Robert Oppenheimer

J. Robert Oppenheimer (April 22, 1904 – February 18, 1967) was an American physicist of German-Jewish origin, and 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 Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of rehabilitation.

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.

Related Topics:
1920s - 1950s

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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, 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.

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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 fuse, 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.

Related Topics:
World War I - Fascism - Radar - Proximity fuse - Operations research - Technocrat - Big Science - 1954

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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.

Related Topics:
German - Heinar Kipphardt - 1964

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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:

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:The whole damn thing 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 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.

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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.

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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 portrayal of Oppenheimer as a modern Faustus in the opera Doctor Atomic is an exaggerated expression of this point of view.

Related Topics:
Great Depression - Faustus - Doctor Atomic

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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) and left its imprint also on Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Die Physiker.

Related Topics:
Bertolt Brecht - Galileo - 1955 - Friedrich Dürrenmatt - Die Physiker

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