Oppenheimer – The Man and his Legacy

How the A-Bomb changed the course of history

 

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

- J Robert Oppenheimer

quoting the Bhagavad-Gita

 

 

Overview

Christopher Nolan’s recent Hollywood blockbuster biopic Oppenheimer has again brought into sharp focus the legacy of its lead character, J Robert Oppenheimer, simultaneously vilified and glorified as the ‘father of the A-bomb’, at least in popular perception. An outstanding theoretical physicist, of such unqualified reputation as to head the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as the boss of the great Albert Einstein, one who was associated with the seminal developments of quantum physics in Europe and took them with him back to America, one who came close to predicting the existence of the blackhole long before the concept had received serious consideration, and possibly missed out on a physics Nobel prize, a pacifist at heart with strong leftist sympathies that made him look like a traitor in the eyes of a myopic and paranoid administration, something of a polymath and polyglot, including scholarship of the ancient Sanskrit language and its monumental Bhagavad-Gita, a man with the organizational and administrative acumen needed to bring together a diverse group of prima donnas in their respective areas of specialization to work together and pull off one of the most challenging  achievements in the history of human endeavour, a man of unsteady character and questionable resolve at times, a libertarian with his personal life, who chain smoked his way to a premature demise and, above all, a man who happened to be at the right time and place, with the right skills and competence, to oversee the transformation of one of the profoundly fundamental discoveries in science into what sadly turned out to be an existential threat to humanity itself.  This is the American Prometheus who was ‘destined’ to place in the hands of the US presidency and its military the ultimate weapon, something few had even dreamed possible, a byproduct of the intellect pushing the frontiers of science and technology beyond their limits at the time.

Oppenheimer, the movie

Before examining Oppenheimer, the man and his terrible legacy, which is the primary purpose of this article, I would like to dwell a little on Oppenheimer the movie, which has been the trigger for such an exercise. It is an epic  biographical film released this year, written and directed by the renowned producer, Christopher Nolan, based on the 2005 monumental Pulitzer Prize winning biographical work American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer, by acclaimed historians Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin (see picture below). The film stars Cillian Murphy in the title role, Matt Damon as General Leslie Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey Jr as the villain of the piece Lewis Strauss, chairman of the U S Atomic Energy Commission, besides numerous actors playing the roles of a galaxy of nuclear scientists, all part of the project. In my view, a few of the characters in the movie whose appearance is disproportionately lowkey compared to their real-life contributions to the project are: Enrico Fermi, E O Lawrence, Arthur H Compton and Leo Szilard.

Cillian Murphy has played the role of Oppenheimer competently, but doesn’t quite fit the real-life version I had read about in my past gleanings of the history of the Manhattan Project, including a very famous low-budget BBC miniseries, also on the same theme, produced as far back as 1980.  More about it later in this article. Murphy’s role of Oppenheimer reminds me of the all-time great Attenborough classic Gandhi, in which the title role is played perhaps even more competently by Ben Kingsley.  Murphy’s appearance in relation to the real tall and skinny Oppenheimer is as dissimilar as that of a strongly muscular Kingsley in relation to the real impoverished looking Gandhi.

Barring the cinematic liberties inevitably employed in any work of its type, the three-hour (unnecessarily) long movie is superbly produced and largely true to the book, with the focus strongly on the triumphal and tragic personality of a tormented genius, and the humiliation he had to suffer for exercising his personal freedom in an ostensibly free society.   The movie, its lead actor Cillian Murphy and director Christopher Nolan have already emerged as strong contenders for next year’s Oscar awards, as is Robert Downey Jr for his ‘supporting’ role. Matt Demon is a bit of a disappointment in his role as General Leslie Groves, certainly missing some of the latter’s rustic dynamism and idiosyncrasies.  The two female roles come out as somewhat incidental and padded up, though they lived more significant roles in real life.  The Bhagavad Gita in the bedroom scene is certainly in poor taste if not actually insulting to the country of its origin.  Also depicted in poor light is the great Albert Einstein, notwithstanding the fact that he was way past his best as a contributing physicist. There is only a passing reference to his historic letter to President Roosevelt that gave birth to the Manhattan project. Leo Szilard’s catalytic role is also downplayed, as is the contribution of Enrico Fermi who made the early pathbreaking discoveries in Chicago.  Indeed, the hectic scientific activities at Los Alamos and elsewhere don’t find the emphasis they deserve, possibly to avoid portraying the project as something too technical for general audiences.

Incidentally, the book portrays the man faithfully for what he actually was, a multifaceted genius with a talent for almost anything under the Sun, a piece of a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci, as adept in other fields as in theoretical Physics for which he is justly famous. This is missing in the movie, perhaps because it would otherwise interfere with the cause celebre of the production.

While Oppenheimer’s depressing encounter with President Truman gets its due billing, the actual event itself, the dropping of the A-bombs wreaking havoc on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, goes utterly ignored. How could the actual use of the A-bombs not be part of any narrative concerning the man who is credited with their making! 

The movie itself is annoyingly fast paced in the first half, with the average viewer hardly able to keep up with the conversations and understand their significance despite the excellent subtitling.  Apart from the totally irrelevant confirmation hearings of Lewis Strauss, much of the second half is given over to the conduct of Oppenheimer’s security ‘hearings’, amounting to a medieval style inquisition in a modern-day setting, with the accused expected to prove his innocence, the accusation essentially being that he was furthering the cause of communism in an endangered society.  One does not have to look too far back in human history to find a Galileo having to prove that he was not an agent of the devil endangering a god-given belief system enforced by the church.  Nolan should have stayed with a vastly more relevant portrayal of the man and the legacy he left behind, with the unleashing of an existential threat to human survival, instead of straying into the purely collateral happenings at the time or thereafter.

Much is made of the non-use of CGI (computer-generated imagery) in shooting the ultra-expensive (US$ 100 million) movie. I don’t see much merit in this claim since the same quality of production could have been obtained employing CGI, and at a considerably reduced cost as well, since there is so little in this biopic that demands much use of CGI. James Cameron could have shown how this could have been achieved, with some of his own blockbusters.  

Oppenheimer, the BBC Miniseries

After viewing Nolan’s movie in the first week of its local release in a thinly attended show, unsurprisingly so because of its seriously biographical and ‘actionless’ content, set in another society and at another time, I remembered having viewed the BBC miniseries with the same title and content produced long ago. I thought it would be inappropriate to comment on the present movie without seeing the miniseries again.  I took to writing this article only after seeing all seven episodes of the excellent miniseries, each about an hour long.

Barring minor variations, BBC’s Oppenheimer, spread over seven hours in all, is not much of a match to Nolan’s production in terms of technical qualities, but otherwise equally good in my assessment.  It has an uncomplicated sequential development of content all through, at a leisurely pace, without perplexing the viewer in any way.  In my view, Sam Waterston (see picture below) playing the role of a properly lean and lanky Oppenheimer looks even more realistic and convincing than Murphy, without taking away any credit from the latter for his current performance.  Manning Redwood is definitely better than Matt Damon as General Groves. David Suchet as Edward Teller with his premature super-bomb mania has a considerably more impactful role as well.  The role of Kitty, Oppenheimer’s wife, finds a great deal more prominence than in Nolan’s movie. The Los Alamos science related activities and the nuclear scientists involved get their rightful representation.  To my chagrin the ‘inquisition’ related scenes are produced even more tellingly than in the current version, with Oppenheimer, backstabbed by Teller in the end, appearing to be even more of a wrong-doer. This is something on which I find the BBC production rather guilty of undue wrong doing. Those who detest seeing Oppenheimer in poor light at the end of his career do well to completely ignore the last episode of the miniseries. Also, the multifaceted genius that Oppenheimer really was doesn’t show up any more glaringly here than in Nolan’s production.

I would now like to get back on track with my own assessment of Oppenheimer the extraordinary man and the terrible legacy he left behind through the Manhattan Project and its aftermath.

Early Life

Born in 1904 to a rich nonconformist liberal Jewish American family in New York, Oppenheimer was a naturally brilliant student, of almost anything that he fancied, science taking the front seat.  In 1911, he entered the Ethical Culture Society School, founded on the Ethical Culture movement, whose motto was "Deed before Creed". Oppenheimer entered Harvard College in 1922, graduating in 1925.  He spent some unhappy time at Cambridge, England, before moving to Gottingen in Germany to work under the legendary Max Born (see picture below), a pioneer in quantum mechanics. It was there that he also studied with some of the greatest names of that era in the fledgling field, including Werner Heisenberg, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi, Maria Goeppert and Edward Teller, most of them future Nobel laureates.  In 1927 he got his doctorate degree under Max Born.

[It is interesting to note that Max Born was a visiting scientist in 1935 at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, on the invitation of its then director and Indian Nobel Laureate C V Raman.]

Max Born

Life at Berkeley

Back in the USA, Oppenheimer worked alternately at Caltech and the University of California, Berkeley, both outstanding centres for physics research. At Berkeley, aside from his research and teaching activities, he became a strong sympathiser and active supporter of communist ideology, something that was to haunt him for the rest of his life.  He also had an interest in learning languages and learned Sanskrit in 1933, apart from mastering several European languages. He eventually read literary works such as the Bhagavad Gita and Meghaduta in the original Sanskrit, and deeply pondered over them. He later cited the Gita as one of the books that most shaped his philosophy of life and called it "the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue."

Physics Contributions

Oppenheimer’s research output is too widespread even to be summarized here. He did important research in nuclear physics, spectroscopy, and quantum field theory, including its extension to quantum electrodynamics. His work predicted many later discoveries, including the neutron, meson and neutron star.

Perhaps Oppenheimer’s best-known contribution to Physics is what has come to be known as the Born-Oppenheimer approximation method in the mathematical treatment of molecules to simplify complex calculations. The technique, developed with his mentor Max Born, had a profound influence on the application of quantum mechanics to solve complex problems. It remains his most import work.

With Melba Phillips, the first graduate student to begin her PhD under Oppenheimer's supervision, Oppenheimer worked on calculations of artificial radioactivity under bombardment by deuterons, subsequently known as the Oppenheimer–Phillips process.

As early as 1930, Oppenheimer wrote a paper that essentially predicted the existence of the positron. Two years later, Carl Anderson discovered the particle, for which he received the 1936 Nobel Prize in Physics.

In the late 1930s, Oppenheimer became interested in astrophysics and developed a theory of what later came to be known as black holes, a terminal phase in stellar evolution, now well established. If he had lived long enough to see his predictions substantiated by experiment, he might have won a Nobel Prize for his work on gravitational collapse concerning neutron stars and black holes.

Oppenheimer usually sowed the seeds of pathbreaking new ideas only to leave them for his students and associates to see them through to their logical conclusion. In this he earned the lasting respect and admiration of fellow physicists, including the likes of Albert Einstein, Max Born and Niels Bohr.

The Manhattan Project

1938 marked the discovery of nuclear fission by two German scientists, leading to the eventual development of the Atom Bomb under the leadership of Oppenheimer as part of the Manhattan Project, and this altered the course of history.  The story is told in considerable detail in one of my previous blog articles, titled “Physics behind the horror of Hiroshima”, and I strongly urge the reader to go through it before continuing with the present article.

The implication of the discovery of uranium fission was quick to be absorbed by the scientific community, and Oppenheimer was among the first to do so.  Urged on by Leo Szilard, Einstein wrote a matter-of-fact style letter to the American president Franklin Roosevelt, which is now part of history.  The letter was a wake-up call for some concrete action on the part of the government, with the implication that the Germans could otherwise steal a march over the USA. This resulted in the Manhattan Project under the US Army, headed by then Col Leslie Groves, for a massive developmental effort in great secrecy, recruiting some of the best-known nuclear scientists in the country. A substantial number of them were immigrant Europeans who had virtually fled from Hitler’s Germany and other parts of the troubled continent. Some were also from Britain and Canada.

Albert Einstein with Leo Szilard 

Oppenheimer with Einstein

Groves realized that he had been put in charge of getting sound scientific ideas, but mostly ideas nevertheless, transformed into speedy action. He needed a highly competent, brilliant and respected scientist who could get a team of equally brilliant scientists to work together, make the key discoveries still needed, design a functional nuclear fission bomb and make it work, all as fast as humanly possible and before the dreaded Germans could do so.  Though the project also involved both Britain and Canada, Groves understandably needed a ‘native’ American to head such a developmental effort.  After some exploratory effort, he chose Oppenheimer for the job, overlooking his well-known communist sympathies as well as the consequent security concerns that had also been documented.  The two of them got on with each other very well despite some irritants and Oppenheimer’s reluctance to follow all the security protocols that Groves was trying to impose.  Los Alamos in New Mexico state, a place Oppenheimer used to visit frequently, was chosen to carry out much of the developmental work under military control, and the desert land was transformed into a large human habitat in a matter of months.

Key Project Scientists

Oppenheimer successfully brought together most of the greatest nuclear physicists and chemists of the times to work on the Manhattan Project in an atmosphere they were generally used to, an atmosphere of informal discussions with free interchange of ideas. However, much Groves disliked this lack of ‘discipline’ he had to be accommodative in the interests of ‘getting things done’ as expeditiously as the situation demanded. With the notable exception of Edward Teller, whose interest was primarily and unwaveringly in the development of a Hydrogen bomb even before the A-bomb became a reality, most of the people worked with him as much out of their respect for him as because of compelling necessity, without coercion of any kind.  

Oppenheimer with Leslie Groves at Los Alamos 

Oppenheimer with Fermi (centre) and Lawrence

Here is a who-is-who of the key project scientists, the prima donnas in their respective fields, some of them already Nobel laureates and others soon to be in later years:

Ernest O Lawrence: A great experimental physicist and pioneer of particle accelerators at Berkeley, through his invention of the cyclotron. Worked mostly at Berkeley on the electromagnetic separation of Uranium-235 from natural uranium.  He had an ambivalent attitude towards Oppenheimer at the end. Won Nobel Prize in 1939.

Enrico Fermi: One of the greatest physicists of the last century, as brilliant on the experimental side as on the theoretical, this Italian émigré first achieved the self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction so necessary for any further work on the A-bomb. His importance to the success of the project has not been adequately recognized.   He won the Nobel prize in 1938.

Arthur H Compton: A ‘native’ American like Lawrence, and an excellent administrator, he is known for his leadership role in the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago during the project.  Winner of the Nobel prize in 1927.

Isidor Isaac Rabi: A long-standing and great friend of Oppenheimer, Rabi was another mainstay of the project, always supportive and helpful.  He won the Nobel prize in 1944.

Robert Serber: A right hand man and former student of Oppenheimer, Serber played a massive behind-the-scenes role in the success of the whole project. He was involved hugely in the dissemination of official project information through his famous Los Alamos Primer, LA-1.

Richard Feynman: Another one of the greatest physicists of the last century, the inimitable Richard Feynman also had a role in the Manhattan Project, a fact not too well known.  He won a Nobel Prize in 1965.

Edward Teller:  Despite the tag of infamy that he acquired in the Oppenheimer ‘security hearings’ affair, this brilliant though eccentric Hungarian émigré acquired fame through his pioneering work on the Hydrogen bomb that followed the Manhattan Project.

Hans Bethe: A refugee from Nazi Germany in 1935, Bethe was the head of the theoretical physics group at Los Alamos.  Won the Nobel Prize in 1967.

Philip Morrison: As an acclaimed theoretical physicist (later a renowned astrophysicist as well) and former student of Oppenheimer, this polio victim had a major role in the project despite his known status as a former member of the communist party.  He has been euphemistically described as “the man with one of the most incriminating pro‐Communist records in the entire academic world.”

[I fondly recall meeting this savant at the Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, where he was a visiting professor circa 1978 when I was a research fellow at the same institute.]

Leo Szilard: Another Hungarian émigré, this physicist and inventor was not only instrumental in getting the Manhattan Project initiated through his association with Einstein but also played a key role in the project itself. He was the first to propose the self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, and later worked with Fermi in actually achieving it.

Niels Bohr: Another of the foremost physicists of modern times, this father figure of quantum physics was associated with the Manhattan Project under the assumed name of Nicholas Baker for security reasons.  He won a Nobel Prize for his revolutionary work on the structure of the atom in 1922.  

James Frank:   A German émigré, Franck became a leader of those scientists in the Manhattan Project who sought to stop the bomb’s use against Japan; they instead suggested that the bomb be exploded in an unpopulated area to demonstrate its power to the Japanese government. He had won a Nobel Prize in 1925.

Emilio Segre: A distinguished Italian émigré and a student of Enrico Fermi in Rome, Segre played a key role in the project as a group leader in the Los Alamos laboratory. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1959.

Klaus Fuchs:  Fuchs was a German theoretical physicist who stealthily supplied information from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union during and shortly after World War II. While at the Los Alamos Laboratory, Fuchs was responsible for many significant theoretical calculations relating to the A-bomb and, later, early models of the H-bomb. He was convicted as a spy in Britain in 1950.

[Contrary to popular belief, Albert Einstein was not involved in the Manhattan Project though he was instrumental in its initiation; so also, Max Born and the Chicago based astrophysicist of Indian origin, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.]

Bomb Development

Here are some key points related to the development and first use of the A-bombs:

• The Manhattan Project employed nearly 130,000 people at its peak and cost nearly US$2 billion at that time. Over 90 percent of the cost was for building factories and to produce fissile material, with less than 10 percent for development and production of the weapons.
• Headquartered at Los Alamos, research and production took place at more than 30 sites across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
• The project led to the development of two types of atomic bombs, both developed concurrently: a relatively simple gun-type fission weapon and a more complex implosion-type nuclear weapon.
• The ‘Thin Man’ gun-type design proved impractical to use with plutonium, so a simpler gun-type design called ‘Little Boy’ was developed that used uranium-235.
• Three methods were employed for uranium enrichment: electromagnetic, gaseous and thermal. In parallel with the work on uranium was an effort to produce plutonium.
• After the feasibility of the world's first artificial nuclear reactor, the Chicago Pile-1, was demonstrated in 1942 at the Metallurgical Laboratory in the University of Chicago, the project designed the X-10 Graphite Reactor and the production reactors at the Hanford Site, in which uranium was irradiated and transmuted into plutonium.
• The ‘Fat Man’ plutonium implosion-type weapon was developed in a concerted design and development effort by the Los Alamos Laboratory.

Trinity Test

Trinity was the code name of the first detonation of a nuclear weapon on 16 July 1945, as part of the Manhattan Project. The test was conducted in a desert about 56 km southeast of Socorro, New Mexico, on what was then the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range.  A base camp was constructed, and there were 425 people present at the time of the test. The test was of an implosion-type plutonium device, nicknamed ‘The Gadget’, of the same design as the 'Fat Man' bomb later detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, on 9 August 1945.  The device was placed on top of a 30m steel tower pictured below with the device itself shown in the inset. Also shown is the ‘mushroom’ cloud formed over the test site, engulfing and swallowing up everything in and around, immediately after the blast.

 

Robert Oppenheimer later recalled: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed; a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince (Arjuna) that he should do his duty and, to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.”

Bombs on Japan

‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ bombs were used a month after the Trinity Test in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, with Manhattan Project personnel serving as bomb assembly technicians and weaponeers on the attack aircraft. The destruction caused on Hiroshima is recounted in graphic detail in my earlier blog article titled partly as “Horror of Hiroshima”.

Oppenheimer’s post war stance

After the war ended, Oppenheimer, who had now become the ‘American Prometheus’, was immensely sad and contrite about the terrible means of destruction he had helped unleash on humanity. Greatly distressed, he had remarked: “I have blood on my hands.” He decided not only to take no further part in weapons development, the ‘super’ H-bomb so strongly proposed by Teller being the next on line, but also joined fellow project scientists in pleading for an embargo on the further use of the A-bombs in any manner. This stance put him in direct conflict with the administration, and American president Harry Truman, with his own political compulsions, fell fowl of him. Oppenheimer suddenly became a persona non grata of sorts and lost much of the influence and fame he had acquired through the success of the Manhattan Project.

Strauss and his chargesheet

Oppenheimer’s miniscule enemies, principally the chairman of the newly formed US Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, had an axe or two to grind against his former friend and associate for his refusal to toe the official line and other obscure reasons. He was now in a position to wreak his vengeance on Oppenheimer. Even while outwardly in good terms with him, Strauss was plotting to bring Oppenheimer down for good.  The past association with the communist party and a few small indiscretions committed by Oppenheimer suddenly became a national security concern and a witch hunt, reminiscent of medieval times, was initiated. This was perhaps the precursor to something much worse to follow soon in the McCarthy era. 

Lewis Strauss

Oppenheimer’s security clearance with governmental agencies was suspended pending a full investigation, to be followed by ‘hearings’ to determine if he was a ‘national security threat’.  The man who was admired and respected as the ‘father of the atom bomb’ not so long ago was being humiliated and asked to defend himself against a long chargesheet handed out by Strauss, digging into Oppenheimer’s past that had been fully and justifiably overlooked by Groves at a time of dire need for a leader of his stature. The chargesheet was a litany of some 24 allegations, most of them connected with Oppenheimer’s past that had already been investigated and cleared.

The Inquisition and the aftermath

Against Einstein’s advice, Oppenheimer chose to ‘defend’ himself at the ensuing hearings. Einstein felt that Oppenheimer’s stature was too high to stoop to being treated as an accused. In effect, he was advocating defiance, not defence.

In 1954, a four-week court martial style ‘hearings’ conducted by the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) dug into the background, actions, and past associations of Oppenheimer. The court-room style drama had been carefully orchestrated to make Oppenheimer’s past actions look indefensible and appear like a national threat. With the sole exception of Edward Teller, all the scientists who testified spoke strongly in favour of Oppenheimer, notably the great Fermi. 

Edward Teller

The sham hearings resulted in Oppenheimer’s security clearance being revoked by a 2-1 ‘verdict’. This marked the end of his formal relationship with the government of the United States, and generated considerable controversy regarding his treatment.  This humiliation also effectively ended his career and his stature as an internationally famous figure.

By humiliating a public figure of the stature of Oppenheimer, the US administration was exposing the hollowness of its claim of guaranteed freedom of expression and action. The McCarthy trials soon to follow merely exacerbated this. It was not Oppenheimer the person alone who was being ill-treated. It was indeed the entire scientific community since they were left with no voice to express themselves against the horrors that could follow from any unfettered nuclear armaments programme. Indeed, such fears were well founded considering how fast an international nuclear armaments race unfolded soon after.  The Manhattan Project was not just a triumph for the world scientific community, it was a tragedy as well, one over which they had no control, and one they had to suffer in silence.

The terrible legacy of Oppenheimer

There are few parallels in history to the terrible nature of the legacy that Oppenheimer left behind him. Rightly or wrongly, willingly or otherwise, fortuitously or accidentally, he was instrumental in the creation of a weapon of mass destruction, indeed even of the possible extinction, of life on earth.  With the arsenal of nuclear weapons now stockpiled by both super and lesser powers, it is estimated that their simultaneous detonation can wipe out much of life on earth, much the same way as the dinosaurs became extinct about 65 million years ago as the result of a gigantic asteroid impact.  True, such a simultaneous detonation is highly improbable, but great deal more probable is an all-out nuclear warfare that can be triggered by just one such weapon dropped on enemy territory intentionally or otherwise.

It is true that there has been no use of nuclear weapons since Hiroshima even in mega scale conventional wars, including the one in eastern Europe right now between super power Russia and a defiant Ukraine, but how long can such a nuclear détente continue? What is the guarantee that a demented leader of a rogue nuclear power will not provoke even a ‘limited’ nuclear war deliberately or as a last resort?  Even while such existential threats continue to haunt the post Oppenheimer era, even as questions continue to be asked without tangible solutions, the whole of humanity is tottering under a Damocles’ sword hanging over its head! Should we take this as the legacy of Oppenheimer? Or, should we continue to feel snugly comfortable under the illusion that a nuclear weapon is so deadly that no nation dares to use it on another because it would then be open to instant retaliation and may itself cease to exist as a nation? This would be like assuming that a fear of MAD (mutually assured destruction) is the ultimate deterrent. The fact that this illusion has worked so far doesn’t lift it to the status of a (non-existent) universal law of human behaviour!

Could the development of a nuclear weapon have ever been prevented or even postponed?  The incredibly fast paced developments in science and technology in recent history should convince anyone that this is only a pipedream.  The moment it was discovered that a self-sustaining chain reaction could be attained in a uranium pile as demonstrated by Enrico Fermi, it was apparent that it was only a matter of time before a weapon would be developed.  If an Oppenheimer was not on hand to assume the leadership mantle, someone else, like Lawrence or Compton, would have been available to oversee the development.  It was perhaps the misfortune of Oppenheimer that chance threw him into the cauldron, and he ended up sharing both fame and blame for his stewardship. That this happened to someone as sensitive, humane and competent as Oppenheimer is the real tragedy of the man. The terrible legacy is undeniable and even unavoidable, but the responsibility is incidental. He was only a cog in a wheel.  Is this what is also described as ‘fate’ or ‘destiny’?

Epilogue

It is appropriate to take note of a belated vindication of Oppenheimer as recently as December 16, 2022.  Jennifer Granholm, the Secretary of the United States Department of Energy (DOE) – the successor organization to the AEC – vacated the 1954 revocation of Oppenheimer's security clearance. Her statement said Oppenheimer's clearance was revoked "through a flawed process that violated the Commission's own regulations. 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.”

[Postscript: According to Kai Bird, the then Indian Prime Minister Nehru offered Oppenheimer the Indian citizenship after the latter’s disgrace, but Oppenheimer was too much of a patriot to consider such an offer.]