Review of The Open Mind by J. Robert Oppenheimer.

This collection of eight lectures is interesting from two different points of view. On the one hand, Dr. Oppenheimer is one of the few men who know all about nuclear weapons both from the scientific and from the governmental point of view. This gives weight to everything that he has to say on world affairs. But there is another point of view which has become important owing to the action of the authorities. Since Dr. Oppenheimer was refused security clearance his personality, his character and his outlook have become matters of public interest. I am quite unable to see how any candid person who has read this book and the evidence upon which the adverse verdict was based can fail to be convinced that that verdict was mistaken and resulted (to take the most favorable hypothesis) from a lack of comprehension of a very sensitive character accustomed, as all men of science should be, to the balancing of conflicting hypotheses. A policeman may say: “We do not want men who balance hypotheses. We want men of firm and unshakable convictions on the side of the Right. The open mind, forsooth! Can it be a virtue to have an open mind between right and wrong?” This outlook is common, and in a police force perhaps inevitable, but it is not that of men who are successful in scientific investigation. If the authorities insist upon employing only those whose orthodoxy is more impeccable than that of simpler men in the scientific preparation of nuclear weapons, they will do infinite damage to their country by excluding all men of first-rate scientific ability.

So much by way of generalities. To come to the particular case of Dr. Oppenheimer: Investigation made it undeniable that he has committed mistakes, one of them from a security point of view rather grave. But there was no evidence of disloyalty or of anything that could be considered treasonable. Such errors of judgment as there were resulted from an inability to see things simply, an inability which is not surprising in one possessed of a complex and delicate mental apparatus. He suffers, as all sensitive atomic scientists do, from the unintended horrors which their work has rendered possible. As he says: “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.” He speaks of “the deep trouble and moral concern which so many of us who are physicists have felt.” I do not see how any humane person engaged in the kind of work which Dr. Oppenheimer was doing could fail to have such feelings. I do not mean to suggest that the work ought not to have been done. The scientists were caught in a tragic dilemma, and even the most conscientious of them might justly feel that no good could come of an individual or unilateral refusal to engage in the researches that governments demanded. But it is not difficult to understand how, in moments when intricate political arguments were forgotten, the sense of sin of which Dr. Oppenheimer speaks would return. It is a shocking thing that policemen, who have no such sense, should be considered morally superior to those who have it.

The development of Dr. Oppenheimer’s own opinions is perfectly clear. Like many others of liberal outlook he had when young hopes that it might be possible to co-operate with the Soviet Government. These hopes gradually faded and finally died at the time of the Russian rejection of the Baruch Plan. A propos of this, he says: “Openness, friendliness and co-operation did not seem to be what the Soviet Government most prized on this earth. … We came to grips, or began to come to grips, with the massive evidences of Soviet hostility.” From these and many other passages it is clear that Dr. Oppenheimer’s attitude to Russia had become all that the American authorities could wish.