Robert J Oppenheimer

Robert J Oppenheimer – A Hero, A Villian, A Story

• Oppenheimer’s early life

He was born in 1904 into a wealthy secular Jewish family in New York City and educated at Manhattan’s Ethical Culture School, graduating in 1921. Although his parents were first- and second-generation Americans of German-Jewish descent, Oppenheimer refrained from embracing his heritage for much of his life.

Antisemitism impacted him throughout his time studying at Harvard, and later, amid the Nazis’ rise to power in Germany, changed the way he engaged with his Jewishness.

• Years in Europe

After graduating summa cum laude from Harvard in 1925, Oppenheimer travelled to England to conduct research at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory under British physicist and 1906 Nobel Prize winner J. J. Thomson. There, he struggled with mental health issues and ended up on probation.

Oppenheimer ultimately transferred to the University of Göttingen in Germany, where he earned his Ph.D in quantum physics. During his time in Germany, he studied with a number of prominent physicists, including Max Born and Bohr. Oppenheimer attended Göttingen alongside Werner Heisenberg, who would go on to lead the German effort to develop an atomic bomb.

• Ties to the Communist Party

In 1929, after returning to America, Oppenheimer accepted an assistant professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, in a special arrangement that also saw him teaching at the California Institute of Technology. Over the next 14 years, he established Berkeley as one of the greatest schools of theoretical physics in the U.S. and garnered a loyal following of up-and-coming physicists.

After entering into a tumultuous relationship with Stanford Medical School student and Communist Party member Jean Tatlock in 1936—when she was 22 and he was 32—Oppenheimer began taking an interest in left-wing political causes, from supporting anti-fascists during the Spanish Civil War to unionizing academics. While Oppenheimer never officially joined the Communist Party, many of his closest friends and family members, including his brother Frank Oppenheimer, friend Haakon Chevalier, and future wife Katharine “Kitty” Puening, were members at various points in time.

• The Manhattan Project

In early 1942, Oppenheimer was recruited for the Manhattan Project, the United States government’s secret World War II undertaking to build an atomic bomb. Later that year, General Leslie Groves appointed Oppenheimer as the scientific director of the program and, in early 1943, construction began on Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico—one of a number of laboratories in secret locations across the country, including Chicago and Oak Ridge, involved in the operation. Oppenheimer convinced Groves that Los Alamos should be turned into town where scientists could live with their families, since many might refuse to relocate otherwise.

Oppenheimer assembled a group of the top scientists of the time to live and work at Los Alamos until the bomb had been completed. Less than three years after the laboratory’s founding, the world’s first nuclear weapons test, dubbed the Trinity test, took place in the nearby Jornada del Muerto desert on July 16, 1945. The test was successful in proving that the bomb worked, but it caused decades of immense harm to Indigenous people living in the surrounding area.

Three weeks later, on Aug. 6 and 9, respectively, the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, ending the war. The bombings together killed between an estimated 110,000 to 210,000 people, most of whom were civilians.

• Oppenheimer’s post-war life

Following the war, public opinion about the use of the atomic bomb wavered. While visiting the White House in October 1945, as shown in the movie, Oppenheimer told President Harry S. Truman, “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands.”

However, Oppenheimer was hailed as a national hero by many and, in 1946, was awarded a Medal for Merit. When the Manhattan Project came under the jurisdiction of the newly-formed AEC, the agency charged with overseeing all atomic research and development in the U.S., Oppenheimer was named chairman of the General Advisory Committee. As chairman, he staunchly opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb—a “Super Bomb” conceived by fellow Los Alamos scientist Edward Teller that was a thousand times more powerful than the atomic bomb—when Cold War tensions began to rise between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

In 1947, Oppenheimer had also been appointed director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Oppenheimer stayed on as director of the Institute for Advanced Study until 1966, shortly before dying of throat cancer at his Princeton home on Feb. 18, 1967. Prior to his death he was presented in 1966 with the AEC’s highest honor, the Enrico Fermi Award—by President Lyndon B. Johnson.

In his acceptance speech, Oppenheimer referenced former President Thomas Jefferson’s odes to “the brotherly spirit of science.”

“We have not, I know, always given evidence of that brotherly spirit,” he said. “This is not because we lack vital common or intersecting scientific interests. It is in part because, with countless other men and women, we are engaged in this great enterprise of our time, testing whether men can both preserve and enlarge life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and live without war as the great arbiter of history.”