J. Robert Oppenheimer
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer at the early nuclear test recalled from the Bhagavad Gita
This was the first topic of the week. A strange one indeed. I can’t quite remember what sparked me wanting to research Oppenheimer, but a part of it was wanting to know more about the man who was in part responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people and how he lived with it.
He studied in Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge after graduating from Harvard. He dosed an apple with noxious chemicals and left it on the desk of his tutor. His tutor didn’t eat the apple but Oppenheimer was put on probation and ordered to have psychiatric sessions.
He ended up leaving and Studying at the University of Göttingen, Germany, studying under Max Born, with whom he contributed to the newly developed quantum theory and published a paper called the Born-Oppenheimer approximation.
It would seem that Oppenheimer surrounded himself with people who were very involved in the ever growing communist party. This was later be used as evidence that claimed Oppenheimer was a party member during a number of security cases dubbed the McCarthy Hearings.
Whilst working at Berkeley Labs at the beginning of WWII Oppenheimer became involved with the efforts to develop an atomic bomb. The US army was eventually put in charge of the bomb effort, and it was subsequently renamed the Manhattan Engineering District. Oppenheimer was appointed as the Manhattan Project’s scientific director.
During early scientific discussions there was a fear that there could be a remote possibility of the bomb generating enough heat as to ignite the planets atmosphere. This was later proved to be impossible (before the tests took place).
May 10-11, 1945. The Target Committee led by Oppenheimer recommended Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama and Kokura as possible targets for the use of the atomic bomb. They were chosen as they fitted the following criteria.
-
The target was larger than three miles in diameter and was an important target in a large urban area.
-
The blast would create effective damage.
-
The target was unlikely to be attacked by August 1945. “Any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb.”
After the bombings and the subsequent security hearings in which his security clearance was revoked (one day before it naturally expired), Oppenheimer chose to live a more retreated lifestyle. Living on the island of St John in the Virgin Islands with his wife Kitty. Oppenheimer joined with Einstein and a number of other prominent scientist of the time to form the World Academy of Art and Science which was concerned about the danger that scientific discoveries could be to humanity.
Oppenheimer died at the age of 62, from throat cancer due to chain smoking since a early age. His daughter, Toni, later committed suicide due to being refused security clearance as a translator at the U.N. due to her fathers security problems during the McCarthy era.
Minutes of the second meeting of the Target Committee, Los Alamos, May 10-11, 1945
