Redefining Science

Scientists, the National Security State, and Nuclear Weapons in Cold War America

Paul Rubinson

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781613764800
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Cold War forced scientists to reconcile their values of internationalism and objectivity with the increasingly militaristic uses of scientific knowledge. For decades, antinuclear scientists pursued nuclear disarmament in a variety of ways, from grassroots activism to transnational diplomacy and government science advising. The U.S. government ultimately withstood these efforts, redefining science as a strictly technical endeavor that enhanced national security and deeming science that challenged nuclear weapons on moral grounds "emotional" and patently unscientific. In response, many activist scientists restricted themselves to purely technical arguments for arms control. When antinuclear protest erupted in the 1980s, grassroots activists had moved beyond scientific and technical arguments for disarmament. Grounding their stance in the idea that nuclear weapons were immoral, they used the "emotional" arguments that most scientists had abandoned. Redefining Science shows that the government achieved its Cold War "consensus" only by active opposition to powerful dissenters and helps explain the current and uneasy relationship between scientists, the public, and government in debates over issues such as security, energy, and climate change.

1

From “Highly Unreliable” to “Patriotic and Prompt”

Scientists Confront the National Security State, 1945–1957

In making the atomic bomb and offering guidance on its use, scientists carved a political niche that, after World War II, made it seem natural for policymakers to consult them on atomic policy. By the mid-1950s, however, changes in the Cold War had drastically altered the relationship between scientists and policymakers and limited the type of advice science advisers could give. This transformation centered around Robert Oppenheimer, the emblematic scientist of the atomic age, who went from war hero to Red Scare victim after the 1954 security clearance hearing that dismissed him from government service. But looking beyond Oppenheimer’s personal tragedy reveals bigger shifts in the dynamics of power. For the rest of the scientific community, the verdict was an ultimatum, redefining how scientists could give advice to the national security state. While U.S. scientists divided over the Oppenheimer hearing, predictions at the time that scientists would break entirely from the government can only be described as inaccurate. National security required keeping scientists on board while limiting their dissent against nuclear deterrence. By the late 1950s a new cohort of influential scientists came to the fore, eager to influence U.S. policy, even if it meant restricting their personal views and moral arguments against nuclear weapons.

Carving a Niche

Observers of all types hailed the atomic bomb at the moment of its use as a watershed invention in human history certain to change the course of civilization. Harry Truman claimed that on hearing of the use of the bomb against Hiroshima, he blurted out, “This is the greatest thing in history.” From a distinctly different perspective, Japanese emperor Hirohito, speaking directly to his subjects for the first time, mentioned the “cruel bombs” that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki and concluded that “to continue the war further could lead in the end not only to the extermination of our race, but also to the destruction of all human civilization.” In his survey of immediate reactions to the atomic bomb, the historian Paul Boyer found that Hirohito’s perspective was not unique—that “in the earliest moments of the nuclear era,” nuclear fears “had already found urgent expression.”1

The daunting nature of atomic weapons certainly shaped visions of the postwar world. As has been repeated numerous times, on witnessing the test of the first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico, Oppenheimer thought of Hindu scripture, in particular the apocalyptic verse “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” To title his landmark history of the diplomatic significance of the A-bomb, Martin Sherwin paraphrased Oppenheimer’s reaction in order to describe the military and political effects of the weapon: “A World Destroyed.” Perhaps most tellingly, in the long history of violence that has produced countless weapons, “the Bomb” requires no other descriptors.2

But another reason the atomic bomb held such import for the postwar world was that its creators self-consciously endowed it with great significance long before its initial use. In 1939, hours after discovering that uranium would release enough neutrons during fission to create a nuclear chain reaction, the physicist Leo Szilard felt that “there was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.” That same year in Germany, Carl von Weizsäcker, working on the German A-bomb, reflected that “this discovery could not fail to radically change the political structure of the world.” Niels Bohr, an idol to many physicists of the twentieth century, predicted that the weapon would be so terrible that it would end forever the human race’s propensity for war, adding that the harnessing of atomic energy was “a far deeper interference with the natural events than anything ever before attempted.” Bohr heavily influenced the thinking of Oppenheimer, who, not long after the war’s end, justified atomic weapons as “the best argument science could make . . . for a more reasonable and a new idea of the relations between nations.”3

The select scientists responsible for creating the A-bomb directly shaped perceptions of the weapon and in so doing carved a niche for themselves in the policymaking of the atomic age. When the Los Alamos physicist Robert Wilson felt pangs of doubt while working on the Manhattan Project, he convened a meeting to discuss the consequences of creating such a powerful weapon. To emphasize the bomb’s image as a world-changing force, Wilson titled his meeting “The Impact of the Gadget on Civilization.” The fact that a mere “gadget”—a wartime nickname Los Alamos scientists gave the A-bomb—could have an impact on “civilization” succinctly expressed scientists’ vision of the bomb’s magnitude: fairly straightforward to invent, quite difficult to control. In a November 1945 speech to Los Alamos scientists, Oppenheimer defended the bomb as the culmination of the quantum revolution in physics of the 1920s. Oppenheimer (no longer the lab’s director) described the bomb as a momentous and crucial turning point in the history of science itself: “The real impact of the creation of the atomic bomb and atomic weapons [is] the fact that the very existence of science is threatened, and its value is threatened.” On a more upbeat note, President Truman described the Manhattan Project as “the greatest achievement of organized science in history.”4

Not everyone joined the chorus of voices proclaiming a new era. Many U.S. military officials and policymakers saw the bomb as a fairly conventional weapon, while those unfriendly to the United States simply scoffed at it. Unlike most of his fellow Manhattan Project engineers, David Greenglass (who passed atomic information to Soviet agents) did not even bother to wake up early for the Alamogordo test. “You gotta understand something,” he explained to a journalist years later. “I knew it went off.” According to legend, Joseph Stalin, who had been nonplussed when Truman revealed the bomb to him at Potsdam, had a similarly ho-hum reaction to his own atomic weapon. Stalin slept through the first Soviet A-bomb test in 1949, and when a phone call woke him to tell him of the successful explosion, the dictator muttered that he already knew and hung up. Mao Zedong attempted to belittle atomic weapons before his country developed them, describing the atomic bomb as “a paper tiger. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn’t.”5 Reactions to the bomb reflected what was at stake in the atomic age. While enemies of the United States needed to be unimpressed with the bomb, it boosted the importance of U.S. scientists when the bomb appeared to have created a sea change in the course of history. If the public saw the bomb as momentous, it would seem more natural for scientists, as the creators of atomic weapons, to claim a role in guiding the nation’s atomic energy policy.

Scientists and Early Atomic Policy

Such was the thinking of the atomic scientists who forged for themselves large roles in nuclear policymaking near the war’s end and after. In his farewell speech at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer commented on the new world created by the bomb. “It is a new field,” the physicist remarked, “in which the role of science has been so great that it is to my mind hardly thinkable that the international traditions of science, and the fraternity of scientists, should not play a constructive part.” Oppenheimer was hoping to reinforce what had already tentatively begun: the active consultation of scientists by policymakers. Along with the Nobel Prize winners Enrico Fermi, Arthur Holly Compton, and Ernest Lawrence, Oppenheimer had been invited to serve as a scientific adviser to the spring 1945 Interim Committee that decided the most effective way to use the atomic bomb against Japan. These scientists joined Vannevar Bush and James Conant in rubbing shoulders with establishment luminaries such as James Byrnes, George Marshall, and Henry Stimson.6 Other scientists endeavored to influence policy after the war with more civic-minded activism. Albert Einstein, Linus Pauling, Eugene Rabinowitch, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, and other scientists took part in what became known as the Atomic Scientists’ Movement, an attempt to shape U.S. atomic energy legislation. These efforts helped defeat the May-Johnson bill, which would have ceded control over atomic energy policy to the military, and helped pass the McMahon Act, which established the civilian Atomic Energy Commission to regulate, promote, and protect the U.S. atomic energy industry, including weapons.7

The Atomic Scientists’ Movement had loftier visions than just the provincial goal of lobbying Congress for favorable legislation. Since the threat of atomic weapons loomed especially large in the shadow of Hiroshima, many scientists—including even the relatively conservative and aloof Oppenheimer—adamantly believed that only a world government with control over atomic energy could, in the long run, guarantee the survival of humanity. But the fragile ship of world government crashed and sank on the rough shoals of the Cold War. As tensions between the United States and Soviet Union heightened after 1945, nationalism triumphed over internationalism. U.S. officials cynically transformed Oppenheimer’s proposal for UN control of atomic energy into a vacant piece of Cold War propaganda by insisting on conditions designed to lock in U.S. nuclear superiority and conceptions of national security.8 The scientists who had hoped to guide atomic energy policy soon clashed with the anticommunists shaping U.S. policy and increasingly fell out of favor as paranoia replaced postwar optimism.

A growing public perception of theoretical physicists as the “weakest links” in the U.S. national security system painted scientists with a pink brush and proved particularly damaging to atomic activists. According to the historian David Kaiser, “Theoretical physicists emerged as the most consistently named whipping-boys of McCarthyism.” These questions of character arose when atomic spy scandals involving Klaus Fuchs and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg came to light; the Soviet A-bomb, the fall of China, the Korean War, and Joseph McCarthy then encouraged a full-blown Red Scare well into the 1950s. In 1954 one scientist complained to the AEC that “exaggerated reports in the public press have led to the impression that scientists as a class are highly unreliable and that many are disloyal.” Perhaps most troubling for scientists, some academic and government science institutions fell in line behind the Red Scare’s manufacture of consent. The University of California (UC) at Berkeley instituted loyalty pledges for its faculty and fired many who refused to sign, while the AEC launched a new round of security clearance hearings to weed out alleged subversives.9

A categorization of all scientists as liberal-leaning activists would be inaccurate. The Manhattan Project’s most famous scientists left Los Alamos after the end of the war, some of them to take up antinuclear causes. But more than enough scientists remained behind to staff the weapons lab and help build the nation’s nuclear arsenal. A majority of scientists accepted, explicitly or tacitly, the policy of deterrence as the best means for preventing a nuclear war. While rank-and-file scientists may have powered big science forward in the years after World War II, the nation’s elite scientists—mostly Manhattan Project veterans—wrestled over the direction of the ship. Men like Oppenheimer, Hans Bethe, and Teller engaged with the nuclear issue and were present during the 1950s as political conflicts reshaped power relations between scientists and the state.

The Oppenheimer Hearing

Though not really a participant in the Atomic Scientists’ Movement, Oppen-heimer had been politically radical during the Great Depression, when he supported a wide variety of Far Left causes and embraced communism as a fellow traveler.10 Having purged himself of most of these leftist associations on joining the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer emerged from the war as the premier government science adviser and perhaps the greatest beneficiary of scientists’ newfound fame and cachet. But Oppenheimer also embodied scientists’ fall from grace during the Red Scare, when the AEC revoked his security clearance after a 1954 hearing, completing a lengthy effort by his adversaries to oust him from government service. While Oppenheimer’s tragedy marks the nadir of U.S. political life in the 1950s, his security clearance hearing also ushered in a new relationship between the national security state and elite scientists only slightly less influential than Oppenheimer.

In 1945 the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bombs elevated Oppenheimer to celebrity status. As the head of the Los Alamos lab that had produced the atomic bombs, the enigmatic and photogenic Oppenheimer expressed ambivalence about nuclear weapons and cultivated the mystique that allowed observers then and now to view him as the symbol of the atomic age and all of its dilemmas and contradictions.11 The slender physicist was essential to the successful crafting of the first weapons of mass destruction but also worried deeply about war. As one who prided himself on having pondered Eastern religion, world literature, and human nature, Oppenheimer gave the impression that he would not wield his influence lightly. Even so, he could make boneheaded decisions—“I was an idiot,” he later confessed to the AEC in an exasperated attempt to explain his concocted stories about espionage attempts during the Manhattan Project. At times Oppenheimer appeared to be a sort of pacifist, worriedly prophesying that “the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima” and denouncing the proposed Super Bomb (an early version of the hydrogen bomb) as a potential “weapon of genocide” that would “slaughter a vast number of civilians.” Yet he eagerly advised military policymakers, and in place of the terrifying Super he comforted himself with the thought of a great many A-bombs, including an acceleration of the A-bomb program and tactical nuclear weapons.12 Respected by many, Oppenheimer also advised the powerful: as head of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee (GAC), he often met with congressional and military officials and rarely the president.

But in a drastic reversal of fortune, the AEC humiliated Oppenheimer in 1954 by upholding the decision of the previous year to revoke his security clearance (and thus his access to privileged government policymaking circles) after an infamous hearing.13 In less than a decade, Oppenheimer went from the power elite of atomic energy circles to a martyred intellectual, exiled to the purgatory of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Observers at the time, as well as scholars in years since, recognized that the hearing served as retaliation for a multitude of Oppenheimer’s technical and political faux pas, including his initial opposition to the Super, his recommendations against U.S. air force atomic weapons and policy plans, and his alleged domination and intimidation of members of the GAC.

The hearing also resulted from the desire of several of Oppenheimer’s enemies to punish him for his personal arrogance and the perceived insults they had received from him over the years. These transgressions included his bypassing of Teller for Bethe as head theoretical physicist of the Los Alamos lab in 1943, his public ridiculing of the AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss in front of Congress in 1949, and his continued “association,” in the words of the AEC Personnel Security Board, “on what could not be considered a casual basis” with his friend (and known communist) Haakon Chevalier. Strauss, like a dark Wizard of Oz, used intimidation, coercion, and bribery to orchestrate the hearing and ensure Oppenheimer’s dismissal. For his part, Teller damned Oppenheimer in his testimony by saying, “I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more.” Teller had actually helped set the hearing in motion in 1952 by telling an interviewer with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that the “H bomb would have been a reality at least one year ago if it had not been opposed by Oppenheimer” and that “he would do most anything to see subject [Oppenheimer] separated from [the] General Advisory Committee because of his poor advice and policies regarding national preparedness and because of his delaying the development of [the] H bomb.”14

Menaced by the weapons they had made, the atomic scientists found that their agency, the AEC, had turned against them as well. Scientists had worked incredibly hard in the mid-1940s to see that atomic policy would not be dominated by the military, only to learn that the civilians who ended up running the AEC could be as militaristic as anyone in the national security state. This shift, with the hawkish Strauss eventually replacing the New Dealer ...