On 12/28/2019 9:52 PM, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Sat, 28 Dec 2019, Peter Loron wrote:
While Oppenheimer did have “left” leanings, and some participation in communist organizations, I’m not aware of any solid evidence that he was a significant risk factor for the bomb program.
The Manhattan Project security people had reservations about him from the start -- he had too many associations with Communist groups and Communist people -- but they didn't have the final say. Groves needed a lab chief competent to run the R&D effort, someone that Groves could work with, day in and day out, without gritting his teeth too much. Oppenheimer was a fairly unlikely choice for this, but improbably enough, when they met, they hit it off well. So Groves had his lab chief, and if the security people didn't like his choice, tough -- he overrode their objections. (When Groves made up his mind about something, you stood in his way at your peril.) Some of what they came up with did come back to haunt Oppenheimer after the war, when Groves was no longer in charge.
There's not a shred of actual evidence that there was a real security problem there, but we may never be absolutely sure. We *know* there were spies in the Manhattan Project whose identities are still unknown, because there are codenames in the Venona decrypts which have never been matched to real people. (The messages seldom used real names, so circumstantial evidence had to be used to identify people, and in some cases there just isn't enough information.) Unless there are clues in the still-unbroken parts of the Venona messages, we may never know who some of those people were. It does seem *unlikely* that Oppenheimer was one of them.
After WWII, like many of the other physicists, he argued for arms control and not pursuing the “super” which Teller was such a proponent of.
Herbert York's book "The Advisors" argues persuasively that in hindsight, Oppenheimer was right, and Teller wrong, about the "super": refraining from developing it, in hopes that the Soviet Union could be convinced to do likewise, probably would not have worked... but its true military value was modest, the risks to real US security from delaying development until Soviet intentions became clear were slight, and the long-term gain from having at least *tried* to restrain the arms race fairly early could have been considerable. (And York was not some pinko peacenik: he was a bomb designer and the first director of Lawrence Livermore.) But realistically, the political pressures of the day made that impossible.
Of the three choices Anthony offered :-), I'd definitely pick Oppenheimer. Teller was too blinded by his latest enthusiasms to hold a good discussion on long-term policy -- even in Manhattan Project days, he was notorious for abandoning his current project half-finished because he'd gotten excited about something else, forcing other people to pick up the pieces. Groves would be better, but I think he had unrealistic ideas about how feasible it was to maintain a US monopoly, and that helped drive him in the direction of tight government control of the technology. Oppenheimer mostly had a fairly practical attitude (note that the same report which called for delaying "super" development also called for an aggressive push into tactical nuclear weapons and some other areas -- it wasn't blindly against further weapons development, despite some claims).