I was taken aback by the penultimate sentence in Dennis Wrong's review article on Noam Chomsky's American Power and the New Mandarins (DISSENT January—February...
...He was an excellent organizer and director...
...239...
...How ironic and unjust then, that he should be compared to the object of his own criticism, to a physicist who "applied" science in order to become a bureaucrat and to walk in the corridors of power...
...Not Einstein, not Newton...
...According to Robert Jungk in his valuable book Brighter Than A Thousand Suns, J. Robert Oppenheimer from the time of his appointment as director of the Los Alamos project (in 1942, Oppenheimer was just 40) did very little original work in physics...
...Noam Chomsky has alerted us rightly to a dangerous elite, intellectuals and scientists who cooperate with the government for questionable ends...
...I should have thought this basis for my comparison was obvious enough...
...Oppenheimer has told how until in his thirties he was totally absorbed in scientific and scholarly pursuits and completely indifferent to politics, but that the Spanish Civil War and the fate of the Loyalists abruptly aroused his intense moral indignation and he promptly plunged into the world of left-wing politics...
...he was a public figure on a first-name basis with politicians and generals...
...Surely it is well-known that the physicists who worked on nuclear weapons, including Oppenheimer, agonized from the very beginning about the moral implications of even showing that such weapons could be made, of actually making them, of the decision to use them against Japan, of the American postwar monopoly, and of developing new and more potent weapons in the arms race with the Soviet Union...
...Chomsky, incidentally, scarcely refers to the bomb in his book and makes no mention at all of the physicists who worked on it...
...Wrong writes that "his [Chomsky's] career as a scientist and his political sensibility remind one of the late J. Robert Oppenheimer...
...Oppenheimer said as late as 1949 with reference to the Bomb: "It is my judgment in these things that when you see something that is technically sweet you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success" (Jungk, p. 296...
...Whether well-meant or patronizing, Mr...
...I would doubt that he was among those young scientists who yelled "whoopee...
...There is a parallel here to Chomsky's sudden involvement in 1966 with the campaign against the Vietnam War after having devoted himself previously to extremely complex and technical researches in linguistics...
...As for Oppenheimer's moral qualms about the bomb, Dean Acheson recently reported that when he introduced Oppenheimer to President Truman the President was exasperated by Oppenheimer's reiterated insistence that he had "blood on his hands...
...Setting aside the much-debated question of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was it such a "questionable end" to work on the bomb during World War II when it was widely believed that the Nazis too were on the verge of creating such a bomb...
...Has Mr...
...He expresses considerable doubts about American policies toward Japan in the 1930s, but says nothing at all about the war with Germany, nor whether he considers that Oppenheimer and the other physicists who worked on the Manhattan Project, in Mr...
...Siegel is mistaken in doubting that Oppenheimer said "whoopee" after the first atomic explosion, since it is a matter of record that he quoted the Hindu god, Vishnu: "I am become Death, Destroyer of Worlds...
...Siegel read nothing on the subject but Jungk's decadeanda-half old book...
...In comparing Chomsky's "political sensibility" with Oppenheimer's, I had in mind the conditions under which they first became politically engaged on the Left...
...To me, it partakes of both...
...Oppenheimer & Chomsky Editor: I was taken aback by the penultimate sentence in Dennis Wrong's review article on Noam Chomsky's American Power and the New Mandarins (DISSENT January—February 1970...
...What physicists have done important original work after the age of 40...
...Wrong's comparison can only mislead your younger readers who know all about Chomsky but for whom Oppenheimer must be a dim figure at best...
...His "New Mandarins" are mostly social scientists and it is their role as advisers to the government on Cold War policies in general and on Vietnam in particular that he assails...
...GEORGE SIEGEL DENNIS WRONG replies: In writing that Chomsky reminded me of Oppenheimer, I deliberately left it to the reader to decide for himself whether the comparison constituted a tribute or a put-down...
...This was the consideration that moved Oppenheimer, Fermi, and the others, not a desire to build the bomb as a technical exercise, let alone to see it dropped on Japanese cities under the circumstances in which it was first used...
...However, in comparing their scientific careers I obviously had in mind Oppenheimer's achievements in physics rather than in administration, which, of course, antedated his Los Alamos appointment...
...after the first atomic bomb was dropped but his moral qualms seemed to have awakened slowly...
...Siegel's words, "cooperated with the government for questionable ends," although he approvingly quotes Einstein who played a leading role in encouraging his fellow scientists to work for the Manhattan Project...
Vol. 17 • May 1970 • No. 3
