The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 by Manchester William

Author:Manchester, William [Manchester, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780795335587
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2013-11-10T00:00:00+00:00

Oppenheimer appealed the two-to-one decision to the AEC, which upheld it in a four-to-one vote. Commissioner Henry D. Smyth urged the others to see that Oppenheimer’s “loyalty and trustworthiness emerge clearly,” that in the light of his distinguished attainments “his services could be of great value to the country in the future,” and that “the security system has… neither the responsibility nor the right to dictate every detail of a man’s life.” But it was precisely there that the others parted company with him; a man of great achievements might be forgiven much, and the commissioners were less rigid than the Gray board in passing judgment on Oppenheimer’s mixed feelings about thermonuclear weapons, but failure to repudiate friends and relatives with unorthodox political persuasions could not be overlooked.

Ironically, the effect of purging Oppenheimer was the exact opposite of what his enemies had intended. In martyrdom he acquired new stature. Teller, on the other hand, became something of an outcast. The plotters had expected him to become the new wise man of nuclear physics. Instead he was ostracized. The only established scientist who had spoken against Oppenheimer, he was looked upon as an FBI informer, a turncoat who had betrayed both a fellow scientist and science itself. At scientific meetings he was snubbed by the others; when he protested they walked away. Eventually he came to be tolerated, but he was never really trusted again; in panel discussions and conversations his fellow physicists were formal and guarded. He appealed to Enrico Fermi, now near death, and the great Italian scientist supported him in an article in the magazine Science, but to Teller’s critics this was just one more breach of ethics. They put him down as a publicity seeker and continued to ignore him. In the world of science his Dr. Strangelove image had already formed.

Meantime the human condition which would be symbolized by Strangelove had been brought into focus by a chance wind in the western Pacific Ocean, giving Americans a brief but terrible glimpse of what they were doing to themselves and to the world. On March 1, when Robb was preparing his case against Oppenheimer, the AEC had exploded its second hydrogen bomb on Bikini atoll, just east of Eniwetok. Outstripping all expectations, it ripped open the coral reef with a force of some 18 million to 22 million tons of TNT—the equivalent of 900 to 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. Then the wind picked up the fallout. Meteorologists had predicted a stiff breeze to the north. Instead, it blew southward until, 120 miles from Bikini and far from the danger zone marked by the bomb testers, it dropped clouds of radioactive dust on a Japanese trawler grimly misnamed the Lucky Dragon No. 5. The startled Japanese fishermen at first thought themselves to be in the world’s first tropical snowstorm. By the time they reached their home port of Yaizu, the ghastly truth had begun to emerge. All twenty-three of them were sick and had to be hospitalized. Subsequently one, the wireless operator, died.

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