Oppenheimer Born: Father of the Atomic Bomb

J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the first atomic bomb test in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, and thought of a line from the Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." Born on April 22, 1904, in New York City, to a wealthy German-Jewish family, he studied at Harvard, Cambridge, and Göttingen, earning his doctorate in theoretical physics at 23. He was appointed to the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology, where he built one of the leading theoretical physics programs in the United States. In 1942, General Leslie Groves chose Oppenheimer to lead the scientific division of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. He was 38. The choice was controversial: Oppenheimer had no Nobel Prize, no administrative experience, and past associations with communist organizations that troubled military intelligence. But his ability to understand and coordinate work across multiple scientific disciplines proved exactly what the project needed. He managed a team that included many of the most brilliant physicists alive, translating their theoretical insights into a functioning weapon in less than three years. Three weeks after the Trinity test, two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Hiroshima on August 6, Nagasaki on August 9. Japan surrendered on August 15. After the war, Oppenheimer chaired the Atomic Energy Commission's General Advisory Committee and advocated for international control of nuclear weapons. He opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb. In 1954, during the McCarthy era, the AEC revoked his security clearance after a hearing that examined his political associations and his opposition to the H-bomb. The hearing was widely seen as a political vendetta. He never received his clearance back. He died of throat cancer on February 18, 1967, at age 62.