In the 1940s, physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer led a team to develop the world's first atomic bomb.
His work garnered him the title "father of the atomic bomb," but he wasn't an obvious choice for its leader.
He was a complicated, intelligent man known for being condescending, volatile, and impractical.
J. Robert Oppenheimer was the architect behind the atomic bomb.
He spent decades working as a physics lecturer and made several notable scientific discoveries, including forecasting black holes thirty years before it became a common theory.
He was called "Oppie" by colleagues and friends. He was a 6-foot-tall skinny man with a stoop. He could be condescending, volatile, and impractical.
During the paranoia of the Cold War in the 1950s, his political enemies used his colorful past to remove his security clearance and he ended up retreating back into academia.
Director Christopher Nolan's upcoming film about his life, called "Oppenheimer," will be released in July, with actor Cillian Murphy portraying the titular character.
Julius Robert Oppenheimer was born on April 22, 1904, in New York City.
The Oppenheimers were a rich German Jewish family; his father made his money manufacturing clothes, and they lived in a high-rise apartment in the Upper West Side.
Sources: New York Times, New Atlantis, Guardian
Oppenheimer went to the Ethical Culture School, which was focused on creating students who were devoted to service.
For hobbies, he collected minerals and read poetry. He graduated at the top of his class.
Source: New Atlantis
In 1922, he went to Harvard College. His plan was to be a chemist, but he quickly swapped to physics.
He studied intensely and widely — taking classes in philosophy, literature, and Eastern religion alongside his major — and finished the four-year degree in three years, graduating summa cum laude.
Oppenheimer then went to Cambridge University to study atomics under the physicist Lord Rutherford. While there, he took issue with working in a laboratory.
He later transferred to the University of Gottingen in Germany to study under Dr. Max Born, a famous atomic scientist.
He graduated in 1927. After he left his Ph. D. exam, the administering professor reportedly sighed in relief.
"Phew," he said. "I'm glad that's over. He was on the point of questioning me."
Sources: New York Times, New York Times, IAS
Dr. Born later said Oppenheimer was obviously intelligent but could be snide in class and interrupt speakers to explain to them what they had been trying to say.
Around this period, Oppenheimer had also been struggling with depression.
He saw several psychoanalysts but credited a Corsica biking tour and reading Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time" for making him better again.
Sources: New York Times, New Atlantis, PBS
Oppenheimer was a complex character. He was known as "Oppie" by colleagues and friends.
He was 6 feet tall, skinny, and had a stoop. He could be condescending, volatile, and impractical.
He drank liquor, smoked constantly, and was recognizable by a porkpie hat that he always wore.
Source: Guardian
He could be reckless. For instance, while he was a student he raced against a train and ended up crashing his car.
While he walked away from the accident unscathed, his girlfriend at the time was knocked unconscious.
Source: New York Times
He was also criticized for spreading himself too thin intellectually.
But there was never any doubt of his intelligence. He knew Latin, French, German, and Greek, and later studied Sanskrit so he could read important Hindu texts.
In 1929, Oppenheimer returned to the US and began to lecture. He taught at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena and the University of California, Berkeley.
While his work in the field was often noted for being good but not quite as good as some of his peers, in the classroom he excelled.
Unlike other lecturers who could be bogged down in unimportant details, Oppenheimer had a sense for real-world implications stemming from theories and kept his students' interest piqued.
According to physicist Hans Bethe, he was one of the most sophisticated physics lecturers in the US.
"Here was a man who obviously understood all the deep secrets of quantum mechanics, and yet made it clear that the most important questions were unanswered," Bethe said.
"His earnestness and deep involvement gave his research students the same sense of challenge," he continued. "He never gave his students the easy and superficial answers but trained them to appreciate and work on the deep problems."
For a while, Oppenheimer lived an entirely academic life.
He later said during the early years of teaching he did not read anything to do with politics or economics and he never listened to the radio or even had a telephone.
Sources: New York Times, New Atlantis, IAS
During the 1930s, he made several notable scientific discoveries including forecasting black holes 30 years before it became a common theory.
Sources: New York Times, New Atlantis
It was also during the 1930s that Oppenheimer began to spend time with communists.
In 1936, he had an affair with a female communist named Jean Tatlock. She introduced him to left-wing politics.
Sources: Guardian, New Atlantis, New York Times, NPS
Tatlock and Oppenheimer's relationship didn't last, and in 1940, he married Katherine "Kitty" Puening, a biologist and former communist, whose first husband had been a communist who died in the Spanish Civil War.
Sources: New Atlantis, New York Times, IAS
They had two children, Peter and Katherine.
Sources: New Atlantis, New York Times
Oppenheimer, who had previously considered himself apolitical, began to see the impacts of the depression and fascism in Germany. He later said he was furious at how Jews were treated in Germany.
"I saw what the Depression was doing to my students," he said. "Often they could get no jobs, or jobs which were wholly inadequate. And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men's lives."
"I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community," he added.
Sources: PBS, New York Times
In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Manhattan Project in response to news that Germany had managed to split the atom and therefore might be able to create atomic weapons.
He appointed Gen. Leslie Groves to run it. Groves needed someone to lead his bomb laboratory and chose Oppenheimer.
By the end of the war, an estimated $2 billion was spent on the project.
Sources: New York Times, History, PBS, New Atlantis, Office of Legacy Management
There were concerns about Oppenheimer's loyalty.
Groves managed to address the concerns by noting they could count on his loyalty due to the intensity of his desire to make history.
Oppenheimer previously had concerns about working on the war effort. But he accepted Groves' offer and tracked down the best people for the job. They would spend the next two years working with him in Los Alamos, New Mexico.
He enlisted experts who had worked in different areas relating to atomic energy, including some of the world's brightest people, like Dr. Niels Bohr and Dr. Enrico Fermi.
Sources: New York Times, History, PBS, New Atlantis
During this period, Oppenheimer was under constant surveillance.
His calls and letters were monitored. In June 1943, he was seen spending a night with Tatlock, his former communist lover. By then she had left the communist party.
He also unexpectedly admitted to a government agent that Russians had been trying to learn more about their work in the Manhattan Project.
In response, he was interrogated three times. On one occasion, he provided a list of communists and sympathizers.
Source: New York Times
But he wasn't removed from his job. He carried on and directed about 4,000 people to build the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It took a little over two years.
Despite being known for his impracticality, he was praised for the way he ran the project, notably for his efficiency and his charismatic leadership. But at times, some of his staff raised concerns about whether they were doing the right thing.
Oppenheimer managed to convince them that it was. He told them though an atomic bomb would create its own problems, it was also a way to end the war.
Sources: Mercury News, History, Atlantic, Guardian
At 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1945, the first man-made atomic bomb was detonated. The mushroom cloud reached 40,000 feet into the sky. It was a success.
Sources: New York Times, New Atlantis, History
Oppenheimer watched from afar and as he saw the mushroom cloud form he famously thought, "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
It was a line from the 700-verse Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.
The quote is from when the Hindu god Vishnu orders a prince to execute his duty and achieve militant success.
He later said, "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent."
Source: Wired
In a matter of weeks, the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, ending World War II, killing 80,000 people in Hiroshima and 40,000 people in Nagasaki.
Thousands more later died of radiation poisoning.
At the time the bombs dropped Oppenheimer celebrated and even said he wished the bomb had been made earlier so that it could have been dropped on Germany.
But he also spoke of his sadness on behalf of the Japanese victims.
Later, he addressed the American Philosophical Society and told them: "We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon, that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world… a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing. And by so doing… we have raised again the question of whether science is good for man."
Sources: New Atlantis, History
In October, Oppenheimer met with President Harry Truman and told the president he felt he had blood on his hands.
Truman was reportedly disgusted and rebuffed him.
Sources: New Atlantis, History
Despite his guilt, over the next few years Oppenheimer became a well-known public figure.
He appeared on the covers of magazines and became chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, which was formed to replace the Manhattan Project.
He was given awards for his work, like the Army-Navy Award of excellence in the 1940s.
Sources: PBS, New Atlantis, IAS
But he was also openly reluctant to develop a hydrogen bomb, which would be 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb.
His stance was controversial since it was the beginning of the Cold War, and Russia and the US were grappling for dominance.
Truman approached the commission in 1949 to create a hydrogen bomb and Hungarian scientist Edward Teller, the future "father of the H-Bomb" publicly called for it too.
But Oppenheimer reportedly said, "I neither can nor will do so."
He also publicly backed an international group having control of atomic weapons, rather than the US.
Sources: New Atlantis, New Atlantis, History, Guardian, IAS
But his reluctance didn't matter. The H-bomb was developed and tested in 1952.
Source: History
Oppenheimer's time at the top came to an end in December 1953.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered a ban on all secret data going to him. On December 23, 1953, he received a letter informing him his security clearance had been suspended.
Oppenheimer was accused of being a communist sympathizer. A secret trial was held. In June 1954, after 19 days of hearings, Oppenheimer's security clearance was permanently revoked.
The committee found no evidence of him having mishandled any classified information or any sign of disloyalty.
All it noted was that he had "fundamental defects in his character."
Bethe said, "Oppenheimer took the outcome of the security hearing very quietly but he was a changed person; much of his previous spirit and liveliness had left him."
Sources: New York Times, SFGate
Without his security clearance, Oppenheimer couldn't continue his work. He moved back to academia, running the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, while also delivering public lectures and publishing scientific essays.
Sources: Guardian, Smithsonian, IAS
The atomic bomb and its repercussions never left him. Years later, in 1961, when he was asked about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, he said it wasn't on his conscience.
"Scientists are not delinquents," he said. "Our work has changed the conditions in which men live, but the use made of these changes is the problem of governments, not of scientists."
Source: New York Times
In 1962, Oppenheimer was invited to a Nobel Prize dinner at the White House by President John F. Kennedy, and the following year, he received the Fermi Award, the AEC's highest honor.
Source: IAS
On February 18, 1967, just one year after retiring, Oppenheimer died of lung cancer. He was 62 years old.
"Such a wrong can never be righted; such a blot on our history never erased," physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth said at his memorial service. "… We regret that his great work for his country was repaid so shabbily."
Sources: New York Times, Princeton Magazine, Smithsonian
The role the government played in his fall from grace was raised occasionally and in December 2022, the US Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm nullified the decision to revoke his security clearance.
The process was described as flawed and stemmed more from disagreements over his stance on nuclear weapons rather than any real security concerns.
In a statement, she said, "As time has passed, more evidence has come to light of the bias and unfairness of the process that Dr. Oppenheimer was subjected to, while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed."
Sources: New York Times, Princeton Magazine, Smithsonian
Correction: July 6, 2023 — An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the Institute for Advanced Study. It's in Princeton, New Jersey, but is not part of Princeton University.
Correction: July 10, 2023 — An earlier version of this story misstated which US president established the Manhattan Project. It was Franklin D. Roosevelt, not Theodore Roosevelt.
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