Oppenheimer - Destroyer of Worlds Documentary

The man known to history as Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904 as Julius Robert Oppenheimer in New York City. He quickly became known primarily by his middle name and today is typically known as Robert Oppenheimer or J. Robert Oppenheimer. Robert was born into a wealthy Jewish family in New York City. His father Julius had been born in the province of Hesse-Nassau in the territory of the Kingdom of Prussia in what had just become the united German Empire months before his birth in May 1871. At a time of growing anti-Semitism in the West and Central Europe, Julius Oppenheimer left Germany in 1888, at the age of 17, bound for the United States.

Although he was practically penniless, he prospered in America and when Robert was born in 1904, he had become a wealthy executive of one of Manhattan's leading textile manufacturers. Robert's mother was Ella Friedman, a woman also of Jewish descent, who had been born in New York in 1870 into a family of German Jews who had headed to America a generation before Julius Oppenheimer. She was a painter from whom Robert inherited some of his aesthetic views on the structure of existence and the universe. She and Julius would have another child, a boy named Frank who was born eight years after Robert in 1912 and who would follow in his older brother's footsteps by becoming a physicist.

Robert's youth was privileged. By the mid-1900s, his father had become an important figure within New York business circles, and in the early 1910s, they moved into a large apartment on West 88th Street in Manhattan overlooking the Central Park Reservoir in one of the most prosperous areas of New York City. At the time. There the family had original works by Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso, among others, on the walls. Robert attended the School of Ethical Culture and then the Alcuin Preparatory School, two of the best educational establishments in New York at the beginning of the 20th century.

At the age of five he was already interested in mineralogy, a hobby inherited from his German grandfather. Such was his aptitude, that at eleven years of age he was admitted to the Mineralogical Club of New York City. His precocity extended into his high school years and he completed his education at Alcuin in a year and a half less than the standard time, having completed two years of degree in twelve months and advancing to the eighth grade. By then, his interests had developed beyond mineralogy and into the more complex sciences, particularly chemistry, but ultimately it was physics that would prove his vocation in the years to come.

In 1922, Oppenheimer began studying at Harvard University at the age of 18. Initially, Robert intended to focus on the study of chemistry, but soon switched to physics; However, his earlier interest in chemistry and eclectic curiosity would serve him well in later years, during a period when scientists were becoming over-specialized in specific fields. While studying at America's oldest university, he was deeply influenced by the teachings of Professor Percy Bridgeman, an experimental physicist who was on the Harvard staff at the time. This was also a period when students at Harvard and other elite American universities were still studying a very wide range of subjects and Oppenheimer was delving into history and the Greek and Latin classics, which were still central to many curricula.

Westerns in the 1920s. Reflecting on his years at Harvard in later life, Oppenheimer noted that he spent most of his time in the library and read voraciously. He even attended more classes than necessary. The result, in 1925, was that Oppenheimer graduated with a bachelor's degree summa cum laude after only three years at Harvard, a distinction that normally took four years to achieve, but which Oppenheimer, following an emerging pattern, completed in less time than the standard. . Even before graduating from Harvard, Oppenheimer had already been accepted to continue his studies at the University of Cambridge in England. This was the great center for the study of physics in Britain at the time, a reputation he has maintained and cultivated since Isaac Newton's days there in the late 17th century.

The year Oppenheimer spent in Cambridge between the fall of 1925 and the summer of 1926 was influential in his development, as he was exposed there to the teachings of Lord Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand-born physicist who is commonly understood As the father. of current nuclear physics. For example, it was Rutherford who first discovered and explained what nuclear half-life and the radiation associated with it was, an achievement for which Rutherford received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908. Towards the end of his first year at Cambridge, Oppenheimer, whose abilities were beginning to attract considerable attention among European physicists, accepted an offer from the German physicist Max Born to study with him at the University of Gottingen in Germany, one of the great centers of learning in Europe.

There Oppenheimer studied with several contemporaries who would become giants in the study of theoretical physics during the 20th century, notably Werner Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller, several of whom would work alongside Oppenheimer during the Manhattan Project in the midst of the Second World War. World War. World War. Remarkably, Oppenheimer earned his doctorate in physics in the spring of 1927, less than a year after arriving in Gottingen. The internal examiner, James Franck, who had won the Nobel Prize in Physics two years earlier in 1925, is said to have expressed relief when the oral or viva voce examination concluded, stating that Oppenheimer had easily defended his doctoral work and seemed to have prepared himself. to start interrogating Franck.

The great promise that Oppenheimer showed as a theoretical physicist when he earned his PhD around the same time he turned 23 was most clearly demonstrated in a paper he and Born co-authored on the "Quantum Theory of Molecules" in 1927 and which stated what is known as the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. This falls into the field of molecular dynamics or how molecules move and interact. The approach that Born and Oppenheimer demonstrated showed that the wave functions of nuclei and electrons within a molecule are different, due to the fact that nuclei are considerably heavier than electrons. This means that the coordinates of the nuclei are relatively fixed, while the lighter electrons are affected to a greater extent by wave functions and therefore their coordinates are more dynamic.

The pair reached the approximation largely due to Oppenheimer's dual interest in chemistry and physics, as the theory they presented employed elements of quantum chemistry and molecular physics. In terms of its practical applicability, the approximation was important because it allowed scientists, from the late 1920s onwards, to separate the motion of a nucleus and an electron. The person who worked this out with Max Born and who got his PhD at Gottingen was a curious figure. Oppenheimer was a mix of an aloof scientist and a relatively jovial individual, shifting from introversion to extroversion as occasions demanded or as his mood inclined.

A chain smoker, he was constantly surrounded by a cloud of smoke throughout his adult life, a habit that would contribute substantially to his premature death when he was in his early sixties. People who knew him during his years at Harvard, Cambridge, and Gottingen remembered a person who had a strange mix of intelligence combined with surprising naivety at times, who often made poor judgments and decisions, and was prone to exaggeration. Over the years he developed an arrogant streak, but this was tempered by intellectual generosity towards those who studied and worked with him and those whom he taught in later years.

A striking aspect of his personality was his interest in Eastern philosophy and mysticism, taking a special interest in Hinduism and Confucianism, even learning Sanskrit, the sacred language of Hinduism, in order to read the ancient texts of this faith in the original. This interest in religion and mysticism was not an eccentric hobby. For Oppenheimer, the study of physics was an entry point to understanding the mystical nature of the universe and existence, and his broader intellectual outlook was one of open curiosity rather than the pursuit of concrete scientific data. However, Oppenheimer also had an unstable and erratic side.

His behavior at Harvard was sometimes questioned by fellow students and professors. In 1926, while at Cambridge, he allegedly sprayed an apple with some disease-causing chemicals and left it in the office of his tutor, Patrick Blackett, with whom he had had a difficult relationship, before leaving on holiday to France. Evidently, this action and perhaps others saw him briefly threatened with suspension from his studies at Cambridge. A close friend of his in the 1920s, Francis Ferguson, who later became an acclaimed theorist of stage acting and drama, claimed that Oppenheimer attacked him and tried to strangle him once when he told him that he was engaged to get marry.

Behind all this erratic behavior was a strange mix of an individual who could be terribly arrogant and, as a result, fall out with many colleagues over the years, but who many biographers have concluded was also a deeply insecure individual. The root of this may have been Oppenheimer's position as the son of a German Jew who emigrated to the United States at a time when anti-Semitism was common throughout the Western world. He was a constant outsider, or at least felt like one, and it is known that he suffered from frequent bouts of depression. He was, in short, something of an enigma.

After completing his studies at Gottingen and publishing several more articles on the research he had conducted in England and Germany, Oppenheimer returned to the United States, where he briefly held fellowships at Harvard and the California Institute of Technology, interrupted by return visits to Europe to work for a few months at the University of Leiden (Netherlands) and in Zurich (Switzerland), where Albert Einstein had carried out much of his first and most innovative work. In Leiden he acquired his nickname Oppie from a Dutch interpretation of the name he. It was not until 1929 that Oppenheimer returned permanently to the United States, having received numerous job offers from American universities.

He accepted two and became an associate professor of physics at both the University of California at Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech. Over the next thirteen years, between 1929 and 1942, he would hold positions at both institutions, teaching during the fall and winter semesters at Berkeley before spending the spring semester teaching at Caltech in Pasadena. During the 1930s, Oppenheimer became famous within the United States physics community for his teaching methods, and the best physicists of mid-20th century America trained with him at Berkeley and Caltech at the School of Theoretical Physics. which he founded. Within this there used to be a cohort of about a dozen advanced graduate students and research fellows who worked closely with Oppenheimer on some of the most relevant questions in the field of theoretical physics at the time.

During the busiest times of the term, they would often meet daily and Oppenheimer would quiz them on his progress and offer suggestions. Mainly, as several biographers who knew him during those days later recounted, he inspired those he taught, conveying to them the idea that they were at the forefront of answering some of the most important questions facing humanity at the time. However, it was an eclectic academic environment and when not discussing physics, Oppenheimer and his colleagues were often seen reading Plato in the original Greek or learning Sanskrit. Hans Bethe, who met Oppenheimer during those days, later recalled that Robert largely stayed away from the rest of the world in the late 1920s and 1930s in California, only learning about the Wall Street crash of late 1929. , months after it had happened.

Oppenheimer and his students at Berkeley and Caltech made impressive scientific advances during the 1930s. In 1930, for example, Oppenheimer wrote a paper that effectively predicted the existence of the positron or antielectron as an antiparticle to the electron, although its existence was not fully demonstrated until 1932 by Carl David Anderson, a student who worked with Oppenheimer at Caltech. From this, Oppenheimer worked closely with Wendell Furry to develop the modern form of the electron-positron theory and how the two interacted with each other. Perhaps his most important work was a mammoth effort with Melba Phillips, one of Oppenheimer's first doctoral students at a time when physicsfemales were very rare in the United States.

Together they proposed the Oppenheimer-Phillips Process in 1935, a type of deuteron-induced nuclear reaction in which the neutron half of a deuteron fuses with a target nucleus, ejecting a proton in the process. This showed that some elements can become radioactive if bombarded with deuterons and that nuclear interaction can occur at lower energies than previously thought. This, and many other advances by Oppenheimer and his students at Berkeley and Caltech, made California one of the world's great centers of theoretical physics in the mid-20th century. Oppenheimer's personal life was somewhat chaotic during this period. He had been diagnosed with a mild case of tuberculosis in the late 1920s, for which illness he sought the dry desert air of Arizona and New Mexico in the following years, eventually purchasing a ranch in New Mexico.

In the mid-1930s, he began a relationship with Jean Tatlock, a psychiatry student who was the daughter of John Strong Tatlock, an eminent Old English scholar and expert on the life and work of Geoffrey Chaucer. Ten years younger than Robert, Jean was a troubled young woman, with severe depression and a troubled sexuality. Their relationship was tempestuous but continued until 1940, even after Oppenheimer began seeing Kitty Harrison, a Caltech botanist and physicist who eventually divorced her second husband, Stewart Harrison, in November 1940 and married Robert the next day. To this day it is unclear whether Oppenheimer continued to see Tatlock periodically in the early 1940s before she took her own life in January 1944.

Robert and Kitty would later have two children, a son named Peter who was born in May 1941, as Kitty. she was already pregnant when they married, and a daughter named Katherine after her mother, who was born in 1944. Oppenheimer's life, like that of virtually everyone in Europe, North Africa, North America, and much of Asia was greatly disrupted in the fall of 1939 with the outbreak of World War II. The conflict arose as a direct result of the rise to power in Germany of the Nazis led by Adolf Hitler in early 1933. The Nazis, a rabidly anti-Semitic nationalist and fascist organization, had set themselves the dual goal of crushing the Jewish people in Germany. and start a new war in Europe to nullify the terms of the Treaty of Versailles that had ended World War I and build a new Third Reich or German empire that would dominate the continent.

Oppenheimer was very familiar with the Nazis. As a non-practicing Jew, he became politically involved for the first time in his life in the mid-1930s, when he began setting aside 3% of his salary to help German Jews trying to flee Germany in the wake of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg laws which were introduced beginning in 1934. The Nazis' anti-Jewish policies had become more extreme beginning in 1936 and particularly in 1938, when Germany began annexing neighboring states, first Austria and then Czechoslovakia. With the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, but public opinion in the United States was not yet fully in favor of intervention, in what was considered a European war.

The United States would therefore remain officially neutral for the first two years of the conflict, although President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration was providing extensive support in the form of war materiel to Great Britain, from the start of the war. Oppenheimer's life and place in history would be forever changed by the events of December 1941. At the time, the United States still remained neutral in World War II, despite the desperate situation in Europe, with the Nazis conquering Poland. in the autumn of 1939, Denmark and Norway the following spring and then the Netherlands and France in the summer of 1940. With many other states such as Italy, Hungary and Romania allied with the Nazis and the invasions of the British colonies in the north of Africa and Russia on the march since the summer of Starting in 1941, it seemed that Germany was destined to dominate Europe.

It was in this context that the Empire of Japan, an ultranationalist state bent on creating an empire in Asia and the Pacific, which already included Korea, Manchuria and much of eastern China in the early 1940s, decided to preemptively attack the United States. United without declaring war. The attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and other American territories such as the Philippines on December 7, 1941, pushed the United States into World War II. Within days, the United States was at war with Germany, Italy, and the other Axis states, while the entire northern hemisphere ended up at war. Oppenheimer would soon be catapulted to the center of America's research efforts during the conflict.

This occurred in the context of Nazi Germany's efforts to acquire a weapon of mass destruction as a means of quickly winning the war. In the 1920s and 1930s, Germany had been home to some of the world's most prominent scientists and was therefore well positioned to develop a nuclear weapon. Nuclear fission, for example, had been discovered by a team led by Otto Robert Frisch and Lise Meitner in Berlin in 1938. The following year, the Nazis began several experiments to begin using this advance to develop a nuclear weapon. Some of them focused on the development of a nuclear reactor, while others favored the theory of using heavy water to produce an atomic weapon, research that was carried out in Nazi-occupied Norway throughout the war.

Already in August 1939, President Roosevelt had received in Washington D.C. a letter from Hungarian nuclear physicist Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein, alerting the United States government to the threat posed by these Nazi experiments. Little effort was made to respond to this in 1939 or 1940, but with the entry of the United States into the war in late 1941, the possibility of the United States beginning its own research in this area was again considered. Oppenheimer would technically be in charge of the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, but this was all under the umbrella of the Manhattan Project, a research and development program initiated by the United States government in 1942 with the ultimate goal of developing a bomb. nuclear. .

The name simply comes from the fact that the team of people who were in charge of the larger project had their first headquarters where they met in 1942 on the island of Manhattan in New York City. Over time, it grew from 1942 to employ approximately 130,000 people nationwide. They worked on various elements of the project in many states and regions. For example, a large team that worked in Chicago during the war, which included Oppenheimer's former colleague from Gottingen, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard, who had co-authored the letter to Roosevelt in 1939 warning the president about the Nazi nuclear program , developed the first operating nuclear reactor there.

Another team at the Hanford site in Washington state was tasked with producing plutonium from uranium as a raw material for any future nuclear weapons, and a similar project was underway in Tennessee. There were even teams of people operating under the rubric of the Manhattan Project in Europe and carrying out espionage to try to find out what the Nazis were working on. Oppenheimer would oversee the most critical research team of all involved in the Manhattan Project, as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. He was almost not chosen for this position. The person who oversaw the Manhattan Project was Major General Leslie Groves.

Groves isn't exactly a household name today, but he has the distinction of having been in charge of the Manhattan Project, which created the first nuclear weapon, and also of overseeing the construction of the Pentagon as the headquarters of the US military and Department of Defense. USA. . Oppenheimer was suggested to Groves in 1942 as a possible candidate to lead a team of theoretical physicists and scientists as part of the Manhattan Project, but Groves was initially skeptical and favored the idea of ​​appointing someone who had received a Nobel Prize in Physics and could in Consequently, I have enough academic seriousness to lead a team made up of some of the most eminent minds of the moment.

He eventually became convinced that Oppenheimer had a track record of bringing out the best in the people he worked with. He contacted Oppenheimer and, after interviewing him, concluded that he was the right candidate for the position. In the following weeks, in the early winter of 1942, Oppenheimer searched for a suitable location for the establishment of a research center, somewhere remote and far from any urban center, where secrecy would be guaranteed and a nuclear weapon could be tested at in due time. . He eventually settled in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where a research center was built on the site of a former school.

This was outsourced to the University of California through the War Department so that Oppenheimer would have a degree of autonomy in hiring and firing as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory. Although there would be more hiring than layoffs. At its peak, there were more than 5,000 people employed at Los Alamos, far more than Oppenheimer had initially anticipated. The team Oppenheimer assembled at Los Alamos included some of the best scientists of the first half of the 20th century. One of them was John Hasbrouck van Vleck, a physicist and mathematician who had been at Harvard when Oppenheimer arrived there in 1922.

He later received the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his work on electronic magnetism. Van Vleck made important contributions to the design of the weapon that would be used in the bomb used on Hiroshima. A colleague of Oppenheimer's from Berkeley, Robert Serber, acted as an organizing physicist at Los Alamos and would eventually name the bombs used in the first test explosion, as well as against Japan, as "Thin Man", "Little Boy" and "Fat Man". . ' according to characters from movies and detective novels such as The Maltese Falcon. Hans Bethe was a German-born theoretical physicist who would later receive the Nobel Prize in 1967.

He was instrumental in calculating the critical mass of the bombs designed at Los Alamos. Finally, Edward Teller was a Hungarian-born Jew who was recruited to the Los Alamos Laboratory. He had studied in Germany at about the same time as Oppenheimer in the late 1920s, but subsequently emigrated to the United States. Teller had already worked at the Fermi reactor center in Chicago before being sent to New Mexico. Teller was arguably Oppenheimer's closest colleague at Los Alamos. Beyond these, there were hundreds of other engineers, metallurgists, chemists and military experts involved in the research teams at Los Alamos, working on a wide range of finer details about how the first atomic weapon could be built.

The task facing this team of physicists and other engineers and scientists was daunting. When they met at Los Alamos, they had little to work on other than a theoretical understanding of how a nuclear chain reaction could occur. But what we must remember in a time when we know what a nuclear explosion and the destruction it causes is like, is that Oppenheimer and his colleagues at Los Alamos were not only trying to build a nuclear weapon, but also predict what would happen. It happened when one exploded. Thus, there was an enormous amount of experimentation and theoretical speculation throughout 1943 and 1944.

During all this time, Oppenheimer worked exhaustively. As Hans Bethe would recall years later, “his astonishing speed in grasping the main points of any subject was a decisive factor; he could familiarize himself with the essential details of each part of the job. He did not direct from headquarters. He was present intellectually and even physically at every decisive step.” However, the incredibly arduous work schedule that Oppenheimer followed at Los Alamos also took a toll on his health. He was always a thin person, but during his work in New Mexico he lost another nine pounds and finally weighed only 50 kilos or less than eight kilos.

During the course of 1943, research efforts at Los Alamos began to focus on a prototype codenamed "Thin Man." This was a plutonium gun type weapon, which would function more like an artillery weapon, to detonate, rather than an implosion type bomb. The research to produce it was extremely complex from a logistical perspective, as the polonium used in the starter had to be sourced from ores in Ontario, Canada, and then manufactured at a separate facility in Tennessee, which was also part of the metropolitan area of Manhattan. Project, or at the Hanford site in Washington state. However, even more complex was the question of design.

For the gun-type weapon to work, a plutonium bullet that would be fired into the bomb would have to be accelerated to a speed of 3,000 feet per second or more than 3,200 kilometers per hour or else nuclear fission would begin.before the The rest of the bomb's mechanics were ready for a successful explosion. Ultimately, this was the undoing of the 'Thin Man' design, as during the course of 1944 it was realized that the gun barrel needed to produce this velocity would be too large to be employed in a bomb of a type that could be transported. . aboard a B-29 Flying Superfortress, the newly designed heavy bombers that would be used to carry any nuclear bombs developed by the US government.

This, along with issues related to the use of plutonium in a weapon-type bomb, caused the 'Thin Man' design to be abandoned in April 1944. With the abandonment of the 'Thin Man' design, Oppenheimer redeployed many of the scientists and engineers who had been working on another design called 'Little Boy'. This was a simplified cannon-type fission bomb, but unlike the 'Thin Man', it was intended to use uranium-235 instead of plutonium for the nuclear fission that would create the explosion. Simultaneously, progress was being made on a third type of design. The 'Fat Man', as he was known, would use plutonium but was designed as an implosion-type bomb.

The design team was led by an American physicist named Seth Neddermeyer. Oppenheimer continued to favor the gun-like design even as 'Fat Man' progressed over the course of 1943 and 1944. Oppenheimer's brilliance as a supervisor at Los Alamos was seen in his decision to bring in John von Neumann, a Hungarian-born mathematician. and physicist born in Los Alamos in 1943 to review the design. It was von Neumann who suggested a spherical shape and conformal charges that would reduce the amount of plutonium needed and make the assembly of an implosion-type bomb more practical and achievable. For the next few months, metallurgists at Los Alamos had to try to solve the problem of how to melt plutonium into a sphere, but this was finally overcome when an alloy of plutonium and gallium was devised, which was pressed into spheres and coated with nickel. . .

The design process was nearing completion. As 1945 dawned in Los Alamos, Oppenheimer's teams were close to completing the design of "Little Boy" and "Fat Man." Consequently, there were two plausible candidates for building a successful nuclear weapon. In the end, both were completed at about the same time, as design problems were resolved in the spring of 1945 and the required levels of enriched uranium and plutonium were produced at sites in Washington state and Tennessee. The latter were enormous undertakings given the technology available for the Manhattan Project, as it was extremely expensive and time-consuming to enrich them into fissile substances in the mid-1940s.

Other elements that needed to be resolved were, for the most part, problems of engineering. For example, the "Fat Man" bomb was being assembled using a huge array of approximately 1,500 bolts in 1944, an impractical amount to develop a working bomb. When it was completed in the early summer of 1945, Oppenheimer's team had reduced the number to just 90 screws. Other technical issues concerned how the bomb would descend when dropped from a height, and throughout 1944 and 1945 tests were conducted to assess how a bomb the size and build of "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" would fall through the air. All of this came together during the spring of 1945, and by mid-summer, Oppenheimer was able to communicate the news to the head of the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie Groves, that they were ready to conduct a test detonation.

The Trinity nuclear test was carried out in the Jornada del Muerto desert in New Mexico on July 16, 1945. Fittingly, the name of the desert translated from Spanish means "Dead Man's Route." Oppenheimer revealed in correspondence with Groves in 1962 that he named the test "Trinity" because he had been reading the religious poetry of the 17th-century English poet, John Donne, around the time he came up with the name. The device that would be used during the test was a 'Fat Man' bomb, plutonium and implosion type. For the purposes of the test, the bomb in question was named "The Gadget." So that the test could be carried out safely, a very remote, almost completely unpopulated and isolated location was chosen.

There was only one building at the proposed explosion site, the McDonald Ranch House, which had been built there by a German immigrant in 1913 and which had been forcibly evicted in 1942 by the McDonald family after the United States government took over the region under the mandate of the Manhattan Project. The test was carefully planned, as producing the plutonium to be used had cost billions of dollars in today's money, such were the tortuous methods used in uranium and plutonium enrichment at the time. Much depended on its success. As Groves noted at the time, he didn't want to explain to a congressional committee why he had blown up a billion dollars' worth of plutonium in the desert for no reason.

The Trinity test took place near dawn, on the morning of July 16. Observation shelters were established at three different locations to the north, south, and west of the explosion site, each approximately nine kilometers away from where the bomb would be detonated. Goggles were provided to prevent harmful ultraviolet wavelengths, while the distance was considered safe enough in terms of the radioactive half-life that would be produced. Many of the observers that morning were scientists and included Oppenheimer, Teller, Bethe, Enrico Fermi, and John von Neumann. Some believed the bomb would not work. Others worried exactly how destructive it might prove.

They had their answers at 5:29 in the morning, when "The Gadget" exploded, releasing explosive energy equivalent to 25,000 tons of TNT. This created a crater a third of a kilometer wide and melted the sand around the launch site, turning it into a light green, glass-like rock. Observers nine kilometers away did not hear the immense noise of the shock wave for 40 seconds after the detonation, but at that moment they witnessed a growing fireball that changed color from purple, green and orange to white. It then coalesced into a mushroom cloud, which eventually spiraled twelve kilometers into the sky. The impact of the explosion was felt almost one hundred kilometers away, while those in observation shelters nine kilometers away later recalled that there was a brief period of immense heat, as if they were momentarily in front of an oven. open for a few seconds. , when the bomb detonated.

Oppenheimer's alleged words while observing the explosion of the Trinity text have become somewhat infamous in modern times. He is supposed to have quoted the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most sacred texts of Hinduism, written in the second half of the first millennium BC and whose title is close to "The Song of God." The Gita is a 700-verse scripture that revolves primarily around Prince Arjuna and his guidance, the Hindu deity Krishna, on a wide range of moral and religious issues. Oppenheimer is widely and wrongly believed to have quoted a line from the Gita, in which another Hindu god, Vishnu, says: "I have become death, the

destroyer

of

worlds

." Although the phrase would have been an appropriate expression that morning in New Mexico, Oppenheimer never actually said this.

Instead, recalling the event twenty years later, he said that another line from the Gita crossed his mind, one in which it was stated: “If the radiance of a thousand suns burst forth at once in the sky, it would be like the splendor of the powerful.” Reflecting in 1965, he thought the other line would have been more appropriate, but despite the myth that has developed, Oppenheimer never uttered the words: "I have become death, the

destroyer

of

worlds

." However, in what in retrospect should have been a sobering moment, the general reaction in the observation shelters was one of joy at the success of the Manhattan Project.

Oppenheimer was later noted to be ecstatic. However, the ramifications of his success would become abundantly clear in a matter of weeks. Within weeks of the Trinity test explosion, the atomic bomb would be used as a weapon of war. By then, the conflict in Europe had come to an end, as the Allies had entered Germany from the east and west in the spring of 1945, leading Hitler to take his own life in Berlin in late April and The Nazis surrendered a little more than a week later. However, the Empire of Japan had indicated no willingness to surrender, and Japanese honor systems and military culture seemed to suggest that an invasion of the Japanese islands would be necessary to end the war in the Pacific.

The American government had estimated that this could lead to millions of deaths, as the Japanese would fight to the end. Consequently, the decision was quickly made to use the new atomic bomb as a demonstration to the Japanese government of the new weapons available to the administration, now headed by President Harry Truman, who had succeeded the White House after Roosevelt's presidency. . death in office in mid-April 1945. The result was the bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima with one of the 'Little Boy' bombs on August 6, 1945. That night, at Los Alamos, Oppenheimer was triumphant and seemed lament the fact that the weapon had not been available for use against the Nazis in Germany.

However, this mood quickly gave way to disillusionment three days later, when the United States dropped a second “Fat Man” bomb on the city of Nagasaki in Japan. Surely, Oppenheimer and his colleagues concluded, this was not acceptable. After all, the Japanese had not been given enough time to process the implications of the first bomb and decide to surrender, which they did six days after the bombing of Nagasaki. With that the war came to an end. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the only two occasions in world history when nuclear weapons have been used in war. Consequently, they are hugely controversial.

Today, most analysts of the events of August 1945 tend to take the same view as Oppenheimer and his colleagues, that the use of the first bomb on Hiroshima was justifiable, yet imminently regrettable at the same time, as means to force the Japanese to surrender and in the process potentially save millions of lives by preventing a ground invasion of the Japanese archipelago, but most agree that the bombing of Nagasaki just three days later was unjustified. More generally, the ethical implications of the work that Oppenheimer and his colleagues carried out as part of the Manhattan Project during the war have been questioned.

This has two sides. On the one hand, the development of nuclear weapons has introduced an existential threat to the survival of humanity in modern times, but on the other hand, nuclear deterrence has ensured that the world's superpowers and great states have avoided major wars since 1945. For centuries, the states of Europe had been at endless war with each other. That all changed when it became clear that direct conflict could result in mutually assured destruction. Ironically, the impact of nuclear weapons development has been to foster a “nuclear peace,” but the risks remain profound in a world where politics is becoming more adversarial and destabilized during the 21st century.

With the end of the war, Oppenheimer's reputation reached an unprecedented level within American academic circles. Consequently, new opportunities opened up for him and he decided to leave Berkeley and head to the East Coast to take up the position of Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1947, a prestigious center for the study of physics in the United States. , which included Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Paul Dirac as former founding members or visiting fellows. Under Oppenheimer's leadership, it became a center for emerging physicists, and when he left Berkeley half a dozen of his most promising graduate students also left to study at Princeton.

In New Jersey he continued the methods he had developed in California in the 1930s, generating an environment of vigorous debate and investigation, often at the expense of his own research; Oppenheimer decided to write and publish very little at Princeton. As a result, the Institute became the leading center for the study of physics in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Many of the most important physicists of the second half of the 20th century passed through the Institute during Oppenheimer's tenure, notably Yoichiro Nambu, a Japanese-American who in 2008 would receive the Nobel Prize for his role in the discovery of symmetry. spontaneous rupture. in subatomic physics and Murray Gell-Mann, who won the Nobel Prize in 1969 for his work on elementary particles.

In addition to his work at Princeton, OppenheimerHe continued to hold various government positions in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, while also holding security clearance to view classified documents and material related to the evolving United States nuclear program. Notable in this regard was his membership in the newly created Atomic Energy Commission, which had been founded in 1947 as a commission headed by the United Nations, a newly created body designed to foster world peace after the war. The Energy Commission was charged with regulating the proliferation of nuclear materials and the development of nuclear weapons. While the United States was for several years the only nation with access to nuclear bombs after 1945, it was only a matter of time, now that the world had seen that it was possible to develop such weapons, before other nation states began building their own. own. bombs or try to develop them.

Oppenheimer and several of his former Manhattan Project colleagues were instrumental in the 1946 and 1947 efforts to establish restrictions on nuclear proliferation that are still in place today. As the first chairman of the Commission, Oppenheimer attempted to discourage a nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the context of the developing Cold War, but these efforts were in vain and a major nuclear arms race developed once that the Soviets conducted their first successful test of a nuclear weapon in 1949. When news of the Soviet acquisition of a nuclear weapon reached the United States in 1949, debate began within President Harry Truman's government over the development of a thermonuclear or hydrogen bomb, a much more powerful bomb. nuclear weapon than the atomic bombs that had been developed under the rubric of the Manhattan Project and used against Japan in 1945.

Oppenheimer and many other scientists who had contributed to the work at the Los Alamos Laboratory between 1942 and 1945 were opposed to such bombs. a measure, arguing that such a weapon could not be used in any practical sense in war, without causing immense damage and potentially triggering a nuclear war, which would wipe out much of the life on the planet. In their petition to the government in late 1949 they stated that “the extreme danger to humanity inherent in the proposal completely outweighs any military advantage.” However, Truman went ahead and gave the green light to the new program in January 1950.

Almost three years later, in November 1952, the first hydrogen bomb was tested on an atoll in the Pacific Ocean. "Ivy Mike", as the bomb was called, produced an explosion equivalent to more than ten million tons of TNT and was 450 times more powerful than the atomic bomb that the United States dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. Despite reservations expressed by Oppenheimer and many others, the Cold War was heading towards the era of mutually assured destruction. As much as Oppenheimer would have been absolutely critical to the Manhattan Project and a top government scientist for many years, Oppenheimer fell out of favor with the government in the early 1950s during the Second Red Scare.

These were years in which the Cold War with the Soviet Union deepened following the division of Germany into a Western-aligned West Germany and a communist East Germany, along with the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the Warsaw Pact as rival military alliance. , while the Korean War pitted the Western and Communist blocs for the first time in a major proxy war. In this environment, the United States became tormented by what were initially legitimate concerns about communist organizations within the United States, acting as a fifth column of the Soviet Union within the United States, but this soon gave way to intense paranoia. and unfounded about the motives of anyone associated with socialism. politics or even groups like the American Civil Liberties Union.

The Second Red Scare, named to distinguish it from the First Red Scare, which struck the United States in the late 1910s following the Russian Revolution of 1917, gained momentum beginning in the late 1940s and reached its most intense point. between 1950 and 1954, while Senator Joseph McCarthy undertook extensive efforts to identify and prosecute anyone remotely suspected of having communist sympathies. Oppenheimer would soon come under suspicion during the Second Red Scare. Oppenheimer's associations with socialist and left-wing political movements and civil liberties organizations in the United States date back to the mid-1930s, when, after having been largely apolitical during his youth, he finally began to take an interest in political affairs.

This led him to join a number of progressive and left-wing movements at a time when socialist parties and organizations were seen as the logical opposition to the rising fascist tide across Europe, particularly after 1936, when the Soviet Union and other communist parties Supported the republicans against the nationalists in the Spanish Civil War. It should be noted, however, that Oppenheimer never joined the Communist Party of the United States, although many individuals very close to him were active members, including Jean Tatlock, with whom he was romantically involved from 1936 onwards, his wife Kitty, and his Brother Frank. Other movements Robert participated in, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, were also considered radical between the 1930s and 1950s, but they are now considered the torchbearers of the civil rights movement that ended segregation after of almost a century.

All of this ensured that Oppenheimer was viewed with some suspicion by the authorities, a fact that was compounded by his father's birth in Germany once the United States entered World War II, although this was a complete oxymoron, as that Oppenheimer's Jewish origin would have converted him. a persona non grata for the Nazi regime in Berlin. However, suspicions about Oppenheimer abounded. He was even under surveillance throughout the United States' involvement in World War II, a strange period during which he was one of the most important figures involved in the Manhattan Project, but at the same time the FBI had an open file on him.

These issues merged in 1949 and that year Oppenheimer was forced to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about his political associations. During this, he admitted to having ties to the Communist Party and that many of his most prominent students at Berkeley in the 1930s had also been official members of the party, but claimed that he himself had never been a member. Not much else emerged from the interrogation at this point, but four years later, in the early winter of 1953, the accusations against Oppenheimer were resurrected and this time the FBI was convinced, wrongly as it turned out, that Oppenheimer was a Soviet asset who operated within the US.

Such was the level of paranoia that reigned in the United States at the time of the Second Red Scare. In mid-December 1953, Oppenheimer's security clearance for the United States government was revoked and he was recommended to resign from his government positions. Oppenheimer refused to do so and demanded a hearing, which was held behind closed doors in late spring 1954. During this, Oppenheimer was completely undermined by his former colleague, Edward Teller, who testified that he had found Oppenheimer's behavior questionable in occasions. during his time as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory. With this betrayal, Oppenheimer was stripped of his security clearance and cast into the political and social wilderness in the mid-1950s.

The years following his security hearing and the revocation of his security clearance were difficult for Oppenheimer. Reaction within the academic community was mixed. Most of his colleagues defended Oppenheimer, but the bureaucrats and administrators who ran American universities were often less optimistic, and many canceled lectures and appearances Oppenheimer was scheduled to give. Oppenheimer's own confidence was shaken and he refrained from openly involving himself in numerous initiatives launched by figures such as Einstein to warn the American government and society about the dangers of excessive nuclear proliferation. Instead, he spent increasing time outside the continental United States and moved to the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean, a US overseas territory.

Here he purchased property on what was then known as Gibney Beach on the island of Saint John, but has since become known colloquially as Oppenheimer Beach. He spent long periods here from 1957 onwards, although there were many institutions and organizations within the United States that continued to invite him to lecture. However, the 1950s were notably difficult years for him from a research point of view, during which he hardly published anything. By the late 1950s, concerted efforts were being made to rehabilitate Oppenheimer abroad. For example, in 1957, the French government awarded him the Legion of Honor in recognition of his service to the Allied cause during the war.

In 1962 he was appointed a foreign member of the Royal Society of Great Britain. At the time, there was a growing awareness in the United States that the Second Red Scare had been completely excessive in its prosecution of people who had been only loosely associated with the American communist movement and who had no real ties of any kind to the Soviet Union. Consequently, in 1963, President John F. Kennedy took steps to rehabilitate Oppenheimer by awarding him the Enrico Fermi Prize, a prize that had been created in 1956 by the United States Department of Energy and named in honor of Enrico Fermi, the scientist Italian American who had developed the world's first nuclear reactor in Chicago in 1942, as part of the early stages of the Manhattan Project and who had died prematurely of stomach cancer in 1954.

The prize had been awarded to several people who had worked at the Laboratory of Los Alamos under the direction of Oppenheimer. between 1943 and 1945, including von Neumann, Bethe and Teller in 1956, 1961 and 1962 respectively. Oppenheimer's receipt of the award in 1963 was therefore belated but a welcome recognition of the government's mistake in pursuing him as part of the Red Scare. Oppenheimer did not live long to enjoy the partial restoration of his reputation. Two years after receiving the Fermi Prize, in late 1965 he was diagnosed with throat cancer, a disease that was undoubtedly caused by his lifelong heavy smoking. It was a time when many forms of cancer that are treatable today were effectively a death sentence.

Thus, while Oppenheimer underwent aggressive chemotherapy in an effort to prolong his life, he fell into a coma in early 1967 and died at his home in Princeton on February 18. He was 62 years old. Although his reputation had only been partially rehabilitated with the award of the Enrico Fermi Prize in 1963 and many political figures continued to view him with suspicion, the academic community clearly demonstrated its respect for Oppenheimer at a funeral attended by more than 600 insider colleagues. . academia, the scientific community and the military, many of whom had worked with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos. Later, his ashes were placed in an urn in the waters of the island of San Juan in the Caribbean.

In the decades since, his reputation has been completely rehabilitated. Instead, Edward Teller, who testified against Oppenheimer at his closed-door hearing in 1954, was shunned by many within the American scientific community for decades to come. In 1967, Oppenheimer was posthumously nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics for the third time. He had previously been nominated in 1946 and 1951, but had not received the award on those occasions, nor in 1967. Considerable attention has been paid over the years to why he did not receive the Nobel Prize, given his extensive achievements. he. , but there seem to be clear reasons why he didn't. First, Oppenheimer did not publish widely, unlike someone like Albert Einstein, who published more than 300 scientific papers during his lifetime and many books later.

In contrast, Oppenheimer published only five academic articles after World War II. Furthermore, while he contributed to numerous fields of research within physics, he did not achieve the type of theoretical or applied advance in any specific area that would have justified a Nobel Prize. Nobels are not awarded for a lifetime's work, but usually for a specific scientific achievement. Einstein, for example, won the prize primarily for his work on the photoelectric effect. Therefore, Oppenheimer was considered undeserving of a Nobel Prize for his individual contributions to science, although some have speculated that his work on gravitational collapse was worthy of receiving it.

His main achievements throughout his career lay in collaborative work andsupervision of teams of physicists and other scientists. It was this that made him the ideal person to run the Los Alamos Laboratory during the war. Robert Oppenheimer is one of the most important theoretical physicists in history. His research and work between the 1920s and 1960s contributed substantially to our understanding of the universe, particularly the way in which the Born-Oppenheimer approximation transformed our understanding of molecular dynamics after 1927 and how the Oppenheimer-Phillips process allowed a deuteron-induced approximation. nuclear reaction after Oppenheimer and Melba Phillips provided an explanation for this phenomenon in 1935.

But he will always be remembered for his role in the Manhattan Project as director of the Las Alamos Laboratory. In this capacity, Oppenheimer could be said to have been the leading physicist in the American efforts to develop an atomic bomb during World War II. Whatever the existential and moral implications of the introduction of such weapons into the world, there is no doubt that this research was considered necessary in the context of the time. Oppenheimer was clearly concerned about what he and his colleagues had unleashed on the world and spent much of the postwar period arguing against the development of even deadlier weapons of mass destruction.

It was partly because of this that he found himself persecuted and prosecuted by the government for which he had worked in the early 1950s and thrown into the desert as a result of the Second Red Scare. His legacy, however, is alive and well today. Oppenheimer, an eccentric man who viewed the physical universe in mystical terms, should surely be remembered as one of the great scientists of modern times. What do you think of Robert Oppenheimer? Was he the most important person involved in the Manhattan Project and should he have received the Nobel Prize? Let us know in the comments section and in the meantime, thank you so much for watching.