Vacated

Everyone knows the story. The physicist who built the atomic bomb was destroyed in 1954 by a security hearing, punished for what the government had learned about his politics. It had learned none of it in 1954. Leslie Groves ordered him cleared in July 1943 over the objection of his own security officers, who had read the file. The Atomic Energy Commission read that same file entire in August 1947 and recorded the clearance a second time, Lewis Strauss among the commissioners who let it stand. In 1954, on the same evidence and with nothing added, a security board took it away.

That sequence is the argument, a matter of dates rather than psychology. Between 1949 and 1953 J. Robert Oppenheimer had opposed a crash hydrogen program, argued in public for air defense and tactical weapons rather than larger city-killers, made Strauss look ridiculous over an isotope export, and published the image of two great powers as scorpions in a bottle. He had stopped being useful and started being an argument.

The book refuses the martyr reading, and two chapters make it impossible. In his own kitchen, Haakon Chevalier told him that George Eltenton could pass technical information to the Soviet Union, and Oppenheimer said it would be wrong. Eight months later he gave Army security a version involving three intermediaries that was not true, and kept telling it until Groves ordered him to name the man. Nobody knows why he told it, and the book says so rather than guessing. Before a congressional committee in 1949 he called his former student Bernard Peters quite a red. The remark leaked, and by 1951 Peters had left for Bombay, unable to get work in the United States. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm vacated the 1954 decision in 2022, an order that clears a procedure rather than a man. The last chapter goes to the Tularosa Basin, where ranching families lived within fifty miles of the tower, unwarned and unevacuated, drinking rainwater out of cisterns.