#The Making of the Atomic Bomb | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

denimbex1986 · 9 months

Text

'It was the early hours of 16 July 1945, and Robert Oppenheimer was waiting in a control bunker for a moment that would change the world. Around 10km (6 miles) away, the world's first atomic bomb test, codenamed "Trinity", was set to proceed in the pale sands of the Jornada del Muerto desert, in New Mexico.

Oppenheimer was a picture of nervous exhaustion. He was always slender, but after three years as director of "Project Y", the scientific arm of the "Manhattan Engineer District" that had designed and built the bomb, his weight had dropped to just over 52kg (115lbs). At 5ft 10in (178cm), this made him extremely thin. He'd slept only four hours that night, kept awake by anxiety and his smoker's cough.

That day in 1945 is one of several pivotal moments in Oppenheimer's life described by the historians Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin in their 2005 biography American Prometheus, which provided the basis for the new movie biopic Oppenheimer, released 21 July in the US.

In the final minutes of the countdown, as Bird and Sherwin report, an army general observed Oppenheimer's mood at close-quarters: "Dr. Oppenheimer... grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed..."

The explosion, when it came, outshone the Sun. With a force matching 21 kilotonnes of TNT, the detonation was the largest ever seen. It created a shockwave that was felt 160km (100 miles) away. As the roar engulfed the landscape and the mushroom cloud rose in the sky, Oppenheimer's expression relaxed into one of "tremendous relief". Minutes later, Oppenheimer's friend and colleague Isidor Rabi caught sight of him from a distance: "I’ll never forget his walk; I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car... his walk was like High Noon... this kind of strut. He had done it."

In interviews conducted in the 1960s, Oppenheimer added a layer of gravitas to his reaction, claiming that, in the moments after the detonation, a line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, had come into his mind: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

In the following days, his friends reported he seemed increasingly depressed. "Robert got very still and ruminative during that two-week period," one recalled, "because he knew what was about to happen." One morning he was heard lamenting (in condescending terms) the imminent fate of the Japanese: "Those poor little people, those poor little people." But only days later, he was once again nervous, focussed, exacting.

In a meeting with his military counterparts, he seemed to have forgotten all about the "poor little people". According to Bird and Sherwin, he was instead fixated on the importance of the right conditions for the bomb drop: "Of course, they must not drop it in rain or fog… Don’t let them detonate it too high. The figure fixed on is just right. Don’t let it go up [higher] or the target won’t get as much damage." When he announced the successful bombing of Hiroshima to a crowd of his colleagues less than a month after Trinity, one onlooker noticed the way Oppenheimer "clasped and pumped his hand over his head like a victorious prizefighter". The applause "practically raised the roof".

Oppenheimer was the emotional and intellectual heart of the Manhattan Project: more than any other single person he had made the bomb a reality. Jeremy Bernstein, who worked with him after the war, was convinced that nobody else could have done it. As he wrote in his 2004 biography, A Portrait of an Enigma, "If Oppenheimer had not been the director at Los Alamos, I am persuaded that, for better or worse, the Second World War would have ended... without the use of nuclear weapons."

The variety of Oppenheimer's reported reactions as he witnessed the fruition of his labours, not to mention the pace with which he moved through them, might seem bewildering. The combination of nervous fragility, ambition, grandiosity and morbid gloom are hard to square in a single person, especially one so instrumental in the very project provoking these responses.

Bird and Sherwin also call Oppenheimer an "enigma": "A theoretical physicist who displayed the charismatic qualities of a great leader, an aesthete who cultivated ambiguities." A scientist, but also, as another friend once described him "a first-class manipulator of the imagination".

By Bird and Sherwin's account, the contradictions in Oppenheimer's character – the qualities that have left both friends and biographers at a loss to explain him – seem to have been present from his earliest years. Born in New York City in 1904, Oppenheimer was the child of first-generation German Jewish immigrants who had become wealthy through the textiles trade. The family home was a large apartment on the Upper West Side with three maids, a chauffeur, and European art on the walls.

Despite this luxurious upbringing, Oppenheimer was recalled as unspoiled and generous by childhood friends. A school friend, Jane Didisheim, remembered him as someone who "blushed extraordinarily easily", who was "very frail, very pink-cheeked, very shy...", but also "very brilliant". "Very quickly everybody admitted that he was different from all the others and superior," she said.

By the age of nine, he was reading philosophy in Greek and Latin, and was obsessed with mineralogy – roaming Central Park and writing letters to the New York Mineralogical Club about what he found. His letters were so competent that the Club mistook him for an adult and invited him to make a presentation. This intellectual nature contributed to a degree of solitude in the young Oppenheimer, write Bird and Sherwin. "He was usually preoccupied with whatever he was doing or thinking," recalled a friend. He was uninterested in conforming to gender expectations – taking no interest in sports or the "rough and tumble of his age-group" as his cousin put it; "He was often teased and ridiculed for not being like other fellows." But his parents were convinced of his genius.

"I repaid my parents’ confidence in me by developing an unpleasant ego," Oppenheimer later commented, "which I am sure must have affronted both children and adults who were unfortunate enough to come into contact with me." "It’s no fun," he once told another friend, "to turn the pages of a book and say, 'yes, yes, of course, I know that'."

When he left home to study chemistry at Harvard University, the fragility of Oppenheimer's psychological make-up was exposed: his brittle arrogance and thinly-masked sensitivity appearing to serve him poorly. In a letter from 1923, published in a 1980 collection edited by Alice Kimbal Smith and Charles Weiner, he wrote: "I labour and write innumerable theses, notes, poems, stories and junk… I make stenches in three different labs…I serve tea and talk learnedly to a few lost souls, go off for the weekend to distill low grade energy into laughter and exhaustion, read Greek, commit faux pas, search my desk for letters, and wish I were dead. Voila."

Subsequent letters collated by Smith and Weiner reveal that the problems continued through his post-graduate studies, in Cambridge, England. His tutor insisted on applied laboratory work, one of Oppenheimer's weaknesses. "I am having a pretty bad time," he wrote in 1925. "The lab work is a terrible bore, and I am so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything." Later that year, Oppenheimer's intensity led him close to disaster when he deliberately left an apple, poisoned with laboratory chemicals, on his tutor's desk. His friends later speculated he could have been driven by envy and feelings of inadequacy. The tutor didn't eat the apple but Oppenheimer's place at Cambridge was threatened and he kept it only on condition that he see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist diagnosed psychosis but then wrote him off, saying that treatment would do no good.

Recalling that period, Oppenheimer would later report that he seriously contemplated suicide over the Christmas holidays. The following year, during a visit to Paris, his close friend Francis Fergusson told him he had proposed to his girlfriend. Oppenheimer responded by attempting to strangle him: "He jumped on me from behind with a trunk strap," Fergusson recalled, "and wound it around my neck... I managed to pull aside and he fell on the ground weeping."

It seems that where psychiatry failed Oppenheimer, literature came to the rescue. According to Bird and Sherwin, he read Marcel Proust's A La Recherché du Temps Perdu while on a walking holiday in Corsica, finding in it some reflection of his own state of mind that reassured him and opened a window on a more compassionate mode of being. He learned by heart a passage from the book about "indifference to the sufferings one causes", being "the terrible and permanent form of cruelty". The question of attitude towards suffering would remain an abiding interest, guiding Oppenheimer's interest in spiritual and philosophical texts throughout his life and eventually playing a significant role in the work that would define his reputation. A comment he made to his friends on this same holiday seems prophetic: "The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance."

He returned to England in lighter spirits, feeling "much kinder and more tolerant", as he later recalled. Early in 1926, he met the director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Göttingen in Germany, who quickly became convinced of Oppenheimer's talents as a theoretician, inviting him to study there. According to Smith and Weiner, he later described 1926 as the year of his "coming into physics". It would prove a turning point. He obtained his PhD and a postdoctoral fellowship in the year to follow. He also became part of a community that was driving the development of theoretical physics, meeting scientists who would become life-long friends. Many would ultimately join Oppenheimer at Los Alamos.

Returning to the US, Oppenheimer spent a few months at Harvard before moving to pursue his physics career in California. The tone of his letters from this period reflect a steadier, more generous cast of mind. He wrote to his younger brother about romance, and his ongoing interest in the arts.

At the University of California in Berkeley, he worked closely with experimentalists, interpreting their results on cosmic rays and nuclear disintegration. He later described finding himself "the only one who understood what this was all about". The department he eventually created stemmed, he said, from the need to communicate about the theory he loved: "Explaining first to faculty, staff, and colleagues and then to anyone who would listen ... what had been learned, what the unsolved problems were." He described himself as a "difficult" teacher at first but it was through this role that Oppenheimer honed the charisma and social presence that would carry him during his time at Project Y. Quoted by Smith and Weiner, one colleague recalled how his students "emulated him as best they could. They copied his gestures, his mannerisms, his intonations. He truly influenced their lives."

During the early 1930s, as he strengthened his academic career, Oppenheimer continued to moonlight in the humanities. It was during this period that he discovered the Hindu scriptures, learning Sanskrit in order to read the untranslated Bhagavad Gita – the text from which he later drew the famous '"Now I am become Death" quotation. It seems his interest was not just intellectual, but represented a continuation of the self-prescribed bibliotherapy that had begun with Proust in his 20s. The Bhagavad Gita, a story centred on the war between two arms of an aristocratic family, gave Oppenheimer a philosophical underpinning that was directly applicable to the moral ambiguity he confronted at Project Y. It emphasised ideas of duty, fate and detachment from outcome, emphasising that fear of consequences cannot be used as justification for inaction. In a letter to his brother from 1932, Oppenheimer specifically references the Gita and then names war as one circumstance that might offer the opportunity to put such a philosophy into practice:

"I believe that through discipline... we can achieve serenity... I believe that through discipline we learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances... Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war... 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."

In the mid 1930s, Oppenheimer also met Jean Tatlock, a psychiatrist and physician with whom he fell in love. By Bird and Sherwin's account, Tatlock's complexity of character equalled Oppenheimer's. She was widely read and driven by a social conscience. She was described by a childhood friend as "touched with greatness". Oppenheimer proposed to Tatlock more than once but she turned him down. She is credited with introducing him to radical politics and to the poetry of John Donne. The pair continued to see each other occasionally after Oppenheimer married the biologist Katherine "Kitty" Harrison in 1940. Kitty was to join Oppenheimer at Project Y, where she worked as a phlebotomist, researching the dangers of radiation.

In 1939, physicists were far more concerned about the nuclear threat than politicians were and it was a letter from Albert Einstein that first brought the matter to the attention of senior leaders in the US government. The reaction was slow, but alarm continued to circulate in the scientific community and eventually the president was persuaded to act. As one of the preeminent physicists in the country, Oppenheimer was one of several scientists appointed to begin looking more seriously into the potential for nuclear weapons. By September 1942, partly thanks to Oppenheimer's team, it was clear that a bomb was possible and concrete plans for its development started to take shape. According to Bird and Sherwin, when he heard that his name was being floated as a leader for this endeavour, Oppenheimer began his own preparations. "I’m cutting off every communist connection," he said to a friend at the time. "For if I don’t, the government will find it difficult to use me. I don’t want to let anything interfere with my usefulness to the nation."

Einstein would later say: "The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves [something that] doesn’t love him – the United States government." His patriotism and desire to please clearly played a role in his recruitment. General Leslie Groves, the military leader of the Manhattan Engineer District, was the person responsible for finding a scientific director for the bomb project. According to a 2002 biography, Racing for the Bomb, when Groves proposed Oppenheimer as scientific lead, he met with opposition. Oppenheimer's "extreme liberal background" was a concern. But as well as noting his talent and his existing knowledge of the science, Groves also pointed out his "overweening ambition". The Manhattan Project's chief of security also noticed this: "I became convinced that not only was he loyal, but that he would let nothing interfere with the successful accomplishment of his task and thus his place in scientific history."

In the 1988 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Oppenheimer's friend Isidor Rabi is quoted as saying he thought it "a most improbable appointment", but later conceded it had been "a real stroke of genius on the part of General Groves".

At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer applied his contrarian, interdisciplinary convictions as much as anywhere. In his 1979 autobiography, What Little I Remember, the Austrian-born physicist Otto Frisch recalled that Oppenheimer had recruited not only the scientists required but also "a painter, a philosopher and a few other unlikely characters; he felt that a civilised community would be incomplete without them".

After the war, Oppenheimer's attitude seemed to change . He described nuclear weapons as instruments "of aggression, of surprise, and of terror" and the weapons industry as "the devil's work". At a meeting in October 1945, he famously told President Truman: "I feel I have blood on my hands." The President later said: "I told him the blood was on my hands – to let me worry about that."

The exchange is an arresting echo of one described in Oppenheimer's beloved Bhagavad Gita, between Prince Arjuna and the god Krishna. Arjuna refuses to fight because he believes he will be responsible for the murder of his fellows, but Krishna takes away the burden: "View in me the active slayer of these men... Arise, on fame, on victory, on kingly joys intent! They are already slain by me; be you the instrument."

During the development of the bomb, Oppenheimer had used a similar argument to assuage his own and his colleagues' ethical hesitations. He told them that, as scientists, they were not responsible for decisions about how the weapon should be used – only for doing their job. The blood, if there was any, would be on the hands of the politicians. However, it seems that once the deed was done, Oppenheimer's confidence in this position was shaken. As Bird and Sherwin relate, in his role at the Atomic Energy Commission during the post-war period, he argued against the development of further weapons, including the more powerful hydrogen bomb, which his work had paved the way for.

These efforts resulted in Oppenheimer being investigated by the US government in 1954 and having his security clearance stripped, marking the end of his involvement with policy work. The academic community came to his defence. Writing for The New Republic in 1955, the philosopher Bertrand Russell commented that the "investigation made it undeniable that he has committed mistakes, one of them from a security point of view rather grave. But there was no evidence of disloyalty or of anything that could be considered treasonable... The scientists were caught in a tragic dilemma."

In 1963, the US government presented him with the Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of political rehabilitation, but it wasn't until 2022, 55 years after his death, that the US government overturned its 1954 decision to strip his clearance, and affirmed Oppenheimer's loyalty.

Throughout the last decades of Oppenheimer's life, he maintained parallel expressions of pride at the technical achievement of the bomb and guilt at its effects. A note of resignation also entered his commentary, with him saying more than once that the bomb had simply been inevitable. He spent the last 20 years of his life as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, working alongside Einstein and other physicists.

As at Los Alamos, he made a point of promoting interdisciplinary work and emphasised in his speeches the belief that science needed the humanities in order to better understand its own implications, write Bird and Sherwin. To this end, he recruited a raft of non-scientists including classicists, poets, and psychologists.

He later came to consider atomic energy as a problem that outstripped the intellectual tools of its time, as, in President Truman's words, "a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas". In a speech made in 1965, later published in the 1984 collection Uncommon Sense, he said "I have heard from some of the great men of our time that when they found something startling, they knew it was good, because they were afraid". When talking about moments of unsettling scientific discovery, he was fond of quoting the poet John Donne: "Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone."

John Keats, another poet Oppenheimer enjoyed, coined the phrase "negative capability" to describe a common quality in the people he admired: "that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." It seems as though it was something of this that the philosopher Russell was getting at when he wrote of Oppenheimer's "inability to see things simply, an inability which is not surprising in one possessed of a complex and delicate mental apparatus." In describing Oppenheimer's contradictions, his mutability, his continual running between poetry and science, his habit of defying simple description, perhaps we are identifying the very qualities that made him capable of pursuing the creation of the bomb.

Even in the midst of this great and terrible pursuit, Oppenheimer kept alive the "tear stained countenance" he had foretold in his 20s. The name of the "Trinity" test is thought to have come from the John Donne poem Batter my heart, three-person'd God: "That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend/Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new." Jean Tatlock, who had introduced him to Donne, and with whom he is thought by some to have remained in love, had committed suicide the year before the test. The bomb project was marked everywhere by Oppenheimer's imagination, and by his sense of romance and tragedy. Perhaps it was overweening ambition that General Groves identified when he interviewed Oppenheimer for the job at Project Y, or perhaps it was his ability to adopt, for the time required, the idea of overweening ambition. As much as it was the result of research, the bomb was the product of Oppenheimer's ability and willingness to imagine himself as the kind of a person that could make it happen.

A chain smoker since adolescence, Oppenheimer suffered bouts of tuberculosis during his life. He died of throat cancer in 1967, at the age of 62. Two years before his death, in a rare moment of simplicity, he drew a distinction that marked out the practice of science from that of poetry. Unlike poetry, he said, "science is the business of learning not to make the same mistake again".'

4 notes · View notes

denimbex1986 · 8 months

Text

'Moviegoers who watch the closing credits of Oppenheimer may notice a familiar name. Writer and director Christopher Nolan's three-hour biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who led the Manhattan Project during World War II to develop the atomic bomb, ends with a thank-you to retired U.S. senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

Unrelated to Leahy's appearances in Nolan's Batman trilogy, this cinematic shout-out is about righting a decades-old injustice. Vermont's longest-serving U.S. senator played a critical role in clearing Oppenheimer's name 55 years after his death. And longtime Leahy staffer Tim Rieser deserves his own screen credit for the role he played in that process.

The Norwich native worked for Leahy for 37 years, mostly as his senior foreign policy aide on the Senate Appropriations Committee. Rieser's political savvy and deep relationships in Washington, D.C., earned him a level of influence rarely achieved by Capitol Hill staffers. In one of his final acts before Leahy retired in January, Rieser helped right a grievous wrong that ended Oppenheimer's career — one that, as viewers of Oppenheimer now know, was based on a lie.

In June 1954, at the height of the Red Scare, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission voted to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance. The decision was influenced by Oppenheimer's past association with communists and justified with the baseless allegation that he was a Soviet spy.

In actuality, Oppenheimer's fall from grace was a political hit job motivated by his opposition to U.S. development of the hydrogen bomb. Denying the physicist access to nuclear secrets effectively ended his government career and left a stain on his reputation that endured long after his death in 1967.

Nolan's blockbuster movie, which is based on the 2006 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird, chronicles much of that previously untold story. But viewers may leave the theater thinking that Oppenheimer was never vindicated.

In fact, Rieser, 71, spent years working with Sherwin and Bird to do just that. His motivation wasn't just to remove a black mark from the history of one of the most important scientists of the 20th century. As he explained to Seven Days, Rieser also wanted to affirm the ongoing importance of protecting scientists who express their political views from becoming targets of government retribution.

The cause was personal for the former Vermont public defender, who lives in Arlington, Va., but still owns, with his siblings, their family home in Norwich. Rieser's parents, Leonard and Rosemary Rieser, worked on the Manhattan Project, knew Oppenheimer and had tremendous respect for him.

"It was probably the most memorable year of their lives," Rieser said of his parents' stint in Los Alamos, N.M. "My father, my mother and everybody else there just revered Oppenheimer. He was larger than life for people their age."

Leonard Rieser was 21 in 1943 when he graduated with a physics degree from the University of Chicago, site of the first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. The following year, he got married, enlisted in the U.S. Army and, because of his knowledge of nuclear physics, was sent to Los Alamos.

The Riesers knew little about where they were going or what they'd do there. For more than a year, they couldn't disclose their whereabouts to family and friends or reveal their activities. While Rieser's mother ran the Los Alamos nursery school, his father worked alongside such scientists as Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi and Hans Bethe.

The Trinity test, the first-ever detonation of an atomic bomb, occurred on July 16, 1945, which was also the Riesers' first wedding anniversary. Leonard witnessed the blast from less than 20 miles away, face down in the sand.

After the war, Leonard took a teaching job at Dartmouth College, where he later became chair of the physics department, then dean of faculty and provost. When president Lyndon Johnson gave Oppenheimer the prestigious Enrico Fermi Award in 1963, Leonard invited the physicist to speak at Dartmouth and even hosted him at their home.

Tim Rieser, who was only 5 at the time, doesn't remember meeting Oppenheimer, but he grew up hearing stories about the Manhattan Project and still has his father's correspondence with the physicist.

He cannot recall his parents discussing Oppenheimer's blacklisting. "I can only assume ... that they must have been appalled," he said.

So were others in the scientific community. Shortly after the 1954 ruling, 500 scientists signed a letter urging the Atomic Energy Commission to reverse its decision. But it would fall to the next generation to take up that cause.

Bird related in his July 7 New Yorker article "Oppenheimer, Nullified and Vindicated" how Sherwin spent 25 years researching the Oppenheimer case before Bird joined him on the project in 2000. In 2010, with the Pulitzer under their belt, the two authors tried unsuccessfully to convince president Barack Obama's administration to reinstate Oppenheimer's security clearance.

Others made similar attempts. In 2011, senator Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) sent a 20-page memo urging Oppenheimer's vindication to secretary of energy Steven Chu, who was a scientist and cowinner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. Chu never acted on that memo, and Bingaman retired from the Senate in 2013.

Next, Sherwin and Bird approached Rieser, whom Bird had known for years. Their interest in the Vermont aide had nothing to do with his personal connection to Oppenheimer, of which neither was aware. (Coincidentally, Leonard Rieser had once hired Sherwin to teach at Dartmouth.)

The biographers' interest in Rieser was a political strategy: A seasoned Capitol Hill staffer, he worked for one of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate and had access to high-ranking officials in the Obama administration.

Rieser said it wasn't until he read American Prometheus that he grasped the scope of the miscarriage of justice done in 1954.

"Until then, I didn't know what had happened to Oppenheimer," he said. "I don't think many people did."

Uniquely Qualified

It's hard to imagine anyone else on Capitol Hill who could have brought to the task of clearing Oppenheimer the combination of political clout, governmental savvy, personal motivation and professional autonomy that Rieser did. Because Rieser had worked for Leahy since 1985, the senator knew his parents. After Leonard Rieser died and the Montshire Museum of Science in Norwich renamed part of the museum in his honor, Leahy attended the dedication ceremony. And because the senator shared Rieser's view that Oppenheimer had been railroaded, he gave Rieser broad discretion on the project.

Rieser had earned a reputation as someone who knew how to get things done in Washington. He helped draft Leahy's 1992 signature legislation banning the sale of land mines. He was also an architect of the so-called Leahy Law, which outlawed the export of U.S. arms to countries that violate human rights with impunity — an effort that made Rieser the target of a character assassination campaign by Guatemala's then-president, Otto Pérez Molina. In her book Sweet Relief: The Marla Ruzicka Story, author Jennifer Abrahamson described Rieser as "the conscience of the Senate."

Rieser was known for his dogged persistence. In the New Yorker piece, Bird described him as "relentless."

After Alan Gross, a U.S. government contractor, was jailed in Cuba in 2009 and accused of spying, Rieser spent years using back-channel diplomacy to secure his release, making multiple trips to Havana and enlisting the help of Pope Francis. The effort succeeded in 2014. According to the New York Times, once the deal was finalized and Obama called Leahy to thank him, the Vermont senator told the president, "I could not have done it without Tim Rieser."

Rieser brought that same determination to the Oppenheimer cause. In the summer of 2016, he penned a letter from Leahy, cosigned by Sens. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), asking Obama to reinstate Oppenheimer's security clearance. That letter landed on the desk of secretary of energy Ernest Moniz.

"He's a nuclear physicist," Rieser said, "so we thought, If there's anyone who would want to clear Oppenheimer's name, you would think it would be him."

But reversing a 1954 decision on the security clearance of a scientist who died in 1967 was more nettlesome than it looked at first. However corrupt and flawed that process had been, Rieser said, Oppenheimer had lied to a federal investigator.

At issue, he explained, was the so-called "Chevalier incident." Haakon Chevalier was a professor of French literature at the University Of California, Berkeley who met Oppenheimer in 1937. The two became friends, and, in 1943, Chevalier and his wife dined at the Oppenheimers' home.

That evening, Chevalier mentioned to Oppenheimer that the U.S. government wasn't sharing its nuclear secrets with the Soviets, who were U.S. allies at the time. When Chevalier told Oppenheimer that he knew of someone who could get that information to the Russians through back channels, Oppenheimer called the idea treasonous and ended the discussion.

Oppenheimer later disclosed that conversation to general Leslie Groves, the U.S. Army officer who oversaw the Manhattan Project, but he didn't reveal Chevalier's identity. When a federal investigator interrogated him about it, Oppenheimer concocted a fake story to protect his friend.

Why would such historical details matter decades after the fact?

"Moniz was afraid of creating a standard for Oppenheimer that was different from those seeking a security clearance today," explained Rieser, who has a security clearance himself. Though he vehemently disagreed with the Department of Energy's legal argument, Rieser understood why Moniz wouldn't want to set a precedent of giving preferential treatment to someone based merely on their public stature.

As a concession, Moniz renamed a DOE fellowship in honor of Oppenheimer, which wasn't at all what Bird, Sherwin and Rieser had sought. In the meantime, Donald Trump was elected president, at which point Bird and Sherwin essentially gave up the fight.

But not Rieser. He made little progress during the Trump years, which often had a skeptical, if not antagonistic, relationship with science and scientists.

"Generally, when I try to solve a problem, I do everything I can until I finally feel like I've exhausted everything I can possibly do," he said. "I also felt it was so outrageous what had been done to Oppenheimer. It was pure vindictiveness and politics."

Carrying the Day

To make his case, Rieser had to show the government why the Oppenheimer decision still matters — a quest with personal resonance. After the war, Rieser's father, like Oppenheimer, was conflicted about the way the atomic bomb had been used. Having visited Hiroshima, he devoted much of the rest of his life to advocating for strict controls on nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. Also like Oppenheimer, he once chaired the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization devoted to controlling nuclear weapons and other new technologies that can negatively affect humanity. Rieser was incensed that the government could exact retribution against scientists merely for expressing controversial or unpopular views.

"So when [Joe] Biden got elected," Rieser said, "I decided we should try again."

In June 2021, Rieser wrote a second letter to the DOE, signed by Leahy and the same three Democratic senators. When two months passed with no reply, he called "this guy I knew" at the department.

Ali Nouri had worked in the Senate for about a decade and had once sold Rieser a Ping-Pong table through Craigslist. After leaving the Hill, Nouri went to work for the Federation of American Scientists before Biden tapped him to be assistant secretary of congressional relations at the DOE.

Nouri replied to Rieser a few days later.

"'I think you're going to get the same answer,'" Rieser recalled Nouri telling him. "So I said, 'Then don't answer it. I'm going to write a different letter.'"

The underlying problem, Rieser explained, lay in the nature of the request. He couldn't ask the DOE simply to reinstate Oppenheimer's security clearance, because that would require a new hearing, one that was fair, impartial and, obviously, impossible, given that Oppenheimer is dead. Instead, Rieser decided to ask the department to "nullify" the 1954 decision.

Beginning in August 2021, Rieser drafted a third letter to Biden's secretary of energy, Jennifer Granholm. This one not only detailed the injustices and illegalities of the 1954 proceedings but also highlighted why the decision should be nullified. It read, in part:

Government scientists, whether renowned like Oppenheimer or a technician laboring in obscurity, including those who risk their careers to warn of safety concerns or to express unpopular opinions on matters of national security, need to know that they can do so freely and that their cases will be fairly reviewed based on facts, not personal animus or politics.

After more than a year of working on the letter, Rieser and Leahy got 42 other senators to sign it, including four Republicans: Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Ala).

Even with such bipartisan backing, Rieser said, he feared that the endorsement of 43 senators might not be enough to "carry the day." So he asked Thomas Mason, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to pen a letter in support. Mason did so and got all seven surviving former directors of the Los Alamos lab to sign it, too.

Next, Rieser contacted the heads of the Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, American Physical Society and Federation of American Scientists. Though Sherwin had died of lung cancer in 2021, Rieser asked Bird and Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, to pen similar letters to the energy secretary. It didn't hurt that Nolan's Oppenheimer was scheduled for release the following year.

"What I've learned over the years in Congress," Rieser explained, "is, if you're going to take on a difficult problem, you have to use every ounce of energy you can muster and stick with it no matter how long it takes."

In late August 2022, Rieser compiled all the supporting materials into a binder, then bicycled down to the DOE headquarters and hand-delivered it to Nouri to present to Granholm.

"And then I waited," he said.

On December 16, 2022, Granholm issued a five-page order vacating the Atomic Energy Commission's 1954 decision against Oppenheimer. She wrote:

When Dr. Oppenheimer died in 1967, Senator J. William Fulbright took to the Senate floor and said "Let us remember not only what his special genius did for us; let us also remember what we did to him." Today we remember how the United States government treated a man who served it with the highest distinction. We remember that political motives have no proper place in matters of personnel security. And we remember that living up to our ideals requires unerring attention to the fair and consistent application of our laws.

"It had everything that I could have hoped for," Rieser said. "Granholm felt, as senator Leahy and I did, that this is as relevant today as it was 70 years ago."

Even after Oppenheimer's vindication, Rieser felt that his work wasn't done. Knowing that millions of people would see Oppenheimer, he suggested to Nolan, whom he knew through Bird and Leahy's Batman cameos, that he include an epilogue to that effect; he even suggested the wording.

Ultimately, Nolan didn't include it. While Rieser has no hard feelings about not getting thanked in the movie himself — Senate staffers are accustomed to letting their bosses take credit for their work — he wishes that viewers of the film knew the final outcome. As he put it, "It's important that people know there is another chapter, and an important one, albeit many, many years later."

Rieser, who now works as a senior adviser to Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) hasn't remained entirely in the shadows. In addition to being featured in last month's New Yorker piece, he will be in two forthcoming documentaries about Oppenheimer's life.

For one, Rieser was interviewed in the late physicist's New Mexico house. While sitting in Oppenheimer's living room, he remembers thinking, "If only my parents could have been here! None of us could ever have imagined that I would be doing such a thing. It's amazing how life does come full circle."'

#Tim Rieser #Oppenheimer #Christopher Nolan #The Manhattan Project #Atomic Energy Commission #American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer #Kai Bird #Martin J. Sherwin #Los Alamos #Haakon Chevalier #Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists #President Obama #Jennifer Granholm #Richard Rhodes #The Making of the Atomic Bomb

1 note · View note