Was Oppenheimer a Soviet spy? It’s a valid question.
J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” has captivated the left for reasons beyond his role in creating a devastating weapon. Oppenheimer is seen as the tormented conscience of the Cold War and a martyr of McCarthyism.
Kai Bird, co-author of the captivating
There it is. You can almost picture that innocent screenwriter, who had only briefly flirted with communism as a youngster, being accused of sedition by The Donald. The Red Scare, just ask anyone in Hollywood, was the greatest crime ever visited upon mankind.
Well, perhaps the second greatest after the 2016 election. “Just recall the former president’s fact-challenged comments on the pandemic or climate change,” Bird reminds us. “This is a worldview proudly scornful of science.”
The problem is, Bird doesn’t defend Oppenheimer’s science — or any science, for that matter. Rather, he defends the physicist’s political outlook, which, like his own, was fueled by utopian wish-casting and counterhistories.
It’s no accident that Bird, the Oppenheimer expert, writes an entire column about this witch hunt without once mentioning that the physicist was likely a communist — or, at best, a communist sympathizer. Bird’s column creates the impression that only hysterical and paranoid Birchers could possibly have questioned Oppenheimer’s integrity.
Bird’s book, American Prometheus, tells a different story. On numerous occasions, Oppenheimer admitted to being a “fellow traveler.” Indeed, Oppenheimer lied to government investigators and was often evasive about his numerous close relationships with known communist operatives. His first love, his wife, his brother, and many of his good friends and colleagues were all communists at some point.
And long before anyone ever heard the name “Roy Cohn,” the U.S. government was monitoring Oppenheimer, tapping his phones, tracing his movements and relationships. There was much consternation among U.S. officials about Oppenheimer while he was director of the Los Alamos lab. According to Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Peer de Silva, the project’s chief resident security officer, believed Oppenheimer was a spy back in 1942.
Just because they’re paranoid doesn’t mean you’re innocent. There were plenty of communists operating in the U.S. government around this time. Many elites who came of age in the 1920s and 1930s, including Oppenheimer, had been supportive of the Soviet Union. When the Venona files and Soviet archives were opened, Americans learned that Alger Hiss, Laurence Duggan, Lauchlin Currie, William Remington, and many others defended by the American left had been Soviet agents. Some of the know-nothings knew something.
Indeed, Oppenheimer managed a Manhattan Project that was teeming with Soviet spies. In their book, Sacred Secrets, Jerrold and Leona Schecter produce a Soviet document sent to Stalin’s secret police henchman Beria that they claim points to Oppenheimer as being a facilitator of espionage — much like FDR’s pro-Soviet Treasury official Harry Dexter White, who let a nest of spies work under his nose.
Historians can debate the significance of the document and whether Oppenheimer was a spy. My admittedly cynical view is that many contemporary historians don’t really see very much wrong with the communist flirtations of U.S. officials, anyway. Hagiographies of Oppenheimer’s life almost always double as critiques of American Cold War policy. Oppenheimer, for instance, is nearly always compared to his great rival, the stern and uncompromising anti-communist Edward Teller, the ”father of the hydrogen bomb” and template for Dr. Strangelove and other warmongering villains.
Though Teller would be proven right about both the Nazi and Soviet threats, no one is ever making a movie celebrating his life.
When the Manhattan Project was concluding, numerous participants began to argue that the U.S. shouldn’t have a monopoly on nuclear technology. Niels Bohr (not a spy) famously wanted atomic science open-sourced. Klaus Fuchs (definitely a spy) wanted the same, but simply handed Stalin atomic secrets instead. In 1995, when it was learned that another Los Alamos scientist, Ted Hall, had sent secrets to the Soviets in the 1940s, he went on television and
How these men conducted business matters, but the rationalization of all of them is perilously close to Oppenheimer’s stated thinking on the technology he had helped create.
As Bird writes:
Oppenheimer was trying desperately to have that kind of conversation about nuclear weapons. He was trying to warn our generals that these are not battlefield weapons, but weapons of pure terror. But our politicians chose to silence him; the result was that we spent the Cold War engaged in a costly and dangerous arms race.
Would Hall or Oppenheimer have wanted to break the U.S. atomic monopoly or effectively surrender our technology had the Nazis still held power? Of course not. The American left never really viewed Stalin with the same moral disdain they did Hitler.
Had it not been for the spies working under Oppenheimer, the United States might have spent more of the Cold War in a less costly and precarious position. Even still, the U.S. avoided the kind of large-scale conflict that engulfed the world in the first half of the 20th century. All the spies did was help the Soviets strip hundreds of millions of people of their basic dignity and freedom and spread war and destruction.
And those who wanted the United States to surrender their advantage voluntarily were basically arguing for the same results. That is not a position to be admired. It’s a position that sparks more curiosity about Oppenheimer’s thinking.
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