After World War II, the nation hailed Julius Robert Oppenheimer as a hero, but he considered
himself a villain. And when Oppenheimer turned on his creation, it blew up his life.
When the New York Mineralogical Society invited J. Robert Oppenheimer to deliver a lecture,
they had no idea he was 12 years old. In fact, Oppenheimer was so short that he needed to stand
on a box to see over the lectern. An avid mineral collector since age 5, he wowed the
society with typewritten correspondence about his observations. Now he was leaving them speechless.
Born on April 22, 1904, Oppenheimer was in a class of his own academically. Philosophy,
chemistry, English — you name it, he aced it. He loved reading classic texts in their
original languages, which he often learned lickety-split. He mastered Dutch in just six
weeks so he could give a lecture in Holland. Also fluent in bragging, he supposedly told a cousin,
"Ask me a question in Latin, and I'll answer it in Greek."
Unfortunately, social interactions were also Greek to Oppenheimer, who had very few friends
growing up. He was illness-prone, and his mother worried about exposing him to germs. She rarely
let him venture outside. Even his barber made house calls. Oppenheimer had the company of his
younger brother Frank, but their eight-year age gap made it difficult to relate to him.
If money could buy happiness, J. Robert Oppenheimer's childhood would have been
rich with million-dollar smiles. By the time he was 10, his father Julius — a German immigrant
who arrived in the U.S. completely broke and unable to speak English — had become
a multimillionaire in modern terms, thanks to a lucrative textile importing business.
Oppenheimer's mother Ella was a painter who collected fine art. They had a lavish
New York apartment that occupied an entire floor, plus three maids and a chauffeur.
Little Oppenheimer's parents treated him like a precious jewel,
according to writer Priscilla McMillan.
"He was too brilliant to be just one of the children.
But his parents treasured him. [...] And he just skipped being a boy."
But the older Oppenheimers kept their jewel locked in a safe,
sheltered environment that emotionally stunted him. Oppenheimer's high school
English teacher and lifelong friend Herbert Smith remarked,
"The most important element I think in Robert's life was his feeling
that his own parents' [...] maladroitness had resulted in all sorts of humiliation to him."
Smith shared a telling anecdote about Oppenheimer encountering "smut" at
summer camp. After his distraught parents showed up to complain,
some unhappy campers made young Oppenheimer pay by locking him in a refrigerator, naked, overnight.
In 1921, J. Robert Oppenheimer graduated as valedictorian of the Ethical Culture School.
He was supposed to head off to Harvard, but a spell of ill health held him back a
year. The Atomic Heritage Foundation claims he came down with dysentery,
while his longtime friend Herbert Smith claims it was colitis.
He was melancholy and prone to depression. It didn't help that he smoked constantly and
skipped meals to focus on coursework. And he didn't go on a single date during his
three years at Harvard. Perhaps that's why when his friend, Francis Ferguson,
announced his engagement during a trip to Paris, Oppenheimer snapped. Ferguson
claimed Oppenheimer tried to choke him with a belt but was just too weak.
After Harvard came graduate studies at the famed Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where he
flunked experimental physics. This was his first real failure, and, freaked out and hungry for
revenge, he left a poisoned apple on his tutor's desk. Oppenheimer was placed on probation and
forced to see multiple psychiatrists. He finally found his calling while studying theoretical
physics in Germany and earned his doctorate from the University of Göttingen in 1927.
In 1929, J. Robert Oppenheimer became a professor at both UC Berkeley and Caltech.
But in 1931, his beloved mother died of leukemia. Herbert Smith spent time with
him while his mother was dying and remembered Oppenheimer admitting,
"I'm the loneliest man in the world."
In 1937, a heart attack claimed his father.
But in 1936, Oppenheimer met one of the great loves and torments of his life:
medical student Jean Tatlock. An aspiring psychiatrist,
Tatlock seemed committed to driving him crazy. Manhattan Project member Robert Serber recalled,
"At times of crisis in her relationship with Oppenheimer, she disappeared for weeks,
months sometimes, and then would taunt [him] mercilessly [...] about who she had been with."
Oppenheimer tried twice to marry her, and twice she broke it off. Yet he
continued seeing her even after he married Katherine "Kitty" Oppenheimer in 1940.
Tatlock grappled with depression and took her own life in 1944.
J. Robert Oppenheimer's doomed romance with Jean Tatlock led to a disastrous
relationship with Communism. Tatlock embraced California's Bay Area Communist
scene, and it's believed that she whetted Oppenheimer's appetite for leftist politics.
"I did not then regard communists as dangerous.
And some of their declared objectives seemed to me desirable."
This would come back to bite him. But if Tatlock helped detonate his career, he rigged the bomb.
Oppenheimer belonged to several alleged Communist fronts. And his wife, Katherine,
was a former party member and the widow of a Communist revolutionary. Shortly before the
Manhattan Project, Oppenheimer was implicated in what became known as "the Chevalier incident."
The trouble began when the secretary to the Soviet consulate-general in San Francisco enlisted a man
named George Eltenton to gather intelligence about the University of California's nuclear research.
Eltenton reached out to Oppenheimer's close friend and Berkeley colleague, Haakon Chevalier,
who discussed the conversation with Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was adamant that that would be treason
and the matter was dropped. Unfortunately, he chose not to report the incident to lab security
and refused to name names when the FBI questioned him about what had transpired. Perhaps he wanted
to protect his brother, Frank, who was not only a Communist but had also spoken with Chevalier.
The Manhattan Project put J. Robert Oppenheimer on a collision course with Edward Teller,
the father of the hydrogen bomb. Their relationship began amicably. Teller praised
Oppenheimer for his ability to oversee some of the brightest minds ever assembled despite the
difficulties of living and working at Los Alamos. But admiration eventually gave way to jealousy.
Oppenheimer possessed the kind of charisma that drew people to him. This repulsed Teller,
who considered himself the superior physicist. He didn't just think he had the bigger brain;
he wanted to think bigger. While the Manhattan Project produced weapons driven by fission, Teller
had his sights set on a hydrogen-based bomb fueled by fusion, which would have more destructive
potential than a fission bomb. Teller was so obsessed with the hydrogen bomb that Oppenheimer
eventually demoted him from the main team, though Teller remained on the Manhattan Project.
Tensions came to a head between Teller and Oppenheimer during the Cold War,
when Teller wanted to build a hydrogen bomb and Oppenheimer sought to stop him.
"Because I have always thought it was a dreadful weapon."
Life at Los Alamos Laboratory was hard. The desert town lacked sidewalks and paved roads,
and multiple families were crammed into a single house with thin walls. Water was scarce,
forcing residents to restrict their shower time to one or two minutes.
And faucets were full of surprises, pouring algae, sediment, and worms.
What Los Alamos lacked in moisture, it made up for in blackouts and expired food. Making
a rotten situation worse, the scientists assigned there found themselves surrounded by barbed wire
and constantly watched by guards. The effects of the stress were dubbed "Los Alamositis."
To top it off, Oppenheimer contracted a severe case of chickenpox. His Los Alamos neighbor,
head of ordnance Peggy Bowditch, blamed Oppenheimer's almost Bubble
Boy-like upbringing, which prevented him from catching chickenpox as a kid.
When the time came to test the A-bomb in 1945, the six foot-one-inch Oppenheimer
weighed a skeletal 115 pounds. Nobody knew what to expect from the detonation, which
Oppenheimer dubbed the "Trinity" test. According to historians at the U.S. Department of Energy,
"To break the tension, Nobel Laureate Enrico Fermi, [associate director of the Los Alamos lab],
began offering anyone listening a wager on 'whether or not the bomb would ignite the
atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world.'"
"The work is so hard. And failure is, of course, I guess, an inevitable condition of success."
Oppenheimer bet $10 that the A-bomb would fail to detonate,
while George Kistiakowsky bet a month's salary that it would. The
explosion toppled Kistiakowsky from five miles away, to which he replied,
"Oppie, you owe me ten dollars."
In July 1945, the A-bomb passed the Trinity test with flying colors and a
40,000-foot mushroom cloud. J. Robert Oppenheimer summed up
his reaction in a quote from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita, saying,
"'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.'"
But he had only witnessed a hint of the raw and awful oblivion that was to come. In August,
the atomic bombs dubbed Little Boy and Fat Man became Death for an estimated 120,000
people in strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one bomb on
Hiroshima and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy."
Radiation exposure would kill tens of thousands more.
America celebrated the destroyer of worlds as a hero. As far as they were concerned,
his weapons prevented countless casualties by forcing the Japanese
Empire to surrender. After the war, however, Oppenheimer discovered that Japan's emperor
had been open to surrender as early as June 1945, before the first bomb test.
To make matters worse, Oppenheimer had blocked attempts to stop the bombings.
When various scientists petitioned against unleashing a nuclear weapon on a city,
and some advocated scrapping atomic bomb research altogether, Oppenheimer
had buried their concerns. In October 1945, a guilt-wracked Oppenheimer told Harry Truman,
"Mr. President, I have blood on my hands."
In hopes of atoning for his sins, Oppenheimer tried to dissuade the U.S. government from beefing
up its nuclear arsenal. Meanwhile, Edward Teller was hell-bent on building hydrogen bombs capable
of unleashing hundreds of times more energy than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Oppenheimer deemed the H-bomb immoral. He openly opposed constructing such a weapon
when President Harry Truman broached the subject with the Atomic Energy Commission in 1949. When
the government forged ahead with the H-bomb in 1952, Oppenheimer joined the project with
the apparent aim of undermining it, which placed him in the government's crosshairs.
"We are engaged in this great enterprise of our time,
testing whether men can live without war as the great arbiter of history."
In 1953, he was formally accused of being a security risk, branded a Communist operative,
and removed from his job with the Atomic Energy Commission.
When Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission
Lewis Strauss accused J. Robert Oppenheimer of being a Communist,
it probably had less to do with McArthyist fervor than it did with a deep-seated vendetta.
Oppenheimer was prone to displays of arrogance,
thoughtlessness, and mockery. And in 1949, he made Strauss a laughingstock.
At the time, Strauss served as president of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton,
where Oppenheimer had been director since 1947.
During a congressional hearing, they sparred over whether to send radioactive
isotopes to Europe. Strauss worried the Soviets would intercept the isotopes,
but a dismissive Oppenheimer replied that,
"Radioisotopes [are] no more dangerous than a shovel, or a bottle of beer."
Everybody laughed, while Strauss reportedly turned red with rage.
He launched a media smear campaign and enlisted Oppenheimer's scientific nemesis,
Edward Teller, who would tell the FBI,
"A lot of people believe Oppenheimer opposed the
development of the H-bomb on 'direct orders from Moscow.'"
As Oppenheimer prepared to challenge the allegations against him in court,
Strauss had the FBI spy on him and refused to grant Oppenheimer's lawyers
security clearances that could have helped them build a case.
In 1954, J. Robert Oppenheimer stood trial for allegedly threatening national security. He
testified for 27 hours over the course of almost four weeks. Yes, he'd dated and married Communists
and joined Communist-affiliated organizations. His brother and sister-in-law were indeed Communists.
Yet there was absolutely no evidence of spying or disloyalty to implicate Oppenheimer himself.
In 2014, a declassified transcript of the Oppenheimer hearings confirmed that
he hadn't betrayed his country. But the deck had been stacked against him by Atomic Energy
Commission chief Lewis Strauss and Oppenheimer's rival, Edward Teller, who told the court,
"I would like to see the vital interests of this
country in hands which I understand better, and therefore trust more."
Oppenheimer was humiliated. And his appeals for reason and restraint in
the matter of nuclear weapons no longer carried the same weight.
"We were intervening – explicitly and heavy-handedly – in the course of human history."
J. Robert Oppenheimer would lose his voice and his life to throat cancer, dying in 1967.