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J. Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American theoretical
physicist, best known for his role as the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the World
War II effort to develop the first nuclear weapons, at the
secret Los Alamos
laboratory in New Mexico. Known
colloquially as "the
father of the atomic bomb", Oppenheimer lamented the weapon's killing power after it was used to destroy the Japanese cities of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. After the war, he was a chief advisor to the newly created Atomic Energy
Commission and used that position to lobby for international control of atomic
energy and to avert the nuclear arms race with
the Soviet Union. After
invoking the ire of many politicians and scientists with his outspoken political
opinions during the Red Scare, he had his security
clearance revoked in a much-publicized and politicized hearing in 1954.
Though stripped of his direct political influence, Oppenheimer continued to
lecture, write, and work in physics. A decade later, President John F. Kennedy awarded
him the Enrico Fermi Award as
a gesture of rehabilitation.
As a scientist, Oppenheimer is remembered most for being a chief founder of the
American school of theoretical physics while at the University
of California, Berkeley.
Early life and education
Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904 to Julius S.
Oppenheimer (a wealthy textile importer who had immigrated to the United
States from Germany in 1888) and Ella
Friedman, a painter. He studied at the Ethical
Culture Society School (whose physics laboratory has since been named for
him) where, in addition to mathematics and science, he was exposed to a variety
of subjects ranging from Greek to French literature, and met with success at the
school's particular form of ethical training, based on the secular Judaism of its
founder, Felix Adler (the
Oppenheimers were of Jewish descent but they did not
observe the religious traditions). Throughout his life, he remained a versatile
scholar, proficient in science as well as the humanities. He entered Harvard University one year late due to an attack of colitis. During the
interim, he went with a former English teacher to
recuperate in New Mexico, where he fell in
love with horseback
riding and the mountains and plateau of the Southwest. He
returned reinvigorated, flourishing with ten courses at once each term in as
vast topics beyond science as Greek, architecture, classics, art, and
literature, and made up for the delay by graduating summa cum laude in just
three years with a major in chemistry.
Europe
When at Harvard, after being admitted to graduate standing in physics in his
first year as an undergraduate on the basis of independent study, Oppenheimer
was introduced to experimental physics during a course on thermodynamics taught by Percy Bridgman,
and was encouraged to go to Europe for future study, as a
world-class education in the subject could not then be obtained in the United
States. He was accepted for postgraduate work at Ernest Rutherford's
famed Cavendish
Laboratory in Cambridge, working under the
eminent but aging J.J. Thomson. Oppenheimer's
clumsiness in the laboratory made it apparent that his forte was theoretical,
not experimental, physics, so he left in 1926 for the University of
Göttingen to study under Max Born. Göttingen was one of
the top centers for theoretical physics in Europe, and Oppenheimer made a number
of friends who would go on to great success, such as Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, and Werner Heisenberg,
before he obtained his Ph.D. at the young
age of 22. After the oral exam for his Ph.D., the professor administering it is
reported to have said, "Phew, I'm glad that's over. He was on the point of
questioning me."[1] At Göttingen, Oppenheimer was known for being a quick study. However, he was
also known for being too enthusiastic in discussions, sometimes to the point of
taking over seminar sessions, a fact that used to irritate a few of Born's
pupils.
At Göttingen, Oppenheimer published many important contributions to the then
newly developed quantum theory, most
notably a famous paper on the so-called Born-Oppenheimer
approximation, which separates nuclear motion from electronic motion in the
mathematical treatment of molecules. In September 1927, he returned to Harvard
as a young maven of mathematical
physics and a National Research Council Fellow, having published more than a
dozen articles, and in early 1928 he studied at the California
Institute of Technology. Here he received numerous invitations for teaching
positions, and accepted an assistant professorship in physics at the University
of California, Berkeley. In his words, "it was a desert", yet paradoxically
a fertile place of opportunity. He maintained a joint appointment with Caltech,
where he spent every spring term in order to avoid isolation from mainstream
research. At Caltech, Oppenheimer struck a close friendship with Linus
Pauling and they planned to mount a joint attack on the nature of the
chemical bond, a field in which Pauling was a pioneer—apparently Oppenheimer
would supply the mathematics and Pauling would interpret the results. However,
this relationship was nipped in the bud when Pauling began to suspect that the
theorist was becoming too close to his wife, Ava Helen; once when Pauling was at
work, Oppenheimer had come to their place and blurted out an invitation to Ava
Helen to join him on a tryst in Mexico. She flatly refused and
reported this incident to Pauling. This, and her apparent nonchalance about the
incident, disquieted him, and he immediately cut off his relationship with the
Berkeley professor, leading to a coolness between them that would last their
lives, although Oppenheimer did invite Pauling to be the head of the Chemistry
Division of the atomic bomb project (Pauling refused, saying that he was a pacifist).
In the Autumn of 1928, Oppenheimer visited Paul Ehrenfest's
institute at the University of
Leiden, the Netherlands, where he
impressed those there by giving lectures in Dutch despite his little
experience with the language. There he was given the nickname of "Opje", which
was later Anglicised by his students as "Oppie". From Leiden he continued on to Zurich, Switzerland, to work with Wolfgang Pauli on
problems relating to quantum theory and the continuous spectrum, before heading
back to the United States. Oppenheimer highly respected and liked Pauli, and
some of his own style and his critical approach to problems was said to be
inspired by Pauli. His time with both Ehrenfest and Pauli gave Oppenheimer a
chance to polish his mathematical skills.
California
Before his Berkeley professorship began, Oppenheimer was diagnosed with a
mild case of tuberculosis, and with his
brother Frank, spent some
weeks at a ranch in New Mexico, which he leased and eventually purchased. (When
he heard the ranch was available for lease, he exclaimed, "Hot dog!"—and since
it was in New Mexico, the Oppenheimer brothers named it "Perro Caliente", the
literal Spanish translation of this exclamation.[2])
Later, Oppenheimer used to say that 'physics and desert country' were his two
great loves, loves that would be improbably combined when he directed the atomic
bomb project at Los Alamos in New Mexico. He recovered from his tuberculosis and
returned to Berkeley, where he prospered as an advisor and collaborator to a
generation of physicists who admired him for his intellectual virtuosity and
broad interests. Nobel Prize
winner Hans Bethe later said about
him:
- Probably the most important ingredient Oppenheimer brought to his
teaching was his exquisite taste. He always knew what were the important
problems, as shown by his choice of subjects. He truly lived with those
problems, struggling for a solution, and he communicated his concern to the
group.
He also worked closely with (and became good friends with) Nobel Prize winner
experimental physicist Ernest O. Lawrence and his cyclotron pioneers, helping
the experimentalists understand the new data their machines were producing at
the Lawrence's Radiation
Laboratory.
Oppenheimer became credited with being a founding father of the American
school of theoretical physics, and developed a reputation for his erudition in
physics, his eclecticism, his interest in languages and Eastern philosophy, and
the eloquence and clarity with which he thought. But he was also troubled
throughout his life, and professed to experiencing periods of depression. "I
need physics more than friends," he once informed his brother. A tall, thin chain
smoker who often neglected to eat during periods of intellectual discomfort
and concentration, Oppenheimer was marked by many of his friends as having a
self-destructive tendency, and during numerous periods of his life worried his
colleagues and associates with his melancholy and insecurity. When he was
studying in Cambridge and had taken a vacation to meet up with his friend
Francis Ferguson in Paris, a disturbing event had taken place. During a
conversation in which Oppenheimer was narrating his frustration with
experimental physics to Ferguson, he had suddenly leapt up and tried to strangle
him. Although Ferguson easily fended off the attack, the episode had convinced
Ferguson of his friend's deep psychological troubles. Oppenheimer developed
numerous affectations, seemingly in an attempt to convince those around him—or
possibly himself—of his self-worth. He was said to be mesmerizing, hypnotic in
private interaction but often frigid in more public settings. His associates
fell into two camps: one which saw him as an aloof and impressive genius and an
aesthete; another which saw him as a pretentious and insecure poseur. His
students almost always fell into the former category, adopting "Oppie's"
affectations, from his way of walking to talking and beyond — even trying to
replicate his inclination for reading entire texts in their originally
transcribed languages.
Oppenheimer's intelligence and charisma attracted students
from across the country to his new school of theoretical
physics.
Oppenheimer did important research in theoretical
astrophysics (especially as it relates to general relativity and nuclear theory), nuclear physics, spectroscopy, and quantum field
theory (including its extension into quantum
electrodynamics). The formalism of relativistic quantum mechanics also
attracted his attention. His best-known contribution, made as a graduate
student, is the Born-Oppenheimer
approximation mentioned above. He also made important contributions to the
theory of cosmic ray showers, and did
work which led eventually toward descriptions of quantum tunneling. His
work on the Oppenheimer-Phillips
process, involved in artificial radioactivity under bombardment by deuterons, has
served as an important step in nuclear physics. In the late 1930s, he was the first to write
papers suggesting the existence of what we today call black holes. After the
Born-Oppenheimer approximation paper, these papers remain his most cited ones,
and they were key in the rejuvenation of astrophysical research in the United
States in the 1950s, mainly by John Wheeler. As early as
1930, he also wrote a paper essentially predicting the existence of the positron (which
had been postulated by Paul Dirac), a formulation
that he however did not carry to its natural outcome, because of his skepticism
about the validity of the Dirac equation. As
evidenced above, his work predicts many later finds which include, further, the neutron, meson, and neutron
star. Even beyond the immense abstruseness of the topics he was expert in,
Oppenheimer's papers were considered difficult to understand. Oppenheimer was
very fond of using elegant, if extremely complex, mathematical techniques to
demonstrate physical principles, though he was sometimes criticized for making
mathematical mistakes, presumably out of haste.
Many people thought that Oppenheimer's discoveries and research were not
commensurate with his inherent abilities and talents. They still considered him
an outstanding physicist, but they did not place him at the very top rank of
theorists who fundamentally challenged the frontiers of knowledge. One reason
for this could have been his diverse interests, which kept him from completely
focusing on any individual topic for long enough to bring it to full fruition.
His close confidant and colleague, Nobel Prize winner Isidor Rabi, later gave his
own interpretation:
- Oppenheimer was overeducated in those fields which lie outside the
scientific tradition, such as his interest in religion, in the Hindu religion
in particular, which resulted in a feeling of mystery of the universe that
surrounded him like a fog. He saw physics clearly, looking toward what had
already been done, but at the border he tended to feel there was much more of
the mysterious and novel than there actually was...he turned away from the
hard, crude methods of theoretical physics into a mystical realm of broad
intuition.
In spite of this, some people (such as the Nobel Prize winner physicist Luis
Alvarez) have suggested that if he had lived long enough to see his
predictions substantiated by experiment, Oppenheimer might have won a Nobel
Prize for his work on gravitational collapse, concerning neutron stars and black
holes.
Radical politics
During the 1920s, Oppenheimer kept himself
aloof of worldly matters, and claimed to have not learned of the Stock Market Crash of
1929 until some time after the fact (Oppenheimer himself had little worry
regarding financial matters, as his family inheritance provided him with ample
funding). It was not until he became involved with Jean Tatlock, the daughter
of a Berkeley literature professor, in 1936, that he showed any interest in
politics. Like many young intellectuals in the 1930s he became a supporter of Communist ideas, and having much more money than most professors (he inherited over
$300,000, a massive sum at the time, after his father's death in 1937) was able
to bankroll many left-wing efforts.
The majority of his radical work consisted of hosting fund-raisers for the Republican cause
in the Spanish Civil War and
other anti-Fascist activity. He never
openly joined the Communist Party (his
brother Frank, however, did, against Robert's advice), though the historian
Gregg Herken has recently claimed to have evidence that Oppenheimer did interact
with the Communist Party during the 1930s and early 1940s.[3] In November 1940, he married Katherine Puening Harrison, a radical Berkeley
student, and by May 1941 they had their first child, Peter.
The Manhattan Project
When World War II started,
Oppenheimer eagerly became involved in the efforts to develop an atomic
bomb which were already taking up much of the time and facilities of
Lawrence's Radiation
Laboratory at Berkeley. In 1941, Lawrence, Vannevar Bush, Arthur
Compton, and James Conant were trying to
wrest the bomb project from the Uranium Committee established by President Franklin D.
Roosevelt in 1939, because they felt it was proceeding too slowly.
Oppenheimer was invited to take over work on fast neutron calculations, a task
which he threw himself into with full vigor, renouncing what he called his
"left-wing wanderings" to abandon himself to his responsibilities (though many
of his friends and students were still quite radical). When the U.S. Army was given jurisdiction over the bomb effort, now called the Manhattan Project,
project director General Leslie R. Groves (who had just finished directing the construction of the Pentagon) appointed, to the
surprise of many, Oppenheimer as its scientific director. Groves knew of
Oppenheimer's potential security problems, but thought that Oppenheimer was the
best man to direct a diverse team of scientists and would be unaffected by his
past political leanings.
Los Alamos
One of Oppenheimer's first acts was to host a summer school for bomb theory
at his building in Berkeley. The mix of European physicists and his own
students—a group including Robert Serber, Emil
Konopinski, Felix Bloch, Hans
Bethe, and Edward Teller—busied
themselves calculating what needed to be done, and in what order, to make the
bomb. When Teller put forward the remote possibility that the bomb would
generate enough heat to ignite the atmosphere (an event that was soon shown to
be impossible by Bethe), Oppenheimer nevertheless was concerned enough to meet
up with Arthur Compton in Michigan to
discuss the situation. At the time, research for the project was going on at
many different universities and laboratories across the country, presenting a
problem for both security and cohesion. Oppenheimer and Groves decided that they
needed a centralized, secret research laboratory. Scouting for a site,
Oppenheimer was drawn to New Mexico, not far from his ranch. On a flat mesa near Santa Fe, New
Mexico, the Los
Alamos laboratory was hastily built, a rag-tag collection of barracks and
mud. There Oppenheimer coaxed and collected a group of the most brilliant
physicists of his day, which he referred to as the "luminaries", including Enrico
Fermi, Richard Feynman, Robert R. Wilson, and Victor Weisskopf, as
well as Bethe and Teller. His wife gave birth there to their second child,
Katherine (called Toni), in 1944.
Oppenheimer was noted for his mastery of all scientific aspects of the
project and for his efforts to control the inevitable cultural conflicts between
scientists and the military. He was an iconic figure to his fellow scientists,
as much a figurehead of what they were working towards as a scientific director.
Victor Weisskopf put it thus:
- "He did not direct from the head office. He was intellectually and even
physically present at each decisive step. He was present in the laboratory or
in the seminar rooms, when a new effect was measured, when a new idea was
conceived. It was not that he contributed so many ideas or suggestions; he did
so sometimes, but his main influence came from something else. It was his
continuous and intense presence, which produced a sense of direct
participation in all of us; it created that unique atmosphere of enthusiasm
and challenge that pervaded the place throughout its time."
All the while, Oppenheimer was under investigation by both the FBI and the Manhattan Project's
internal security arm for his past left-wing associations. He was also followed
by an FBI agent during an unannounced trip to California in 1943 to meet his former girlfriend,
Jean Tatlock. In August 1943, Oppenheimer told Manhattan Project security agents
that three of his students had been solicited for nuclear secrets by a friend of
his with Communist connections. When pressed on the issue in later interviews
with General Groves and security agents, he identified the friend as Haakon
Chevalier, a Berkeley professor of French literature. Oppenheimer would be asked
for interviews related to the "Chevalier incident", and he often gave
contradictory and equivocating statements, telling Groves that only one person
had actually been approached, and that that person was his brother Frank. But
Groves still thought Oppenheimer too important to the ultimate Allied goals to
oust him over this suspicious behavior.
Trinity
- Main article: Trinity test
The joint work of the scientists at Los Alamos resulted in the first nuclear explosion near Alamogordo on July 16, 1945, the site of which
Oppenheimer named "Trinity", Oppenheimer later
said this name was from one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets. According
to the historian Gregg Herken, this naming could have been an allusion to Jean
Tatlock (who had introduced him to Donne when they had dated in the 1930s),
who had committed suicide a few months previously. He later recalled that while
witnessing the explosion he thought of a verse from the Hindu holy book, the Bhagavad
Gita:
- 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...
Years later he would explain that another verse had also entered his head at
that time:
- "We 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, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade
the Prince that
he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and
says, 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all
thought that one way or another."[4]
According to his brother, at the time he simply exclaimed, "It worked." News
of the successful test was rushed to President Harry S. Truman, who
would try to use it as leverage at the upcoming Potsdam Conference on
the fate of post-war Europe.
Japan
- Main article: Atomic
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Though the initial impetus for the development of the bomb—a perceived arms
race with Nazi Germany—had been shown
unnecessary (when the German program was discovered to be stillborn by the
Manhattan Project's Alsos investigation), Oppenheimer
and his scientists pressed on.
The scientist-administrators were divided on whether and how to use the
now-tested weapon. Lawrence initially favored not using the weapon on a live
target, arguing that a demonstration alone would be enough to convince the
Japanese government of the futility of continuing the war. Oppenheimer and many
of the military advisors strongly disagreed with this assessment. Oppenheimer
feared that if it were announced where such a demonstration might occur, the
enemy might move American POWs or other human shields into the
region. To other physicists, including Teller and Leo Szilard, using the
weapon on a civilian area would be a moral horror. A petition was circulated at
the labs in Los Alamos and Oak Ridge pleading that use of the bomb against civilians would be immoral and
unnecessary. Oppenheimer opposed the petition and warned Szilard and Teller not
to impede the project. It is uncertain how much stock the American government
and military put in the opinions of the scientists on the weapon they had
created.
On August
6, 1945, the "Little
Boy" uranium bomb was dropped on the
city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days
later, the "Fat
Man" plutonium bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The
bombs killed tens of thousands of civilians immediately and many more over time.
The U.S. government, and many other commentators, claimed that the bombs
hastened the end of the war, which came after Japanese surrender on August 15.
(Allied military casualties of the planned invasion of Japan, Operation Downfall,
were estimated to number approximately 268,000 by Admiral William D. Leahy in a
June 18, 1945 briefing to President Truman; Japanese military and civilian
deaths would have potentially numbered in the millions, based on experience with
Japanese civilians on Okinawa.)
Many people, including many of the scientists involved in the bomb project,
were shocked by the devastation that the bombs produced, reports of which
filtered into the United States over time. The pride which Oppenheimer had felt
after the successful "Trinity" test was soon replaced by guilt and horror. "In
some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can
quite extinguish," he later famously said, "the physicists have known sin; and
this is a knowledge which they cannot lose." Los Alamos was awarded the
Army-Navy "Excellence" Award shortly thereafter, and in his acceptance speech
for the lab, Oppenheimer warned that:
- "If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a
warring world, or to the arsenals of the nations preparing for war, then the
time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima.
The people of this world must unite or they will perish."
He never said that he regretted making the weapon. During his only visit to
postwar Japan in 1960, he was asked by a reporter whether he felt any guilt on
developing the bomb. Oppenheimer quipped, "It's not that I don't feel bad about
it. It's just that I don't feel worse today than what I felt yesterday."
Postwar activities
Overnight, Oppenheimer became a national spokesman for science, and
emblematic of a new type of technocratic power. Nuclear physics became a
powerful force as all governments of the world began to realize the strategic
and political power which came with nuclear weapons and their horrific
implications. Like many scientists of his generation, he felt that security from
atomic bombs would come only from some form of transnational organization (such
as the newly formed United Nations) which
could institute a program to stifle a nuclear arms race.
Atomic Energy Commission
After the Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC) was created in 1946, as a civilian agency in control of
nuclear research and weapons issues, Oppenheimer was immediately appointed as
the Chairman of its General Advisory Committee (GAC) and left the directorship
of Los Alamos. From this position he advised on a number of nuclear-related
issues, including project funding, laboratory construction, and even
international policy—though the GAC's advice was not always implemented. The Baruch Plan of 1946,
which called for the internationalization of atomic energy, was derived in part
from his opinions, though to his dismay it included many additional provisions
which made it clear that its goal was simply to prevent the USSR from gaining its own bomb,
rather than promoting a lasting international mechanism for control. The plan
was rejected by the USSR to no surprise of observers, and it became clear to
Oppenheimer that an arms race was unavoidable, due to the mutual distrust of the
U.S. and the USSR.
Oppenheimer eventually took over
Einstein's position at
the Institute for Advanced Study.
In 1947, he left Berkeley, citing difficulties with the administration during
the war, and took up the directorship of the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton
Township, New Jersey. He later held Albert Einstein's old
position of senior professor of theoretical
physics.
While still Chairman of the GAC, Oppenheimer lobbied vigorously for
international arms control and funding for basic science, and attempted to
influence policy away from a heated arms race. When the government questioned
whether to pursue a crash program to develop an atomic weapon based on nuclear fusion—the hydrogen
bomb—Oppenheimer initially recommended against it, though he had been in
favor of developing such a weapon in the early days of the Manhattan Project. He
was motivated partly by ethical concerns, feeling that such a weapon could only
be used strategically against civilian targets, resulting in millions of deaths.
But he was also motivated by practical concerns; as at the time there was no
workable design for a hydrogen bomb, Oppenheimer felt that resources would be
better spent creating a large force of fission weapons. He was overridden by
President Harry Truman, who announced
a crash program after the Soviet Union tested their first atomic bomb in 1949.
Oppenheimer and other GAC opponents of the project, especially James Conant,
felt personally shunned and considered retiring from the committee. They stayed
on, though their views on the hydrogen bomb were well known.
In 1951, however, Edward Teller and mathematician Stanislaw Ulam developed
what became known as the Teller-Ulam design for a hydrogen bomb. This new design seemed technically feasible, and
Oppenheimer changed his opinion about developing the weapon. As he later
recalled:
- The program we had in 1949 was a tortured thing that you could well
argue did not make a great deal of technical sense. It was therefore possible
to argue that you did not want it even if you could have it. The program in
1951 was technically so sweet that you could not argue about that. The issues
became purely the military, the political, and the humane problems of what you
were going to do about it once you had it.
Oppenheimer's critics have accused him of equivocating between 1949—when he
opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb—and 1951, when he supported it, and
some have made this a case for reinforcing their opinions about his moral
inconsistency. Historian Priscilla McMillan has argued, however, that if
Oppenheimer has been accused of being morally inconsistent, then so should Rabi
and Fermi, who had also opposed the program in 1949. McMillan's argument is that
because the hydrogen bomb appeared to be well within reach in 1951, everybody
had to assume that the Russians could also do it, and that was the main reason
why they changed their stance in favour of developing it. Thus this change in
opinion should not be viewed as a change in morality, but a change in opinions
purely based on technical possibilities.
The first true hydrogen bomb, dubbed "Ivy Mike", was tested in 1952
with a yield of 10.4 megatons—more than 650 times the strength of the weapons
developed by Oppenheimer during World War II.
Security hearings
In his role as a political advisor, Oppenheimer made numerous enemies. The FBI under J.
Edgar Hoover had been following his activities since before the war, when he
showed Communist sympathies as a
radical professor. They were willing to furnish Oppenheimer's political enemies
with incriminating evidence about Communist ties. These enemies included Lewis
Strauss, an AEC commissioner who had long harbored resentment against
Oppenheimer both for his activity in opposing the hydrogen bomb and for his
humiliation of Strauss before Congress some years earlier. Strauss and Senator Brien
McMahon, author of the 1946 Atomic Energy Act, pushed
President Eisenhower to
revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance. This came following controversies about
whether some of Oppenheimer's students, including David Bohm, Joseph
Weinberg, and Bernard
Peters, had been Communists at the time they had worked with him at
Berkeley. Oppenheimer's brother, Frank Oppenheimer, was
forced to testify in front of the House
Un-American Activities Committee, where he admitted that he had been a
member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, but he refused to name
other members. Frank was subsequently fired from his university position, could
not find work in physics, and became instead a cattle rancher in Colorado.
-LLNL)
Oppenheimer's former colleague, physicist
Edward
Teller, testified against Oppenheimer at his security hearing in
1954.
In 1953, Oppenheimer was accused of being a security risk and President Dwight D.
Eisenhower asked him to resign. Oppenheimer refused and requested a hearing
to assess his loyalty, and in the meantime his security clearance was suspended.
The public hearing which followed focused on Oppenheimer's past Communist ties
and his association during the Manhattan Project with suspected disloyal or
Communist scientists. One of the key elements in this hearing was Oppenheimer's
earlier testimony about his friend Haakon Chevalier, something which he himself
confessed he had fabricated. In fact, Oppenheimer had never told Chevalier about
this, and the testimony had led to Chevalier losing his job. Edward
Teller, with whom Oppenheimer had disagreed on the hydrogen bomb, testified
against him, leading to outrage by the scientific community and Teller's virtual
expulsion from academic science. Many top scientists, as well as government and
military figures, testified on Oppenheimer's behalf. Inconsistencies in his
testimony and his erratic behavior on the stand convinced some that he was
unreliable and a possible security risk. Oppenheimer's clearance was
revoked.
During his hearing, Oppenheimer testified willingly on the left-wing behavior
of many of his scientific colleagues. Cornell historian Richard
Polenberg has speculated that if Oppenheimer's clearance had not been stripped
(it would have expired in a matter of days anyhow), he would have been
remembered as someone who had "named names" to save his own reputation. As it
happened, Oppenheimer was seen by most of the scientific community as a martyr to McCarthyism, an eclectic
liberal who was unjustly attacked by warmongering enemies, symbolic of the shift
of scientific creativity from academia into the military.
Institute for Advanced Study
Deprived of political power, Oppenheimer continued to lecture, write, and
work on physics. He toured Europe and Japan, giving talks about the history of
science, the role of science in society, and the nature of the universe. In
1963, at the urging of many of Oppenheimer's political friends who had ascended
to power, President John F. Kennedy awarded
Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Award as
a gesture of political rehabilitation. Edward Teller, the winner of the previous
year's award, had also recommended Oppenheimer receive it. A little over a week
after Kennedy's assassination, his successor, President Lyndon
Johnson, presented Oppenheimer with the award, "for contributions to
theoretical physics as a teacher and originator of ideas, and for leadership of
the Los Alamos Laboratory and the atomic energy program during critical years".
Oppenheimer told Johnson: "I think it is just possible, Mr. President, that it
has taken some charity and some courage for you to make this award today. That
would seem a good augury for all our futures". The rehabilitation implied by the
award was only symbolic, as Oppenheimer still lacked a security clearance and
could have no effect on official policy, but the award came with a $50,000
stipend.
In his final years Oppenheimer continued his work at the Institute for
Advanced Study, bringing together intellectuals at the height of their
powers and from a variety of disciplines to solve the most pertinent questions
of the current age. His lectures in America, Europe, and Canada were published in a number
of books. Still, he thought the effort had minimal effect on actual policy.
Final years
After the 1954 Security hearings, Oppenheimer is reported to have been "like
a wounded animal", and he started to retreat to a simpler life. In 1957, he purchased a piece of land
on Gibney Beach in the island of St
John in the Virgin Islands. He built
a spartan vacation home on the beach, where he would spend holidays, usually
months at a time, with his wife Kitty. Oppenheimer also spent a considerable
amount of time sailing with his wife. Upon their death, the property was
inherited by their daughter Toni, who then left it to "the people of St. John
for a public park and recreation area." Today, the Virgin Islands Government
created a Community Center there, which can be rented out. The beach is
colloquially known to this day as "Oppenheimer Beach".[5]
Robert Oppenheimer died of throat cancer in
Princeton, New Jersey, in 1967. His funeral was attended by many of his
scientific, political, and military associates. His ashes were spread over the Virgin Islands.
Legacy
Robert Oppenheimer's life is usually seen to highlight a number of cultural
and historical trends in the transformation of science from the 1920s through the 1950s.
As a scientist, Oppenheimer is remembered by his students and colleagues as
being a brilliant researcher and engaging teacher, the founder of modern
theoretical physics in the United States. Many have asked why Oppenheimer never
won a Nobel Prize. Scholars
respond that his scientific attentions often changed rapidly and he never worked
long enough on any one topic to achieve enough headway to merit the Nobel Prize.
His lack of a Prize would not be odd—most scientists do not win Nobel Prizes—had
not so many of his associates (Einstein, Fermi, Bethe, Lawrence, Dirac, Rabi,
Feynman, etc.) won them. Some scientists and historians have speculated that his
investigations towards black holes may have warranted the Nobel, had he lived
long enough to see them brought into fruition by later astrophysicists.
Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves, shortly after the
war.
As an advisor, Oppenheimer delineates a shift in the interactions between
science and the military. During World War II, scientists became involved in
military research to an unprecedented degree (some research of this sort had
occurred during World War I, but it was far
smaller in scope). Because of the threat Fascism posed to Western
civilization, scientists volunteered in great numbers both for technological and
organizational assistance to the Allied effort, resulting in such powerful tools
as radar, the proximity fuze, and operations research.
As a cultured, intellectual, theoretical physicist who became a disciplined
military organizer, Oppenheimer represented the shift away from the idea that
scientists had their "head in the clouds" and that knowledge on such previously
esoteric subjects as the composition of the atomic nucleus had no "real-world"
applications. He also represented for many the new form of technocrat who would guide
the emergence of what later became known as "Big Science." When
Oppenheimer was ejected from his position of political influence in 1954, he
symbolized for many the folly of scientists thinking they could control how
others would use their research. Oppenheimer has been seen as symbolizing the
dilemmas involving the moral responsibility of the scientist in the nuclear
world.
Most popular depictions of Oppenheimer, notably German playwright Heinar
Kipphardt's 1964 play on his trial, portray his security struggles as a
confrontation between right-wing militarists (symbolized by Edward Teller) and
left-wing intellectuals (symbolized by Oppenheimer) over the moral question of
weapons of mass destruction. Many historians have contested this as an
over-simplification: the trial, while very political, was undertaken as much for
personal reasons as any political agenda, and Oppenheimer's opinion on nuclear
weapons was too inconsistent to brand him as a pacifist. While popular
moralizations depict Oppenheimer as against the bomb for moral reasons, a more
complete look shows him opposing it primarily for technical reasons. Once these
were resolved, he supported the bomb, on the grounds that the Soviet Union too
would inevitably construct one.
Even Oppenheimer himself had difficulty with this portrayal—after reading a
transcript of Kipphardt's play soon after it began to be performed, Oppenheimer
told an interviewer:
- The whole damn thing [his security hearing] was a farce, and these
people are trying to make a tragedy out of it. ... I had never said that I had
regretted participating in a responsible way in the making of the bomb. I said
that perhaps he [Kipphardt] had forgotten Guernica, Coventry, Hamburg,
Dresden, Dachau, Warsaw, and Tokyo; but I had not, and that if he found it so
difficult to understand, he should write a play about something else.
Oppenheimer, Groves, and others at the site of the
Trinity
test shortly after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Despite Oppenheimer's apparently remorseful attitudes—claiming that
physicists "had known sin"—Oppenheimer was a vocal supporter of using the first
atomic weapons on "built-up areas" in the days before the bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki. Rather than consistently opposing the "Red-baiting" of the late 1940s and early 1950s,
he had testified against many of his former colleagues and students, both before
and during his hearing. In one incident, Oppenheimer's damning testimony against
former student Bernard Peters was selectively leaked to the press. Historians
have interpreted this as an attempt by Oppenheimer to please his colleagues in
the government (and perhaps to avert attention from his own previous left-wing
ties and especially from those of his brother, who had earlier been a target of
the anti-Red lobby). In the end it became a liability: under cross-examination,
it became clear that if Oppenheimer had really doubted Peters' loyalty, then his
recommending him for the Manhattan Project was reckless, or at least
contradictory.
The removal of his security clearance was probably as much related to his
inconsistent testimony, and his open admission of telling lies to intelligence
agents, as to the left-wing views he shared with many intellectuals and
scientists in the wake of the Great Depression and
the rise of Fascism. Nevertheless, the trope of Oppenheimer as a martyr has
proven indelible, and to speak of Oppenheimer has often been to speak of the
limits of science and politics, however more complicated the actual history.
The question of the scientists' responsibility towards humanity, so manifest
in the dropping of the atomic bombs and Oppenheimer's public questioning,
inspired Bertolt Brecht's drama Galileo (from 1955),
left its imprint on Friedrich
Dürrenmatt's Die Physiker, and is
the basis of the opera Doctor Atomic, which
portrays Oppenheimer as a modern Faustus.
See also
Notes
- ^ Quoted at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/baoppe.html.
- ^ [1]
- ^ [2]
- ^ [3]
- ^ Oppenheimer
Beach
On Oppenheimer's first initial
The meaning of the "J" in J. Robert Oppenheimer has been the source of
confusion among many. Historians Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner sum up
the general historical opinion, in their volume Robert Oppenheimer: Letters
and recollections (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, 1980), on page
1:
- "Whether the 'J' in Robert's name stood for Julius or, as Robert himself
once said, 'for nothing' may never be fully resolved. His brother Frank
surmises that the 'J' was symbolic, a gesture in the direction of naming the
eldest son after the father but at the same time a signal that his parents did
not want Robert to be a 'junior.'"
In Peter Goodchild's J. Robert Oppenheimer: Shatterer of Worlds (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1981), it is said that Robert's father, Julius, added
the empty initial to give Robert's name additional distinction, but Goodchild's
book has no footnotes so the source of this assertion is unclear. Robert's claim
that the J. stood "for nothing" is taken from an autobiographical interview
conducted by Thomas S. Kuhn on November
18, 1963, which
currently resides in the Archive
for the History of Quantum Physics. When investigating Oppenheimer in the 1930s and 1940s, the FBI itself
was befuddled by the "J", deciding erroneously that it probably stood for Julius
or, strangely, Jerome. On the 1910 US Census when he was 5, and
living in New York, he was listed as "J. Robert Oppenheimer" (see 1). On the 1920 US Census,
when he was 15 and still living in New York, he listed his name as "Robert J.
Oppenheimer" (see: 2). In the 1930 US Census, when
he was living in California he had switched back to "J. Robert Oppenheimer." He
additionally listed his first name as "J." and his middle name as "Robert" on a
biographical questionnaire he filled out at Los Alamos in 1945.[4] On the other hand, a recent biography of Oppenheimer by the historian David
Cassidy claims that his birth certificate has "Julius Robert Oppenheimer" on
it, adding further confusion to the name.
On the birth certificate of Oppenheimer reads "Julius Robert Oppenheimer"
(taken from The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and
Martin J. Sherwin)
References
- Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and
Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (New York: Knopf, 2005) ISBN
0375412026
- David C. Cassidy, J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century (New York: Pi Press, 2005). ISBN
0131479962
- Nuel Pharr Davis, Lawrence and Oppenheimer (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1968). Very well-written, reads like a novel.
- Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties
of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (New York: Henry
Holt and Co., 2002). ISBN
0805065881
- James A. Hijiya, "The Gita of Robert Oppenheimer" Proceedings of
the American Philosophical Society, 144:2 (June 2000). [5] (on
Oppenheimer's famous quote)
- Priscilla J. McMillan, The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer: And the Birth
of the Modern Arms Race (New York: Viking, 2005) ISBN
0670034223
- Richard Polenberg, ed., In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer: The
Security Clearance Hearing (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002). ISBN
0801437830
- Jack Rummel, "Robert Oppenheimer: Dark Prince" (New York: Facts on File,
1992). ISBN
0816025983
- S.S. Schweber, In the Shadow of the Bomb: Oppenheimer, Bethe, and the
Moral Responsibility of the Scientist, (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000). ISBN
0691049890
- Sterling Seagrave, "Play About Him Draws Protests of Oppenheimer", Washington Post (9 Nov 1964), p. B8
- Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner, Robert Oppenheimer: Letters and
Recollections, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
- U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, In the Matter of J. Robert
Oppenheimer (Washington, D.C.: 1954).
- Herbert York, The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976).
Non-scientific by Oppenheimer
- Science and the Common Understanding (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1954).
- The Open Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).
- The flying trapeze: Three crises for physicists (London: Oxford
University Press, 1964).
- Uncommon sense (Cambridge, MA: Birkhäuser Boston, 1984).
(posthumous)
- Atom and void: Essays on science and community (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1989). (posthumous)
Hans Bethe's
"Biographical Memoirs" contains a full list of Oppenheimer's scientific
publications.
External links
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