Home > Media > Books > Gregg Herken - Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller
Gregg Herken - Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller
The Glare of a Thousand Suns: New Light on Teller, Lawrence, and Oppenheimer
Written: Dec 03 '02
Product Rating:
Pros: Thorough, rigorous, ground-breaking, and compelling. Put it on your list
Cons: Minor quibbles and one major reservation of interpretation
The Bottom Line: Despite a serious caveat regarding Herken's sympathies of interpretation, this is an admirably written and researched account, factual, absorbing, and provocative. A sure-fire holiday gift for clever recipients
mshawpyle's Full Review: Gregg Herken - Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangle...
There is a sense in which the main plot, the primary story arc, of the last century, was the development beyond all imagining of applied science and of technology: the tale, often the cautionary tale, of how man’s mastery of nature overmastered man.
There is likewise a sense in which the true story of that bloody century is its ‘secret history,’ a story in which Angleton and Dulles, Stevenson and Stephenson, ‘Borodin,’ ‘Blyukher,’ Sorge, XX Committee, Fuchs, Radek, and Münzenberg are the main players, the true movers of events.
The intersection of these plot lines in the US (and UK) atomic and nuclear projects is thus inherently among the most compelling of stories, and Gregg Herken has now told it compellingly. Compellingly, and more nearly completely than has been possible before: now that Soviet archives have opened since that evil empire attained its meet and inevitable end on the ash-heap of history, the Venona files have become accessible, and much that was classified during the Cold War has been declassified.
The work is full of incident, as were, after all, the years it chronicles, from the coincidence of portentous breakthroughs in physics with the start of the Second World War, on through to the Cold War and beyond. It would take, one imagines, positive effort to be less than exciting with such materials. Yet other writers have managed to do just that; or have managed to make the more cinematic aspects of the story: the Manhattan Project, the Soviet spy rings, the loyalty investigations, and the political struggle over arms control: their focus, while leaving the scientific jockeying, and the intellectual excitements that truly drive the story, opaque.
Herken, by contrast, is capable of writing clearly on all aspects of his subject, and of conjuring in the reader a reflected sense of the intellectual excitements of the science of the day.
Fundamentally, however, Herken’s primary subject and concern is not so much the events at Trinity, as it is the characters of that unholy trinity formed by the dour Ed Teller, that salesman of physics Ernest Lawrence, and – to be blunt – that brilliant poseur Oppie. And this choice of concentration is at once the work’s crowning glory, and the sole source of my reservations regarding it.
Herken is at his most insightful in dealing with that refulgent showboat, that impresario of technology, E. O. Lawrence. Lawrence comes across, very vividly, in these pages as he must by all accounts have come across in life, as an avatar of a very American type of the early XXth Century, the Visionary Salesman. He was a man of the stamp of Edison and Ford and ‘Colonel’ Lucas of Spindletop fame, a Barnum-and-ballyhoo whipper-up of enthusiasm (and funding): no theoretician he, he was rather, in the terms of the time, a ‘go-getter’ and a ‘world-beater,’ a Captain of Industry turned loose in the staid precincts of the sciences. His overreaching, his febrile huckstering, his boosterism and his compulsive empire-building were very much of his time and background, and adumbrated the modern approaches to academic fundraising and to the engagement of the applied sciences with industry and profit.
Yet he did remarkable things, and with his students and assistants and lieutenants he achieved – in matters of pure science – almost as greatly as he dared, and the sciences are the richer for his driven determination to show nothing to be impossible to American ingenuity. Medical radiology and all of the physical sciences stand in debt to the effective father of the cyclotron, and his contributions were as varied as they were showy. Herken does an admirable job in showing Lawrence in action, and in his interactions with Oppenheimer, Vannevar Bush, Conant, and all the rest of the ensemble cast.
It is, to be sure, quite a cast. There is Leslie Groves, blindly determined to meet and exceed every deadline his superiors can conceive of, and thus blindly blundering and bullying his way to compromising his own project: a man with the relentlessly linear mind, and lack of imagination and even of common caution, that is engendered by the synergy of the military viewpoint and the engineer’s mindset. There is Luis Alvarez, the future Nobel Prize winner and already in 1941 a physicist of renown, though he will, in the event, be forever best known, with his geologist son Walter, as the discoverer of the Chicxulub impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs.
And of course there are Teller and Oppenheimer, the eternal rivals.
Herken again does an admirable job of limning their characters, actions, achievements, failings, and intense conflict. A very recognizable Edward Teller is reflected here, heavily humorless, irremediably Mitteleuropean, a ‘man of constant sorrow’ – or, rather, persistent wallowing in Weltschmerz: the classic sample of the Hungarian physicist come to America. (There is, as I recall, an old joke amongst physicists to the effect that, yes, indeed, aliens possessed of mental powers beyond the mortal ken are in charge of science and weapons development in this country: Hungarian aliens.) And certainly Doctor Teller has sometimes played to the gallery as a stock European-Jewish intellectual, a scientific Henry Kissinger, wearied of the callow American fools who surround him, his natural gravitas the only brake on his despair and raging impatience…. And certainly also, Doctor Teller suffers, as accomplished men tend to do, from that last infirmity of noble mind, proud ambition.
But there is more to Edward Teller than these stock tropes, and to his credit, Herken lays out the evidence of Teller’s ill-hidden but politically incorrect depths.
I say this is to Herken’s credit; and that statement deserves some explanation. The fact is, there remains to this day a divide between the fans of J Robert Oppenheimer, for whom Oppie is the Christ-figure of the McCarthy years, the noble victim of ominously-motivated persecutions, and those who see him as a quite formidable theoretical physicist who ought never have been allowed to have such clearances as would have allowed him even to buy an electromagnet. And it seems to me readily discernible which side Herken is on.
As is the case with his handling of Teller, Herken honorably lays out the facts, even those very much to Oppenheimer’s discredit; and as with Teller, so with Oppie does Herken refrain from overt judgment and even from drawing conclusions that beg to be drawn.
In another author’s hands, I might be inclined to see in this merely an unrelenting positivism, a studied objectivity dedicated to allowing the reader to Make Up His Own Mind. But while Herken dutifully reports the opinions of those intimates of Oppie’s who found his Adlerian, Ethical-Culture-tinged, acte gratuite moral posturing intolerable, or who (reasonably enough) rolled their eyes at his pretentious quotations of Classical tags he had no clear understanding of and of third-hand Sanskrit quotations, Herken rather evidently is not persuaded of the truth of a comment a Dutch colleague addressed to Oppenheimer, that he was so interested in moral grandstanding because he ‘had no character.’
Similarly, Herken has done a laudable job of research into Oppenheimer’s complex ties with Communists and Communism, and again reports with absolute honesty what he has unearthed; yet his tone is indulgent. Most significantly, Herken reflexively and without irony or question uses the diction of the bien-pensant Left in discussing matters of fact: as when outright unreconstructed Stalinist positions and personalities are blandly referred to as ‘progressive.’ He treats with peculiar solicitude such characters as the Stalinoid Haakon Chevalier, a Communist who was self-evidently also an enthusiastic security risk, though of little accomplishment in his malice, and a witting agent of some sort who regarded his select circle, including Oppie, as a formal Communist cell. Herken likewise seems largely unwilling to draw the conclusions his own admirable work impels in detailing the Oppenheimers’s association with George and Dolly Eltenton, British-born Stalinists who had lived and thrived in Leningrad at the height of the purges and the show trials. Dolly, in her nineties, by which time the moral bankruptcy of Communism was apparent even to the average village idiot, published a memoir of her happy years in Stalin’s cold hell entitled Laughter in Leningrad; which, given that the only people with any grounds for jollity in Leningrad in 1937 were the NKVD, is sort of an apogee – or, better, nadir – of moral idiocy.
The fact is, Herken is imbued in his very diction with the ‘semantic infiltration,’ the carefully cultivated set of Great Lies implanted in our very discourse, that remains – over sixty years after Willi Münzenberg broke with the totalitarians and met a swift death – the most persistent legacy of Münzenberg’s Comintern.
As Herken properly sets out, congressional staff bloodhound William L. Borden asked, unanswerably, ‘In the period 1940 - 1942, did Dr Oppenheimer have any close friends who were not associated with Communism?’ Herken’s own work gives the answer; but Herken, like that considerable section of the elite who regard Oppenheimer as a martyr of conscience, seems not to grasp the magnitude of the only conclusion Herken’s own evidence allows.
In a sense, of course, Groves’s willingness to overlook Oppenheimer’s criminal negligence in security matters, and Oppenheimer’s own negligence and folly, are immaterial. Given the penetration of the US (and British) governments by the Soviet intelligence apparat at the time, from Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss to Noel Field (and the Cambridge traitors in Britain), given the depredations of Fuchs and Greenglass and the Rosenbergs, given even the fatal carelessness and uncritical ‘Uncle Joe’ follies of FDR, Henry Wallace, Harold Ickes, and others, there was never any hope of preserving the security of the Manhattan Project or of postwar atomic and nuclear weapons research.
By the same token, however, it is abundantly clear, indeed to the trained eye it is incontrovertible, that it was likewise immaterial whether or not Oppenheimer was ever himself a witting agent, even merely an agent of influence, much less a man under Party and Comintern discipline, as his brother and so many of his associates were: he couldn’t very well have done much more damage if he had been. Lenin’s remarks on ‘useful fools’ remain apt. Not only was his involvement with The Bomb in many ways disastrous from a security standpoint, so to, and perhaps still more, were his loyalty investigation, its equivocal result, his consequent celebrity as a ‘martyr,’ his years of factitious moral posturing, and the legacy of his showily ‘tortured’ affectations of conscience in creating a poisonously anti-American set of reflexes in important segments of the scientific community.
Herken’s publisher – far more than does Herken himself – presents this work as a cautionary tale of ‘what [happens] to … integrity when big-time science – and its practitioners – are enlisted in the service of the state.’ Perhaps so; but on Herken’s own exquisitely marshaled evidence in this formidably researched work, the failures of integrity were largely Oppenheimer’s, they antedated the US government’s wartime recruitment of science in the cause of defeating the Nazis and their Axis partners, and they derived largely from the enlistment of far too many scientists in the service of another, foreign, and totalitarian state, the USSR.
There are a few other cavils to be made. Herken has chosen to relegate to endnotes not only source annotations, which is perfectly defensible, but also quite a few meaty and meaningful points of clarification and materiality, many of them having to do with the intricacies of intelligence and counter-intelligence, with such important matters as Fuchs’s Soviet controller or important surveillance incidents. There seems nowadays to be a belief that one may have either endnotes or footnotes, but not both. Anyone who has ever possessed an unabridged edition of Gibbon, which takes up as many volumes as it does because of the footnotes, can sympathize: at times, the text is reduced to a thin trickle at the top of the page, the rest of which is taken up with Gibbon’s own magisterial footnotes and the annotations of generations of assiduous editors. But it would have profited the reader greatly either to have integrated material points into the text or to have distinguished them by making them footnotes within hailing distance of the main narrative, rather than relegating them to the back of the book amidst the thicket of citations.
There are also a few jarring moments, as when a single farewell between only two persons gives rise to plural adieux or when – perhaps it was a pun that misfired – a hardening of the American position in arms control negotiations, which may admittedly have had an ‘in your face’ quality, is designated not a volte-face, but a votre-face.
But these are minor caveats at best, and even the issue of Herken’s undue sympathies towards Oppenheimer’s dishonesty, dubious friendships with traitors and their abettors, and parlous openness to Soviet penetration, suffices at worst to drop my recommendation here from five stars to four. On balance, this is a formidably researched account, superbly structured, evidentially fair and evidentially exhaustive. It is also a commendably lucid, engaging, and evocative narrative, and Herken seems to have grasped in very large measure the key to the relationships between his three protagonists, and the magnitude of the fashion in which their interactions and even their failings, failures, and fallings-out have shaped our world.
For the layman or the scholar, for the reader interested in the history of the Second World War and the Cold War, for the science buff and the political junkie alike, this is an excellent choice: detailed, rigorous, often elegant, compelling, and in its facts if not always in its interpretations admirably fair and unbiased. I commend it highly to you all – and to those playing Santa for any history, science, or policy wonks this holiday season.
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