Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect

  • Charles Thorpe
University of Chicago Press: 2007. 413 pp. $37.50 0226798453 | ISBN: 0-226-79845-3

Does the world really need yet another book about J. Robert Oppenheimer? The already high pile of Oppenheimer biographies has been elevated in the past three years by David Cassidy's book J. Robert Oppenheimer (Pi Press, 2004) and Priscilla McMillan's The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Viking, 2005). There have also been collaborative studies by Abraham Pais and Robert P. Crease (J. Robert Oppenheimer; Oxford University Press, 2006) and by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin (American Prometheus; Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). But amazingly, Charles Thorpe's Oppenheimer still manages to provide a fascinating new perspective.

Why have so many scholars tried to put together an account of Oppenheimer's life? Perhaps it is simply because the pieces are so intriguingly hard to mesh. In his younger years, Oppenheimer was a master of intellectual abstraction, an early expert in quantum mechanics who was also drawn to Sanskrit and communist politics. At Los Alamos he impressively managed the effort to build the first atomic bombs, making him a hero both inside and outside science. Although initially a strong advocate for using those weapons, after the Second World War he expressed qualms about developing the hydrogen bomb. He then precipitously lost power and respect, ensnared by McCarthy-era anti-communist politics and by his own testimony against friends at a highly publicized hearing that led to the revocation of his security clearance and the end of his government career. Oppenheimer continued to serve as director of Princeton's highly prestigious Institute for Advanced Study, a post he assumed in 1947. His speeches suggested that he felt guilt, but not regret, for ushering in the atomic age.

When worlds collide: J. Robert Oppenheimer had to work closely with the military at Los Alamos. Credit: AMERICAN INST. PHYSICS/EMILIO SEGRE VISUAL ARCHIVES/UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL

Like other biographers, Thorpe argues that Oppenheimer's contradictory behaviour arose from a poorly formed and therefore malleable self-identity. What's new here is a precise and compelling description of how Oppenheimer's Los Alamos persona was forged by wartime circumstances and the Los Alamos community. To succeed in its grim mission, Los Alamos needed a certain type of leader, and Oppenheimer nimbly fit himself to the role, becoming the intellectual, moral and social centre of gravity for the constellation of scientific and engineering problem-solving. Thorpe argues that just as Oppenheimer created Los Alamos, so Los Alamos created, or at least reconfigured, Oppenheimer.

This approach might have resulted in sociological, postmodern sophistry. Instead, it helps to mesh apparent disconnections. For example, the congeniality that linked Oppenheimer and army general Leslie Groves, despite their divergent backgrounds and styles, now makes sense. At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer did his best to adapt academic tradition — with its leisurely pace and emphasis on continuously advancing knowledge for its own sake — to fit the job of wartime weapons-building, with its requirement to engineer rapidly using approximate knowledge. And because completing this military mission hinged on exploiting scientific expertise, Groves was willing to alter military tradition along quasi-academic lines to get that vital knowledge.

The book also shines new light on Oppenheimer's leadership. Thorpe is at his best when skilfully weaving quotations from the myriad of Los Alamos accounts and his own interviews, blending voices from oft-quoted scientists, seldom-included wives and largely forgotten military technicians. These accounts vividly describe how Oppenheimer acted as a mediator and buffer between the academic and military traditions, calmly soothing fears, easing moral concerns and lighting the way with his own keen intelligence. So, instead of complaining or fighting among themselves — and instead of second-guessing their mission after Germany surrendered — the diverse staff worked cooperatively under difficult conditions to solve hard technical problems on a tight schedule. The testimony itself strongly supports Thorpe's contention that the Los Alamos staff had a hand in shaping Oppenheimer's wartime persona. Oppenheimer, according to this testimony, was god-like, smarter and more noble than any human could be, a man much too good to be true. This larger-than-life persona was tailor-made for wider export, so it is not surprising that this version of Oppen-heimer was embraced by the public in the heady days after the atomic bombs ended the Second World War.

By so clearly presenting the falseness of Oppenheimer's wartime persona, Thorpe sets the stage for understanding why Oppenheimer later fell from grace: the gravity of postwar reality made the fall inevitable. However, Thorpe's analysis of the postwar years is much less impressive than his wartime study. The problem is that Oppenheimer was positioned to shape and be shaped by the compact, insular, war-focused Los Alamos, but the same was not true for postwar society. Thorpe tries to argue that Oppenheimer's experience in this period extends to all scientists — that work on the bomb joined science and the national security state together, leaving scientists compromised. Maybe they were compromised (as others have argued), but what happened to Oppenheimer cannot be seen as typical; he was too eccentric and his experience was unique. The Los Alamos portrait is apt, in fact, because it shows the precise relationship between a quirky leader and an odd community under unusual circumstances.

Understanding the evolving and complex relationship between scientists and the national security state requires a much wider focus than Oppenheimer's life. Indeed, understanding Oppenheimer's life in this postwar period requires a wider focus than McCarthy-era politics. Surely he was strongly influenced by his personal life, a subject Thorpe glosses over. Here, Thorpe lags behind the competition. The books by McMillan and by Pais and Crease provide a superior explanation of the security hearings, and those by Cassidy and by Bird and Sherwin provide a more comprehensive account of the entirety of Oppenheimer's life. Nonetheless, Thorpe's book provides the best perspective yet for understanding Oppenheimer's Los Alamos years, which were critical, after all, not only to his life but, for better or worse, the history of mankind.