J. Robert Oppenheimer

J. Robert Oppenheimer
J. Robert Oppenheimer, c. 1944
Born	(1904-04-22)April 22, 1904 New York City, New York, United States
Died	February 18, 1967(1967-02-18) (aged 62) Princeton, New Jersey, United States
Citizenship	United States
Alma mater	Harvard University University of Cambridge University of Göttingen
Known for	Atomic bomb development Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit Oppenheimer-Phillips process, Born–Oppenheimer approximation
Awards	Enrico Fermi Award
Scientific career
Fields	Theoretical physics
Institutions	Manhattan Project University of California, Berkeley California Institute of Technology Institute for Advanced Study
Doctoral advisor	Max Born
Notable students	Julian Schwinger Stan Frankel Samuel W. Alderson
Notes
Brother of physicist Frank Oppenheimer

Julius Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is best known for his role as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the World War II project that developed the first nuclear weapons, for which he is often referred to as the "father of the atomic bomb". In reference to the Trinity test in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was detonated, Oppenheimer famously recalled the Bhagavad Gita: "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... Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

After the war Oppenheimer was a chief advisor to the newly created United States Atomic Energy Commission and used that position to lobby for international control of nuclear power and to avert the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union. After provoking the ire of many politicians with his outspoken political opinions during the Red Scare, he had his security clearance revoked in a much-publicized and politicized hearing in 1954. Though stripped of his direct political influence Oppenheimer continued to lecture, write, and work in physics. A decade later President John F. Kennedy awarded (and Lyndon B. Johnson presented) Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of political rehabilitation.

Oppenheimer's notable achievements in physics include the Born–Oppenheimer approximation, work on electron–positron theory, the Oppenheimer–Phillips process, and the first prediction of quantum tunneling. With his students he also made important contributions to the modern theory of neutron stars and black holes, as well as work on the theory of quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and the interactions of cosmic rays.

As a teacher and promoter of science, Oppenheimer is remembered most for being the chief founder of the American school of theoretical physics while at the University of California, Berkeley, contributing significantly to the rise of American physics to its first era of world prominence in the 1930s. After the second World War, he contributed to American scientific organizations again, as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he held Einstein's old position of Senior Professor of Theoretical Physics.

Early life

Childhood and education

J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904 to Julius S. Oppenheimer, a wealthy Jewish textile importer who had immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1888, and Ella Friedman, a painter. In 1912 the family moved to an apartment on the eleventh floor of 155 Riverside Drive, near West 88th Street, Manhattan, an area known for luxurious mansions and town houses. The family's art collection included works by Pablo Picasso and Édouard Vuillard, and at least three original paintings by Vincent van Gogh. He had a younger brother, Frank Oppenheimer, who also became a physicist.

Oppenheimer was initially schooled at Alcuin Preparatory School. In 1911 he entered the Ethical Culture Society School. It had been founded by Felix Adler to promote a form of ethical training based on the Ethical Culture movement, whose motto was "Deed before Creed". Julius Oppenheimer had been a member of the Society for Ethical Culture for many years, serving on its board of trustees from 1907 to 1915.

Oppenheimer was a versatile scholar, interested in the English and French literature and particularly in mineralogy. He completed the third grade and fourth grade in one year and later skipped half of the eighth grade. During his final year, he became interested in chemistry. He entered Harvard College a year late, at age 18, because he suffered an attack of colitis while prospecting in Joachimstal during a family summer vacation in Europe. To recover he went with Herbert W. Smith, a former English teacher, to New Mexico, where Oppenheimer fell in love with horseback riding and the Southwest United States.

In 1922, Oppenheimer entered Harvard where he studied chemistry. His lecturers included James B. Conant. In addition to an academic major ("concentration"), undergraduates had to study history, literature and philosophy or mathematics. Oppenheimer took a year of English history and two of French literature, and a course on the history of philosophy. He made up for his late start by taking six courses each term, and graduated summa cum laude in three years. He was admitted to Phi Beta Kappa. In his first year at Harvard, Oppenheimer was admitted to graduate standing in physics on the basis of independent study, which meant that he was exempted from taking the basic classes, and could enroll in advanced ones. In a course on thermodynamics taught by Percy Bridgman Oppenheimer was attracted to experimental physics.

Studies in Europe

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes' Laboratory in Leiden, Netherlands, 1926. Oppenheimer is in the second row, third from the left.

In 1924, Oppenheimer was informed that he had been accepted into Christ's College, Cambridge. He wrote to Ernest Rutherford requesting permission to work at the Cavendish Laboratory. Bridgman provided Oppenheimer with a recommendation, which conceded that Oppenheimer's clumsiness in the laboratory made it apparent his forte was not experimental but rather theoretical physics. Rutherford was unimpressed, but Oppenheimer went to Cambridge in the hope of landing another offer. He was ultimately accepted by J. J. Thomson on condition that he complete a basic laboratory course. Oppenheimer developed an antagonistic relationship with his tutor, Patrick Blackett, who was only a few years his senior. Oppenheimer once doused an apple with noxious chemicals and put it on Blackett's desk; Blackett did not eat the apple, but Oppenheimer was put on probation and ordered to go to London for regular sessions with a psychiatrist.

A tall, thin chain smoker who often neglected to eat during periods of intense thought and concentration, Oppenheimer was marked by many of his friends as having self-destructive tendencies. During numerous periods of his life, he worried his colleagues and associates with his melancholy and insecurity. When he was studying in Cambridge and had taken a vacation to meet up with his friend Francis Ferguson in Paris, a disturbing event had taken place. During a conversation in which Oppenheimer was narrating his frustration with experimental physics to Ferguson, he had suddenly leapt up and tried to strangle him. Although Ferguson easily fended off the attack, the episode had convinced Ferguson of his friend's deep psychological troubles.

In 1926 he left Cambridge for the University of Göttingen to study under Max Born. Göttingen was one of the world's leading centers for theoretical physics. Oppenheimer made friends who would go on to great success, including Werner Heisenberg, Pascual Jordan, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller. However, he was also known for being too enthusiastic in discussions, sometimes to the point of taking over seminar sessions. This irritated some of Born's other pupils so much that Maria Goeppert presented Born with a petition signed by herself and others threatening a boycott the class unless he made Oppenheimer be quiet. Born left it out on his desk where Oppenheimer could read it, and it was effective without a word being said.

Oppenheimer obtained his Doctor of Philosophy degree in March 1927 at the age of 23 at the University of Göttingen, supervised by Born. After the oral exam for his degree, James Franck, the professor administering, reportedly said, "I'm glad that's over. He was on the point of questioning me." Oppenheimer published more than a dozen papers at Göttingen, including many important contributions to the then newly developed quantum mechanics. He and Born published a famous paper on the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which separates nuclear motion from electronic motion in the mathematical treatment of molecules, allowing nuclear motion to be neglected in order to simplify calculations. It remains his most cited work.

Early professional work

Educational work

Oppenheimer applied for a National Research Council fellowship to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). He was appointed in September 1927, receiving one of 123 postdoctoral fellowships in physics it awarded between 1919 and 1930. However Bridgman also wanted Oppenheimer at Harvard and a compromise was reached whereby Oppenheimer split his fellowship for the 1927-1928 academic year between Harvard in 1927 and Caltech in 1928.

Oppenheimer's intelligence and charisma attracted students from across the country to Berkeley to study theoretical physics

At Caltech, Oppenheimer struck a close friendship with Linus Pauling and they planned to mount a joint attack on the nature of the chemical bond, a field in which Pauling was a pioneer—apparently Oppenheimer would supply the mathematics and Pauling would interpret the results. However, this collaboration, and their friendship, was nipped in the bud when Pauling began to suspect that the theorist was becoming too close to his wife, Ava Helen Pauling. Once when Pauling was at work, Oppenheimer had come to their place and blurted out an invitation to Ava Helen to join him on a tryst in Mexico. She flatly refused and reported this incident to Pauling. This, and her apparent nonchalance about the incident, disquieted him, and he immediately cut off his relationship with Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer later invited Pauling to be the head of the Chemistry Division of the Manhattan Project but Pauling refused, saying that he was a pacifist.

In the autumn of 1928, Oppenheimer visited Paul Ehrenfest's institute at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, where he impressed those there by giving lectures in Dutch despite having little experience with the language. There he was given the nickname of "Opje", which was later Anglicized by his students as "Oppie". From Leiden he continued on to the ETH in Zurich to work with Wolfgang Pauli on problems relating to quantum theory and the continuous spectrum. Oppenheimer highly respected and liked Pauli, and some of his own style and his critical approach to problems was said to be inspired by Pauli.

On returning to the United States, Oppenheimer accepted an associate professorship from the University of California, Berkeley, where Raymond T. Birge wanted him badly enough to offer to share him with CalTech. Before his Berkeley professorship began, Oppenheimer was diagnosed with a mild case of tuberculosis and, with his brother Frank, spent some weeks at a ranch in New Mexico, which he leased and eventually purchased. When he heard the ranch was available for lease, he exclaimed, "Hot dog!"—and later on the name of the ranch became "Perro Caliente", which is a translation of the words "hot" and "dog" into Spanish. Later, Oppenheimer used to say that "physics and desert country" were his "two great loves", loves that would be combined when he directed the atomic bomb project at Los Alamos.

He recovered from his tuberculosis and returned to Berkeley where he prospered as an advisor and collaborator to a generation of physicists who admired him for his intellectual virtuosity and broad interests. Nobel Prize winner Hans Bethe later said about him:

Probably the most important ingredient Oppenheimer brought to his teaching was his exquisite taste. He always knew what were the important problems, as shown by his choice of subjects. He truly lived with those problems, struggling for a solution, and he communicated his concern to the group.

He also worked closely with Nobel Prize winning experimental physicist Ernest O. Lawrence and his cyclotron pioneers, helping the experimentalists understand the data their machines were producing at the Lawrence's Radiation Laboratory. In 1936, Berkeley promoted Oppenheimer to full professor, at a salary of $3,300 per annum. In return, Oppenheimer was asked to curtail his teaching at CalTech. A compromise was reached whereby he was released for six weeks each year, enough to teach one trimester there.

Oppenheimer developed numerous affectations, seemingly in an attempt to convince those around him—or possibly himself—of his self-worth. He was said to be mesmerizing, hypnotic in private interaction but often frigid in more public settings. His associates fell into two camps: one that saw him as an aloof and impressive genius and an aesthete; another that saw him as a pretentious and insecure poseur. His students almost always fell into the former category, adopting "Oppie's" affectations, from his way of walking to talking and beyond—even trying to replicate his inclination for reading entire texts in their original languages. He became known as a founding father of the American school of theoretical physics, and developed a reputation for his erudition in physics, his eclecticism, his quick mind, his interest in languages and Eastern philosophy, and the eloquence and clarity with which he thought. Throughout his life he experienced periods of depression, and was sometimes emotionally troubled. "I need physics more than friends", he once informed his brother.

Scientific work

Oppenheimer did important research in theoretical astronomy (especially as it relates to general relativity and nuclear theory), nuclear physics, spectroscopy, and quantum field theory (including its extension into quantum electrodynamics). The formalism of relativistic quantum mechanics also attracted his attention, although because of the then existing well-known problem of the self-energy of the electron, he doubted the validity of quantum electrodynamics at high energies. His work predicted many later finds, which include the neutron, meson, and neutron star.

Oppenheimer made important contributions to the theory of cosmic ray showers and did work that eventually led toward descriptions of quantum tunneling, In 1930 he wrote a paper on the "Relativistic Theory of the Photoelectric Effect", in which, based on empirical evidence, he disagreed with Dirac's assertion that the states of the hydrogen atom must have identical energy states. Subsequently, one of his doctoral students, Willis Lamb, determined that this was a consequence of the Lamb shift, for which Lamb was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1955.

Oppenheimer worked with his first doctoral student, Melba Phillips, on calculations of artificial radioactivity under bombardment by deuterons. When Ernest Lawrence and Edwin McMillan bombarded nuclei with deuterons they found the results agreed closely with the predictions of George Gamow, but when higher energies and heavier nuclei were involved, the results did not conform to the theory. Oppenheimer and Phillips worked out a new theory to explain the results. This became known as the Oppenheimer-Phillips process, and is still in use today.

As early as 1930, Oppenheimer wrote a paper essentially predicting the existence of the positron. This arose from a paper by Paul Dirac published in 1928, that proposed that electrons could have both a positive charge and negative energy. This paper introduced the Dirac equation, a unification of quantum mechanics, special relativity, and the then-new concept of electron spin to explain the Zeeman effect. Oppenheimer, drawing on the body of experimental evidence, rejected the idea of these being protons; he argued that they would have to have the same mass as an electron, but the opposite charge. Two years later, Carl David Anderson discovered the positron in 1932, for which he received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In the late 1930s, Oppenheimer became interested in astrophysics, probably as a result of his friendship with Richard Tolman, resulting in a series of papers. In the first of these, a 1938 paper co-written with Robert Serber entitled "The Stability of Stellar Neutron Cores", he explored the properties of white dwarves. This was followed by a paper co-written with one of his students, George Volkoff, "On Massive Neutron Cores", in which they demonstrated that there was a size limit, the so called Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, to stars beyond which they would not remain stable as neutron stars, and would undergo gravitational collapse. Finally, in 1939, Oppenheimer and another of his students, Hartland Snyder, produced a paper "on Continued Gravitational Attraction", which predicted the existence of what we today call black holes. After the Born-Oppenheimer approximation paper, these papers remain his most cited, and they were key in the rejuvenation of astrophysical research in the United States in the 1950s, mainly by John Wheeler.

Even beyond the immense abstruseness of the topics he was expert in, Oppenheimer's papers were considered difficult to understand. Oppenheimer was very fond of using elegant, if extremely complex, mathematical techniques to demonstrate physical principles though he was sometimes criticized for making mathematical mistakes, presumably out of haste. "His physics was good", said his student Snyder, "but his arithmetic awful."

Many people thought that Oppenheimer's discoveries and research were not commensurate with his inherent abilities and talents. They still considered him an outstanding physicist, but they did not place him at the very top rank of theorists who fundamentally challenged the frontiers of knowledge. One reason for this could have been his diverse interests, which kept him from completely focusing on any individual topic for long enough to bring it to full fruition. In 1933, he learned Sanskrit and met the Indologist Arthur W. Ryder at Berkeley. He read the Bhagavad Gita in the original language and later he cited it as one of the most influential books that shaped his philosophy of life. His close confidant and colleague, Nobel Prize winner Isidor Rabi, later gave his own interpretation:

Oppenheimer was overeducated in those fields, which lie outside the scientific tradition, such as his interest in religion, in the Hindu religion in particular, which resulted in a feeling of mystery of the universe that surrounded him like a fog. He saw physics clearly, looking toward what had already been done, but at the border he tended to feel there was much more of the mysterious and novel than there actually was...[he turned] away from the hard, crude methods of theoretical physics into a mystical realm of broad intuition.

In spite of this, some people (such as the Nobel Prize winner physicist Luis Alvarez) have suggested that if he had lived long enough to see his predictions substantiated by experiment, Oppenheimer might have won a Nobel Prize for his work on gravitational collapse, concerning neutron stars and black holes. In retrospect, some physicists and historians consider this to be his most important contribution, though it was not taken up by other scientists in his own lifetime. Interestingly, when the physicist and historian Abraham Pais once asked Oppenheimer about what he considered to be his most important scientific contributions, Oppenheimer cited his work on electrons and positrons, but did not mention anything about his work on gravitational contraction. Oppenheimer was nominated for the Nobel Prize three times, in 1945, 1951 and 1967, but never won.

Private and political life

During the 1920s, Oppenheimer kept aloof of worldly matters. He claimed that he did not read newspapers or listen to the radio, and had only learned of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 some time after it occurred. He once remarked that he never cast a vote until the 1936 election. However, from 1934 on, he became increasingly concerned about politics and international affairs. In 1934, Oppenheimer earmarked 3 per cent of his salary - about $100 - to support German physicists fleeing from Nazi Germany. During the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike, Oppenheimer and some of his students, including Melba Phillips and Bob Serber, attended a longshoremen's rally. Oppenheimer repeatedly attempted to get Serber a position at Berkeley but was blocked by Birge, who felt that one Jewish faculty member was enough.

In 1936, Oppenheimer became involved with Jean Tatlock, the daughter of a Berkeley literature professor, who was a student at Stanford University School of Medicine. Like many young intellectuals in the 1930s, Oppenheimer was a supporter of social reforms that were later alleged to be communist ideas. When Julius Oppenheimer died in 1937 leaving $392,602 to be divided between Robert and his brother Frank, Robert immediately wrote out a will leaving his estate to the University of California for graduate scholarships. He donated to many progressive efforts which were later branded as "left-wing" during the McCarthy era. The majority of his allegedly radical work consisted of hosting fund raisers for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, and other anti-fascist activity. He never openly joined the Communist Party, though he did pass money to liberal causes by way of acquaintances who were alleged to be Party members.

Oppenheimer broke up with Tatlock in 1939. In August that year he met Katherine ("Kitty") Puening Harrison, a radical Berkeley student and former Communist Party member. Harrison had been married three times previously. Her first marriage, to a homosexual musician with drug addiction problems, lasted for only a few months. Her second husband, Joe Dallet, an active member of the Communist party, was killed in the Spanish Civil War. Kitty returned to the United States where she obtained a bachelor of arts degree in botany from the University of Pennsylvania. There she married her third husband, Richard Harrison, a physician and medical researcher in 1938. In June 1939 Kitty and Harrison moved to Pasadena, California, where he became chief of radiology at a local hospital and she enrolled as a graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles. Kitty and Robert created a minor scandal by sleeping together after one of Tolman's parties. In the summer of 1940 she stayed with Robert at his ranch in New Mexico. She finally asked Harrison for a divorce when she found out she was pregnant. When he refused, she obtained an instant divorce in Reno, Nevada and married Robert on 1 November 1940.

Their first child, Peter was born in May 1941. Oppenheimer joked that the 8-pound (4 kg) baby, born 7 months after their marriage, should be named "Pronto". Their second child, Katherine ("Toni"), was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico on 7 December 1944. During his marriage, Oppenheimer continued his affair with Jean Tatlock. Later their continued contact became an issue in Oppenheimer's security clearance hearings, due to Tatlock's Communist associations. Many of Oppenheimer's closest associates were active in the Communist Party in the '30s or '40s. They included his brother Frank, Frank's wife Jackie, Kitty, Jean Tatlock, his landlady, Mary Ellen Washburn, and several of his graduate students at Berkeley, including Joe Weinberg, Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, David Bohm and Philip Morrison.

When he joined the Manhattan Project in 1942, Oppenheimer wrote on his personal security questionnaire that he [Oppenheimer] had been "a member of just about every Communist Front organization on the West Coast." On December 23, 1953, when the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was considering whether to revoke his security clearance, Oppenheimer wrote to AEC Chairman K.D. Nichols that he did not remember saying this, that it was not true, and that if he had said anything along those lines, it was "a half-jocular overstatement." On April 15, 1954, during Oppenheimer's AEC security hearing, Roger Robb, counsel for the AEC's Personnel Security Board, asked Oppenheimer, "If you said that to Colonel Lansdale, were you jocular?" Oppenheimer testified, "I don't think I could have been jocular during this interview." He was a subscriber to the People's World, a Communist Party organ, and he testified in 1954, "I was associated with the Communist movement." In 1937–42, in the midst of the Great Purge and Hitler-Stalin pact, Oppenheimer was a member at Berkeley of what he called a "discussion group", which was later identified by fellow members, Haakon Chevalier and Gordon Griffiths, as a "closed" (secret) unit of the Communist Party for Berkeley faculty. Oppenheimer was the only member of this group who was not a Communist.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation recorded that J. Robert Oppenheimer attended a meeting in the home of self-proclaimed Communist Haakon Chevalier, that Communist Party's California state chairman William Schneiderman, and Isaac Folkoff, West Coast liaison between the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence, attended in Fall 1940, during the Hitler-Stalin pact. Shortly thereafter, the FBI added Oppenheimer to its Custodial Detention Index, for arrest in case of national emergency, and listed him as "Nationalistic Tendency: Communist." Debates over Oppenheimer's Party membership or lack thereof have turned on very fine points; almost all historians agree he had strong socialist sympathies during this time, and interacted with Party members, though there is considerable dispute over whether he was officially a member of the Party. Oppenheimer at his 1954 security clearance hearings denied being a member of the Communist Party, but identified himself as a fellow traveler, which he defined as someone who agrees with many of the goals of Communism, but without being willing to blindly follow orders from any Communist party apparatus.

Manhattan Project

Main article: Manhattan Project

Los Alamos

Oppenheimer's badge photo from Los Alamos

On October 9, 1941, after World War II began, President Franklin D. Roosevelt approved a crash program to develop an atomic bomb. To control it, he created a Top Policy Group consisting of himself—although he never attended a meeting—Vice President Henry A. Wallace, Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) Director Vannevar Bush, National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) Chairman James Conant, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and Chief of Staff of the Army General George C. Marshall. In May 1942 Conant invited Oppenheimer to take over work on fast neutron calculations, a task that he threw himself into with full vigor. Oppenheimer was given the title "Coordinator of Rapid Rupture", specifically referring to the propagation of a fast neutron chain reaction in an atomic bomb. One of Oppenheimer's first acts was to host a summer school for bomb theory at his building in Berkeley. The mix of European physicists and his own students—a group including Robert Serber, Emil Konopinski, Felix Bloch, Hans Bethe, and Edward Teller—busied themselves calculating what needed to be done, and in what order, to make the bomb. Teller put forward the remote possibility that the bomb would generate enough heat to ignite the atmosphere. Such an event was soon shown to be of near zero probability by Bethe.

In June 1942, the U.S. Army established the Manhattan Engineer District to handle its part in the project, beginning the process of transferring responsibility from the OSRD to the Army. In September, Brigadier General Leslie R. Groves, Jr. was appointed director of what became known as the Manhattan Project. Groves, in turn, selected Oppenheimer to head the project's secret weapons laboratory. Many were surprised at Groves' choice of Oppenheimer, as Oppenheimer was neither known to be politically aligned with the conservative military nor was he known to be an efficient leader of large projects. Groves was also concerned that Oppenheimer did not have a Nobel Prize and might not have the prestige to direct fellow scientists. However Groves was impressed by Oppenheimer's grasp of the practical aspects of designing and constructing an atomic bomb, and by the breadth of Oppenheimer's knowledge. As a military engineer, Groves knew that this would be vital in an interdisciplinary project that would involve not just physics, but chemistry, metallurgy, ordnance and engineering. These were things that Groves found lacking in other scientists. Groves also detected in Oppenheimer something that many others did not, an "overweening ambition" which Groves reckoned would supply the drive necessary to push the project to a successful conclusion. Rabi considered the appointment "a real stroke of genius on the part of General Groves, who was not generally considered to be a genius..."

A group of physicists at a wartime Los Alamos colloquium. In the front row are Norris Bradbury, John Manley, Enrico Fermi, and J.M.B. Kellogg (L-R). Oppenheimer is in the second row on the left; to the right in the photograph is Richard Feynman.

Oppenheimer and Groves decided that for security and cohesion they needed a centralized, secret research laboratory in a remote location. Scouting for a site in late 1942, Oppenheimer was drawn to New Mexico, not far from his ranch. On 16 November 1942, Oppenheimer, Groves, and others toured a prospective site. Oppenheimer feared that the high cliffs surrounding the site would make his people feel claustrophobic, while the engineers were concerned with the possibility of flooding. Oppenheimer suggested a site that he knew well; a flat mesa near Santa Fe, New Mexico, which was the site of a private boys' school called The Los Alamos Ranch School. Oppenheimer was impressed and expressed a strong preference for the site. The engineers were concerned about the poor access road and the water supply, but otherwise felt that it was ideal. The Los Alamos laboratory was hastily built on the site of the school, taking over some of its buildings, but erecting many others in great haste. There Oppenheimer assembled a group of the top physicists of the time, which he referred to as the "luminaries."

Initially Los Alamos was supposed to be a military laboratory with Oppenheimer and other researchers commissioned into the Army. Oppenheimer went so far as to order himself a lieutenant colonel's uniform, and took the Army physical test, which he failed. Army doctors considered him underweight at 128 pounds (58 kg), diagnosed his chronic cough as tuberculosis, and were concerned about his chronic lumbosacral joint pain. However, two key physicists, Robert Bacher and Isidor Rabi balked at the idea. Conant, Groves and Oppenheimer devised a compromise was whereby the laboratory was operated by the University of California under contract to the War Department. It soon turned out that Oppenheimer's initial estimates of the size of the effort required were extraordinarily over-optimistic. Los Alamos grew from a few hundred people in 1943 to over 6,000 in 1945.

Oppenheimer at first had difficulty with organizational division of large groups, but soon rapidly learned the art of large-scale administration after he took up permanent residence on the mesa. He was noted for his mastery of all scientific aspects of the project and for his efforts to control the inevitable cultural conflicts between scientists and the military. He was an iconic figure to his fellow scientists, as much a figurehead of what they were working towards as a scientific director. Victor Weisskopf put it thus:

He did not direct from the head office. He was intellectually and even physically present at each decisive step. He was present in the laboratory or in the seminar rooms, when a new effect was measured, when a new idea was conceived. It was not that he contributed so many ideas or suggestions; he did so sometimes, but his main influence came from something else. It was his continuous and intense presence, which produced a sense of direct participation in all of us; it created that unique atmosphere of enthusiasm and challenge that pervaded the place throughout its time.

In 1943, development efforts were directed to a plutonium gun-type fission weapon called "Thin Man". Initial research on the properties of plutonium was done using cyclotron-generated plutonium-239, which was extremely pure, but could only be created in tiny amounts. When Los Alamos received the first sample of plutonium from the X-10 Graphite Reactor in April 1944 a problem was discovered: reactor-bred plutonium had a higher concentration of plutonium-240, making it unsuitable for use in a gun-type weapon. In July 1944, Oppenheimer abandoned the gun design and in favor of an implosion-type. Using chemical explosive lenses, a sub-critical sphere of fissile material could be squeezed into a smaller and denser form. The metal needed to travel only very short distances, so the critical mass would be assembled in much less time. In August 1944, Oppenheimer implemented a sweeping reorganization of the Los Alamos laboratory to focus on implosion.

The Chevalier incident

All the while, Oppenheimer was under investigation by both the FBI and the Manhattan Project's internal security arm for his past left-wing associations. He was also followed by Army security agents during an unannounced trip to California in 1943 to meet his former girlfriend, Jean Tatlock, where he spent the night in her apartment. Jean committed suicide on 4 January 1944.

In August 1943, Oppenheimer volunteered to Manhattan Project security agents that three men at Los Alamos National Laboratory had been solicited for nuclear secrets on behalf of the Soviet Union, by a person he did not know who worked for Shell Oil, and who had Communist connections. He gave that person's name: George Eltenton. However, when pressed on the issue in later interviews with Groves, who ordered him to give the names of these men and promised to keep their identity from the FBI, he finally identified the only contact who had approached him, as his friend Haakon Chevalier, a Berkeley professor of French literature who he said had mentioned the matter privately at a dinner at Oppenheimer's house. Oppenheimer would be asked again in 1947 for interviews related to the "Chevalier incident", and he gave contradictory and equivocating statements, telling government agents that actually only one scientist had been approached at Los Alamos, and that person was himself. This was by Chevalier, who at the time had supposedly said that he had a potential conduit through Eltenton for information which could be passed to the Soviets. Oppenheimer claimed to have invented the other contacts in order to conceal the identity of Chevalier, whose identity he believed would be immediately apparent if he named only one contact, but whom he believed to be innocent of any disloyalty.

Groves thought Oppenheimer was too important to the ultimate Allied goals to oust him over this suspicious behavior. On July 20, 1943, he wrote to the Manhattan Engineer District:

In accordance with my verbal directions of July 15, it is desired that clearance be issued to Julius Robert Oppenheimer without delay irrespective of of the information which you have concerning Mr Oppenheimer. He is absolutely essential to the project.

By 1947, Oppenheimer had told two conflicting versions of this story, both of which were taped without his knowledge, and importantly was taped in the latter interview admitting to have told a deliberate lie in the first.

Trinity

Groves, Oppenheimer and others at remains of the Trinity shot tower a few weeks later

Main article: Trinity test

The joint work of the scientists at Los Alamos resulted in the first artificial nuclear explosion near Alamogordo on July 16, 1945, the site of which Oppenheimer named "Trinity". Oppenheimer later said this name was from one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets. According to the historian Gregg Herken, this naming could have been an allusion to Jean Tatlock, who had committed suicide a few months previously and had in the 1930s introduced Oppenheimer to Donne's work. Oppenheimer later recalled that, while witnessing the explosion, he thought of a verse from the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad Gita:

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...

Years later he would explain that another verse had also entered his head at that time: namely, the famous verse; "kālo'smi lokakṣayakṛtpravṛddho lokānsamāhartumiha pravṛttaḥ", which Oppenheimer translated as "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Oppenheimer later would be persuaded to quote again in 1965 for a television broadcast:

We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.'

According to his brother, at the time Oppenheimer simply exclaimed, "It worked." A contemporary account by Brigadier General Thomas Farrell, who was present in the control bunker at the site with Oppenheimer, summarized his reaction as follows:

Dr. Oppenheimer, on whom had rested a very heavy burden, grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed. He held on to a post to steady himself. For the last few seconds, he stared directly ahead and then when the announcer shouted "Now!" and there came this tremendous burst of light followed shortly thereafter by the deep growling roar of the explosion, his face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief.

Postwar activities

Institute for Advanced Study

After the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Manhattan Project became public knowledge, and Oppenheimer became a national spokesman for science, emblematic of a new type of technocratic power. His face appeared on the covers of Life and Time. Nuclear physics became a powerful force as all governments of the world began to realize the strategic and political power that came with nuclear weapons and their horrific implications. Like many scientists of his generation, he felt that security from atomic bombs would come only from a transnational organization such as the newly formed United Nations, which could institute a program to stifle a nuclear arms race.

Oppenheimer eventually took over Einstein's position at the Institute for Advanced Study.

In November 1945, Oppenheimer left Los Alamos to return to Caltech, but he soon found that his heart was no longer in teaching. In 1947, Oppenheimer accepted an offer from Lewis Strauss to take up the directorship of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. This meant moving back east and leaving Ruth Tolman, the wife of his friend Richard Tolman, with whom he had begun an affair after leaving Los Alamos. The job came with a salary of $20,000 per annum, plus rent free accommodation in the director's house, a 17th century manor with a cook and groundskeeper surrounded by 265 acres (107 ha) of woodlands.

Oppenheimer brought together intellectuals at the height of their powers and from a variety of disciplines to solve the most pertinent questions of the age. He directed and encouraged the research of many well-known scientists, including Freeman Dyson, and the duo of Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee, who won a Nobel Prize for their discovery of parity non-conservation. He also instituted temporary memberships for scholars from the humanities, such as T. S. Eliot and George F. Kennan. Some of these activities were resented by a few members of the mathematics faculty, who wanted the institute to stay a bastion of pure scientific research. Abraham Pais said that Oppenheimer himself thought that one of his failures at the institute was a failure to bring together scholars from the natural sciences and the humanities.

A series of conferences in New York in 1947 through 1949 saw physicists switching back from war work to theoretical issues again. Under Oppenheimer's direction, physicists tacking the greatest outstanding problem of the pre-war years: the problem of infinities in the quantum electrodynamics of elementary particles. Julian Schwinger, Richard Feynman, and Shin'ichiro Tomonaga developed techniques for getting around this, which became known as renormalization. Freeman Dyson was able to prove that their procedures gave similar results. The problem of meson absorption and Hideki Yukawa's theory of mesons as the carrier particles of the strong nuclear force were also tackled. Probing questions from Oppenheimer prompted Robert Marshak's innovative two-meson hypothesis: that there were actually two types of mesons, pions and muons. This led to Cecil Frank Powell's breakthrough and subsequent Nobel Prize for the discovery of the pion.

Atomic Energy Commission

After the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) came into being in 1947, as a civilian agency in control of nuclear research and weapons issues, Oppenheimer was immediately appointed as the Chairman of its General Advisory Committee (GAC) and left the directorship of Los Alamos. From this position he advised on a number of nuclear-related issues, including project funding, laboratory construction, and even international policy—though the GAC's advice was not always heeded.

Oppenheimer in 1946

As a member of the Board of Consultants to a committee appointed by President Truman to advise the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, Oppenheimer strongly influenced the Acheson–Lilienthal Report. In this report, the committee advocated creation of an international Atomic Development Authority, which would own all fissionable material, and the means of its production, such as mines and laboratories, and atomic power plants where it could be used for peaceful energy production. Bernard Baruch was appointed to translate this report into a proposal to the United Nations, resulting in the Baruch Plan of 1946. The Baruch Plan introduced many additional provisions regarding enforcement, in particular requiring inspection of the USSR's uranium resources. The Baruch Plan was seen as an attempt to maintain the United States' nuclear monopoly, and was rejected by the USSR. With this, it became clear to Oppenheimer that an arms race was unavoidable, due to the mutual suspicion of the US and the USSR, which even Oppenheimer was starting to distrust.

While still Chairman of the GAC, Oppenheimer lobbied vigorously for international arms control and funding for basic science, and attempted to influence policy away from a heated arms race. When the government questioned whether to pursue a crash program to develop an atomic weapon based on nuclear fusion—the hydrogen bomb—Oppenheimer initially recommended against it, though he had been in favor of developing such a weapon during the Manhattan Project. He was motivated partly by ethical concerns, feeling that such a weapon could only be used strategically against civilian targets, resulting in millions of deaths. But he was also motivated by practical concerns; as at the time there was no workable design for a hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer felt that resources would be better spent creating a large force of fission weapons; he and others were especially concerned about nuclear reactors being diverted away from producing plutonium to produce tritium. He was overridden by President Truman, who announced a crash program after the Soviet Union tested their first atomic bomb in 1949. Oppenheimer and other GAC opponents of the project, especially James Conant, felt personally shunned and considered retiring from the committee. They stayed on, though their views on the hydrogen bomb were well known.

In 1951, however, Edward Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam developed what became known as the Teller-Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb. This new design seemed technically feasible, and Oppenheimer changed his opinion about developing the weapon. As he later recalled:

The program we had in 1949 was a tortured thing that you could well argue did not make a great deal of technical sense. It was therefore possible to argue that you did not want it even if you could have it. The program in 1951 was technically so sweet that you could not argue about that. The issues became purely the military, the political, and the humane problems of what you were going to do about it once you had it.

Security board convened

Main article: Oppenheimer security hearing

The FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had been following Oppenheimer since before the war, when he showed Communist sympathies as a professor at Berkeley, and had been close to members of the Communist Party, which included his wife and brother. He had been under close surveillance since the early 1940s, his home and office bugged, his phone tapped and his mail opened. The FBI furnished Oppenheimer's political enemies with incriminating evidence about his Communist ties. These enemies included Lewis Strauss, an AEC commissioner who had long harbored resentment against Oppenheimer both for his activity in opposing the hydrogen bomb and for his humiliation of Strauss before Congress some years earlier, regarding Strauss's opposition to the export of radioactive isotopes to other nations, when Oppenheimer had memorably categorized these as "less important than electronic devices but more important than, let us say, vitamins."

President Eisenhower receives a report from Lewis L. Strauss, Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, on the Operation Castle hydrogen bomb tests in the Pacific, March 30, 1954

Oppenheimer testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he admitted that he had associations with the Communist Party in the 1930s, and testified that some of Oppenheimer's students, including David Bohm, Joseph Weinberg, and Bernard Peters, had been Communists at the time they had worked with him at Berkeley. Frank Oppenheimer and his wife Jackie testified before the HUAC and admitted that they had been members of the Communist Party. Frank was subsequently fired from his University of Michigan position. Unable to find work in physics for many years, he became instead a cattle rancher in Colorado. He later became a high school physics teacher and later the founder of the San Francisco Exploratorium.

Oppenheimer had also found himself in the middle of more than one controversy and power struggle, in the years from 1949 to 1953. Edward Teller, who had been so uninterested in work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos during the war that Oppenheimer had given him time instead to work on his own project of the hydrogen bomb, had eventually left Los Alamos to help found, in 1951, a second laboratory at what would become the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There, he could be free of Los Alamos control to develop the hydrogen bomb. This laboratory would go on to develop long-range jet-bomber delivered themonuclear "strategic weapons" (city-destroyers) which would necessarily be under control of the new US Air Force. By contrast, Oppenheimer had for some years pushed for smaller "tactical" nuclear weapons which would be more useful in a limited theater against enemy troops, and which would be under control of the Army. As these two branches of the service fought for control of nuclear weapons, often allied with different political parties, the Air Force, with Teller pushing its program, had begun to gain ascendence in the Republican controlled government, after the election of Eisenhower in 1952.

In 1950, Paul Crouch, Communist Party organizer for Alameda County from April 1941 to early January 1942, was the first person to accuse Oppenheimer of Communist Party ties. He testified before a Congressional committee that Oppenheimer had hosted a Communist Party meeting at his Berkeley home. The charges were widely publicized at the time. However, Oppenheimer was able to prove that he was in New Mexico at the time, and Crouch over time was shown to be an unreliable informant. In November 1953, J. Edgar Hoover was sent a letter concerning Oppenheimer by William Liscum Borden, former executive director of Congress' Joint Atomic Energy Committee. In the letter, Borden stated his opinion "based upon years of study, of the available classified evidence, that more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union."

Oppenheimer's former colleague, physicist Edward Teller, testified against Oppenheimer at his security hearing in 1954

Strauss and Senator Brien McMahon, author of the 1946 McMahon Act, pushed President Dwight D. Eisenhower to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance. On December 21, 1953, Oppenheimer was told by Lewis Strauss that his security clearance had been suspended, pending resolution of a series of charges outlined in a letter, and discussed his resigning. Oppenheimer chose not to resign, and requested a hearing instead. The charges were outlined in a letter from Kenneth D. Nichols, General Manager of the AEC. The hearing that followed in April–May 1954, which was initially confidential and not made public, focused on Oppenheimer's past Communist ties and his association during the Manhattan Project with suspected disloyal or Communist scientists. One of the key elements in this hearing was Oppenheimer's earliest testimony about George Eltenton's approach to various Los Alamos scientists, a story that Oppenheimer confessed he had fabricated to protect his friend Haakon Chevalier. Unknown to Oppenheimer, both versions were recorded during his interrogations of a decade before. He was surprised on the witness stand with transcripts of these, which he had not been given a chance to review. In fact, Oppenheimer had never told Chevalier that he had finally named him, and the testimony had led to Chevalier losing his job. Both Chevalier and Eltenton confirmed mentioning that they had a way to get information to the Soviets, Eltenton admitting he said this to Chevalier, and Chevalier admitting he mentioned it to Oppenheimer, but both put the matter in terms of gossip and denying any thought or suggestion of treason or thoughts of espionage, either in planning or in deed. Neither was ever convicted of any crime.

Teller testified against Oppenheimer, saying that he considered him loyal, but of such questionable judgment that he should be relieved of clearance on the basis of bad decision-making. This led to outrage by the scientific community and Teller's virtual expulsion from academic science. Groves, threatened by the FBI as having been potentially part of a coverup about the Chevalier contact in 1943, testified against Oppenheimer also. Many top scientists, as well as government and military figures, testified on Oppenheimer's behalf. Inconsistencies in his testimony and his erratic behavior on the stand, at one point, saying he had given a "cock and bull story" and that this was because he "was an idiot", convinced some that he was unstable, unreliable and a possible security risk. Oppenheimer's clearance was revoked one day before it was slated to lapse anyway. Rabi's comment was that Oppenheimer was merely a government consultant at the time anyway, and that if the government "didn't want to consult the guy, then don't consult him."

During his hearing, Oppenheimer testified willingly on the left-wing behavior of many of his scientific colleagues. Had Oppenheimer's clearance not been stripped—it would have expired in a matter of days anyhow—he might have been remembered as someone who had "named names" to save his own reputation. As it happened, Oppenheimer was seen by most of the scientific community as a martyr to McCarthyism, an eclectic liberal who was unjustly attacked by warmongering enemies, symbolic of the shift of scientific creativity from academia into the military. Wernher von Braun summed up his opinion about the matter with a quip to a Congressional committee: "In England, Oppenheimer would have been knighted."

In a seminar at the Woodrow Wilson Institute on May 20, 2009, and based on an extensive analysis of the Vassiliev notebooks taken from the KGB archives, John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev confirmed that Oppenheimer never was involved in espionage for the Soviet Union. The KGB tried repeatedly to recruit him, but never was successful. Oppenheimer did not betray the United States. In addition, he had several persons removed from the Manhattan project who had sympathies to the Soviet Union.

Final years

Oppenheimer Beach, in St John, U.S. Virgin Islands

Starting in 1954, Oppenheimer spent several months of the year living on the island of St John in the Virgin Islands. In 1957, he purchased a 2-acre (0.81 ha) tract of land on Gibney Beach, where he built a spartan home on the beach. Oppenheimer spent a considerable amount of time sailing with his daughter Toni and wife Kitty.

Increasingly concerned about the potential danger to humanity arising from scientific discoveries, Oppenheimer joined with Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Joseph Rotblat, and other eminent scientists and academics to establish what would eventually become the World Academy of Art and Science in 1960. Significantly, however, after his public humiliation, Oppenheimer did not sign the major open protests against nuclear weapons of the 1950s, including the Russell–Einstein Manifesto of 1955. He also did not attend the first Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in 1957, though invited. However, in his speeches and public writings, Oppenheimer continually stressed the difficulty of managing the power of knowledge in a world in which the freedom of science to exchange ideas was more and more hobbled by political concerns.

Deprived of political power, Oppenheimer continued to lecture, write, and work on physics. He toured Europe and Japan, giving talks about the history of science, the role of science in society, and the nature of the universe. On May 3, 1962 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1963, at the urging of many of Oppenheimer's political friends who had ascended to power, President John F. Kennedy awarded Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of political rehabilitation. Edward Teller, the winner of the previous year's award, had also recommended Oppenheimer receive it, in the hope that it would heal the rift between himself and Oppenheimer. A little over a week after Kennedy's assassination, his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, presented Oppenheimer with the award, "for contributions to theoretical physics as a teacher and originator of ideas, and for leadership of the Los Alamos Laboratory and the atomic energy program during critical years." Oppenheimer told Johnson: "I think it is just possible, Mr. President, that it has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today." The rehabilitation implied by the award was partly symbolic, as Oppenheimer still lacked a security clearance and could have no effect on official policy, but the award came with a $50,000 tax-free stipend, and its award to Oppenheimer outraged many prominent Republicans in Congress. The late President Kennedy's widow Jacqueline, still living in the White House, made it a point to meet with Oppenheimer to tell him how much her husband had wanted him to have the medal. While still a senator in 1959, Kennedy had been instrumental in voting to narrowly deny Oppenheimer's enemy Lewis Strauss a coveted government position as Secretary of Commerce, effectively ending Strauss' political career. This was partly due to lobbying on the basis of the scientific community on behalf of Oppenheimer, as was the Fermi prize.

A chain smoker since early adulthood, Robert Oppenheimer was diagnosed with throat cancer in late 1965 and, after inconclusive surgery, underwent radiation treatment and chemotherapy late in 1966. These were not curative, and the tumor spread to his palate, affecting his swallowing, hearing, and breathing. He fell into a coma on February 15, 1967 and died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, USA on February 18, aged 62. A memorial service was held at Alexander hall at Princeton University a week later, which was attended by 600 of his closest scientific, political, and military associates, including Bethe, Groves, Kennan, Lilienthal, Rabi, Smyth and Wigner. His family, including his brother Frank was there, as was the historian Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr., the novelist John O'Hara and George Balanchine, the director of the New York City Ballet. Bethe, Kennan and Smyth gave brief eulogies. Oppenheimer was cremated and his ashes were placed in an urn. Kitty took the ashes to St John and dropped the urn into the sea off the coast, within sight of the beach house.

Upon the death of Kitty Oppenheimer, who died of an intestinal infection complicated by pulmonary embolism in October 1972, Oppenheimer's ranch in New Mexico was inherited by their son Peter, while the beach property in St. John was inherited by their daughter Toni. Toni was refused security clearance for her chosen vocation as a United Nations translator. She committed suicide by hanging in the beach house in St. John in January 1977, and left it in her will to "the people of St. John for a public park and recreation area." The original house, built too close to the coast, succumbed to a hurricane, but today, the Virgin Islands Government maintains a Community Center in the area. The northern portion of the beach is colloquially known to this day as "Oppenheimer Beach".

Legacy

As a scientist, Oppenheimer is remembered by his students and colleagues as being a brilliant researcher and engaging teacher, the founder of modern theoretical physics in the United States. Scholars respond that his scientific attentions often changed rapidly and he never worked long enough on any one topic to achieve enough headway to merit the Nobel Prize. Some scientists and historians have speculated that his investigations towards black holes may have warranted the Nobel, had he lived long enough to see them brought into fruition by later astrophysicists.

Groves and Oppenheimer at remains of the Trinity test in September 1945. The white overshoes prevent fallout from sticking to the soles of their shoes.

As a military and public policy advisor, Oppenheimer was a technocratic leader in a shift in the interactions between science and the military and the emergence of "Big Science". During World War II, scientists became involved in military research to an unprecedented degree (some research of this sort had occurred during World War I, but it was far smaller in scope). Because of the threat fascism posed to Western civilization, scientists volunteered in great numbers both for technological and organizational assistance to the Allied effort, resulting in such powerful tools as radar, the proximity fuse, and operations research. As a cultured, intellectual, theoretical physicist who became a disciplined military organizer, Oppenheimer represented the shift away from the idea that scientists had their "head in the clouds" and that knowledge on such previously esoteric subjects as the composition of the atomic nucleus had no "real-world" applications.

When Oppenheimer was ejected from his position of political influence in 1954, he symbolized for many the folly of scientists thinking they could control how others would use their research. Oppenheimer has been seen as symbolizing the dilemmas involving the moral responsibility of the scientist in the nuclear world. Most popular depictions of Oppenheimer view his security struggles as a confrontation between right-wing militarists (symbolized by Edward Teller) and left-wing intellectuals (symbolized by Oppenheimer) over the moral question of weapons of mass destruction. Many historians have contested this as an oversimplification. The hearings were motivated both by politics, as Oppenheimer was seen as a representative of the previous administration, and also by personal considerations stemming from his enmity with Lewis Strauss. Furthermore, the ostensible reason for the hearing and the issue that aligned Oppenheimer with the liberal intellectuals, Oppenheimer's opposition to hydrogen bomb development, was based as much on technical grounds as on moral ones. Once the technical considerations were resolved, he supported "the Super" because he believed that the Soviet Union too would inevitably construct one.

Rather than consistently opposing the "Red-baiting" of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Oppenheimer had testified against some of his former colleagues and students, both before and during his hearing. In one incident, Oppenheimer's damning testimony against former student Bernard Peters was selectively leaked to the press. Historians have interpreted this as an attempt by Oppenheimer to please his colleagues in the government and perhaps to divert attention from his own previous left-wing ties and those of his brother, who had earlier been a target of the anti-Red lobby. In the end it became a liability: under cross-examination, it became clear that if Oppenheimer had really doubted Peters' loyalty, then his recommending him for the Manhattan Project was reckless, or at least contradictory.

The question of the scientists' responsibility towards humanity, so manifest in the dropping of the atomic bombs and Oppenheimer's public questioning, in addition to Kipphardt's play, inspired Bertolt Brecht's drama Galileo (from 1955), left its imprint on Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Die Physiker, and is the basis of the opera Doctor Atomic by John Adams (2005), which was commissioned to portray Oppenheimer as a modern Faust. Heinar Kipphardt's play In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, after appearing on West German television, had its theatrical release in Berlin and Munich in October 1964. Oppenheimer's objections resulted in an exchange of correspondence with Kipphardt, in which the playwright offered to make corrections but defended the play. It premiered in New York in June 1968, with Joseph Wiseman in the Oppenheimer role. New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes called it an "angry play and a partisan play" that sided with Oppenheimer but portrayed the scientist as a "tragic fool and genius." Oppenheimer had difficulty with this portrayal. After reading a transcript of Kipphardt's play soon after it began to be performed, Oppenheimer threatened to sue the playwright, decrying "improvisations which were contrary to history and to the nature of the people involved." Later Oppenheimer told an interviewer:

The whole damn thing [his security hearing] was a farce, and these people are trying to make a tragedy out of it. ... I had never said that I had regretted participating in a responsible way in the making of the bomb. I said that perhaps he [Kipphardt] had forgotten Guernica, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, Dachau, Warsaw, and Tokyo; but I had not, and that if he found it so difficult to understand, he should write a play about something else.

The 1980 BBC TV serial Oppenheimer starring Sam Waterston, won three BAFTA Television Awards. The Day After Trinity, a 1980 documentary about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the building of the atomic bomb, was nominated for an Academy Award and received a Peabody Award. In addition to his use by authors of fiction, Oppenheimer's life has been explored in numerous biographies. Notable recent titles include American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, and J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century by David C. Cassidy.

Works

Books

• Science and the Common Understanding (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954).
• The Open Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).
• The Flying Trapeze: Three crises for physicists (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).
• Uncommon Sense (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Birkhäuser Boston, 1984). (posthumous)
• Atom and Void: Essays on Science and Community (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989). (posthumous)

References

Notes

Citations

Bibliography

• Bethe, Hans (1991). The Road from Los Alamos. Springer Science+Business Media. ISBN 0883187078. OCLC 22661282. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Bird, Kai; Sherwin, Martin J. (2005). American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-41202-6. OCLC 56753298. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Carson, Cathryn (2005). Reappraising Oppenheimer: Centennial Studies and Reflections. Office for History of Science and Technology: Office for History of Science and Technology, Univ. of California. ISBN 0-9672617-3-2. OCLC 64385611. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Cassidy, David (2005). J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century. Pi Press. ISBN 0-13-147996-2. OCLC 56503198. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Conant, Jennet (2005). 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos. Simon & Schuster. p. 75. ISBN 0743250079. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Feldman, Burton (2000). The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy, and Prestige. Arcade Publishing. ISBN 155970537X. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Groves, Leslie (1962). Now it Can be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project. New York, New York: Harper. ISBN 0-306-70738-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hager, Thomas (1995). Force of Nature: The life of Linus Pauling. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0684809095. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Haynes, John Earl (2006). Early Cold War Spies: The Espionage Trials that Shaped American Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521674077. {{cite book}}: Cite has empty unknown parameter: |1= (help)
• Herken, Gregg (2002). Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller. New York: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 0-8050-6588-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hewlett, Richard G.; Anderson, Oscar E. (1962). The New World, 1939–1946. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-520-07186-7. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Hewlett, Richard G.; Duncan, Francis (1969). Atomic Shield, Volume II, 1947–1952. A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission. University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0-520-07187-5.
• Hoddeson, Lillian; Henriksen, Paul W.; Meade, Roger A.; Westfall, Catherine L. (1993). Critical Assembly: A Technical History of Los Alamos During the Oppenheimer Years, 1943–1945. New York, New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-44132-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Jungk, Robert (1958). Brighter than a Thousand Suns: a Personal History of the Atomic Scientists. New York: Harcourt Brace. ISBN 0156141507. OCLC 181321. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Kelly, Cynthia C. (2006). Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project. New Jersey: World Scientific. ISBN 9812564187. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• McMillan, Priscilla J. (2005). The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer: And the Birth of the Modern Arms Race. Viking Press: Viking. ISBN 0-670-03422-3. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Pais, Abraham (2006). J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-516673-6. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Polenberg, Richard (2002). In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Security Clearance Hearing. Ithaca: Cornell University. ISBN 0-8014-3783-0. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Smith, Alice Kimball (1980). Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and recollections. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0804726205. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Stern, Philip M. (1969). "The Oppenheimer Case" (Document). New York: Harper & Row.
• Strout, Cushing (1963). "Conscience, Science and Security: The Case of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer" (Document). Chicago: Rand McNally. {{cite document}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |url= ignored (help)
• Szasz, Ferenc M. (1984). The Day the Sun Rose Twice. Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 0826307671. OCLC 10779209. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• United States Atomic Energy Commission (1954). "In the Matter of Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer" (Document). Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office. {{cite document}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |accessdate= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |url= ignored (help)

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