Oppenheimer Celebration Examines the Myth and the Man June 29, 2004 By SANDRA BLAKESLEE (New York Times) LOS ALAMOS, N.M., June 27 - Too bad J. Robert Oppenheimer did not live to attend his 100th-birthday party here over the weekend. The "father of the atomic bomb," who died in 1967, might have enjoyed mingling with the octogenarians who helped build the bomb; his doppelg�nger, a distant relative wearing a loose suit, a porkpie hat and vivid blue contact lenses; as well as former students, parents intent on teaching their children all about the cold war, and a Who's Who of Manhattan Project historians. Oppenheimer remains a controversial figure, revered by some historians, and by most scientists and engineers who worked under him, and reviled by others. Accused of Communist sympathies at the height of the cold war, he was stripped of his security clearance in 1954, and lived out his life at Princeton University under a shadow of suspicion. (That should be the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, not Princeton University. The newspaper posted the correction July 1 on its website.) Controversy aside, it is important to keep talking about Oppenheimer, said Cynthia C. Kelly, president of the Atomic Heritage Foundation, which is dedicated to preserving the history of the atomic age. "And it's very important to preserve Manhattan Project history," Ms. Kelly added, "to understand what happened here and how it changed the world." To that end, the foundation and the Los Alamos Historical Society organized a two-day "Oppie Fest" on Friday and Saturday to celebrate the physicist's centennial. He was born in New York on April 22, 1904. Except for Dr. Hans Bethe, who turns 98 next week, all the top scientists who worked on the bomb are dead. But scores of others who played less visible roles are alive and talking. "They love to tell their stories," Ms. Kelly said. On Friday, several elderly men with wispy white hair and bolo ties festooned with turquoise stepped in front of audiences and told vivid tales of how they built Fat Man and Little Boy, the nuclear weapons that ended World War II. John Mench, 84, described barracks connected by boardwalks over a sea of mud. He remembered the machinists and welders who worked for $50 a month and the glorious day the Women's Army Corps arrived. Dr. McAllister Hull, 80, helped build "the gadget," as Fat Man was called, by casting the explosives that ignited its plutonium core. He used candy kettles and malted-milk stirrers to get the job done. An unexpected attraction was an Oppie ringer, Andy Oppenheimer, 51, from London, who described himself as a distant relative and consultant on unconventional weapons for the Jane's Information Group, the provider of intelligence and military and security analysis. Scientists who knew Robert Oppenheimer said the resemblance was striking, except for the diamond stud earring and the blue contacts. For one day only, visitors rode buses and glimpsed the building sites for the bombs, deep behind a security fence. Three sites are marked for preservation, the V site, where implosion devices were assembled; the gun site, where Little Boy was tested; and a Quonset hut where Fat Man was tested and assembled. Americans visit Civil War battlegrounds. Why not the grounds that gave birth to the atomic bomb and the cold war? Ms. Kelly envisions a discontinuous national park that would include missile silos in Montana; remnants of weapons complexes at Hanford, Wash.; the Oak Ridge, Tenn., National Laboratory; and dozens of other historic places. Parents, she said, could take their children along an atomic trail. A measure before Congress would instruct the National Park Service to identify Manhattan Project buildings and artifacts nationally and develop ways to interpret them for the public. The Los Alamos Historical Society recently purchased what it calls the crown jewel of such a park, Robert and Kitty Oppenheimer's house on Bathtub Row in the heart of Los Alamos. The house, which had one of the town's six bathtubs in 1943, is where Oppie served martinis, Edward Teller played the piano and Enrico Fermi danced the night away. When the current residents, Bergen and Helene Suydam, leave the house they have owned for 58 years, curators will turn it into a museum. On Saturday, Oppenheimer's hagiographers took to the stage. Jon Hunner, a historian at New Mexico State University who wrote a coming book, "Chasing Oppie," described his early years, how this brilliant, frail, overprotected child went to camp where bullies painted his genitals green and locked him in an outhouse overnight, how he mastered languages easily, how he discovered the American West on horseback. Robert S. Norris, author of "Racing for the Bomb" (Steerforth Press, 2002), described how Oppenheimer's boss, Gen. Leslie R. Groves of the Army, chose the brilliant but untested physicist to create the nation's first weapons laboratory. Kai Bird, co-author of "Robert Oppenheimer: An American Life," to be published next year, described his life here, his wife's drinking, his sex appeal and the intense stresses of his scientific and personal problems. Richard Rhodes, author of "The Making of the Atomic Bomb," which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, said that with the Manhattan Project "fading into myth," it was worth asking why one man, Julius Robert Oppenheimer, should emerge as the iconic central figure of what might have been the single most important development of the 20th century. Tall, handsome, brilliant, compassionate and self-loathing Oppenheimer could never settle on an identity, Mr. Rhodes said. One friend said Oppie never knew whether he wanted to be president of the Knights of Columbus or B'nai B'rith, or both. This ambiguity is raw material for myth making, Mr. Rhodes said. Like Thomas Jefferson, who had his slaves, Oppenheimer had Hiroshima. Americans bitterly debate the decision to drop the bomb, ensuring that his troubled legacy lives on. It lives on in other ways, too. More than half a century before Sept. 11, 2001, Oppenheimer foresaw the threat of terrorists' possessing nuclear bombs and hiding them for detonation on American shores. Along with Niels Bohr and others, he said the only ways to forestall such threats were to open every shipping container with screwdrivers or, alternatively, to give away nuclear technology, free, to every nation. Any system based on outlawing military development of atomic energy or relying solely on inspection will not work, they said. Rather, nations need to collectively take control of uranium resources and make their uses transparent so that every country can keep an eye on every other. "Knowledge of how to release nuclear energy," Mr. Rhodes said, "is new knowledge of the natural world, to which the human world has no choice but to adapt or be destroyed. With Bohr, Oppenheimer understood that truth, and it was a deeper understanding than theoretical physics, original and profound." |