It is heartening for all those who admire Oppenheimer’s “genius and leadership” of the Los Alamos National Laboratory to hear that at last he got the ‘black mark’ against his name cleared after 68 years.
**
Oppenheimer, the creator of the
nuclear bomb, was born in New York City to German Jewish immigrant parents—Julius
S Oppenheimer, a wealthy German textile merchant and Ella Friedman, an artist.
He studied physics under Ernest
Rutherford at Cambridge. In 1927, he obtained his PhD at the age of 22 from the
University of Gottingen under the guidance of Max Born. While at this
university, he made notable contributions to the then newly developing quantum
theory—the most famous among them was the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, which
separates nuclear motion from electronic motion in the mathematical treatment
of molecules.
Returning to the US in 1927, he
studied mathematical physics at Harvard, and later moved to the California
Institute of Technology. Finally, he settled at the University of California,
Berkeley as a professor. His research contributions are spread across
astrophysics, nuclear physics, spectroscopy, and quantum theory. He was the
first to publish papers suggesting the existence of black holes.
In 1942, Major General Leslie R
Groves, who was chosen by President Franklin D Roosevelt as the head of the
Manhattan Project, picked up Oppenheimer to lead the secret weapons laboratory
established in Los Alamos, New Mexico, as its Scientific Director. He built the
Los Alamos laboratories and assembled the brightest nuclear physicists, such as
Leo Szilard, Ernest O Lawrence, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, John
von Neumann, etc., chemists, and engineers, and led them to assemble the first
atomic bomb.
This joint effort of scientists
at Los Alamos finally enabled the US to detonate the world’s first nuclear bomb
on July 16, 1945, at Alamagordo. Looking at the mushroom cloud produced by the
successful underground explosion of the ‘gadget’—the first nuclear device at
‘Trinity’—the poet in Oppenheimer made him quote a phrase from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death,
destroyer of worlds”.
Later, Oppenheimer was appointed
Chairman of the General Advisory Committee to the Atomic Energy Commission
(AEC). Serving in that capacity from 1947 to 1952, he, with a pure heart of
longing for perpetual peace rather than permanent destruction, took strong
opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb. His opposition to
thermonuclear weapons was said to be more out of his belief that they are “more
destructive than mankind could responsibly control”.
This sharp opposition brought him
into direct conflict with his erstwhile Manhattan project colleague, Edward
Teller, the most vocal proponent of the H-bomb, who in fact testified against
him during the security hearing. Indeed, it is Oppenheimer’s general criticism
of the atomic energy program and his known left-wing political views that made
him the victim of the then-prevailing Red Scare in the US. In 1953, McCarthy
and anti-communist zealots subjected Oppenheimer to a security investigation
and alleging him to be a spy of the Soviet Union denied security clearance. He
thus lost his position with the AEC.
The scientific community, of
course, with a few exceptions, was shocked by this decision of AEC. In fact,
493 Los Alamos scientists and 214 scientists from Argonne National Laboratory
signed a protest against the verdict. But according to Hans Bethe, a 1967 Nobel
Laureate in physics who worked at Los Alamos along with Oppenheimer, and a
known campaigner against the nuclear arms race, “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”.
After that hearing, he settled in
Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study stimulating discussion and research on
quantum and relativistic physics. Finally, he retired from the institute in
1966. This six-feet tall, thin, and
a bit stooped Oppenheimer, who captivated many intellectuals with his “erudition,
eloquence and the incisiveness of his mind and his arrogance toward those he
thought were shoddy thinkers”, died of throat cancer, a result of years
of incessant smoking and exposure to radiation, perhaps, on February 18, 1967,
at the age of 62.
Intriguingly, Oppenheimer, quite
often, appeared to have lamented at the subservience of science to innate human
cruelty. This never-ending agony of Oppenheimer who headed “the greatest school
of theoretical physics that the US has ever known” during the 1930s and early
40s at Berkeley and Caltech, comes out vividly in his address to the American
Philosophical Society: “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”. His savage
self-loathing of his role in making the atomic bomb well reflects in what he
once announced to President Truman: “Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my
hands”.
Now, after a lapse of over six
decades, on December 16, 2022, the Secretary of Energy nullified the 1954
decision to revoke the security clearance of Oppenheimer stating, “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 for country have
only been further affirmed.”
Historians, who all along lobbied
for revocation of the 1954 order, hailed the vacating order as a milestone.
Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science felt that “the injustice done to
Oppenheimer doesn’t get undone by this. But it’s nice to see some response and
reconciliation even if it’s decades too late”.
True, it at least corrects history
and that may make Oppenheimer’s soul rest in Peace!
**
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