Tag: J. Robert Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer and Putin’s Suitcases

“You know, when the [United] States already had nuclear weapons and the Soviet Union was only building them, we got a significant amount of information through Soviet foreign intelligence channels . . . . They were carrying the information away not on microfilm but literally in suitcases. Suitcases!” Vladimir Putin, 2012[1]

I recently cited evidence that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atomic Bomb, was a security risk if ever there was one, yet he got what Albert Einstein could not: security clearance to work on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, New Mexico, which the legendary physicist (and leftwing activist and Zionist) had urged on President Roosevelt. As Oppenheimer was a pro-Soviet Communist, I thought it ironic that in 1946 Ayn Rand, who fled the Communist system that had impoverished her family, interviewed him for a stillborn movie project. Neither of them (or anyone else to my knowledge) ever noted that irony.

Oppie’s Red politics was not a youthful, romantic fling from which he was detached only by the imperative of stopping Hitler. Two days ago Diana West, having read my post, wrote to suggest that while Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, the scholarly witnesses that informed my post, established the color of Oppie’s politics, there is evidence that he crossed the line demarcating political activity from disloyalty. I am grateful to her for pointing me toward that evidence, part of which I now pass along to you. Continue reading “Oppenheimer and Putin’s Suitcases”

When Rand Met Oppenheimer: A Neglected Irony

Ayn Rand, early 1940s

Sometimes a fact can be so plain that it’s overlooked, so obvious as to be devious. Herbert Aptheker’s conspicuous silence about C. L. R. James, for example, took me 40 years to notice. (To my knowledge, no one else had noticed it before or since). The absence of any mention by the passionately anti-communist Ayn Rand about the cerebral Communist “Father of the Atomic Bomb” J. Robert Oppenheimer is a silence that neither she nor any Objectivist writer felt comfortable addressing afterward.

From reading Jennifer Burns’s 2009 The Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right, I’ve learned that in 1946, basking in the success of her novel The Fountainhead, Oscar-winning film producer Hal Wallis (Casablanca,  The Maltese Falcon) tasked her to write screenplays, one of them titled Top Secret:

J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1944

Rand began a careful investigation of the Los Alamos [New Mexico atomic bomb] project, even securing an extensive audience with the atomic scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan Project. The film was never produced, but Rand’s encounter with Oppenheimer provided fuel for a character in her developing novel, the scientist Robert Stadler.[1]

Burns didn’t source this assertion. (I wish I had picked up Burns’s book when it came out.) I was therefore pleased to find a 2023 essay by Ayn Rand Institute archivist, Brandon Lisi: Continue reading “When Rand Met Oppenheimer: A Neglected Irony”