Kai Bird

“I remember Mr. Stimson [the secretary of war] saying to me,” Oppenheimer later remarked, “that he thought it appalling that there should be no protest over the air raids which we were conducting against Japan, which in the case of Tokyo led to such extraordinarily heavy loss of life. He didn’t say that the air strikes shouldn’t be carried on, but he did think there was something wrong with a country where no one questioned that. . . .”

Szilard left the meeting once again disheartened, knowing that this, his third attempt to stop the bomb, had failed. Over the next few weeks, he worked feverishly to establish a public record that would show that at least a vocal minority of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project had opposed the use of the bomb on a civilian target.

Though he had clearly argued for some of Bohr’s ideas about openness, in the end he had won nothing and acquiesced to everything.

MEANWHILE, a group of scientists in Chicago, spurred on by Szilard, organized an informal committee on the social and political implications of the bomb. In early June 1945, several members of the committee produced a twelve-page document that came to be known as the Franck Report, after its chairman, the Nobelist James Franck. It concluded that a surprise atomic attack on Japan was inadvisable from any point of view: “

As the countdown reached the two-minute mark, he muttered, “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.”

As Victor Weisskopf later wrote: “The war had made it obvious by the most cruel of all arguments, that science is of the most immediate and direct importance to everybody. This had changed the character of physics.”

Oppie had rapidly become a Washington insider—a cooperative and focused supporter of the Administration, guided by hope and sustained by naïveté.

ALL THIS WAS too much for Robert Wilson, who rewrote the suppressed ALAS “Document” and mailed it to the New York Times, which promptly published the statement on its front page. “Mailing it was a serious violation of security,” Wilson later wrote. “For me, it was a declaration of independence from our leaders at Los Alamos, not that I did not continue to admire and cherish them. But the lesson we learned early on was that the Best and the Brightest, if in a position of power, were frequently constrained by other considerations and were not necessarily to be relied upon.”

Though he hadn’t a shred of evidence, Hoover now floated the possibility that Oppenheimer intended to defect to the Soviet Union.

He harshly criticized Soviet tyranny, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism.