[OPPENHEIMER, J. Robert]. UNITED STATES ATOMIC ENERGY COMMISSION. In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Transcript of hearing before personnel security board. Washington D.C.: United States Government Printing Office. 1954.
8vo. Contemporary red cloth, gilt lettering to spine; pp. 992, [ii, list of witnesses]; previous owner’s signature in blue biro to ffep, very good.
First edition of the transcript of the hearing held at the height of McCarthyism that resulted in the removal of Oppenheimer’s security clearance due to his supposed Communist sympathies. The FBI had been bugging his phone since the 1940s due to reports from informers inside the Communist party, and he testified that he had associations with the party in a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing in 1949. Yet despite his political leanings and his grave doubts about the H-bomb, there was no evidence that he was a spy, and the allegations of disloyalty that brought about the 1954 hearing were based mainly upon the paranoid and self-protective testimony of colleagues such as Edward Teller. It later emerged that Oppenheimer had in fact removed Soviet-leaning colleagues from the Manhattan Project. It was also shown that he had never passed secrets to the Russians. His condemnation rested on the anti-Communist fever of the 1950s and on the suspicions aroused by his own mercurial, arrogant and distant character. In 2022 the revocation of his security clearance was posthumously reversed, and in 2023 Christopher Nolan released the film Oppenheimer based upon the events detailed in the transcript.
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