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Death Wish. Other names usually mentioned only as footnotes in stories about the A-bomb suddenly acquire personality in Lawrence and Oppenheimer. While wiser and more experienced scientists at a Los Alamos meeting discussed a gun-and-bullet technique for igniting the Abomb, tall, bony Seth Neddermeyer sat quietly, visualizing uranium spheres squeezed like oranges. Finally, he spoke up haltingly for the principle of implosion, understanding it instinctively but expressing it so clumsily that he made little impression on anyone—except Oppenheimer, who encouraged him to devise what finally became an efficient triggering mechanism for nuclear weapons.
And there was Louis Slotin, a morose Canadian with an apparent death wish, who conducted tests of critical assemblies by poking curved segments of uranium or plutonium together with a screwdriver while eying his Geiger counter and neutron monitor. One day in 1946, nudging segments of a Bikini test bomb a little too close, he suddenly saw a blue ionization glow in the room—the sign of a dangerously radioactive reaction. He threw his body over the segments until everyone else in the room could hurry out. Although the others lived, Slotin achieved his death wish. He died in agony nine days later, of radiation poisoning.
Ferocious Energy. Davis, for all his attention to the others is continually drawn back to the enigmatic, mesmerizing personality of Oppenheimer. He describes a young scientist so lost in the abstractions of physics that he once drove an automobile up the courthouse steps of a Western town, a man so unworldly that he had no radio, did not read newspapers and first heard about the 1929 stock-market crash months after it happened.
Jarred into political consciousness in the middle '30s by the ravages of the Depression on his students and the rise of Nazi Germany, Oppenheimer became too suddenly a social activist, naively lending his support to Communist as well as liberal causes. By the time the U.S. entered World War II, however, Oppenheimer had become disenchanted with Communism. Called upon to head the Los Alamos atom-bomb laboratory after a brilliant teaching career at Berkeley, he turned to his new assignment with ferocious energy, wasting away to 116 Ibs., but performing what even his enemies admit was a "magnificent" job in producing a workable bomb.
After the war, Oppenheimer remained an adviser to the Atomic Energy Commission and argued fruitlessly against the creation of the H-bomb, insisting that it would only stimulate the Russians into building one too. In the hysterical climate of the early 1950s, his anti-H-bomb stand and his well-known earlier association with Communists led to the lifting of his security clearance. In the celebrated 1954 hearing that followed, the AEC refused to reinstate his clearance but made it clear that it was not questioning his loyalty, only his veracity, conduct and associations.