J. Robert Oppenheimer
Oppenheimer is often referred to as the “father of the atomic bomb”. Oppenheimer led the effort to design and construct the world’s first atomic bombs, culminating with the successful Trinity test on July 16, 1945. After the war, Oppenheimer served as an advisor to the Atomic Energy Commission, worked at Caltech, and became director for the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In the 1950s, at the height of the communist “Red Scare”, Oppenheimer’s past perceived communist leanings and his speaking out against the development of the hydrogen bomb led the Atomic Energy Commission to revoke his security clearance, effectively ending his political influence.
The letter J in Oppenheimer’s first name is still a mystery. Most sources—including Oppenheimer’s own birth certificate and a 1944 letter from the War Department granting Oppenheimer his security clearance—state that Oppenheimer’s first name was Julius. Numerous other people, though—including Oppenheimer himself— insisted the J didn’t stand for anything at all. In a 1946 letter to the U.S. Patent Office, Oppenheimer wrote: “This is to certify that I have no first name other than the letter J, and that my full and correct name is J Robert Oppenheimer.”
Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City on April 22, 1904, to wealthy textile importer Julius Oppenheimer and his wife painter Ella Friedman Oppenheimer. The Oppenheimer family lived at 155 Riverside Dr., Manhattan, in an apartment with fine European furniture, servants, and original paintings by Picasso, Rembrandt, and van Gogh. Robert was a solitary and precocious child who enjoyed mineralogy and writing poetry. The Oppenheimers were a non-observant Jewish family and sent young Oppenheimer to the Ethical Culture School founded on principles of rationalism and progressive secular humanism. As an adult, Oppenheimer said “my life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.”
Oppenheimer was a complex, complicated man. As a 12-year-old boy he presented his research paper to the New York Mineralogical Club and subsequently was made an honorary member. As a young academic learning Dutch in six weeks to deliver a technical lecture in the Netherlands. (It was there he was first dubbed “Oppie,” or “Opje” in Dutch.) As a professor at the California Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, Oppenheimer seemed to both inspire and influence his students, earning a loyal following—quite literally, as many joined him in Los Alamos. “Like most of his students, I would more or less follow him to the ends of the earth,” recalled Manhattan Project scientist Robert Christy in a 1983 interview.
Long before joining the Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer had a personal connection to northern New Mexico. Prone to illness in his youth, an 18-year-old Oppenheimer spent a restorative and formative summer at Los Piños ranch near Santa Fe. He returned often to the area in adulthood, even as a busy academic teaching physics at the University of California, Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology. The fall of 1942 found Oppenheimer back in New Mexico touring a potential site—Jemez Springs—for Project Y, the wartime codename for what would eventually become Los Alamos National Laboratory. Both Oppenheimer and Groves found Jemez Springs unsuitable, and Oppenheimer proposed a nearby alternative: Los Alamos, which he had once visited during a horse-packing trip. There, a few homesteads and a boys’ boarding school sat on an isolated, nearly inaccessible plateau—the perfect location for a secret lab.
In the fall of 1922, Oppenheimer entered Harvard University and after briefly studying chemistry, switched to physics. Introverted and at times socially awkward, Oppenheimer continued to write poetry while taking a heavy courseload. Recalling this time Oppenheimer later said, “My feeling about myself was always one of extreme discontent.” Oppenheimer finished his degree in just three years.
Oppenheimer was accepted to study at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England in 1925. While he proved poor at conducting experiments in the laboratory and came close to being expelled for misbehavior, he learned of the rising field of quantum mechanics and later transferred to the University of Gottingen, Germany in 1926. Both physics, and Oppenheimer’s personality, were in a state of transition. Oppenheimer saw three psychoanalysts in four months but ultimately credited reading Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time and a bicycle tour of Corsica with lifting his depression. Thriving at Gottingen, Oppenheimer collaborated with physicist Max Born and worked toward mastery of the new quantum mechanics. In 1927, Born and Oppenheimer published On the Quantum Theory of Molecules that was a breakthrough in using quantum mechanics to understand the behavior of molecules. Oppenheimer was awarded a doctorate in physics in May of 1927.
Following graduation, Oppenheimer accepted a job teaching physics at Caltech in Pasadena, California. In 1929, Oppenheimer started teaching at the University of California - Berkeley where he began to gather a dedicated following of student admirers that coalesced around his genius. Berkeley gained a reputation as the premier place to study physics in the United States because of Oppenheimer’s work and the work of experimental physicist Ernest Orlando Lawrence.
During his time at the University of California, Berkeley, Oppenheimer had associated with many communist sympathizers — his brother, a former fiancée, and close friends, to name a few. On a Manhattan Project security questionnaire, Oppenheimer had once joked that while he’d never been a communist, he’d “probably belonged to every communist-front organization on the West Coast.”
In 1936, Oppenheimer entered a turbulent relationship with Jean Tatlock, a medical school student and Communist Party member who introduced Oppenheimer to left-wing politics. Before meeting Jean, Oppenheimer was disinterested in politics and lived without a radio or printed newspapers and magazines. As Oppenheimer engaged with politics further, he developed a “smoldering fury” for the oppression his Jewish relatives were suffering in Nazi Germany. Despite Stalinist purges in Russia, many people in the 1930s thought Communism was the only viable alternative to the rise of Fascism in Europe. Tatlock introduced Oppenheimer to West coast Left-wing figures like Thomas Addis, who would be investigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Unlike his brother Frank, Robert never joined the Communist Party.
Tatlock ended her relationship with Oppenheimer in early 1939 and he met his future wife, Katherine “Kitty” Puening, later that same year. On November 1, 1940, Kitty divorced her third husband and married Robert Oppenheimer on the same day. The Oppenheimer’s first child, Peter, was born in May of 1941. Like Tatlock, Kitty was a Communist Party member but Oppenheimer was soon to curtail his Communist connections because of the start of World War II and the new possibility of atomic weapons.
In the spring of 1941, the Roosevelt Administration received a British report on atomic bombs, prompting them to create the S-1 Committee of military and academic personnel to focus on an atomic bomb building project. By the fall of 1942, S-1 Committee members Vanevar Bush and James Conant wanted Oppenheimer to direct an atomic bomb laboratory. Bush and Conant pressured the War Department to approve security clearances for Oppenheimer and other scientists with left wing political views.
In the winter of 1942-43, Oppenheimer’s close friend, Professor Hakkon Chevalier told Oppenheimer that a physicist at Shell, George Eltenton, wanted Oppenheimer to pass atomic bomb information to the Soviet consulate in San Francisco. Chevalier later maintained that he was just informing Oppenheimer and not soliciting. While Oppenheimer never considered treason, this “Chevalier Incident” caused Oppenheimer problems as he sought security clearances for Manhattan Project work and in his post-war life.
In 1943, at 38 years old and with no previous administrative experience, theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer accepted responsibility for a national security mission of unprecedented scale. Oppenheimer had never managed anything larger than a graduate seminar but molded himself into an efficient and persuasive administrator. His charge, handed down by Manhattan Project director General Leslie Groves, was to lead a team of the world’s foremost scientific minds in developing the first nuclear weapon. Under Oppenheimer’s leadership, more than 6,000 scientists, engineers, and other personnel lived and worked at a top-secret lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project’s clandestine lab in Los Alamos from 1943 to 1945. An accomplished theoretical physicist, intellectual jack-of-all-trades, and a deep thinker well-read in Eastern philosophy, Oppenheimer was a guiding force in asking and answering the research questions that led to groundbreaking innovations at the Lab. Though he had no shortage of expert advisors and team leaders, including more than a dozen current or future Nobel laureates, Oppenheimer bore the responsibility of making critical scientific and personnel decisions to keep the Lab on track and on schedule. Many who worked with Oppenheimer said that there was no other man for the job. His profound understanding of both nuclear physics and human nature made Oppenheimer a natural leader of his technical staff and an able keeper of the specialized research underway across the Lab’s four divisions.
In June of 1943, Oppenheimer was observed by military intelligence visiting Jean Tatlock in San Francisco. Tatlock, a Communist Party member, had a relationship with Oppenheimer and was suspected of sharing atomic secrets and was under FBI surveillance. Groves’ security aide Lieutenant Colonel Lansdale wanted to press Oppenheimer to inform on Communists while intelligence officer Colonel Boris Pash wanted Oppenheimer fired. Both Pash and Landsdale interviewed Oppenheimer while secretly recording him. Groves believed Oppenheimer’s ambition guaranteed his loyalty.
At five feet, ten inches (1.5 m) tall, he only weighed 115 pounds (52 kg) during his time directing Project Y. Oppenheimer chain smoked four to five packs of cigarettes a day along with a pipe and had a persistent cough.
In just 27 months, Oppenheimer and his team secretly created the first nuclear weapons, a scientific achievement that brought the world into the Atomic Age and helped end history’s bloodiest conflict. By the time he was the director at Los Alamos, stories portray Oppenheimer as charming and charismatic, holding court at parties while sipping his signature martini and chain-smoking cigarettes. Recollections from his directorship also point to Oppenheimer’s incredible drive and ambition. Perhaps this is what Manhattan Project leader General Leslie Groves saw in Oppenheimer beyond his lack of managerial experience and questionable past associations. According to the transcript of the call Groves made to Oppenheimer after the release of the Little Boy bomb, Groves said, “I think one of the wisest things I ever did was when I selected the director of Los Alamos.”
After the Little Boy atomic bomb designed at Los Alamos was dropped on Hiroshima, Oppenheimer talked to assembled workers and said he was “proud” and his only regret was not getting the bomb fast enough to use against the Germans. In October 1945, Oppenheimer met with President Truman to advocate for international control of atomic weapons but aggravated Truman. Truman later described Oppenheimer as a “cry-baby scientist.”
After World War II, Oppenheimer became chairman of the AEC’s General Advisory Committee, a post that solidified him as America’s leading mind on atomic weapons. Oppenheimer was initially wary of the moral implications and scientific feasibility of pursuing the development of a new and more powerful type of nuclear weapon called a hydrogen bomb, and he voted in 1949 with the GAC that an accelerated program of thermonuclear weapon (H-bomb) research and production wasn’t advisable. Oppenheimer didn’t oppose H-bomb research but “hoped that [it] would ‘never be produced,’” according to the Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus.
At the time Oppenheimer led the committee, one major priority was how the nation should proceed after, in 1949, the Soviet Union successfully detonated its own atomic bomb. Almost immediately, the AEC called for a series of planning sessions. During these sessions, Oppenheimer sometimes displayed little patience toward people who spoke on topics they didn’t comprehend, and at one AEC session before Congress, Oppenheimer clashed with fellow AEC commissioner Lewis Strauss, a former naval officer. Popular historical narrative argues that Strauss had a personal vendetta and intended to destroy Oppenheimer’s credibility and career.
Strauss thought the United States should not export radioactive isotopes to foreign countries because the isotopes held special military value. Radioactive isotopes are indeed necessary for nuclear weapons, but they also have myriad peaceful uses, which is why Oppenheimer believed that the United States should share this technology with other countries. During the session, Oppenheimer offered a condescending remark to Stauss’ recommendation: “My own rating of the importance of isotopes,” Oppenheimer said, “is that they are far less important than electronic devices, but far more important than, let us say, vitamins.” Strauss was humiliated, publicly. “Somewhere along the way, [Oppenheimer] had learned to go for the jugular,” said AEC general counsel Joseph Volpe in The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer. It was the start of a rivalry that would end in Oppenheimer losing his security clearance.
The greatest contention between Oppenheimer and Strauss was whether to build a hydrogen bomb, a potentially smaller but more powerful weapon than the first-generation atomic bombs developed during the Manhattan Project. Strauss, alongside physicists Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, both of whom Oppenheimer had worked with at Los Alamos, believed the United States needed the hydrogen bomb to gain technological advantage over the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer was against such a device, which many assumed to mean he was anti-American.
A hydrogen bomb would require large quantities of the rare hydrogen isotope tritium. This element is made by irradiating lithium in nuclear reactors that, in 1949, would have otherwise been devoted to breeding plutonium for atomic bombs. Oppenheimer felt the nation faced a binary choice: build more of something the country knew it was capable of building, his atomic bomb, or risk precious space in nuclear reactors to breed tritium for a still-theoretical hydrogen bomb.
After Truman ordered the H-bomb’s development in January 1950 and physicists Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam, both of whom worked with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, proved a year later that the H-bomb was possible, Oppenheimer’s stance remained unchanged. According to then Lab Director Norris E. Bradbury’s testimony, Oppenheimer didn’t hinder the program, nor did he advocate or recruit for it. However, Truman and Strauss continued to believe that Oppenheimer was “persuading . . . outstanding scientists not to work on the hydrogen-bomb” and was therefore actively obstructing the program, according to American Prometheus. Unfortunately, the GAC report and sour professional relationships became the impetus for the ordeal that followed.
By 1953, in the middle of the McCarthy “Red Scare” era, Strauss was appointed chairman of the AEC. Strauss seemed to have never let go of Oppenheimer’s comments, or his stance against the hydrogen bomb. As AEC chairman, Strauss called for an investigation into Oppenheimer, claiming there was evidence the physicist was a Soviet spy.
In December 1953, Strauss sent a letter to Oppenheimer saying his security clearance was suspended pending an investigation into his loyalty to the nation. Give up his clearance and resign from the AEC, the letter demanded, or appear before an investigatory board. Oppenheimer chose the latter.The board had access to a 3,000-page FBI file on Oppenheimer and bugs provided by Strauss, and the prosecution’s witnesses were kept secret—all hampering defense efforts.
In the late spring of 1954, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) held a closed-door hearing to decide the fate of J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance. Oppenheimer, a physicist, had led the scientific effort to build the world’s first nuclear weapons that helped end World War II, and now, nine years later, his loyalty to the country was being questioned. The four-week hearing became a national spectacle. Politicians, high-ranking military officials, and some of the world’s most renowned physicists testified both for and against the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance. The hearing took place in Washington, D.C., near the White House. Oppenheimer’s defense lawyer was never granted the clearance to review classified documents, however, so the team was cut off from much of the prosecution’s evidence. Strauss acted as chief appellate judge. Secretly, Strauss had also contacted the FBI, which illegally wiretapped Oppenheimer’s phone communications with his attorney.
At the hearing, which began on April 12, 1954, two of the most damning testimonies came from long-time colleagues. One was General Leslie Groves, who’d handpicked Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project. Groves defended the physicist at the hearing, but the general also said that he would probably not be allowed to clear Oppenheimer using the updated security clearance regulations introduced that year.
Teller, who would go on to develop the hydrogen bomb, questioned Oppenheimer’s character, his methods, and his hesitancy to develop a hydrogen bomb. Teller began with a glowing testimony of Oppenheimer’s work and loyalty to the United States. However, none of that mattered when he said, “If it is a question of wisdom and judgment, as demonstrated by actions since 1945 [when World War II ended following the release of the atomic bombs], then I would say one would be wiser not to grant clearance.” By “actions,” Teller referred to Oppenheimer’s “bad advice” and lack of support for Teller’s H-bomb, according to The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Of the 40 witnesses called to testify, 28 were fiercely loyal to Oppenheimer and highly respected, including Nobel Prize winners Isidor Rabi and Enrico Fermi, both of whom worked with him at the wartime Los Alamos lab. Rabi refused to be baited into criticizing Oppenheimer’s character or misgivings about the H-bomb. “We have an A-bomb” because of Oppenheimer’s work, physicist Isidor Rabi told commissioners as he vouched for his friend and colleague. “What more do you want, mermaids?”
At the end of the four-week hearing, the AEC board voted two-to-one to revoke Oppenheimer’s clearance. The board found no evidence to support Strauss’s claim that Oppenheimer was a spy, but noted that he had many past ties to communists, as Oppenheimer had already revealed. In its decision, the board also emphasized Oppenheimer’s resistance to the hydrogen bomb, writing that his position “had an adverse effect on recruitment of scientists and the progress of the scientific effort.”
The AEC decision to revoke Oppenheimer’s security clearance was meant to “wall off” Oppenheimer from classified information. But, as this cartoon depicts, some members of the public wondered if the government was hurting itself by ending its relationship with the brilliant scientist. In the end, the AEC ruled to revoke Oppenheimer’s clearance, which denied him all access to the nation’s atomic secrets—science that he played a major part in developing.
Despite his efforts, Strauss’s reputation was tarnished. The Senate rejected his nomination for Secretary of Commerce in 1959. The rejection was the end to Strauss’s 42-year public career. Largely retired, he published his memoir and lived on a cattle-breeding farm until his death in 1974.
“My train wreck,” is how Oppenheimer later referred to the hearing, and his close friends say he was never the same. In the years after his security clearance was revoked, Oppenheimer retired from public service, though he still contributed heavily to the scientific community. He helped found the World Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960, and he continued to lecture and write about physics.
Nearly a decade after his security clearance was revoked, Oppenheimer received the Enrico Fermi Award from the Atomic Energy Commission on December 2, 1963. The award recognized Oppenheimer’s “unique role in the development of physics in the United States, as a teacher, as an originator of several fundamental concepts and as the administrator under whose leadership the atomic bomb was successfully developed at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory during World War II” and came with $50,000. President Lyndon Johnson presented the award to Oppenheimer in the wake of Kennedy’s death just 10 days prior.
Oppenheimer smoked for most of his life and died in 1967 from throat cancer at the age of 62. One of Oppenheimer’s physics students at the University of California—Berkeley recalled that “the most distinctive feature of his lectures [was] his chain smoking. He spoke quite rapidly, and puffed equally rapidly. When one cigarette burned down to a fragment he no longer could hold, he extinguished it and lit another almost in a single motion.”
Then in April 2022, members of the Lab tried once more to nullify the AEC’s decision. Laboratory Director Thom Mason and eight former Los Alamos directors signed a letter and delivered the note to Secretary of Energy Granholm, urging DOE to nullify the AEC’s decision as a “historically appropriate remedy” to what they saw as an egregious mistake.
In December 2022, the Department of Energy (DOE, the successor to the AEC) nullified the AEC’s earlier ruling, calling the entire hearing flawed. “As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to,” Energy Secretary Jennifer M. Granholm said in a statement, “while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed.”
Provided the context now available, it is widely believed that the hearings against Oppenheimer arose from personal grievances and insider politics. Clearing his name, however, was a much more public struggle, one that generations of Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists, and even directors, took on.
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