New Delhi: When the first detonation of a nuclear bomb was conducted successfully in July 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer — the ‘father of the atomic bomb’ and director of the lab behind it — had an expression of “tremendous relief”, according to biographers Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.
There was reportedly some regret and apprehension in the run-up to the nuclear attack on Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki the following month, but his focus on the operation soon took over.
A few months later, however, when he met US President Harry S. Truman at the White House in October 1945, the exultation appeared to have faded. “Mr President, I feel I have blood on my hands,” he said, according to the 2005 Bird-Sherwin biography, after which the President privately dubbed him a “crybaby scientist”.
The celebrated theoretical physicist, now the subject of a big-ticket Christopher Nolan-helmed movie, believed that the creation of the bomb was needed to bring an end to World War 2, but also struggled to cope with the reality of mass destruction.
Wrestling with the potential consequences of the weapon he had helped create, he opposed the development of a hydrogen bomb, which causes a bigger explosion. The protest ended his career as a physicist with a paranoid US administration — then at the peak of its anti-Communist stance — stripping him of his security clearance and shoving him out of the nuclear establishment in 1954.
The decision was attributed to his opposition to the hydrogen bomb and support for “progressive causes”.
It was only in December 2022 that the Biden administration reversed the decision, calling it biased, unfair and the result of a flawed process.
However, presidents Kennedy and Johnson did try to undo the damage to his reputation: In 1962, when Kennedy invited him to a White House dinner, and, in 1963, when Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the highest honour given by the US Atomic Energy Commission.
Oppenheimer, born on 22 April 1904 to affluent first-generation German-Jewish immigrants, has been described by those who knew him as charismatic, an “enigma”, and a man whose genius was evident when he was yet a child — he was reportedly reading philosophy in Greek and Latin by age 9, and exploring physics and chemistry by the time he was 10.
He also loved poetry and was fascinated by the Bhagavad Gita, which he called “the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue”. A well-worn copy of the epic was always kept on the bookshelf closest to his desk.
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A psychosis diagnosis
Oppenheimer studied at some of the world’s top institutes, and was a PhD at 22.
As an undergraduate student at Harvard University, Oppenheimer studied mathematics and science, philosophy, Eastern religion, French and English literature, and physics.
During a course on thermodynamics, Oppenheimer was introduced to experimental physics, according to a profile on the website of the Institute for Advanced Study, the research institute where he served as director after the Second World War.
He graduated with the highest distinction in 1925, and went on to Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory as a research assistant.
But he found laboratory work to be “a terrible bore”, as mentioned in a letter from 1925.
At one point, he deliberately left an apple poisoned by injection on his tutor’s desk. While the latter never ate it, a subsequent psychiatric exam led to a psychosis diagnosis for Oppenheimer, but the therapist said treatment would do no good, says a BBC profile by UK-based writer Ben Platts-Mills.
Oppenheimer subsequently went to the University of Göttingen, Germany, to study quantum physics, which brought him in contact with eminent physicists such as Max Born and Niels Bohr.
He worked with Born to produce the Born-Oppenheimer Approximation, which is described as the “cornerstone of molecular science”.
Oppenheimer also received offers to teach at Caltech and the University of California at Berkeley.
The first atomic bomb
The rise of Hitler’s rule in Germany led physicists like Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner to warn the US government of the danger humanity would face if the Nazis managed to make a nuclear bomb first.
On 2 August 1939 — a month before Hitler’s invasion of Poland set off World War 2 — Einstein signed a letter addressed to the then US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, saying the Nazis might be developing nuclear weapons. He urged the US government to stockpile uranium ore and begin work on its own atomic weapons.
In response, the US government assembled a team of physicists — headed by Oppenheimer — and the project to build an atomic bomb began. It was dubbed the ‘Manhattan Project’, and based in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where Oppenheimer’s team spent three years. The first test of the atomic bomb was codenamed ‘Trinity’.
As the team prepared for detonation, Oppenheimer’s already slender frame is said to have grown frailer, with the weight of the 5’10” scientist dropping to just over 52kg.
In October 1945, after the war had ended, Oppenheimer resigned from his post.
Oppenheimer told interviewers in 1965, that on the day of the explosion — equivalent to the force of 21 kilotonnes of TNT, whose shockwave was felt 160 kilometres away — he remembered a line from the Gita: “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
He added: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent.”
Man of science & arts
Scholar James A. Hijiya extensively studied how Oppenheimer was a man of two minds: science and the arts.
In his essay, ‘The Gita of J Robert Oppenheimer’, Hijiya said he was a physicist that was caught between poetry and science till the very end of his life.
Even the name of the Trinity test is said to have come from John Donne’s poem ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God’.
Apart from his penchant for Petrarch, Proust and Dante, Oppenheimer studied Sanskrit and, apart from the Bhagavad Gita, read Kalidasa’s Meghaduta and the Vedas.
In 1940, Oppenheimer married Katherine ‘Kitty’ Vissering Puening, with whom he had an affair while she was married to her third husband, Richard Stewart Harrison.
They had two children.
After the end of the Second World War, Kitty and Oppenheimer moved to New Jersey, where he took up the position as director of the Institute for Advanced Study.
Known to be a chainsmoker, Oppenheimer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1965, and fell into a coma in 1967. He passed away on 18 February 1967.
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
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