A. General Leslie R. Groves

"The Commission shall have determined that permitting such person to have access to restricted data will not endanger the common defense or security," and it mentions that the investigation should include the character, associations, and loyalty.

My interpretation of "endanger" - and I think it is important for me to make that if I am going to answer your question - is that it is a rea-sonable presumption that there might be a danger, not a remote pos-sibility, a tortured interpretation of maybe there might be something, but that there is something that might do. Whether you say that is 5 percent or 10 percent or something of that order does not make any difference. It is not a case of proving that the man is a danger. It is a case of thinking, well, he might be a danger, and it is perfectly logical to presume that he would be, and that there is no consideration whatsoever to be given to any of his past performances or his general usefulness or, you might say, the imperative usefulness. I don't care how important the man is, if there is any possibility other than a tortured one that his associations or his loyalty or his character might endanger.

Hans Bethe:
...Finally there was a very brilliant discovery made by Dr. Teller. It was one of the discoveries for which you cannot plan, one of the discoveries like the discovery of the relativity theory, although I don't want to compare the two in importance. But something which is a stroke of genius, which does not occur in the normal development of ideas. But somebody has to suddenly have an inspiration. It was such an inspiration which Dr. Teller had which put the program on a sound basis.

Only after there was such a sound basis could one really talk of a technical program. Before that, it was essentially only speculation, essentially only just trying to do something without having really a direction in which to go. Now things changed very much. After this brilliant discovery there was a program...

George F. Kerman:

...That is the view I hold of him. I have the greatest respect for Dr. Oppenheimer's mind. I think it is one of the great minds of this genera-tion of Americans. A mind like that is not without its implications.
Q. Without its what?
A. Implications for a man's general personality. I think it would be actually the one thing probably in life that Dr. Oppenheimer could never do, that is to speak dishonestly about a subject which had really engaged the responsible attention of his intellect. My whole impression of him is that he is a man who when he turns his mind to something in an orderly and responsible way, examines it with the most extraordinary scrupulousness and fastidiousness of intellectual process.

I must say that I cannot conceive that in these deliberations in Government he could have been speaking disingenuously to us about these matters. I would suppose that you might just as well have asked Leonardo da Vinci to distort an anatomical drawing as that you should ask Robert Oppenheimer to speak responsibly to the sort of questions we were talking about, and speak dishonestly.

....I also think it quite possible for a person to be himself profoundly honest and yet to have associates and friends who may be misguided and misled and for who either at the time or in retrospect he may feel intensely sorry and concerned. I think most of us have had the experience of having known people at one time in our lives of whom we felt that way.

Isador Rabi:
That the suspension of the clearance of Dr. Oppenheimer was a very unfortunate thing and should not have been done. In other words, there he was; he is a consultant, and if you don't want to consult the guy, you don't consult him, period.

...We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it, and what more do you want, mermaids? This is just a tremendous achievement. If the end of that road is this kind of hearing, which can't help but be humiliating, I thought it was a pretty bad show. I still think so.

Edward Teller:
...I know Oppenheimer as an intellectually most alert and very complicated person, and I think it would be presumptuous and wrong on my part if I would try in any way to analyze his motives.

...In a great number of cases I have seen Dr. Oppenheimer act-I under-stood that Dr. Oppenheimer acted in a way which for me was exceedingly hard to understand. I thoroughly disagreed with him in numerous issues and his actions frankly appeared to me confused and complicated. To this extent I feel that I would like to see the vital interests of this country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more.

In this very limited sense I would like to express a feeling that I would feel personally more secure if public matters would rest in other hands.

Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.

General Leslie Groves on Oppenheimer: "He's a genius. A real genius...Why, Oppenheimer knows about everything. He can talk to you about anything you bring up. Well not exactly. I guess there are a few things he doesn't know about. He doesn't know anything about sports."


K. D. Nichols, General Manager: (to oppenheimer)

....The Consumers Union was cited in 1944 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as a Communist-front headed by the Communist Arthur Kallet.

....you strongly opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb; (1) on moral grounds, (2) by claiming that it was not feasible, (3) by claiming that there were insufficient facilities and scientific personnel to carry on the development and (4) that it was not politically desirable.

....It was further reported that you were instrumental in persuading other outstanding scientists not to work on the hydrogen-bomb project, and that the opposition to the hydrogen bomb, of which you are the most experienced, most powerful, and most effective member, has definitely slowed down its development.

....In view of your access to highly sensitive classified information, and in view of these allegations which, until disproved, raise questions as to your veracity, conduct and even your loyalty, the Commission has no other recourse, in discharge of its obligations to protect the common defense and security, but to suspend your clearance...

Oppenheimer: (to K. D. Nichols)

Jean Tatlock / death in 1944 / Communist Party memberships

Loyalist cause in Spain / organization of migratory workers

1937, my father died

...teacher's union, which included faculty and teaching assistants at the university, and school teachers of the East Bay. continued until some time in 1941

...Sidney and Beatrice Webb's book on Russia, read in 1936, predisposed me to make much of the economic progress and general level of welfare in Russia, and little of its political tyranny

the purge trials / damning to the Soviet system

Placzek, Weisskopf, and Schein / physicists lived in Russia in the thirties

What they reported seemed to me so solid, so unfanatical, so true, that it made great impression; and it presented Russia, even when seen from their limited experience, as a land of purge and terror, of ludicrously bad management and of a long-suffering people.

Nazi-Soviet Pact / behavior of the Soviet Union in Poland and in Finland

I never accepted Communist dogma or theory; in fact, it never made sense to me. I had no clearly for-mulated political views.

I hated tyranny and repression and every form of dictatorial control of thought.

my wife / member of the Communist Party

I knew of no attempt to obtain secret information at Los Alamos. Prior to my going there my friend Haakon Chevalier with his wife visited us on Eagle Hill, probably in early 1943. During the visit, he came into the kitchen and told me that George Eltenton had spoken to him of the possibility of transmitting technical information to Soviet scientists. I made some strong remark to the effect that this sounded terribly wrong to me. The discussion ended there. Nothing in our long standing friendship would have led me to believe that Chevalier was actually seeking information; and I was certain that he had no idea of the work on which I was engaged.

No serious controversy arose about the super until the Soviet explosion of an atomic bomb in the autumn of 1949