Free Einstein's Genius Club by Katherine Williams Burton Feldman

clearance. Teller was thereafter reviled by a large part of the physics community.
    Oppenheimer, forced out of government service, went back to the Institute and physics, more serene in some ways, more troubled in others. He lived little more than a decade longer, dying of throat cancer in 1967. In his blunt way, Rabi insisted that the HUAC hearings were meant to kill Oppenheimer—and did. The Oppenheimer security trial is sometimes said to have inaugurated a new era in governmental suspicion and control of its scientists. Yet Oppenheimermust have known, during those uncomfortable interviews of 1943, that he had met his masters.
    Oppenheimer succeeded in building the bomb, and was eventually disgraced. Heisenberg failed, and was received in triumph.
DANGEROUS KNOWLEDGE: THE NEW SECURITY ORDER
    Einstein no sooner arrived in Princeton in 1933 than the FBI opened a file on him as a suspicious character. To keep him out of the country, the Woman Patriot group, made up of affluent right-wing women living in Washington, D.C., published a sixteen-page screed. They accused Einstein of being the true and “acknowledged world leader” of all Communist activity, outdoing “even Stalin himself” in this effort. Einstein meant to destroy all organized government, promote treason, organize unlawful “acts of rebellion against officers of the U.S. in time of war.” He was also a charlatan; his relativity theory was nonsense; he was moreover an atheist. 32 This was the first item in Einstein's FBI file. Einstein read a copy of the publication and thought it so funny he answered it in print lightheartedly. The FBI did not find it amusing; its fantasies would be repeated a thousand times over in that file. The FBI added this warning when it forwarded the file to Army G-2 in 1940:
    In view of his radical background, this office would not recommend the employment of Dr. Einstein on matters of a secret nature, without a very careful investigation, as it seems unlikely that a man of his background could, in such a short time, become a loyal American citizen. 33
    That same year, Einstein became a citizen of the United States. He would contribute to the war effort minimally, as a consultant to the Navy, with his wild hair intact.
    Even without Einstein's help, the Americans built the bomb and won the war. But an unexpected result was that a new and lasting conflict broke out around science and within it. Since they alone understood how to build such destructive weapons, physicists became indispensable to their governments as never before. The possession of such incalculably dangerous knowledge made them suspect—top security risks—to the authorities, who now could not do without them, but in many ways did not quite know what to do with them. For the scientists, there was an added sting of self-suspicion: After the bombs had burned away Japanese cities and their people, science itself became suspect to many of its creators, innocent no longer. Modern physics had earned a new and bitter pathos of its own. As early as 1945, Oppenheimer put it eloquently:
    We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world. We have made a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And… we have raised again the question of whether science is good for men. 34
    Until the destruction of Hiroshima, the atom bomb was a project under the tightest wraps. The atom bomb was a weapon that would bring a truly “total” war and threaten the very existence of humanity anywhere on the globe. In the short run, the weapon gave the United States an advantage over rivals such Germany and the USSR.
    By 1945, the United States had poured four billion dollars into the atom bomb project, an astonishing sum for that time. The project involved thousands of technicians, vast tracts in Tennessee and Washington, and Los Alamos in New Mexico. It was kept so