ORNL Communications Director David Keim fielded questions for author Kai Bird (right). The April 21, 2023, Director's Lecture took place in the recently renovated Wigner Auditorium.
Kai Bird also described a former ORNL director's role.
In Friday’s (4/21/2023) Director’s Lecture, “The Oppenheimer Case: The Story Behind the Nullification of the 1954 Oppenheimer Security Decision,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Kai Bird recounted the effort to right a wrong committed against one of the science icons of the twentieth century — the revocation of the security clearance of Robert Oppenheimer, who led the scientific effort to develop the atom bomb during World War II.
The success of the Manhattan Project and the resulting atom bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, haunted Oppenheimer throughout the decade after the war. He also clashed with the military and government establishment over the development of the hydrogen bomb, which he opposed for both humanitarian and policy reasons. These were the days of McCarthyism and the Cold War: His detractors exhumed his and family members’ prewar dabblings with communist organizations, and a committee was convened in 1954 to review his security clearance.
In what Bird flatly calls a “kangaroo court,” Oppenheimer’s security clearance was revoked, which ended his scientific career. Several prominent friends and colleagues, likely out of fear for their own careers, failed to support him. Despite some accolades in the ensuing years — he received the Enrico Fermi Award from the then-Atomic Energy Commission during the final days of the Kennedy Administration — the revocation destroyed him personally. He died at age 62 in 1967.
Bird and co-author Martin Sherwin resolved to ride the success of American Prometheus, their biography of Oppenheimer that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006, with a campaign to seek a nullification of the 1954 decision from the head of the AEC’s descendant agency, the Department of Energy. In addition to the redemption of Oppenheimer, Bird and Sherwin believed it would restore the integrity of the clearance process, which they believed had been corrupted by the 1954 committee.
Nullification would also demonstrate that scientists and policymakers could debate honestly without fear of retribution, which Bird termed the worst outcome of the Oppenheimer clearance revocation.
What ensued was an odyssey of reluctance by officials, including Obama Administration Energy secretaries Steven Chu and Ernest Moniz, to intervene in what had been done half a century before despite the efforts of Bird, Sherwin and a host of allies that included congressional staffers who knew how to navigate the rocky Capitol waters. The story involved serendipity and luck both good and bad — one important connection occurred through the purchase of a ping-pong table some years before, while a leading Washington law firm backed out of the project because the 1954 committee was chaired by the father of one of the partners.
Eventually the clock ran out on the Obama Administration, and Bird said the nullification effort lay fallow until the Biden administration took office in 2021.
Mason’s intervention was extraordinary.
Thom Mason's role. Former ORNL Director Thom Mason played a major role in removing the chocks from the nullification wheels. Bird spoke with Mason on a visit to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where Mason is now director, and convinced him that nullifying the 1954 cancellation would both redeem Oppenheimer and the security clearance process. Mason drafted a letter to the Energy Secretary and also enlisted the support of the eight living Los Alamos lab directors.
“Mason’s intervention was extraordinary,” Bird said. “Here was a director of a science and weapons lab, a man ultimately responsible for adjudicating the security clearance process for thousands of scientists, urging the nullification of the 1954 Oppenheimer verdict.”
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, after her own review, agreed that reversing the 1954 revocation was important to the integrity of the security review process. She officially nullified the revocation, citing a “flawed process” that violated the Atomic Energy Commission’s own regulations.
There is a poignant end to the story. Sherwin, who began American Prometheus in the 1980s, two decades before Bird joined the effort, died of lung cancer a year before the nullification was formalized by Granholm last December.
“Secretary Granholm made a courageous decision,” Bird said. “This is the real tragedy of Oppenheimer. What happened to him damaged our ability as a society to debate honestly about scientific theories, the very foundation of our modern world.”— Bill Cabage