Robert J Oppenheimer – the man who birthed the atomic age

( Note: My plan was to write a review of Christopher Nolan’s movie “Oppenheimer”. When I started writing it, I realized that without a proper profile of Oppenheimer that includes specific facets of his upbringing, education, and personality, it is difficult to appreciate the man, his work, and the controversies he faced post the Manhattan Project. There are many biographies and books about Oppenheimer and his legacy. The ones I like the best are “The American Prometheus” – the brilliant, detailed, and bulky biography by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin on which Nolan’s movie is based, Richard Rhodes’s monumental 1986 work ” The Making of the Atomic Bomb” ( which includes insightful biographical details about Oppenheimer), and Jeremy Bernstein’s short but cryptic biography ” Oppenheimer”. But for those who know of Oppenheimer just casually or through his Bhagavad Gita quotes or as the leader of the Manhattan Project and a great physicist, this essay could give you a reasonably detailed background of the man as he was in his different dimensions. I certainly believe that to appreciate Nolan’s insightful portrayal of Oppenheimer, it would help to know the man better. This essay is about 4000 words long. I have attempted to condense the rich, multifaceted, enigmatic, and controversial life of Robert J Oppenheimer as best as I could. There is much of his life I had to leave out so the essay doesn’t become unbearably long, but what I have captured, I hope, would help you appreciate the movie better. Part 2 will be about “Oppenheimer”, the movie. Hope you enjoy this profile. Thanks.)

Part 1

Robert J Oppenheimer, born on April 22nd, 1904, was a lucky child in many ways. His Jewish parents, Julius and Ella, were rich, classy, and cultivated. He was born with a silver spoon. Julius had a thriving textile import business, and Ella was the quintessential socialite of New York. Robert spent his formative years in their spacious apartment at Riverside Drive overlooking the majestic Hudson River, whose walls were adorned with the paintings of van Gogh, Cézanne, and Gauguin. The private school he was sent to – The Ethical culture school, founded by Rabbi Felix Adler in 1878- was one of the most expensive of its times ( even today, the school charges $63,020 per annum for tuition and books. Back then Robert’s father would have paid $90 per annum, which was a high sum considering the average annual American income at that time was $700). The family wore fashionable clothes, took exotic vacations, and mixed only with the elite in society. The overtly protective parents took sufficient care to ensure that Robert and his younger brother Frank never knew harm in any manner. (In fact, they went out of their way to protect Robert, in particular for as long as it took. Years later, As a young professor, Robert once crashed his car while racing a train, leaving his girlfriend who was with him unconscious. His father gave the young woman a Cézanne drawing to keep her quiet.) Robert was a weak child, often prone to bouts of illness. That kept him off the playgrounds and at home reading, writing, and collecting minerals – a passion he inherited from his Grandfather. There was no doubt in anyone who came in contact with this young kid that he was precociously intelligent. There was something in those blue eyes, the palest hue of blue in color – mesmerizing, and crystalline in their transparency and intensity; it danced with mercurial curiosity and sparkled with every passing emotion on his face like the glimmer of stars in the distant skies. Throughout his life, people would notice those spectacular eyes along with his thin frame, elongated neck, and the swaggering gait that became his hallmark in later years. By the time Robert was in the third grade, he was performing experiments with a professional telescope gifted to him, in his fourth grade he began keeping scientific journals, and by the fifth, he was studying physics and chemistry, though it was chemistry that held his attention for a long time, until, he realized years later that chemistry and physics were inseparable at the quantum level. He did not have too many friends growing up, and the ones he had during his college years recognized his intellectual superiority, but they also noticed something else about Robert – a childish shyness and emotional ambivalence. Einstein also had this in him. Perhaps it is the price one pays for living too much in the mind.

By the time Robert graduated from Ethical future school, he was eighteen, six foot tall, and possessed his characteristic narrow frame. He never weighed more than 125 pounds in his entire life, and when he fell sick ( which he often did) he dropped 10 pounds in just a few days. His plans to join Harvard immediately after graduation couldn’t materialize because he fell ill on a family trip to Europe. He missed the year and convalesced at home. Robert’s father realized that something must be done to pull his boy out of his shell and make him strong. He requested Robert’s English teacher Herbert Smith, whom Robert was fond of, to take the young man out into the wild and bring him strong and healthy. Smith took his charge to a ranch in Santa Fe, and then to a famous canyon near Frijolos. They had a good time, and on their way back, Smith pointed out another canyon four miles north of Frijoles: Los Alamos. This is the play of destiny if ever there was such a thing. Robert couldn’t have conceived in his wildest imagination at that time that, twenty years later, Los Alamos – a Spanish name derived from the cottonwoods that shaded the land – would become his home and for hundreds of other top-class scientists to secretly work on building an atomic bomb. In 1921, when Robert came across Los Alamos for the first time, it was a quiet place, snuggled in the desert with miles and miles of open space. Twenty-five years later it would go down into the history books as a place when human civilization made an irrevocable turn for the better or worse.

The trip with Herbert Smith hardened Robert, and when he returned to civilization, he took Harvard by storm. His classmate during those years said, ” He ( Robert) intellectually looted the place”. He took four semesters of chemistry, two of French literature, two of mathematics, three of physics, and one of Philosophy. These were only the standard academic credits required to graduate from Harvard. Apart from this, Robert was a voracious reader, an autodidact, and had a flair for languages. In later years, as a distinguished professor, Robert would stun his audience by delivering his lecture on Quantum mechanics in German to a predominantly german speaking student audience – a language he casually picked up during his two-year study of quantum physics under Dr. Born in Gottingen, Germany. It was during his time at Harvard, Robert picked up a deep interest in Hindu Philosophy – especially, the Bhagavad Gita. He learned Sanskrit to understand the book better. It is not clear how Robert viewed the contents of the book, but he relished its beautiful aphorisms and its vivid imagery. One of his crowning intellectual achievements, at least, that is how Robert viewed it in later years, was the course he took on Bertrand Rusell’s and Alfred North Whiteheads’s path-breaking three-volume mathematical treatise ” Principia Mathematica”, taught by Whitehead himself. Only two students were enrolled in the class, and only Robert completed the rigors of the course. Robert’s theoretical understanding of mathematics, chemistry, and physics was outstanding, but the one thing he was not good at was lab work. He was clumsy, and confused, and rarely knew what to do in a lab. He was a hardcore theoretician, in the manner of Einstein who preferred to conceive and work out systems of thought in his capacious and fertile brain and preferred others to verify the results. He loved to stretch the limits of any theory to its logical conclusion, but not more than that. This ability would prove invaluable during the making of the atomic bomb. Robert could conceptualize with crystal clarity every aspect of the complex process that went into the creation of the bomb, and not get bogged down with the details of implementation. While future Nobel laureates recruited under him would work out the details, he stood above, looking at and absorbing the bigger picture and steering the efforts in the right direction – which is why he is still referred to as the father of the atomic bomb, even though his contribution to the process lay in bringing together several strands of insight and coordinating the work of some of the brightest minds in the business, into one focussed endeavor. People listened to Oppenheimer when he spoke science.

It was Niels Bohr, the great Danish quantum theoretician, who showed Robert the path when he was studying at Cambridge after Harvard. Bohr realized quickly that Robert wasn’t cut out for experimentation – his was a theoretical, mathematical mind, and Bohr urged him to pursue theory rather than practice. Robert’s years in Germany – 1926 – 1929- were the most fruitful as a scientist with Professor Born. He published sixteen papers during this period that established him as a formidable scientist to be taken seriously. He loved the scientific environment in Germany and was especially fascinated by the quantum world that was unfolding around him. Rutherford, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, and Einstein – all of them were attempting to understand matter at its innermost level. Einstein’s famous E=mc² was tantalizing in its implications, yet to be tested at a grand scale. Numerous models of Cyclotrons, or particle accelerators to penetrate the atom were being built, discarded, and rebuilt again in attempts to break the atom. The idea that even a small shift in mass could potentially release huge amounts of energy was frightening and at the same time exhilarating to conceive. Could it actually be so? can it be experimentally verified? Theory and mathematics agreed that it is true. Splitting the atom, or more specifically by knocking off the neutron – that hard chargeless particle that probably existed at the core of the swirling electrons – would release unimaginable energy. What could such power, if unleashed achieve? The imaginative brains of quantum scientists extrapolated further. What would happen if a chain reaction is created that keeps knocking off neutrons one after the other like a deck of dominos? If each atom split and released energy as per the Einsteinian equation, what could the magnitude of such unleashed power be? The world was about to find out soon. When Robert returned to the United States after his stint in Germany as a student, Harvard and Caltech offered him immediate tenured professorship positions. But he preferred to work at the University of California at Berkeley. At that time Berkley did not have a theoretical physics department, and Robert was excited about setting it up. It was the first of its kind in the United States, and dedicated to quantum physics. Robert was a fascinating teacher. His roving intellect could connect the dots so well and communicate to his students the key issues in quantum physics to be solved. He would keep pushing the boundaries till the understanding reached the logical edge of mathematical reasoning.

Robert was thirty-eight years in 1942, and by then, renowned around the world for his brilliance. His close friend and colleague Haakon Chevalier at that time, wrote in his autobiography ” Oppy looked like a young Einstein and at the same time like an overgrown choir boy”. He wasn’t particularly liked though because of his caustic tongue, condescending attitude, and sarcasm – traits acquired from a high-class upbringing, perhaps; but what was more bothering for everyone who knew him well was the utter disregard he had for his health. His incessant smoking, the raking cough that could sometime go on for minutes, the yellowing teeth spoilt by tobacco, and his habit of filling his appetite with Martinis and really spiced food didn’t do him any good. He dressed tastefully to cover up his thinness. Despite this, ladies loved him. He could be charming when needed and give his total attention to whomever he was speaking to. He was a popular teacher and life was setting down to a good rhythm – intellectually and professionally. In 1931, he lost his mother; in 1936, his father. This brought about a profound change in him. He realized there was a larger world he should be participating in, and not just in the abstract self-centered intellectual cocoon he had built around himself. Around 1936, he began searching for causes he could lend his support to. Economic depression and poverty among his students moved him towards communist causes. Not that he subscribed to communism, that was so unlike Robert to lock himself into anything; but he definitely admired the efforts of the communist movement and lent financial and moral aid to them. It was at this time that Jean Tatlock, the lithe, smart lady with definite communist affiliations came into his life. Both of them had a turbulent relationship, intensely physical and equally intellectual. For a time it seemed that Robert would marry Jean, but her own personal issues made such a decision impossible. Robert continued his secret liaisons with Jean even after he was married, and the relationship ended only when Jean killed herself, or allegedly killed herself. She was found dead in her bathtub and there has been speculation that she may have been murdered. Robert had met Kitty, his wife during one of many social events both of them were invited to. Kitty was a petite woman, a divorcee with brown eyes and an expressive face, who had also been a member of the Communist party once, but quickly got disillusioned with the cause and left the movement for good. Kitty, though eccentric in her own way, was a stabilizing influence in Robert’s life. Both of them stuck together and weathered the triumphs and tribulations of the Los Alamos period and the tumultuous life thereafter. For all practical purposes, it was a successful marriage.

The United States had already committed itself to building the atomic bomb before General Leslie T Groves came over to Berkely to meet Oppenheimer. And Groves knew of Robert’s participation in communist-sponsored causes. But Groves was a pragmatist. He realized Robert’s broad and deep understanding of physics and his ability to talk about it at any level made him the obvious choice to lead the atomic bomb project, which is nothing but a scientific experiment at a large scale using Federal money. The military committee at Washington wasn’t keen at first on Groves’s choice, but when he asked them to propose an alternative name to Robert Oppenheimer, they couldn’t think of one. By the time Groves approached him for the job, Oppenheimer was thoroughly convinced that the US should build an atomic bomb before Germany did and that the safety of the nation should surpass any apprehensions anyone had about the use of the bomb. This was the message Groves and Robert shared when they went around the country on a talent recruitment spree. Top scientists, future noble laureates, and men and women who were used to being treated as prima donnas listened to Robert as he made his case with the intellectual persuasiveness that Groves had expected of him. Nearly everyone agreed to join the project in Los Alamos, except very few who refused due to moral reasons and other pressing research commitments. Groves made it clear that security at the facility was his concern, however, Robert could run the teams as he considered best. The choice of Los Alamos itself was indicated by Robert based on his trip with Herbert Smith twenty years ago. It had good transportation, adequate water supply, a strong local labor force, and a moderate climate throughout the year for the back-breaking work they had to do. Once the facility was set up, and families began to arrive at Los Alamos, it was time to set the agenda for the project, At the beginning of April 1943, Robert assembled his top scientists in a room and requested Robert Serber, a thin, and shy man, who spoke with a slight lisp to deliver lectures on the current state of the nuclear fission experiments, the process, and its outcomes. Out of these lectures, Los Alamos primer, the first document to detail the making of the atomic bomb, was printed. It was mandatory reading for all the new recruits to the Manhattan Project.

It was a moment of personal and professional triumph for Oppenheimer when on July 16, 1945, the Trinity (Oppenheimer suggested this name) device, or the Gadget, as they code-worded it was detonated. The energy it released was equal to roughly 20 kilotons of TNT, enough to raise down many square miles of life and matter around. More than anything else, it was the transfiguring light and the billowing cloud of heat and smoke that rose above the ground like a mushroom stirring up hot blasts of air that ripped through the empty fields and buildings, that sent a chill up the spine of all those who witnessed it. Even a blind woman five miles away driving in a car with her sister at the wheels, turned around to check ” if there was lightning just then”. The test site became a wasteland for many years after the blast. Robert was deeply affected by what he saw. Though the blast vindicated his theoretical calculations, Robert realized that the power he and his team unleashed in Los Alamos was unimaginable in scope. The impact of such a bomb, such energy, on human civilization was inconceivable. The US had already made plans to drop it on Japan, even though it was conceived to combat Germany’s military power. Oppenheimer began to hear rumblings among his teammates that the progress of the bomb should be halted given that Germany had surrendered earlier that year. But by then, the US Government had shifted its target to Japan on the twin cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The success of Trinity had made Oppenheimer a household name, he was on the cover of Time magazine, and his wisdom was sought in a thousand interviews. Deep down, however, Oppenheimer was turning into a pacifist. He used every forum he could to speak about forming an international consensus on the manufacture and use of atomic energy. The utter devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the haunting images of innocent lives burned, eviscerated, and sprawled across miles and miles of rubble and smoke, brought out a very different quality of sensitivity in Oppenheimer. Robert had always struggled to reconcile his personality, interests, and the emotional investments he made in people and projects, but now, after he saw the bomb in action, he was clear about his stand in this matter. When he met President Truman after Japan was bombed, he confessed to him that “he had blood on his hand”, a comment that prompted the President to call Robert a crybaby and that he never wished to see him again in his office. Robert opposed the Government’s plan of building a Hydrogen bomb, a more powerful bomb than the Trinity device, but by this time the matter was largely out of Robert’s hands. He was sidelined. Robert was not in favor of building another bomb not because he was pro-communist but because he believed that an atomic race between nations would jeopardize human civilization, and the nature of war itself would be redefined. However, the US government pressed on with the development of the bomb stating they had information that the Soviets already had a hydrogen bomb in place. It was deemed absolutely necessary that the United States have one too, in quick time. The atomic energy commission believed that Robert in his current frame of mind would be more of a liability than an asset in the building of such a weapon. They found ways to demonize him and discredit his authority. Based on intelligence reports he received on Robert’s affiliations and activities, President Eisenhower ordered that Robert be stripped of his national security clearance. This decision hurt Robert so badly, that against the advice of well-wishers ( including Einstein) and friends, he contested the decision and requested a hearing. It was granted. Between the months of April and May of 1954, after 19 days of testimonies and depositions from everyone Oppenheimer knew or had interacted with, the commission confirmed the revocation of Oppenheimer’s security clearance. It was a big blow to Robert. During the hearing, the committee did everything it could to question his integrity. Robert knew he wasn’t being given a fair hearing, but there was nothing he could do. The entire establishment which at one time supported his efforts was now aligned against him.

Oppenheimer retired from public life after the hearings but continued to teach, research, and publish. His best years were behind him. He was diagnosed with throat cancer in the 1960s; not surprising at all, considering his compulsive smoking habit. He died in Princeton on Feb 18th, 1967. As an epilogue to Robert’s story, on December 22nd, 2022, nearly sixty years after Oppenheimer’s death, Energy Secretary, Jennifer M. Granholm, issued a public statement that based on the declassified information from the Oppenheimer hearings now available to them, they have nullified the 1954 decision to revoke the security clearance of Robert J Oppenheimer. They found no evidence that Robert had leaked anything to the Soviets, or that he was a risk to the nation. On the contrary, they found that critical evidence was suppressed and misrepresented by federal agencies to deliberately frame and discredit Oppenheimer. Finally, there is justice to Oppy’s ( he was fondly called Oppy by his friends) life and legacy. History books will no longer have to portray him as a man who sold his conscience to the devil and compounded the crime by being a traitor to the country. Younger generations would now view Robert J Oppenheimer’s life through a fresh lens, and cherish him for what he was – an exceptional man with wide-ranging brilliance, flamboyance, and charm. It is true he set up the team that created the first atomic bomb, However, like Dr Viktor Frankenstien in Mary Shelly’s story, Robert understood the nature of the beast they had unleashed on the New Mexico desert and tried his best to curtail the implications of the experiment. He was excited that the Trinity test was a triumphant demonstration of scientific ingenuity, power, and theoretical prediction, but upon witnessing the blast and the devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the power atomic energy could potentially put into the hands of unscrupulous and power-hungry politicians was disturbing to contemplate. He decided to do something about it. Unfortunately, the political environment wasn’t right for such cautionary conversations about high-powered weapons. The cold war between the United States and Russia, immediately after the second world war, had exacerbated, and tensions between the two powerful nations on the globe were high. Each needed weapons of mass destruction to play political one-upmanship. Robert was caught in the crossfire. It did not help Robert’s cause either that his brother, his brother’s wife, his own wife, and mistress were all card-bearing communists, even though he never was one. However, given this context and the background, It was implicitly assumed that Oppy was a communist sympathizer, and that was enough for the bureaucracy to malign him.

It was a pity that Robert J Oppenheimer was never considered for the Nobel Prize, though his scientific work was prodigious and original enough to be in that league. However, in April 1962, President Kennedy invited Robert to a White House dinner of Nobel Prize winners. It was his personal gesture to the man who had been wronged during the terrible McCarthy years. In the following year, President Johnson who succeded Kennedy, awarded Oppenheimer the highest honor given by the AEC, the Fermi Award. Perhaps, the finest tribute to Robert J Oppenheimer came from the men and women who worked with him in Los Alamos. These were not ordinary people, but the cream of scientific talent in the country, and in many cases, undisputed experts in their respective fields. In an open letter addressed to the editor of the New York Times, during the security clearance hearing in 1954, the group wrote in defense of Robert’s work – it is worth quoting a paragraph of that letter in full:

“The work at Los Alamos was to be a task of unprecedented difficulty. It required a degree of competence, a depth of knowledge, and an ability for original thinking such as few persons possess. In addition, it required extraordinary qualities of leadership, for it was necessary to mold into a smooth operating team a group of scientists used to independent work, many of them leaders in their fields. Lastly, it required a physical endurance and an emotional strength seldom found in human beings and to devote all one’s energy unsparingly to the task. Dr. Oppenheimer is a man endowed with a rare combination of all these qualities.”

This is the Oppenheimer the world needs to remember and cherish, and we will, I am sure.