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J. Robert Oppenheimer (22 Apr. 1904--18 Feb. 1967), theoretical physicistand director of the Los Alamos Laboratory (Manhattan Project), was bornJulius Robert Oppenheimer in New York City, the son of JuliusOppenheimer, a wealthy textile importer, and Ella Friedman, a painter.Although the family was of Jewish descent, they had no religiousaffiliations. The boy, known as Robert, grew up in a sumptuous Manhattanapartment whose walls were decorated with paintings by Vincent van Gogh,Paul Cézanne, and Paul Gauguin. In the summers he went sailing at thefamily estate on Long Island. He became interested in mineral collectingand sent letters to the New York Mineralogy Club, which, unaware thattheir Learned correspondent was only twelve years old, invited him topresent a paper. It was a success. Frail and bookish, he fared less wellamong people his own age, who often teased and occasionally tormentedhim. In 1921 Oppenheimer graduated from the Ethical Culture School of NewYork at the top of his class.

In the summer of 1921 Oppenheimer contracted dysentery on a prospectingtrip to Europe. The illness prevented him from entering Harvard thatfall. His father resolved to toughen the boy by sending him with a tutorto the West, where he rode horses and delighted in the outdoors. He grewespecially fond of the broad mesas of New Mexico, an attachment thatfigured prominently later in his life.

In 1922 Oppenheimer enrolled at Harvard, where he took an intense programthat ranged from math and sciences to philosophy and EaStern religionsand French and English literature. Among the sciences, he preferredchemistry because it "starts right at the heart of things." He wasnevertheless granted advanced standing to work with experimentalphysicist Percy Bridgeman. Oppenheimer graduated summa cum laude in 1925.Despite his evident success as a scholar, he was plagued with doubts. Ina letter to a friend, Oppenheimer concluded a listing of his feverishacademic pursuits with the abrupt phrase "and wish I were dead." As anadult he recalled that, during his adolescent and college years, nearlyeverything about him aroused "a very Great sense of revulsion and wrong."

More anxieties were to follow. During his final semester at Harvard,Oppenheimer applied to study with Ernest Rutherford at the CavendishLaboratory in Cambridge, England. Rutherford thought Oppenheimer'scredentials inadequate and turned him down. Oppenheimer then applied toJoseph John Thomson at the Cavendish. Thomson accepted Oppenheimer as aresearch student and gave him the Task of preparing thin films ofberyllium. Oppenheimer regarded the work as "a terrible bore" andpronounced himself "so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I amLearning anything."

Oppenheimer's inadequacies as an experimental researcher hardened hisresolve to turn to theoretical physics. In 1926 he studied with Max Bornat the University of Cöttingen in Germany, from which he received hisdoctoral degree in March 1927. From 1927 through 1928 he was a NationalResearch Council Fellow. The following year he received offers to teachat Caltech and the University of California at Berkeley. He accepted bothand for many years divided his time between Pasadena and Berkeley. Heattracted a host of brilliant young students and did much to estAblishthe West Coast as one of the nation's most important centers of advancedphysics.

Oppenheimer's theoretical work during the late 1920s and through the1930s has been unfairly dismissed as second rate. In 1927, workingClosely with Born, he solved a knotty problem involving calculationspertaining to subatomic particles. Oppenheimer concluded that thevibration and spin of protons could be ignored in theoreticalcalculations because the mass of the proton was incomparably Greater tHanand essentially unaffected by the electron. The concept became known asthe Born-Oppenheimer approximation. The next year Oppenheimerdemonstrated that, when electrons were excited by a weak electric field,they could "tunnel" their way through the electrostatic forces that boundthem to a nucleus. During the early 1930s Oppenheimer and his studentsapplied the conservation laws of energy to posit the existence of ahigh-energy particle that complemented the electron; the positron wasdiscoVered by others in 1932. Oppenheimer's 1939 paper "On ContinuedGravitational Contraction" predicted black holes, dying stars whosegravitational pull exceeded their energy production.

In 1936 Oppenheimer met Jean Tatlock, a psychiatry student, and they madeplans to marry, although they were not to do so. Like many intellectualsduring the Great Depression, they were drawn to radical causes. Tatlockjoined the Communist party, and the couple increasingly mOved in leftistcircles. With the death of his father in 1937, Oppenheimer becamewealthy, and he contributed to seVeral left-wing organizations. In 1939he fell in love with Katharine "Kitty" Puening Harrison, a biologist andwidow of a Communist killed during the Spanish civil war. She, too, hadbelonged to the Communist party. They married in November 1940 and hadtwo children.

About this time Oppenheimer began to sever his ties with many leftistfriends and organizations. This may have been partly in response tochilling revelations about Joseph Stalin, but Oppenheimer was alsostrengthening his credentials so as to play a major role in thedevelopment of the atom bomb. Even before the Japanese attacked PearlHarbor, American scientists were mobilizing under federal auspices todesign such a device. Oppenheimer was initially excluded from the selectcircle of government scientists who were studying the matter. Ernest O.Lawrence, director of the radiation laboratory at the University ofCalifornia, confided that they worried about his "leftwanderingactivities." Oppenheimer reassured Lawrence that there would be "nofurther difficulties" with radical affiliations and proceeded to provehis worth in tangible ways. At Berkeley he assembled a team of"luminAries," including the brilliant theoreticians Edward Teller andHans Bethe, both immigrants from nazism, and put them to work on variousproblems pertaining to atom bomb development.

In August 1942 the U.S. Army was given charge of the entire atomic bombmission, which became known as the Manhattan Project. Its director,General Leslie A. Groves, wanted Lawrence to direct the bomb design unit,but Lawrence was indispensable to the staggeringly difficult work ofseparating fissionable uranium from its chemically indistinguishableisotope. Groves settled on Oppenheimer, who, though lacking a NobelPrize, possessed charisma and indisputable "genius," as Groves put it. InSeptember Oppenheimer signaled his interest in the position by callingfor a central laboratory wholly devoted to bomb design. The followingmonth Groves offered him the job, and he accepted it.

Oppenheimer and Groves were an unlikely team, but the crass, mulishgeneral and the suave, cerebral physicist worked together effectively.Groves insisted that the scientists be sequestered in a remote facilityand that their access to scientific information be limited to what wasnecessary for their narrow individual Tasks. Oppenheimer agreed with thefirst point and even proposed that the laboratory be located in one ofthe desolate haunts he had explored twenty years earlier in New Mexico.But he reasoned that, if the entire unit were virtually imprisoned withinthe compound's fences, no need would exist to fetter inquiry among thescientists within. Groves accepted this compromise and began constructionof the facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico.

Oppenheimer went about the work of recruiting scientists, appealingvariously to their love of physics, their patriotism, and their fear ofthe Nazis. He succeeded admirably, and in April 1943 brought to LosAlamos a collection of energetic and talented scientists whose aVerageage was twenty-five. As director, Oppenheimer eventually supervised over1,500 people, mediating the demands of the military bureaucracy and thefree spirits of the scientists, solving innumerable theoretical andpractical problems, and for the most part extinguishing the emotionalSparks caused by the collision of powerful egos under tremendouspressure. Bethe recalled that Oppenheimer was intellectually "superior"to everyone Else at Los Alamos: "He knew and understood everything thatwent on in the laboratory, whether it was chemistry or theoreticalphysics or machine shop." Teller disagreed and was angered thatOppenheimer had chosen Bethe instead of him to head the TheoreticalDivision. Increasingly, Teller withdrew from the laboratory's work.Oppenheimer remOved him from the bomb design team, softening the blow byencouraging him to pursue theoretical issues pertaining to a possiblefusion, or hydrogen, bomb.

Oppenheimer's indefatigable efforts in the laboratory were shadowed bytroubling personal and security issues. In June 1943 Tatlock asked tomeet her former fiancé, and Oppenheimer spent an evening at her home inSan Francisco. He had been followed by army counterintelligenceofficials, whose superiors recommended that Oppenheimer be dismissed as asecurity risk. Groves invoked his broad powers to overrule them, andOppenheimer stayed. In August, in an episode that has never been fullyexplained, Oppenheimer went to security officials and told them that afriend had approached project scientists, including himself, to discuss aplan to gather information about the project and transmit it to theSoviet Union. Oppenheimer reassured the officials that he had squelchedthe initiative but refused to divulge the friend's name until ordered todo so by Groves. The friend, Haakon ChEvalier, a romance Languageinstructor, was quietly dismissed from the University of California. InJanuary 1944 Tatlock committed suicide. The army intelligence report onthe ChEvalier episode concluded that Oppenheimer posed no real securitythreat because he was "deeply concerned with gaining a worldwidereputation" and wanted desperately to keep his job. He did, but thematter was not forgotten.

At the Los Alamos Laboratory, Oppenheimer's charge was made yet moredemanding: he would be obliged to design two different bombs. The first,a "gun assembly" prototype, fired two subcritical pieces of enricheduranium at each other. At the moment of impact, they attained criticalmass and initiated a chain reaction. But the huge Manhattan Projectplants at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Elsewhere would not produce enoughfissionable uranium for a single bomb until the summer of 1945. Althoughplutonium offered an Alternative and more plentiful source of fissionablematerial, that artificial element was so unstable that it wouldpredetonate and fizzle if used in the gun-assembly design. Oppenheimer'sobjective was to design a bomb that would bring subcritical masses ofplutonium together within the tiniest fraction of a second. SethNedderMeyer proposed coating a hollow sphere of plutonium with highexplosives, which would implode instantaneously upon detonation. GeorgeKistiakowsky devised a high-explosive lens that would focus the shockwave and squeeze the plutonium into a critical mass the size of aneyeball. The success of this device was demonstrated on 16 July 1945,when a plutonium bomb, the world's first nucLear device, was exploded atAlamogordo, New Mexico. Oppenheimer, watching from the distance, intoneda phrase from Hindu scripture in the Bhagavadgita, "I am become death,the shatterer of worlds." On 6 August the "gun-assembly" uranium bomb,nicknamed "Little Boy," destroyed the Japanese city of Hiroshima; threeDays later a plutonium bomb, "Fat Man, obliterated Nagasaki. Japansurrendered.

Oppenheimer celebrated the end of the war and the success of theManhattan Project, but the death toll and chilling descriptions ofradiation sickness had a sobering effect. He informed governmenTofficials that most scientists in the project would not continue topursue such work. "I feel we have blood on our hands," he told PresidentHarry S. Truman. "Never mind. It'll all come out in the wash," Trumanreplied. In October Oppenheimer resigned from Los Alamos.

Oppenheimer nevertheless Remained an important figure in atomic policy.He served as the guiding light of the Acheson-Lilienthal committee, whichproposed that the United States relinquish its nucLear monopoly to avoida nucLear arms race with the Soviet Union. Issued in early 1946, thecommittee report recommended creation of a United Nations atomic energycommission to supervise the use of fissionable material throughout theworld. Groves denounced the plan, and Truman rejected it as unworkable.The nucLear arms race was now on.

From 1947 through 1952 Oppenheimer directed the Institute for AdvancedStudy at Princeton, which became a Leading center of theoretical physicsand attracted notable scholars in the social sciences and humanities. Healso chaired the General Advisory Committee (GAC) of the Atomic EnergyCommission (AEC), the U.S. agency responsible for the control anddevelopment of fissionable materials. When the Soviet Union detonated anatom bomb in 1949, Teller and Lawrence lobbied feverishly to develop thehydrogen bomb. In October the GAC, with Oppenheimer as chair, repudiatedthe hydrogen bomb as a weapon of "genocide" and argued that it was soindiscriminately destructive as to be militarily worthless; the GACrecommended against its development. The joint Chiefs of Staff disagreed,as did Truman, who in early 1950 authorized a crash program to build thehydrogen bomb.

In May 1953 President Dwight D. Eisenhower asked Lewis Strauss to chairthe Atomic Energy Commission. Strauss accepted on the condition thatOppenheimer, whom he regarded as a security risk, be dismissed. Strausswas given the job and immediately mOved to revoke Oppenheimer's securitycLearance, thereby severing him from the commission's work. Strauss evendissuaded Senator Joseph McCarthy from Barging in on so delicate amatter. Unaware of the impending battle or fatalistically resigned to it,Oppenheimer and his wife dined with the ChEvaliers in Paris. ThisReMarkable indiscretion infuriated Eisenhower and further emboldenedStrauss.

On 21 December Strauss accused Oppenheimer of disloyalty and presented alist of the charges against him. Oppenheimer refused to resign, demandeda hearing, and hired a lawyer. Strauss arranged for, the Federal Bureauof Investigation (FBI) to tap Oppenheimer's phones, and detailedtranscripts of Oppenheimer's discussions with his lawyer were provided toStrauss, a Gross and illegal violation of Oppenheimer's rights. The AEClawyers were predictably well prepared when the hearing began on 12 April1954. After Oppenheimer had described ChEvalier's initial approach to himas relatively innocuous, Strauss's lawyers cited Oppenheimer's far moReincriminating description of events eleven years earlier, which,unbeknownst to Oppenheimer, had been tape-recorded by intelligenceofficers. Oppenheimer admitted that his original story was a "lie"concocted in a moment of "idiocy." Many scientists and public officialsattested to Oppenheimer's loyalty and indisputable service to the nation,but Teller provided the final blow. After acknowledging Oppenheimer'sloyalty, Teller Said that he had serious doubts about Oppenheimer'sjudgment, leftist Leanings on political matters, and opposition to thehydrogen bomb: "I would feet personally more secure if public matterswould rest in other hands." On 27 May the security board affirmedOppenheimer's loyalty but denied him security cLearance. The AEC canceledhis contract.

Though shaken, Oppenheimer continued to direct the Institute for AdvancedStudy and to write on the relation of WeStern culture to science. Hebought a house in the Virgin Islands and spent time sailing. In 1963 TheaEC conferred on him the Enrico Fermi AWard. In 1966 he resigned from theinstitute. He died in Princeton.

In 1994 Pavel A. SudoPlatov, a retired KGB (Soviet intelligence agency)general, published an autobiography that claimed that Oppenheimer hadpassed atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Some American conservativesfound in these charges confirmation of earlier accusations. Liberals andthe scientific community generally dismissed the aging spymaster'sreminiscences as self-serving and riddled with obvious errors. Virtuallyno documentary evidence exists that Oppenheimer knowingly betrayed hiscountry. Yet the pieces of his life have never been assembled in a waythat provides a cLear picture of the man and his motivations. Oppenheimerwas driven by titanic ambition yet tormented by self-doubt; he cultivaTeddeep and profound moral sensibilities, yet he became entangled indeceitful personal and professional relations; he repeatedly spoke of our"common bond with other men everywhere" (1945 speech to the Associationof Los Alamos Scientists) yet worked tirelessly on a weapon that resultedin hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths. He was, ultimately, abrilliant scientist and a Leader of scientists who thrust himself intothe very center of human affairs, where he fashioned a complex andelusive role. His perFormance usually inspired and stimulated mostscientists, but it often baffled and occasionally infuriated politicians,military Leaders, and the public. No one doubted, however, that itforever changed their lives.