THE ATOM: The Oppenheimer Case

THE ATOM The Oppenheimer Case Swirling last week amid the currents of opinion stirred up by Russia’s Sputniks was a demand for a re-examination of the decade’s most sensational security-risk case: the Atomic Energy Commission’s 1954 decision revoking the security clearance of Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, wartime director of the Los Alamos A-bomb laboratory and later chairman of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee. A three-man special board headed by the University of North Carolina’s President Gordon Gray (now Defense Mobilization Director) concluded in 1954 that Oppenheimer was a loyal citizen, but that past “disregard for the requirements of the security system” made him a security risk. Director of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, Oppenheimer. 53, has been deep in basic research in atomic physics since the Gray board decision, but has had nothing to do with Government research or national secrets.

Last week Electronics Executive Trevor Gardner (Hycon Mfg. Co.), who stalked out as Air Force research chief last year in protest against lagging missile development, suggested a new look at the Oppenheimer case “in light of today’s problems.” Senate Democrats took up Gardner’s theme. Declared Washington’s Senator Henry M. (“Scoop”) Jackson: it would be “entirely proper for the AEC to arrange a rehearing and a reconsideration in light of present circumstances.” Chorused Florida’s George Smathers: “We must do everything we can to enlist all the brainpower on our side.” Said New Mexico’s Clinton P. Anderson, vice chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy: “Mr. Oppenheimer was indiscreet in many of the things he said, but you have to take genius the way it exists.” Some scientists backed up the politicians. Said Columbia University’s Nobel Prizewinning Physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi, chairman of President Eisenhower’s Science Advisory Committee: reinstatement of Oppenheimer would be “a source of encouragement to the whole scientific community.”

The most unexpected comment came from Thomas E. Murray, former AECommissioner and now a consultant to Capitol Hill’s Atomic Energy Committee. Back in 1954. when the AEC upheld the Gray board’s findings by a vote of four to one, Murray not only voted with the majority but added an extra sting of his own by declaring that Oppenheimer’s disregard for the security system made him, in a special sense, “disloyal.” Last week Murray said that he saw “no objection” to a rehearing and “would not be at all displeased” if Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance is reinstated.