Briefed with weaponising atomic energy, the 38-year-old Oppenheimer was chosen by General Leslie Groves to head up the project\u2019s secret research laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and oversaw the development of the world\u2019s first atomic weapons between 1943-45.<\/p>\n
Prior to taking up the post, he had carried out research into the quantity of radioactive material that would be required to make an atomic weapon, and how destructive it might be. Such insight proved indispensable to the project\u2019s ultimate success.<\/p>\n
![\""J\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/07\/GettyImages-56949086-1132765.png?quality=90&resize=620%2C412"\" "\\"\"GettyImages-56949086\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>Kai Bird is co-author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer<\/em> (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). On an episode of the HistoryExtra<\/em> podcast, he explained the physicist\u2019s unique value to the project.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone we interviewed about his years in Los Alamos always mentioned that the atomic bomb would never have been produced in two and a half years if they had chosen anyone other than Oppenheimer. It turned out that he was a brilliant administrator, and was very persuasive at getting all these large-ego minded scientists to work together.\u201d<\/p>\n Oppenheimer was anti-fascist in his political leanings, explains Bird, and this was his major motivation for building what he called \u201cthe gadget\u201d.<\/p>\n He knew from the physics that such a weapon was possible; it was simply a large engineering problem. He feared that the German physicists with whom he had studied in the 1920s were just as capable of building this weapon, and believed that they would gift it to Adolf Hitler<\/a> and Germany would win the war.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was very fearful that they were way too far behind,\u201d says Bird. \u201cAnd this gave him the motivation to work hard and to inspire other physicists and scientists at Los Alamos to build the gadget.\u201d<\/p>\n An important part of his brilliance, says Bird, is that he was a polymath. \u201cHe loved quantum physics, but he also loved the deserts of New Mexico. He first went to New Mexico when he was an 18-year-old, and he fell in love with horseback riding and the very spartan cowboy existence out there.\u201d<\/p>\n Oppenheimer also loved French poetry and the novels of Ernest Hemingway, and he also acquired an interest in Hindu mysticism and read the Hindu scriptures, the Bhagavad Gita<\/em>. \u201cHe taught himself Sanskrit so he could read it in the original,\u201d says Bird.<\/p>\n It was this multifaceted brilliance that was part of his appeal, says Bird. He differed from other theoretical physicists as he was able to explain concepts in \u201cplain English\u201d and was also a charismatic speaker, though Bird notes that he could also be shy and reticent.<\/p>\n He was \u201cvery complicated\u201d, says Bird. \u201cHe could be sweet and patient with his students, and then in the presence of authority figures, he could suddenly become brusque and even rude. And, of course, this was part of his downfall later.\u201d<\/p>\n J Robert Oppenheimer was married to Kitty Oppenheimer (formerly Kitty Puening). A German American biologist and botanist, Puening studied mathematics, biology, and chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh in the late 1920s, and in the early 1930s became a member of the Communist Party of the America (CPA).<\/p>\n Prior to meeting Oppenheimer in 1939, Kitty had been married three times, and was married to her third husband, Richard Stewart Harrison, when her relationship with the physicist began.<\/p>\n Kitty became pregnant with their first child in the autumn of 1940, and soon afterwards she obtained a divorce from Harrison, which left Robert and Kitty free to marry in November 1940.<\/p>\n A keen horsewoman and lover of the outdoors, Kitty joined Oppenheimer to live in the desert town in Los Alamos, where she worked as a biologist on the health group of the Manhattan Project, conducting blood tests to assess the danger of radiation, before she became pregnant again.<\/p>\n During this period, she also suffered with depression and alcohol issues, in part due to the isolation of the military facility. She survived Oppenheimer by four years, dying of an embolism in 1972.<\/p>\n Oppenheimer also had an enduring relationship with Jean Tatlock, a woman whom he met in the early 1930s.<\/p>\n She was a psychiatrist and also a member of the Communist Part of America, and is often credited with introducing Oppenheimer to radical politics.<\/p>\n Some historians have suggested that Oppenheimer and Tatlock were romantically involved following Oppenheimer\u2019s marriage to Kitty in 1940; though their relationship had broken off in 1939, Oppenheimer continued to visit Tatlock in San Francisco until 1943.<\/p>\n Tatlock suffered from clinical depression and died by suicide in 1944.<\/p>\n \u201cAny attempt to label Robert Oppenheimer a party member is a futile exercise,\u201d wrote Kai Bird and the late Martin Sherwin in their 2005 biography, \u201cas the FBI learned to its frustration over many years.\u201d<\/p>\n But many people close to the physicist were either members of the party \u2013 including Kitty, Jean, and his brother Frank Oppenheimer \u2013 or had links to its activity.<\/p>\n Though Sherwin and Bird concluded that Oppenheimer didn\u2019t join the party himself, he did contribute to Communist Party activities, including an effort to desegregate a public swimming pool in California, and a fund to buy an ambulance to ship it to the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War<\/a>.<\/p>\n These associations would \u201chaunt him with the American political authorities and the FBI\u201d, explains Bird. \u201cHe fell under FBI surveillance as early as 1940. And by 1954, his FBI file had grown to be about 8,000 pages.\u201d<\/p>\n The line is often associated with Oppenheimer, who quoted \u201cI am become Death, the destroyer of worlds\u201d from the Hindu Bhagavad Gita<\/em>, after the successful detonation of the Trinity nuclear weapon in July 1945.<\/p>\n He didn\u2019t utter it straight away though. Immediately afterwards, explains Bird, the physicist turned to his brother Frank and simply said: \u201cIt worked.\u201d<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until a few days later, when he was interviewed by the New York Times<\/em>, that Oppenheimer quoted the Hindu scripture.<\/p>\n \u201cHe had a very theatrical sense to him,\u201d says Bird. \u201cHe knew how to get up on the stage and perform.\u201d<\/p>\n Oppenheimer himself later spoke of the moment in a 1965 NBC documentary: \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n The Trinity bomb was successfully tested on 16 July, producing the estimated equivalent of 20,000 tonnes of TNT.<\/p>\n German-born Rudolf Peierls recalled that the brilliant blinding flash \u201ctold us\u2026 we had done our job\u201d. Yet by that time, the war with Nazi Germany was over and so Japan instead became the target.<\/p>\n Some Los Alamos staff expressed concern that, as Japan had no bomb project, why should the operation go ahead? Though Oppenheimer grappled with the huge moral weight of deploying such a weapon, he was influenced by Danish physicist Niels Bohr who, upon a visit to the project in 1943 had asked Oppenheimer: \u201cRobert, can you tell me, is it big enough?\u201d \u2013meaning, will it be significant enough to change the nature of warfare?<\/p>\n Though conflicted, Oppenheimer\u2019s position in August 1945 was that the bomb would ignite with such explosive power that it could persuade all of humanity that the world should never again fight total warfare like the Second World War.<\/p>\n There is evidence that the decision undoubtedly weighed heavy on Oppenheimer. Bird interviewed Anne Wilson Marks, Oppenheimer\u2019s secretary. She recalled that one day, in the intervening three weeks between the Trinity test and the use of the bomb on Japan, Oppenheimer was muttering under his breath as they walked to work: \u201cThose poor little people, those poor little people.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAnne stopped him and said, \u2018Robert, what are you talking about?\u2019 And he said, \u2018Well, the Trinity test shows that the gadget has worked, and now it\u2019s going to be used on a large target in Japan, meaning a city. And there are going to be innocents, thousands of innocents killed. Those poor little people.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n This shows, explains Bird, that he was painfully aware of the tragic implications of the gadget. And yet, as Bird and Martin Sherwin considered Anne Wilson Marks\u2019s testimony when writing American Prometheus<\/em>, \u201cMarty pointed out that, chronologically, that [conversation with Anne Wilson Marks] is the same week that [Oppenheimer] was briefing some of the bombardiers who were going to be on the aeroplane that was going to drop the bomb. And he instructed them exactly at what altitude they should detonate the weapon to have the maximum destructive power, and [said] that it should be dropped on the centre of the city for to have the most destructive implications.\u201d<\/p>\n At 2.45am on 6 August 1945, the crew of the Enola Gay aircraft dropped a bomb named Little Boy on Hiroshima<\/a>, a 4.8-tonne device that detonated with the power of 15,000 tonnes of TNT. Authorities estimated the number of deaths by December 1945 to be around 140,000 (since then, deaths from radiation-related diseases have added to the toll).<\/p>\n Japan surrendered on 14 August 1945, five days after a second bomb devastated Nagasaki.<\/p>\n After the detonation of the two atomic bombs in August 1945, Oppenheimer never worked on weapons again.<\/p>\n Kitty Oppenheimer\u2019s letters to friends tell of how in the days following the bombs, he plunged into a deep depression, and she feared for his life. As journalist Lincoln Barnett wrote in Life magazine in 1949: \u201cOppenheimer knew that he and his coworkers had acquired a promethian [sic] burden they could never shed.\u201d<\/p>\n Once somewhat recovered, Oppenheimer headed to Washington, DC for briefings on the end of the war, and in October 1945 he met with US President Harry Truman.<\/p>\n \u201cBy this time, Oppenheimer was determined to try to persuade the president and the policy makers that they needed to understand that this is a weapon that cannot be used defensively, and that we shouldn\u2019t rely on it,\u201d says Bird. He believed \u201cthat we should try to find some way to impose international regulations, and maybe ban it and control the technology\u201d.<\/p>\n President Truman didn\u2019t respond favourably to Oppenheimer\u2019s pro-regulation position or the suggestion that the US had blood on its hands. In response to Truman\u2019s belief that the Russians would never be able to match the technology, Oppenheimer strongly felt that \u201cthere were no secrets to this weapon,\u201d says Bird. \u201cThe physics was known.\u201d<\/p>\n Just a few weeks later in November 1945, Oppenheimer delivered a speech in Philadelphia to the American Philosophical Society, in which he said:<\/p>\n \u201cWe have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world. We have made a thing that, by all standards of the world we grew up in, is an evil thing.<\/p>\n By so doing, by our participation in making it possible to make these things, we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man, of whether it is good to learn about the world, to try to understand it, to try to control it, to help gift to the world of men increased insight, increased power.\u201d<\/p>\n By the autumn of 1945, the Manhattan Project was public knowledge, and Oppenheimer\u2019s position on the development of the world-changing weapons had caused him to become a household name.<\/p>\n![\""An\"](\""https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/07\/GettyImages-615301124-8e4ead7.png?quality=90&resize=620%2C412"\" "\\"\"GettyImages-615301124\"\\"\/")
<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>Kitty Oppenheimer: who was J Robert Oppenheimer married to?<\/h2>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>What was Oppenheimer\u2019s relationship with Jean Tatlock?<\/h2>\n
Was Oppenheimer a communist?<\/h2>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>Did Oppenheimer really say, \u201cI am become Death, the destroyer of worlds\u201d?<\/h2>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>Did Oppenheimer regret the atomic bomb?<\/h2>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>What happened to Oppenheimer after the atomic bomb?<\/h2>\n
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div>Why is Oppenheimer known as the father of the atomic bomb?<\/h2>\n
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