Two Lives in Contrast: Blackett, Oppenheimer and the Nuclear AgeAuthor(s): Jessica WangBlackett: Physics, War, and Politics in the Twentieth CenturyJ. Robert Oppenheimer and theAmerican Century by Mary  Jo Nye; David C.  CassidySource: Isis, Vol. 97, No. 1 (March 2006), pp. 144-147Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/501108 .

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Isis, 2006, 97:144–147�2006 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved.0021-1753/2006/9701-0011$10.00

144

Two Lives in Contrast: Blackett,Oppenheimer and the Nuclear Age

By Jessica Wang*

Mary Jo Nye. Blackett: Physics, War, and Politics in the Twentieth Century. x � 255 pp., illus.,index. Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 2004. $39.95 (cloth).

David C. Cassidy. J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century. xviii � 462 pp., table, apps.,bibl., index. New York: Pi Press, 2004. $27.95 (cloth).

Mary Jo Nye’s Blackett: Physics, War, and Politics in the Twentieth Century and David C.Cassidy’s J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century present the life histories oftwo distinguished scientists whose careers provide a study in contrasts. On the surface, P.M. S. Blackett and J. Robert Oppenheimer shared much in common. Both were physicists,and, like many physicists of their generation, they participated in military research duringWorld War II, earned reputations as practical men who could respond to the needs of thestate, and, as a result, became heavily involved in the Cold War politics of science. Forthe most part, however, the similarities end there. Differences in personality, politics, andcelebrity cut across the parallels of the lives they led on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Relative fame offers the most obvious point of contrast. After the atomic bombings ofHiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer became a household name, probably second onlyto Einstein in public cognizance of scientists worldwide. As with most writing on recenthistory, historians of science have tended to reproduce the existing hierarchies of celebrityby devoting primary attention to the figures anointed by their times as the great men andmakers of events. Cassidy’s biography thus comes amid a spate of books about Oppen-heimer published in recent years: Silvan S. Schweber’s In the Shadow of the Bomb (Prince-ton, 2000), a study of Hans Bethe, Oppenheimer, and moral choice; Gregg Herken’s Broth-erhood of the Bomb (Holt, 2002), on Oppenheimer, Ernest O. Lawrence, and EdwardTeller; a new, abridged, and annotated edition of the long out-of-print Oppenheimer hear-ings by Richard Polenberg (Cornell, 2002); American Prometheus (Knopf, 2005), a com-peting biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin; and Priscilla J. McMillan’s The Ruinof J. Robert Oppenheimer (Viking, 2005), on Oppenheimer’s 1954 confrontation with theAtomic Energy Commission that led to the revocation of his security clearance. J. RobertOppenheimer: A Life (Oxford), by the late Abraham Pais, will be issued early in 2006,and Charles Thorpe’s sociological study of Oppenheimer and the nature of charismaticleadership, titled Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect (Chicago), is set for publication infall 2006. Oppenheimer also continues to be the subject of creative work, including Oh

*Dept. of History, UCLA, 6265 Bunche Hall, Box 951473, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1473

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JESSICA WANG 145

Pure and Radiant Heart (Soft Skull, 2005), a novel by Lydia Millet in which Oppenheimer,Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard find themselves reincarnated in present-day America. Inaddition, this past October witnessed the premiere in San Francisco of Doctor Atomic, ahighly anticipated opera by the composer John Adams and the librettist/director PeterSellars that takes place on the eve of the Trinity test and offers a meditation on Oppen-heimer, science, and morality. Although Oppenheimer has not spawned quite the publish-ing empire of Newton or Darwin, he nonetheless remains a subject of fascination andinterest.

Blackett, by contrast, remains a much less visible personage. As a Nobel laureate, ad-visor to the British government, and politically active individual, he was known to hiscolleagues, government officials, and opinion makers, and he had a prominent reputationin left-wing political circles. Among the public at large, however, he possessed nothinglike Oppenheimer’s visibility as “father of the atomic bomb,” despite his status as one ofthe forefathers of operations research during World War II. By bringing advanced math-ematical techniques to the Taylorist aspiration for scientific management, operations re-search developed critical tools for overseeing the distinctly unglamorous military problemof managing and coordinating war materiel, and the discipline continues to exert a powerfulinfluence on the running of large bureaucratic enterprises in both the public and privatesectors today. Blackett’s wartime legacy has thus infiltrated countless hidden corridors ofdaily life around the world, but the ubiquity of operations research has not translated intoa wealth of historical work about the scientist. The neglect is unfortunate, since Blackettwas an energetic and impassioned individual whose professional and political life covereda wide range of roles: naval cadet and officer in the Royal Navy, nuclear physicist, expertin operations research, geophysicist, science advisor to the British government, leftist ColdWar critic, and vigorous opponent of the nuclear arms race.

Thankfully, Mary Jo Nye has provided the first biography of Blackett, and her slim andelegant account covers the main events in his scientific and political life. Blackett’s navalbackground, Nye convincingly argues, was crucial in shaping his subsequent careers inscience and politics. As a naval cadet, “Blackett received what was probably the mostintensive physical science and engineering education available at secondary-school levelin England” (Nye, p. 18). The combination of laboratory and hands-on workshop expe-rience offered by Britain’s naval colleges, in addition to a curriculum strong in the artsand sciences, provided excellent training for a future in experimental physics, as well asskills for dealing with practical problems. Blackett’s understanding of the experimentalistas “a ‘Jack-of-all Trades’—a glass-blower, a mechanic, a carpenter, a photographer, anengineer, a mathematician” (Nye, p. 63)—owed much to his naval education. His Navyexperience also perhaps contributed to his later political stands, particularly his antimili-tarism and opposition to civilian bombing. The carnage of World War I affected Blackettdeeply. He narrowly missed death on at least one occasion, and while at sea he witnesseda handful of survivors from a crew of twelve hundred hanging onto debris as they awaitedrescue. Although he followed other naval officers in voting Conservative in 1918, by 1922he was supporting the Labour Party, and by the 1930s he had become an outspoken socialistand part of the large circle of left-wing British intellectuals.

Meanwhile, Blackett built his scientific reputation in nuclear physics, starting as a phys-ics student of Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory and then moving on to aresearch position at Birkbeck College before becoming a professor of physics at the Uni-versity of Manchester in 1937. In the early 1930s Blackett and Giuseppe Occhialini nar-rowly missed the credit for identifying the positron, a discovery for which Carl Anderson

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146 ESSAY REVIEW

received the Nobel Prize in 1936. Blackett’s own Nobel Prize came a dozen years later,in recognition of his advanced experimental innovations in using the Wilson cloudchamber—first for studying nuclear particles, beginning in his student years at the Cav-endish, and then for studying cosmic radiation with Occhialini in the 1930s. By the timeof his Nobel Prize Blackett’s scientific interests had shifted to new topics, and he spentthe period from the late 1940s to the mid 1960s on problems in geophysics, particularlygeomagnetism and continental drift.

For Blackett, World War II and the Cold War also required a growing preoccupationwith politics and public policy. Operations research brought him into the thick of Britishpolicy-making circles, but his Cold War neutralism, harsh criticisms of U.S. foreign policy,and opposition to nuclear weapons development frequently placed him at odds with theBritish political establishment in the late 1940s and 1950s. Although many observers onboth sides of the Atlantic like to think of anticommunism as a peculiarly American phe-nomenon, Blackett’s experiences should remind historians to consider more carefully theeffects of Cold War ideology in Western European and trans-Atlantic contexts. Blackettmade the extent of his uncompromising Cold War critique clear with the publication ofMilitary and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy (Turnstile, 1948; released in theUnited States as Fear, War and the Bomb [Whittlesey, 1949]), in which he characterizedthe atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “not so much as the last military act ofthe Second World War, but as the first act of the cold diplomatic war with Russia” (quotedin Nye, p. 89). Throughout the early Cold War years Blackett sharply attacked the UnitedStates for engaging in dangerous brinksmanship with the Soviet Union, and he targetedthe invidious abstraction of Cold War operations research, with its scenarios of winnablenuclear war. Already by early 1947, Blackett was frozen out of British nuclear policymaking, and in 1949 the writer George Orwell placed him on a list of thirty-eight personswhom he considered “crypto-communists, fellow-travellers or inclined that way” (Nye, p.3). Orwell passed the list to a contact at the British Foreign Office, where it possibly alsoreached the notice of British intelligence.

British politics nonetheless stayed more open to the left than American politics, andalthough he was kept off government committees on more than one occasion because ofhis Cold War views, Blackett managed to remain influential. As Nye observes, “Blackett,for all the charges that he was a radical figure in British science and politics, was theconsummate insider in an elite of military, academic, and governmental experience andidentity” (Nye, p. 40). He advised the Shadow Cabinet throughout the 1950s, and underHarold Wilson’s government he became science advisor to Britain’s Ministry of Technol-ogy in the 1960s. His admiration for Nehru and sympathy for Third World neutralism alsoallowed him to build ties with India’s scientific establishment, and, starting in the late1940s, Blackett lent the Indian government informal scientific and military advice.

If Blackett was an outsider who managed to maintain insider status, Oppenheimer be-came the consummate insider who nonetheless remained an outsider. In his biographyCassidy asks, “How did it happen that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the sensitive, culturedhumanist, so readily accepted his new role as the scientific administrator of and drivingforce behind the rapid construction and ultimate use of the atomic bomb?” (Cassidy, p.211). Cassidy’s question, however, misses the point implicit in his own narrative on Op-penheimer’s life prior to the Manhattan Project. The will to believe in Oppenheimer’shumanism, a reputation established during his lifetime as a result of his charisma, earlyliterary pretensions, and linguistic leanings, continues to obscure an alternative reading ofhis character. Oppenheimer may have been a humanist in the narrow sense of devotion to

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JESSICA WANG 147

literature or classical learning, but he failed under the standard of broader interest inhumanity and human welfare. The Oppenheimer who emerges from the early chapters ofJ. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century was an aesthete, a bit of an intellectualdilettante, and maybe even a misanthrope; he was hardly a “grand humanist” (Cassidy, p.236). As a Harvard college student marginalized by his Jewishness and his poor socialskills, Oppenheimer adopted literary affectation as a means of building bonds among asmall group who “were not really intimate friends but rather congenial intellectual col-leagues and companions who had somehow found each other on a campus that they re-garded as an intellectual wasteland” (Cassidy, p. 74). Oppenheimer’s famous learning ofSanskrit in the 1930s added to his mystique, but his extracurricular endeavors could easilybe interpreted as the intellectual wanderings of a fragile personality still struggling toimpress through a public posture of brilliance. As Cassidy observes, “In keeping with hisalways eclectic interests and his campus image as an aesthete connoisseur of culture,Oppenheimer immersed himself in the finest literature, dabbled in painting, and studiedthe world’s great religions and philosophies, all the while engaging simultaneously in someof the most demanding physics of the day” (Cassidy, p. 150). Such a passage speaks to aman of great energy and intelligence, but it also suggests a flurry of activity meant tosupport an image for popular consumption, not serious concern for the human condition.

S. S. Schweber has written at length about Oppenheimer’s lack of an integrated person-ality, and his interpretation makes more sense to me than Cassidy’s narrative of personalgrowth and the rise and fall of the scientist as humanist. As I read Cassidy’s account ofOppenheimer, I saw instead a person who, throughout his entire life, tried on differentmasks—effete literary intellectual, theoretical physicist, campus bohemian, man of radicalpolitics, wartime leader, eminent advisor to the state, publicly renowned “father of theatomic bomb,” Cold War martyr, and, finally, public intellectual—without ever establish-ing a coherent identity or gaining a sense of who he was. The only constants were ambitioncombined with profound insecurity, a far cry from, say, Blackett’s confidence, straightfor-ward honesty, and willingness to stand up for his deeply held beliefs. Cassidy asks whetherthe Cold War left any place “for the fully humanized scientist, the man of moral cultureas well as technical skill” (Cassidy, p. 327). The question is a worthy one, but Oppenheimerseems the wrong subject for answering it. As Cassidy notes of the aftermath following theAtomic Energy Commission’s revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance, “all thathe had really lost, in Pais’s words, was ‘the sense of power, which he craved’” (Cassidy,p. 341). Such a lust for status and influence hardly befits “the fully humanized scientist.”Instead, it provides a cautionary warning about the will to power that has shaped sciencethroughout the twentieth century and beyond.

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