J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Legacy of the Manhattan Project's Mastermind - Audio History Documentary

The episode then transports you to the heart of the Manhattan Project, where Oppenheimer's leadership at Los Alamos played a crucial role in the development of the atomic bomb. We explore the scientific challenges and triumphs of this era, from the seminal Oppenheimer-Phillips process to the tense atmosphere leading up to the Trinity Test. Alongside these technical achievements, we delve into the complexities of Oppenheimer's personal life and political activism, driven by the shadow of Nazi Germany and his own Jewish heritage. His relationships and beliefs add a rich, human dimension to his scientific narrative, revealing a man entangled in the moral dilemmas of his time.

As the episode unfolds, we reflect on Oppenheimer's complex legacy. Despite his monumental contributions to science, his opposition to the hydrogen bomb and ties to left-wing politics during the tumultuous Cold War era led to his fall from grace. We dissect how these factors contributed to his tarnished reputation during the Second Red Scare. Finally, we ponder the existential questions his work raises about the nature of scientific progress and its moral implications. Was Oppenheimer the most significant individual in the Manhattan Project? Did he deserve a Nobel Prize? We invite listeners to grapple with these questions and consider the lasting impact of a man whose life remains a profound symbol of scientific ambition and ethical complexity.

Episode Transcript

(00:05):
The man known to history as Robert Oppenheimer was born on
the 22nd of April 19 O 4 as Julius Robert Oppenheimer in New
York City. He quickly became known
primarily by his middle name andis typically referred to today
as Robert Oppenheimer or J Robert Oppenheimer.

(00:25):
Robert was born into an affluentJewish family in New York City.
His father, Julius, had been born in the Hesse Nassau
Province in the territory of theKingdom of Prussia, in what had
just become the United German Empire months prior to his birth
in May 1871, at a time of growing anti-Semitism across
Western and Central Europe, Julius Oppenheimer left Germany

(00:49):
in 1888 at 17 years of age, bound for the United States.
Though virtually penniless, he prospered in America, and by the
time Robert was born in 19 O four, he had risen to become a
wealthy executive at one of Manhattan's leading textile
manufacturers. Robert's mother was Ella
Friedman, a woman of Jewish heritage as well, who had been

(01:12):
born in New York in 1870 to a family of German Jews who had
headed for America a generation before Julius Oppenheimer.
She was a painter from whom Robert inherited some of his
aesthetic views on the structureof existence and the universe.
Ella and Julius would have one other child, a boy named Frank,

(01:33):
who was born eight years after Robert in 1912 and who would
follow in the steps of his olderbrother by becoming a physicist.
Robert's youth was a privileged one.
By the mid 1900s, his father hadbecome a substantial figure
within New York business circles, and in the early 1910s
they moved into a large apartment on West 88th St. in

(01:56):
Manhattan, overlooking the Central Park Reservoir in one of
the most affluent 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 Ethical Culture School, followed by the
Alquin Preparatory School 2 of New York's best educational

(02:17):
establishments in the early 20thcentury.
By the time he was five, he was already interested in
mineralogy, a hobby inherited from his German grandfather.
Such was his aptitude that at 11years of age he was admitted to
the Mineralogical Club of New York City.
His precociousness extended intohis secondary school years and

(02:38):
he finished his education at Alquin in a year and a half less
than the Standard Time, having taken two grade years in 12
months and being fast tracked through the 8th grade.
By this time his interests have developed beyond mineralogy into
the harder sciences, particularly chemistry, but it
was eventually physics which would prove his calling in years

(03:00):
to come. In 1922, Oppenheimer began
studying at Harvard University at the age of 18.
Robert initially intended to focus on studying chemistry, but
soon switched to physics. Yet his earlier interest in
chemistry and his eclectic inquisitiveness would serve him
well in later years, during a period when scientists were

(03:21):
becoming all too specialized in specific fields.
While studying at America's oldest college, he was deeply
influenced by the teachings of Professor Percy Bridgeman, an
experimental physicist on the staff at Harvard at the time.
This was also a period when students at Harvard and other
elite universities in America still studied a very wide range

(03:43):
of subjects, and Oppenheimer delved deeply into history and
the Greek and Latin classics, which was still central to many
Western curricula 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 it was necessary for him

(04:04):
to. The result in 1925, was that
Oppenheimer graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, summa cum
laude, after just three years atHarvard, a distinction which
usually took four years to attain but which Oppenheimer,
following an emerging pattern, completed in less than the
Standard Time. Even before he graduated from

(04:25):
Harvard, Oppenheimer had alreadybeen accepted to continue his
studies at Cambridge University in England.
This was the great centre for the study of physics in Britain
at the time, a reputation it hasheld and cultivated since Isaac
Newton's days there in the late 17th century.
The year that Oppenheimer spent at Cambridge between the fall of
1925 and the summer of 1926, wasinfluential in his development

(04:50):
as he was exposed there to the teachings of Lord Ernest
Rutherford, a New Zealand born physicist who is typically
understood to be the father of nuclear physics today.
For instance, it was Rutherford who first discovered and
explained what nuclear half lifeand the radiation associated
with it were, an achievement which Rutherford was awarded a
Nobel Prize in Chemistry for in 19 O 8.

(05:14):
Towards the end of his first year at Cambridge, Oppenheimer,
whose abilities were beginning to attract considerable
attention amongst European physicists, accepted an offer
from the German physicist Max Borne to study under him at the
University of Girtingen in Germany, one of Europe's great
centres of learning. There, Oppenheimer studied with

(05:34):
a number of contemporaries who would become giants of the study
of theoretical physics during the 20th century, notably Werner
Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller, several of whom
Oppenheimer would work alongsideduring the Manhattan Project in
the midst of the Second World War.
Remarkably, Oppenheimer was awarded his PhD in physics in

(05:56):
the spring of 1927, less than a year after arriving in
Guttingen. The internal examiner James
Frank, who had won the Nobel Prize for Physics two years
earlier in 1925, is famously said to have expressed relief
when the oral examination or Viva voce concluded, stating
that Oppenheimer had easily defended his doctoral work and

(06:20):
had seemed to be ready to begin questioning Frank.
The great promise which Oppenheimer showed as a
theoretical physicist as he acquired his PhD around the same
time he turned 23, was most clearly demonstrated in a paper
which he and Bourne co-authored on the quantum theory of
molecules in 1927, and which laid out what has come to be

(06:41):
known as the Born Oppenheimer approximation.
This pertains to the fields of molecular dynamics, or how
molecules move and interact. The approximation which Born and
Oppenheimer demonstrated show that the wave functions of
nuclei and electrons within a molecule are different, owing to
the fact that nuclei are considerably heavier than the

(07:03):
electrons. This means that the coordinates
of the nuclei are relatively fixed in place, whereas the
lighter electrons are impacted on to a greater extent by wave
functions and their coordinates are consequently more dynamic.
The approximation was reached bythe pair to a great extent owing
to Oppenheimer's dual interests in chemistry and physics, as the

(07:25):
theory which they presented employed elements of quantum
chemistry and molecular physics in terms of its practical
applicability. The approximation was important
in allowing scientists from the late 1920s onwards to separate
the motion of a nuclei and an electron.
The individual who worked this out with Max Borne, and who

(07:46):
acquired his PhD at Gertengen was a curious figure.
Oppenheimer was a mix of a distant scientist and a
relatively jovial individual, slipping from introversion to
extroversion as occasion sometimes demanded or as his
mood was inclined. A chain smoker, he was
perennially surrounded by a cloud of smoke throughout his

(08:08):
adult life, a habit which would contribute substantially to his
premature death in his early 60s.
Individuals who knew him during his years at Harvard, Cambridge
and Girtingham recalled a personwho was a strange mix of
intelligence combined with a striking naivety, at times,
often making poor judgements anddecisions and being prone to

(08:28):
exaggeration. As the years went by, he
developed an arrogant streak, but this was tempered by
intellectual generosity to thosewho studied and worked with him
and those he taught. In later years, a striking
aspect of his personality was his interest in Eastern
philosophy and mysticism, being particularly interested in
Hinduism and Confucianism, even going so far as to learn

(08:52):
Sanskrit, the sacred language ofHinduism, so that he might read
the ancient texts of this faith in the original.
This interest in religion and mysticism was not an eccentric
pastime for Oppenheimer. The study of physics was an
entry point into understanding the mystical nature of the
universe and existence, and his broader intellectual outlook was

(09:14):
one of open curiosity rather than a quest for hard scientific
data. There was, though, also an
unstable and erratic side to Oppenheimer.
His behaviour at Harvard was sometimes questioned by fellow
students and teachers. In 1926, while he was at
Cambridge, he allegedly doused an apple with some illness

(09:35):
inducing chemicals and left it in the office of his tutor,
Patrick Blackett, with whom he had had a difficult
relationship, before heading offto France on holiday.
Evidently this action, and perhaps others besides, saw him
briefly threatened with being suspended from his studies at
Cambridge. A close friend of his in the
1920s, Francis Ferguson, who later went on to become an

(09:58):
acclaimed theorist of stage performance and drama, claimed
that Oppenheimer attacked him and tried to strangle him once
when he told him he was engaged to be married.
Underlying all of this erratic behaviour was a strange mix of
an individual who could be appallingly arrogant and fell
out with a great many colleaguesover the years as a result, but

(10:19):
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 Jewish emigre to
America at a time when anti-Semitism was common across
the western world. He was a constant outsider, or
at least felt like 1, and is known to have suffered

(10:41):
frequently from bouts of depression.
He was, in short, something of an enigma.
After completing his studies at Gottengen and publishing several
more papers from the research hehad undertaken in England and
Germany, Oppenheimer returned tothe United States briefly,
holding fellowships at Harvard and the California Institute of

(11:02):
Technology, punctuated by returnvisits to Europe to work for a
few months at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and at
Zurich in Switzerland, where Albert Einstein had carried out
much of his earliest and most groundbreaking work.
In Leiden, he acquired his nickname, Opie from a bolarized
Dutch rendering of his name. It was not until 1929 that

(11:25):
Oppenheimer settled back in America permanently, having been
presented with numerous job offers from US universities.
He accepted 2 and became an associate professor in physics
at both the University of California at Berkeley and the
California Institute of Technology, or Caltech.
For the next 13 years. Between 1929 and 1942, he would

(11:48):
hold positions at both institutions, teaching during
the fall and winter semesters atBerkeley before spending the
spring term lecturing at Caltechin Pasadena.
During the 1930s, Oppenheimer became famous within the physics
community in the United States for his teaching methods, and
the finest physicists of the mid20th century in America trained

(12:10):
under him at Berkeley and Caltech at the School of
Theoretical Physics, which he founded.
Within this, there was usually acohort of a dozen or so 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 busier times in term, they would often meet daily with

(12:32):
Oppenheimer, quizzing them on their progress and offering
suggestions. They're on, mostly, as several
biographers who knew him during these 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.
Yet it was an eclectic academic environment, and when not

(12:55):
discussing physics, Oppenheimer and his colleagues were often
seen to be reading Plato in the original Greek or learning
Sanskrit. Hans Better.
Who knew? Oppenheimer during these Days
later recalled that Robert was largely aloof from the wider
world in the late 1920s and 1930s in California, only
learning of the Wall Street crash of late 1929, months after

(13:17):
it had happened. There were impressive scientific
breakthroughs made by Oppenheimer and his students at
Berkeley and Caltech during the 1930s.
In 1930, for instance, Oppenheimer wrote a paper which
effectively predicted the existence of the positron or
anti electron as an antiparticleof the electron, although its

(13:37):
existence was not fully proven until 1932 by Carl David
Anderson, a student who worked with Oppenheimer at Caltech.
Following on from this, Oppenheimer worked closely with
Wendell Ferry to work out the modern form of the electron
positron theory and how the two interacted with each other.
Perhaps his most important work,though, was a giant effort with

(14:00):
Melba Phillips, 1 of Oppenheimer's first doctoral
students at a time when female physicists were all too 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 the deuteron
fuses with a target nucleus, ejecting a proton in the

(14:22):
process. This proved that some elements
can become radioactive if bombarded by deuterons, and that
a nuclear interaction can occur at lower energies than had
previously been understood. This and many other
breakthroughs by both Oppenheimer and his students at
Berkeley and Caltech made California one of the world's

(14:42):
great centres 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 thelate 1920s, for which condition
he sought out the dry desert airof Arizona and New Mexico in the
years that followed, eventually buying a ranch in New Mexico.

(15:06):
In the mid 1930s, he began a relationship with Jean Tatlock,
A psychiatry student who was thedaughter of John Strong Tatlock,
an eminent Old English scholar and expert on the life and works
of Geoffrey Chaucer, 10 years Roberts junior.
Jean was a troubled young woman with severe depression and a
conflicted sexuality. Their relationship was

(15:27):
tempestuous but continued through to 1940, even after
Oppenheimer began seeing Kitty Harrison, a botanist and
physicist at Caltech, who eventually divorced her second
husband, Stuart Harrison, in November 1940 and married Robert
the following day. It remains unclear to this day
if Oppenheimer continued to periodically see Tatlock in the

(15:49):
early 1940s prior to her taking her own life in January 1944.
Robert and Kitty would subsequently have two children,
a boy named Peter who was born in May 1941 as Kitty had been
pregnant already when they married, and a daughter named
Catherine after her mother who was born in 1944.

(16:11):
Oppenheimer's life, like that ofvirtually every individual
across Europe, North Africa, North America and much of Asia,
was hugely interrupted in the autumn of 1939 by the outbreak
of the Second World War. The conflict came about as a
direct result of the ascent to power in Germany of the Nazis,
led by Adolf Hitler early in 1933.

(16:33):
A rabidly anti-Semitic nationalist and fascist
organization, the Nazis had madetheir twin goals, to crush the
Jewish people in Germany and to initiate a new war in Europe, to
overturn the terms of the Treatyof Versailles which had brought
the First World War to an end, and to build a new German Third
Reich or Empire, which would dominate the continent.

(16:55):
Oppenheimer was very familiar with the Nazis as a Jew himself,
albeit a non observant. 1 He hadbecome politically involved for
the first time in his life during the mid 1930s when he
began setting aside 3% of his salary to help German Jews who
were trying to flee Germany in the wake of the anti Jewish
Nuremberg laws which were introduced from 1934 onwards.

(17:19):
The Nazis anti Jewish policies had become more extreme from
1936 onwards, and particularly so in 1938 as Germany began
annexing neighboring states, firstly Austria and then
Czechoslovakia. With the invasion of Poland in
September 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany,

(17:40):
but public opinion in the UnitedStates was not yet wholly in
favour of intervention in what was deemed to be a European war.
Therefore, America would remain officially neutral for the first
two years of the conflict, though the administration of
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was providing
extensive support in the shape of war material to Britain from

(18:01):
the war's inception, Oppenheimer's life and his place
in history would be changed forever by the events of
December 1941. By that time, the United States
still remained neutral in the Second World War despite the
desperate situation in Europe, with the Nazis conquering Poland
in the autumn of 1939, Denmark and Norway the following spring,

(18:23):
and then the Low Countries and France in the summer of 1940.
With many other states like Italy, Hungary and Romania
allied with the Nazis and invasions of Britain's colonies
in North Africa and Russia afootfrom the summer of 1941 onwards,
it seemed that Germany was destined to dominate Europe.
It was in this context that the Empire of Japan, an ultra

(18:46):
nationalist state bent on creating an Asiatic and Pacific
empire, one which already included Korea, Manchuria and
much of Eastern China by the early 1940s, decided to
preemptively attack the United States without declaring war.
The attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and other American
territories such as the Philippines on the 7th of

(19:08):
December 1941 pulled the United States into the Second World
War. Within days, the US was at war
with Germany, Italy and the other Axis states as the
entirety of the Northern hemisphere ended up at war.
Oppenheimer would soon be catapulted to the centre of
America's research efforts during the conflict.

(19:29):
This occurred in the context of efforts by Nazi Germany to
acquire a weapon of mass destruction as a means of
winning the war swiftly. In the 1920s and the 1930s,
Germany had been home to some ofthe world's leading scientists
and so was well placed to develop a nuclear weapon.
Nuclear fission, for instance, had been discovered by a team

(19:51):
led by Otto Robert Frisch and Lisa Meitner in Berlin in 1938.
Various experiments were initiated by the Nazis the
following year to begin using this breakthrough to develop a
nuclear weapon. Some of these focused on
developing a nuclear reactor, while others favored the theory
of using heavy water to produce an atomic weapon, research which

(20:15):
was carried out in Nazi occupiedNorway throughout the war.
Already in August 1939, President Roosevelt in
Washington, DC. Had received a letter from the
Hungarian nuclear physicist Leo Zillard and Albert Einstein
alerting the US government to the threat posed by these Nazi
experiments. Little effort was made to

(20:36):
respond to this in 1939 or 1940,but with the entry of the US
into the war at the end of 1941,fresh consideration was given to
America commencing its own research in this area.
Oppenheimer would technically bein charge of the Los Alamos
Laboratory during the Second World War, but this was all

(20:57):
under the umbrella of the Manhattan Project, a research
and development program initiated by the US government
in 1942 with the ultimate aim ofdeveloping a nuclear bomb.
The name comes simply from the fact that the team of
individuals who were in charge of the wider project had their
first headquarters where they met in 1942 on the island of

(21:18):
Manhattan in New York City. Eventually it grew from 1942
onwards to employ approximately 130,000 people across the
country. They worked on various elements
of the project in many States and regions.
For instance, a large team working in Chicago throughout
the war, which included Oppenheimer's old colleague from

(21:39):
Girtingen, Enrico Fermi, and LeoZillard, who had co-authored the
letter to Roosevelt in 1939 warning the president about the
Nazi nuclear program, developed the first working nuclear
reactor there. Another team at the Hanford Site
in Washington state were chargedwith producing plutonium from
uranium as a raw material for any future nuclear weapon, and a

(22:01):
similar project was underway in Tennessee.
There were even teams of individuals operating under the
rubric of the Manhattan Project in Europe, carrying out
espionage to try to uncover whatthe Nazis were working on.
Oppenheimer would oversee the most critical research team of
all those involved in the Manhattan Project.
As director of the Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico, he was

(22:24):
very nearly not picked for this position.
The individual who oversaw the Manhattan Project was Major
General Leslie Groves. Groves is not exactly a
household name today, but he hasthe distinction of having been
in charge of both the Manhattan Project, which created the first
nuclear weapon, and also overseeing the construction of
the Pentagon as the headquartersof the US military and

(22:47):
Department of Defence. 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
sceptical, favouring the idea ofappointing someone who had been
awarded a Nobel Prize in physicsand would consequently have
enough academic gravitas to leada team of some of the most

(23:10):
eminent minds of the day. He was eventually persuaded that
Oppenheimer had a track record of getting the best out of
people he worked with. He contacted Oppenheimer and,
after interviewing him, came to the conclusion that he was well
suited for the post. In the weeks that followed in
the early winter of 1942, Oppenheimer scouted out a
suitable location for the establishment of a research

(23:32):
centre, somewhere remote and away from any urban centres
where secrecy would be insured and a nuclear weapon could be
tested in due course. He eventually settled on Los
Alamos in New Mexico, where a research facility was erected on
the site of an old school. This was subcontracted to the
University of California throughthe War Department so that

(23:55):
Oppenheimer had some degree of autonomy in hiring and firing as
director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, although there would
be more hiring than firing. At its height, there were well
over 5000 people employed at LosAlamos, far more than
Oppenheimer had initially anticipated.
The team that Oppenheimer assembled at Los Alamos included

(24:16):
some of the finest scientists ofthe first half of the 20th
century. 1 was John Hasbrouck Van Vleck, a physicist and
mathematician who had been at Harvard when Oppenheimer arrived
there in 1922. He was subsequently awarded a
Nobel Prize in 1977 for his workon electronic magnetism.
Van Vleck made significant contributions to the gun design

(24:38):
which would be used in the bomb used over Hiroshima.
A colleague of Oppenheimer's from Berkeley, Robert Serber,
acted as an organizing physicistat 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
after characters from detective movies and novels such as The

(25:01):
Maltese Falcon. Hans Bather was a German born
theoretical physicist who would later be awarded a Nobel Prize
in 1967. He was central to 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.

(25:22):
He had studied in Germany aroundthe same time as Oppenheimer in
the late 1920s, but had subsequently immigrated to the
United States. Teller had already worked at
Fermi's reactor centre in Chicago before being sent to New
Mexico. Teller was arguably
Oppenheimer's closest colleague at Los Alamos.
Beyond these were hundreds of other engineers, metallogists,

(25:45):
chemists and military experts involved in the research teams
at Los Alamos, working on a widerange of finer details about how
the first atomic weapon could beconstructed.
The task which confronted this team of physicists and other
engineers and scientists was daunting.
When they assembled at Los Alamos, they had little to work

(26:06):
on other than a theoretical knowledge of how a nuclear chain
reaction could be produced. But what must be remembered in
an age when we know what a nuclear explosion looks like and
the destruction that it results in, is that Oppenheimer and his
colleagues at Los Alamos were not just trying to build a
nuclear weapon, but also to predict what would happen when 1

(26:26):
exploded. Thus, there was an enormous
amount of experimentation and theoretical speculation
throughout 1943 and 1944. Throughout it all, Oppenheimer
worked exhaustively. As Hansbetter recollected years
later, his uncanny speed in grasping the main points of any
subject was a decisive factor. He could acquaint himself with

(26:50):
the essential details of every part of the work he did not
direct from the head office. He was intellectually and even
physically present at each decisive step.
Yet the incredibly arduous work schedule which Oppenheimer
followed at Los Alamos also tooka toll on his health.
He was always a thin person, butduring the work in New Mexico he

(27:11):
lost another 20 lbs, eventually weighing as little as £110 or
less than 8 stone. 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 work more like an artillery gun to

(27:33):
detonate rather than an implosion type bomb.
The research into producing thiswas extremely complex from a
logistical perspective, with thepolonium which was used in the
initiator having to be obtained from ores in Ontario in Canada
and then manufactured at a separate facility in Tennessee
which was also part of the widerManhattan Project, or at the

(27:55):
Hanford Site in Washington state.
However, more complex still was the design issue.
In order for the gun type weaponto work, a plutonium bullet
which would be fired off inside the bomb would have to be
accelerated to a speed of 3000 feet per second, or over 3200
kilometres per hour, or else thenuclear fission would begin

(28:17):
before the rest of the mechanicsof the bomb were ready for a
successful explosion. This was ultimately the undoing
of the Thin Man design as it wasrealized during the course of
1944 that the gun barrel needed to produce this speed would be
far too large to be employed in a bomb of a kind which could be
transported on board AB29 FlyingSuperfortress, the newly

(28:40):
designed heavy bombers which were to be used to transport any
nuclear bomb developed by the USgovernment.
This, along with issues relatingto the use of plutonium in a gun
type bomb saw the Thin Man design abandoned in April 1944.
With the abandonment of the ThinMan design, Oppenheimer
redeployed many of the scientists and engineers who had

(29:03):
been working on it to another design called Little Boy.
This was a simplified gun type fishing bomb, but unlike the
Thin Man, it was intended that Uranium 235 would be used
instead of plutonium for the nuclear fission that would
create the explosion. Simultaneously, 1/3 type of
design was being progressed. The Fat Man, as it was known,

(29:26):
would use plutonium but was designed as an implosion type
bomb. The design team for it was led
by an American physicist by the name of Seth Nedermeyer.
Oppenheimer continued to favour the gun type design even as the
fat man was being furthered during the course of 1943 and
1944. Oppenheimer's brilliance as an

(29:47):
overseer at Los Alamos was seen in his decision to bring John
von Neumann, A Hungarian born mathematician and physicist, to
Los Alamos in 1943 to review thedesign.
It was von Neumann who suggesteda spherical shape and shaped
charges which would reduce the amount of plutonium needed and
make the assembly of an implosion type bomb more

(30:08):
practical and achievable. Over the next several months,
metallogists at Los Alamos had to try to solve the problem of
how to cast plutonium into a sphere, but this was eventually
overcome when a plutonium gallium alloy was devised, one
which was pressed into spheres and coated with nickel.
The design process was nearing completion as 1945 dawned at Los

(30:32):
Alamos, Oppenheimer's teams werecoming close to completing both
the design of the Little Boy andFat Man.
Consequently, there were two plausible candidates for a
successfully built nuclear weapon.
In the end, both would be completed at roughly the same
time as design problems were worked out in the spring of 1945

(30:53):
and the required levels of enriched uranium and plutonium
were produced in the sites in Washington state and Tennessee.
The latter were enormous undertakings given the
technology available to the Manhattan Project, as it was
extremely costly and time consuming to enrich these to
become fissile substances in themid 1940s.
Other elements which needed to be resolved were engineering

(31:16):
problems for the most part. For instance, the Fat Man bomb
was being assembled using a hugearray of approximately 1500
bolts in 1944, an impractical amount in order to develop a
working bomb. By the time it was completed in
the early summer of 1945, Oppenheimer's team had reduced
this to just 90 volts. Other technical issues concerned

(31:40):
how the bomb would descend when dropped from a height, and
throughout 1944 and 1945 tests were done to assess how a bomb
of the size and structure of theFat Man and Little Boy would
fall through the air. All of this came together during
the course of the spring of 1945, and by Midsummer
Oppenheimer was able to deliver the head of the Manhattan

(32:03):
Project, Major General Leslie Groves, the news that they were
ready to conduct a test detonation.
The Trinity nuclear test was carried out in the Honada del
Muerto Desert in New Mexico on the 16th of July 1945.
Fittingly, the desert's name, translated from the Spanish,
means Dead Man's Root. Oppenheimer revealed in

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correspondence with Groves in 1962 that he codenamed the test
Trinity as he had been reading the religious poetry of the 17th
century English poet John Donne around the time that he came up
with the name. The device which would be used
during the test was a fat man bomb using plutonium and of an
implosion type. For the purposes of the test,

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the bomb in question was christened the Gadget.
In order for the test to be carried out safely, a location
was chosen which was highly remote, almost entirely
unpopulated and otherwise isolated.
There was only one building on the proposed blast site, the
McDonald Ranch House, which had been built there by a German
migrant in 1913 and which had been forcefully vacated in 1942

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by the McDonald family after theUS government took over the
region under the remit of the Manhattan Project.
The test was a carefully plannedthing, as the plutonium which
was to be used had cost billionsof dollars to produce in today's
money. Such were the torturous methods
involved in enriching uranium and plutonium at the time.
Much hinged on its success. As Groves noted at the time, he

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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 was carried out
near dawn on the morning of the 16th of July.
Observation shelters were established in three different
places to the north-south and West of the blast site, each

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approximately 9 kilometers away from where the bomb would be
detonated. Goggles were provided to prevent
against harmful ultraviolet wavelengths, while the distance
was considered safe enough in terms of the radioactive half
life which would be produced. Many of the observers that
morning were scientists and included Oppenheimer, Teller,
Beta, Enrique Fermi, and John von Neumann.

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Some believed that the bomb would not work, others were
concerned about exactly how destructive it could prove to
be. They had their answers at 5:29
AM when the gadget exploded, releasing explosive energy
equivalent to 25,000 tons of TNT.
This created a crater 1/3 of a kilometer wide and melted the

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sand across the launch site, turning it into a light green
glass like rock. The observers 9 kilometers away
did not hear the immense noise from the shockwave for 40
seconds after the detonation, but by that time they were
witnessing a growing fireball which changed colour from
purple, green and orange eventually to white.

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Then it coalesced into a mushroom cloud, one which
eventually spiralled 12 kilometers into the sky.
The shock from the explosion wasfelt nearly 100 kilometers away,
while those at the observation shelters 9 kilometres away later
recollected that there was a brief period of immense heat,
like they were standing in frontof an open oven for a few

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seconds momentarily when the bomb detonated.
Oppenheimer's supposed words as he watched the Trinity test
explosion have become somewhat infamous in modern times.
He's alleged to have quoted fromthe Bhagavad Gita, one of the
holiest texts in Hinduism, one which was written in the
second-half of the first Millennium BC and the title of

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which approximates to the song by God.
The Gita is a 700 verse scripture which primarily
revolves around Prince Arjuna and his guide, the Hindu deity
Krishna, on a wide range of moral and religious matters.
It is widely and mistakenly believed that Oppenheimer quoted
a line from the Gita in which another Hindu God, Vishnu, says

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I am become Death, the destroyerof worlds.
Although the line would have been a fitting utterance that
morning in New Mexico, in reality Oppenheimer never said
this, instead recording the event 20 years later.
He said that another line from the Gita ran through his head,
one in which, it is stated, if the ragents of 1000 Suns were to

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burst at once into the sky, thatwould be like the splendor of
the mighty one. On reflection, in 1965, he
thought the other line would have been more fitting.
But despite the myth that has developed, Oppenheimer never
actually uttered the words. I am become Death, the destroyer
of worlds. However, for what in retrospect

(36:54):
should have been a sobering moment, the general reaction in
the observation shelters was oneof Glee.
That the Manhattan Project had succeeded Oppenheimer, it was
later noted, was jubilant. The ramifications of their
success, though, would become all too clear within a matter of
weeks. Within weeks of the Trinity Test
explosion, the atomic bomb wouldbe used as a weapon of war.

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By that time, the conflict in Europe had come to an end as the
Allies had streamed into Germanyfrom both East and West in the
spring of 1945, leading to Hitler taking his own life in
Berlin in late April and the Nazis surrendering just over a
week later. However, the Empire of Japan had
indicated no willingness to surrender, and Japanese honor

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systems and military culture seemed to suggest an invasion of
the Japanese islands would be necessary to bring the war in
the Pacific to an end. The US government had calculated
that this could result in millions of deaths as the
Japanese would fight to the bitter end.
Consequently, the decision was quickly taken to utilize the new
atomic bomb as a demonstration to the Japanese government of

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the new weapon which was available to the administration,
which was now headed by President Harry Truman, who had
succeeded to the White House following President Roosevelt's
death in office in mid-april 1945.
The result was the bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima
with one of the Little Boy bombson the 6th of August 1945 in Los

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Alamos. That evening, Oppenheimer was
triumphant and seemed to regret the fact that the weapon had not
been available to use against the Nazis in Germany.
However, this mood quickly gave way to disillusionment 3 days
later when the US dropped a second bomb of the Fat Man type
on the city of Nagasaki in Japan.

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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 to decide to surrender, which they did six
days after the bombing of Nagasaki.
With that, the war came to an end.

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The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the only two
occasions in world history when nuclear weapons have been
utilized in warfare. They are, accordingly,
enormously controversial today. Most analysts of the events of
August 1945 tend to take the same view, as Oppenheimer and
his colleagues did, that the useof the first bomb in Hiroshima

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was somewhat justifiable, thoughimminently regrettable, at the
same time as a means of forcing the Japanese to surrender and in
the process potentially saving millions of lives by avoiding a
land invasion of the Japanese archipelago.
But most are agreed that the bombing of Nagasaki just three
days later was unwarranted. More broadly, the ethical

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implications of the work Oppenheimer and his colleagues
carried out as part of the Manhattan Project during the war
have been questioned. There are two sides to this.
On the one hand, the developmentof nuclear weapons has
introduced an existential threatto humanity's survival in modern
times. But on the other hand, the
nuclear deterrent has ensured that the world's superpowers and

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large states have avoided major wars ever since 1945.
For centuries, Europe's states had been endlessly at war with
one another. That all changed once it became
apparent the direct conflict could result in mutually assured
destruction. Ironically, the impact of the
development of nuclear weapons has been to foster a nuclear

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peace, but the risks remain profound in a world where
politics are becoming more antagonistic and destabilized
during the 21st century. With the end of the war,
Oppenheimer's reputation was at an unprecedented height within
American academic circles. There were accordingly new
opportunities open to him, and he decided to leave Berkeley and

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head to the East Coast to take up a position as director of the
Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton in New Jersey in
1947, an esteemed centre for thestudy of physics in the United
States, which included Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Paul
Dirac as former charter members or visiting fellows.

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Under Oppenheimer's leadership it became a Center for emerging
physicists, and when he left Berkeley, 1/2 a dozen of his
more promising graduate studentsleft also to study at Princeton
in New Jersey. He continued the methods he had
developed in California in the 1930s, producing an environment
of energetic discussion and research, often at the expense

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of his own research, Oppenheimerchoosing to write and publish
very little himself 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 ofthe 20th century passed through

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the Institute, notably Yoshiro Nambu, a Japanese American who
in 2008 would be Co awarded the Nobel Prize for his role in
discovering the spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic
physics, and Murray Gell Mann, who won the Nobel Prize in 1969
for his work on elementary particles as well as his work at

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Princeton. Oppenheimer continued to hold a
number of government positions throughout the late 1940s and
into the 1950s, while also having security clearance to
view classified documents and material relating to the United
States evolving nuclear program.Notable in this respect was his
membership of the newly established Atomic Energy

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Commission, which had been founded in 1947 as a Commission
headed by the United Nations, itself a newly created body
designed to foster World Peace. In the aftermath of the war, the
Energy Commission was charged with regulating the
proliferation of nuclear materials and the development of
nuclear weaponry. While the United States was for

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several years the only nation with access to nuclear bombs
after 1945, it was only a matterof time now that the world had
seen that it was possible to develop such weapons before
other nation states began building their own bombs or
trying to develop them. Oppenheimer and several of his
former colleagues from the Manhattan Project was central to

(43:32):
efforts in 1946 and 1947 to establish restrictions on
nuclear proliferation, which arestill in force today.
As the first chairman of the Commission, Oppenheimer tried to
discourage a nuclear arms race between the United States and
the Soviet Union in the context of the developing Cold War.

(43:53):
But these efforts were in vain, and a major nuclear arms race
developed once the Soviets conducted their first successful
test of a nuclear weapon in 1949.
As news of the Soviet acquirement of a nuclear weapon
reached the US in 1949, debate began within the government of
President Harry Truman about thedevelopment of a hydrogen, or

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thermonuclear bomb, a far more powerful nuclear weapon than the
atomic bombs which had been developed under the rubric of
the Manhattan Project and used against Japan in 1945.
Oppenheimer and a great many other scientists who had
contributed to the work at the Los Alamos Laboratory between
1942 and 1945 were opposed to such a measure, arguing that

(44:40):
such a weapon could not be used in any practical sense in
warfare without causing immense damage and potentially
triggering a nuclear war which would wipe out much of life on
the planet. In their petition to the
government in late 1949, they stated that the extreme danger
to mankind inherent in the proposal to develop

(45:02):
thermonuclear weapons wholly outweighs any military
advantage. Nevertheless, Truman pressed
ahead and greenlit the new program in January 1950.
Nearly three years later, in November 1952, the first
hydrogen bomb was tested on an atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
Ivy Mike of the bomb was named, produced an explosion equivalent

(45:27):
to over 10 million tons of TNT, and was 450 times more powerful
than the atomic bomb which the US dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.
Despite the reservations expressed by Oppenheimer and
many others, the Cold War was heading into the era of mutually
assured destruction. As much as he had been

(45:49):
absolutely central to the Manhattan Project and a senior
government scientist for many years, Oppenheimer fell foul of
the government in the early 1950s during the Second Red
Scare. These were years when the Cold
War with the Soviet Union was deepening, following the
division of Germany into a Western aligned West Germany and

(46:10):
a Communist East Germany, along with the formation of the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization andthe Warsaw Pact as a rival
military alliance. While the Korean War pitted the
Western and communist blocs against each other for the first
time in a major proxy war. In this environment, America
became wracked with what were initially legitimate concerns

(46:32):
about communist organizations within the United States, acting
as a fifth column for the SovietUnion within America.
But this soon gave way to intense and unfounded paranoia
about the motives of anyone associated with socialist
politics or even groups such as the American Civil Liberties
Union. The Second Red Scare, which is

(46:55):
termed as such to distinguish itfrom the First Red Scare, which
struck America in the late 1910sfollowing the Russian Revolution
of 1917, gathered pace from the late 1940s and was at its most
intense between 1950 and 1954. As Senator Joseph McCarthy
undertook extensive efforts to identify and bring to trial

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anyone even remotely suspected of 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 America stretched back to the
mid 1930s when, after being largely apolitical throughout

(47:41):
his youth, he began to finally take an interest in political
affairs. This led him to join a number of
left wing and progressive movements at a time when
socialist parties and organizations were seen as the
logical opposition to the growing fascist tide across
Europe, particularly so from 1936 onwards when the Soviet
Union and other Communist parties supported the

(48:04):
Republicans against the Nationalists in the Spanish
Civil War. It should be noted, however,
that Oppenheimer never actually joined the Communist Party of
the United States, though a great many individuals who were
very close to him were active members, including Gene Tatlock,
with whom he was involved romantically from 1936 onwards,

(48:25):
his wife Kitty and his brother Frank.
Other movements which Robert wasinvolved in, such as the
American Civil Liberties Union, were also considered radical
between the 1930s and 1950s, butare now viewed as the torch
bearers of the Civil Rights movement, which ended
segregation after nearly a century.

(48:45):
All of this ensure that Oppenheimer was viewed with some
suspicion by the authorities, a development which was compounded
by his father's birth in Germany.
Once the United States entered the Second World War.
Though, this was a complete oxymoron, as Oppenheimer's
Jewish background would have made him a persona non grata to
the Nazi regime in Berlin, Nevertheless, suspicions

(49:08):
abounded about Oppenheimer. He was even under surveillance
throughout America's involvementin the Second World War, a
bizarre period during which he was one of the most senior
figures involved in the Manhattan Project.
But the FBI simultaneously had afile open on him.
These issues coalesced by 1949, and that year Oppenheimer was

(49:31):
forced to testify before the House on American Activities
Committee about his political associations.
During this, he admitted to tiesto the Communist Party and that
many of his more prominent students at Berkeley in the
1930s had also been official members of the party, but stated
he had never been a member himself.

(49:52):
Not much more came of the interrogation at this juncture,
but four years later, in the early winter of 1953, the
accusations against Oppenheimer were resurrected and on this
occasion the FBI were convinced,wrongly as it turns out, that
Oppenheimer was a Soviet asset operating within the US.

(50:12):
Such was the level of paranoia which pertained within America
at the time of the Second Red Scare.
In mid-december 1953, Oppenheimer's security clearance
for the US government was revoked and he was advised to
resign from his government positions.
This Oppenheimer refused to do and demanded a hearing, one
which was held behind closed doors in the late spring of

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1954. During this, Oppenheimer was
completely undermined by his oldcolleague Edward Teller, who
testified that he had found Oppenheimer's behaviour
questionable at times during histime 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.

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The years following his securityhearing and the revocation of
his security clearance were difficult ones for Oppenheimer.
The reaction within the academiccommunity was mixed.
Most of his colleagues defended Oppenheimer, but the bureaucrats
and administrators who ran the American universities were often
less sanguine, with many cancelling lectures and

(51:19):
appearances which Oppenheimer was scheduled to give.
Oppenheimer's own confidence wasdented, and he refrained from
overt involvement in numerous initiatives launched by figures
like Einstein to warn the government and American Society
about the dangers of excessive nuclear proliferation.
Instead, he spent an increasing amount of time away from the

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continental United States, relocating to the Virgin Islands
in the Caribbean AUS Overseas territory.
Here he purchased an estate on what was then known as Gibney
Beach on the island of Saint John, but which has since become
known colloquially as Oppenheimer Beach.
He spent extended periods here from 1957 onwards, though there

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were many institutions and organizations within America
that continued to invite him to guest lecture.
Yet the 1950s were notably lean years for him from a research
perspective, during which he barely published anything.
By the late 1950s, there were concerted efforts on the way to
rehabilitate Oppenheimer abroad.For instance, in 1957 the French

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government awarded him the Le Jean Doner in recognition for
his wartime service to the Allied cause.
In 1962, he was made a foreign member of the Royal Society in
Britain. By that time, there was an
increasing awareness at home in America that the Second Red
Scare had been utterly excessivein its prosecution of
individuals who had been only vaguely associated with the

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American communist movement and had no real ties of any kind
with the Soviet Union. Accordingly, in 1963, President
John F Kennedy moved to rehabilitate Oppenheimer by
awarding him the Enrico Fermi Award, an award which had been
created in 1956 by the US Department of Energy and named

(53:11):
in honour of Enrico Fermi, the Italian American scientist who
had developed the world's first nuclear reactor in Chicago in
1942 as part of the early stagesof the Manhattan Project, and
who had died prematurely of stomach cancer in 1954.
The award had been bestowed on several individuals who had
worked at the Los Alamos Laboratory under Oppenheimer

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between 1943 and 1945, includingvon Neumann, Berta and Teller in
19561961 and 1962 respectively. Hence, Oppenheimer's receipt of
the award in 1963 was belated but a welcome acknowledgement of
the government's mistake in persecuting him as part of the

(53:52):
Red Scare. Oppenheimer did not live long to
enjoy having his reputation partially restored. 2 years
after he was awarded the Fermi Award, he was diagnosed in late
1965 with throat cancer, an illness which was undoubtedly
caused by his lifelong chain smoking.
This was a time when many forms of cancer which are treatable

(54:13):
today were effectively a death sentence.
Thus, while Oppenheimer underwent aggressive
chemotherapy in an effort to prolong his life, he fell into a
Cova early in 1967 and died at home in Princeton on the 18th of
February. He was 62 years of age.
While his reputation had been only partly rehabilitated by the

(54:34):
bestowal of the Enrico Fermi Award in 1963, and many
political figures continued to view him suspiciously, the
academic community clearly demonstrated its respect for
Oppenheimer at a funeral servicewhich was attended by over 600
colleagues from within academia,the scientific community and the
military, a great many of whom had worked with Oppenheimer at

(54:57):
Los Alamos. His ashes were later deposited
in the waters of St. John's Island in the Caribbean
in an urn. In the decades since, his
reputation has been fully rehabilitated.
By way of contrast, Edward Teller, who testified against
Oppenheimer at his closed doors hearing in 1954, was spurned by
many within the American scientific community for decades

(55:19):
to come. In 1967, Oppenheimer was
posthumously nominated for the third time for the Nobel Prize
for Physics. He had previously been nominated
in 1946 and 1951, but he had notreceived the accolade on those
occasions, nor did he in 1967. There has been considerable
attention given over the years as to why he did not receive the

(55:42):
Nobel Prize, given his extensiveaccomplishments, but there would
seem to be clear reasons why he did not.
Firstly, Oppenheimer did not publish extensively, unlike
someone like Albert Einstein whopublished over 300 scientific
papers during his lifetime and many books later in his life.
By way of contrast, Oppenheimer published just five academic

(56:05):
papers after the Second World War.
Furthermore, while he contributed to numerous fields
of inquiry within physics, he did not make the kind of
theoretical or applied breakthrough in anyone specific
area which would have warranted a Nobel Prize.
The Nobels are not awarded for alifetime's work, but generally
for a specific scientific accomplishment.

(56:27):
Einstein, for instance, won his primarily for his work on the
photoelectric effect. Hence, Oppenheimer was deemed
not to have warranted a Nobel Prize for his individual
contributions to science, thoughsome have speculated that his
work on gravitational collapse was worthy of one.
His primary accomplishments throughout his career lay in

(56:47):
collaborative work and overseeing teams of physicists
and other scientists. It was this which made him the
ideal individual to head the LosAlamos 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 added

(57:09):
substantially to our understanding of the universe,
notably the manner in which the Born Oppenheimer approximation
transformed our understanding ofmolecular dynamics from 1927
onwards, and how the OppenheimerPhillips process allowed for a
deuteron induced nuclear reaction after Oppenheimer and
Melt the Phillips providing an explanation for this phenomenon

(57:30):
in 1935. But he will forever be
remembered for his role in the Manhattan Project as Director of
the Los Alamos Laboratory. In this capacity, Oppenheimer
might be said to have been the lead physicist in US efforts to
develop an atomic bomb during the Second World War.
Whatever the existential and moral implications of the
introduction of such weapons into the world might be, there

(57:53):
is no doubt that this research was considered necessary in the
context of the times. Oppenheimer was clearly troubled
by what he and his colleagues had unleashed into the world and
spent much of the post war period arguing against the
development of even more deadly weapons of mass destruction.
It was in part owing to this that he found himself persecuted

(58:15):
and prosecuted by the governmenthe had worked for in the early
1950s and cast into the wilderness as a result of the
Second Red Scare. His legacy, though, is alive and
well today. An eccentric man who viewed the
physical universe in mystical terms, Oppenheimer should surely
be remembered as one of the great scientists of modern

(58:36):
times. What do you think of Robert
Oppenheimer? Was he the most significant
individual involved in the Manhattan Project, and should he
have been awarded a Nobel Prize?Please let us know in the
comments section. And in the meantime, thank you
very much for watching.