Julius
Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City
on 22nd April, 1904. He studied at Harvard
University before working with Ernest
Rutherford at Cambridge University
and Max Born in Germany.
While in Europe he met and shared information with Nils
Bohr.
He
returned to the USA in 1929 and over the next
few years worked at the University of California. Oppenheimer developed
left-wing views and was a strong supporter of the Republicans during
the Spanish Civil War.
Influenced
by the research carried out by Nils Bohr,
Lise Meitner, and Leo
Szilard, Oppenheimer began to seek a process for the separation
of uranium-235 from natural uranium and to determine the critical
mass of uranium required to make an atom bomb.
In
1943 Oppenheimer was appointed director of the Manhattan
Project where he worked with Edward Teller,
Enrico Fermi, David
Bohm, James Franck, Emilio
Segre, Felix Bloch, Rudolf
Peierls, James Chadwick, Otto
Frisch, Eugene Wigner, Leo
Szilard and Klaus Fuchs in developing
the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki.
After
the war Oppenheimer served as chairman of the General Advisory Committee
of the Atomic Energy Commission. He was now fully aware of the dangers
of radioactivity caused by nuclear explosions and in October, 1949,
he controversially opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb.
Oppenheimer
was a victim of McCarthyism and in 1953 he
was accused of being closely associated with communists in the 1930s.
A security hearing decided he was not guilty of treason but ruled
that he should not have access to military secrets. As a result he
was removed from the Atomic Energy Commission.
In
1963 Oppenheimer was forgiven for his left-wing past when Lyndon
B. Johnson awarded him the Enrico Fermi Award. Julius Robert Oppenheimer
died of throat cancer on 18th February, 1967.
(1)
Robert Oppenheimer, interviewed for a television documentary in 1965.
We were a true community of people working toward a common goal.
I think that irrespective of what was done with it, irrespective of
what was to come of it, it was clear that this was a very major change
in the human situation, and the people were playing a part in history.
We started out by thinking that it might make the difference between
defeat and victory, and ended by thinking that it might make a difference
between a world periodically convulsed by increasingly ferocious global
wars and a world in which there will be none.
(2)
Robert Oppenheimer, evidence given before Personnel Security Board
(1954)
I was almost wholly divorced from the contemporary scene in this
country. I never read a newspaper or a current magazine like Time
or Harper's; I had no radio, no telephone; I learned of the stockmarket
crack in the fall of 1929 only long after the event; the first time
I ever voted was in the presidential election of 1936. To many of
my friends, my indifference to contemporary affairs seemed bizarre,
and they often chided me with being too much of a highbrow. I was
interested in man and his experience; I was deeply
interested in my science; but I had no understanding of the relations
of man to his society.
(3)
Paul Tibbets was interviewed by Studs
Terkel in
the Guardian
on 6th August 2002.
Studs Terkel: And now you're training. And you're also talking to
physicists like Robert Oppenheimer (senior scientist on the Manhattan
project).
Paul Tibbets: I think I
went to Los Alamos (the Manhattan project HQ) three times, and each
time I got to see Dr Oppenheimer working in his own environment. Later,
thinking about it, here's a young man, a brilliant person. And he's
a chain smoker and he drinks cocktails. And he hates fat men. And
General Leslie Groves (the general in charge of the Manhattan project),
he's a fat man, and he hates people who smoke and drink. The two of
them are the first, original odd couple.
Studs Terkel: They had
a feud, Groves and Oppenheimer?
Paul Tibbets: Yeah, but
neither one of them showed it. Each one of them had a job to do.
(4)
Robert Oppenheimer, on watching the first atomic bomb test (16th July,
1945)
I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
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