The first time he met Truman, after the atomic bombings of Japan, out of frustration and passion Oppenheimer blurted out, “There is blood on my hands.” Truman would stew on this for years, retelling and embellishing the anecdote, once claiming he pulled out his handkerchief and said “Well, here, would you like to wipe your hands?” Immediately after he left, Truman called him a “cry baby scientist,” and would never trust him again.
Oppenheimer’s postwar record was just as bad. He was the main intellectual force behind the 1946 Acheson-Lilienthal Report, which proposed a single worldwide Atomic Development Agency with a monopoly over all uranium mines, labs, enrichment facilities, and power plants. Control over nuclear technology would be international, rather than national. However, as Oppenheimer later acknowledged, this was infeasible and naive. Stalin would never have agreed to renunciation of sovereignty, to the inspections, or to the depth of cooperation with the capitalist West the plan would have demanded. Bernard Baruch, proposer of the failed Baruch Plan, was a convenient scapegoat.
When the Soviets exploded their first bomb in 1949, Oppenheimer told David Lilienthal, the first chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, that “we mustn’t muff it this time,” meaning the arms race. But they did muff it, and the US stockpile grew from 50 warheads in 1948 to 300 in 1950. The next fight was on whether to build a “Super” or hydrogen bomb, much more destructive than the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer opposed it on scientific, technical, and moral grounds. But when the decision came to Truman, the president had one question: can the Russians do it? The answer was yes. “In that case,” Truman replied, “we have no choice.” The meeting took 7 minutes. The cry baby scientist’s concerns were completely dismissed.
How Oppenheimer was outplayed
The two most notable facts about Oppenheimer’s life are that he first sped up the creation of nuclear weapons, and then failed utterly to restrict the nuclear arms race he had helped begin. The arms racers used his scientific credibility to support their reckless buildup, and outplayed him in every important political battle. It would take a further 18 years after his 1954 defrocking before the first bilateral arms control agreement on nuclear weapons. This removal of his security clearance can be seen as the final mercy kill of an utterly defanged and defeated political opponent.
