Unveiling the Dark Legacy of Robert J. Oppenheimer: Heroic Scientist or Catalyst for Destruction?
"Unraveling the Enigmatic Genius: The Life and Legacy of Robert J. Oppenheimer, Father of the Atomic Age"
As Oppenheimer put it, “Some people, I think, were motivated by curiosity, and rightly so; and some by a sense of adventure, and rightly so. Others had more political arguments and said, ‘Well, we know that atomic weapons are in principle possible, and it is not right that the threat of their unrealized possibility should hang over the world. It is right that the world should know what can be done in their field and deal with it.’ ”
A brief introduction:
J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904, the son of wealthy, first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants from Germany. He attended the Ethical Culture School in New York, an institution celebrating rationalism, and by 1922 had earned his B.A. in chemistry from Harvard University.
In 1925 he travelled to England to study at the illustrious Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge with J.J. Thomson (his first choice for mentor, Ernest Rutherford, had rejected him). He left Cambridge a year later to accept a position studying with Nobel Laureate Max Born at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Göttingen, Germany. At this renowned center of theoretical physics, Oppenheimer worked alongside luminaries such as Werner Heisenberg, Otto Hahn, Paul Dirac, John Von Neumann, and James Franck-some of whom he would work with again during the Manhattan Project.
After finishing his physics PhD from Göttingen in 1927, Oppenheimer returned to the United States. In 1929 he accepted a joint professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology to introduce the exciting theoretical work being done in Europe to American graduate students. In the subsequent decade, Oppenheimer's teaching of the new physics and training of impressive graduate students helped forge an American school of theoretical physics. While at Berkeley, he became a friend and colleague of Ernest Lawrence who had built up the Radiation Laboratory at the university as a major center for nuclear physics.
This time in Berkeley also marked the flowering of Oppenheimer's political activism, and it was here where he established personal connections to various left-leaning individuals and groups that years later would be central to his security problems.
The Manhattan Project:
After the United States joined the Allies in 1941, Oppenheimer was asked to participate in the top-secret Manhattan Project, whose aim was to develop an atomic weapon. As he endeavoured to figure out what would need to happen to trigger and sustain the kind of neutron-chain reaction needed to create a nuclear explosion, Oppenheimer’s superiors were impressed by his wide-ranging knowledge, ambition, and ability to work with, and inspire, other scientists. In 1942, the U.S. Army called on Oppenheimer to head up the secret lab where the bomb would be tested.
Not long after General Leslie Groves assumed command of the Manhattan Engineer District in September 1942, Oppenheimer suggested establishing a special bomb laboratory. Groves agreed and asked Oppenheimer to be the director of the new weapons laboratory at Los Alamos. Yet, Oppenheimer was not necessarily an obvious choice for the job.
First, as a theoretical physicist, it was not apparent that Oppenheimer possessed the practical technical skills necessary to build a bomb. As the American physicist, and friend to Oppenheimer, I.I. Rabi, later explained, "He was a very impractical fellow. He walked about with scuffed shoes and a funny hat, and more important he didn't know anything about equipment." Second, other than briefly coordinating weapons theory research, he had never been an administrator and never demonstrated a desire for or skill at institution building.
Hans Bethe who would work under Oppenheimer at Los Alamos noted that before being handed the tremendous responsibility of overseeing the weapons laboratory, Oppenheimer had, "no experience in directing a large group of people." Third, Oppenheimer's background revealed a history of political activism for left-leaning causes and associations with politically radical individuals, which troubled security personnel greatly. Later writing of his decision, Groves noted, "No one with whom I talked showed any great enthusiasm about Oppenheimer as a possible director."
Despite reservations about his fitness to direct the weapons lab, Oppenheimer proved to be an excellent director. One oft-appreciated administrative choice he made was avoiding the compartmentalization that could inhibit scientific work at secret facilities. He acquiesced to security requirements which wrapped the laboratory in a heavy blanket of isolation and secrecy, but he preserved the right of scientists to speak freely with their peers inside the laboratory as much as possible. Through relatively free discourse and weekly progress review meetings, Oppenheimer hoped to in some ways replicate the academic environment most comfortable for his personnel and most conducive to innovative thinking-even at a secret military laboratory. His personal charm and charisma won the admiration of many wartime lab personnel, and his capacity for understanding a great breadth of technical issues made him a useful and engaged leader.
When the civilian Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) took over most of the Manhattan Project's facilities and activities in 1947, he became chairman of the new agency's General Advisory Committee.
The prestige and authority he earned during his wartime leadership made him an exceptionally respected and influential advisor. He fought the push for a crash effort to produce a thermonuclear fusion weapon in the late 1940s, calling the device "a torture thing that you could well argue did not make a great deal of sense," but when a radically new approach involving stage nuclear implosion made a workable weapon likely he described it as "technically so sweet that you could not argue about that."
In 1954, however, at the height of McCarthyism, the AEC revoked Oppenheimer's security clearance and thus severed all connections between him and government policy. The 1954 security clearance hearing, which turned on Oppenheimer's left-leaning personal associations and on his resistance to developing the hydrogen bomb, was a polarizing moment for the scientific community, and its outcome shocked the nation. Oppenheimer now lingered in exile, cut off from a world that had been the centre of his career. Even so, the greatness of the man and his service to his country could not be denied.
In 1963, less than a decade after the United States government had declared Oppenheimer a security risk, President Lyndon Johnson presented him with the Enrico Fermi Award, the highest honor the AEC could bestow. Oppenheimer retired from the Institute of Advanced Study in 1966, and, following a struggle with throat cancer, died the next year.
The Bombing of Japan:
On August 6 and August 9, 1945, the U.S. dropped two of the bombs Oppenheimer had helped develop over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A minimum of 110,000 people are thought to have been killed in the blasts, which wiped out both cities on a scale of devastation never seen before or since.
(‘A ball of blinding light’: Atomic bomb survivors share their stories.)
Oppenheimer had served on the scientific committee that recommended the War Department deploy the bomb as soon as possible against Japan. Historical debates still rage about whether the government listened to scientists’ pleas that the bomb be deployed against military targets only, or even publicly tested beforehand in an attempt to force Japan’s surrender.
The night of the Hiroshima bombing, Oppenheimer was cheered by a crowd of fellow scientists at Los Alamos and declared that his only regret was that the bomb hadn’t been finished in time to use against Germany.
But though they were thrilled by their accomplishment, the scientists were horrified at the loss of civilian lives in the attack, worrying that the future of the weapons would encourage future wars instead of deter them. A few weeks after the bombing, Oppenheimer wrote a letter to the Secretary of War warning that “the safety of this nation…cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess. It can be based only on making future wars impossible.”
It seems as though Oppenheimer believed in his work, including the work that led up to the ultimate detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. In the 2012 book Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center, author Jay Monk wrote that on Aug. 6, 1945, (when the first bomb was dropped), Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists seemed victorious.
As the book describes, “To ecstatic cheering, Oppenheimer told the crowd that it was too early to say what the results of the bombing had been, but that ‘the Japanese didn’t like it.’ ” Monk added Oppenheimer's only regret was that "we hadn't developed the bomb in time to use it against the Germans."
The second bomb devastated Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945. Monk also wrote that President Truman and Oppenheimer were not involved in the decision to deploy the weapon, as a previous directive issued on July 24 of the same year had already authorized General Spaatz to drop subsequent atomic bombs “as soon as made ready by the project staff.” The following day, President Truman issued an order to stop atomic bombings.
It does not seem that Oppenheimer was proud of or happy about the deployment of the second bomb. Monk wrote that an FBI report stated the physicist was a “nervous wreck” following the events of Aug. 9, and was also described as being “reluctant to promise that much real good could come out of continuing atomic-bomb work.”
Nuclear deterrence:
Nonetheless, Oppenheimer spent much of his life after the war lobbying for nuclear deterrence, vocally opposing U.S. attempts to develop a more powerful hydrogen bomb after the U.S.S.R. made strides with its own bomb. Instead, said Oppenheimer, the U.S. should consider using nuclear weapons only tactically and pursue other uses of nuclear technology, like generating power, instead.
This earned him political enemies—and put him the crosshairs of the Red Scare, an American political era of anti-Communist hysteria during the Cold War. At a 1954 hearing looking into his supposed Communist sympathies, the Atomic Energy Commission revoked his security clearance. The move was only reversed in 2022, after government officials revisited Oppenheimer’s case and found the investigation had been flawed and unlawful.
“He doesn't slot into easy categories of pro-nuclear, anti-nuclear or anything like that,” historian Alex Wellerstein told PBS NewsHour. “He's a tricky figure.”
Oppenheimer never returned to government service, instead founding the World Academy of Arts and Sciences and lecturing on science and ethics until his death in 1967. Though he had helped create the “necessary” weapon that ended a war, destroyed two entire cities, and ushered in a dangerous new age, he lobbied against nuclear proliferation for the rest of his life.
“In some crude sense which no vulgarity, no humour, no overstatement can quite extinguish,” he said in 1950, “the physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”