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PARTISAN REVIEW
Rumor is now given most uncomfortable substance as we study the
record and begin to understand the kind of interest Dr. Oppenheimer
challenged, both as a personality and a policy-maker, and the
strength of personal and professional feeling which might very well
have dictated his elimination from the scientific-military community.
After all, the fact of Dr. Oppenheimer's past association with Com–
munist activities was hardly news in 1953 and '54. It was no news
even in 1943, when Dr. Oppenheimer was put in charge of Los
Alamos. And the record frequently reminds us that in 1947 there
was another loyalty check-up on him, and Dr. Oppenheimer was
cleared by the Atomic Energy Commission. Yet now, more than six
years later, his case is reopened and not on the basis of significant
new evidence against him-most of what is new and significant that
can now be charged against Dr. Oppenheimer was discovered or
established in the hearings and was not sufficiently known to the
Commission to have compelled a reinvestigation- but, at best, on
the basis of making security doubly sure according to the latest se–
curity rulings. Inevitably, seeking an explanation of why what might
have been handled as a routine check-up was launched like a full–
scale man-hunt, we are returned to the history of the last six years
of scientific-military development in the United States and, most
crucially, to the year 1949 when our scientific-military community
broke into the two warring camps which would seem now to have
met in final battle.
It was in the fall of 1949, we remember, that Russia exploded
an A-bomb and that a group of distinguished physicists, Dr. Teller
chief among them, immediately sprang into action with a program
for pursuit of a super weapon with which to outdistance the Soviet
Union. They were supported by a certain section of the academic
world and certain branches and persons in the military and in Gov–
ernment. On the other side, opposed to a crash program for the
H-bomb, was a group of scientists of whom Dr. Oppenheimer is de–
scribed as "the most experienced, most powerful and most effective" ;
this group also had the support of certain government persons. Dr.
Oppenheimer was then Chairman of the General Advisory Com–
mittee of the Atomic Energy Commission. In October 1949 this
Committee met and although it encouraged further research into
thermonuclear reactions, it made strong recommendation against a
