J. Robert Oppenheimer: Report on the International Control of Atomic Energy

About the Author

J. Robert Oppenheimer was born in New York City to Ella and Julius Oppenheimer on April 22, 1904. He was educated at the private Ethical Culture School. This institution had been founded by Felix Adler, a strong advocate of modern liberal humanism, who argued in the disastrous wake of World War I that the only way to avoid such catastrophes in the future was to create a single world government. These ideas deeply influenced Oppenheimer's later political thought. In 1925 Oppenheimer completed an undergraduate degree in chemistry at Harvard in just three years. He also developed an intense interest in experimental physics and decided to pursue further study in that field. Since there was at that time no world-class department of physics in the United States, he enrolled at Cambridge University in England. After a year, however, it became obvious that he did not have the painstaking technique necessary to become a great laboratory experimenter, and he switched to the study of theoretical physics at Göttingen in Germany, completing his PhD in 1927. He took his advanced degree in German and lectured the following year in Dutch (a language he learned in only a few weeks) during an academic appointment in the Netherlands. Oppenheimer had a remarkable facility with language; he not only was proficient in Greek, Latin, and French (all commonly taught in the universities of the time) but also learned Sanskrit simply for his own reading interests.

Oppenheimer is considered the father of mathematical theoretical physics in the United States. In the 1920s and 1930s he did fundamental work on both relativity and quantum mechanics (whose relationship has still not been resolved) and was the first to predict the existence of black holes. His most important theoretical work is considered to be the publication in 1928, in collaboration with Max Born, of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which makes possible mathematical computations concerning the wave-function of molecules in quantum chemistry. As an academic, he built the Department of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley from scratch (while simultaneously working in the more established department at Caltech to stay in touch with the physics community). In 1947 he took over Albert Einstein's position as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he began for the first time to incorporate humanities into the program. For almost any physicist those accomplishments alone would have made a brilliant career, but in Oppenheimer's case they hardly approach the significance of his work as scientific chief of the Manhattan Project—the U.S. government's program to develop nuclear weapons during World War II—and his subsequent role in national politics.

In 1941 Oppenheimer was invited by the government to begin work on the calculations necessary to design an atomic bomb, and in 1942 he was made director of the secret laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, under the military command of General Leslie Groves. In this capacity he oversaw a team of America's leading physicists, chemists, and engineers working to design and build an atomic bomb based on the newly discovered principle of nuclear fission, using the enormous energies released when atoms of heavy elements such as uranium-235 or plutonium are split apart. Oppenheimer's team produced three weapons—the first one exploded in the Trinity Test near Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, and two more that were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August to end World War II.

After the war Oppenheimer served as chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, one of the most important positions in developing government policy on nuclear weapons and nuclear energy. After his attempts to internationalize control of nuclear weapons and prevent the arms race between the United States and Soviet Union failed, Oppenheimer was attacked by his political enemies over his links to radical politics in the 1930s and was denied his security clearance in an infamous McCarthy-era hearing in 1954. Having lost all influence with the government, Oppenheimer concentrated on his academic work at the Institute for Advanced Study and engaged in a career as a public lecturer, speaking against the dangers of nuclear war. His public reputation was rehabilitated to a degree by the John F. Kennedy administration in 1963, with the grant of the Enrico Fermi Award for achievements in physics (ironically named after a scientist who had worked under Oppenheimer at Los Alamos). He died from cancer on February 18, 1967.