With his life’s story hitting the big screen on Friday, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s life has come under renewed attention.
The renowned theoretical physicist, set to be played by Cillian Murphy in Christopher Nolan’s new film, was key to the United States’s Manhattan Project, the quest for the atomic bomb. Largely due to his efforts as director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II, the U.S. beat its competitors in obtaining the first nuclear weapon on July 16, 1945.
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Here are some key details about the real life of the “American Prometheus,” the man who, according to his biography, had “led the effort to wrest from nature the awesome power of the sun for his country in time of war.”
Who was Oppenheimer?
Oppenheimer was born in New York City in 1904 to Jewish immigrant parents. He entered Harvard at the age of 18, then became a professor of theoretical physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology. He is credited as one of the founding fathers of theoretical physics.
Oppenheimer would marry Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer, who he met while teaching at Berkeley, in 1940. They would have two children together, Peter and Katherine.
Work on the Manhattan Project
By the time of his recruitment by Gen. Leslie Groves into the Manhattan Project, the code name for the U.S. effort to obtain the first atomic bomb, in the fall of 1942, Oppenheimer had already been studying a potential atomic bomb for some time.
On July 16, 1945, a team assembled by Oppenheimer gathered in the desert to observe the Trinity test, where the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated.
Two months later, two of the newly constructed bombs were dropped on the Imperial Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bringing an end to World War II, the most destructive war in human history.
Controversy and communist links
Throughout his career, Oppenheimer’s relationship with communism drew immense scrutiny and controversy. Concerns over his connections reached a head in 1953 when his security clearance was revoked over suspicions from the U.S. government. His public trial drew attention and support from scientific figures all around the world.
Conservatives claimed that he was a communist and Soviet spy and had passed atomic secrets to the Soviets, leading them to obtain their own nuclear weapons shortly after the U.S. While Oppenheimer had given money to communist causes, he denied being a communist or Soviet spy.
Defenders of Oppenheimer, such as curator Hayden Peake, point to the fact that he had no role in bringing the two confirmed Soviet spies, Klaus Fuchs and Ted Hall, into the project. They also note that the Soviets should have been able to get the atomic bomb much sooner if Oppenheimer were truly feeding them information.
However, as historians John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr wrote in Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Oppenheimer was confirmed to have deep ties with communist organizations before the start of the Manhattan Project, and his attempts to obfuscate this truth draw skepticism on his broader denials.
“He was not simply a casual Popular Front liberal who ignorantly bumped up against the Party in some of the arenas in which it operated,” they wrote. “Throughout his life Oppenheimer declined to provide a detailed or accurate accounting of his relationship with the CPUSA in the late 1930s and early 1940s.”
Oppenheimer’s personal connections with communists were well known. His wife was an official member of the Communist Party of the U.S., formerly working as a writer for a communist paper. Her first husband was killed while serving as a communist political commissar for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. His other lover Jean Tatlock was a communist as well.
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Death and legacy
His record was officially cleared prior to his death, with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson publicly honoring him. Oppenheimer famously became highly critical of the weapon he designed in later years, taking a pacifistic approach to the nuclear arms race.
Oppenheimer died of throat cancer in 1967; his funeral was attended by over 600 people.
