5
minute read
Christopher Nolan’s biopic Oppenheimer is the story of a conflicted physicist who developed America’s first nuclear weapon, a bomb that could win WWII or wipe out humanity. The real-life drama behind the scenes was just as intense, leading to questions about whether J. Robert Oppenheimer was also a Soviet spy.
At the height of the ‘red scare’ in 1953, Julius Robert Oppenheimer - known as the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ - was accused of having communist sympathies and hauled before a tribunal. Senator Joseph McCarthy helped stoke the mass paranoia that communists were infiltrating the US and Oppenheimer was in the crosshairs of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Oppenheimer's communism ties
The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) also accused the scientist of having communist sympathies and declared him a security risk. "I can't believe what is happening to me," Oppenheimer said four days before Christmas in 1953. He’d received a letter outlining the AEC charges against him that afternoon. Should he resign from the Commission or fight?
Oppenheimer often felt something ominous awaited him after the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Now the FBI was tapping his phone. Communist-hunting Congressmen were demanding his scalp. Oppenheimer’s left-wing activities at Berkeley in the ‘30s were being dredged up along with his resistance to the Air Force's plan for massive strategic bombing with nuclear weapons. He was on the wrong side of AEC chairman Lewis Strauss and the scientist’s career and reputation hung in the balance.
That evening, Oppenheimer collapsed.
Oppenheimer: a conflicted genius
It had all started so promisingly. Oppenheimer was born into a wealthy Jewish family in New York City in 1904 - his father was a successful textile importer, his mother a painter. After Harvard, Oppenheimer studied physics at the University of Cambridge then the University of Göttingen where he earned a Ph.D. He taught at University of California, Berkeley in the 1930s where he met one of the graduate students, Jean Tatlock, a sporadic member of the American Communist Party and Oppenheimer’s lover.
“His associates fell into two camps: one saw him as an aloof and impressive genius and aesthete, the other as a pretentious and insecure poseur,” historian Gregg Herken wrote in Brotherhood of the Bomb.
Some students worshiped him, even adopting Oppenheimer’s walk, speech, mannerisms, and habit of reading entire texts in their original languages. In 1940, Oppenheimer married a German botanist, Katherine ‘Kitty’ Puening, another communist who’d moved to California and fell under his spell. Kitty was already married so a quick divorce in Las Vegas ensued. By the time she and Oppenheimer tied the knot, Kitty was pregnant.
Around the same time, Oppenheimer was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project and, in 1943, appointed director in charge of developing weapons at New Mexico’s Los Alamos Laboratory. He was among those who observed the so-called ‘Trinity’ test on July 16, 1945, when the first atomic bomb was detonated. A month later, the US dropped two more on Japan.
Oppenheimer was conflicted about his involvement in developing the deadly weapons, recalling that the Trinity test brought to mind words from the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Was J. Robert Oppenheimer a Soviet spy?
Jerrold and Leona Schecter, authors of Sacred Secrets, argue that a Russian document they obtained raises the question of whether Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy when he directed the Manhattan Project. The document is a letter from Boris Merkulov, USSR People’s Commissar for State Security, to Lavrenty Beria, USSR People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, dated October 2, 1944. (The Schecters also said they interviewed former intelligence officers in Moscow who stressed that Oppenheimer's assistance was of great importance from 1942-1944.)
The text of the translated letter reads: “In 1942 one of the leaders of scientific work on [uranium] in the USA, Professor Oppenheimer while being an unlisted member of the apparat of Comrade Browder informed us about the beginning of work. On the request of Comrade Kheifetz, confirmed by [Comrade Browder], he provided cooperation in access to research for several of our tested sources including a relative of [Comrade Browder].”
Questions have been raised about the October 2, 1944 letter, however, by Gregg Herken, author of Brotherhood of the Bomb. "It is difficult to know whether this cable is evidence of Oppenheimer's complicity or reflects the (understandable) desire of Kheifetz and other NKVD operatives to curry favor with their boss." Grigory Kheifetz was a Soviet intelligence officer, a lieutenant colonel of the NKVD-MGB, and one of the principals in Soviet nuclear espionage who operated undercover as Soviet vice consul San Francisco from 1941 to 1944.
So was Kheifetz simply padding his resume by telling hiss bosses he had recruited Oppenheimer?
“The Schecters write that the Merkulov letter to Beria ‘raises the question’ of whether Robert Oppenheimer was a spy for the Soviet Union. Indeed it does. But it does not answer that question,” Herken said in a roundtable discussion hosted by the Wilson Center. “Before one accuses the chief scientist of the Manhattan Project of treason - and treason is what it would have been - there needs to be more, and better, evidence than the single, contradictory document the Schecters have produced.”
