Kai Bird & Martin J Sherwin. Smithsonian. Volume 36, Issue 5, August 2005.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was born to wealthy parents in New York City in 1904. The Depression at home and the rise of Fascism abroad drew him to progressive politics during his tenure as a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley.
In 1942, he joined a select group of physicists investigating whether the development of an atomic bomb was possible. Impressed by Oppenheimer’s ideas and intelligence, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, the Army officer in charge of the Manhattan Project, appointed him to be the director of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, despite some objections from the project’s security staff.
The new lab opened in April 1943 with just a few hundred scientists. Los Alamos soon became a “secret city” housing some 6,000 men and women. Just 27 months later, Oppenheimer—known as “Oppie”—and his colleagues were ready to test an atomic weapon. Everyone at Los Alamos in a position to have an informed opinion agreed that without Oppenheimer’s extraordinary leadership, atomic bombs would not have been completed in time to be used during the war. That was both a matter of pride and a heavy burden for “the father of the atomic bomb.”
Everyone sensed Oppie’s presence. He drove himself around the Hill in an Army jeep or in his own large black Buick, dropping in unannounced on one of the laboratory’s scattered offices. Usually he’d sit in the back of the room, chain-smoking and listening quietly to the discussion. His mere presence seemed to galvanize people to greater efforts. Victor “Viki” Weisskopf, a physicist recruited to Los Alamos, marveled at how often Oppie seemed to be physically present at each new breakthrough: “He was present in the laboratory or in the seminar rooms when a new effect was measured, when a new idea was conceived. It was not that he contributed so many ideas or suggestions; he did so sometimes, but his main influence came from something else. It was his continuous and intense presence, which produced a sense of direct participation in all of us.” Hans Bethe, head of the lab’s theoretical physics division, recalled the day Oppie listened to an inconclusive debate over what type of container should be used for melting plutonium. After listening to the argument, Oppie summed up the discussion. He didn’t directly propose a solution, but by the time he left the room the right answer was clear to all.
Restlessness was also part of his character—or so thought young physicist Freeman Dyson. But Dyson also saw restlessness as Oppie’s tragic flaw: “Restlessness drove him to his supreme achievement, the fulfillment of the mission of Los Alamos, without pause for rest or reflection.”
By the end of 1944, six months after the Allies had landed on the beaches of Normandy, it was clear that the war in Europe would soon be over, and a number of the scientists at Los Alamos began to voice their growing ethical qualms about the continued development of the “gadget.” Robert Wilson, chief of the lab’s experimental physics division, had long discussions with Oppenheimer about how the bomb might be used. Wilson proposed holding a formal meeting to discuss the matter more fully. “He tried to talk me out of it,” Wilson later recalled, “saying I would get into trouble with the G-2, the security people.”
Despite his respect, even reverence, for Oppenheimer, Wilson thought little of this argument. He put up notices all over the lab announcing a public meeting to discuss “The Impact of the Gadget on Civilization.”
To his surprise, Oppenheimer showed up on the appointed evening and listened to the discussion. Wilson later thought about 20 people attended. “We did have a pretty intense discussion of why it was that we were continuing to make a bomb after the war had been [virtually] won.”
A young physicist working on implosion techniques, Louis Rosen, remembered a packed daytime colloquium at which Oppenheimer was the speaker and, according to Rosen, the topic was “whether the country is doing the right thing in using this weapon on real live human beings.” Oppenheimer apparently argued that as scientists they had no right to a louder voice in determining the gadget’s fate than any other citizen. “He was a very eloquent and persuasive guy,” Rosen said. Chemist Joseph O. Hirschfelder recalled a similar discussion held in Los Alamos’ small wooden chapel in the midst of a thunderstorm on a cold Sunday evening in early 1945. On this occasion, Oppenheimer argued that although they were all destined to live in perpetual fear, the bomb might also end all war. Such a hope was persuasive to many of the assembled scientists.
On another occasion, Oppenheimer argued that the war should not end without the world knowing about this primordial new weapon. If the gadget remained a military secret, then the next war would almost certainly be fought with atomic weapons, and they would be used in a surprise attack. The scientists had to forge ahead, he explained, to the point where it could at least be tested.
ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON, April 12, 1945—just two years after the lab’s opening—word suddenly spread that Franklin Roosevelt had died. Oppenheimer scheduled a memorial service for that Sunday. “We have been living through years of great evil,” he said in his eulogy, “and great terror.” And during this time Roosevelt had been, “in an old and unperverted sense, our leader.” Roosevelt had inspired millions around the globe to have faith that the terrible sacrifices of this war would result in “a world more fit for human habitation.” For this reason, Oppenheimer concluded, “we should dedicate ourselves to the hope, that his good works will not have ended with his death.”
Oppenheimer still nurtured the hope that Roosevelt and his men had learned that the formidable new weapon would require a radical new openness. “Well,” he told his assistant David Hawkins after the eulogy, “Roosevelt was a great architect, perhaps Truman will be a good carpenter.”
The war in the Pacific was coming to its bloodiest climax as Harry Truman moved into the White House. On the evening of March 9, 1945, three hundred thirty-four B-29 aircraft dropped tons of jellied gasoline—napalm—and high explosives on Tokyo. The firestorm killed an estimated 100,000 people and completely burned out 16 square miles of the city. The firebombing raids continued, and by July 1945 all but five of Japan’s major cities had been attacked and hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed. This was total warfare, an attack aimed at the destruction of a nation, not just its military targets.
The firebombings were no secret. Ordinary Americans read about them in their newspapers. Thoughtful people understood that strategic bombing of cities raised profound ethical questions. “I remember [Secretary of War Henry] Stimson saying to me,” Oppenheimer later remarked, “that he thought it appalling that there should be no protest over the air raids which we were conducting against Japan, which in the case of Tokyo led to such extraordinarily heavy loss of life. He didn’t say that the air strikes shouldn’t be carried on, but he did think there was something wrong with a country where no one questioned that….”
On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, and seven days later Germany surrendered. When the physicist Emilio Segrè heard the news, his first reaction was, “We have been too late.” Like almost everyone at Los Alamos, Segrè thought that defeating Hitler was the sole justification for working on the gadget. “Now that the bomb could not be used against the Nazis, doubts arose,” he wrote in his memoirs. “Those doubts, even if they do not appear in official reports, were discussed in many private discussions.”
On May 31, Oppenheimer attended a critical meeting of Stimson’s so-called Interim Committee, an ad hoc group of government officials brought together to advise the secretary of war on the future of atomic policy.
Stimson controlled the agenda—and it did not include a decision on whether the bomb should be used against Japan. That was more or less a foregone conclusion. Decisions on the military use of the bomb would be controlled exclusively by the White House, with no input from the scientists who had been building it. But Stimson had paid careful attention to all the discussions regarding the implications of nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer and the other scientists thus were reassured to hear him say that he and the other members of the Interim Committee did not regard the bomb “as a new weapon merely but as a revolutionary change in the relations of man to the universe.” The atomic bomb might become “a Frankenstein which would eat us up,” Stimson said, or it could secure the global peace. Its import, in either case, “went far beyond the needs of the present war.”
When Stimson asked about the nonmilitary potential of the project, Oppenheimer dominated the discussion. He pointed out that up until then their “immediate concern had been to shorten the war.” But it should be understood, he said, that “fundamental knowledge” about atomic physics was “so widespread throughout the world” that he thought it wise for the United States to offer a “free interchange of information” on the development of peacetime uses of the atom. “If we were to offer to exchange information before the bomb was actually used,” he went on, “our moral position would be greatly strengthened.”
Over lunch, someone raised the question of the use of the bomb on Japan. No notes were taken, but when the formal meeting resumed, the discussion continued to focus on the effect of the impending bombing. Someone commented that one atomic bomb would have no more effect than some of the massive bomber strikes launched against Japanese cities that spring. Oppenheimer seemed to agree, but added that “the visual effect of an atomic bombing would be tremendous. It would be accompanied by a brilliant luminescence which would rise to a height of 10,000 to 20,000 feet. The neutron effect of the explosion would be dangerous to life for a radius of at least two-thirds of a mile.”
“Various types of targets and the effects to be produced” were discussed, and then Secretary Stimson summarized what seemed to be a general agreement: “… that we could not give the Japanese any warning; that we could not concentrate on a civilian area; but that we should seek to make a profound psychological impression on as many of the inhabitants as possible.” Stimson said he agreed with Harvard president James Conant’s suggestion “that the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” Thus, with such delicate euphemisms, did the president of Harvard University select civilians as the target of the world’s first atomic bomb. On June 16, 1945, Oppenheimer signed a short memorandum summarizing the recommendations of the top Manhattan Project scientists “on the immediate use of nuclear weapons.” Addressed to Secretary Stimson, it was a diffident document. The panel members recommended, first, that prior to the use of the bomb, Washington should inform Britain, Russia, France and China of the existence of atomic weapons and “welcome suggestions as to how we can cooperate in making this development contribute to improved international relations.” Second, the panel reported that there was no unanimity among their scientific colleagues on the initial use of these weapons. Some of the men who were building them proposed a demonstration of the gadget as an alternative. “Those who advocate a purely technical demonstration would wish to outlaw the use of atomic weapons, and have feared that if we use the weapons now our position in future negotiations will be prejudiced.” Although Oppenheimer surely sensed that most of his colleagues favored such a demonstration, he now weighed in on the side of those who “emphasize the opportunity of saving American lives by immediate military use….”
By the spring of 1945, the combat zones of the Pacific had become brutal killing fields. On April 6, in response to the American invasion of Okinawa, Japan unleashed its most desperate effort to stave off defeat—kamikaze planes that attacked American ships. On land, the carnage was even more brutal. But when the three-month battle was over, 7,400 Japanese soldiers surrendered, a sign that a sense of inevitable loss had penetrated the rank and file of Japan’s army.
Similarly, Japan’s government was confronting defeat. The Truman administration had decoded intercepted cables indicating that the emperor himself was participating in the “struggle to surrender.” In July, President Truman noted in his handwritten diary that he had read a message to Stalin from the “Jap Emperor asking for peace.” That cable, and others like it, revealed that the major sticking point was a clarification of “unconditional surrender”: Tokyo wanted a promise from Washington that the emperor would not be harmed or humiliated.
Truman was also aware that Stalin was committed to enter the war against Japan no later than August 15, and that this event was likely to compel Tokyo to surrender. The first phase of the U.S. ground invasion was not scheduled to begin until November 1. But by the early summer of 1945, Truman had been persuaded that it would be better to end the war before Soviet troops attacked Japan, and if atomic bombs were available, they should be used for that purpose. None of these facts were known to Robert Oppenheimer or to any of the physicists working under his direction to produce atomic bombs before the war ended.
THE SUMMER OF 1945 was unusually hot and dry on the mesa. Oppenheimer pushed the men in the Tech Area to work longer hours; everyone seemed on edge. Oppenheimer was convinced that a full-scale test of the bomb was absolutely necessary because of the “incompleteness of our knowledge.” Without a test, he told Gen. Leslie Groves, “the planning of the use of the gadget over enemy territory will have to be done substantially blindly.”
More than a year earlier, Oppenheimer had spent three days and nights bouncing around the barren, dry valleys of southern New Mexico in a three-quarter-ton Army truck, searching for a suitably isolated stretch of wilderness where the bomb could be safely tested. Accompanying him were Kenneth Bainbridge, an experimental physicist from Harvard, and several Army officers. For Oppenheimer, it was a rare opportunity to savor the Spartan desert he so loved. Several expeditions later, Bainbridge selected a desert site 60 miles northwest of Alamogordo. The Spanish had called the area the Jornada del Muerto—”Journey of the Dead Man.”
Here the Army staked out an area 18 by 24 miles in size, evicted a few ranchers by eminent domain and began building a field laboratory and hardened bunkers from which to observe the first explosion of an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer dubbed the test site “Trinity.”
General Groves’ timetable for testing the bomb was driven by President Truman’s scheduled meeting with Stalin and Churchill in Potsdam in mid-July. Groves wanted a tested and usable bomb in Truman’s hands before that conference ended. By the end of June, after further pressure from Groves, Oppenheimer told his people that they were now aiming for Monday, July 16.
On the evening of July 11, 1945, Robert Oppenheimer said goodbye to Kitty, his wife. He told her that if the test was successful, he would get a message to her saying, “You can change the sheets.” For good luck, she gave him a four-leaf clover from their garden.
As if people were not already anxious enough, a last minute test-firing of the implosion explosives indicated that the bomb was likely to be a dud. Everyone began quizzing George Kistiakowsky; their explosives expert. “Oppenheimer became so emotional,” Kistiakowsky later recalled, “that I offered him a month’s salary against ten dollars that our implosion charge would work.”
Two nights before the test, Oppenheimer slept only four hours; an officer trying to sleep on a bunk in the next room heard him coughing miserably half the night. Oppenheimer awoke that Sunday, July 15, exhausted and still depressed by the news of the previous day. But as he ate breakfast in the Base Camp mess hall, he received a phone call from Hans Bethe informing him that the implosion test had failed only because of flawed detectors. There was no reason, Bethe went on, why Kistiakowsky’s design on the actual device shouldn’t work. Relieved, Oppenheimer now turned his attention to the weather. That morning the skies over Trinity were clear, but his meteorologist, Jack Hubbard, told him that the winds around the site were picking up. Speaking on the phone to Groves shortly before the general flew in from California for the test, Oppie warned, “The weather is whimsical.”
That night, Oppenheimer hung out in the Base Camp mess hall, alternately gulping down black coffee and rolling one cigarette after another, and smoking them nervously down to the butt. For a time, he pulled out a copy of Baudelaire and sat quietly reading poetry By then, the storm was pelting the tin roof. As lightning flashes pierced the darkness outside, physicist Enrico Fermi, fearing that the storm’s winds might drench them with radioactive rain, said he favored a postponement. “There could be a catastrophe,” he warned Oppenheimer.
But meteorologist Hubbard assured Oppie that the storm would pass before sunrise. Hubbard recommended postponing the hour of detonation, moving it from 4:00 to 5:00 a.m. At one point, an agitated Groves pulled Oppenheimer aside and listed all the reasons why the test should proceed. Both men knew that everyone was so exhausted that any postponement would have meant delaying the test for at least two or three days. Worried that some of the more cautious scientists might convince Oppie to postpone the test, Groves took him to the control center at South Shelter, less than six miles from the Trinity site.
At 2:30 a.m., the whole test site was being raked by 30-mile-an-hour winds and severe thundershowers. Still, Jack Hubbard and his small team of forecasters predicted that the storm would clear by dawn. Outside the bunker, Oppenheimer and Groves paced the ground, glancing to the skies every few minutes to see if they could discern a change in the weather. Finally, they announced their decision: they would schedule the test for 5:30 a.m. and hope for the best. An hour later, the skies began to clear and the wind abated. At 5:10 a.m., a voice boomed across a loudspeaker outside the control center, “It is now zero minus twenty minutes.”
Young physicist Richard Feynman was standing 20 miles from the Trinity site when he was handed dark glasses. He decided he wouldn’t see anything through them, so instead he climbed into the cab of a truck facing Alamogordo. The truck windshield would protect his eyes from harmful ultraviolet rays, and he’d be able to see the flash. Even so, he reflexively ducked when the horizon lit up. When he looked up again, he saw a white light changing into yellow and then orange: “A big ball of orange, the center that was so bright, becomes a ball of orange that starts to rise and billow a little bit and get a little black around the edges, and then you see it’s a big ball of smoke with flashes on the inside of the fire going out. “A full minute and a half after the explosion, Feynman finally heard an enormous bang, followed by the rumble of man-made thunder. Physicist Bob Serber said, “I could feel the heat on my face a full 20 miles away.”
James Conant had expected a relatively quick flash of light. But the white light so filled the sky that for a moment he thought “something had gone wrong” and the “whole world has gone up in flames.”
Joe Hirschfelder, the chemist assigned to measure the radioactive fallout from the explosion, described the moment: “After about five seconds the darkness returned but with the sky and the air filled with a purple glow, just as though we were surrounded by an aurora borealis….We stood there in awe as the blast wave picked up chunks of dirt from the desert soil and soon passed us by.”
Frank Oppenheimer, also a Los Alamos physicist, was next to his brother Robert when the gadget exploded. Though he was lying on the ground, “the light of the first flash penetrated and came up from the ground through one’s [eye]lids. When one first looked up, one saw the fireball, and then almost immediately afterwards, this unearthly hovering cloud. It was very bright and very purple.” Frank thought, “Maybe it’s going to drift over the area and engulf us.” He hadn’t expected the heat from the flash to be nearly that intense. In a few moments, the thunder of the blast was bouncing back and forth on the distant mountains. “But I think the most terrifying thing,” Frank recalled, “was this really brilliant purple cloud, black with radioactive dust, that hung there, and you had no feeling of whether it would go up or would drift towards you.”
Oppenheimer was lying facedown, just outside the control bunker, 10,000 yards south of ground zero. As the countdown reached the two-minute mark, he muttered, “Lord, these affairs are hard on the heart.” Groves’ executive officer General Farrell watched him closely as the final countdown commenced: “Dr. Oppenheimer…grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed….For the last few seconds he stared directly ahead and when the announcer shouted ‘Now!’ and there came this tremendous burst of light followed abruptly thereafter by the deep growling of the explosion, his face relaxed into an expression of tremendous relief.”
Afterward, physicist Isidor Rabi caught sight of Oppie from a distance. Something about his gait, the easy bearing of a man in command of his destiny, made Rabi’s skin tingle: “I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car…his walk was like High Noon…this kind of strut. He had done it.”
Later that morning, when William L. Laurence, the New York Times reporter selected by Groves to chronicle the top-secret event, approached him for comment, Oppenheimer described his emotions in pedestrian terms. The effect of the blast, he told Laurence, was “terrifying” and “not entirely undepressing.” After pausing a moment, he added, “Lots of boys not grown up yet will owe their life to it.”
Whatever Oppenheimer thought, it is certain that the men around him felt unvarnished euphoria. Laurence described their mood in his dispatch: “The Big Boom came about 100 seconds after the Great Flash—the first cry of a new-born world. It brought the silent, motionless silhouettes to life, gave them a voice. A loud cry filled the air. The little groups that hitherto had stood rooted to the earth like desert plants broke into a dance.” The dancing lasted but a few seconds and then the men began shaking hands, Laurence reported, “slapping each other on the back, laughing like happy children.” Kistiakowsky, who had been thrown to the ground by the blast, threw his arms around Oppie and gleefully demanded his ten dollars. Oppie pulled out his empty wallet, and told Kisty he’d have to wait. (Later, back in Los Alamos, Oppie made a ceremony of presenting Kistiakowsky with an autographed ten-dollar bill.)
As Oppenheimer left the control center, he turned to shake hands with Ken Bainbridge, who looked him in the eye and muttered, “Now we’re all sons-of-bitches.” Back at Base Camp, Oppie shared a brandy with his brother and General Farrell. Then, according to one historian, he phoned Los Alamos and asked his secretary to pass a message to Kitty: “Tell her she can change the sheets.”
On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, a B-29, dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing more than 70,000 people. Three days later, another atomic bomb devastated Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered on August 15.
In 1947, Oppenheimer became director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. As chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission, he warned against entering an arms race with the Soviet Union and against developing the even more powerful hydrogen bomb.
The enemies these efforts made for him concocted charges of disloyalty, and following a hearing before the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, Oppenheimer’s security clearance was rescinded. He became the red scare’s most prominent victim. Ironically, this enhanced his fame: where once he had been known as the “father of the atomic bomb,” he now became even more Promethean—a martyred scientist, like Galileo. He died in 1967 at age 62.