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TWO OPPENHEIMERS, TWO VIEWS OF WHO SHOULD CONTROL THE BOMB  
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KC Cole
March 5, 2024
Knowable Magazine
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_ A rift in thinking about who should control powerful new
technologies sent Robert Oppenheimer and his brother Frank on
diverging paths. For one, the story ended with a mission to bring
science to the public. _

Frank Oppenheimer in 1948,

 

Every now and then, science serves up poison pills. Knowledge gained
in the course of exploring how nature works opens doors we might wish
had stayed shut: For much of the past year, our newsfeeds were flooded
with stories about how computational superpowers can create amoral
nonhuman “minds”
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that may learn to think better than we do (and then what?). On the big
screen, the movie _Oppenheimer_ explored a threat people have lived
with for nearly 80 years: How the energy of the atom can be unleashed
to power unimaginably destructive bombs.

When potentially catastrophic inventions threaten all humanity, who
decides how (or whether) they’re used? When even scientists toss
around terms like “human extinction,” whose voice matters?

Such questions were at the core of the _Oppenheimer_ film, a
blockbuster now nominated for more than a dozen Oscars. To me, the
movie hit home for a different reason. I spent a great deal of time
with Frank Oppenheimer during the last 15 years of his life. While I
never knew his brother Robert, Frank remained anguished over what he
felt was Robert’s squandered opportunity to engage the world’s
people in candid conversations about how to protect themselves under
the shadow of this new threat.

 
During the post-World War II years, the emotionally close ties between
the brothers (Robert — the “father of the atom bomb” — and his
younger brother, Frank — the “uncle” of the bomb, as he
mischievously called himself) were strained and for a time even
fractured. Both hoped that the nascent nuclear technology would remain
under global, and peaceful, control. Both hoped that the sheer horror
of the weapons they helped to build could lead to a warless world.

They were on the same side, but not on the same page when it came to
tactics.

Robert — whose fame surged after the war — believed decisions
should be left to experts who understood the issues and had the power
to make things happen — that is, people like himself. Frank believed
just as fiercely that everyday people had to be involved. It took
everyone to win the war, he argued, and it would take everyone to win
the peace.

In the end, both lost. Both paid for their efforts with their careers
(although Frank eventually resurrected his ideas as a “people’s
science museum” that had a worldwide impact).

Given that the question “Who decides?” underlies so much of
today’s fast-evolving sciences, the brothers’ story seems more
compelling and relevant than ever.

Ethical education

In many ways, the Oppenheimer brothers were very much alike. Both
studied physics. Both chain-smoked. Both loved art and literature.
Both had piercing blue eyes, inherited from their mother, Ella
Friedman Oppenheimer, an artist with a malformed hand always hidden in
a glove. Their father, Julius, was a trustee of the Society for
Ethical Culture, dedicated to “love of the right.”

They shared a Manhattan apartment with maids, Renoirs, and books piled
down the halls and into the bathrooms. Ella was terrified of germs, so
tutors and barbers often came to them. Frank had his tonsils out in
his bedroom. Both boys attended Ethical Culture schools in New York,
so morality was baked into their upbringing.

But they were also in other ways opposites.

 
Robert was, by his own admission, “an unctuous, repulsively good
little boy.” Frank was anything but. He sneaked out at night to
scale New York City’s rooftop water towers; by high school, he was
using the electric current in the family home to weld whatever metal
he could get his hands on. He took apart his father’s player piano
(then stayed up all night putting it back together).

Robert got through Harvard in three years and received his PhD from
the University of Göttingen two years later, in 1927, at age 23.
Frank didn’t get his PhD until he was 27. Robert was arrogant, picky
about his company. Frank would talk with anyone and did, later
befriending even his FBI tail.

When Robert joined the faculty at Caltech, he was described as “a
sort of patron saint,” always center stage, smooth, articulate,
captivating. When Frank arrived at Caltech many years later for
graduate work, he was described as standing “at the fringe,
shoulders hunched over, clothes mussed and frayed, fingers still dirty
from the laboratory.”

Still, they loved each other dearly. Frank wept when Robert left for
grad school in Europe. Robert wrote Frank that he would gladly give up
his vacation “for one evening with you.” He sent his little
brother books on physics and chemistry, a sextant, compasses, a
metronome, along with letters full of brotherly wisdom. My personal
favorite: “To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no
other specifications than it shall run noiselessly.”

In summer, they retreated to a cabin in the mountains of New Mexico,
which Robert called Perro Caliente (Spanish for “hot dog”). They
rode horses over 13,000-foot peaks, 1,000 miles a summer. During one
night ride, Robert got knocked off his horse. “He was very thin
anyway,” Frank said. “Here was this little bit of protoplasm on
the ground, not moving. It was scary, but he was all right.”

On a road trip back to Caltech, Frank rolled the car into a ditch,
breaking Robert’s arm. When Robert stopped at a store to get a
sling, he came back with a bright red one, to cheer up his little
brother, who he knew was feeling bad about the accident.

 
The world around them was fraught, with fascism on the rise in
Germany, Italy and Spain. The Depression meant people were still out
of work. Robert kept mostly aloof from politics, but Frank dived in.
He married a UC Berkeley student who was a member of the Young
Communist League, then joined himself. He admired the Communists for
taking unemployment seriously — and for understanding the threats
posed by Hitler and Mussolini. His personal tipping point was the
treatment of Blacks at a Pasadena public pool: Blacks were allowed
only on Wednesdays; the pool was drained before the whites came back
on Thursday. Only the Communist Party seemed concerned.

Robert didn’t approve of Frank’s decision to join the party, and
he didn’t approve of his wife, Jackie, either, referring to her as
“that waitress.” He accused Frank of being “slow” because it
took him what Robert regarded as too long to get his PhD. He called
Frank’s marriage “infantile.” The feelings became mutual. Jackie
later regarded Robert and his wife, Kitty, as pretentious, phony and
tight.

Frank soon realized that he wasn’t cut out to be a Communist, and
quit. He felt the party was too authoritarian, and not as interested
in social justice as in petty bickering. (Robert never joined,
although Kitty had been a party member.)

From quantum theory to atom smashers

The brothers were both working as physicists when the Japanese bombed
Pearl Harbor in 1941. Robert, the theorist, was sharing the
revolutionary physics of quantum mechanics with his American
colleagues at Berkeley and Caltech, where he had joint appointments.
Frank, a natural-born experimentalist, was working with Ernest
Lawrence at Berkeley on the rapidly developing technology of particle
accelerators — known to some as “atom smashers.”

 
Once it became clear that the enormous energy contained in the atomic
nucleus could be used to build a bomb — and that Nazi Germany might
well be doing just that — President Franklin Roosevelt approved a
major American effort to beat them to it: the Manhattan Project. It
came as a surprise to everyone when Gen. Leslie Groves tapped Robert
as director. Seemingly overnight, the ethereal young man who enjoyed
reading poetry in Sanskrit became the ringleader of the most
concentrated collection of brilliant minds ever assembled —
scientists summoned from around the world to a makeshift lab on a
desolate New Mexico mesa, where they would build an atomic bomb to
stop Hitler.

Frank, meanwhile, worked with Lawrence on what he called
“racetracks” (officially calutrons) used to coax small but vital
amounts of pure uranium-235 out of a dirty mix of isotopes by steering
them in circles with magnets. Uranium-235, like plutonium-239, is
easily split, just what was needed to set off a chain reaction. Since
no one knew how to bring together a critical mass of the stuff to make
an explosion, two designs were pursued simultaneously. The plutonium
bomb acquired the nickname Fat Man; the uranium bomb was Little Boy.

Frank helped supervise an enormous complex for uranium separation at
Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Frank liked Gen. Groves and Groves, in turn,
liked Frank — and later defended him when he was booted from physics
for his politics.

As the time to test the bomb approached, Frank joined his brother at
the Trinity site, a dry scrubby desert formerly part of the Alamogordo
Bombing Range. Frank, who saw his job (ironically enough) as a
“safety inspector,” mapped escape routes through the desert and
made sure workers wore hard hats.

 
Finally, on July 16, 1945, the go-ahead was given. After a long night
on edge watching driving rain and lightning rage around “the
gadget” — a Fat Man-style plutonium bomb perched on a
100-foot-tall tower — the proverbial (and literal) button was
pushed.

The brothers lay together at the nearest bunker, five miles away,
heads to the ground. Frank later described the “unearthly hovering
cloud. It was very bright and very purple and very awesome … and all
the thunder of the blast was bouncing, bouncing back and forth on the
cliffs and hills. The echoing went on and on.…” The cloud, he said
“just seemed to hang there forever.”

Frank and his brother embraced each other: “I think we just said:
‘It worked.’”

On August 6, 1945, Little Boy was dropped on the pristine city of
Hiroshima — which had been deliberately untouched by US bombs, the
better to assess the damage. In an instant, the city was all but
flattened, people reduced to charred cinders, survivors hobbling
around with their skin peeled off and hanging from their bodies like
rags. An estimated 140,000 people were killed in the attack
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and in the months after, according to Japanese authorities.

Frank heard the news outside his brother’s office at Los Alamos.
“Up to then I don’t think I’d really thought of all those
flattened people,” he said. The US bombing of Nagasaki with Fat Man
just days later brought the death toll even higher.

Some physicists saw their success as a moral failure. Still, many —
including Frank and Robert — also hoped this new weapon would cause
people to see the world differently; they hoped it would ultimately
bring about peace. “Those were the days when we all drank one toast
only,” Robert said: “‘No more wars.’”

Intolerable weapon

After the war, the brothers’ lives diverged, driven by circumstance,
in ways that were painful to both.

Robert was a hero; he mingled easily with the powerful. Famously, he
was Einstein’s boss — director of the Institute for Advanced Study
in Princeton. He chaired a committee to advise the government on a new
and vastly more powerful type of bomb — the hydrogen bomb. Rather
than split atoms, it fused them, using the physics of stars. The
H-bomb could be 1,000 times more powerful than Little Boy.

Robert’s committee voted unanimously against developing it. “The
extreme dangers to mankind inherent in this proposal wholly outweigh
any military advantage that could come from this weapon.” They
described it as a “threat to the future of the human race which is
intolerable.”

Frank, meanwhile, had joined the physics department at the University
of Minnesota, building detectors to catch cosmic rays streaming from
space with equipment tethered to balloons he frequently lost but
chased gamely through Cuban forests and other remote locations. He was
excited about their discovery that the cosmic ray particles were not
merely protons, as people had assumed, but the nuclei of many elements
— from hydrogen to gold — implying that some were forged
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in supernova explosions.

At the same time, he was giving speeches “all over the map,” as he
put it, trying to educate the public about nuclear bombs, trying to
explain what 1,000 times more powerful really meant. He spoke to
bankers, civic associations, schools. He argued that so-called
“smart” people weren’t all that different from everyone else.
The mistrust of the “hoi polloi,” Frank thought, stemmed largely
from the tendency of people to credit their own success to a single
personal characteristic, which they then “idolize” and use to
measure everyone else by the same yardstick.

He believed people would educate themselves if they thought their
voices mattered. “All of us have seen, especially during the war,
the enormous increase in the competence of people that results from a
sense of responsibility,” he said. Building the “racetracks”
during the war had required training thousands of people “fresh from
farms and woods to operate and repair the weirdest and most
complicated equipment.”

 
Soon, his physics career was cut short. The FBI had been keeping tabs
on both brothers for years, pausing only for the war, when military
intelligence took over. Agents followed them everywhere, tapped their
phones, planted microphones in their houses.

In 1949, Frank received a summons to appear before the House
Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he refused to take the
fifth, but also refused to testify about anyone other than himself. He
was effectively fired from the University of Minnesota physics
department, leaving the chair’s office in tears.

Attempts to find work elsewhere were blocked at every turn, despite
support from multiple Nobel laureates, Gen. Groves and even H-bomb
enthusiast Edward Teller. Finally, an FBI agent told Frank flat out:
If he wanted a job, he had to cooperate. “Then I realized what the
wall was.”

Out of options, and having just purchased a ranch to live on
“someday,” Frank and Jackie became serious cattle ranchers,
learning from neighbors and veterinary manuals. (The FBI was right on
their tails, pestering neighbors for information, suggesting they were
broadcasting atomic secrets to Mexico.) All the while, Frank thought
and wrote about physics and peace, civil rights, ethics, education and
the critical role of honesty in science and public life.

Robert did not approve of any of Frank’s activities. He thought
there wasn’t time to bring the public in on the debate; he thought
he could use his fame and power to influence policy in Washington
toward peaceful ends. Frank expressed his disgust at what he
considered his brother’s futile and elitist approach. Robert made it
clear that he thought the idea of becoming a rancher was a little
silly — as well as beneath Frank.

Frank felt he could no longer reach him. “I saw my bro in
Chicago,” Frank wrote his best friend Robert Wilson at Cornell in an
undated letter probably from the early 1950s. “I fear that I merely
amused him slightly when, in brotherly love, I told him that I was
still confident that someday he would do something that I was proud
of.”

 

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A man destroyed

Robert’s now-famous downfall was swift. Many great books have been
written about the subject (not to mention Christopher Nolan’s
colossal film); in effect, he was punished for his opposition to the
H-bomb, probably his arrogance and naivete as well. After a series of
secret hearings, his security clearance was revoked; he was, by all
accounts, a ruined man.

It wasn’t something Frank liked to talk about. “He trusted his
ability to talk to people and convince them,” Frank said. “But he
was up against people that weren’t used to being convinced by
conversation.”

Some of Robert’s most poignant testimony during the hearings
involved Frank. Asked if his brother had ever been a Communist, Robert
answered: “Mr. Chairman … I ask you not to press these questions
about my brother. If they are important to you, you can ask him. I
will answer, if asked, but I beg of you not to ask me these
questions.”

The broader tragedy for both brothers was that the creation of the
world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction — a thing too
horrible ever to use — didn’t much change how people viewed war.
The H-bomb was just another weapon.

“What undid him,” Frank said, “was not just his fall from
official grace, but the fact that this fall represented a defeat for
the kind of civilized behavior that he had hoped nations would
adopt.”

Robert died at the age of 62, in 1967. Frank’s last memory of his
brother is poignantly familial. Robert was lying in bed, in great pain
from throat cancer. Frank lay down beside him and together they
watched Perry Mason on TV.

A new path

While Robert was being politically destroyed, Frank had started
teaching science in a one-room schoolhouse. Before long, students from
Pagosa Springs, Colorado, were winning the state science fairs.
Eventually allowed into academia by the University of Colorado in
1959, Frank promptly built a “library of experiments” out of
equipment scavenged from other labs.

That “library” in time grew into a vast public playground of
scientific stuff housed in the abandoned Palace of Fine Arts in San
Francisco. Exhibits — sometimes sophisticated and delicate — were
meant to be played with, even broken; no guards stopped people from
touching anything, no rules prevented theft — and remarkably, there
was almost none. He called it an Exploratorium so people wouldn’t
think it was a “museum” where good behavior was expected (although
he liked the idea that “no one flunks a museum”). Top scientists
and artists from around the globe contributed time and talent. Barbara
Gamow, wife of the physicist George Gamow, painted a sign to hang over
the machine shop: Here is Being Created an Exploratorium, a Community
Museum Dedicated to Awareness.

 
In the end, I like to think Frank proved his brother (and most
everyone else) wrong about the willingness of everyday people to
engage and learn. The “so-called inattentive public,” he’d said,
would come to life if people didn’t feel “fooled and lied to,”
if they felt valued and respected. And if people got addicted to
figuring things out for themselves, they’d be inoculated against
having to take the word of whatever bullies happened to be in power.
Society could tap into this collective wisdom to solve pressing global
problems — the only way he thought it could work.

Today, Exploratorium-style science centers exist in some form all over
the globe.

I count myself as one of Frank’s many thousands of addicts, hooked
on science (a subject I’d found boring) the minute I met him in
1971. (In a weird resonance with today, my first foray into journalism
was a piece on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia for the _New York
Times Magazine_.) I was interested in peace, not physics. Frank talked
me into writing for him, explaining optics and wave mechanics to the
public. My first editor was Jackie. Over the years, Frank and I spent
endless hours chatting about life, art, science and his family,
including his brother.

Nolan’s film _Oppenheimer_ doesn’t offer much insight into
Robert’s thoughts on science and peace or science and human
morality. However, Robert did think and talk about these ideas, many
of which are collected in his 1954 book _Science and the Common
Understanding_, as well as other places.

Frank continued to get upset (and a little drunk) every August 6, the
day Hiroshima was bombed. He’d rub his forehead hard, as if he was
trying to rub something out. He had much the same reaction to many
previous dramatizations of the Oppenheimer story, because he thought
they focused too much on the fall of his brother, rather than on the
failure of attempts to use the horror of the bomb to build a warless
world.

Frank’s fierce integrity permeated our work together: He refused to
call me writer/editor because he said that meant writer divided by
editor. Instead, I was his Exploratorium Expositor.

If someone said, “It’s impossible to know something, or impossible
to adequately thank someone,” he’d argue: It’s not impossible,
it’s only very, very, very hard.

No matter what impossible thing Frank was trying to do, he refused to
be stopped by so-called “real world” obstacles. “It’s not the
real world,” he’d rage. “It’s a world we made up.” We could
do better. In fact, so many of what we came to call “Frankisms”
seem more relevant today than ever:

“The worst thing a son of a bitch can do to you is turn you into a
son of a bitch.”

“Artists and scientists are the official noticers of society.”

“If we stop trying to understand things, we’ll all be sunk.”

Navigating the dark side of science, I think, will require attending
closely to all of these. The “real world” we’re presented with
is not the way things have to be. We shouldn’t become sons of
bitches. We can never stop noticing or trying to understand.

_KC COLE  [[link removed]]is the author of eight
nonfiction books, most recently Something Incredibly Wonderful
Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up. She is senior
senior editor at Wired magazine, teaches in the honors program at
the University of Washington, and has written for dozens of newspapers
and magazines._

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