Harvard was decidedly conservative

Harvard's political culture in the early 1920s was decidedly conservative. Soon after Robert Oppenheimer's arrival, the university imposed a quota to restrict the number of Jewish student. (By 1922, the Jewish student population had risen to twenty-one percent.) In 1924, the Harvard Crimson reported on its front age that the university's former president Charles W. Eliot had publicly declared it "unfortunate" that growing numbers of the "Jewish race" were intermarrying with Christians. Few such marriages, he said, turned out well, and because biologists had determined that Jews are "prepotent" the children of such marriages "will look like Jews only." While Harvard accepted a few Negroes, President A. Lawrence Lowell staunchly refused to allow them to reside in the freshman dormitories with whites.

From American Prometheus, the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Now read about a Harvard alumni with musical connections, who had strong views on Jews.
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The Winter's Tale

“Heck, I reckon you wouldn’t even be human beings if ya didn’t have some pretty strong feelings about nuclear combat.But I want ya to remember one thing, tha folks back home is a countin’ on ya, and by golly, we ain’t about to let ‘em down” Major Kong (Slim Pickens) to his B-52 aircrew when told to attack the Soviet Union. From the movie Doctor Strangelove.

In January 1968 the fears of a catastrophic nuclear accident that had haunted the scientists working on the wartime Manhattan Project were almost realised when an American B-52 bomber carrying four thermonuclear weapons with a reported combined yield of 4.4 megatons of TNT crashed in Greenland. The US Air Force base at Thule in Greenland was a strategically important early-warning station monitoring Soviet missile activity. Because of its importance and location the US government decided in the late '60s that the base was too vulnerable to Russian attack. So at least one US bomber armed with nuclear weapons was kept in the air all the time within radio range of the base. If Thule was attacked this bomber would be able to strike back against Russia, and the picture below shows one of the bombers, armed with nuclear weapons, at the base.


On 21st January 1968 a B-52 Stratofortress carrying seven crew members and four nuclear weapons was circling near Thule on such a mission when a fire started in the cabin heater. The captain tried to land the crippled bomber at the base, but the fire cut all power and the landing was abandoned. Six crew members baled out safely using their ejector seats, and the stricken bomber with one crew member on board (he could not escape as he did not have an ejector seat) flew over the base and crashed onto the sea ice seven miles west of the base. The bomber exploded on impact killing the remaining crew member, and the force of the explosion scattered the burning wreckage over a wide area. The crashing plane is reported to have severed the hot line telecommunications link from the base, triggering a false nuclear attack alert, and causing the Strategic Air Command to think for a short time that the Thule base had been attacked.

A complex sequence of actions was required to set off the nuclear bombs, and these safeguards thankfully meant that there was not a full nuclear explosion. But the deadly weapons are triggered by high explosives, and these did explode in all four bombs. The resulting explosion spread uranium, tritium and plutonium over a 700 meter radius. The heat from the burning plane caused the ice to melt, and debris, including the thermonuclear assembly from one of the bombs, fell through to the seabed.

The ensuing clean-up operation involved 3000 personnel, 38 naval ships, and the removal of 10,000 tons of snow and ice. But controversy continues as to how successful it was. A U.S. State Department document dated August 1968 said all the nuclear weapons had been ‘accounted for’, but failed to spell-out whether this actually meant they had been recovered. The Danish media claims that one of the thermonuclear weapons (picture right) was never recovered, and still lies on the seabed. A Pentagon spokesman is reputed to have made the following statement about the missing weapon, “I don’t know of any missing bomb, but we have not positively identified what I think you are looking for”.

A study in 1987 by a Danish medical institute showed that workers at the Thule base were 50% more likely to develop cancers than other Danish military personnel. 200 of the workers subsequently unsuccessfully sued the U.S. government, but the discovery process for the court case identified anomalies in health monitoring procedures.

Missing bomb, or no missing bomb, the Thule B-52 crash graphically confirmed the stanza from the Bhagavad Gita quoted by ‘Doctor Atomic’ Robert Oppenheimer before the very first atomic test, and quoted in my article about the Manhattan Project.

If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds

Eighteen years after the Thule accident fears of a full nuclear disaster were realised at Chernobyl in the former USSR (now Ukraine). Important safety procedures were disregarded while testing one of the reactors in the Chernobyl nuclear power plant located 80 miles north of Kiev. In the early morning of 25th April 1986 the chain reaction in one reactor escalated out of control. The subsequent explosion blew off the reactor's heavy steel and concrete lid (right), releasing a fireball with 'the radiance of a thousand suns'. As well as those killed in the blast 28 people died within four months from radiation burns. 19 more died subsequently, and there have been a further nine deaths from thyroid cancer apparently due to the accident, bringing the total fatalities to 56. As a result of the high radiation levels in the surrounding area 135,00 people had to be evacuated

Nuclear energy is never far from the headlines. On the day I wrote this article Russia cut Ukraine's gas supplies, and triggered a knock-on gas shortage in other European countries. Concern over the stability of energy supplies triggered new calls for the development of further nuclear power stations. Among those who worked with the victims of the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear plant were International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), a non-partisan international grouping of medical organisations dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons. They work with the long-term victims of nuclear explosions and accidents in locations ranging from Hiroshima to Chernobyl, and their work has been recognised with the 1984 UNESCO Peace Prize, and 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. For the last 21 years IPPNW-Concerts has been working from its Berlin office with top musicians world-wide to raise funds for their work.

As well as being a fantastic cause there is some music well worth exploring available on IPPNW-Concerts' own CD label, and in co-productions with Swedish label BIS. These are all live recordings of concerts promoted by IPPNW over the years. There are forty-nine CDs in the catalogue with composers ranging from Monteverdi to Elliot Carter. The nuggets worth mining include Furtwängler's Te Deum (right) coupled with Brahms and Hindemith (CD40).

Wort und Musik - 60 Jahre nach Hiroshima is a live recording made at the March 2005 'Nuclear Weapons Inheritance Project' which mixes readings in German from a range of authors including Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein and Sadako Kurihara with relevent music including the aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Shostakovich's String Quartet No 8 and Schubert’s Quartettsatz. On the lighter side there are also a number of jazz recordings worth exploring, including the Berlin Philharmonic Jazz Group playing live in 2004 in the Philharmonie in Berlin with the world-famous baritone Thomas Quasthoff.

IPPNW co-productions with BIS also contain some real gems. My own favourite is a live Missa Solemnis from the Philharmonie in Berlin with Antal Doráti conducting the European Symphony Orchestra, University of Maryland Chorus, and a distinguished group of soloists. Another BIS co-production recorded at the Philharmonie with the New Berlin Chamber Orchestra and members of the Czech Philharmonic and HdK-Chamber Choir conducted by Martin Fischer-Dieskau includes two of Doráti’s own compositions (his Pater Noster, Prayer for Mixed Choir and Jesus oder Barabbas? a melodrama after a story by Karinthy Frigyes for Speaker, Orchestra and Choir) alongside works from Bartok and Martinu. Finally among the BIS co-productions a live Mahler Symphony No 9 with Rudolf Barshai conducting the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra is a rarity well worth investigating. All proceeds from the sale of these CDs benefit those in dire need as a result of war, industrial and natural catastrophe. Need I say more?

Picture credits: Header - Amazon, B-52 and nuclear bomb - Thule Forum, Chernobyl - BBC News, Image owners - if you do not want your picture used in this article please contact me and it will be removed.
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The radiance of a thousand suns

In August 1945 atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Around 120,000 people, of which 95% were civilians, were killed outright. It is estimated that a further quarter of a million died from the after effects of the explosions. Six days after the second bomb was dropped Japan surrendered unconditionally, removing the requirement for an invasion of the Japanese mainland by Allied forces , an engagement that would undoubtedly have resulted in dreadful casualties on both sides. Hopefully the music community, as well as the world, will remember 2005 as the sixtieth anniversary of these terrible events, as well as the year of the premiere of an opera by John Adams.

My attempts to understand the almost incomprehensible events of 1945 led me to the recently published 109 East Palace by Jennet Conant. This is the story of the extraordinary secret community of allied scientists at Los Alamos in New Mexico that, in a race against the clock, created the two bombs that were dropped on Japan. The Los Alamos scientists had also been racing to beat the threat of a German atomic weapon. Nazi scientists working in the Kiaser Wilhelm Institute for Physics in Berlin had discovered in 1938 that the splitting of a uranium atom set free enormous quantities of energy, opening up the possibility of a chain reaction creating an explosion of unheard-of power. Their 'uranium project' had the full backing of Nazi Minister of Arnaments Albert Speer, and one of the leading German physicists, Werner Heissenberg (who won the 1932 Nobel prize in physics) later said: 'Since September 1941 we saw a clear road towards the atom bomb.' Created initially to head off the German atomic threat the research centre at Los Alamos was led by the legendary J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Doctor Atomic of John Adam's opera.

The author of 109 East Palace is Jennet Conant, the granddaughter of former Harvard president and chief administrator of the Manhattan Project James B. Conant. She is unashamedly pro-Oppenheimer, and some will find this lack of objectivity a flaw, but despite this the new book makes a useful contribution to the Los Alamos literature. The title 109 East Palace comes from the nondescript office in Santa Fe that was the gatehouse for the secret compound created on the high mesa beyond the town. The book doesn't set out to be another academic study of Oppenheimer (right) and the development of the bombs. Instead it is a very human study of the people involved in the project, and the horrendous work pressures and ethical dilemnas that they faced. It tells how the young Oppenheimer failed to find a cure for his depression in medical treatment, and instead turned to Eastern mysticism, and in particular the Mahabharata, and other stories from the Hindu devotional poem the Bhagavad Gita. (Among others who turned to Hindu texts were T.S. Eliot in his Four Quartets, and somewhat surprisingly Beethoven, who in in his diary for 1816 wrote about the “Indian literature” he had been reading. After reading the Rig-Veda Beethoven wrote “God is immaterial and transcends every conception”.)

On the night before the first atomic test at the Trinity site Oppenheimer quoted this stanza from the Bhagavad Gita:

In battle, in forest, at the precipice in the mountain,
On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,
In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,
The good deeds a man has done before defend him

And after the first successful test explosion which confirmed the horrendous destructive power created by his team he quoted the lines where Vishnu tries to persuade the Prince to do his duty and take on his multi-armoured form:

If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst at once into the sky,
That would be like the splendor of the Mighty One...
I am become Death,
The shatterer of Worlds

Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant scientist and intellectual. After the war he was appointed director of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, where he was unofficial intellectual guru to an amazing roster of talent ranging from Nobel Prize winning physicists Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac, to the poet T. S. Eliot (neatly squaring the Sanskrit circle), and the historian Arnold Toynbee. Oppenheimer's mother was an artist, whose personal art collection included a Renoir, drawings by Picasso and Vuillard, a Rembrandt etching, and a Van Gogh. He was fond of the sonnets of John Donne, learnt Sanskrit to read the Hindu scriptures in the original, and read Marx's entire Das Kapital, in German, on a cross-country train trip. His musical tastes included Bach fugues and the late Beethoven Quartets, with the Op. 131 in C sharp Minor a particular favoutite.

Like every highly gifted person Oppenheimer was flawed. He was not averse to making highly damaging accusations against colleagues such Bernard Peters and Haakon Chevalier to throw the security services off his own scent as they investigated his left-wing sympathies. The political paths he continued to explore when working on the atomic bomb, and the doubts he later developed about the ethics of the develoment of the hydrogen bomb were used at the Gray Board hearings to categorise him as a security risk, and he lived out his final years as a marginalised figure.His treatment was a puzzling contrast to that handed out to scientists with proven Nazi connections. For instance the rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun joined the Nazi SS in 1939, and headed the Germans missile weapons project until 1945. As well as developing the V2 rocket which was used with considerable effect against Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands he was working on the A9/A10 rocket which was designed to reach as far as the USA. In 1945 von Braun, together with 500 employees, surrendered to US troops, and the key scientists and their prototype rockets were shipped to the US. In 1960 von Braun became director of the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, and in the 1970s he was made vice-director of NASA. Following his death in 1977 he was honoured with a statue, and the von Braun performance centre for the arts in Huntsville, Alabama.

Robert Oppenheimer fared less well, presumably because he was judged to have sympathised with the wrong enemy. The story of his security clearance and fall from grace is not covered in Doctor Atomic, which ends with the first test in 1945. I haven't seen the opera, but was impressed by the positive response it received. However from a distance ending it at the Trinity test seems a bit like ending the Ring with the Ride of the Valkyries. Interestingly 109 East Palace also tells us that John Adams was not the first to dramatise the Manhattan Project. In 1947 a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer blockbuster The Beginning or the End? hit the silver screens, with Hume Cronyn starring as Robert Oppenheimer, and Spencer Tracy as his military boss, General Leslie Groves. The film flopped at the box-office.

109 East Palace does not set out to be a biography of Robert Oppenheimer, or a detailed study of the Manhattan Project. The literature of the project is already very rich, with books such as Gregg Herken's extraordinarily well researched, detailed and virtually unreadable Brotherhood of the Bomb shortly to be joined by a new life of Oppenheimer from the late Abraham Pais. By contrast 109 East Palace is Oppenheimer-lite. Instead of placing him centre stage it uses an unpublished memoir by one of the first civilians recruited to the project, a young widow and Smith graduate Dorothy McKibbin, as the thread that binds the narrative together. McKibbin was close to Oppenheimer, and clearly besotted by him, which is another reason why the book lacks objectivity. 109 East Palace is useful book for anyone wanting to place the cold mechanics of weapons of mass destruction in a human context. But in the final analysis it is too superficial (much of the information in this article about the Manhattan Project comes from other sources) and subjective to provide anything more than a fascinating lightweight introduction to a subject that cries out for heavyweight coverage.

109 East Palace by Jennet Conant is published by Simon & Schuster ISBN 0-7432-5007-9
Los Alamos continues as a National Laboratory involved with nuclear weapons, and other activities. Interestingly, in view of the much publicised avian flu outbreaks, it is currently involved with researching influenza genetic codes. Visit the facility via this link
There are some excellent photos of Los Alamos and the test site, plus coverage of Doctor Atomic on New Yorker music critic, and fellow blogger, Alex Ross' web site.

International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) is a non-partisan international grouping of medical organisations dedicated to the abolition of nuclear weapons. They work with the long-term victims of nuclear explosions and accidents from Hiroshima to Chernobyl, and their work has been recognised with the 1984 UNESCO Peace Prize, and 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. For the last 21 years IPPNW-Concerts has been working from its Berlin office with top musicians world-wide to raise funds for their work. The organisation is run by medical practitioner Dr Peter Hauber and his wife, who I had the pleasure of meeting in Berlin last week.

As well as being a fantastic cause there is some music well worth exploring available on IPPNW-Concerts' own CD label, and in co-productions with Swedish label BIS. These are all live recordings of concerts promoted by IPPNW over the years. There are forty-nine CDs in the catalogue with composers ranging from Monteverdi to Elliot Carter. The nuggets worth mining include Furtwängler's Te Deum coupled with Brahms and Hindemith (CD40).

Of particular relevance to this article is Wort und Musik - 60 Jahre nach Hiroshima. This is a live recording made at the March 2005 'Nuclear Weapons Inheritance Project' which mixes readings in German from a range of authors including Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein and Sadako Kurihara with relevent music including the aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Shostakovich's String Quartet No 8 and Schubert’s Quartettsatz. On the lighter side there are also a number of jazz recordings worth exploring, including the Berlin Philharmonic Jazz Group playing live in 2004 in the Philharmonie in Berlin with the world-famous baritone Thomas Quasthoff.

IPPNW co-productions with BIS also contain some real gems. My own favourite is a live Missa Solemnis from the Philharmonie in Berlin with Antal Doráti conducting the European Symphony Orchestra, University of Maryland Chorus, and a distinguished group of soloists. Another BIS co-production recorded at the Philharmonie with the New Berlin Chamber Orchestra and members of the Czech Philharmonic and HdK-Chamber Choir conducted by Martin Fischer-Dieskau includes two of Doráti’s own compositions (his Pater Noster, Prayer for Mixed Choir and Jesus oder Barabbas? a melodrama after a story by Karinthy Frigyes for Speaker, Orchestra and Choir) alongside works from Bartok and Martinu. Finally among the BIS co-productions a live Mahler Symphony No 9 with Rudolf Barshai conducting the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra is a rarity well worth investigating. All proceeds from the sale of these CDs benefit those in dire need as a result of war, industrial and natural catastrophe. Need I say more?

Picture credits:
Nuclear explosion - UCL Astrophysics Group
Robert Oppenheimer - Gallery M
Book cover - Simon & Schuster
Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
If you enjoyed this post take An Overgrown Path to The year is '72 and Musicians against nuclear weapons