Only on Tap

...On the whole, the treatments have tended to be superficial...

...the trial was presided over by a former Secretary of the Army...

...And the true meaning of his sacrifice remains little understood, and, indeed, as much confused by his glorifiers as by his detractors...

...otherwise, who would dream up the new weapons systems that scientific progress made possible...

...Oppenheimer, the faithful servant though he was, had overstepped the bounds...

...who would keep the military from making the technical misjudgments and blunders to which they have always been prone...

...But the ultimate decisions, as to which weapons should be made and how they should be used, were to be the sole prerogative of the military establishment...

...And the military counteroffensive already may be under way...

...But if this was heresy to the Air Force, it was a heresy which frequently and loudly had been expressed by most scientists, by James Franck, Leo Szilard and the Chicago group even before the first test explosion...

...His chronic inability to suffer in silence stupidity and mediocrity, his incisive and biting wit in repartee, sometimes a reflection of arrogance as much as of intellect, created bitter and vindictive enemies in influential circles...

...In large part, as is generally believed, Oppenheimer was a victim of the cold-war hysteria and McCarthyite witch-hunting of the late Forties and early Fifties...

...But Wilson has been somewhat sloppy with the facts, has tended to mix up people, places, and events (especially in Oppenheimer's early life...

...And by example and conviction, he carried many of his colleagues and much of the younger generation of physicists, who held him in awe and esteem, along with him...

...This travesty of a hearing resulted in the lifting of Oppenheimer's security clearance on the grounds of his "unreliability and lack of enthusiasm," but it also called forth fervent expressions of confidence and support on the part of most of his scientific peers and the community of younger American physicists...

...that "he nourished an almost absolute faith in the virtues of an open society...

...Not until last year, in the fight against the Safeguard ABM system, have scientists close to the Government finally been willing to raise a public outcry against the deployment of a military system that virtually all agree is detrimental to national and international security...

...to disregard or gloss over some of the less praiseworthy aspects of his hero's career, and even occasionally to rewrite history (as, for example, in overlooking Oppenheimer's lapse of judgment in supporting the military-inspired May-Johnson Bill at the end of the war, and then crediting the Acheson-Lilienthal Committee with the proposals for national legislation which eventually led to the civilian Atomic Energy Commission...

...And, if so, will we have the guts •—and the strength—to stand up and fight...

...The order to withdraw Oppcnheimer's security clearance came from a four-star general elected President, on the recommendation of a retired Admiral, then chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission...

...and the chief instigators and witnesses for the prosecution were officers of the Air Force and their pet technical consultants...

...More to the point, "he was vulnerable...

...His sanc-tification is well-earned by a genuine passage through the fiery furnace...

...Oppenheimer's charismatic qualities have attracted playwrights, journalists, and serious historians as well...

...that he "understood that the advent of the atomic age was in head-on conflict with the deepest traditions of the sovereign nation-state . . ." is only to say that he was in tune with the great majority of his colleagues...

...As such, it flows smoothly, is short and to the point, and never dull...

...Thenceforth, those scientists who were called upon by the Government to serve did so with unstinting enthusiasm and devotion, hardly ever calling to question the wisdom of the projects that they advanced...

...Reviewed by Bernard T. Feld J. Robert Oppenheimer is well on the way to being enshrined as a Twentieth Century martyr...

...to be extremely dangerous...

...Most important: the military needed a fall-guy, and Oppenheimer was available—practically made to order...

...And in the end, his loyalty to the system led to his acquiescence to the procedures of a public trial which was flagrantly rigged against him...

...Wilson draws the evident parallel between that historic battle over the decision to proceed with the development of the super bomb and the current controversy over the deployment of the ABM...

...So successful was this brainwashing of scientists that it has taken almost two decades to wear off...

...He shirked no official assignment, no matter how onerous...

...Recently, the pendulum has swung all the way over towards idolatry, as in Nuel Pharr Davis' Lawrence and Oppenheimer and in the work here under review...

...But the fact is that the struggle against the ABM, MIRV, and other horrors is so far going badly...

...He was the outstanding representative of a generation of American scientists—heroes because of their major contributions to our military victory in World War II— that fervently believed the nation and the world could be saved from the horrors of nuclear war only by working with and inside the system...

...Wilson's thesis, in brief, is that Oppenheimer's heresy was his premature espousal of the doctrine of "sufficiency," his publicly expressed conviction that "our twenty-thousandth bomb . . . will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two-thousandth...

...Oppenheimer worked as hard as any man could to avoid the role to which he was consigned by history and the circumstances of the times...

...That, in addition, Oppenheimer "was addicted to rationality, to distrust of secrecy, and to the habit of testing inherited assumptions...

...Thus, finally, Oppenheimer has been vindicated...

...Nevertheless, as far as the military was concerned, the results were all that they could have desired...

...the case was prepared by another general, appointed general manager of the Commission...

...But in common with many great saints, his martyrdom was more an accident of circumstance than an act of choice...

...But at the same time, Oppenheimer sowed the seeds of his downfall...

...Criticize they might—quietly and on the inside, however—and advise they must...

...But the tragedy goes much deeper...

...Far from seeking to act as spokesman for scientific integrity against the establishment, he strove with all the strength of his formidable intellectual powers and persuasive personality to be a faithful representative of science in the service of the Government...

...With a character as complex and as interesting as Oppenheimer's, evidence can be adduced to support each of these interpretations...

...Earlier writers have been inclined to place a Faus-tian interpretation on Oppenheimer's life—although the devil to whom he sold his youthful soul has been variously identified as the military, the Government, technology, the Communist Party, and the conventional lust for power...

...On the basis of the observation that the current discussion is much more open and the opposition to the military much more widespread, he permits himself to hope that "at long last Oppenheimer's heresy [has] become respectable—perhaps well on its way toward becoming the conventional wisdom of tomorrow...

...Oppenheimer was singled out by the military and his treatment was especially designed by them to hammer home to the American scientific community a specific lesson— that scientists must be on tap but never on top...

...It is bitterly ironic that the military was able to use the Atomic Energy Commission—that body which had been devised at the end of the war by a rebellious scientific fraternity to insure civilian control of nuclear energy —as the instrument for achieving this end...

...But in this reviewer's opinion he ends on much too optimistic a note...

...But if the voice was civilian, the hand was undeniably military...

...His highly intellectual, mystical, and frequently oblique mode of expression turned off the military, the politicians, and the general public...

...The above analysis applies generally to the great mass of material which has appeared in recent years about Oppenheimer and the Oppenheimer case...

...And since the point is congenial to this reviewer, it would be pleasant to be able to report that the facts are all accurately recorded even if we disagree on important aspects of the interpretation...

...Most of us at the time "harbored perceptions believed...

...Or will we break and run for cover as we did on that other, sad occasion...

...Still, in all fairness, Thomas Wilson's The Great Weapons Heresy is intended more as a journalistic than as a scholarly historical effort...

...But real people and real history can seldom be fit into such simple nitches—and Oppenheimer less than most...

...Can it be that we are witnessing the beginnings of an effort to force conformity on the most independent, vocal, and effective segment of the scientific community by the crudest application of pressures where they hurt most...

...His continuing advocacy of international control of nuclear energy, his public soul searching concerning the propriety of the use of nuclear weapons against Japanese cities, his doubts about the wisdom of proceeding pell-mell with the development of the super (hydrogen) bomb, his position of leadership and authority in the scientific community—all these made him the natural choice of the military in their need for an example through which they could bring the scientists to heel...

...On the contrary, scientists have generally taken upon themselves the role of enhancing military technology, of uncovering and developing all weapons possibilities opened up by the rapidly unfolding technological revolution...

...Would that it were true...

...It is probably no accident that Federal and particularly Defense Department grants for basic research are being drastically cut, with especially painful consequences for independent, university-based programs...