Oppenheimer: Shotgun Security

A month or so ago, seven distinguished diplomats complained that official security policy has made safety-first and stagnation the rule in the State Department. The Administration, having shrugged this off, has now in the field of atomic energy proved its truth. Perhaps the handling of J. Robert Oppenheimer was necessary to steal a march on McCarthy, as the apologists have said, but this makes the affair no sweeter a commentary on the nation's approach to the problem of security.

To begin with, one must accept the possibility that the Administration has more damning material than has been published to date. Barring that, however, the indictment against Oppenheimer in calmer times would have stirred nothing but contempt for the small minds which put it together with such solemn urgency. Its main charge is based on an opinion the scientist expressed at a meeting of the AEC's Advisory Board in 1950. At that point he opposed the plan to develop the Hydrogen bomb, partly for technical and strategic reasons which apparently retain much force, and partly on grounds of morality. After Truman's decision on the matter, Oppenheimer continued to express his doubts and, if Fortune is any guide, continued to press upon his friends and officialdom his idea that a comprehensive radar defense system should have priority over the government's bigger-bang-for-a-buck project.

Regardless of what one thinks of his views, Oppenheimer's part in this debate was a necessary one; a discussion of the technical and strategic aspects of nuclear warfare without Oppenheimer would be, in the old phrase, like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Yet, for so serving his country, for giving his well informed and experienced opinion on a vital matter of state, he is now heavily penalized. He took an easily misrepresented position and that was enough, apparently, to make out a prima facie case of disloyalty against him.

There are other items in the charge, of course--just enough to invoke the Communist issue and thus justify, by the slick logic of the times, imputing the worst possible motives to Oppenheimer. Back in the thirties and early forties, he spoke with Communists and ex-Communists. He married someone who tasted Communism and spat it out. He joined and supported those organizations most vigorously opposed to Naziism, which to sensitive people then was as abhorrent as Communism is today. And so on. At the very worst, these were indiscretions. They are best explained by Oppenheimer himself as the result of the impact of a depression at home and barbarism abroad on one who lacked a "framework of political conviction or experience to give me perspective in these matters."

For all the wispiness of the indictment, it is difficult to boil with indignation. Any Administration with memories of Fuchs, the Rosenbergs, and such, is likely to be cautious in the extreme. Yet, considered from another point of view, its action is the opposite of caution. Against the background of the Fort Monmouth fiasco, the demoralization of the Voice of America, Stassen's defeat in the Greek Ship squabble, the humiliation of the Pentagon, and the disruption of the State Department, the Oppenheimer episode seems part and parcel of the process by which the government, through one branch or another, has stultified its most vital agencies and suppressed many brilliant and thoughtful men.

The consequences of this process are obvious. Had Oppenheimer kept his mouth shut four years ago and shied away from anything outside his field, or if he had refused to work for the government, he would now have no trouble. It is a logical outcome of the Administration's action this week that more and more people of ability will base their future job decisions on such reasoning. Another consequence is, as the seven diplomats said, an unwillingness among those who remain to say anything out of the ordinary--an unwillingness which with time will ripen into an inability. Whether this attrition of intelligence is carried out the quiet way, through "hard" security policies run by Scott McCleods, or the McCarthy way, through shotgun charges and noise, the result is the same.