In the Shadow of the Bomb: Bethe, Oppenheimer, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist (review)

In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the Moral Responsibility of the Scientist. By S. S. Schweber. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xviii+260. $24.95.

Silvan S. Schweber's In the Shadow of the Bomb is a rare example of a successful hybrid work. It is neither a full biography of physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Hans Bethe nor a complete study of postwar American science and its ethical dilemmas. Instead, it is an examination of the professional, personal, and scientific lives of two men, and the ways in which they confronted the changes in science and politics before and after World War II. Schweber entwines issues of science, technology, ethics, and politics in a relatively seamless manner, bringing in each lens of analysis at the appropriate time.

In the Shadow of the Bomb is much more than a work in the Great Man tradition. Schweber places both Oppenheimer and Bethe in the context of the Enlightenment and then within the ethical and moral framework that shaped their upbringing. For Oppenheimer, this was the Ethical Culture Society of Felix Adler, with its emphasis on political reform and uplift. Bethe had a far different trajectory. He was educated in the German milieu of Bildung, which stressed the whole person as an intellectual, ethical, and political being. Schweber argues that this provided Bethe with an ethical and moral compass that guided him through a long career far more smoothly than did Oppenheimer's political instincts.

The fork in the road for these two men was the Manhattan Project. When it began, Oppenheimer and Bethe were on parallel paths. By the end of the war Oppenheimer had used the new atomic age as a means of becoming a powerful political figure, dropping the active pursuit of science. Bethe returned to research, maintaining ties to weapons development at Los Alamos. When the hydrogen bomb was first proposed, Bethe refused to work on it, considering it a destabilizing force. With the deepening of the cold war he relented, but never worked on the device with the energy he had invested in the Manhattan Project. From the 1950s to the present, he has advocated arms control.

The two men confronted McCarthyism differently as well. Schweber details how Oppenheimer turned on his graduate students, allowing them to be savaged in the press as Communists. Several of his former students were fired from university positions, not to work in science again until decades later. Bethe, while under similar pressure, defended colleagues who ran afoul of investigating committees, and quietly rallied support for them to keep their jobs. Unlike Oppenheimer, Bethe had no Communist ties of his own to hide during the period, but Schweber stresses that Bethe also had a strong ethical and moral commitment to fellow scientists that did not allow him to sell others out for personal advancement or survival.

Most strikingly for a book of this type, Schweber pursues the thorny issue of Oppenheimer's personal crises in the 1920s. Schweber has little evidence of Oppenheimer's private thoughts and desires but makes a case that he wrestled with a sexual identity more complex than was socially acceptable. Did Oppenheimer feel a need to act tough in the wartime and postwar world to prove his masculinity and heterosexuality? Ronald Takaki has argued that Harry Truman was fighting against an image as a "sissy" when he ordered using nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one can say whether Oppenheimer faced similar internal and external pressures, but Schweber's raising of the issue of sexual identity in this book is both provocative and appropriate.

In the Shadow of the Bomb presents a model of how to write respectfully of individuals while portraying them as fallible human beings in a complex cultural, political, intellectual and scientific context. One hopes that other scholars will...