United States Department of State

The United States Department of State enters the narrative at the meeting point of foreign policy, nuclear strategy, and personal mobility. Its leaders weighed whether the United States should build a vastly more destructive thermonuclear weapon, while its authority over passports affected the lives and careers of scientists under political scrutiny. The department’s role was not uniform: it served as a venue for arms-control advice, a center of policy debate, and an institution capable of restricting travel.

Policy Debate Over the Super

After the Soviet Union’s successful atomic test, the question of a hydrogen bomb became a pressing policy problem. J. Robert Oppenheimer and the General Advisory Committee argued against a crash program, warning that a weapon with a possible yield of 100 million tons of TNT could destroy hundreds of square miles and might become a weapon of genocide. They also argued that building it would damage American security and world opinion, and that the existing atomic arsenal could provide an effective response if the Soviet Union developed such a weapon.

Dean Acheson, then secretary of state, was among the officials asked by President Harry S. Truman to study the issue again. Oppenheimer briefed him on the committee’s reasoning, but Acheson did not find the case for restraint persuasive. He understood the argument as an attempt to persuade a suspicious adversary to disarm by example. Oppenheimer’s encounter with Acheson made clear how few allies he had within the administration; it also showed the difficulty of translating a technically and morally qualified argument into terms that officials would accept as a workable security policy.

George F. Kennan and an Alternative Nuclear Policy

George F. Kennan, then director of the Policy Planning staff at the United States Department of State, became an important ally of Oppenheimer’s. Disillusioned by the increasingly militarized direction of containment and by the administration’s decision to establish an independent government in West Germany, Kennan had announced in September 1949 that he intended to leave government service. His engagement with Oppenheimer nevertheless continued through their shared concern about nuclear policy.

The two men developed a close friendship during 1949–50. Oppenheimer invited Kennan to Princeton for a classified seminar on nuclear weapons, and they also discussed British and Canadian access to uranium. During a visit to Princeton in November 1949, Kennan proposed that the president announce a moratorium on building the Super. Oppenheimer found the proposal reasonable but warned that officials in Washington would regard it as too dangerous. Kennan then drafted a possible presidential statement arguing that the weapon could have no purely military use, that the existing arsenal already deterred attack, and that an American decision to build the Super would encourage others to do the same.

The proposed speech was never delivered. Kennan instead developed its arguments into an eighty-page report, shown in draft to Oppenheimer and sent to Acheson on January 20, 1950, as a personal paper. Drawing on Oppenheimer’s analysis, Kennan warned that the bomb was being treated as an easy answer to profound political problems. He urged Acheson not to support a new weapon of almost unlimited destructive power without first attempting comprehensive arms-control negotiations with the Soviet Union. The report also argued that atomic weapons should remain secondary to the country’s basic military posture, with a small number sufficient to deter their use by an opponent. The department was therefore a channel through which a dissenting nuclear strategy could reach its senior leadership, even though the evidence does not establish that the report determined policy.

A Departmental Panel on Disarmament

In 1952, after resigning from the General Advisory Committee, Oppenheimer did not leave government advising altogether. Dean Acheson asked him to serve on the State Department Panel of Consultants on Disarmament, and the panel elected him chairman. Its members included Vannevar Bush, John Sloan Dickey, Allen Dulles, and Joseph Johnson; McGeorge Bundy served as recording secretary. The appointment extended Oppenheimer’s participation in official policy discussions at a time when he was frustrated with Washington and had intended to devote himself to physics.

The panel’s creation also illustrates the department’s continuing use of outside expertise. Oppenheimer’s advisory role followed his committee work on the Super and his discussions with Kennan, placing him once more in a position to assess disarmament questions. At the same time, his continued access was institutionally contingent: after he resigned from the General Advisory Committee, Gordon Dean persuaded him to remain available as a contract consultant, which automatically extended his top-secret Q clearance for another year. The department’s advisory machinery thus kept him close to policy even as his influence and political standing faced growing opposition elsewhere.

Passports and the Limits on Scientific Careers

The department also exercised a more immediate form of power through its control of international travel. After J. Robert Oppenheimer publicly corrected his testimony about Bernard Peters, Peters faced a career increasingly constrained by the political climate and the loss of access to classified and government research. His correction helped salvage his job, but it could not restore those opportunities.

Late in 1949, when Peters said he intended to travel to India, the United States Department of State refused to issue him a passport. The following year it relented, and Peters accepted a teaching position at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay. In 1955, however, the department refused to reissue his passport. Peters eventually took German citizenship; in 1959, he and Hannah moved to Niels Bohr’s institute in Copenhagen, where he spent the remainder of his career. These events distinguish the department’s administrative role from the decisions of universities and research employers, but they show how travel restrictions could add another barrier to a scientist’s professional life and shape the direction of his career.