“After 10 years of research, I have written a book about how the hydrogen bomb was developed by this country. J. Robert Oppenheimer is a prominent figure in my book.”

By Tom Ramos

SINCE THE release of the movie Oppenheimer I have been inundated with questions from enthusiasts who have recently seen the film. Now that it is winning awards, more so. Many would like my opinion about how accurately the film portrayed events and characters.

You see, after 10 years of research, I have written a book about how the hydrogen bomb was developed by this country. J. Robert Oppenheimer is a prominent figure in my book because the stories leading to the creations of the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb are intimately entwined. However, while the movie ends in the aftermath of dropping atomic bombs on Japan, my story ends with President John F. Kennedy traveling to Berkeley to thank a group of physicists for helping to avert a nuclear war.

So, how well did the movie handle the events and characters? It did pretty well, but I think I would have portrayed some of them differently. In one trailer, the movie’s producer claims Oppenheimer was the mastermind behind the atomic bomb. Well, I think that title would be more fitting if it were applied to a delicate Jewish woman, an Austrian physicist named Lise Meitner. Two Nobel laureates, Enrico Fermi and Otto Hahn, had conducted experiments with uranium and they didn’t understand their results, and Hahn pleaded in a letter to Meitner to explain what he had seen. It took her about one week to create a theory of nuclear fission, and with her nephew Otto Frisch, she wrote an article in the British journal Nature that revealed a theory about a never seen before nuclear energy. Albert Einstein and Marie Curie are well-known scientists, Lise Meitner should be too.

One of America’s most outstanding physicists, John Wheeler, who among other things had coined the phrase “black hole” to describe a star so massive even light couldn’t escape it, worked with Niels Bohr (portrayed in the film by Kenneth Branagh), the Danish Nobel laureate who was the “father of the atom,” and the pair wrote a paper a few months after Meitner’s article that refined her theory of nuclear fission. They claimed it was a rare isotope of uranium, uranium-235 that had caused the nuclear fissions in Hahn’s and Fermi’s experiments. They suggested that to make an atomic bomb one had to separate uranium-235 out of natural uranium and form it into a critical mass.

Nuclear physicists around the world marvelled at Meitner’s article and within the next two to three years, atomic programs would start in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Japan, the United States and the Soviet Union.

The British were quick to organize a group of physicists to design an atomic bomb. They wrote a report and sent it to America, but they got no response because the American group leader responsible for studying the “uranium question” had placed it into his safe without notifying his boss.

Mark Oliphant, an Australian born physicist who had an astigmatism so bad he was nearly blind, was despondent that the Americans had not replied to the British report, and he flew out to Berkeley, California to meet with a good friend of his, Ernest O. Lawrence. Oliphant showed Lawrence the British report and Lawrence, who immediately grasped its importance, arranged for his friend to meet an American who fulfilled a role we would now call the president’s science advisor, Vannevar Bush, who was portrayed in the film by Matthew Modine. It took a while for Bush to understand that to make an atomic bomb one needed to form a mass of about 50 pounds of uranium-235. Finally passionate, Bush saw President Roosevelt and got permission to start an American atomic program.

A lot has been said about a letter signed by Einstein that alerted Roosevelt about the atomic bomb, but Roosevelt had already been briefed about the possibility of the bomb. Enrico Fermi had briefed a Navy panel earlier about his experiments at Columbia University to build a nuclear reactor, and the import of his briefing had gone to the president. When Fermi arrived at the office of the Navy’s head of research to give his briefing, he must have been met by a clerk from my old neighborhood in Brooklyn, for the sailor got up and peered into an office and announced, “Admiral, the Wop is here.”

Bush had to get things rolling with the atomic program, and he had help from two events that had occurred at Lawrence’s laboratory in Berkeley, which was known as the “Rad Lab.” The first was the invention of a machine to separate uranium-235 from natural uranium. The second was the discovery of plutonium.

Bush appointed a Nobel laureate in Chicago, Arthur Compton, to lead the effort to design the bomb. Compton called meetings with prominent physicists, including Lawrence, who brought along his theoretical physicist, J. Robert Oppenheimer. In the meantime, Bush met with the Chief of Staff of the Army, George C. Marshall, who agreed to create a program to build an atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project. After a false start with a Colonel John Marshall, no relation to the general, Marshall appointed Colonel Dick Groves (played by Matt Damon) to run the project. Groves immediately procured a secluded patch of land adjacent to the Clinch River in Tennessee, the locals called it Oak Ridge, and located a plant there called Y12 to house Lawrence’s calutrons to “enrich” uranium, and then he signed a contract with DuPont to create another laboratory in Hanford, Washington, to start producing plutonium.

Groves kept Ken Nickols as his deputy, a lieutenant colonel who had been with the project since its start in Schenectady, New York. Unfortunately, the movie portrays Nichols as a beady looking character who mistrusts Oppenheimer from the get-go. Instead, Nichols was a handsome young man who like Groves, had graduated in the top five in his class at West Point. (He had to be on the ball to graduate that high. In my own class at West Point, the fifth ranked graduate was Bill Taylor, the former ambassador to Ukraine.) He was no dummy, he held advanced engineering degrees from several European universities before getting a PhD in hydraulic engineering from the University of Iowa. In the 1930s, Groves and Nichols, both engineer officers, worked together to survey a possible site for a second inter-ocean canal through Nicaragua. It was Nichols who provided Lawrence with the engineering skill to build and operate the Y12 plant, which thanks to the talent of the “atomic girls,” enriched the uranium for the Manhattan Project.

Groves needed to create a laboratory to integrate all the activities of the Manhattan Project into a cohesive design for the atomic plan. His first choice to create and lead the laboratory was Ernest Lawrence, so he flew out to the Rad Lab in Berkeley and asked for his help. Lawrence told Groves he had his hands full getting the Y12 plant operating, so he suggested he talk to his theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer. Groves did, and Oppenheimer was offered the position to lead the design laboratory, which was built at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Oppenheimer recruited fellow scientists from the Rad Lab to help him get things started but he needed to get established physicists into the project immediately.

At the top of his list was Enrico Fermi, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. Fermi obliged Oppenheimer to join the project but suggested his good friend Edward Teller should be recruited too, which Oppenheimer did. In the movie Teller is shown to be a shady looking character, argumentative, acting as a foil to Oppenheimer. There have been occasions when I met with Teller, either at work or just to socialize, and he was a warm and engaging man with a remarkable ability to explain difficult concepts of physics in a way that was understandable. Later in life he became a committed opponent of communism, driven by the way the Hungarian communist government had mistreated his sister. That passion led him to be impatient with anyone who disagreed with his political views.

The population of Los Alamos grew, and the movie portrayed new arrivals in curious ways. Richard Feynman (played by Jack Quaid), an American Nobel laureate, was played by a young man shaking his head and banging on bongo drums. That was an anachronism since Feynman didn’t pick up on the bongos until he had visited Brazil years after these events. There was a scene where Oppenheimer had an engaging chat with a blonde at a bar. She was the wife of Richard Tolman, the head of the physics department at CalTech. Tolman had given Oppenheimer an appointment at CalTech and had even offered him a place to live. At Los Alamos it was Tolman who had suggested using implosion to fix a problem with plutonium. Tolman’s fellow CalTech physicist, Sid Niedermeyer, provided the details for the plutonium pit design. Oppenheimer repaid Tolman’s kindness by having an affair with his wife.

Before departing for Los Alamos, Fermi and Teller went on a walk when Fermi asked his friend whether the energy from an atomic detonation could ignite fusion reactions; that is, cause hydrogen atoms to collide and fuse together in what were called thermonuclear reactions, which released energy. Teller, who adored his Italian colleague, later answered it was possible; he called the new weapon the Super. When he arrived at Los Alamos, Teller asked to create a program to design a Super weapon, and Oppenheimer agreed to let him form a design group; Fermi gave a series of lectures to Los Alamos physicists that laid out the basic principles behind designing the Super. Throughout the war years Teller’s group made little headway. Once the designs for the atomic bombs were complete, Oppenheimer shut down research on the thermonuclear weapon and Teller joined Fermi in Chicago.

In 1946 Oppenheimer left Los Alamos to rejoin Lawrence’s Rad Lab in Berkeley. In leaving, he underwent a change of character and told those scientists who were staying that it was immoral to do research on nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, the new director who replaced Oppenheimer, a scientist named Norris Bradbury, tried to rejuvenate thermonuclear research. He offered Teller a contract to return to Los Alamos to continue his wartime research and organized a conference to update the knowledge that had been gained during the war. During the conference a German expatriate named Klaus Fuchs (played by Christopher Denham) partnered with Hungarian born mathematician John von Neumann and the pair applied for and received a patent for the hydrogen bomb. That year also saw Congress pass the Atomic Energy Act that established the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to oversee atomic research. A General Advisory Committee (GAC) was established to give technical advice to the AEC commissioners and Oppenheimer was appointed to be the first chairman of the GAC.

In 1949 the Soviet Union detonated an atomic bomb that was an exact duplicate of the implosion device developed during the war. Klaus Fuchs and at least a score of others were arrested as being Soviet spies. Just as he had argued ten years earlier that an atomic threat loomed that would come from Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Lawrence once again went to Washington to warn the government that a thermonuclear threat was looming from Stalin’s Soviet Union. Using his chairmanship of the GAC as a bully pulpit, Oppenheimer responded that if we developed the H bomb the Russians would certainly do so too, but they might not if we gave up developing one.

With a sympathetic AEC chairman, David E. Lilienthal, Oppenheimer forestalled any further thermonuclear research. Meanwhile, Lawrence argued that the Russians had most likely already started a thermonuclear program. They had – Igor Tamm led the program and he had already hired a young physicist named Andre Sakharov.

In heated debates Congress asked the AEC what the American response to the Soviet nuclear test should be, and Oppenheimer wrote a GAC decision paper that said members of his committee opposed development of the Super on moral grounds. It is interesting to note that Jewish physicists such as Oppenheimer and Bethe, who had experienced life in a Nazi regime, were adamant to develop an atomic bomb before Hitler did, but they seemed to be more receptive for a socialist government to be a nuclear power, while Jewish physicists who had experienced life in communist governments in Eastern Europe were adamant to develop a thermonuclear weapon before Stalin had one.

Back at Los Alamos, a Polish born mathematician by the name of Stanislav Ulam had conducted an intensive set of calculations that suggested Teller’s model of the Super was a fizzle – it wouldn’t work. Teller was livid, but Ulam got together with him and the two came up with a new model that looked like it would work.

John Wheeler, that wizard who had explained nuclear fission with Bohr, had responded to a call for help from Teller and after weeks of intensive work one of Wheeler’s physicists, Ken Ford, provided calculations that suggested the “new Super” model would work. Teller later appeared before the GAC and asked that a second laboratory be created that would emphasize thermonuclear research, but the committee, led by Oppenheimer, went against Teller’s request. Tom Murray, an AEC commissioner, disheartened by the negativity he saw, flew out to Berkeley and asked Lawrence to create a second nuclear weapons laboratory. On September 2, 1952, the Livermore Laboratory opened its gates.

The new laboratory did not start off too well. Teller had been recruited to join, and since he was the only physicist present who had nuclear testing experience, he was chosen to lead the warhead design effort. Teller pursued his dreams from the Manhattan Project and experimented with testing two nuclear devices that mixed hydrogen with uranium, most likely to get a thermonuclear blast out of the atomic explosion. Both experiments failed. Worse, the following year Teller led the effort to test a thermonuclear device and it too failed. The director of Los Alamos, Norris Bradbury, wrote the AEC that the new laboratory was a failure and should either be shuttered or at least made to support Los Alamos nuclear tests.

It was at this time that a letter arrived at the office of the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. The letter had been written by a former chief of staff of the Congressional committee that oversaw atomic energy, William Borden, who had been a B-24 bomber pilot in the war. It claimed Oppenheimer’s wife, mistress, and brother were members of the Communist Party, that Oppenheimer himself contributed to communist organizations, and that Oppenheimer had lied to army investigators about attempts of the communist party to obtain atomic secrets from him. President Eisenhower had just issued an executive order that all government employees with security clearances that exhibited suspicious behavior must be investigated, and Borden’s letter certainly meant that Oppenheimer had to be investigated. Hoover forwarded the letter to President Eisenhower, who then called AEC chairman Louis Strauss (played in the film by Robert Downy Jr.) to his office and ordered him to revoke Oppenheimer’s clearance.

When notified of this, Oppenheimer called up Ken Nichols that night and asked for his advice. Nichols told Oppenheimer that since he was the AEC general manager, he could not provide him with legal advice. Oppenheimer mulled it over and demanded a hearing to restore his clearance. At the hearing, he admitted he had lied to security about communist moves to meet with him, and when asked why he had lied, he could only offer an excuse that he was an idiot.

If the hearing ended then, Oppenheimer would have forfeited his security clearance and the matter would have ended. But AEC chairman Strauss wanted to prove that Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy. To do that he wanted to show how Oppenheimer had hindered progress on thermonuclear research and the chief witnesses to prove that would be the men from Berkeley and the new laboratory in Livermore, with Lawrence and Teller being most notable. None of those men thought Oppenheimer was a spy, and Ken Nichols argued against bringing up the matter of Oppenheimer’s opposition to thermonuclear research, but Strauss was insistent.

When Lawrence traveled to Washington to testify against his old friend, he was accosted by Isidor Rabi, who had temporarily replaced Oppenheimer as the chairman of the GAC. The confrontation brought home to Lawrence that when added to the failure of his laboratory’s last nuclear test, his testimony against Oppenheimer could shut down his laboratory before it had a chance to start. He was shaken and at a banquet that night, he went to the restroom and vomited blood from an attack of colitis. He returned to Berkeley and had to make do with a deposition.

Teller arrived next and testified that Oppenheimer had indeed used his position at the AEC to stymy thermonuclear research. For that performance Teller was ostracized by practically the entire physics community of America. He was so stressed he too suffered an attack of colitis and was hospitalized. With the leaders of the new laboratory in the hospital, the leadership of the nuclear weapons program fell on the shoulders of two group leaders, thirty-two-year-old Johnny Foster and 28-year-old Harold Brown. Within two months they co-authored a document written to the scientists and engineers of the laboratory: they were abandoning the course set by Teller; they would set out with revolutionary designs to provide the country with a viable nuclear deterrent against a hostile Soviet Union.

In 1960 John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States. Within six months of his inauguration he would be faced with a nuclear crisis that was arguably more dangerous than the Cuban missile crisis he would face a year later. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave an ultimatum to Kennedy to withdraw American troops from West Berlin within six months because the Red Army was going to occupy it. Kennedy refused to abandon the two million Germans living in the city to communism and he let Khrushchev know it. The number of American GIs in Germany would be no match against the two-and-a-half million-man Russian Army and if a conflict started there was a good chance the American forces resort to battlefield tactical nuclear weapons to stem the Soviet advance. Kennedy ordered a program to build fallout shelters throughout the nation to better protect Americans in the event of a thermonuclear war. The country had just deployed a new nuclear weapon system that featured a small nuclear warhead designed and developed at Livermore that provided total protection against a Soviet surprise attack. With this new weapon Kennedy knew Khrushchev could not destroy America without seeing Russia destroyed as well, and the president later admitted that this knowledge gave him the backbone to stand up to Moscow. Khrushchev threw out his threats and Kennedy stood firm; eventually the Soviet succumbed to his situation and blinked. The deadline passed and the communist leader retaliated by building the Berlin Wall.

Six months later Kennedy reflected on how close the country had come to a disaster and he wanted to recognize those who had given him the means to stand up to a Russian thug and avert a nuclear war. He arranged to fly out to Berkeley to meet an elite group of physicists at the Rad Lab.

I asked Mike May, who stood inside the entrance to the Rad Lab, “Mike, what was it like to meet President Kennedy?”

Like Kennedy, Mike was a World War Two veteran — he had been an Army paratrooper.

“Tom,” he told me, “the president walked through the lobby with a broad smile on his face. He stepped up to me, shook my hand, and said thank you. It was the proudest day of my life.”

I knew then I had to tell his story.

Tom Ramos is the author of From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War from the U.S. Naval Institute Press. A physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Ramos was a member of the nuclear team that developed the X-ray laser for President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. He later supported U.S./Soviet arms control negotiations. Ramos, who graduated from West Point, commanded combat engineers before entering MIT to earn a degree in high energy physics.