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.

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
• 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). http://www.aps-pub.com/proceedings/1442/Hijiya.pdf (on Oppenheimer's famous quote)
• 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).

Works 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" also contains a full list of Oppenheimer's scientific publications.

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