Oppenheimer: Father of The Atom Bomb
The physicist who inspired Christopher Nolan's 2023 summer blockbuster.
Christopher Nolan is back with yet another classic film. Oppenheimer, starring Cillian Murphy, swept the box office this summer.
But who is this man, the father of the atom bomb? Did he realize the significance of his world-changing invention?
Humble origins
Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904 in New York City. He became commonly called by his middle name. Robert was born into an affluent Jewish family in New York. His father, Julius, had recently come from Prussia. Anti-Semitism was on the rise across Western and Central Europe. Robert’s father left Germany in 1888, at the age of 17, to seek freedom in the United States. Robert’s impoverished immigrant father flourished in America, where he had risen to become a rich executive at a Manhattan textile manufacturers.
Robert’s mother was Ella Friedman, a Jewish woman born in New York in 1870. Her family were German refugees to the US as well. She was a painter, and young Robert inherited some of her aesthetic views to describe the physical structure of the natural universe. The couple had another boy, named Frank, who also became a physicist.
By the mid-1900s, Robert’s father had become a major New York business tycoon. The family moved closer to Central Park, and were rich enough to own Picasso paintings on the walls of their house.
Harvard education
Robert received an elite education and comfortable upbringing, despite the humble origins of his parents. He attended the Ethical Culture School, and then Alcuin Preparatory School. Those were two of New York’s most elite schools at the time.
By the age of 5, the precocious child was interested in mineralogy. He was fast-tracked into eighth grade. He cycled through various scientific interests, moving into the harder sciences, such as chemistry. Ultimately, it was physics that would attract the young boy.
In 1922, at the age of 18, Oppenheimer began his studies at Harvard. There, he came under the influence of Percy Bridgeman, an experimental physicist. Beyond his scientific interests, Robert indulged in history, as well as the Greek and Latin classics, which were still central to many Western curriculums in the 1920s. This was before political correctness dismantled classical education.
Robert spent most of his time reading at the library. He audited classes in his free time. He graduated with a BA summa cum laude in just three years.
Cambridge years
He was accepted into Cambridge, Britain’s leading physics centers since the days of Newton. He spent some summers there, and learned the works of Ernest Rutherford. Rutherford described nuclear half-life, and won a Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1908.
Toward the end of his first year in Cambridge, Robert accepted an offer from German physicist Max Born to study at the University of Gottingen in Germany. There, Oppenheimer studied with other leading scientific intellectuals, including Werner Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller. Many of these pioneering scientists would later join Oppenheimer as part of the Manhattan Project in WWII. Oppenheimer earned his PhD in physics in the spring of 1927, less than a year after arriving in Gottingen. He was age 23.
With Born, Oppenheimer wrote the Quantum Theory of Molecules, an essential document in the then-burgeoning field of quantum physics. His contributions allowed scientists of the late 1920s to separate the motions of a nuclei and an electron.
Personality
Oppenheimer possessed a charismatic personality, vacillating between introversion and extraversion as the occasion demanded. He was a chain smoker, and a jovial individual. He was extremely intelligent, and a bit arrogant, but also very naive at times.
He could also be erratic, to the concern of his students and teachers. He allegedly attempted to kill a teacher with a poison apple. On one occasion, when told by a friend about a marital engagement, Oppenheimer tried to strange his friend in a fit of anger. Oppenheimer’s arrogance often alienated his friends, many of whom he lost over the years. But biographers also regard him as a deeply insecure person. As a Jew, he was often an outsider.
Mysticism
He found himself especially interested in Eastern philosophy, such as Confucianism and Hinduism. He learned Sanskrit, the ancient language of India. He studied ancient Indian texts in their original language.
Oppenheimer’s interest in mysticism and religion were not just an eccentric pastime. For Oppenheimer, physics was the way of understanding the ultimate nature of reality. For him, his scientific enterprise was imbued with deep philosophical and spiritual significance.
Research
After his research in England and Germany, Oppenheimer returned to the US, where he held posts at University and Caltech. He made a few visits back to Europe to work at the University of Leiden and in Zurich. In Leiden, he acquired his nickname Oppie.
In 1929, he settled back in the US, this time permanently. He became an associate professor of physics at Berkeley and Caltech. For the next 13 years, he held positions at both institutions.
By the 1930s, Oppenheimer was a celebrity among America’s scientific community. He was renowned for his teaching methods and pioneering insights into modern theoretical physics.
Lovers
Oppenheimer began a romance with Jean Tatlock, a psychiatry student who was the daughter of an English scholar. His girlfriend was ten years younger than him. She was a troubled young woman, with severe depression and a conflicted sexuality. Their relationship was rocky, but it continued into 1940. He began to see a second woman, a girl named Kitty Harrison. She was a botanist and physicist at Caltech, who later divorced her second husband to marry Robert. Tragically, Jean took her own life in January of 1944. Robert and Kitty had two kids, a boy named Peter and a daughter named Katherine.
WWII
The Second World War broke out in autumn of 1939. Hitler’s Nazi regime took power in Germany. The Nazis were determined to wipe out Europe’s Jews and spark a new war to reverse the Treaty of Versailles.
Oppenheimer was familiar with the Nazis. Even though he was secular, he was still seen as a Jew. He became politically active, and began to devote three percent of his salary to aid the Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. The Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1934. Over the next four years, the Nazi crackdowns only grew more severe. In 1938, the Germans annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia.
With the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the British declared war on Nazi Germany. The US was still hesitant to join the fight, seeing it as just another European entanglement. The US remained neutral for the first two years, but the Roosevelt administration offered material aid to the British from the beginning. Italy, Hungary, and Romania allied with the Nazis. The Nazi invasions of Britain’s colonies in North Africa, and the conflict against Russia, made it seem that Hitler would dominate Europe. Japan, seeking its own Pacific empire, decided to preemptively attack the US.
In December 1941, the US was attacked at Pearl Harbor. This whipped up American fervor against the Axis powers. Oppenheimer soon became one of America’s leading researchers. He and others feared that Nazi Germany was seeking out a weapon of mass destruction to quickly win the world war.
Nuclear weapons
In the 1920s and 1930s, Germany had some of the leading scientists, and had the potential to develop a nuclear weapon. Nuclear fission had been discovered by a team led by Otto Robert Frisch and Lise Meitner in Berlin in 1938.
Various experiments were done by the Nazis. The Nazis tried to develop a nuclear reactor. Other experiments sought to use water for atomic weaponry.
In August 1939, President Roosevelt received a letter from Albert Einstein and a Hungarian physicist, warning of the existential threat posed by the Nazis’ pursuit of nuclear weapons. Little effort was done to respond, but with the US entry into the war, America began its own research.
Manhattan Project
Oppenheimer was tasked with the Los Alamos Lab in New Mexico, under the umbrella of the secret Manhattan Project. From 1942 onward, it went on to employ 130,000 people. A large team worked in Chicago developed the first nuclear reactor. Study of uranium was underway.
The Manhattan Project was overseen by Major General Leslie Groves. He also oversaw the construction of the Pentagon, the headquarters of the US Department of Defense. Oppenheimer was suggested to Groves in 1942 as a possible candidate to lead a team of theoretical physicists and scientists. Groves was skeptical, but eventually came to accept Oppenheimer.
In the weeks going into winter 1942, Oppenheimer began to tour various remote centers to test the weapons. He settled on Los Alamos, in New Mexico. A facility was built on the site of an old school. The job was subcontracted to the University of California. So Oppenheimer enjoyed some autonomy in the project. He was in charge of 5,000 people, including some of the 20th century’s greatest scientists. Oppenheimer’s closet colleague was Edward Teller.
When the Manhattan Project began, the team knew only vague theoretical knowledge about nuclear chain reactions. No one knew anything about nuclear weapons yet. They had to predict what would happen with a nuclear bomb. Oppenheimer worked tirelessly on the project. He was present at every step. It took a toll on his health. He lost 20 pounds. By the end, the spidery scientist had shrunk to a mere 110 pounds.
Atomic designs
Over the course of 1943, research at Los Alamos began to focus on a prototype for a plutonium gun. The logistics were very difficult. Over the year’s course, it was learned that such a design could not be transported using a B-29 heavy bomber. The Thin Man design was abandoned by April 1944. Oppenheimer began to work on a second attempted design, called the Little Boy. This is a simplified gun-type fission bomb. There was also the Fat Man design, designed as an implosion-style bomb.
Oppenheimer continued to favor a gun-style design, even as the Fat Man grew more successful. He selected John von Neumann, a Hungarian-born mathematician and physicist, to review the design in 1943.
Over the next several months, metallurgists at Los Alamos had to solve the problem of casting plutonium into a sphere. This was solved by the invention of a plutonium-gallium alloy, coated with nickel. The design was reaching completion.
By the start of 1945, Los Alamos was close to achieving a workable atomic design. This became the Little Boy and the Fat Man. The two designs were worked out in the spring of 1945, and produced at sites in Washington state and Tennessee. There were still some problems. It was costly and time-consuming to enrich the nuclear substances. Engineering problems persisted.
Trinity test
By summer 1945, Oppenheimer told General Groves that he was ready for a denotation test. The Trinity nuclear test was carried out in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico. In Spanish, the name translates to “Dead Man’s Route.” It was a fitting name for what would soon transpire. Oppenheimer said that he named the test Trinity, after reading the religious poetry of 17th-century Englishman John Donne. The device used was a Fat Man bomb. It was called the Gadget. The plutonium cost billons of dollars. Much hinged on its success.
The test took place near dawn, on July 16. Observation shelters were stationed to the north, south, and west of the blast site. Each was about 9 kilometers. Many of the observers were scientists. Some believed the bomb would not work. Others feared its destructive potential.
The bomb was so powerful, that it literally melted the sand and produced a massive crater. The growing fireball’s color went from purple, green, orange, and eventually to white. It all coalesced into a mushroom cloud, reaching as high as 12 km up in the sky.
“Destroyer of worlds”
When Oppenheimer witnessed the bomb, he allegedly spoke words from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, one of the sacred texts in Hinduism from the second half of the first millennium BC. Its title translates to “The Song by God.” The Gita is a 700-verse scripture, which follows Prince Arjuna and his guide, the Hindu deity Krishna.
It is widely (and wrongly) believed that Oppenheimer quoted from the Gita. The god Vishnu says, “I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
Actually, Oppenheimer later recalled an entirely different line from the Gita. It goes, “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.” He clarified this in 1965.
Within weeks of the Trinity test, the atomic bomb would be used. By that time, the war in Europe had ended. The Allies marched into Berlin in late April of 1945, and the Nazis surrendered. Japan’s empire remained intransigent. Based on Japan’s military honor, it seemed that the Japanese would never surrender. This risked a drawn-out conflict that could cost millions of lives. The decision was chosen to use the atomic bomb to force Japan’s fascist regime into submission.
The Japanese city of Hiroshima was blown to pieces by the Little Boy on August 6, 1945. Oppenheimer was pleased, and wished that the bomb had existed earlier to use against Hitler. Three days later, the US dropped a second atomic bomb, the Fat Man, on Nagasaki. Oppenheimer was horrified. He felt that Japan’s government had not had enough time to surrender. Six days after Nagasaki, Japan came to a speedy surrender. The war was over.
The ethics of nuclear weapons remains hotly debated today. On the one hand, the nuclear bombings of Japan saved millions of lives from a bloody invasion of the mainland, ensuring an Allied victory. Since WWII, the unthinkable prospect of nuclear conflict has been an effective deterrent against a clash of global great powers. On the other hand, nuclear weapons continue to pose an existential threat to humanity well into the 21st century.
Princeton years
After the war, Oppenheimer enjoyed unprecedented popularity. He decided to leave Berkeley to head the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton in 1947. The project included the likes of Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Paul Dirac.
In New Jersey, Oppenheimer continued his teaching career. He published little at Princeton. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Princeton emerged as one of the world’s leading centers of modern physics.
Oppenheimer continued to hold a number of government positions going into the 1950s. He still enjoyed security clearance. He joined the newly established Atomic Energy Commission, founded in 1947 by the United Nations to foster world peace. It was tasked with preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer and his colleagues played a central role in designing international restrictions on such dangerous weaponry, which are still in place today.
Cold War
Growing tensions between the US and the Soviets initiated the Cold War. When the USSR held its first successful test of nukes in 1949, it triggered a decades-long arms race between the two superpowers.
When news reached the US, President Truman authorized research into the hydrogen bomb. Oppenheimer was opposed, insisting that the weapon was impractical and would wipe out all of humanity. He petitioned the White House, but Truman pressed ahead. In November 1952, an H bomb was successfully tested. Despite reservations by Oppenheimer and others, the Cold War was leading into an era of mutually assured destruction.
McCarthyism
The US government became suspicious of Oppenheimer in the 1950s, during the Second Red Scare. The Cold War escalated, and Germany was split up into two competing spheres of influence. The Soviets controlled Eastern Germany. To block any further Russian expansion, the Western Bloc formed the NATO alliance. In the Korean War, the US became involved in a proxy conflict for the first time against the Soviets.
Paranoia broke out about communism within the US. From 1950 to 1954, Senator Joe McCarthy undertook extensive efforts to uncover communist supporters.
Oppenheimer’s association with liberal and left-leaning politics stretched back to the mid-1930s. After being largely apolitical, he began to get active against the growing tide of Fascism. In 1936, the Soviets supported the Republicans and Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. So the USSR was viewed favorably by some American leftists of the time.
Oppenheimer himself was never a member of the Communist Party USA, but some of his close allies were. This included his former wife, Jean Tatlock, when the two were romantically involved in the 1930s. Other groups, such as the ACLU, were considered radical at the time, but are now viewed more favorably for ushering in Civil Rights.
The FBI opened a file on him. He was forced to testify before the HUAC about his political associations. He admitted to ties to the Communist Party, but said he was not a member himself. No much came from this investigation. In early winter of 1953, the FBI came to the inaccurate conclusion that Oppenheimer was a Soviet spy. In mid-December, Oppenheimer lost his security clearance. He was enraged, and demanded a private hearing. This happened in late spring of 1954.
The hearing did not go as Oppenheimer had hoped. Oppenheimer’s old friend, Edward Teller, testified that he was sometimes suspicious. Oppenheimer was stripped of his clearance, and fell out of public attention in the mid-1950s.
Oppenheimer was horrified. Many academics came to his defense, but bureaucrats and administers were less sympathetic. Many of his scheduled talks and appearances were routinely cancelled. Oppenheimer’s confidence was severely wounded, and he largely retired from public life in the mainland US. He relocated to the Virgin Islands, in the Caribbean. The island of St. John was later renamed in his honor as Oppenheimer’s Island.
Final years
The 1950s were extremely unproductive for Oppenheimer. He barely published anything. By the late 1950s, there were concerted efforts to rehabilitate his reputation. He received lavish honors from the grateful governments of France and Britain. The Second Red Scare fell out of favor, and Oppenheimer’s reputation was revived. He received the Enrico Fermi Award from President Kennedy in 1963.
Oppenheimer was happy to have his reputation restored, but he didn’t live long to enjoy it. Two years later, he was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1965. This was because of his lifelong smoking. He fell into coma, and died on February 18, 1967. He was aged 62. His funeral was attended by 600 of his colleagues.
In the decades since his death, Oppenheimer’s legacy has since become extremely beloved and positive. He won a posthumous Nobel Prize for the third time in 1967.
Legacy
Oppenheimer is unquestionably one of the most important theoretical physicists in history. From the 1920s to 1960s, his insights revolutionized science and modern life. Most of all, he was the director of the Manhattan Project, and was instrumental in the Allies’ triumph against Axis totalitarianism.
Oppenheimer’s legacy remains alive and well today. He was a modern-day mystic, who saw his scientific enterprise as a spiritual quest to explore the profound mysteries of the universe. Today, he is warmly regarded as one of modernity’s greatest physicists and public intellectuals.