39 



Oppenheimer's opposition to the hydrogen bomb project led to 

 professional and personal opposition to him within the Department 

 of Defense and elsewhere, including from the formidable AEC Com- 

 mission chairman, Lewis Strauss. On 7 November 1953, the former 

 executive director of Congress's Joint Committee on Atomic 

 Energy, William L. Borden, addressed a letter to FBI director J. 

 Edgar Hoover accusing Oppenheimer of being an agent of the 

 Soviet Union. Wanting to avoid another investigative spectacle by 

 Senator McCarthy, members of the Eisenhower Administration 

 urged the AEC to conduct its own internal review of the Oppen- 

 heimer case. The agency, with the full support of Strauss, com- 

 plied. Beginning in mid-April 1954, Oppenheimer was made the 

 subject of four weeks of formal hearings within the AEC to deter- 

 mine if he was a security risk. Despite the highly questionable 

 nature of the evidence and arguments, much of it loaded with in- 

 nunendo and farfetched inference, the fears fed by McCarthyism 

 led to the 27 May decision that Oppenheimer was loyal but should 

 nevertheless be considered to be a security risk. As a result of this 

 judgment, Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearances and 

 his various government connections were terminated — all of which 

 seriously limited his ability to make future recommendations on 

 science policy. The ruling, which gained nationwide press coverage, 

 was held by many to be unjust. Nowhere was this more true than 

 within the scientific community. 



Reflecting the scientists' concern over their government's obses- 

 sion with security, the National Science Foundation decided 

 against instituting security checks for its prospective grantees, in 

 part because the Foundation supported only unclassified research. 

 The awards of research grants remained based on the investigator's 

 competence and the merit of the research topic. The National Sci- 

 ence Board adopted this policy in 1954 with the limiting condition 

 that the NSF "would not knowingly support the research of an 

 avowed Communist or an individual who had been determined to 

 be a Communist by judicial proceedings or by an unappealed deter- 

 mination of the attorney general or the Subversive Activities Con- 

 trol Board, or of an individual who advocated change in the form of 

 government by other than constitutional means." 11 Also excluded 

 from NSF support were convicted saboteurs. Both the American 

 Association for the Advancement of Science and the National 

 Academy of Sciences supported this policy, and President Eisen- 

 hower made it government-wide in 1956. 12 



Summary 



Between 1950 and 1957, the various components that comprised 

 the Federal system for the support of science were solidified. This 

 system — the basis of which had been laid in the five years after 

 World War II — was highly pluralistic in its make-up. Defense-relat- 



1954); Joseph Alsop and Stewart Alsop, We Accuse! The Story of the Miscarriage of American 

 Justice in the Case of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954); Philip M. 

 Stern, The Oppenheimer Case: Security and Trial (New York: Harper and Row, 1969); Herbert F. 

 York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 

 1976); and Barton J. Bernstein, "The Oppenheimer Conspiracy," Discover, 6 (March 1985), 22-32. 



1 ' Wilson, Academic Science, p. 27. 



12 Ibid. 



