Perhaps just as likely that the Verona material included false leads in
case, for instance, someone was able to decrypt.
Surprised in a way that a few (highly-competent, and very) innocent people
weren’t caught up like this and exonerated only after the damage
counterintelligence was able to do. Oh, wait, we couldn’t reveal that,
because it would tip our own hand....
On Sat, Dec 28, 2019 at 9:52 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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).
Henry