# American Prometheus  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin]] - Full Title:: American Prometheus - Category: #books ## Highlights > he had read Henry James’ short story “The Beast in the Jungle.” Oppenheimer was utterly transfixed by this tale of obsession and tormented egotism in which the protagonist is haunted by a premonition that he was “being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen.” Whatever it was, he knew that it would “overwhelm” him. ([Location 111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=111)) > “What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life [but] which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?” ([Location 151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=151)) > “On no one,” Kennan said, “did there ever rest with greater cruelty the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength. No one ever saw more clearly the dangers arising for humanity from this mounting disparity. This anxiety never shook his faith in the value of the search for truth in all its forms, scientific and humane. ([Location 232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=232)) > Theodore Roosevelt was using the bully pulpit of the White House to argue that good government in alliance with science and applied technology could forge an enlightened new Progressive Era. ([Location 269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=269)) > Without rejecting their Jewishness they chose to shape their identity within a uniquely American offshoot of Judaism—the Ethical Culture Society—that celebrated rationalism and a progressive brand of secular humanism. ([Location 273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=273)) - Note: Jewish u u”s > Distinguished speakers like W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, among many other prominent public personalities, were welcomed in this ornate auditorium. ([Location 426](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=426)) > Organized, institutional discrimination against Jews was a relatively recent phenomenon; since the American Revolution, when deists like Thomas Jefferson had insisted on a radical separation of organized religion from the state, American Jews had experienced a sense of tolerance. ([Location 431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=431)) > Philosophically, Ethical Culture was as deist and republican as the Founding Fathers’ revolutionary principles. ([Location 438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=438)) > Ethical Culture members served as agents of change on such politically charged issues as race relations, labor rights, civil liberties and environmentalism. ([Location 469](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=469)) > George Eliot. The novelist’s major work, Middlemarch, appealed to him greatly, perhaps because it explored so thoroughly a topic he found so mysterious: the life of the inner mind in relation to the making and breaking of human relationships. ([Location 514](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=514)) > He read Plato and Homer in Greek, and Caesar, Virgil and Horace in Latin. ([Location 529](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=529)) > In 1924, the Harvard Crimson reported on its front page that the university’s former president Charles W. Eliot had publicly declared it “unfortunate” that growing numbers of the “Jewish race” were intermarrying with Christians. Few such marriages, he said, turned out well, and because biologists had determined that Jews are “prepotent” the children of such marriages “will look like Jews only.” While Harvard accepted a few Negroes, President A. Lawrence Lowell staunchly refused to allow them to reside in the freshman dormitories with whites. ([Location 745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=745)) > With the family’s fortune eaten away by Germany’s postwar inflation, they were compelled to take on boarders. Fluent in German, Robert quickly grasped the debilitating political atmosphere of the Weimar Republic. He later speculated that the Carios “had the typical bitterness on which the Nazi movement rested.” That autumn, he wrote his brother that everyone seemed concerned with “trying to make Germany a practically successful & sane country. Neuroticism is very severely frowned upon. So are Jews, Prussians & French.” ([Location 1244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=1244)) > it was parked there in a very miserable German mood.” He found many Germans “bitter, sullen . . . angry and loaded with all those ingredients which were later to produce a major disaster. And this I felt very much.” ([Location 1249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=1249)) > “When your ancestors were still living in the trees, mine were already forging checks!” ([Location 1364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=1364)) > “Hot dog!” Robert exclaimed. “No, perro caliente!” ([Location 1557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=1557)) > “The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in times of preparation that determine what you do in the pinch, and that it takes an error to father a sin.” ([Location 1736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=1736)) > To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.” ([Location 1972](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=1972)) > “I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, and war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude; for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.” ([Location 2129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2129)) > “Batter my heart, three-person’d God . . .” for inspiration in assigning the code name “Trinity” to the first test of an atomic bomb. ([Location 2297](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2297)) > (As an adolescent, she had rebelled against the religious dogma she had been taught by the Episcopal Church; she told a girlfriend that every day she scrubbed her forehead to wipe away the spot where she had been christened. She hated any form of religious “claptrap.”) ([Location 2330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2330)) > “Beginning in late 1936,” Oppenheimer would explain to his interrogators in 1954, “my interests began to change. . . . I had had a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany. I had relatives there [an aunt and several cousins], and was later to help in extricating them and bringing them to this country. I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.” ([Location 2358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2358)) > Our perception then—which I feel was shared by Oppenheimer—had been that our work was vital and, in the language of today, ‘relevant’ while his was esoteric and remote.” ([Location 2367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2367)) > By 1940 Hannah had a private practice in a poverty-stricken district of downtown Oakland, and this experience “strengthened a conviction that had been growing for some years, namely that adequate medical care can only be provided by a comprehensive health insurance scheme with federal backing.” Hannah also insisted on racial integration in her practice, accepting black patients at a time when few other white physicians did so. Both views stamped her as a radical—and the FBI concluded that she was a member of the CP. ([Location 2412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2412)) > And even if most intellectuals didn’t actually join the Communist Party, their hearts lay with a populist movement that promised a just world steeped in a culture of egalitarianism. ([Location 2733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2733)) > Frank’s attachment to communism had deep American roots. As he later explained: “The intellectuals who were drawn toward the left by the horror, the injustices and fears of the thirties did, in varying degrees, identify with the history of protest in America. . . . John Brown, Susan B. Anthony, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, and even with movements such as the abolitionists, the early AFL and the IWW.” ([Location 2735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2735)) > “We tried to integrate the city swimming pool,” he said. “They just allowed blacks in Wednesday afternoon and evening, and then they drained the pool Thursday morning.” But despite their efforts, the pool remained segregated. ([Location 2742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2742)) - Note: Mexican mondays > But the time has come to set the record straight, and to put the question as it should have been put: not whether or not he had or had not been a member of the Communist Party, but whether such membership should, in itself, constitute an impediment to his service in a position of trust.” ([Location 2897](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2897)) > The FBI would never resolve the question of whether or not Robert was a CP member—which is to say that there was scant evidence that he was. ([Location 2934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2934)) > No issue of the day was more vigorously debated within left-intellectual circles than the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Many American Communists resigned from the Party. As Chevalier put it with marked understatement, the Soviet-German pact “confused and upset many people.” ([Location 2946](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2946)) > Sixteen years later, in 1954, Oppenheimer explained to his interrogators, “What they reported seemed to me so solid, so unfanatical, so true, that it made a great impression; and it presented Russia, even when seen from their limited experience, as a land of purge and terror, of ludicrously bad management and of a long-suffering people.” ([Location 3032](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=3032)) > He would fund specific causes through the CP—the Spanish Republic, farm workers, civil rights and consumer protection. ([Location 3113](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=3113)) > The most relevant political fact about Robert Oppenheimer was that in the 1930s he was devoted to working for social and economic justice in America, and to achieve this goal he chose to stand with the left. ([Location 3132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=3132)) > Cadillac; they nicknamed it “Bombsight.” ([Location 3370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=3370)) > historical materialism and the theory of history,” ([Location 3569](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=3569)) > I don’t want to let anything interfere with my usefulness to the nation.” ([Location 3779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=3779)) > Manhattan Engineer District, but most often referred to as the Manhattan Project. ([Location 3808](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=3808)) > You drop a bomb and it falls on the just and the unjust. There is no escape from it. The prudent man can’t escape, [nor] the honest man. . . . During the war with Germany, we [in the Rad Lab] certainly helped to develop devices for bombing . . . but this was a real enemy and a serious matter. But atomic bombing just carried the principle one step further and I didn’t like it then and I don’t now. I think it’s terrible.” ([Location 4254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=4254)) > Oppie could make Chico “single-foot”—trot by placing each of his hooves down at a different time— ([Location 5205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=5205)) > “Unless, indeed, some agreement about the control of the use of the new active materials can be obtained in due time, any temporary advantage, however great, may be outweighed by a perpetual menace to human security.” ([Location 5513](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=5513)) > complementarity to physics. He saw it everywhere: instinct and reason, free will, love and justice, and on and on.” ([Location 5543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=5543)) > Bhagavad-Gita: “Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.” ([Location 5858](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=5858)) > “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. . . .” ([Location 5870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=5870)) > And yet Oppenheimer—and surely many others in the room—understood that they could not rush to “stay ahead” in atomic weapons without pushing the Russians into an arms race with the United States. ([Location 5970](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=5970)) > Stimson said he agreed with James Conant’s suggestion “that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” Thus, with such delicate euphemisms, did the president of Harvard University select civilians as the target of the world’s first atomic bomb. ([Location 5983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=5983)) > The Soviets would not be adequately informed about the Manhattan Project, and the bomb would be used on a Japanese city without warning. ([Location 6002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6002)) > “[I]t is clear that we, as scientific men, have no proprietary rights . . . no claim to special competence in solving the political, social, and military problems which are presented by the advent of atomic power.” It was an odd conclusion—and one that Oppenheimer would soon abandon. ([Location 6060](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6060)) > Among other things, he was unaware that military intelligence in Washington had intercepted and decoded messages from Japan indicating that the Japanese government understood the war was lost and was seeking acceptable surrender terms. ([Location 6065](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6065)) > Donne poem that opens with the line “Batter my heart, three-person’d God . . .” But this suggests that he may also have once ([Location 6154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6154)) > Bhagavad-Gita; Hinduism, after all, has its trinity in Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. ([Location 6155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6155)) > ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ ([Location 6259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6259)) > and perhaps Caltech had enough Jews on its faculty. ([Location 6425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6425)) > Morrison had landed in Hiroshima just thirty-one days after the Enola Gay dropped its deadly load. “Virtually everyone in the street for nearly a mile around was instantly and seriously burned by the heat of the bomb,” Morrison said. “The hot flash burned suddenly and strangely. They [the Japanese] told us of people who wore striped clothing upon whom the skin was burned in stripes. . . . There were many who thought themselves lucky, who crawled out of the ruins of their homes only slightly injured. But they died anyway. They died days or weeks later from the radium-like rays emitted in great numbers at the moment of the explosion.” ([Location 6446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6446)) > The Hiroshima bomb, he said, was used “against an essentially defeated enemy. . . . it is a weapon for aggressors, and the elements of surprise and of terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.” ([Location 6502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6502)) > Such a talent might lead a man to think his velvet tongue was an effective political armor. ([Location 6510](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6510)) > Oppie had rapidly become a Washington insider—a cooperative and focused supporter of the Administration, guided by hope and sustained by naïveté. ([Location 6555](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6555)) > He just knew that good men like Henry Stimson, James Conant and Vannevar Bush had helped to draft the legislation, and “if they like the philosophy of this bill,” well, that was good enough for him. ([Location 6567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6567)) > Wallace subsequently noted in his diary: “The guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.” ([Location 6657](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6657)) > When Oppie replied that he did not know, Truman confidently said he knew the answer: “Never.” ([Location 6666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6666)) > His habit of relying on spontaneity worked well when he was at ease, but, time and again, under pressure he would say things that he would regret profoundly, and that would do him serious harm. ([Location 6683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6683)) > As a result of this quantitative change, the very nature of war had changed: Now the advantage rested with the aggressor, not the defender. ([Location 6718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6718)) > However confident Americans might be that their views and ideas will prevail, the absolute “denial of the views and ideas of other people, cannot be the basis of any kind of agreement.” ([Location 6736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6736)) > Oppenheimer, all directed toward the goal of discrediting this “individualistic” thinker. ([Location 6790](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6790)) > Oppenheimer believed that in the long run, “without world government there could be no permanent peace, that without peace there would be atomic warfare.” ([Location 6873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6873)) > It would take the terrors of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the massive Soviet buildup that followed it, before an American administration would propose, in the 1970s, a serious and acceptable arms control agreement. ([Location 7003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=7003)) > Among other things, they involve a more or less permanent renunciation of any hope that the United States might live in relative isolation from the rest of the world.” ([Location 7117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=7117)) > tyranny, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism. ([Location 7142](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=7142)) > But he was troubled by MacLeish’s prescription—a call for a “redeclaration of the revolution of the individual.” This familiar exhortation to Jeffersonian individualism seemed somehow inadequate and not very fresh. “Man is both an end and an instrument,” Oppenheimer wrote. ([Location 7145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=7145)) > The atomic bombings were “not so much the last military act of the Second World War,” he concluded, “as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress.” ([Location 7858](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=7858)) > But Strauss was not a student; he was a powerful, thin-skinned, vengeful man easily humiliated. He left the hearing room that day very angry. “I remember clearly,” said Gordon Dean, another AEC commissioner, “the terrible look on Lewis’ face.” Years later, David Lilienthal vividly recalled, “There was a look of hatred there that you don’t see very often in a man’s face.” ([Location 8105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8105)) - Note: Obama on trump at the who 2011 correspondence dinner > Kitty’s “crew of birds with broken wings. . . . Kitty had a ring of damaged women around her, all of them somewhat alcoholic.” ([Location 8221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8221)) > Armed with Super bombs, a single airplane could kill millions of people in minutes. It was too big for any known military target; it was a weapon of mass, indiscriminate murder. The possibility of such a weapon horrified Oppenheimer as much as it excited the imaginations of various Air Force generals, their supporters in Congress and the scientists who supported Edward Teller’s ambition to build a Super. ([Location 8445](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8445)) > Oppenheimer feared that the Super would simply be too big—or to put it another way, any legitimate military target for a thermonuclear device would be “too small.” If the Hiroshima bomb packed an explosive yield of 15,000 tons of TNT, a thermonuclear bomb—if it proved to be feasible— might explode with the force of 100 million tons of TNT. The Super was simply too large even as a city-buster. ([Location 8543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8543)) > “Pestiferous, ([Location 8661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8661)) > “We must protect the president.” It had come to that. The real issues related to national security had been rendered irrelevant by the simplifications imposed by domestic politics. ([Location 8668](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8668)) > By the end of the decade, America’s stockpile of nuclear weapons would leap from some 300 warheads to nearly 18,000 nuclear weapons. Over the next five decades, the United States would produce more than 70,000 nuclear weapons and spend a staggering $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons programs. In retrospect—and even at the time—it was clear that the H-bomb decision was a turning point in the Cold War’s spiraling arms race. Like Oppenheimer, Kennan was thoroughly “disgusted.” I. I. Rabi was outraged. “I never forgave Truman,” he said. ([Location 8684](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8684)) > Secrecy had become the handmaiden of ignorant policies, and so Oppenheimer decided to speak out against secrecy. ([Location 8704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8704)) > They adjusted their target goals to the production goals.” ([Location 8767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8767)) > “Borden was like a new dog on the block who barked louder and bit harder than the old dogs,” wrote the Princeton physicist John Wheeler, who met him in 1952. “Wherever he looked, he saw conspiracies to slow down or derail weapons development in the United States.” ([Location 8839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8839)) > emerging as professional witnesses against their former comrades. By 1950, Crouch was the most highly paid “consultant” on the Justice Department’s payroll, and would earn $9,675 in the following two years. ([Location 8917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8917)) > That does not mean that I think it is a good idea. I believe that until you have looked the tiger in the eye you are going to be in the worst of all dangers, which is that you will back into it.” ([Location 9076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9076)) > The notion of “candor” was directly inspired by Niels Bohr, who had always insisted that security was inextricably linked to “openness.” ([Location 9157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9157)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Note: Like open source software > And in the years since the demise of the Soviet empire, Russian archival documents have compelled historians to rethink basic assumptions about the early Cold War. The “enemy archives,” as the historian Melvyn Leffler has written, demonstrate that the Soviets “did not have pre-conceived plans to make Eastern Europe communist, to support the Chinese communists, or to wage war in Korea.” Stalin had no “master plan” for Germany, and wished to avoid military conflict with the United States. At the end of World War II, Stalin reduced his army from 11,356,000 in May 1945 to 2,874,000 in June 1947—suggesting that even under Stalin, the Soviet Union had neither the capability nor the intention to launch a war of aggression. ([Location 9165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9165)) > We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life. J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, 1953 ([Location 9336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9336)) > Henry James’ short story “The Beast in the Jungle,” ([Location 9339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9339)) > The initiation of Strauss’ campaign to destroy Oppenheimer’s reputation can thus be precisely dated; it began on the afternoon of May 25, 1953, with his appointment with the president. ([Location 9442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9442)) > Time, Life and Fortune magazines—all controlled by Henry Luce—published broadsides attacking Oppenheimer and the influence of scientists in defense policy. ([Location 9456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9456)) > nature of communism: “It is a cruel and humorless sort of pun that so powerful a present form of modern tyranny should call itself by the very name of a belief in community, by a word, ‘communism,’ which in other times evoked memories of villages and village inns and of artisans concerting their skills, and of men learning [to be] content with anonymity. But perhaps only a malignant end can follow the systematic belief that all communities are one community; that all truth is one truth; that all experience is compatible with all other; that total knowledge is possible; that all that is potential can exist as actual. This is not man’s fate; this is not his path; to force him on it makes him resemble not that divine image of the all-knowing and all-powerful but the helpless, iron-bound prisoner of a dying world.” ([Location 9615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9615)) > The inclusion of Oppenheimer’s opposition to the Super reflected the depth of McCarthyite hysteria that had enveloped Washington. Equating dissent with disloyalty, it redefined the role of government advisers and the very purpose of advice. ([Location 9838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9838)) > Einstein, of course, didn’t think America was Nazi Germany and he didn’t believe Oppenheimer needed to flee. But he was truly alarmed by McCarthyism. In early 1951 he wrote his friend Queen Elizabeth of Belgium that here in America, “The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil.” He now feared that by cooperating with the government’s security board, Oppenheimer would not only humiliate himself but would lend legitimacy to the whole poisonous process. ([Location 10006](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=10006)) > If judged by his whole life, the charges lodged against him involved behavior not at all unusual for a New Deal liberal in the 1930s committed to supporting and working for racial equality, consumer protection, labor union rights and free speech. But there was one more allegation in the AEC indictment that would prove to be almost as difficult to deal with as the Chevalier affair. The indictment claimed that “during the period 1942–45 various officials of the Communist Party, including Dr. Hannah Peters, organizer of the professional section of the Communist Party, Alameda County, Calif., Bernadette Doyle, secretary of the Alameda County Communist Party, Steve Nelson, David Adelson, Paul Pinsky, Jack Manley and Katrina Sandow are reported to have made statements indicating that you were then a member of the Communist Party; ([Location 10097](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=10097)) > When it came to the mind of Dr. Oppenheimer, he said, “I would accept a considerable amount of political immaturity in return for this rather esoteric, this rather indefinite, theoretical thinking that I believe we are going to be dependent on for the next generation.” ([Location 10641](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=10641)) - Note: Mccloy > Addison, and someone correct me if I am wrong, that said, ‘Great wits are near to madness, closely allied and thin partitions do their bounds divide.’ ” ([Location 10661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=10661)) > The Gray Board was, in sum, a veritable kangaroo court in which the head judge accepted the prosecutor’s lead. ([Location 10895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=10895)) > IN THE LONG RUN, however, Strauss’ strategy backfired; the transcript revealed the inquisitorial character of the hearing, and the corruption of justice during the McCarthy period. Within four years, the transcript would destroy the reputation and government career of Lewis Strauss. ([Location 11085](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=11085)) > The broadcaster Eric Sevareid noted, “He [Oppenheimer] will no longer have access to secrets in government files, and government, presumably, will no longer have access to secrets that may be born in Oppenheimer’s brain.” ([Location 11091](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=11091)) > Increasingly alarmed by the development of what President Eisenhower would someday call the “military-industrial complex,” Oppenheimer had tried to use his celebrity status to question the scientific community’s increasing dependency on the military. In 1954, he lost. ([Location 11141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=11141)) > He disapproved of self-appointed pundits—like the young Henry Kissinger, who had turned himself into a nuclear strategist. “A lot of nonsense,” he privately told Lilienthal, waving his unlit pipe around in the air. “To think that these are troubles that can be solved by the theory of games or behavioral research!” But he would not publicly condemn Kissinger or any other nuclear strategist. ([Location 11328](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=11328)) > Eric Severeid described Oppenheimer as “the scientist who writes like a poet and speaks like a prophet”—and approvingly suggested that the award signaled Oppenheimer’s rehabilitation as a national figure. ([Location 11649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=11649)) > Proust forty years earlier in Corsica: that “indifference to the sufferings one causes . . . is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.” ([Location 11871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=11871)) - Tags: [[favorite]] # American Prometheus  ## Metadata - Author:: [[Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin]] - Full Title:: American Prometheus - Category: #books ## Highlights > he had read Henry James’ short story “The Beast in the Jungle.” Oppenheimer was utterly transfixed by this tale of obsession and tormented egotism in which the protagonist is haunted by a premonition that he was “being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen.” Whatever it was, he knew that it would “overwhelm” him. ([Location 111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=111)) > “What are we to make of a civilization which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life [but] which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?” ([Location 151](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=151)) > “On no one,” Kennan said, “did there ever rest with greater cruelty the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength. No one ever saw more clearly the dangers arising for humanity from this mounting disparity. This anxiety never shook his faith in the value of the search for truth in all its forms, scientific and humane. ([Location 232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=232)) > Theodore Roosevelt was using the bully pulpit of the White House to argue that good government in alliance with science and applied technology could forge an enlightened new Progressive Era. ([Location 269](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=269)) > Without rejecting their Jewishness they chose to shape their identity within a uniquely American offshoot of Judaism—the Ethical Culture Society—that celebrated rationalism and a progressive brand of secular humanism. ([Location 273](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=273)) - Note: Jewish u u”s > Distinguished speakers like W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, among many other prominent public personalities, were welcomed in this ornate auditorium. ([Location 426](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=426)) > Organized, institutional discrimination against Jews was a relatively recent phenomenon; since the American Revolution, when deists like Thomas Jefferson had insisted on a radical separation of organized religion from the state, American Jews had experienced a sense of tolerance. ([Location 431](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=431)) > Philosophically, Ethical Culture was as deist and republican as the Founding Fathers’ revolutionary principles. ([Location 438](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=438)) > Ethical Culture members served as agents of change on such politically charged issues as race relations, labor rights, civil liberties and environmentalism. ([Location 469](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=469)) > George Eliot. The novelist’s major work, Middlemarch, appealed to him greatly, perhaps because it explored so thoroughly a topic he found so mysterious: the life of the inner mind in relation to the making and breaking of human relationships. ([Location 514](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=514)) > He read Plato and Homer in Greek, and Caesar, Virgil and Horace in Latin. ([Location 529](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=529)) > In 1924, the Harvard Crimson reported on its front page that the university’s former president Charles W. Eliot had publicly declared it “unfortunate” that growing numbers of the “Jewish race” were intermarrying with Christians. Few such marriages, he said, turned out well, and because biologists had determined that Jews are “prepotent” the children of such marriages “will look like Jews only.” While Harvard accepted a few Negroes, President A. Lawrence Lowell staunchly refused to allow them to reside in the freshman dormitories with whites. ([Location 745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=745)) > With the family’s fortune eaten away by Germany’s postwar inflation, they were compelled to take on boarders. Fluent in German, Robert quickly grasped the debilitating political atmosphere of the Weimar Republic. He later speculated that the Carios “had the typical bitterness on which the Nazi movement rested.” That autumn, he wrote his brother that everyone seemed concerned with “trying to make Germany a practically successful & sane country. Neuroticism is very severely frowned upon. So are Jews, Prussians & French.” ([Location 1244](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=1244)) > it was parked there in a very miserable German mood.” He found many Germans “bitter, sullen . . . angry and loaded with all those ingredients which were later to produce a major disaster. And this I felt very much.” ([Location 1249](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=1249)) > “When your ancestors were still living in the trees, mine were already forging checks!” ([Location 1364](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=1364)) > “Hot dog!” Robert exclaimed. “No, perro caliente!” ([Location 1557](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=1557)) > “The reason why a bad philosophy leads to such hell is that it is what you think and want and treasure and foster in times of preparation that determine what you do in the pinch, and that it takes an error to father a sin.” ([Location 1736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=1736)) > To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly.” ([Location 1972](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=1972)) > “I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, and war, and personal hardship, and even the need for subsistence, ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude; for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace.” ([Location 2129](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2129)) > “Batter my heart, three-person’d God . . .” for inspiration in assigning the code name “Trinity” to the first test of an atomic bomb. ([Location 2297](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2297)) > (As an adolescent, she had rebelled against the religious dogma she had been taught by the Episcopal Church; she told a girlfriend that every day she scrubbed her forehead to wipe away the spot where she had been christened. She hated any form of religious “claptrap.”) ([Location 2330](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2330)) > “Beginning in late 1936,” Oppenheimer would explain to his interrogators in 1954, “my interests began to change. . . . I had had a continuing, smoldering fury about the treatment of Jews in Germany. I had relatives there [an aunt and several cousins], and was later to help in extricating them and bringing them to this country. I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.” ([Location 2358](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2358)) > Our perception then—which I feel was shared by Oppenheimer—had been that our work was vital and, in the language of today, ‘relevant’ while his was esoteric and remote.” ([Location 2367](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2367)) > By 1940 Hannah had a private practice in a poverty-stricken district of downtown Oakland, and this experience “strengthened a conviction that had been growing for some years, namely that adequate medical care can only be provided by a comprehensive health insurance scheme with federal backing.” Hannah also insisted on racial integration in her practice, accepting black patients at a time when few other white physicians did so. Both views stamped her as a radical—and the FBI concluded that she was a member of the CP. ([Location 2412](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2412)) > And even if most intellectuals didn’t actually join the Communist Party, their hearts lay with a populist movement that promised a just world steeped in a culture of egalitarianism. ([Location 2733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2733)) > Frank’s attachment to communism had deep American roots. As he later explained: “The intellectuals who were drawn toward the left by the horror, the injustices and fears of the thirties did, in varying degrees, identify with the history of protest in America. . . . John Brown, Susan B. Anthony, Clarence Darrow, Jack London, and even with movements such as the abolitionists, the early AFL and the IWW.” ([Location 2735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2735)) > “We tried to integrate the city swimming pool,” he said. “They just allowed blacks in Wednesday afternoon and evening, and then they drained the pool Thursday morning.” But despite their efforts, the pool remained segregated. ([Location 2742](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2742)) - Note: Mexican mondays > But the time has come to set the record straight, and to put the question as it should have been put: not whether or not he had or had not been a member of the Communist Party, but whether such membership should, in itself, constitute an impediment to his service in a position of trust.” ([Location 2897](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2897)) > The FBI would never resolve the question of whether or not Robert was a CP member—which is to say that there was scant evidence that he was. ([Location 2934](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2934)) > No issue of the day was more vigorously debated within left-intellectual circles than the August 1939 Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Many American Communists resigned from the Party. As Chevalier put it with marked understatement, the Soviet-German pact “confused and upset many people.” ([Location 2946](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=2946)) > Sixteen years later, in 1954, Oppenheimer explained to his interrogators, “What they reported seemed to me so solid, so unfanatical, so true, that it made a great impression; and it presented Russia, even when seen from their limited experience, as a land of purge and terror, of ludicrously bad management and of a long-suffering people.” ([Location 3032](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=3032)) > He would fund specific causes through the CP—the Spanish Republic, farm workers, civil rights and consumer protection. ([Location 3113](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=3113)) > The most relevant political fact about Robert Oppenheimer was that in the 1930s he was devoted to working for social and economic justice in America, and to achieve this goal he chose to stand with the left. ([Location 3132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=3132)) > Cadillac; they nicknamed it “Bombsight.” ([Location 3370](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=3370)) > historical materialism and the theory of history,” ([Location 3569](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=3569)) > I don’t want to let anything interfere with my usefulness to the nation.” ([Location 3779](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=3779)) > Manhattan Engineer District, but most often referred to as the Manhattan Project. ([Location 3808](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=3808)) > You drop a bomb and it falls on the just and the unjust. There is no escape from it. The prudent man can’t escape, [nor] the honest man. . . . During the war with Germany, we [in the Rad Lab] certainly helped to develop devices for bombing . . . but this was a real enemy and a serious matter. But atomic bombing just carried the principle one step further and I didn’t like it then and I don’t now. I think it’s terrible.” ([Location 4254](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=4254)) > Oppie could make Chico “single-foot”—trot by placing each of his hooves down at a different time— ([Location 5205](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=5205)) > “Unless, indeed, some agreement about the control of the use of the new active materials can be obtained in due time, any temporary advantage, however great, may be outweighed by a perpetual menace to human security.” ([Location 5513](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=5513)) > complementarity to physics. He saw it everywhere: instinct and reason, free will, love and justice, and on and on.” ([Location 5543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=5543)) > Bhagavad-Gita: “Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is.” ([Location 5858](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=5858)) > “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. . . .” ([Location 5870](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=5870)) > And yet Oppenheimer—and surely many others in the room—understood that they could not rush to “stay ahead” in atomic weapons without pushing the Russians into an arms race with the United States. ([Location 5970](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=5970)) > Stimson said he agreed with James Conant’s suggestion “that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” Thus, with such delicate euphemisms, did the president of Harvard University select civilians as the target of the world’s first atomic bomb. ([Location 5983](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=5983)) > The Soviets would not be adequately informed about the Manhattan Project, and the bomb would be used on a Japanese city without warning. ([Location 6002](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6002)) > “[I]t is clear that we, as scientific men, have no proprietary rights . . . no claim to special competence in solving the political, social, and military problems which are presented by the advent of atomic power.” It was an odd conclusion—and one that Oppenheimer would soon abandon. ([Location 6060](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6060)) > Among other things, he was unaware that military intelligence in Washington had intercepted and decoded messages from Japan indicating that the Japanese government understood the war was lost and was seeking acceptable surrender terms. ([Location 6065](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6065)) > Donne poem that opens with the line “Batter my heart, three-person’d God . . .” But this suggests that he may also have once ([Location 6154](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6154)) > Bhagavad-Gita; Hinduism, after all, has its trinity in Brahma the creator, Vishnu the preserver, and Shiva the destroyer. ([Location 6155](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6155)) > ‘Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.’ ([Location 6259](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6259)) > and perhaps Caltech had enough Jews on its faculty. ([Location 6425](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6425)) > Morrison had landed in Hiroshima just thirty-one days after the Enola Gay dropped its deadly load. “Virtually everyone in the street for nearly a mile around was instantly and seriously burned by the heat of the bomb,” Morrison said. “The hot flash burned suddenly and strangely. They [the Japanese] told us of people who wore striped clothing upon whom the skin was burned in stripes. . . . There were many who thought themselves lucky, who crawled out of the ruins of their homes only slightly injured. But they died anyway. They died days or weeks later from the radium-like rays emitted in great numbers at the moment of the explosion.” ([Location 6446](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6446)) > The Hiroshima bomb, he said, was used “against an essentially defeated enemy. . . . it is a weapon for aggressors, and the elements of surprise and of terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.” ([Location 6502](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6502)) > Such a talent might lead a man to think his velvet tongue was an effective political armor. ([Location 6510](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6510)) > Oppie had rapidly become a Washington insider—a cooperative and focused supporter of the Administration, guided by hope and sustained by naïveté. ([Location 6555](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6555)) > He just knew that good men like Henry Stimson, James Conant and Vannevar Bush had helped to draft the legislation, and “if they like the philosophy of this bill,” well, that was good enough for him. ([Location 6567](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6567)) > Wallace subsequently noted in his diary: “The guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.” ([Location 6657](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6657)) > When Oppie replied that he did not know, Truman confidently said he knew the answer: “Never.” ([Location 6666](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6666)) > His habit of relying on spontaneity worked well when he was at ease, but, time and again, under pressure he would say things that he would regret profoundly, and that would do him serious harm. ([Location 6683](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6683)) > As a result of this quantitative change, the very nature of war had changed: Now the advantage rested with the aggressor, not the defender. ([Location 6718](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6718)) > However confident Americans might be that their views and ideas will prevail, the absolute “denial of the views and ideas of other people, cannot be the basis of any kind of agreement.” ([Location 6736](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6736)) > Oppenheimer, all directed toward the goal of discrediting this “individualistic” thinker. ([Location 6790](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6790)) > Oppenheimer believed that in the long run, “without world government there could be no permanent peace, that without peace there would be atomic warfare.” ([Location 6873](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=6873)) > It would take the terrors of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, and the massive Soviet buildup that followed it, before an American administration would propose, in the 1970s, a serious and acceptable arms control agreement. ([Location 7003](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=7003)) > Among other things, they involve a more or less permanent renunciation of any hope that the United States might live in relative isolation from the rest of the world.” ([Location 7117](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=7117)) > tyranny, but lamented the fact that so many Americans were willing to sacrifice their civil liberties in the name of anticommunism. ([Location 7142](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=7142)) > But he was troubled by MacLeish’s prescription—a call for a “redeclaration of the revolution of the individual.” This familiar exhortation to Jeffersonian individualism seemed somehow inadequate and not very fresh. “Man is both an end and an instrument,” Oppenheimer wrote. ([Location 7145](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=7145)) > The atomic bombings were “not so much the last military act of the Second World War,” he concluded, “as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress.” ([Location 7858](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=7858)) > But Strauss was not a student; he was a powerful, thin-skinned, vengeful man easily humiliated. He left the hearing room that day very angry. “I remember clearly,” said Gordon Dean, another AEC commissioner, “the terrible look on Lewis’ face.” Years later, David Lilienthal vividly recalled, “There was a look of hatred there that you don’t see very often in a man’s face.” ([Location 8105](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8105)) - Note: Obama on trump at the who 2011 correspondence dinner > Kitty’s “crew of birds with broken wings. . . . Kitty had a ring of damaged women around her, all of them somewhat alcoholic.” ([Location 8221](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8221)) > Armed with Super bombs, a single airplane could kill millions of people in minutes. It was too big for any known military target; it was a weapon of mass, indiscriminate murder. The possibility of such a weapon horrified Oppenheimer as much as it excited the imaginations of various Air Force generals, their supporters in Congress and the scientists who supported Edward Teller’s ambition to build a Super. ([Location 8445](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8445)) > Oppenheimer feared that the Super would simply be too big—or to put it another way, any legitimate military target for a thermonuclear device would be “too small.” If the Hiroshima bomb packed an explosive yield of 15,000 tons of TNT, a thermonuclear bomb—if it proved to be feasible— might explode with the force of 100 million tons of TNT. The Super was simply too large even as a city-buster. ([Location 8543](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8543)) > “Pestiferous, ([Location 8661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8661)) > “We must protect the president.” It had come to that. The real issues related to national security had been rendered irrelevant by the simplifications imposed by domestic politics. ([Location 8668](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8668)) > By the end of the decade, America’s stockpile of nuclear weapons would leap from some 300 warheads to nearly 18,000 nuclear weapons. Over the next five decades, the United States would produce more than 70,000 nuclear weapons and spend a staggering $5.5 trillion on nuclear weapons programs. In retrospect—and even at the time—it was clear that the H-bomb decision was a turning point in the Cold War’s spiraling arms race. Like Oppenheimer, Kennan was thoroughly “disgusted.” I. I. Rabi was outraged. “I never forgave Truman,” he said. ([Location 8684](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8684)) > Secrecy had become the handmaiden of ignorant policies, and so Oppenheimer decided to speak out against secrecy. ([Location 8704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8704)) > They adjusted their target goals to the production goals.” ([Location 8767](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8767)) > “Borden was like a new dog on the block who barked louder and bit harder than the old dogs,” wrote the Princeton physicist John Wheeler, who met him in 1952. “Wherever he looked, he saw conspiracies to slow down or derail weapons development in the United States.” ([Location 8839](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8839)) > emerging as professional witnesses against their former comrades. By 1950, Crouch was the most highly paid “consultant” on the Justice Department’s payroll, and would earn $9,675 in the following two years. ([Location 8917](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=8917)) > That does not mean that I think it is a good idea. I believe that until you have looked the tiger in the eye you are going to be in the worst of all dangers, which is that you will back into it.” ([Location 9076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9076)) > The notion of “candor” was directly inspired by Niels Bohr, who had always insisted that security was inextricably linked to “openness.” ([Location 9157](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9157)) - Tags: [[favorite]] - Note: Like open source software > And in the years since the demise of the Soviet empire, Russian archival documents have compelled historians to rethink basic assumptions about the early Cold War. The “enemy archives,” as the historian Melvyn Leffler has written, demonstrate that the Soviets “did not have pre-conceived plans to make Eastern Europe communist, to support the Chinese communists, or to wage war in Korea.” Stalin had no “master plan” for Germany, and wished to avoid military conflict with the United States. At the end of World War II, Stalin reduced his army from 11,356,000 in May 1945 to 2,874,000 in June 1947—suggesting that even under Stalin, the Soviet Union had neither the capability nor the intention to launch a war of aggression. ([Location 9165](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9165)) > We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life. J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, 1953 ([Location 9336](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9336)) > Henry James’ short story “The Beast in the Jungle,” ([Location 9339](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9339)) > The initiation of Strauss’ campaign to destroy Oppenheimer’s reputation can thus be precisely dated; it began on the afternoon of May 25, 1953, with his appointment with the president. ([Location 9442](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9442)) > Time, Life and Fortune magazines—all controlled by Henry Luce—published broadsides attacking Oppenheimer and the influence of scientists in defense policy. ([Location 9456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9456)) > nature of communism: “It is a cruel and humorless sort of pun that so powerful a present form of modern tyranny should call itself by the very name of a belief in community, by a word, ‘communism,’ which in other times evoked memories of villages and village inns and of artisans concerting their skills, and of men learning [to be] content with anonymity. But perhaps only a malignant end can follow the systematic belief that all communities are one community; that all truth is one truth; that all experience is compatible with all other; that total knowledge is possible; that all that is potential can exist as actual. This is not man’s fate; this is not his path; to force him on it makes him resemble not that divine image of the all-knowing and all-powerful but the helpless, iron-bound prisoner of a dying world.” ([Location 9615](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9615)) > The inclusion of Oppenheimer’s opposition to the Super reflected the depth of McCarthyite hysteria that had enveloped Washington. Equating dissent with disloyalty, it redefined the role of government advisers and the very purpose of advice. ([Location 9838](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=9838)) > Einstein, of course, didn’t think America was Nazi Germany and he didn’t believe Oppenheimer needed to flee. But he was truly alarmed by McCarthyism. In early 1951 he wrote his friend Queen Elizabeth of Belgium that here in America, “The German calamity of years ago repeats itself: People acquiesce without resistance and align themselves with the forces of evil.” He now feared that by cooperating with the government’s security board, Oppenheimer would not only humiliate himself but would lend legitimacy to the whole poisonous process. ([Location 10006](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=10006)) > If judged by his whole life, the charges lodged against him involved behavior not at all unusual for a New Deal liberal in the 1930s committed to supporting and working for racial equality, consumer protection, labor union rights and free speech. But there was one more allegation in the AEC indictment that would prove to be almost as difficult to deal with as the Chevalier affair. The indictment claimed that “during the period 1942–45 various officials of the Communist Party, including Dr. Hannah Peters, organizer of the professional section of the Communist Party, Alameda County, Calif., Bernadette Doyle, secretary of the Alameda County Communist Party, Steve Nelson, David Adelson, Paul Pinsky, Jack Manley and Katrina Sandow are reported to have made statements indicating that you were then a member of the Communist Party; ([Location 10097](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=10097)) > When it came to the mind of Dr. Oppenheimer, he said, “I would accept a considerable amount of political immaturity in return for this rather esoteric, this rather indefinite, theoretical thinking that I believe we are going to be dependent on for the next generation.” ([Location 10641](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=10641)) - Note: Mccloy > Addison, and someone correct me if I am wrong, that said, ‘Great wits are near to madness, closely allied and thin partitions do their bounds divide.’ ” ([Location 10661](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=10661)) > The Gray Board was, in sum, a veritable kangaroo court in which the head judge accepted the prosecutor’s lead. ([Location 10895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=10895)) > IN THE LONG RUN, however, Strauss’ strategy backfired; the transcript revealed the inquisitorial character of the hearing, and the corruption of justice during the McCarthy period. Within four years, the transcript would destroy the reputation and government career of Lewis Strauss. ([Location 11085](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=11085)) > The broadcaster Eric Sevareid noted, “He [Oppenheimer] will no longer have access to secrets in government files, and government, presumably, will no longer have access to secrets that may be born in Oppenheimer’s brain.” ([Location 11091](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=11091)) > Increasingly alarmed by the development of what President Eisenhower would someday call the “military-industrial complex,” Oppenheimer had tried to use his celebrity status to question the scientific community’s increasing dependency on the military. In 1954, he lost. ([Location 11141](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=11141)) > He disapproved of self-appointed pundits—like the young Henry Kissinger, who had turned himself into a nuclear strategist. “A lot of nonsense,” he privately told Lilienthal, waving his unlit pipe around in the air. “To think that these are troubles that can be solved by the theory of games or behavioral research!” But he would not publicly condemn Kissinger or any other nuclear strategist. ([Location 11328](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=11328)) > Eric Severeid described Oppenheimer as “the scientist who writes like a poet and speaks like a prophet”—and approvingly suggested that the award signaled Oppenheimer’s rehabilitation as a national figure. ([Location 11649](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=11649)) > Proust forty years earlier in Corsica: that “indifference to the sufferings one causes . . . is the terrible and permanent form of cruelty.” ([Location 11871](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B000XUBEYS&location=11871)) - Tags: [[favorite]]